Bulgaria

C

1

The Balkan Wars and World War I

In the First Balkan War (1912-1913), Bulgaria, allied with Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, defeated the Ottoman Empire. Division of the reconquered Balkan territories, however, resulted in the Second Balkan War in 1913, which Bulgaria lost to Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and Romania; as a consequence, Bulgaria lost considerable territory. Bulgaria entered World War I in 1915 on the side of the Central Powers, but was forced to agree on an armistice with the Allies (see Allied Powers) in September 1918. King Ferdinand abdicated in October and was succeeded by his son, Boris III. By the Treaty of Neuilly on November 27, 1919, Bulgaria lost most of what it had gained in the Balkan Wars and all of its conquests from World War I. It was also required to abandon conscription, reduce armaments, and pay large reparations.

C

2

The Interwar Period and World War II

The Agrarian Party government under Aleksandr Stambolisky, who became premier in 1919, attempted to improve the condition of the large peasant class and maintain friendly relations with the other Balkan countries. Stambolisky’s dictatorial regime, unpopular with the army and the urban middle class, was overthrown by a coup d’état in 1923; he was captured and killed while seeking to escape. Internal dissension continued under the new government, which represented all political parties except the Agrarians, Communists, and Liberals. Bulgaria and Greece again came into conflict in 1925, and the Greek army invaded Bulgaria. The Council of the League of Nations brought the conflict to an end and penalized Greece.

In 1934 King Boris III staged a coup of his own and established a royal dictatorship. In September 1940 Germany compelled Romania to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. In March 1941, under German pressure, Bulgaria joined the Axis powers, agreeing to immediate occupation by German forces. Bulgaria declared war on Greece and Yugoslavia in April, shortly afterward occupying all of Yugoslav Macedonia, Grecian Thrace, eastern Greek Macedonia, and the Greek districts of Florina and Kastoría. Bulgaria signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in November and the following month declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom. Although allied with Nazi Germany (see National Socialism), King Boris and his government resisted German demands for the persecution of Bulgarian Jews, most of whom survived the Holocaust, the mass killing of European Jews by the Nazis.

When the tide of war turned against the Germans in 1943, German dictator Adolf Hitler attempted to force Bulgaria to declare war on the Soviet Union. In August 1943, after returning from a meeting with Hitler, King Boris died under mysterious circumstances and was succeeded by his six-year-old son, Simeon II, and a pro-German government under Dobri Bozhilov. An anti-German resistance movement organized by the Communists and the Agrarians opposed the Bozhilov regime, which fell in May 1944. The succeeding government severed its ties with Germany, but it was too late. The Soviet Union formally declared war on Bulgaria on September 5. No fighting occurred, and the Bulgarian government subsequently asked the Soviet Union for an armistice, or truce. Bulgaria, moreover, declared war on Germany on September 7. The armistice was agreed to by the Soviet Union on September 9, and under the protection of Soviet forces a government subservient to the Soviets was immediately established.

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The armistice, signed by the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain in October 1944, provided for the control of Bulgaria, until the signing of final peace treaties, by the Allied Control Commission under the chairmanship of the Soviet representative, who was also the commander of the Soviet occupation forces. The armistice provided also that the Bulgarians evacuate Yugoslav Macedonia and territories they had taken from Greece.

Soviet pressure in the Bulgarian election engaged the attention of Britain and the United States in the fall of 1945. National elections originally scheduled for August were postponed because of U.S. protests concerning the nature of Soviet political maneuvers within Bulgaria. The opposition parties boycotted the elections held on November 18, and a single list of candidates of the communist-dominated Fatherland Front won 85 percent of the vote.

C

3

The Communist Regime

By a plebiscite in September 1946, the Bulgarians ousted King Simeon and ended the monarchy; a week later Bulgaria was proclaimed a people’s republic. 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, was elected premier in November 1946.

In February 1947 the peace treaty formally ending Bulgarian participation in World War II was signed in Paris. 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 modeled on that of the Soviet Union; 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.

Under pressure from the Soviets, 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 neighboring Greece and Turkey. Diplomatic ties with the United States, broken in 1950 but restored in 1959, were frequently marred by Bulgarian accusations of U.S. espionage activities. The U.S. ministry was raised to the status of an embassy in 1966.

During most of the communist period, under the leadership of Todor Zhivkov—secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) 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 Soviet Union’s most dependable allies. During the 1970s the country received substantial financial aid from the Soviet Union, 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.

D

The End of Communist Rule

Late in 1989, Zhivkov was ousted from power and expelled from the Bulgarian Communist Party; replacing him as general secretary was the foreign minister, Petur T. Mladenov. Under Mladenov’s leadership, Bulgaria restored the civil rights of Bulgarian Turks and began to institute a multiparty system. In June 1990 the communists, running as the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), won the nation’s first free parliamentary elections since World War II. Mladenov, who had become president in April, resigned in July over a scandal regarding the use of force in the suppression of student demonstrations. The parliament replaced him with Zhelyu Zhelev of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF).

The subsequent collapse of the Bulgarian economy led to the resignation in November 1990 of Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov of the BSP. Despite being replaced by an independent candidate, Dimiter Popov, new elections were scheduled. The UDF won the elections of 1991 by a narrow margin. Filip Dimitrov, head of the UDF, became the prime minister. Under a new constitution providing for direct presidential voting, Zhelyu Zhelev won reelection in January 1992.

E

Economic and Political Instability

Following the 1991 elections, the government slowly began initiating economic reforms. Among the reforms were laws allowing foreign investment, privatization of state-owned companies, and the return of lands seized by the communists to their original owners. However, public dissatisfaction with the social effects of the reforms led to the overthrow of Dimitrov’s government in October 1992.

The following two years were characterized by volatile and ineffective political alliances with parliament unable to enact key legislation. When the BSP and the UDF refused to form a new government, President Zhelev of the UDF dissolved parliament in October 1994. He then appointed a caretaker government until parliamentary elections were held in December. The BSP won a clear majority, capturing 125 of the 240 seats. Zhan Videnov, the 35-year-old chairman of the BSP, was appointed prime minister.

In 1996 Zhelev lost his party’s nomination to Petar Stoyanov for the November presidential elections. Stoyanov won 60 percent of the vote in the elections, defeating Ivan Mazarov, the BSP candidate. Faced with Mazarov’s defeat, a collapsing economy, and an intraparty rebellion against his leadership, Videnov resigned his posts as prime minister and chairman of the BSP in December. The BSP parliamentary majority then appointed the interior minister, Nikolay Dobrev, as their choice for prime minister. The UDF objected vigorously to continuing the BSP mandate and demanded an early parliamentary election, but the BSP refused, insisting that its mandate from 1994 be continued. Meanwhile, the national economy collapsed; the lev, the Bulgarian currency plunged in value and inflation soared, leaving the country in a state of near-bankruptcy. In January 1997 tens of thousands of Bulgarians began to hold daily protests, calling for early elections and an end to the country’s economic crisis.

On January 10, 1997, the UDF and other opposition parties—angered that the BSP refused to consider the UDF’s motion for new elections—walked out of a National Assembly session and began a boycott of parliament. Protesters immediately stormed the parliament building, trapping more than 100 BSP deputies inside until police broke through and enabled the deputies to escape. The next day, President Zhelev announced he would not give the BSP’s newly appointed prime minister the mandate, as required by the constitution, to form a new government. In the face of this political standoff, president-elect Stoyanov took office on January 22. After the mass protests and strikes succeeded in paralyzing the economy, the BSP conceded to the opposition’s demands on February 4, and Stoyanov appointed a caretaker government led by Sofia mayor Stefan Sofianski. The economy began to recover somewhat in March, in part because the interim government was able to attract support from international lenders and donor governments.

In the April 1997 parliamentary elections, the United Democratic Forces (ODC)—an electoral alliance of the UDF and several smaller parties—swept into power, winning 137 parliamentary seats. The leader of the alliance, Ivan Kostov of the UDF, was unanimously chosen to be prime minister. He immediately established a currency-board system to stabilize Bulgaria’s currency, the lev, a measure required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for aid. Kostov promised to battle organized crime and corruption and institute rigorous economic reforms. Bulgaria used IMF funds to help carry out financial, tax, and trade reforms, and to modernize agriculture and other economic sectors. In 2000 the European Union (EU) opened membership talks with Bulgaria.

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