A Concise History of Bulgaria

by R. J. Crampton

  Plate 7.6 Sofia welcomes the Red Army in September 1944; the slogan in the lower picture reads, ‘Eternal Glory to the Red Army’.

  On the same day, 8 September, Soviet troops crossed the Danube and entered Bulgaria to a wildly enthusiastic welcome. Their arrival greatly encouraged the FF, whose partisan units had grown considerably in the chaotic summer months, as had their support amongst the population as a whole, particularly the intelligentsia. On 4 September a series of strikes had been staged to put pressure on Muraviev to break with Germany, and when he did so on the following day there were massive desertions from the army to the partisans. But, contrary to the post-1944 communist school of history, the action which brought the FF to power on 9 September was not carried out by partisans but by units of the army loyal to the war minister Marinov. He it was who, with those practised coupsters Georgiev and Velchev, arranged for the door of the war ministry to be unlocked so that the rebels could take this key point in the city. With no resistance the Muraviev government was deposed within a few hours and a new administration formed by the FF. The new cabinet, which was led by Kimon Georgiev, consisted of five zvenari, four agrarians, three social democrats and four communists. The communists held the key ministries of the interior and justice.

  In October, after Marshal Tito had withdrawn his prohibition on Bulgarian troops entering Yugoslav territory, Bulgaria continued fighting, this time on the allied side. Its army joined with Marshal Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front and fought with that army through Hungary and into Austria. Thirty-two thousand Bulgarians died in this campaign.

  8 Bulgaria under communist rule, 1944–1989

  The Communist takeover, 1944–1947

  Although the communists dominated the Fatherland Front government from the start, a monolithic, one-party system was not imposed until the end of 1947.

  In their rise to power the communists, still operating as the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (BWP), were helped by a number of factors. They were, initially at least, extremely popular, especially amongst the influential urban intelligentsia; that their membership grew from 15,000 in October 1944 to 250,000 a year later was not entirely due to careerism and opportunism on the part of the new members. Their close association with Russia also helped them; the traditional russophilia of the majority of the Bulgarians could not but be intensified in the months immediately after the expulsion of the Germans, months during which the full horrors of Nazi rule in Europe first became known. The fact that the war was to continue for eight months after September 1944 also helped the communists because the western allies had little time to spare for Bulgaria; the Soviets were given the permanent chairmanship of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) which was to oversee internal Bulgarian affairs until the conclusion of a peace treaty. And until then the Red Army was to remain in Bulgaria, another factor which certainly did not militate against the communists.

  The communists had a sharp nose for political power. One of their first acts was to place political commissars alongside serving officers in the armies fighting with Tolbukhin. Some officers were considered too politically unreliable and eight hundred of them, including forty-two generals, were removed. In December 1944 Colonel Ivan Kinov, a Bulgarian who had served in the Red Army, was made chief of the general staff. Whilst most of the existing, trained army was engaged against the enemy, the former partisans formed the backbone of a new force, the People’s Guard, which was kept in Bulgaria. It was entirely dominated by the communists.

  The government controlled the radio and the distribution of newsprint, whilst the ACC, in effect the Soviets, had the right to sanction the import of foreign films and printed material; thus the FF had a virtual stranglehold over the media, but should a fail-safe be needed opposition newspapers could always be muzzled by the communist-dominated unions in the printing and distributing sectors.

  The local FF committees were equally under the communist thumb. These sprang up immediately after 9 September and by November there were seven thousand of them. They conducted an implacable war against local representatives of the old order, policemen, teachers, and priests being prominent amongst them. Some of these were simply murdered; others went before the new people’s courts to be sentenced to death or to long periods in labour camps. So energetically did some local committees conduct this campaign that they had to be restrained by the central BWP leadership in Sofia. The workers’ councils, established in all industrial concerns, were another new feature of the Bulgarian social landscape and were also totally under communist domination. They had the power to scrutinise company accounts and were to report to the local FF committees who had had dealings with the Germans, the Italians or the Bulgarian ‘fascists’.

  At 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 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 left, however, was still an active force. Though still split the agrarians remained powerful. The faction which had joined the FF was led by G. M. Dimitrov, known as ‘Gemeto’ to distinguish him from the communist leader of the same name. Gemeto, however, did not join the government and was soon being attacked as a spy acting for the British, for whom he had acted as an advisor during the war. In April he fled to avoid arrest. His place was taken by Nikola Petkov who was a member of the cabinet. Petkov had long been a staunch opponent of association with Germany, had an impeccable war record, and had great oratorical and parliamentary skills. By 1945 he had become anxious at the actions of the local FF committees which he wanted freed from communist domination to ensure a return to full political liberties.

  The agrarians 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 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 suspicions 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 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.

  In May 1945 communist intrigues forced another split in the agrarian party and the ministry of justice conveniently declared that all the party’s property, including its newspaper and bank accounts, belonged to the anti-Petkov, pro-communist faction. Petkov resigned from the cabinet on 2 August, his group now becoming the Bulgarian A
grarian National Union – Nikola Petkov (BANU–NP). The communists engineered a similar split in the Social Democratic Party whose anti-communist group was led by Kosta Lulchev.

  After splitting the agrarians the communists demanded a general election, but they wanted all parties within the FF to appear on a single list. Petkov, with the backing of the western powers, declared this to be anti-democratic. He succeeded in having the elections postponed until 18 November but when he failed to get his own way on the issue of the single list he told his supporters to boycott the poll. He believed the communists were losing support at home, which they were, and that the western powers were exercising more influence over the Soviets, which, in the long run, they were not. However, in the short term there was encouragement for Petkov; the USA refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new government which was headed by the BWP leader Georgi Dimitrov who had returned from the USSR on 7 November 1945, and at a meeting of the powers in Moscow the west persuaded the Kremlin to agree that two oppositionists should be included in the Bulgarian cabinet; but the matter went no further than that because Petkov and Lulchev insisted that the communists relinquish control of the ministries of the interior and of justice, dissolve the sûbranie and hold free elections; the communists, with full Soviet backing, refused all three demands.

  In 1946 the battleground of Bulgarian politics widened. A concocted trial of a journalist was said to have disclosed another military conspiracy. This resulted first in another purge of the army which removed over two thousand officers from the active list, and secondly in a bill in July which passed control of the military from the ministry of war to the cabinet as a whole. As the minister of war was Velchev the move was clearly intended to diminish the already declining influence of the zvenari. Shortly afterwards two votes were announced: a referendum on the monarchy was to be held in September, and in the following month elections for a Grand National Assembly were to take place.

  Plate 8.1 Nikola Petkov on trial, August 1947.

  Both votes were meant to send signals to the Paris peace conference which in August began discussion of the Bulgarian peace treaty. The referendum on the monarchy resulted in the declaration of a republic, the simple, or simplistic message for the peacemakers supposedly being that Bulgaria had rid itself of the dynasty which had twice taken it to war on Germany’s side. The convocation of a GNA was intended to show the negotiators in Paris that Bulgaria was keen to create a new form of government which could be relied upon to behave in a mature and cooperative manner. These gestures made little impact upon the basically anti-Bulgarian disposition of the allies. Bulgaria, despite the sacrifices made in the campaigns in Hungary and Austria after September 1944, was not recognised as a co-belligerent, and the loss of all territories occupied during the war was confirmed. The southern Dobrudja, however, was retained.

  The Paris debates indicated declining western interest in Bulgaria and the opposition therefore combined resources to run on a single ticket in the elections to the GNA on 27 October. The opposition won 101 seats to the FF’s 364; and of the latter the communists were given the absurdly high number of 277. This was naked ambition and a violent distortion of any notion that the number of seats taken by the communists should represent their share of FF supporters or of their share of votes cast for the FF list.

  The battle was now moving to its final phase both at home and abroad. At home the communists were clearly losing ground. The holy synod rejected a plan put forward by the FF for the democratisation of the church and even the old leftist party of the pre-9 September era, the democrats, enjoyed something of a resurgence. This was mainly because what remained of Bulgaria’s bourgeoisie was being pushed into oblivion. From September 1944 there had been restrictions on profits and the property of alleged collaborators, war criminals and speculators had been confiscated. Regulations on living space, grudgingly accepted at first in view of the post-bombing housing shortage, limited the size of households, and thereby decreased the already much diminished quality of life; many of the intelligentsia, for example, were forced to dispose of their personal libraries. In 1946 new tax laws required all arrears from 1942 to be paid off in a very short time, but the heaviest blow came with currency and banking reform in March 1947. The new currency was issued at rates which disadvantaged those with savings, in addition to which private accounts above a certain level were blocked and a once-and-for-all tax was levied on all savings. And this during one of Europe’s worst ever winters.

  Even the workers in the towns were showing signs of discontent. Unemployment was high and the winter affected them even more because food and fuel were especially short in urban areas. There were frequent strikes and many workers left the towns to cultivate their own or their relations’ plots. The communists felt an increasing need to act before matters became any worse.

  The same message came from abroad. In February 1947 the peace treaty had been signed and within ninety days of its final ratification the Red Army would be leaving Bulgaria. In March the Truman doctrine was promulgated threatening to resist further communist encroachment.

  Meanwhile, in the GNA 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 death of Petkov broke the opposition. In October the founding meeting of Cominform enjoined all European communist parties in government to intensify the drive towards socialism. The BWP needed little encouragement. It rapidly mopped up what remained of political opposition and in December 1947 pushed through the GNA the ‘Dimitrov constitution’, so-called even though it had been drafted in the USSR.

  The Dimitrov constitution declared Bulgaria a ‘people’s republic’. It was a typical Soviet-style system in which all freedoms were promised 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 co
uld 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 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.