A Concise History of Bulgaria

by R. J. Crampton

  In addition to the dislocating effects of economic reforms there were also ethnic tensions. In February the minister of education had announced that in Turkish areas there was to be four hours of teaching per week in Turkish if that was what the local population desired. There was a swift reaction. Teachers in the affected areas, especially Razgrad, Kûrdjali and Shumen, went on strike whilst Bulgarian parents demonstrated and withheld their children from school. The UDF claimed that those opposing the reform were those who had been responsible for the regenerative process in the 1980s but whether this were the case or not, the government deemed it prudent to postpone the introduction of the plan until the beginning of the new academic year in September.

  When the GNA was not discussing economic or ethnic issues it found other problems to divert its attention from the constitutional debate. There were stormy scenes when the question of police files and the relationship of GNA members to the former political police were discussed. One casualty of this conflict was Beron who resigned after admitting to having played a minor role as an informant on foreign academic visitors; his successor as leader of the UDF was Filip Dimitrov. When the constitutional debate did at last begin there were still a series of distractions. A number of UDF deputies argued that a constitution drawn up by a communist-dominated assembly could not be trusted, and in June thirty-nine of them staged a hunger strike on this issue. There was also a delay when it was decided to hold a national referendum on the future nature of the Bulgarian state, a euphemism for asking whether or not the monarchy should be restored. After the question had taken up almost two weeks of GNA time the referendum was cancelled.

  Eventually, however, the GNA did address itself to the political structure it was meant to define and on 12 July the new constitution was approved. Bulgaria was to be a democratic state subject to the rule of law with complete separation of powers. The head of state was to be a president elected by direct vote for a five-year term of office, and all candidates for the presidency had to have been resident in Bulgaria for five years, this restriction being introduced to prevent King Simeon presenting himself for election as president. A constitutional court was to be established, and the legislature was to be a sûbranie of 240 members elected by proportional representation with an electoral threshold of 4 per cent of the national vote for parties to achieve representation in the assembly.

  The first elections under the new system were held on 13 October 1991, but only after the right of the MRF to stand had been challenged, unsuccessfully, on the grounds that it contravened a law of 1990 stating that no party might be formed on the basis of ethnic or religious affiliation. Thirty-eight parties eventually entered the contest, but only three managed to cross the 4 per cent hurdle and the result produced was agonisingly close. The UDF had the most votes, but only just, their share of the poll being a mere 1 per cent greater than that of the BSP. The UDF emerged with 110 seats, the BSP with 106, and the MRF held the balance with 24. The agrarians, true to tradition, had damaged themselves by splitting. More than one in five of the votes cast had been for parties which had failed to cross the 4 per cent threshold.

  The UDF government, October 1991–October 1992

  After the election a new government was formed by the leader of the UDF, Filip Dimitrov. His cabinet consisted mainly of UDF members but the MRF, on whom he relied for his parliamentary majority, declined to enter a coalition lest this alienate public opinion from the new administration. Also, outside the cabinet the MRF would enjoy greater freedom of action.

  Lilov resigned as leader of the BSP at the end 1991 to be replaced by the thirty-two-year-old Zhan Videnov. At the beginning of 1992 presidential elections reaffirmed Zhelev as head of state though he was surprisingly taken to a second round of voting.

  The Dimitrov government was to stay in office for just under a year. It achieved little. It spent a great deal of energy, to little effect, in trying to enforce the repatriation of land confiscated by the communists and it indulged in lustration, or the punishment of officials from the former regime. Seven hundred and fifty officers, including ten generals, were pensioned off by Dimitûr Ludjev, Bulgaria’s first civilian minister of defence since 1934. Lustration was also evident in September with the sentencing of Zhivkov to seven years in prison; Zhivkov was the first of Eastern Europe’s former leaders to be tried and convicted but he was to be allowed to serve his time under house arrest rather than in gaol. Tough attitudes towards former communists were also reflected in the Panev law which banned from administrative posts in the universities or academies anyone who had held party office under the old regime.

  The effect of the lustration process on the Bulgarian Orthodox church produced a drama which was both tragedy and farce. On 9 March 1992 Patriarch Maxim was sacked; a report by the parliamentary commission on religious faiths said that his election in 1971 had been improper and there was gossip that he had been a ‘collaborator’. In May his opponents elected Metropolitan Pimen as acting chairman of the holy synod. In June, however, the constitutional court declared that it was the removal of Maxim which had been wrong because this was an unlawful intrusion of the government into ecclesiastical affairs. The supporters of Pimen refused to accept the judgement or to vacate the holy synod building, and the Orthodox church, the founding father of the nation, was reduced to the degrading spectacle of its priests fighting on the steps of the Aleksandûr Nevski cathedral. Not even a visit by the Oecumenical Patriarch from Istanbul could mend the breach. The sacking of Maxim was seen by many as the right thing done in the wrong way, a proper end achieved by improper means. Many, including even the president, held the Dimitrov government responsible for the tragedy.

  Plate 9.2 Cartoon by Georgi Chaushov on the ineffectiveness of the Bulgarian Orthodox church; the drawing appeared in December 1992; the church had split disastrously earlier in the year.

  The few successes which the Dimitrov government could set against its failures were to be found mainly in foreign affairs. One was the admission of Bulgaria to the Council of Europe in May 1992. There were also significant improvements in official relations with Turkey. This was in part because the two countries held similar views on how to react to and contain the crises caused by the collapse of Yugoslavia. But there were other reasons. With the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, Bulgaria believed it had to seek new forms of protection against its neighbours, the largest and most powerful of which was Turkey. An approach to NATO in 1990 received scant sympathy and the Bulgarians were advised to seek an accommodation with Ankara. Bulgaria had little choice but to comply and in May 1992 a treaty of friendship was signed.

  One foreign issue which could never be far from Bulgarian politics was Macedonia. Soon after 10 November 1989 those in Bulgaria who regarded themselves as Macedonian had attempted to establish a Macedonian party in Bulgaria, to be called ‘Ilinden’, but this was refused recognition. The collapse of the Yugoslav state and the proclamation of independence by the Skopje government posed considerable difficulties for Sofia but on 16 January 1992 Bulgaria became the first country to recognise the Macedonian state. The decision was an improvised one, with not even the Bulgarian minister for foreign affairs being told of it beforehand. It was also a controversial decision. It greatly angered Greece which rejected recognition of any state bearing the name ‘Macedonia’. Bulgaria could ill afford to alienate Greece who was both an increasingly important trading partner and source of inward investment and who could also be an advocate of the Bulgarian cause in the European Community’s tortuous corridors of power. In an attempt to assuage Greece, and also nationalist opinion at home, a sizeable portion of which continued to regard the Macedonians as part of the Bulgarian nation, the Bulgarian government therefore recognised the Macedonian state but refused to recognise the existence of a separate Macedonian nation. This failed to mollify the Greeks, it did little to placate offended nationalist feelings in Bulgaria, and it made for fearful complications in Bulgarian–Macedonian relations, not least becaus
e the Bulgarians refused to recognise the separate Macedonian language which, the Macedonians insisted, had to be used in official agreements and exchanges between the two states. The impasse was not to be solved for eight years. On the other hand, an accommodation between Bulgaria and Macedonia, however flawed, could not but be an element of stability and order in an increasingly unstable and disorderly south-eastern Europe, particularly when other parties in the region were seriously considering the forcible partition of the country.

  President Zhelev had made the running over the recognition of Macedonia and the government, despite its misgivings, had not in the end frustrated him. But relations between the two were bad. There had been intermittent skirmishing over issues such as the control of the intelligence services but in the late summer of 1992 the president launched an outright attack on the government. Gratuitous aggression on its part, said Zhelev, had not only caused social deprivation but had alienated the trade unions, the press, the non-parliamentary parties, and even the Church. The UDF fought back with equal vigour but it now had an added cause for concern because Ahmed Dogan, the leader of the MRF, upon which the government depended for its majority in the assembly, sided with the president.

  Plate 9.3 President Zheliu Zhelev.

  The MRF itself faced grave difficulties. The government’s economic reforms had hit the Turkish areas even harder than the rest of the country, and many ethnic Turks believed the land privatisation programme was discriminating against them; they responded by emigrating. If this second wave of emigration were to continue the Turkish population might be so depleted as to deprive the MRF of the 4 per cent of the national vote it needed for representation in the sûbranie. In September the MRF, to prove its muscle, drove the chairman of the sûbranie from office.

  In October relations between Dimitrov and Zhelev deteriorated even further when it was alleged that one of the prime minister’s advisors had been involved in attempts to sell arms illegally to Macedonia. Dimitrov denounced the rumours as a smear spread by the chief of the intelligence services acting in concert with some of the president’s close associates. This was yet another round in the dispute over control of the intelligence services and it was also the final nail in Dimitrov’s prime-ministerial coffin. On 28 October he resigned after losing a vote of confidence in the sûbranie.

  The Dimitrov government had entered and departed from office in due constitutional manner. But it had failed to live up to the expectations of many of its supporters. This was to some degree a result of its lack of a dependable sûbranie majority, but there were also faults closer to home. The elevation of Zhelev to the presidency in 1990 had removed the strongest moderating element in the UDF and thereafter the committed, anti-communist ideologues enjoyed greater influence. The differences of emphasis between Zhelev and the members of the Dimitrov cabinet therefore highlighted the main unsolved question of Bulgaria’s constitutional reforms: the relative powers of the presidency and the government.

  The anti-communist drive in the UDF was intensified by the continuing economic and social crisis which imposed immense hardship on most Bulgarians and which forced the leading parties within the alliance into ever more confrontational attitudes. Dimitrov and his cabinet dared not alienate these groups. Therefore, instead of seeking or preserving consensus the government bowed to pressure from its own more extreme supporters. As a result too much time and energy were spent on acts of lustration against individuals such as Zhivkov and Patriarch Maxim and on ill-prepared legislation on such issues as the decollectivisation of agriculture, and too little devoted to considered, effective economic reform not least with regard to the problems of the loss-making state enterprises. This chicken was to come home to roost in dramatic fashion half a decade later.

  The Berov government, December 1992–September 1994

  The vacuum left by the collapse of the Dimitrov government could not be filled by the BSP. It could not command sufficient support in the assembly and its new leader had not yet established himself fully either in his own party or in the public eye. The president and the MRF alone remained as effective forces but the latter could not form an administration. It did, however, agree to sponsor one which consisted largely of non-party, technical experts. The new prime minister was to be Liuben Berov, a distinguished professor of economic history and a former economic advisor to the president.

  Shortly before the Berov government was formed the European Union announced that it would sign an interim trade agreement with Bulgaria. If this created hopes of a new dawn for Bulgaria such hopes were soon dashed. Wrangling within the EU prevented implementation of the agreement until December 1993. It was symbolic of the disappointments that were to characterise the Berov administration.

  Under Berov Bulgaria trod water. His attempts to revitalise the economic reform process failed and he angered many who thought his administration was not merely treading water but swimming backwards. There were complaints that many in the media who opposed the government were being replaced but the fiercest criticism was directed against the judiciary bill of October 1993 which meant that the highest echelons of the legal profession would be confined to those who had held such office under the communists. The bill was submitted to the constitutional court. The judiciary bill was one of the few occasions on which the Berov government showed any resolution.

  A major problem for the cabinet was its lack of clear support in the sûbranie. By the summer of 1993 the cohesion of the MRF, upon which the government depended in parliament, was weakening, whilst the UDF and the BSP also suffered defections. This intensified the politicking which seemed by the summer of 1993 to have replaced government in Bulgaria. And there was little improvement in 1994, partly because in the spring of that year Berov himself was incapacitated and had to undergo heart surgery.

  The lack of firm government made itself felt most notably in the continued inability to enact proper economic reform and to contain the mounting wave of crime. Both problems were intensified by the imposition of sanctions on Yugoslavia.

  The Berov government, undermined by popular disillusion over economic stagnation and rising crime, finally collapsed in September 1994 and a caretaker administration under Reneta Indjova, Bulgaria’s first woman prime minister, was appointed. When elections were held in December the BSP secured an outright victory. The previous administration’s failure to combat economic drift and rising crime were important reasons for this victory but they were not the only ones. The previous five years had been perceived as years dominated by the UDF, and even though the UDF had been in office for only one of those five years it was that group’s ideology which was believed to have dominated the period. The UDF was in effect held responsible for the failure to produce proper economic reform, for the social crisis which the transition from totalitarianism had produced, for rising crime and corruption, and for the general lack of morale which affected the whole country.

  The failure of economic reform, 1989–1994

  In his address to the central committee plenum of 11–13 December 1989 Mladenov had admitted that Bulgaria’s foreign debt stood not at $3 billion, as Zhivkov had stated, but at $12 billion. It was only the first of many indications of the depth of Bulgaria’s economic difficulties, but despite this in the Bulgarian transition economic reform always seemed to rank second behind political reconstruction and party wrangling. The round table discussions of 1990, for example, paid relatively little attention to the problems of the economy.

  Bulgaria faced a number of particular economic difficulties not experienced by other members of the former Soviet bloc. In the first place, the Bulgarian economy had been tied far more closely than that of any other East European state to Comecon and the collapse of that organisation meant that Bulgaria had to construct new patterns of trade with the prime objective of establishing much more developed trading relations with the EU and the dollar area. This was complicated by a number of factors. Bulgarian manufactured goods were of such poor quality that they could be export
ed only to controlled markets such as those Comecon had offered; western Europe and the Americans would not buy them. Primary produce was equally difficult to sell abroad, principally because what Bulgaria could best provide were those products, such as fruit and wine, of which the EU already had a surfeit. There was also soon to be a problem with domestic production levels. A further problem unique to Bulgaria was that just as Comecon was collapsing it was felt advisable to decrease exchanges with two other important previous trading partners, Libya and Iraq. The need to create and retain a favourable image in the west persuaded Sofia to follow rigorously the UN sanctions imposed on both those countries. But this was done at considerable cost; Iraq was Bulgaria’s largest debtor and agreement had only recently been reached that its debt should be repaid in oil, 600,000 tons of which were due for delivery in 1990. A further complicating factor was that in March prime minister Lukanov had suspended capital repayment of Bulgaria’s foreign debt, and in June he did the same to interest payments. This made hard-currency loans much more difficult to secure.

  Despite this setback the west, and in particular the USA, was still prepared to assist, and American advisors helped Lukanov draft the emergency reform programme which he knew was essential if Bulgaria were to regain economic stability. But here he faced political difficulties when the UDF refused to join a coalition with him, insisting that as the communists/socialists alone had created the mess they alone must take the political consequences for clearing it up. And mess it was. The harvest of 1989 had been poor, not least because of the disruptive effects of the exodus of the Turks, many of whom worked on the land or in the distributive processes; in September food rationing was extended from the provinces to Sofia. In the first seven months of 1990 production was 10 per cent below the poor levels of 1989; inflation in May and June alone had reached 108 per cent and unemployment was rising. When he left office in November Lukanov had been able to do nothing to remedy the situation.