Bulgaria under communist rule, 1944–1989

At[181] the central government level the communists’ control of the ministry of the interior enabled them to establish an entirely new police force, the people’s militia, as well as a covert political police to which the Soviets attached advisors, as they did to all central government bodies. At the same time the people’s courts were controlled by the ministry of justice, which was also in communist hands. The new courts were required to punish ‘collaborators and war criminals’, but as Bulgaria had not been occupied by a foreign power and had not been engaged on the eastern front there were few Bulgarians[182] who fell into either category. Yet per capita more Bulgarians were accused of these crimes than any other East European nation. For the communists the problem was that the local intelligentsia and political establishment had not been decimated by the Gestapo or its local equivalent, and therefore the potential pool of opposition was greater than in other states; the Bulgarian intelligentsia and political classes were paying now for their relatively easy war.
A major payment was made in February 1945. A month before the police had arrested the former regents, royal advisors, all members of the last sûbranie, and all who had served in government since 1941. Most were found guilty and the prosecutor demanded death for fifty of them. Twice that number were taken out and executed in batches of twenty the night the verdicts were pronounced. The old right and centre of Bulgarian politics had been eliminated.
The[182] agrarian were the major obstacle on the communists’ road to power. The bulk of the peasantry, who still formed over four-fifths of the population, had always remained loyal to BANU 【Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, Български земеделски народен съюз / БЗНС】 despite the splits and the discreditable behaviour of its ministers between 1931 and 1934. After 9 September 1944 the peasants’ allegiance to BANU was increased by their growing revulsion at communist brutality and by their suspicious of communist intentions with regard to collectivisation of the land. The communists were in a difficult position. They could not, as they had done in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and eastern Germany, win over the peasants[183] by offering them confiscated aristocratic or émigré land; there were no aristocrats or émigrés and the vast majority of the peasants had enough land anyway. All the communists could do was launch a frontal assault on agrarian institutions and personalities.
Meanwhile,[186] in the GNA 【General National Assembly】 Petkov was castigating communist incompetence and arrogance, and lampooning these alleged friends of the people who were spending far more on the police and prisons than the so-called fascists had during the war. He demanded the restoration of the Tûrnovo constitution together with the return of full civil liberties. The communists decided to act. In June Petkov was arrested in the sûbranie and in August was subjected to a grotesque trial in which the defence was denied the rights to legal representation or to present evidence; this, it was decided would be ‘of no use or importance’. Petkov was sentenced to death and hanged, being denied even the last rites and a Christian burial, despite the fact that he was one of Bulgaria’s few genuinely religious public figures.
The[186] Dimitrov constitution declared Bulgaria a ‘people’s republic’. It was a typical Soviet-style system in which all freedoms were promised[187] but where in reality power lay not with the official state organs but with those of the communist party. The means of production were to pass into public ownership and the higher ranks of the judiciary were to be subjected to parliamentary control; this in effect was communist control because local party organisations, acting through the local FF committees, had to sanction all parliamentary candidates. Within a few months all the parties within the FF had come to acknowledge the leading role of the communist party and accept that marxism-leninism was the ruling ideology. Untypically, however, rather than fuse all the elements of the coalition into one communist-dominated party, in Bulgaria there were to be two distinct parties in the ruling coalition. Because of the respect the peasants had for the agrarian tradition, that faction of BANU which had cooperated with the communists was to remain a separate party and was to join in a coalition government with them; it was to remain their coalition partner until 1990. The coalitionist agrarians, however, had little real power because they were represented only in state and not in communist party organisations.
In its fifth congress in December 1948 the BWP reverted to its former name, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). Together with the other ruling parties in Eastern Europe the BCP adopted as its guiding, organisational principle that of ‘democratic centralism’. This meant in effect that the chain of command was always vertical, from the centre down; there were to be no horizontal links because the centre could not tolerate the possibility of local conspiracies against it. The supreme body of the party was its congress which convened usually every five years; the congress elected the central committee which met in plenum at irregular intervals, and which could make important policy decisions. Those decisions, however, were usually to implement those already taken by the party’s most powerful organism, the politburo, whose dozen or so members were chosen by the central committee.
Party control was exercised through a number of mechanisms. In all factories and other places of work and in government units at every level the local party cell, ‘the primary party organisation’, played a vital role in the running of the economic enterprise or government unit. Each primary party organisation kept two lists; one, the nomenklatura list, contained those posts in its area of responsibility[188] which were important enough to be taken only by trustworthy individuals; the second, the cadre list, contained the names of trustworthy individuals; information on all individuals was kept up to date by the informers each primary party organisation recruited. The nomenklatura system ensured that anyone who wanted access to a decent job would keep his or her political nose clean; this was the base of the party’s social power. For those within the party who carefully toed the party line there was the promise of rewarding jobs together with privileges such as access to better shops, holiday resorts, hospitals, schools, and other facilities.
Soon after December 1947 the trade unions, the youth organisations, the Soviet friendship societies, professional bodies, and women’s groups were all brought under communist control, this control being exercised by the Fatherland Front.
The[200] most interesting and unusual aspect of Bulgarian nationalism in the 1970s focuses not so much on Zhivkov as on his daughter, Liudmila Zhivkova. Born in 1942 she was of the generation which had grown up under socialism, albeit in its most privileged circles. That privilege had been responsible for her being able to spend an academic year in Oxford and in 1971 helped her to the post of deputy chairperson of the committee for art and culture. She became its head in 1975 and in the following year took over responsibility for radio, television and the press. In 1980 she was given charge of the politburo commission on science, culture and art. With the help of established scholars she published a number of books and in private she began to show in increasing and wholly unmarxist interest in mysticism. In the small world of the Sofia intelligentsia such private interests soon became public knowledge.
The intelligentsia were fascinated by the discussion of non-materialist ideas and they could not help but be gratified by the stress which Zhivkova placed on Bulgaria’s long cultural traditions and the individuality and separateness of those traditions. In 1981 she orchestrated a huge celebration of the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of the first Bulgarian state. This was no doubt an exaggerated and an extremely expensive affair but it was part of the process of emphasising that Bulgaria’s history and culture were unique and that therefore Bulgarians were culturally different from other peoples. And of course this was immediately interpreted in private as meaning different from the Russians. The 1981 celebrations highlighted the fact that the Bulgarians had had an organised state long before the Russians. Later the Bulgarians were to mark their conversion to Christianity where, once again, the Bulgarians preceded the Russians. But by then Zhivkova was dead. She died in July 1981 aged only thirty-nine. There were immediately rumours that the Russians had murdered her, but there is no evidence to cast doubt on the official cause of death, cerebral haemorrhage, perhaps induced by the effects of a serious motor accident a few years before. Zhivkova’s nationalism had been cultural not ethnic and was a call to celebrate Bulgarian achievements not to discriminate against indigenous minorities; even if she lived a privileged and extremely self-indulgent life, Zhivkova was probably more mourned at her death than any public figure since King Boris.
The[204] most important obstacle in the path of economic advance, however, was that Bulgaria’s managerial cadres were not trained for operating in a system which called for self-reliance, responsibility and the making of decisions on purely economic grounds. Managers feared buying western machines if similar Soviet ones were available because they feared they might be suspected of political disloyalty; plant managers who had for decades been used to having their production routines settled for them by central organisations often did not know how to find their own raw materials or their own markets; and products accustomed to sacrifice everything to achieving plan totals were deaf to calls to improve the quality of their goods, particularly if that meant reducing the quantity of production. By the mid-1980s the NEM 【New Economic Mechanism】 was seen not to be working. For the first time in twenty years there was no perceptible improvement in living standards, nor any expectation of one. This was a quiet but profoundly important shift in public attitudes.
The[204] decision to enforce the assimilation of the Turks, beginning with the requirement that they should take Bulgarian or Slav names, was taken in the highest echelons of the party late in 1984. In the 1940s when the southern Dobrudja had been reincorporated into Bulgaria place names had been changed but it had been considered too draconian to change personal ones. The experience with the Pomaks in the 1970s suggested that the more extreme step was possible. But it was soon to be apparent that it was not easy. In 1985 Bulgarian Turks were told to choose from a list of Slav names that which they wished to adopt; and if they delayed or refused one was chosen for them. In many cases they resisted and troops had to be called in, with even tanks and the élitist paratroop red beret units being[205] deployed. It was the largest military operation undertaken by the Bulgarian army since the end of the second world war. Nor was the new policy confined to making Turks change their names. Turkish newspapers were closed and radio broadcasts in Turkish ceased; it was even declared unlawful to speak Turkish speakers were not in fact Turks but the descendants of Bulgarians who had been forcibly converted to Islam and turkified after the Ottoman conquest. The new ‘regenerative process’ would allow these lost Bulgarians to return to the bosom of their mother nation.
A[206] more likely explanation is the simple one that the regime believed that beating the nationalist drum would increase popular support or at least mask some of the economic difficulties which were being encountered. The lack of progress on the economic front and the bad image of Bulgaria abroad had depressed the population to some degree. What later became known as ‘civil society’ was spreading in the form of martial arts clubs, wild-life protection associations and others which were operating outside the control of local party officials and often outside the law. More sinister was the reappearance of terrorism. On one day in 1984 bombs exploded in Plovdiv railway station and at Varna airport; on that day Zhivkov was to visit both cities, and shortly after the explosions leaflets appeared in the street proclaiming, ‘Forty Years, Forty Bombs’.
In[209] his speech to the July plenum the Bulgarian leader had admitted that the party had reached a turning point at which, he said, it should remember Levski’s words, ‘Either we shall live up to our times, or they will destroy us’. One danger which faced Zhivkov himself was that since the advent of Gorbachev, Moscow, previously the fount of all wisdom for the BCP leadership, had become the centre of dangerously subversive ideas. With one channel of Bulgarian TV regularly relaying Soviet programmes, those subversive ideas were available to all. Zhivkov responded by arguing that the purpose of glasnost in the USSR was to expose the need for perestroika in the economy, but since Bulgaria had already introduced economic perestroika it had no need for glasnost.
This convinced few outside the party or even within it. And the ranks of the unconvinced and discontented were growing rapidly in number. The ethnic Turks were still angry at the regenerative process but they had no established intelligentsia of their own to orchestrate their campaign. The Bulgarian intelligentsia, however, was becoming more and more active. It also found a means by which it could form positive links with the mass of the population: environmental degradation. The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 had given rise to ugly rumours of contaminated food being placed on the open market for public use whilst the party élite enjoyed safe products imported at great cost from outside the affected zone. A problem which the authorities were prepared to acknowledge was that in Rusé where poisoning from a chemical plant across the Danube in Romania[210] was having devastating effects. The party allowed an exhibition in which one item was a plain notice showing the local incidence of lung disease which had risen from 969 per 100,000 in 1975 to 17,386 per 100,000 in 1985. Throughout 1988 there was constant agitation on this and on other issues, and despite hamfisted efforts by the police to silence poets or philosophers, oppositionists even began to form groups. By the spring of 1989 these included: The Discussion Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost; the Independent Association for Human Rights in Bulgaria; Ecoglasnost; an independent trade union, Podkrepa (Support); and the Committee for the Defence of Religious Rights.