Bulgaria

D

Inter-war 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 himself 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, Tsar Boris 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 afterwards 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), Tsar Boris and his government resisted German demands for the persecution of Bulgarian Jews, most of whom survived the Holocaust.

When the tide of war turned against the Germans in 1943, Hitler attempted to force Bulgaria to declare war on the USSR. In August 1943, after returning from a meeting with the German dictator, Tsar 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 USSR formally declared war on Bulgaria on September 5. No fighting occurred, and the Bulgarian government subsequently asked the USSR for an armistice; Bulgaria, moreover, declared war on Germany on September 7. The armistice was agreed to by the USSR on September 9, and under the protection of Soviet forces a government subservient to the USSR was immediately established. The armistice, signed by the USSR, the United States, and the United Kingdom 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 the United Kingdom and the United States in the autumn of 1945. National elections originally scheduled for August were postponed because of US protests concerning the nature of Soviet political manoeuvres within Bulgaria. The opposition parties boycotted the elections held on November 18, and a single list of candidates from the Communist-dominated Fatherland Front won 85 per cent of the vote.

E

Communist Regime

By a plebiscite in September 1946, the Bulgarians ousted Tsar 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 US$45 million and to Yugoslavia in the amount of US$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 Agrarian Party, had been executed after being convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government.

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 West have frequently been marred by Bulgarian accusations of Western espionage activities.

During most of the Communist period, under the leadership of Todor Zhivkov—Secretary of the Communist Party from 1954, the country’s premier from 1962 to 1971, and Head of State from 1971 to late 1989—Bulgaria was one of the most restrictive societies among the former Soviet satellites. In 1953 the government decreed that all people who left the country without permission were subject to the death penalty and their families to internment in concentration camps. Zhivkov also decreed that the country’s population of 800,000 Turks “Bulgarize” their names. 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, Petar T. Mladenov. Under Mladenov’s leadership, Bulgaria restored the civil rights of Bulgarian Turks and began to institute a multi-party system. In June 1990 the Communists, running as the Bulgarian Socialist Party, won the nation’s first free parliamentary elections since World War II. Mladenov, who had become president in April, resigned in July, and with Communist support the opposition leader, Zhelyu Zhelev, was chosen to succeed him. Under a new constitution providing for direct presidential voting, Zhelev won re-election in January 1992. In September, after an 18-month-long trial, Zhivkov was found guilty of corruption while in office and sentenced to prison.

F

Fragile Transition

After the 1991 elections, Bulgaria began to restructure its economy and enacted a plan to return land seized by the Communist Party to the original owners. The parliament also passed laws allowing foreign investment. However, with the collapse of COMECON, the trade association of the former USSR, Bulgaria lost many of its traditional markets and its economy suffered. Since then, Bulgaria has lagged behind the rest of Eastern Europe in economic reform because of a series of weak governments. Private businesses are often run by the old Communist elite. In 1995 unemployment stood at 20 per cent, and inflation topped 120 per cent. A general election held in December 1994 gave the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) an outright parliamentary majority, under the leadership of 35-year-old Zhan Videnov. At the same time, the lev dropped considerably in value, prompting a sharp rise in interest rates.

The distribution of vouchers to be used in the first phase of privatization was approved by the government in August 1995, and the list of state enterprises to be privatized was issued in October. In late March 1996 a Russian offer to join an economic union of former Soviet republics resulted in heated controversy; the Videnov government denied allegations of secret talks and claimed a desire to be part of a united Europe. The collapse of the national currency in May triggered a serious financial crisis, and hastened government legislation to reform the banking system. Exiled King Simeon II returned to Bulgaria in late May, fuelling rumours of his interest in a potential presidential candidacy. Interest rates were tripled in September by the central bank in an attempt to avert another financial crisis.

The fatal shooting of former prime minister Lukanov in October aroused speculation as to the involvement of organized crime. In the second round of presidential elections held in November, Petar Stoyanov, the opposition Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) candidate, emerged as the clear victor. A fresh financial crisis arose in mid-November, when thousands of depositors besieged the State Savings Bank, and in December Videnov resigned from the position of prime minister. In January 1997 Stoyanov was inaugurated as president and the stand-off between the majority BSP and UDF continued. The political crisis eased in February when the BSP agreed to relinquish its mandate, allowing the president to appoint an interim Cabinet and call a general election in April. The IMF gave approval in principle to a US$148 million loan in March to support economic recovery and the currency control board system that was to be established as a condition of the loan. In the April general election the centre-right UDF won a decisive victory, nominating its chairman Ivan Kostov as the new prime minister; he was formally elected by the National Assembly in May. It was announced in June that the lev was to be pegged to the Deutschmark, and the way paved for the operation of the currency control board in July; both measures aimed at increasing financial stability.

President Stoyanov hosted a summit meeting attended by the presidents of Romania and Turkey, during which they issued a joint declaration supporting the accession to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of Bulgaria and Romania, and promising closer cooperation in the fight against organized crime in the region. The National Assembly approved a restitution law in November, providing for the return of property confiscated by previous communist governments to its former owners. During a visit in December by Mesut Yilmaz, prime minister of Turkey, agreements were signed concerning cultural affairs, law enforcement, and customs. Stoyanov vetoed reform of the judicial system in October 1998, on the grounds that reform would give the National Assembly too much control over the judiciary. The former king, Simeon, unsuccessfully attempted, in December, to reclaim his estates confiscated five decades earlier.

In November 1999, Bulgaria announced the closure of four Soviet-built nuclear reactors in return for talks on European Union (EU) membership. In the same month, US president Bill Clinton, on a trip to Sofia to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of Communism, encouraged Bulgaria’s bid for NATO membership in return for the country’s support for NATO's 1999 air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis.

On the final day of the EU summit in Helsinki, Finland, in December, Bulgaria was among seven countries invited to become candidates for membership. The President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Bulgaria that the EU would support the country's bid to join the organization by offering increased financial aid to the value of nearly US$2 billion over six years. Prodi praised Bulgaria's progress in reworking its legislation to conform to EU norms.

Throughout 2000, political life in Bulgaria was marked by a further, and sometimes controversial, diversification of parties and groupings. Ethnic parties and organizations continued to proliferate. In January, two Turkish parties merged, and in February the Ilinden United Macedonian Organization was banned by the Constitutional Court. A new party, the Georgi Ganchev Bloc, was established in March.

Developments in early 2001 were directly influenced by parliamentary elections planned for June. In early April, the former king of Bulgaria announced that he would stand in the election as leader of a new party, the National Movement Simeon II. Internationally, Bulgaria supported the FYROM government in its offensive against Albanian rebels in March 2001 and promoted efforts aimed at a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Bulgaria became a signatory, in April, of an agreement setting up an international naval force, named Blackseafor, of countries bordering the Black Sea. The agreements, signed also by Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, and Turkey, envisaged using the new force for environmental and humanitarian purposes.

G

The Return of Simeon II

In June’s parliamentary elections the former Simeon II achieved a landslide victory, and in July he was sworn in as prime minister, as Simeon of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He swiftly appointed a 16-member coalition Cabinet and reiterated his election pledge to improve Bulgaria’s standards of living, which included raising the minimum wage and dealing with corruption. Simeon also pledged to continue the momentum towards EU and NATO membership. In a closely fought presidential election in November 2001 that went to a second round of voting, Georgi Parvanov, the leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, beat the incumbent Petar Stoyanov. Parvanov was sworn in and took office in January 2002.

In November 2002 NATO invited Bulgaria to join the organization. At the Copenhagen summit in December that year the EU announced that Bulgaria was not included in the list of countries invited to join in 2004; however, the republic remained on course for membership. In April 2004 Bulgaria formally joined NATO. Bulgaria held a general election in June 2005. The initial results showed victory for the Bulgarian Socialist Party-led Coalition of Bulgaria, which secured 82 of the 240 seats over the ruling National Movement Simeon II, which gained 53. President Parvanov asked the leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Sergei Stanishev, to form a government. However, political infighting ensued before a coalition government was finally established with Stanishev as prime minister. In October 2006, Parvanov won a second term as president by beating the controversial nationalist candidate Volen Siderov who remained opposed to the country joining the EU. Bulgaria, along with near-neighbour Romania, finally joined the EU in January 2007.