Plate 8.2 Typical communist propaganda: party boss Todor Zhivkov with a group of children at the First Congress on Public Education, Sofia 1980.
In the early and mid-1970s food production was stimulated by another major reorganisation of the agricultural sector. In 1969 in the Vratsa area seven collective farms employing some 40,000 workers and covering 38,700 hectares were grouped into a loose federation or Agro-Industrial Complex (AIC). In 1970 the experiment was endorsed by a central committee plenum and applied nationally. The AICs employed at least 6,000 workers and were between 20,000 and 30,000 hectares in extent. They were intended to capitalise on the advantages of the local soil and climate by concentrating on two or three crops and one or two brands of livestock. In their early years the AICs gave encouraging returns and were another reason why most Bulgarians in the 1970s felt they had little reason to complain about their lot.
The placidity of the domestic political scene did not mean that Zhivkov was indifferent to potential opposition. One literary man who learned that to his cost was Georgi Markov, poisoned with a pellet shot from an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge, London, in September 1977. Markov had revealed too many details of the life style of Bulgaria’s political élite; two weeks later a similar but this time unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of Vladimir Kostov in Paris, his sin being that he had exposed the workings of the Bulgarian secret police and the extent to which it, and much of the Bulgarian establishment, was subordinated to the Soviet Union.
Nor did Zhivkov tolerate any potential challenge to his leadership in the upper echelons of the party. Throughout his rule he conducted a game of musical chairs, moving ministers or senior party officials sideways if they seemed to be building up too strong a power base. Such changes seldom involved loss of office but occasionally more firm action was taken. In May 1977 Boris Velchev was removed from the politburo and extensive changes were made in a number of provincial party organisations. At the same time party membership cards were called in for examination; this was the standard method of carrying out a purge and in this one some 38,500 members were expelled from the party. This was the largest ‘cleansing’ of the party which took place whilst Zhivkov was in power, though there were further sackings of leading figures, particularly in the mid-1980s.
Like other Balkan communist regimes that in Bulgaria was not devoid of a nationalist tinge. This was useful because as ideological commitment declined the party needed greater legitimacy at home, particularly after the post-1968 tightening of the reins. There were, it seemed in the late 1960s, two easy roads to enhanced legitimacy: consumerism and a greater assertion of national identity. The Bulgarian economy was not yet developed enough to offer consumerism, but there were also problems with the second course. Because Bulgarian policy was so closely aligned with that of the Soviet Union national assertion was difficult in foreign affairs. The answer was more national, Bulgarian self-assertion at home; 1968 saw the end of all but one newspaper and one journal for the Turkish reader; Roma textbooks could henceforth be published in Bulgarian only; and Sofia’s Roma theatre, which had flourished in the post-war years, became a thing of the past.
After the 1971 party programme had called for the creation of a unified socialist nation the assimilationist pressures on the Roma and on other minorities increased. In the early 1970s Pomaks who had become Turkified were required to adopt Slav names, and those who did not were punished; in 1974 five hundred of the thirteen hundred inmates of the notorious Belene labour camp were Pomaks who had resisted pressure to change their names.The Turks were not yet put under such pressure but increased emigration was encouraged. In 1968 Bulgaria and Turkey signed an agreement allowing for the reunification in Turkey of families separated by the exodus of the early 1950s. In the ten years during which the agreement remained in force some 130,000 Turks left Bulgaria.
The Macedonian question was also one where nationalist heart strings could be tweaked. After the break with Tito in 1948 the expression of Macedonian identity became more and more difficult. By the early 1960s severe penalties were being imposed on anyone who attempted such expression in public, and even though the 1963 edition of the shorter Bulgarian encyclopaedia still carried an article on the Macedonian language the 1965 census, which measured ethnicity by mother tongue, was the last in communist years to recognise Macedonian as an ethnic category. Any action on the Macedonian question inside Bulgaria inevitably affected and was affected by relations with Yugoslavia. If the Soviet Union’s relations with Belgrade were bad the Bulgarians did not hesitate to take the offensive on Macedonia. In 1969, for example, the party circulated to its members a pamphlet claiming that two-thirds of the population of Yugoslav Macedonia were ethnic Bulgarians, an assertion to which Skopje naturally took great exception. Other disputes, most of them of an academic nature, were to break out periodically but Zhivkov never lost control of them and there was never any likelihood under his rule that the Macedonian dispute would cause real international complications.
The 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 an 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.
Plate 8.3 A critical cartoon of Liudmila Zhivkova as patron of the arts. Those in line are mostly caricatures of leading Bulgarian academics and men of letters.
The Decline and Fall of Todor Zhivkov, 1981–1989
The death of Liudmila Zhivkova was a symbolic turning point after which hope seemed to turn increasingly to despair amongst Bulgaria’s ruling élite, no matter what contortions of organisation and policy it imposed.
In the first place the gloss of Zhivkova’s cultural self-congratulation was tarnished by a series of international scandals. These had begun with the Markov and Kostov affairs in 1977 but they showed no signs of ending. There were accusations that Bulgaria was involved in the production of counterfeit whisky; that the state trading agency, Kintex, was inv
olved in a complex operation which smuggled drugs into the west and used the money so gained to send arms to subversive groups in countries such as Turkey which the communists wished to destabilise; in 1981 came the accusation that Bulgarian secret service agents had been involved in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome; and in July 1982 the United States branded Bulgaria as a country engaged in ‘state-sponsored’ terrorism. Since the fall of the communists Bulgaria has acknowledged its guilt in the Markov affair but continues strenuously to deny any implication in the attempt on the pope’s life.
By 1981 a more general problem was becoming clear in Bulgaria as it was in other East European states. The transfer from extensive to intensive economic growth was not being accomplished as easily or as rapidly as planned. The scientific-technological revolution in which so much hope had been placed proved disappointing, not least because planned economies could not keep pace with the increasingly rapid changes in computer sciences and fibre optics. The import of western technology, upon which some reliance had been placed, became more difficult partly because of the trading restrictions President Reagan imposed, but much more so because the oil-price hikes of the mid-1970s had made western goods so much more expensive. At the same time efforts to expand trade with central and western Europe were doomed to frustration because all that Bulgaria could offer in the way of high-quality exports were agricultural goods, the very ones which the EEC was determined to exclude. Bulgaria did find some alternative markets in Scandinavia, North America and the Far East but it was becoming more difficult to meet foreign debt obligations; much more difficult, indeed, than the fabricated figures published in the 1980s indicated. By 1981 growth rates were slowing and expectations becoming correspondingly more sober; the eighth five-year plan introduced in that year anticipated an increase in national income of 20 per cent as opposed to the 45 per cent of the seventh plan in 1976.
The regime’s answer was the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) outlined in a plenum of March 1979 and applied to the entire economy by 1982. The purpose of the NEM was to raise productivity, to improve the quality of Bulgarian goods and services, and thereby secure the exports needed to eliminate existing trading deficits and hard currency debts. To achieve this the NEM was to provide ‘a new approach to the management of the economy in the scientific-technological revolution’. The new approach was based on five principles. First, decentralisation was to mean greater freedom for all enterprises which would now receive from the central planning agencies not detailed production quotas but general guidelines. Second, democracy was to be implemented by the election of brigade leaders and other officials in a new system of ‘mobilisation from below’. Third, competition was to be extended and would determine investment allowances as well as wages. Fourth, market forces were to be allowed into the economy with enterprises being left to find their own resources and outlets for their products. And fifth, self-sufficiency was to be applied to all plants which could no longer automatically count on government subsidies.
These were grandiose schemes but they had little real impact. The quality of production showed no sign of improvement. In 1983 Zhivkov gave a lecture, which was broadcast live on radio and television, in which he savagely denounced the quality of Bulgarian goods, even alleging that foreign products assembled under licence had been ‘bulgarised’ by sloppy workmanship and poor labour discipline. In March 1984 a special party conference met to discuss the problem. It produced yet more exhortations and suggestions for industrial reorganisation but once again these had little effect.
The NEM, the attempt to improve quality, and the efforts to increase the supply of consumer goods to the home market, faced a number of obstacles. In the first place the need to tackle the foreign debt had to take priority over other needs if future imports of technology were to be assured and export markets secured. This meant that foreign currency had to be diverted to debt payments rather than to importing foreign consumer goods or the machinery to manufacture them at home. It also meant that much of the best of domestic production had to be diverted into the export trade. The Bulgarians did not have to suffer the privations Ceausescu’s manic determination to overcome Romania’s foreign debt inflicted on his country, but the Bulgarian home buyer was denied enjoyment of the best his country had to offer, not least in wine. It made life in Bulgaria grey and uniform just at a time when foreign travel was becoming easier and when more western films, TV programmes and videos were being seen, thus making an increasing number of Bulgarians more conscious of that greyness.
Energy was another problem facing the Bulgarian economy. The country has little in the way of indigenous fossil fuels and is forced therefore to rely heavily on imports. In the 1980s the Soviets, facing economic problems of their own, were forcing up their prices and in the second half of the decade were to switch to world prices. Bulgaria had developed a nuclear power capability at Kozlodui on the Danube and was constructing a second facility further down the river at Belene. But construction work at the latter and repairs at the former were way behind schedule by the mid-1980s, and as Kozlodui produced in the region of 30 per cent of the nation’s electricity, not having it at full capacity was an extra economic problem. So too were the severe droughts of 1984 and 1985 which reduced hydro-electric power generation.
The 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 producers 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 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.
From 1985 economic difficulties combined with two other factors to wreck the Zhivkov regime. Those two factors were the attempted assimilation of Bulgaria’s ethnic Turks and the advent of Gorbachev.
The 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 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 in public. The official government line was that the 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.
The attack was not merely against the Turks. The taking of an Islamic name is an integral part of the maturation of a Muslim and the new prohibition on taking Islamic names was a continuation of a quiet assault begun some years previously on Islam itself. The washing of the dead had already been pro
hibited as a danger to public health; circumcision had been outlawed; and for years it had been all but impossible to make the pilgrimage to Mecca or the other holy places, whilst inside Bulgaria itself many treasures of Islamic architecture had been destroyed.
The regenerative process produced a world-wide storm of protest. Bulgaria was condemned by the United Nations, the Islamic Conference Organisation, the European Court of Justice and other international organisations. Given the weight of such disapproval and the small apparent internal gains it is difficult to understand why such a policy was adopted. It has been suggested that there was a belief that Islam was fundamentally conservative and could never coexist with the modern mentality demanded by the scientific-technological revolution. But if this were so, why attack the Turkish language as well as Islam?
It is also possible that the regime was frightened of the long-term demographic trends which were apparent by the mid-1980s. By then the Turks formed approximately 10 per cent of the population but differential birth rates meant that this proportion would grow rapidly. This could easily create difficulties in a conscript army, or if Turks in any one area demanded autonomy. That could be the prelude to an Eastern Rumelia in reverse, and if such a notion seemed fanciful those who feared it pointed to the example of northern Cyprus. These dangers would be decreased if the difference between Bulgarian and Turk were made to disappear. This argument is strengthened by the fact that a census was to be held in December 1985.
A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 21