Bulgarian History

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Postwar Bulgaria, Communist Regime

After a short period of coalition rule, the Communists succeeded in taking over the government. The monarchy was abolished, and in a plebiscite in September 1946 Bulgaria was proclaimed a people's republic with Georgi Dimitrov as premier. Simeon II, the child king was ousted and thus the Monarchy ended.

The constitution drawn up by the Fatherland Front, which won an overwhelming victory in the elections to the National Assembly, held in October, provided for freedom of the press, assembly, and speech. The National Assembly, which gained full control of state affairs, then elected the premier and also the president. The first president was Vasil Kolarov, a Communist Party leader. Georgi Dimitrov, a former key figure in the Communist International, became premier in November 1946.

The peace treaty with the Allies in Paris (February 1947) allowed Bulgaria to keep South Dobruja, but no gains were made in Macedonia. It provided for reparations to be paid to Greece in the amount of $45 million and to Yugoslavia in the amount of $25 million; severe limitation of military strength, with partial demilitarization along the Greek frontier; and the retention of southern Dobruja. (The borders with Greece were returned to their status as of 1941.) In December 1947 the National Assembly adopted a new constitution modelled on that of the USSR; this document replaced the presidency with the presidium, an executive committee. That September, Nikola Dimitrov Petkov, leader of the opposition to the Fatherland Front, had been executed after being convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government. During the two year period between 1947 and 1949 as many as 20,000 "bourgeois" Bulgarians were executed or imprisoned by the Communist People's Court.

Dimitrov proceeded to eliminate possible opponents; Agrarian leader Nikola Petrov was executed in 1947. A new constitution was enacted, and Bulgaria became a one-party state. Industry was nationalized and farms collectivized. Bulgaria closely followed the Soviet Union in its domestic and foreign policies; after the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, Bulgaria sided with the USSR. Dimitrov's successor, Vulko Chervenkov, massively purged the Communist party (1950). In 1951–52, Bulgaria deported to Turkey some 160,000 citizens of Turkish origin. Relations with Greece and Turkey improved somewhat after 1954. Bulgaria joined (1949) the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and in 1955 became a member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and the United Nations.

Under pressure from the USSR, Bulgaria renounced its treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia after the Soviet-Yugoslavian rift in 1948; relations with the country and its successor states have since continued to fluctuate, as have those with neighbouring Greece and Turkey. Diplomatic ties with the United States, broken in 1950 but restored in 1959, have frequently been marred by Bulgarian accusations of U.S. espionage activities. The U.S. ministry was raised to the status of an embassy in 1966.

In the mid-1950s the government loosened its grip somewhat. Stalinists fell from power and purge victims were rehabilitated (posthumously in some cases). In 1965 army officers and party officials unsuccessfully attempted a coup. Bulgaria aided the USSR in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1971, Todor Zhivkov, who had been premier since 1962, became president. In the mid-1980s, a “Bulgarization” campaign was launched against the nearly 800,000 ethnic Turks. Turks were forced to adopt Bulgarian names, and Turkish-language broadcasts and publications were halted. In 1986, Zhivkov experimented with limited economic reforms such as a “self-management” program for industrial workers. Zhivkov's ouster in Nov., 1989, set off a year of social and political turmoil.

During most of the Communist period, under the leadership of Todor Zhivkov-secretary of the Communist Party from 1954, the country's premier from 1964 to 1971, and head of state from 1971 to late 1989-Bulgaria was one of the most restrictive societies among the former Soviet satellites. As a member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and the Warsaw Pact, Bulgaria long remained among the USSR's most dependable allies. During the 1970s the country received substantial financial aid from the USSR, which was used for industrialization.

During the mid-1980s the Zhivkov government launched a campaign to assimilate members of Bulgaria's Turkish minority by forcing them to take Slavic names, prohibiting them from speaking Turkish in public, and subjecting them to other forms of harassment; during 1989 alone, more than 300,000 Bulgarian Turks crossed the border into Turkey to escape persecution. Late in 1989, Zhivkov was ousted from power and expelled from the Communist Party; replacing him as general secretary was the foreign minister, Peter T. Mladenov. Under Mladenov's leadership, Bulgaria restored the civil rights of Bulgarian Turks and began to institute a multiparty system. Bulgaria had now joined the rest of Eastern Europe in removing the old communist guard and embarking on the road to democracy.

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