If a healthy respect for education is a qualification for democracy then Bulgaria is strongly placed. The national revival of the nineteenth century would have been impossible without the development of a network of schools both at primary and more advanced levels. Any westerner reading the memoirs of Bulgarians who attended schools in centres such as Constantinople, Salonika, Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna cannot but be impressed both by the range of subjects taught and by the dedication of teachers and pupils alike. To judge from the quality of students coming from Bulgaria to western universities in recent years that tradition has certainly survived, in no small measure thanks to the specialist gymnasia which have for generations been a prominent feature of Bulgarian secondary education.
Crime and corruption remain serious problems. These are not purely Bulgarian phenomena and at present organised crime has not yet seriously threatened the political process as it did before the first world war and in the inter-war period. Murders have been largely the result of turf wars between rival gangs. Corruption, the close ally of crime, is still a danger which saps public morale, frustrates the political process, and damages the country’s image abroad. But the will to tackle the problem has been demonstrated. The Kostov administration tilted ineffectively at this windmill but the popular reaction to its failure, as seen in the June 2001 elections, surely proved that the Bulgarian nation as a whole detested this poisoning of its body politic. And the government of ‘the king’, however burdensome its reforms were for many Bulgarians, has shown application and some success in tackling this age-old curse, not least in the judicial reforms of September 2003.
Bulgaria’s past reveals a strong social base for egalitarianism and democracy. When the modern Bulgarian nation emerged from Ottoman rule in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Bulgarian society was largely homogeneous. The pre-conquest aristocracy had been destroyed and differentiations of wealth had been slow to reappear. On the land, in the late nineteenth century, even the most prosperous, with few exceptions, tilled their own plots; their work was not qualitatively different from that of their poorer co-nationals and fellow-villagers. In the towns and the manufacturing communities production, before and for many years after the liberation of 1878, was almost entirely based on traditional processes organised along traditional lines. Here the guilds played a major role. The guilds, of course, with their hierarchical structures, did see differentiations of wealth and influence, but they also retained a sense of collective responsibility in which the wealthy had obligations to the less fortunate. This lack of social and occupational division created a system and a mentality in which there was equality of opportunity for all and education provided the medium through which that opportunity could be realised. This mentality still persists and it is puzzled by the sharp differences in wealth which have appeared since 1989. Disillusion with this product of western values could clash with the historic disposition for equality and thereby create problems for the integration of Bulgaria into the Euro-Atlantic system.
In 1879 the Bulgarian state was given a political system which reflected its egalitarian society. How effectively did that society manage its new democracy? The record is not entirely reassuring, though it is probably no worse than other states of similar age which emerged from similar backgrounds. It is true that political life in Bulgaria soon contracted the disease of corruption and clientalism; but so, too, did the political life of Greece, Serbia, Romania and, dare one suggest it, the trading of political support for contracts or other favours was not entirely unknown in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years of the state the executive established an increasing control over the legislature, a process which weakened democratic impulses and smoothed the way for royal authoritarian rule and, after it, the totalitarianism of the communists. The post-totalitarian era has seen few signs that this undesirable phenomenon might manifest itself anew. In 1990 the reformers defeated the ex-communists’ proposal that the sûbranie should elect the president; separate elections for parliament and president should help maintain the separation of powers. Nor is the legislature and government likely totally to dominate the presidency. President Zhelev showed a robust determination not to be dominated by the assembly and if Kostov seemed to establish supremacy over the presidency, Pûrvanov has asserted his powers vis-à-vis the king’s cabinet in confident, almost confrontational manner.
Another dispiriting feature of Bulgaria’s political past which has, mercifully, failed to reappear is the propensity towards political violence. Three prime ministers or ex-prime ministers were assassinated between 1895 and 1923 and there were a number of other killings; in the 1920s and 1930s violence was widely practised by the government, the various Macedonian factions, and the communists, whilst after 1944 the latter indulged in an orgy of retributive and prophylactic murder, official and unofficial. The violence which has reappeared in Sofia and elsewhere in the 2000s is extremely unsavoury but, so far, it has not been political violence.
In modern Bulgarian history the military have played a major role. One faction within the army was responsible for the initial deposition of Alexander Battenberg in 1886; his short-lived return to Bulgaria would have been impossible without another group of soldiers. Prince Ferdinand, that master craftsman of political calculation, made sure of his control of the ministry of war and the officer corps before he moved against Stambolov in 1894. In 1923 and 1934 the army was the instrument of major political upheaval; the overthrow of the old regime on 9 September 1944 was also a military coup but this time against the background of enormous international and domestic upheaval. At present, however, there seems little likelihood of military action against the civilian power. Despite demoralisation engendered by the collapse of the Warsaw pact and by fierce budgetary restraint, the army has remained loyal, allowing its grievances to be given occasional public utterance through the new officers’ organisation, the Rakovski Legion. A propensity for military coups may not be the most desirable of historical traditions but it has not prevented Greece, Spain, or Portugal from gaining full membership of the European Union.
Since the signature of the treaty of Berlin in 1878 the national question has never been far from the surface of Bulgarian politics. The loss of much of San Stefano Bulgaria, and above all of Macedonia, burnt deep into the Bulgarian national psyche. Most of the great decisions over external policy since 1878 have hinged on the Macedonian issue. In 1912 an alliance was concluded with Serbia to redeem much of lost Macedonia and in the following year the disastrous second Balkan war was fought and lost in an effort to prevent Serbia and Greece from taking too much of the coveted land. In 1915 it was the hope of retrieving lost Macedonia which, above all, persuaded King Ferdinand and his prime minister to commit Bulgaria to the German cause; in 1941, when King Boris came to the conclusion that Bulgaria could no longer remain neutral, he sweetened the bitter pill by swallowing most of Macedonia. Internally, for the fifty years from the mid-1880s to the mid-1930s, the Macedonian sore itched and aggravated almost without cessation, and it made a fearful contribution to the growth of political violence in the country. But if a longing for national reunion was a constant feature of Bulgarian history between 1878 and 1944 there is as yet little sign of it re-emerging as a powerful factor in the political life of post-totalitarian Bulgaria. The recognition of the Macedonian state disappointed many Bulgarians but reassured other governments. And with the weight of immediate social, economic, and environmental problems pressing upon them, the majority of the Bulgarian people have shown few signs of wishing to relaunch the drive for territorial expansion, though it is impossible to predict what would happen if the Macedonian state were to be destabilised or to collapse.
There is another trend in Bulgarian history which looks neither to the east or the west and which shows no interest in territorial expansion. This is the tradition of introspection, an introspection at times so intense that it engendered disdain for or even rejection of the entire world of politics. The patr
on saint of the Bulgarians, Ivan Rilski, was a hermit, and the tradition of hermitism was strong in mediaeval Bulgaria. The bogomils, of course, took this much further and rejected not merely external alignments but the entire structure of the temporal state. During the long centuries of Ottoman rule Bulgarian culture survived primarily in the small, often self-sufficient villages and in the monasteries which were by definition distanced if not divorced from society and the official apparatus of the state.
Some observers believe that this tendency towards withdrawal into the inner self was in part responsible for the apparent lack of Bulgarian involvement in the struggle for political independence from Ottoman rule and against later examples of political oppression. We have seen how few Bulgarians responded to the call to arms in 1876, nor should it go unnoticed that when the delegates of the powers met in Berlin to devise the treaty which was so harmful and hurtful to Bulgarian aspirations and sensibilities, there were no Bulgarians in the German capital to lobby the ambassadors or influence the press; the Bulgarians, it seemed, hoped or even assumed that the Russians could be relied upon to do the job for them. In the early years of the life of the reborn Bulgaria no family could ignore the state because it insisted on extracting taxes from them, educating their children, and conscripting their sons; yet there was a massive political apathy reflected particularly in very low turn-outs at elections. In the second world war there was little in the way of resistance to the regime until allied bombing began to make an impact and the prospect of a Soviet advance into the Balkans became a reality.
Under the communists Bulgaria became a byword for acquiescence and conformity with the Soviet model. There was no Bulgarian equivalent of the independent policies pursued by the other communist regimes in the Balkans, nor of Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, or Poland 1980–1; the word dissident was not uttered in public in Bulgaria until 1978. We now know that there was more opposition to communist power, particularly in the early years and amongst the peasantry, than was previously believed, whilst both the attempted military coup of 1965 and Liudmila Zhivkova’s assertion of Bulgarian cultural identity showed that not all Bulgarians were content with complete subjugation to Moscow. Nevertheless, it was the case that Bulgaria’s reputation for conformity and quietude was, at least on a comparative basis, justified.
There are some obvious explanations for this. Under the communists the party’s grip on the state and on society was strong and, at least in the years up to about 1970, the regime, quite literally, delivered the goods. But perhaps the placidity of Bulgaria was not simply the result of police power and increasing material well-being. Perhaps it was also to some degree a modern resonance on the string of disassociation from worldly affairs, a contemporary reassertion of the long cultural tradition which rejects the temporal world as tainted, transitory and tawdry. If this is the case what seems like compliance with existing authority is just conformity with that national tradition which rejects political authority as irrelevant.
It would, however, be dangerous for Bulgarians to dwell too fondly on this theme. Rejection of the state was possible for a mediaeval monk, for the inhabitants of a small, self-sufficient mountain village in the days of Ottoman rule, or even for a disaffected intellectual under German or Soviet domination; it is scarcely a wise prescription for the creation of a functioning, modern, representative democracy.
Apathy towards or withdrawal from political affairs contains another danger for post-totalitarian Bulgaria. A major factor in Germany’s success since the second world war has been Bewältigung der Vergangenheit, the ability to come to terms with and to overcome the past. Bulgaria’s past contains nothing to compare with the horrors of the final solution. The saving of the Jews from Bulgaria proper during the second world war was an achievement of almost the entire nation in which the entire nation takes justifiable pride. In the past Bulgaria had also provided a safe refuge for Armenians threatened with persecution and worse in Turkey; in recognition of this the Armenians in Bulgaria formed their own military detachment to fight with the Bulgarians in the Balkan wars. On the other hand, the Bulgarian national state did place some pressure on its Turkish minority. In the early years after liberation that pressure was cultural and perhaps unintentional to the extent that what the Bulgarians regarded as natural celebration of national independence and cultural liberation, the Turks saw as an intolerable alteration to their traditional way of life. There could be no compromise in such circumstances, but for the most part the Turks who left Bulgaria after 1878 did so voluntarily. So too did the majority of those who left in the late 1980s but there was no denying that extreme cultural and political pressures had been put upon them.
The post-1989 governments rapidly rectified the errors of the regenerative process and if the Bulgarians now have a problem in overcoming their past it is less in the way that they have treated other peoples than in the way they believe foreign domination has affected them. There is still a tendency amongst many Bulgarians, particularly when an outsider points out a shortcoming, to relapse into a regressive fatalism, a fatalism expressed most often in phrases such as ‘Five hundred years of Ottoman rule . . .’ This is an unhelpful attitude. It is using the past to escape from the present and more so from the future. Furthermore, the Bulgarians are not alone in having suffered long centuries of foreign domination. That domination was without doubt at times extremely repressive but the Bulgarian nation, the Bulgarian church, and the Bulgarian language survived. When the Ottomans departed from Bulgaria the Bulgarians still spoke Bulgarian and Bulgarian manufacturing had flourished as a supplier to the Ottoman army; when British rule ended in southern Ireland the Irish language was almost dead and Irish industry had been stifled to prevent competition with British manufacturers. Past oppression is inevitably a part of national consciousness and respect for those who suffered is a proper sentiment, but that oppression should not be used as an excuse for present failings or for a lack of commitment to rectifying them.
Bulgarian history has better things to offer the Bulgarian nation than a lack of confidence in their own ability to adapt and survive.
Appendix 1
Bulgarian monarchs
Khans
* * *
Asparukh 681–700
Tervel 700–721
Kormisosh 721–738
Sevar 738–753/4
Vinekh 753/4–760
Telets 760–763
Sabin 763–766
Umor August–September 766
Toktu 766–767
Pagan 767–768
Telerig 768–777
Kardam 777–803
Krum 803–814
Omurtag 814–831
Malmir 831–836
Pressian 836–852
* * *
Kings or Tsars: First Kingdom
* * *
Boris I 852–888
Vladimir 888–893
Simeon ‘the Great’ 893–927
Petûr I 927–970
Boris II 970–971
Roman 971–997
Samuil 997–1014
Gavril-Radomir 1014–1015
Ivan-Vladislav 1015–1018
* * *
Kings or Tsars: Second Kingdom
* * *
Petûr II 1185–1187
Ivan Asen I 1187–1196
Petûr II (restored) 1196–1197
Kaloyan 1197–1207
Boril 1207–1218
Ivan Asen II 1218–1241
Kaliman I 1241–1246
Mihail II Asen 1246–1256
Kaliman II 1256–1257
Konstantin Asen 1257–1277
Ivailo 1277–1279
Ivan Asen III 1279
Georgi Terter I 1279–1292
Smilets 1292–1298
Chaka 1298–1300
Todor Svetoslav 1300–1321
Georgi Terter II 1321–1323
Mihail Shishman 1323–1330
Ivan Stefan 1330–1331
Ivan A
lexander 1331–1371
Ivan Shishman 1371–1395
Ivan Stratsimir 1395–1396
* * *
Princes and Kings of Modern Bulgaria
* * *
Alexander of Battenberg 1879–1886
Ferdinand 1887–1918
Boris III 1918–1943
Simeon II 1943–1946*
* * *
* King Simeon II left Bulgaria after a referendum in September 1946. The legality of the referendum has been questioned.
Appendix 2
Prime ministers of Bulgaria, 1879–2004
* * *
Todor Burmov July–November 1879
Metropolitan Kliment (Vasil Drumev) November 1879–March 1880
Dragan Tsankov March–November 1880
Petko Karavelov November 1880–April 1881
Johan Kazimir Ehrenrot (Russian) April–July 1881
No prime minister July 1881–June 1882
Leonid Sobolev (Russian) June 1882–September 1883
A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 28