World War II

Boris’s alliance with Germany

The desire for territorial expansion at the expense of Yugoslavia and Greece and the expectation of a German victory led Boris to join the Axis on March 1, 1941. German troops used Bulgaria as a base from which to attack Yugoslavia and Greece. In return, Bulgarian forces were permitted to occupy Greek Thrace, Yugoslav Macedonia, and part of Serbia.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on the United States, Bulgaria yielded to German pressure to declare war on Great Britain and the United States, a move of only symbolic importance, but Tsar Boris avoided joining the war against the Soviet Union, fearing that this would lead to popular unrest. Bulgaria did not send troops to the front and was relatively untouched by military operations until the summer of 1943, when Allied bombers began to attack rail and industrial centres.

Defending Bulgarian Jews

In 1941 anti-Semitic legislation was enacted in Bulgaria under German pressure to adopt something akin to the Nürnberg Laws. However, the legislation met with a wave of protest and was never strictly implemented. In early 1943 the government complied with German requests to secretly deport non-Bulgarian Jews from occupied territories that had not been incorporated into Bulgaria to the extermination camp at Treblinka (in Poland). The clandestine deportation of Jews from Bulgaria was also scheduled for March 1943, but Dimitar Peshev, deputy speaker of the National Assembly, managed to force the government to cancel it. Forty-three members of the majority backed a resolution in parliament in defense of Bulgarian Jews, a move supported by many from across the social strata. In late May, in spite of Nazi pressure, Tsar Boris canceled the deportation orders for Bulgaria’s Jews.

Bulgarian resistance to the Axis alliance

Some attempts at forming a resistance were made by Agrarian leaders when Bulgaria joined the Axis. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, however, the Bulgarian Communist Party took the initiative inside the country. Until the final stage of the war, resistance tactics emphasized sabotage and small-group operations. About 10,000 persons are estimated to have participated in or supported the resistance, making it the largest such movement among Germany’s allies. Politically, the communists sought the cooperation of other opposition groups, and in August 1943 the Fatherland Front was formed, composed of communists, left-wing Agrarians, Zveno, socialists, and some independent political figures. The front’s influence grew as the military situation of Germany deteriorated.

Many Bulgarians expected Tsar Boris to break with the German alliance when circumstances permitted. On August 28, 1943, however, just after a stormy encounter with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Germany, the tsar suffered a fatal heart attack. Because his son and heir, Simeon II, was only six years old, Filov established a regency council headed by himself and appointed a new government under Dobri Bozhilov, which remained loyal to the German alliance. In May 1944, faced with the continuing German collapse and stern Allied threats that Germany’s allies would be severely punished, Bozhilov resigned.

He was replaced by the right-wing Agrarian Ivan Bagrianov, who began secret negotiations for surrender with the Allies but at a snail’s pace. At the end of August the sudden surrender of Romania, which brought Soviet troops to the Danube months before they had been expected, created panic in Sofia. When Bagrianov’s attempt to proclaim Bulgarian neutrality was rejected as insufficient by both Britain and the Soviet Union, the prime minister resigned and was replaced by Kosta Muraviev of the Agrarian Union on September 2, 1944.

Three days later, aware that the new government was preparing to break with Germany, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria and entered the country unopposed. Simultaneously, the Fatherland Front began preparations for a coup d’état. On September 8 Muraviev declared war against Germany; nonetheless, military forces organized by Zveno occupied key points in Sofia and toppled Muraviev’s government in the name of the Fatherland Front. Kimon Georgiev of Zveno became the new prime minister and sought an immediate armistice with the Soviet command.

Consolidation of power

Exploiting the popular feeling that those who were responsible for Bulgaria’s involvement in the war should be punished, the regime established “people’s courts” to prosecute the political leaders of the wartime period. The first mass trial (December 20, 1944–February 1, 1945) resulted in death sentences for more than 100 top officials. By the time sentencing was completed in April 1945, the courts had tried 11,122 people, of whom 2,730 were condemned to death, 1,305 to life imprisonment, and 5,119 to terms of up to 20 years. (Unofficial estimates suggested that as many as 30,000 political opponents of the new regime, including anti-Nazi activists, were killed without trial.) When the army returned following the German surrender, the regime also purged the officer corps.

On November 4, 1945, Georgi Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years of exile and became prime minister. Given the Bulgarian Communist Party’s control of the instruments of power, the hopes of the noncommunist opposition rested on the Western democracies. Indeed, during the summer of 1945 the regime postponed parliamentary elections after Great Britain and the United States protested the undemocratic character of the proposed electoral laws. Bulgaria, however, was not a high priority on the diplomatic agenda of the West. As early as October 1944 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had shown his willingness to consign the country to Soviet control during his “percentages discussion” with the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.

Bulgarian communists and their Soviet sponsors moved more forcefully to eliminate the internal opposition. Elections held in November 1945 returned a substantial majority of communists and their allies. In September 1946 a referendum decided by a 93 percent majority proclaimed Bulgaria a republic, and Tsar Simeon II and the queen mother were required to leave the country. Elections for a Grand National Assembly to prepare a new constitution were held on October 27, 1946. The noncommunist opposition polled more than one million votes, or 28 percent of the total. When the assembly opened in November, the Agrarian leader, Nikola Petkov, emerged as the opposition’s principal spokesman. However, he was charged with plotting to overthrow the government and was expelled from the Grand National Assembly along with most of his associates. In June 1947 Petkov was arrested, and on September 23 he was executed. One week later the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the new regime; Great Britain had already done so in February.

The defeat of the political opposition coincided with the elimination of pluralism in Bulgarian society. This was accelerated after the founding congress of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in September 1947 in Poland, where Andrey A. Zhdanov delivered the message that Stalin desired a more rapid transformation of the socialist camp along Soviet lines.

In Bulgaria this resulted in increased pressure on the remaining noncommunist parties. The Socialist Party was formally absorbed by the Bulgarian Communist Party in August 1948, and socialists who remained in opposition were crushed by police repression. The Agrarian leader, Georgi Traikov, repudiated his party’s traditional ideology and defined a new role for it as the helpmate or “little brother” of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the countryside. By 1949 Zveno and the remaining smaller parties announced their “self-liquidation” and dissolved into the Fatherland Front, which in turn was converted into a broad “patriotic” organization under communist control.

In the Grand National Assembly a team of Soviet jurists assisted in the preparation of the “Dimitrov Constitution,” enacted on December 4, 1947. Modeled closely on the Soviet constitution of 1936, it provided a legal foundation for the reconstruction of the state on communist principles.

Reforms under the Fatherland Front

The Fatherland Front regime had launched an assault on private property almost immediately after the coup of September 9, 1944, employing a variety of legislative measures aimed at confiscating the wealth of “fascists” or “speculators.”

The Dimitrov Constitution provided for even larger measures of nationalization. All large-scale industries, banks, and insurance companies were nationalized, and government monopolies were established over retail trade. By the end of 1948 approximately 85 percent of industrial production was in the hands of the state, with another 7 percent carried on by cooperative organizations. The party also created the General Workers’ Trade Union, gradually forcing all workers’ organizations into it. Similarly, the youth organizations of the various parties were incorporated into the Dimitrov Communist Youth League.

Exarch Stefan, head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, sought to adapt to the new political regime, but he resisted the efforts of the Bulgarian Communist Party to control church affairs directly. In September 1948 he resigned his office under mysterious circumstances and retired to a monastery. His successor offered no resistance to legislation adopted in March 1949 that subjected all religious orders to state supervision. At the same time, 15 pastors from evangelical Protestant churches were arrested, tried, and executed for espionage and other alleged crimes. Soon afterward a number of Bulgarian Catholic clergy were tried for spying for the Vatican and for disseminating anticommunist propaganda. Among the executed was Bishop Evgeny Bosilkov, beatified by the Vatican in 1998.

The nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews who survived the war were encouraged to emigrate to Israel. The regime also attempted to deport ethnic Turks and Roma, causing the Turkish government to seal the border.

Rise of Todor Zhivkov

After becoming prime minister in 1962, Zhivkov continued to hold the positions of head of state and head of party until 1989. An attempted putsch led by Gen. Ivan Todorov-Gorunya in 1965 was easily put down, and Zhivkov consistently managed to purge or undercut party leaders regarded as potential rivals. During the era of Zhivkov’s ascendancy, Bulgaria modeled its domestic policies on those of the Soviet Union, with long-term treaties linking Bulgaria’s economic development to the Soviets’. Bulgaria gave the highest priority to scientific and technological advancement and the development of trade skills appropriate to an industrial state. In 1948 approximately 80 percent of the population drew their living from the soil, but by 1988 less than one-fifth of the labour force was engaged in agriculture, with the rest concentrated in industry and the service sector.

By the 1960s Bulgaria had abandoned the isolationism that characterized the Chervenkov period. Although remaining steadfast in its commitments to the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, Bulgaria improved relations with its Balkan neighbours, particularly Greece, and expanded its economic and cultural relations with most Western states. Relations with Yugoslavia remained strained, however, over the persistence of the Macedonian question. In 1979 Bulgaria proposed a treaty with Yugoslavia that would guarantee the inviolability of the borders established after World War II; this proposal was rejected, however, because of Bulgaria’s refusal to admit the existence of a distinct Macedonian nationality. From the Bulgarian point of view, such an admission would both fly in the face of historical reality and legitimize Yugoslav claims on the Pirin region.

During the 1970s concern developed over the low birth rate of the ethnic Bulgarian population, and policies were adopted to encourage larger families, but without apparent effect. In late 1984 the government began a major campaign to “Bulgarize,” or assimilate, the country’s ethnic Turks. Measures aimed at the Turkish population, estimated to number approximately 800,000, included the discontinuation of Turkish-language publications and radio broadcasts and the requirement that Turks adopt Bulgarian names.

The ethnic Turkish population, however, resisted assimilation, and clashes with the authorities continued. In spite of official harassment, independent human rights groups were formed in defense of the Turks. In 1989, when the government of Turkey offered to accept refugees from Bulgaria, more than 300,000 ethnic Turks fled or were forcibly driven from the country by the communist authorities.

The era of reforms launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union had a major impact on Bulgaria, inspiring greater demands for openness and democratization. The increase in Bulgarian dissidents, a declining economic situation, and internal party rivalries led Zhivkov’s colleagues to force his resignation on November 10, 1989. He was later tried, sentenced, and imprisoned for embezzlement.

End of party rule

Under growing popular pressure, Zhivkov’s successors endorsed a policy of openness, pluralism, and respect for law, halted repression of the ethnic Turks, and took the first steps toward separating the Bulgarian Communist Party from the state, such as repealing its constitutional monopoly of power. After some shuffling of positions, Petar Mladenov was named head of state, Andrey Lukanov prime minister, and Alexander Lilov head of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In early 1990 the party held an extraordinary congress that enacted significant changes in party structure, and in April 1990 it renamed itself the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).

In the meantime, dissident groups had taken advantage of the country’s new freedoms to organize opposition political parties. Many of these joined the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), a coalition led by the sociologist Zheliu Zhelev. By the spring of 1990, at a roundtable held between early January and May 1990, the UDF and the BSP had agreed to free elections for a Grand National Assembly that would prepare a new constitution. In these June elections the socialists won a narrow majority. In July 1990 Mladenov resigned after it was discovered that he had recommended a military crackdown on protesters in late 1989. Because their majority was too small to allow them to govern alone, in August 1990 the BSP supported the election of Zhelev as head of state.

The National Assembly adopted a new constitution on July 12, 1991, which proclaimed Bulgaria a parliamentary republic and promised citizens a broad range of freedoms. During the summer several parties withdrew from the UDF coalition, and those that remained split into two factions: UDF (liberals) and UDF (movement). In elections for the National Assembly held in October 1991, the UDF (movement) won a narrow majority of seats over the BSP, with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF; primarily representing the country’s Turkish minority) gaining few seats; no other minority party gained the required minimum percentage of the vote to qualify for participation in parliament. The leader of the UDF, Philip Dimitrov, was elected prime minister and, with the support of the MRF, formed a government, without BSP participation. Under the new constitution, Zhelev was elected president for a five-year term in general elections held in January 1992.

Bulgaria’s transition

Dimitrov’s government launched an ambitious reform program aimed at changing the country into a pro-Western democracy with a market economy. Chief among the reforms were the liberalization of prices, the restitution of properties commandeered during the communist regime, and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises. Efforts were made to ease the external debt, build a legal framework for the new market infrastructure, and reach out to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. In 1992 Bulgaria joined the Council of Europe, and in 1993 it signed the Europe Agreement with the European Union, in which it sought membership.

Bulgaria recognized the newly independent former Yugoslav republics as states and on January 16, 1992, became the first country to recognize the Republic of Macedonia (now the Republic of North Macedonia). The relationship between Bulgaria and North Macedonia nevertheless continues to be complicated by the fact that Bulgaria does not recognize the existence of a separate Macedonian language or nation, claiming that Macedonian is simply a dialect of Bulgarian and that the Macedonians are really Bulgarians. In addition, successive Bulgarian governments have refused to recognize the existence of a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria and have attempted to suppress any expression of a Macedonian national identity among its citizens. In 2000 the United Macedonian Organization (OMO) “Ilinden”–Party for Economic Enhancement and Integration of the Population (PIRIN), an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria, was refused recognition as a political party, an action that was condemned in 2000 by the European Court of Human Rights.

Meanwhile, President Zhelev grew critical of the UDF and Dimitrov’s government and received support from the MRF. In October 1992 Dimitrov’s government was forced to resign by a vote of no confidence. In December 1992 a new government dominated by the MRF was elected with support from the BSP. For the next two years, under the leadership of Zhelev’s adviser Luben Berov, reforms stagnated. In elections in December 1994 the BSP won an absolute majority and formed a government headed by party leader Zhan Videnov, which tried to reestablish subsidies for state-owned enterprises but faced financial losses. In early 1997, when monthly inflation reached about 240 percent, mass protests forced the government to resign.

Zhelev’s successor as president, Petar Stoyanov, called a new election, and, after a decisive victory, UDF leader Ivan Kostov formed a pro-market government. It reduced inflation by introducing a currency board (an institution dedicated to reinforcing a fixed exchange rate and to a monetary policy that defends that rate), sped up privatization, and in early 1997 applied for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In elections in June 2001 Simeon Saxecoburggotski, the former tsar of Bulgaria, led the newly formed National Movement for Simeon II (NDSV) to victory. The new prime minister weathered criticism that he and his ministers lacked political experience, and he continued Bulgaria’s program of financial restraint and increased privatization.

In 2002 Stoyanov was replaced as president by Georgi Parvanov, a candidate from a coalition of leftist and nationalist groups backed by the BSP who nevertheless declared his intent to not stray from the goals of membership in NATO and the EU. Parvanov was reelected in October 2006. Bulgaria became a member of NATO in 2004 and a member of the EU in 2007. Meanwhile, Saxecoburggotski’s party was defeated in the 2005 legislative elections, and Sergei Stanishev of the BSP became prime minister.

In 2008 Bulgaria’s governing institutions received a poor evaluation from the European Commission in its second report on Bulgaria’s progress as an EU member. The report concluded that Bulgaria had failed to make reasonable strides in reforming the judiciary, combating corruption, and fighting organized crime. In January 2009, during an extremely cold month, thousands of Bulgarians did not have electricity or heat, and production was halted in major enterprises across the country because of a disruption of natural gas deliveries throughout eastern and southern Europe, which resulted from a gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine. The crisis highlighted the weakness of Stanishev’s government, which was already struggling to deal with the effects of the global recession; the government also faced mounting allegations of corruption and of misappropriation of EU funds. In the parliamentary elections in July 2009, the centre-right Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (Grazhdani za Evropeisko Razvitie Balgariya; GERB), led by former Sofia mayor Boiko Borisov, garnered nearly 40 percent of the votes and secured 116 seats in the 240-seat National Assembly, while the Socialist-led Coalition for Bulgaria claimed only 40 seats. Borisov took office as prime minister on July 27.

In spite of Bulgaria’s exposure to ailing southern European economies—most notably, Greece—it weathered the financial crisis that plagued the region and even experienced modest growth. Although it remained the poorest country in the EU, exports and tourism boosted the economy, and austerity measures introduced by the Borisov administration encouraged foreign investors and analysts. Long-term unemployment remained a significant concern, but voters affirmed their support for Borisov when they elected GERB candidate Rosen Plevneliev president in October 2011. Bulgaria’s goal of greater integration with the EU continued to be frustrated, however, as EU authorities expressed concern that the country had not taken sufficient steps to reduce political corruption, organized crime, and threats to press freedom. As a result, despite having cleared numerous procedural hurdles, Bulgaria’s accession to the borderless Schengen zone was repeatedly delayed.

As the Borisov government continued to promote austerity, the Bulgarian public became increasingly vocal in its demands that something be done about the country’s rising unemployment and endemic poverty. Government corruption scandals and a hike in the price of electricity triggered a wave of increasingly violent protests in early 2013. The demonstrations signaled the broadest expression of popular unrest since the fall of communism, and Borisov resigned in February 2013. The following month, Borisov was replaced by Marin Raikov at the head of a technocratic caretaker administration that would rule until snap elections could be held. Those elections, held in May 2013, failed to produce a conclusive result, and voter turnout barely topped 50 percent. Although GERB obtained the largest percentage of votes, it fell far short of the number of parliamentary seats required to form a government. Additionally, the parties that had allied with GERB in Borisov’s minority government ruled out the possibility of supporting a GERB-led coalition. A government was ultimately formed by the Socialists and an ethnic Turkish party, with Plamen Oresharski, a former finance minister, installed as the nonpartisan technocratic prime minister. Although technically a minority government—the two parties commanded exactly half the seats in parliament—its creation was given silent assent by the nationalist Ataka party, which abstained from the vote that approved it.