|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
.svg)
.svg)
The People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) (Bulgarian: Народна република България, Narodna republika Balgariya) was the official name of the Bulgarian state from 1946 to 1990, when it was under the rule of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). Bulgaria was an Eastern Bloc country and a Soviet ally during the Cold War, a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, BCP transformed itself in 1990, changing its name to Bulgarian Socialist Party, and is currently part of the governing coalition government.
Contents |
History
Early years and Chervenkov era
On September 9, 1944, a coup d'état, backed by Red Army troops, installed a new government led by the Communist Fatherland Front (FF). As a consequence, Bulgaria broke its alliance and declared war on Nazi Germany. Despite its more active participation on the side of the Allies, the country came out of the war on the losing side. In 1946, Georgi Dimitrov, a close friend of Iosif 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. Almost immediately after that Bulgaria was declared a people's republic. The young Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha fled the country with his sister and mother. Vasil Kolarov was head of state until the adoption of a new constitution in 1947.
In 1950, after the death of Vasil Kolarov and that of Dimitrov an year earlier, Vulko Chervenkov became prime minister. Chervenkov followed a domestic policy similar to that of Stalin - on one hand, he attempted to install a personality cult, created labor camps similar to the Soviet GULAG, and brutally suppressed internal opposition, and started a process of rapid industrialization on the other hand.
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[citation needed], 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.
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[citation needed]. 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[1] 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.
Government and politics
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."
The PRB functioned as a one-party popular democracy, with the People's Committees representing local self-governing. Their role was to excercise the 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.
Economy
The economy of the PRB was a centrally planned economy, similar to those in other COMECON states. In the mid-1940s, when the collectivisation process began, Bulgaria was a primarily agrarian state, with some 80% of its population located in rural areas. Production facilities of all sectors were nationalised, although it was not until Vulko Chervenkov that private economic activity was completely scrapped. Despite negative effects in some other countries, the productivity of Bulgarian agriculture increased rapidly after collectivisation. Large-scale government subsidies were spent each year to cover the losses from the artifically lowered consumer prices.
Chervenkov's Stalinist policy led to a massive industrialisation and development of the energy sector, which is one of Bulgaria's most advanced economic sectors to date. His rule lasted from 1950 to 1956, and saw the construction of dozens of dams and hydroelectric powerplants, chemical works, Elatsite gold and copper mine, and many others. The war-time coupon system was abolished, healthcare and education were made free. All this was achieved with strict government control and organization, prisoner brigades from the labor camps and the Bulgarian Brigadier Movement - a youth labor movement where young people worked voluntarily on construction projects.
In the 1960s Todor Zhivkov closed the GULAG-like prison camps and abolished prisoner labor. He preserved completely the Soviet-type command economy, but also introduced a number of reforms, putting emphasis on light industry and basic consumer needs. Surplus agricultural production could be sold freely, prices were lowered even more, and new equipment for light industrial production was imported. Bulgaria also became the first Communist country to produce Coca-Cola - it was bottled in a glass bottle, where the trademark logo is written in cyrillic. Thanks to these reforms, ordinary Bulgarians achieved a standart of living somewhat higher than that of other COMECON countries, and had access to more basic commodities (although variety was still poor compared to Western countries).
The Bulgarian economy was very stable, but it shared the same drawbacks as other countries from Eastern Europe - it traded almost entirely with the Soviet Union (more than 60% of foreign trade was conducted with this country), although East Germany and Mongolia were also large-scale importers of Bulgarian goods. Corruption was on a small scale, but in some regions it was extensive, and led to a slow down in economic growth. In order to combat the low quality of many goods, a comprehensive State standart system was introduced in 1970, which included precise and strict quality requirements for all sorts of products, machines and buildings.
The economic growth gradually began to slow down, until it reached a point of stagnation in the mid-1980s.
See also
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
References
- ^ Crampton, R.J., A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2005, pp.205, Cambridge University Press
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
