History[edit] Early years and Chervenkov era 9%8T09I! Georgi DimitrovAlthough the Kingdom of Bulgaria changed its alliance and declared war on Nazi Germany on September 7, on September 9, 1944, a coup d'état, backed by Red Army troops, installed a new government led by the Communist Fatherland Front (FF). Despite its more active participation on the side of the Allies, the country came out of the war on the losing side. +oc}kv,h] {u7E )Fdl In 1946, Georgi Dimitrov, a close friend of Joseph Stalin, became prime minister. The same year a referendum was held, on which 95% of voters declared themselves against the monarchy and supported the establishment of a republic. H]-nm+ ZD*>i=S Almost immediately after that Bulgaria was declared a people's republic. The young tsar Simeon II fled the country with his sister and mother. Vasil Kolarov was head of state until the adoption of a new constitution in 1947. [Z 1Eje X Jx_4:G In 1950, after the death of Vasil Kolarov and that of Georgi Dimitrov a year earlier, Vulko Chervenkov became prime minister. Chervenkov started a process of rapid and forceful industrialization. $JOIK9+3z# ^^Y0 \3. 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. n
D?XP<9UU hd900LA} [edit] The Zhivkov eraTodor 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 trials and executions of Traicho Kostov and other "Titoists" (though not of Nikola Petkov and other non-Communist victims of the 1947 purges) were officially denounced. A limited degree of freedom of expression was restored and the persecution of the Church was ended. MFVFr " ({)_[dJ' The upheavals in Poland and Hungary in 1956 did not spread to Bulgaria, but the Party placed firm limits and restraints on intellectual and literary freedom to prevent any such outbreaks. In the 1960s some economic reforms were adopted, which allowed the free sale of production that exceeded planned amounts. 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. d7@ N~<n i
):el= p^2pv{by "The friendship between the Soviet and the Bulgarian people — indestructible for eternity", a 1969 Soviet stamp commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Socialist Revolution in BulgariaYugov 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. M30_b8[Y_ D:f# [edit] Fall of the Communist regimeAlthough 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[1] and were forced to adopt Bulgarian names in the winter of 1984. The issue strained Bulgaria's economic relations with the West. Z`[j;=[ ][.1b@)qV 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. kG E|17I S5;q)qz2J 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. @{j-B
IRZ0 R!`#pklB [edit] Government and politics K_xn> The headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist party in 1984People's Republic of Bulgaria was a single-party Communist state. The Bulgarian Communist Party created an extensive nomenklatura on each organizational level. The constitution was changed several times, with the Zhivkov Constitution being the longest-lived. According to article 1, "The People's Republic of Bulgaria is a socialist state, headed by the working people of the village and the city. The leading force in society and politics is the Bulgarian Communist Party." aw~OvnX E ls=<c< The PRB functioned as a one-party people's democracy, with the People's Committees representing local self-governing. Their role was to exercise Party decisions in their respective areas, and in the meantime to rely on popular opinion in decision-making. In the late 1980s, the BCP had an estimated 1,000,000 members - more than 10% of the population. oR~+s&c |