A Concise History of Bulgaria

by R. J. Crampton

  A 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’.

  If the regenerative process were meant to produce political stability in Bulgaria it failed miserably and it greatly reduced Bulgaria’s standing in the world, even in Moscow. And it was in Moscow that the second great change of 1985 took place. When Mikhail Gorbachev became first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Todor Zhivkov was seventy-four years of age and was the longest serving communist leader in Eastern Europe. In 1981 the central committee of the BCP had an average age of 57.5 years, and only 27 per cent of its members were under 50. The contrast between the new broom in the Kremlin and Zhivkov, to whom still clung the odour of Brezhnevite corruption and stagnation, was enormous. When Zhivkov paid his first visit to Gorbachev’s Moscow he was kept waiting till the second day before meeting the Soviet leader, an unprecedented snub. What Zhivkov found hard to realise in subsequent years was that the Kremlin, so long the ultimate bastion of his power, had now become indifferent to his fate; Gorbachev was content to leave each East European party and state to conduct its own affairs.

  In 1985 the Bulgarian party’s main preoccupation was with the economy. Party plena in February 1985 and in January 1986 heralded more changes. The move was being made, said the propagandists, from bureaucratic to economic planning. In December 1986 another plenum, called to draw up the ninth five-year plan, having faced uncomfortable facts about the recent performance of the economy, moved the engine of reform into a higher gear, emphasising now the idea of self-management.

  Plate 8.4 The Imaret Mosque, Plovdiv, also known as the Sehabüddin Pasha Mosque, built in 1444; during the ‘regenerative process’ the grounds of the mosque were turned into a rubbish tip; this photograph was taken in 1987.

  Map 8.1 Bulgaria in the 1980s.

  These events were but the overture to the restructuring which was put on stage at the plenum of 28–29 July 1987. Zhivkov admitted to the many failings of socialism and launched a massive attack on the middle bureaucracy; this was now to be made self-managing and was to be much more accountable to popular feeling. So great was the reordering of party priorities that the ‘July concept’ was to replace the ‘April Line’ of 1956 as its guiding principle. In August 1987 the sûbranie enacted a raft of reforms meant to give legislative substance to the ideas expressed in the July plenum. A number of ministries were abolished, local government was extensively reformed, and a commission was established to consider constitutional changes. In economic terms the welter of reforms in the 1980s brought little beyond massively destructive dislocation in economic administration, but Zhivkov did try to put the reforms to some political purpose.

  In 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 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.

  Zhivkov’s regime was facing unprecedented challenges and they were made much more serious by the continuing legacy of the regenerative process which was to dominate the fateful spring and summer of 1989 in Bulgaria. By the late spring the oppressed Turkish minority had found its champions amongst the Bulgarian intelligentsia. In late May, shortly before the Paris meeting of the CSCE, a number of leading Turks began a hunger strike. Within days there was a confrontation and when Zhivkov on 28 May called a meeting of the politburo on a Sunday it was clear that the leadership was seriously concerned. They had every reason to be. The Turkish areas of the north-east were in a state of virtual revolt. Zhivkov’s response was to go on TV and announce that if they really preferred capitalist Turkey to socialist Bulgaria the ethnic Turks were free to leave. Zhivkov seems to have believed that this would call the Turks’ bluff and that few would emigrate. He was wrong. By August, when the despairing authorities in Turkey itself closed their borders, some 344,000 ethnic Turks had left Bulgaria.

  Emigration on such a massive scale clearly created difficulties with the Turkish republic. President Bush promised backing to Ankara but Moscow informed Sofia that it did not wish to become involved in Bulgaria’s national question. Zhivkov was isolated internationally.

  He was virtually isolated at home too. Within the party leadership Petûr Mladenov, a member of the politburo and minister for foreign affairs, was more aware than anyone how damaging the regenerative process had been to Bulgaria’s standing abroad. He it was who led the cabal against Zhivkov. By the end of October the two were in bitter conflict and Mladenov’s hand was much strengthened when on 26 October, in full view of foreign journalists, police manhandled demonstrators during an ecological protest. It was a most convenient occurrence for Mladenov who was soon to leave for China. On his return journey he stopped in Moscow to talk with Gorbachev. Immediately upon his return the cabal swung into action and on 10 November, the day after the Berlin Wall was breached, Zhivkov resigned.

  9 Post-communist Bulgaria

  Part I. Incomplete Transition, 1989–1997

  Dismantling the apparatus of totalitarianism, November 1989–December 1990

  Zhivkov’s fall was the work of the party hierarchy; it was a palace coup rather than a revolution, and ‘people power’ in Bulgaria was to be more the consequence than the cause of the change of leadership.

  Soon after 10 November a number of new political organisations appeared. Some of these had lived a shadowy, semi-legal half-life in the final years or mont
hs of the old regime and were now assuming a full and open existence; some were entirely new creations; and others were reborn versions of historic parties, amongst which were the social democrats, and the agrarians who, to distinguish themselves from the collaborators of the post-1947 years, reverted to the name of Petkov’s agrarians: the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union – Nikola Petkov (BANU–NP). On 14 November fourteen of the non-communist political groups came together in a federation which called itself the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). As its leader the UDF chose Zheliu Zhelev, an academic philosopher who had incurred the displeasure of the old regime.

  Meanwhile the new leader of the BCP, Mladenov, had arranged for a central committee plenum to meet from 11 to 13 December. It expressed contrition for the mistakes of the past and promised that in future there would be more party democracy, and that there would be real parliamentary life rather than the stage-managed show it had been since 1947.

  By now the anti-communist forces were demanding more than contrition or promises of change from the ruling party: they wanted real change. This was made manifest on 14 December when the UDF organised a huge demonstration in Sofia calling for the abolition of article one of the constitution which guaranteed the communist party a leading role in the state and in society. With communist rule crumbling all round them the Bulgarian comrades could not be deaf to such calls, the more so as the demonstrations had shown the UDF was able to command and control massive public support. The BCP leaders agreed to begin discussions with the opposition. The way was open to the creation of a Bulgarian ‘round table’ on the Polish and Hungarian models.

  Before the round table convened there were further large-scale protests in Sofia. Even before the meeting of the BCP plenum in mid-December Mladenov had apologised for and repudiated the regenerative process which was formally abandoned in a decree of 29 December. This provoked a fierce reaction. On 7 January thousands of protesters arrived in Sofia from all over Bulgaria, obviously with the connivance of local party officials who alone could have sanctioned use of so much rationed petrol. People power, it was clear, could be on the side of reaction as well as revolution. Counter-demonstrations in favour of the decree were held a week later. The demonstrations, together with the mayhem across the border in Romania, emphasised the need for the round table and encouraged a constructive attitude by both the BCP and the UDF which, it had been agreed, were to be represented equally at the discussions.

  Almost everyone agreed that the apparatus of totalitarianism had to be destroyed. It was the round table’s function to determine how this should be done. It had to decide how to circumvent the contentious article one of the constitution and to secure the withdrawal of the party from its position of political and social dominance, and to separate the party from the social and political bodies it had penetrated and subdued for over forty years. In the event, it was eventually agreed to amend article one substantially, but here the round table was following as much as it was leading events. Many institutions had taken their own action and abolished the primary party organisations in the workplace; the Union of Journalists banned them in its ranks at the end of January, and on 24 January the politburo dissolved those in the military and in places of work. Other changes followed rapidly. In February the old trades’ union central council was abolished and the unions entirely separated from any political organisation, a new body, the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB), being established. A few days later another prominent landmark of communist Bulgaria disappeared when the communist youth organisation dissolved itself. At the end of March the Fatherland Front underwent its dose of restructuring to emerge as the Fatherland Union.

  At the end of January the BCP had called its fourteenth congress. It enacted a drastic restructuring of the party. Both the politburo and the central committee were replaced by larger bodies which were to be more responsible to the membership; the old regime, said Mladenov, had been a dictatorship over the party as well as over the people, and to underline his point it was announced that Zhivkov was to be arrested on charges which included embezzlement, the misuse of power, and incitement to racial hatred. Mladenov also declared that the economy was to be restructured on the basis of privatisation, decentralisation, and demonopolisation; that a multi-party democracy was to be introduced; and that there was to be complete separation of party and state, in conformity with which he relinquished his post of party chief which went to Aleksandûr Lilov, Mladenov remaining head of state. At the same time a new government was formed with Andrei Lukanov as prime minister. The agrarians, embarrassed at their collaborationist record, did not join the new administration; ironically, the collapse of totalitarianism had produced the first purely communist government in Bulgaria’s history. It was communist only in name, and not even that for long because at the beginning of April the BCP changed its name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).

  The attempt to separate the party from the state and from society involved the further extension of individual liberties and fundamental social and economic reform. The most significant move to extend individual liberties was the abolition of the sixth department of the ministry of the interior, the old secret police. Between February and April private agriculture was legalised and there were decrees lifting restrictions on the employment of labour and allowing free enterprise in retailing, the service industries, and tourism. On 6 March strikes were legalised, after compulsory arbitration and mediation, though they were not to be permitted in the army, the police, the ports, the medical services and the power industry. There were also further concessions to the ethnic minorities; on 5 March the sûbranie accepted a bill allowing free choice of names for all citizens.

  The fourteenth congress of the BCP and discussion on issues such as ethnic minorities had delayed movement towards full constitutional revision. So too had a number of disagreements between the BCP and the UDF in the round table, but these were resolved at the end of March when it was agreed that a Grand National Assembly should be called to redesign Bulgaria’s political system. Concessions had to be made by both sides before it was finally agreed that half the GNA’s four hundred deputies would be elected by proportional representation and half by the first past the post system.

  The elections were held on 10 and 17 June 1990 and gave the BSP 211 seats, the UDF 144, the predominantly Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF) 23, and the agrarians 16. Lukanov remained prime minister.

  The meeting of the GNA should have marked the beginning of the phase of constitutional construction, but it did not. The ceremonial opening in Tûrnovo was accompanied by noisy demonstrations by anti-Turks angered by the presence of the MRF, and when the assembly moved to Sofia students and others staged protests against the failure to investigate alleged electoral irregularities. Early in July the protesters revealed a video tape which, they said, showed Mladenov urging the use of tanks against demonstrators in December 1989; Mladenov resigned and Zhelev succeeded him as president with Petûr Beron, a zoologist, becoming leader of the UDF. Mladenov’s fall was not the end of the protests. Calls which had been heard for months for the ending of communist domination over the media and other aspects of national life continued and at the end of August led to the burning of a section of the party’s headquarters in the centre of Sofia.

  The fire induced a more sober mood but real progress towards change was still not possible. There had to be an emergency packet of economic reforms but Lukanov wanted these to be passed by a coalition government because that would give the appearance of full national backing for them. The UDF refused to be drawn. By November the political impasse and a deteriorating economic situation was producing social unrest. Demonstrations had been a constant feature of Bulgarian political life since 1989 and once more the streets filled with protesters, many of them students. Towards the end of the month both CITUB and its rival trade union organisation, Podkrepa, declared strikes and on 29 November Lukanov resigned, chased from office by public action on the streets r
ather than by due parliamentary process. On 20 December a new administration took office under the premiership of Dimitûr Popov, a non-party lawyer.

  Plate 9.1 The fire in the Bulgarian Socialist Party (former Communist Party) headquarters, August 1990.

  Constructing the apparatus of democracy, December 1990–October 1991

  Between November 1989 and December 1990 most of the apparatus of totalitarianism had been dismantled and in foreign relations Bulgaria was presenting a new face to the world; the close links with the USSR were gone and diplomatic relations had been established with Israel, Chile and South Africa. But if the mechanisms of totalitarianism had been dismantled those of democracy had not yet been constructed. This was in part because no workable consensus could be found within the GNA or perhaps within the nation.

  It was the task of the Popov government to find that consensus. It called itself ‘a government to guarantee the peaceful transition to a democratic society’, and as a condition of its taking office insisted that the major parties must agree to a peaceful and orderly transition. Given this consensus the Popov government could set about rescuing the political process from the streets and returning it to constitutional channels; having accomplished this it could allow the GNA to redesign those channels. It would also have to draw up and impose economic reforms.

  Initially the latter took precedence. There was no pretence that the task would be easy but help came from the trade unions and the managers/employers who on 8 January 1991 signed, with the government, a tripartite agreement on social peace. The trade unions accepted a 200-day moratorium on strikes in return for which government and the managers agreed to handle the economic transition with as much sensitivity as possible. The social peace was soon to be tested when Popov’s government in effect introduced a Polish-style ‘big bang’ economic reform which began with the deregulation of the prices of many goods, a measure which caused much social distress.