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Revision as of 14:23, 13 November 2008 by Impulsion (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)| People's Republic of BulgariaНародна република България Narodna republika Balgariya | |||||||||
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| 1946–1990 | |||||||||
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Flag
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Coat of arms
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| Anthem: Mila Rodino | |||||||||
| Capital | Sofia | ||||||||
| Common languages | Bulgarian | ||||||||
| Government | Socialist republic | ||||||||
| President | |||||||||
| • 1946-1947 (first) | Vasil Kolarov | ||||||||
| • 1989-1990 (last) | Petar Mladenov | ||||||||
| Chairman of the Council of Ministers | |||||||||
| • 1946-1949 (first) | Georgi Dimitrov | ||||||||
| • 1990 (last) | Andrey Lukanov | ||||||||
| Historical era | Cold War | ||||||||
| • Established | 1946 | ||||||||
| • Disestablished | 1990 | ||||||||
| Area | |||||||||
| 1989 | 110,910 km (42,820 sq mi) | ||||||||
| Population | |||||||||
| • 1989 | 8,990,055 | ||||||||
| Currency | Bulgarian lev | ||||||||
| ISO 3166 code | BG | ||||||||
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The History of Communist Bulgaria encompasses the period of Bulgarian history between 1944 and 1989. During this time, the country was known as the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) (Bulgarian: Народна република България, Narodna republika Balgariya) and was under the administration of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). BCP transformed itself in 1990, changing its name to Bulgarian Socialist Party, and is currently part of the governing coalition government. Bulgaria was an Eastern Bloc Soviet satellite state during the Cold War, a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon.
Stalinism
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Since World War II ended, Bulgaria was ruled by Georgi Dimitrov, a Stalinist, until his death in July 1949. There have long been suspicions that Dimitrov's sudden death in July 1949 was not accidental, although this has never been proved. It coincided with Stalin's expulsion of Tito from the Cominform, and was followed by a "Titoist" witchhunt in Bulgaria. This culminated in the show trial and execution of the Deputy Prime Minister, Traicho Kostov. The elderly Kolarov died in 1950, and power then passed to an extreme Stalinist, Vulko Chervenkov.
The process of industrialization was accelerated to the point of unsustainability, agriculture was collectivised, and peasant rebellions crushed. About 12,000 people passed through labor camps between end of World War II and Stalin's death in 1953, and many more were killed. The period after communist rule constituted the largest atrocity against Bulgarians since the country's liberation from Ottoman rule. The Orthodox Patriarch was confined to a monastery and the Church placed under state control. In 1950 diplomatic relations with the U.S. were broken. The Turkish minority was persecuted, and border disputes with Greece and Yugoslavia resumed. Communist repressions continued selectively, albeit in lesser scale and severity, all the way till the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Yet, Chervenkov's support base even in the Communist Party was too narrow for him to survive long once his patron, Stalin, was gone. In March 1954, a year after Stalin's death, Chervenkov was deposed as Party Secretary with the approval of the new leadership in Moscow and replaced by the youthful Todor Zhivkov. Chervenkov stayed on as Prime Minister until April 1956, when he was finally dismissed and replaced by Anton Yugov.
The Zhivkov era
Todor Zhivkov ruled Bulgaria for the next 33 years, being completely loyal to the Soviets but pursuing a more moderate policy at home. Relations were restored with Yugoslavia and Greece, the labour camps were closed, the trials and executions of Kostov and other "Titoists" (though not of Nikola Petkov and other non-Communist victims of the 1947 purges) were officially regretted. Some limited freedom of expression was restored and the persecution of the Church was ended. The upheavals in Poland and Hungary in 1956 were not emulated in Bulgaria, but the Party placed firm limits and restrains to intellectual and literary freedom to prevent any such outbreaks. In the 1960s some economic reforms were adopted, which allowed the free selling of overplanned production. The country became the most popular tourist destination for the Eastern Bloc people. Bulgaria also had a large production basis for commodities such as cigarettes and chocolate, which were hard to obtain in other socialist countries.
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Yugov retired in 1962, and Zhivkov then became Prime Minister as well as Party Secretary. In 1971, with the adoption of a new Constitution, Zhivkov promoted himself to Head of State (Chairman of the State Council) and made Stanko Todorov Prime Minister. Zhivkov survived the Soviet leadership's transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev in 1964, and in 1968 again demonstrated his loyalty to the Soviet Union by taking part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Bulgaria became generally regarded as the Soviet Union's most loyal Eastern European ally. In 1968, Todor Zhivkov unofficially requested that Bulgaria join the Soviet Union as its 16th Republic. Leonid Brezhnev, however, rejected that request.
Fall of the Communist regime
Although Zhivkov was never in the Stalinist mould, by 1981, when he turned 70, his regime was growing increasingly corrupt, autocratic and erratic, with a brief period of relative liberalisation coming to an end that year when his daughter Lyudmila died. This was shown most notably in a bizarre campaign of forced assimilation and persecution against the ethnic Turkish minority (comprising 10 percent of the total population), who were forbidden to speak the Turkish language and were forced to adopt Bulgarian names in the winter of 1984. The issue strained Bulgaria's economic relations with the West.
By the time the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program in the Soviet Union was felt in Bulgaria in the late 1980s, the Communists, like their leader, had grown too feeble to resist the demand for change for long. In November 1989, demonstrations on ecological issues were staged in Sofia, and these soon broadened into a general campaign for political reform. Part of the Bulgarian Communist Party leadership, realizing the need for urgent change, reacted promptly by deposing the decrepit Zhivkov and replacing him with foreign minister Petar Mladenov, on November 10, 1989. This swift move, however, gained a short respite for the Communist Party and prevented revolutionary change. In February 1990 the Communist Party voluntarily gave up its absolute hold on power and, in June 1990, the first free elections since 1946 were held, thus paving Bulgaria's way to multiparty democracy.
See also
| Countries of Eastern and Central Europe during their Communist period | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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References
- Association for Asian Research September 21, 2003: The dynamic of repression: The global impact of the Stalinist model, 1944–1953, by dr. Balazs Szalontai
- Crampton, R.J., A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2005, pp.205, Cambridge University Press