Once its monolithic system was established the BCP hastened to the construction of a socialist economy and a society based on the Soviet model. The nationalisation of industry was quickly and easily accomplished, foreign trade was soon made a government monopoly, and Bulgaria was rapidly integrated into the system of alliances and agreements, economic and political, which Stalin’s Soviet Union was building in Eastern Europe. In 1947 an emergency two-year plan for the economy had been introduced, but in 1949 the first five-year plan came into operation designed to shift the emphasis of the Bulgarian economy from the agricultural to the heavy industrial sector. In its plans for the collectivisation of the land, however, the BCP met with opposition. Historians do not yet know the full extent of this opposition but it seems that it was at its most obdurate in north-west Bulgaria where armed clashes are known to have taken place, but protest was by no means confined to that area and all over the country peasants committed acts of defiance such as burning their crops or killing their cattle rather than let them be taken into a collective farm. The resistance, however, had been critically weakened in February 1948 when farm machinery had to be handed over to the new machine tractor stations. By 1951 resistance had virtually ceased.
Even the setting up of the monolithic system did not mean the end of political persecution. The Orthodox church was amongst a number of organisations to be brought into line. The Exarch Stefan was packed off to a monastery and his clergy required to choose between joining the new Union of Bulgarian Priests or being sent to a labour camp. In February 1949 a new law on church organisation confirmed the subjugation of church to state. In 1951 the exarchate was raised to a patriarchate, further weakening the already tenuous links between the Bulgarian church and Istanbul.The non-Orthodox churches suffered a worse fate because their links with the non-communist world could not be dissolved, and links with the outside world were something which communist regimes greatly feared in these early days of the cold war. In 1949 the Sofia government had refused to allow the pope’s newly appointed delegate to Bulgaria to take up his place and in the same year fifteen Protestant pastors had been put on trial, convicted and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
One of the organisations which was most heavily purged in the early years of communist rule was the communist party itself. In March 1949 a popular leading communist, Traicho Kostov, was sacked from his government posts and made director of the national library. In December he was put on trial and sentenced to death. His execution was the prelude to a savage purge in which at least 100,000 party members were expelled, many of them being sent to labour camps. Greater numbers from the civil service, the armed forces and all sections of society were purged at the same time. The purges were an East European phenomenon provoked by Stalin’s paranoia. For justification of the purges the Soviet leader used the alleged danger of national communism as exemplified by Tito, whom he had expelled from the Cominform in the summer of 1948. But there were deeper reasons for the purges. The great social transformation caused by collectivisation and industrialisation would inevitably cause discontent which, equally inevitably, would seek some political vehicle for its expression. In Eastern Europe all political vehicles but one, the communist party, had been immobilised. The purges were therefore meant to warn the communist parties themselves not to have any dealings with the social discontent which their own policies were creating. There were also specifically Bulgarian factors in the Kostov case. In part the succession to the BCP leadership was at stake. Dimitrov had died in July 1949 and his nominated successor, Vasil Kolarov, was ill. Kostov was a natural candidate but his pro-Soviet credentials were not good because he had criticised Soviet economic policies in the post-war years.
Also, in Bulgaria the Yugoslav dimension of the purges was especially large. Immediately after the war the BCP had agreed that those parts of Pirin Macedonia within Bulgaria should be ceded to Yugoslav Macedonia when a Balkan federation was established. In the meantime teachers were imported into Pirin to teach the locals how to read and write in the new Macedonian language recently defined by scholars in Yugoslav Macedonia. In Bulgaria this was an intensely unpopular policy and was abandoned the minute Tito and his Yugoslavia were ostracised. Kostov was not properly pro-Soviet so he could be accused of pro-Yugoslavism; and thus the BCP could try to shift onto Kostov some of the opprobrium for its Pirin policy. Also, the Kostov trial coincided almost exactly with the first elections under the Dimitrov constitution; it was a timely call for obedience to the official party line.
After the Kostov trial Vûlko Chervenkov, who had succeeded Dimitrov as head of the party and prime minister, was secure. Bulgaria’s ‘little Stalin’ could continue the task of constructing socialism with a Soviet face. Every aspect of national life seemed to be refashioned on the Soviet model: education, culture, the economy, architecture and the military. To keep the Bulgarians on the correct line there were ever more Soviet advisors attached to every arm of government.
True to stalinist practice the purges also continued. Accusations that a Bulgarian translator at the US embassy had spied for the United States were used as the excuse for another round of repression against those who had any connection with the non-socialist world and especially America; the USA broke off diplomatic relations in protest. A victim of this purge was the Roman Catholic bishop of Nevrokop who was tried together with twenty-seven other priests and twelve members of the laity. On the other hand, Chervenkov did permit the emigration of almost all Bulgaria’s surviving Jews, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had entered an extreme anti-Israeli phase. Chervenkov also encouraged the emigration of Turks. In fact he terrified Ankara in January 1950 by announcing that a quarter of a million Turks would be allowed to leave. After a good deal of negotiation the Turks admitted 162,000 before closing the border in 1952. Most of the émigrés came from the Dobrudja, the richest arable area of Bulgaria and the one Chervenkov wanted to collectivise fastest; the Turks were in fact displaced persons forced from their homes not by military events but by the social and economic change brought about by the application of stalinist dogma.
Destalinisation and the Rise of Todor Zhivkov, 1953–1965
Chervenkov sailed on in seemingly untroubled waters until 3 March 1953 when Stalin died. There was also a wave of industrial unrest in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria being one of the first countries to experience it when strikes broke out amongst the tobacco workers in Plovdiv. Within a few months Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin had called for a ‘new course’ in Eastern Europe.
The regime in Sofia soon adapted itself to the revised Soviet attitudes. Bulgaria’s new course was seen in improved relations with Greece, talk of repairing the breach with the USA, and the restoration of diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia. At home it was announced that more investment would be allocated to the consumer sector and to agriculture. More dramatically, the terror was relaxed. Police activity was reduced and thousands of detainees were released from prison and the labour camps. Other aspects of the new course included a decline in Soviet influence. Most advisors returned home and the joint stock companies which had given the Soviets great influence in certain sectors of the Bulgarian economy were disbanded. In March 1954 at the BCP’s sixth congress Chervenkov announced that he would no longer hold the offices of prime minister and general secretary of the party, deciding to relinquish the latter. His successor was a young, efficient but self-effacing apparatchik named Todor Zhivkov.
The introduction of the new course was only the beginning of a series of events which were to convulse the USSR and Eastern Europe between 1953 and 1956. In 1955 Khrushchev began the rehabilitation of Tito; given that Chervenkov’s eminence was a result of his defeat of Kostov on the grounds of the latter’s titoism, this seriously undermined Chervenkov’s legitimacy. When Khrushchev, speaking to the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, criticised Stalin’s mistakes he pulled another plank from Chervenkov’s political platform. At the April plenum of the
BCP central committee Chervenkov’s cult of personality was denounced and he resigned. The new prime minister was Anton Yugov.
During the upheavals of 1956, which were to end with the Hungarian anti-Soviet revolution, Zhivkov remained steadfastly loyal to Khrushchev. The relaxations of 1956 had produced in Bulgaria a notable cultural thaw but after Hungary there was an equal and opposite reaction with the purge of the so-called ‘anti-party group’ in 1957 which was both a copy of events in Moscow and an assurance to the Soviet comrades that the Bulgarian party was in full control of events. The crack-down of 1957 enhanced Yugov’s political stature. He was seen as the strong man of the party, a reputation he had earned between 1944 and 1949 when he had been minister of the interior. He had dropped out of favour after the Kostov trial but was back in the saddle as deputy prime minister in time to deal with the Plovdiv strikers in 1953. By 1957 he and Zhivkov were obvious contenders and probable competitors for supremacy within the party and therefore the country.
The late 1950s were dominated by economic policy. In 1958 Bulgaria announced it was the first state after the Soviet Union to have completed the collectivisation of agriculture. In the same year a drastic reform of the collective farms reduced their number from 3,450 to 932. Other reforms in the same year required all bureaucrats, both party and state, to work for a set number of days in a factory or on a farm to make sure they did not lose touch with the proletariat. In 1960 Zhivkov produced a fantastic, or phantasmagoric plan for economic expansion. The figures were absurd and were reduced in 1961 before being abandoned in 1963 after inflicting considerable damage on the economy, particularly agriculture. These ‘Zhivkov Theses’ of 1960 were sometimes referred to as Bulgaria’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ but they were copied from Khrushchev not from Mao.
Both Yugov and Chervenkov were critical of the Zhivkov Theses, but Chervenkov himself was finally discredited in 1961 when Khrushchev launched his second and much more vitriolic attack upon Stalin and stalinism. Chervenkov, after being denounced for not having learnt the lessons of 1956 and the April plenum, disappeared from public life.
Chervenkov’s elimination intensified the duel between Zhivkov and Yugov. Zhivkov’s strength was his backing from Moscow, and his position was bolstered in May 1962 when his patron, Khrushchev, paid a week-long visit to Bulgaria, touring the country with his protégé in the fashion of a Russian general of old. Zhivkov’s weakness was the fast deteriorating agricultural situation which was producing shortages so severe that grain had to be imported from North America. Yugov capitalised on this, as he did on Khrushchev’s mishandling of relations with China and his disastrous adventure in Cuba.
The final battle was due to be fought in the eighth congress of the BCP which had originally been scheduled for August 1962 but which was postponed until November because of the agricultural crisis. Shortly before the congress convened a plenum of the central committee met. Half-way through its proceedings Zhivkov flew to Moscow; when he returned a few days later he announced that Yugov had been removed from the politburo and relieved of his post as prime minister. Yugov retired into obscurity, to emerge as an old man in 1984 to receive the award of ‘hero of socialist labour’.
Zhivkov’s victory had clearly been engineered and confirmed by the Kremlin and henceforth Zhivkov was to be a byword for slavish obedience to the Moscow line. He did not rely on the Soviets alone, however. Soon after Yugov’s ouster he brought his own supporters into the politburo and into other critical party posts at national and local level. By 1964 he was strong enough to survive the fall of his patron in Moscow and in the following year he defeated a military conspiracy aimed at lessening Bulgaria’s subservience to the Soviet Union. Zhivkov was to remain virtually unchallenged for over twenty years.
The Zhivkovshtina, 1965–1981
In 1965 the Bulgarian leadership introduced a series of reforms which were to bring in greater economic accountability and, under the new system of ‘planning from below’, were to allow local enterprises and their managers greater responsibility. The upheavals in Czechoslovakia three years later stopped the reform programme dead in its tracks. Not only did the party return to economic orthodoxy, it actually tightened political controls. The Fatherland Front took into its fold seemingly innocuous organisations such as the temperance society and the slavic committee and a call went out to make sure that all committees in urban residences and all those dealing with the supply of water, food and other necessities were firmly within the party’s grasp. Inside the party itself there was to be ‘iron discipline’.
Much of this renewed centralisation and ideological conformity were reflected in two important innovations in 1971: a new constitution and a new party programme.
The 1971 constitution declared Bulgaria to be a socialist state headed by its working class. The leading role of the BCP was recognised, as was Bulgaria’s membership of the socialist community. A new body was established, the state council, which was to have legislative and executive powers, and whose chairperson was to be head of state. That person was Zhivkov. The state council was also to exercise certain supervisory functions over the administration, functions which in most other East European states were the responsibility of party organs. The new party programme announced that the guiding principles of the BCP were still those laid down in the ‘April Line’ of 1956, but now that socialism had been built a new strategy was needed to guide the party and the nation through the process of constructing mature socialism in ‘a unified socialist society’. In the long term this process would involve the homogenisation of Bulgaria; the emphasis at this stage was on the amalgamation of urban and rural life, and of physical and mental labour, but for those who chose to exploit it the idea of a unified socialist society could also have ethnic connotations. The move towards mature socialism would mean the transition from extensive to intensive growth, a transition which was to be facilitated by the scientific-technological revolution which alone could bring the required increase in productivity and therefore wealth. Though the 1971 party programme was to be greatly modified in the mid-1980s, the 1971 constitution remained in force until after the collapse of the communist system.
The changes of 1971 did not greatly alter Zhivkov’s regime. Its main feature remained an almost total obedience to the Soviet Union, especially in foreign policy; in September 1973 Zhivkov remarked that Bulgaria and the Soviet Union would ‘act as single body, breathing with the same lungs and nourished by the same bloodstream’. On issues such as the Vietnam war, the third world, the Middle East, and Latin America there was not a hair’s breadth of difference between Sofia and Moscow. So far did Zhivkov’s devotion to the Soviet Union go that we now know that on two occasions he proposed that Bulgaria should be incorporated into the USSR. Khrushchev turned him down because he thought Zhivkov saw in such a union easy access to higher living standards; Brezhnev rejected the offer because he knew it to be impracticable in diplomatic terms.
Whilst he always followed the Soviet line in foreign affairs Zhivkov did develop more links with the west. In October 1966 he paid his first visit to the non-communist world when he was received in Paris by General de Gaulle, whose anti-American virtues were considered compensation enough for the vice of his conservatism. In December 1973 full diplomatic relations were established with the Federal Republic of Germany with whom Bulgaria had already developed considerable trading links. In June 1975 Zhivkov visited the Vatican and was received by Pope Paul VI. Later in the year the Bulgarian government sanctioned the nomination of Uniate bishops in Bulgaria and allowed a party of Bulgarian Catholics to make a pilgrimage to Rome; by 1979, for the first time since the 1940s, no Catholic see in Bulgaria was without a bishop.
Increasing links were also established with the third world. African students had been receiving university education in Bulgaria since the early 1960s, though life there was not always to their taste as demonstrations in April 1965 had proved. In the late 1960s and 1970s many trained Bulgarians went in the opposite direction to wo
rk as doctors, teachers, engineers, etc.; by 1981 there were over two thousand Bulgarian doctors working in Libya alone. In the 1970s and 1980s well-heeled, dollar-earning Bulgarians enjoying leave at home were a familiar feature of the country’s somewhat exiguous fleshpots.
At home, the vast majority of the population were content or apathetic. Despite occasional rumblings of discontent there was no prospect of dissidence on the Polish scale; Bulgaria had no independent church to act as an alternative focus of loyalty, and when confronted with a political system which he disliked the Bulgarian tended to respond with apathy and withdrawal rather than with opposition and confrontation; the bogomil legacy lasted long. Zhivkov did not utter the word dissidence in public until 1977, and some years later when an acrostic reading ‘Down With Todor Zhivkov’ appeared in a literary journal he laughed it off, declaring that the regime would not be brought to its knees by a couple of poets.
Another, and more important reason for the relative stability of Bulgaria during the 1960s and 1970s was that for most of the population life was gradually becoming better. The political terror of the late 1940s and 1950s had given way to a reactive policing against the few who spoke out or caused the regime embarrassment. In December 1972 a central committee plenum had promised that in the new phase of economic and social development more attention would be paid to providing consumer goods and social facilities such as education and housing. Progress was always to be slow in these sectors, and there were periodic downturns, but anyone who had visited Bulgaria in the late 1960s and then returned in the late 1970s would have had no doubt that conditions had in general improved.
One reason for this gradual improvement was that Bulgaria benefited from Comecon schemes for economic specialisation introduced in the early 1960s. Under a 1965 agreement with the USSR Bulgaria was to assemble cars and lorries manufactured in the Soviet Union; Bulgaria also began to specialise in ship-building and in the production of railway rolling stock and fork-lift trucks; by 1975 one-third of its industrial output was for the transport sector. By then Bulgaria was beginning to produce magnetic discs and other computer parts for the East European market. Agreements such as these tied Bulgaria to the East European and even more to the Soviet customer, but on the other hand they provided Bulgaria with easy markets for its low-quality manufactured goods and they also allowed Bulgaria to import oil from the Soviet Union at low prices. In later years a good deal of this oil was sold profitably on the open market for hard currency.
A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 20