Cold War in the Balkans

American Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Communist Bulgaria 1943--1947

Michael M. Boll

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185866
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As World War II drew to a close, the United States and the Soviet Union began to maneuver for position in postwar Europe, in the first exploratory moves of what would soon become a worldwide contest for power and prestige. In Bulgaria, Michael Boll finds a unique vantage point for study of the processes of international politics during these years of the emergence of the Cold War. Bulgaria, he writes, was to assume a significance for both the United States and the Soviet Union greater than that small nation's intrinsic importance to either Great Power.

Bulgaria had joined the Axis—under pressure—during the war, though it alone among the Axis satellites had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. Willing in 1943 to lend support to an American plan devised to bring about Bulgaria's surrender and its participation in the war against Germany, the Soviet by the fall of 1944 was to invade Bulgaria and form an alliance with the Bulgarian Communists, who offered dependable support in the Red Army's continuing war effort. When military objectives were replaced by the Soviet's political drive for consolidation of its newly won empire, the Bulgarian Communists remained indispensable allies and continued the determined campaign that culminated in 1947 in declaration of the People's Republic of Bulgaria.

Boll refutes the frequent charge of American "nonpolicy" toward Eastern Europe in this period, concluding that the "loss" of Bulgaria was the result not of the lack of determined policy, but of a realistic assessment of American capabilities and strategic priorities. Cold War in the Balkans, drawing on important new Eastern European sources and newly declassified British and American archives, relates international diplomatic history to local political developments in a way that gives new depth to the study of Cold War origins.

1 Wartime Planning for Bulgaria

Bulgaria on the eve of World War II was a small Slavic state often described as the “key to the Balkans.” Located along the Black Sea and bordering on Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Rumania, Bulgaria possessed a population slightly in excess of 6 million and embraced just over 103,000 square kilometers, its borders having been determined by the Treaty of Neuilly at the close of World War I. Bulgarian politics had experienced a stormy path in the interwar period under the guidance of its monarch, King Boris, who had established tight control over domestic and international policy following a palace coup in 1935. Isolated from normal diplomatic intercourse because of her defeat as an ally of Germany in 1918, Bulgaria, like many of her Balkan neighbors, drifted toward the Axis camp in the 1930s. This trend was apparent in both her foreign trade and her foreign policy.

Aware that a small Balkan state must operate within the confines of Great Power politics, King Boris attempted in the initial stages of World War II to avoid outright hostilities while maintaining close relations with both Italy and Germany. Although certain peculiarities of Bulgaria’s existence such as the known pro-Russian (not pro-Communist) proclivities of the population and the bitter territorial disputes with her neighbors helped shape Bulgarian policy, in the last resort both the king and the Council of Ministers realized that the fortunes of the larger European states would determine Bulgaria’s future. Thus King Boris carefully measured the war’s progress, attempting to avoid direct conflict with either of the European blocs. In 1940, this cautious policy induced a number of Great Powers to intervene in an effort to chart Bulgaria’s future. Among them was the United States. By now, both Bulgaria’s strategic location and her large and well-respected army made her a tempting prize of international diplomacy.

America’s concern for Bulgarian politics arose early in World War II from the desire to enhance the prospects of British resistance to German domination short of an actual commitment of American forces. The lack of any significant cultural ties or economic relations between Washington and Sofia in this period necessitated the submergence of Bulgarian relations within the broader perspective of denying Germany new conquests in the yet unresolved future of southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Thus America’s first intervention into Bulgarian internal affairs came at the specific request of London. Hard-pressed by the seemingly unending German victories, Great Britain sought American diplomatic pressure to forestall the accession of Bulgaria to the Axis Pact, a feared first step in an eventual German invasion of Greece. In January 1941, President Roosevelt responded by sending his personal representative, future OSS Chief Bill Donovan, to several Balkan states with a promise of American assistance for nations fighting Nazi expansion. In the third week of January, Donovan flew to Athens to assess Greek preparedness and to receive a detailed report from the British military attaché on the political and military situation in Bulgaria.¹ On January 20, Donovan arrived in Sofia and the Bulgarian cabinet resolved that concerted German pressure to adhere to the Axis Pact no longer could be resisted.² Unaware of this momentous decision, Donovan made the rounds of high Bulgarian officials in his quest for continued Bulgarian neutrality. The following day, he conveyed his president’s firm belief in an eventual German defeat to the Bulgarian foreign minister, Ivan Popov. The United States, Donovan cautioned, would aid Greece in resisting any German invasion through Bulgaria. That afternoon Donovan repeated America’s dire predictions as to Germany’s eventual fate to War Minister Teodosi Daskalov.³ Later the same day, Donovan visited Prime Minister Bogdan D. Filov, who recorded in his diary: “He was very militant and did not want to hear of peace until the Germans are finally crushed.” That evening, the shaken Popov informed the prime minister that Donovan’s strident attitude confirmed his own distaste for Berlin and that on no account would he approve the Axis Pact. Confronted with a demand to sign, Popov stated, he would choose suicide.⁴

The culmination of Donovan’s policy of “gentle persuasion” came the next morning in an audience with King Boris. America, Donovan related, was aiding Great Britain by all means possible, certain of a final British victory. Bulgaria, he informed the startled King appeared to be on the verge of joining Germany—an event that would range Sofia against America. In weak rebuttal, Boris reiterated his oft-stated opinion that Bulgaria as a small nation must stall for time in the face of a confusing welter of Great Power politics.⁵ Following this conference, Donovan departed for Belgrade.

The importance of Donovan’s journey to Bulgaria in 1941 must not be underestimated in assessing the OSS chief’s subsequent belief in Bulgaria’s potential as an eventual Allied partner. The King, Donovan confided to the British ambassador, was an honest if confused idealist who sincerely wished to avoid bringing Bulgaria to the German side. Should Bulgaria be forced to join Germany, the King would assent but with the hope that America would not condemn her for it.⁶ This belief in Bulgaria’s unwillingness to participate in the strategic plans of her Teutonic neighbor received reinforcement following Pearl Harbor when Bulgaria, under renewed German pressure, declared war on America and Britain. In the final meeting with the U.S. ambassador, Foreign Minister Popov expressed the “deep sadness” of his government in this unwished turn of events, stating that the break was the result of German insistence and against Popov’s own advice.⁷ Well aware of Bulgaria’s position, Washington delayed her own declaration of war against Sofia until June 1942.

During 1942 both America and Bulgaria pursued national interests having little to do with one another. Washington was concentrating on operation Torch, the planned landings in North Africa. Bulgaria, in turn, continued to exploit the tranquil conditions in the Balkans that had followed the 1941 defeat of Greece and Yugoslavia, focusing energies upon occupation and administration of the newly won territories of Thrace and Macedonia. Only in the spring of 1943 with the intense discussions between Washington and London as to the preferred invasion route into occupied Europe did America once again turn attention toward Bulgaria. Renewed interest in Sofia’s possible defection from Axis control was matched by Tsar Boris’s growing desire to leave the war under the best possible conditions. Switzerland and Turkey quickly became the centers of a new American effort toward Bulgaria, with both the OSS and the Department of State being the initial American participants.

In the spring of 1943, the U.S. intelligence chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, established contact with the Bulgarian consul in Geneva, M. H. Milev, in an attempt to ascertain Bulgaria’s conditions for an armistice. Milev reported to Sofia that Dulles possessed a large staff so as to facilitate contacts with enemy states and that discussions already were in progress with the Rumanians and the Hungarians. The Bulgarian ambassador in Switzerland, former Prime Minister Georgi K’oseivanov, initially refused all suggestions of discussions with the Americans, but by the summer of 1943 he informed Sofia: “It would be useful for us to know what the Americans are thinking and what their intentions are with respect to Bulgaria, and, at the same time, to explain our problems.”⁸ In August, K’oseivanov returned to Sofia to report on his contacts. The Americans, he informed Filov, refused to concede Bulgaria’s control of territories captured with German assistance as the price of an armistice.⁹ This issue of territorial acquisitions was to remain an important barrier to Bulgaria’s withdrawal from the war.

While Allen Dulles was fostering ties with Milev and K’oseivanov, Tsar Boris dispatched his own special envoy, L. Pulev, to contact former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, George Earle, then in Ankara. Berlin, however, discovered this mission before initiation of discussions. Undaunted by this temporary setback, Boris authorized a well-known Bulgarian industrialist, Georgi Kiselov, to establish contact with the American consulate in Istanbul.¹⁰ On May 20, 1943, U.S. Consul Burton Berry filed a lengthy report on these discussions. Boris, Berry cabled, was determined to avoid active warfare with troops of the United Nations short of a direct attack upon Bulgarian soil. The December 1941 declaration of war against America, Kiselov confirmed, was deplored by most Bulgarians and resulted solely from German pressures. Should a United Nations force invade Bulgaria, the inevitable Bulgarian defeat would destabilize existing order and produce a Communist dictatorship. Pleading that he was acting on his own initiative, Kiselov asserted that Bulgaria sought exit from the conflict although the terms of unconditional surrender were unacceptable given the absence of actual fighting. A separate peace ran the risk of inviting a German occupation. Despite these caveats, Sofia would consider any tolerable solution that would allow retention of the 1941 frontier.¹¹

The Pulev and Kiselov missions reflected Boris’s growing disillusion with his German ally. In late March 1943, Boris informed his prime minister that “in the last analysis the German cause is already lost.” In June, the depressed tsar told Filov that at his recent meeting with Hitler the conclusion had been reached that an Allied invasion of the Balkans was probable. Bulgaria, Hitler demanded, must further expand its military readiness. In mid-July, Boris read Filov a letter from the former Bulgarian ambassador to London which recommended a combined British-Bulgarian effort to drive German forces from the Balkans.¹² At approximately the same time, Boris reportedly authorized the socialist leader, Krastiu Pastouchov to construct a list for an anti-German cabinet so that Bulgaria might renounce her past allegiance to Berlin; such a list was drawn up.¹³ By midsummer 1943, a convergence of American and Bulgarian policies had become apparent.

The growing Bulgarian interest in seeking accommodation with the West was but one factor in developments that eventually would deeply involve American planners in charting both the wartime and postwar future of this state. In the late spring and early summer President Roosevelt, flush with success from the victories in North Africa, revealed a renewed flexibility in considering limited Allied activities in the southern and southeastern Mediterranean. Despite staunch resistance from the American Chiefs of Staff to any diversion of military resources that might imperil the planned invasion of Western Europe the following spring, Roosevelt agreed in mid-May 1943 that General Dwight D. Eisenhower might exploit the invasion of Sicily by such operations “as are best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to control the maximum number of German forces.”¹⁴ That same month, Roosevelt directed the military chiefs to consider the possibility of attacking Germany by way of Bulgaria, Rumania, and Turkey.¹⁵ In mid-July, reviewing a recent message from Winston Churchill which included a proposal from General Jan Smuts that capture of Rome might create new opportunities for Allied advanced toward the Balkans and the Black Sea, Roosevelt thought that “something of that kind can be undertaken.” By the end of the month, Churchill was informed that an Italian collapse might prompt consideration of plans to seize Corfu and the Dodecanese in tandem with the dispatch of limited assistance to Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia. While maintaining his firm commitment to the invasion of Western Europe, Roosevelt continued to entertain a deep interest in expanding the scope of the Allied threat to the more exposed regions of Hitler’s Europe. Given the known limitations of available men and equipment, however, any such plans necessarily would rely upon the participation of indigenous forces within the Balkans willing to war for Allied objectives. As Roosevelt noted at the fall 1943 Quebec Conference which reaffirmed the priority of the West European invasion, he was “most anxious to have the Balkans [sic] divisions which we have trained, particularly the Greek and Yugoslav, operate in their own countries.”¹⁶ Although the president’s general notions of a possible Balkan strategy failed to spark the interest of his military planners at Quebec, it did receive the careful attention of the Office of Strategic Security Services, which already had drafted a detailed plan to induce several Balkan governments to abandon their German ally and join the Allied cause.

Roosevelt’s speculations on possible use of local forces in the Balkans were the inevitable result of renewed military operations by the Allies in the summer of 1943. On July 10, Sicily was invaded, and nine days later a major American bombing assault destroyed the rail-yards and port of Rome. On July 25, Radio Rome announced that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been ousted from power, with King Victor Emmanuel II reassuming full authority. On August 3 the new Italian regime made its first peace overtures.¹⁷ This disruption of Axis unity in southern Europe and the expected upheavals in the Balkans, where Italy maintained twenty-five occupation divisions, offered a unique opportunity to exploit the use of local forces consistent with Roosevelt’s objective of threatening Germany without a major commitment of Allied troops. OSS Chief Donovan had been recruiting agents for almost a year in a plan to bring the large Bulgarian army to the Western side, and the time seemed ripe for a formal proposal.¹⁸

In early August, General Donovan submitted a memorandum to the U.S. Chiefs of Staff entitled “O.S.S. Plan to Detach Bulgaria from the Axis.” It stressed the vast importance of recent Italian events as they affected Bulgaria, whose queen was Victor Emmanuel’s daughter and whose population included large pro-American and pro-Russian groups. Arguing that the defection of Italy might force Germany to form a new defensive line running from the Po Valley through the Dalmation coast to Transylvania and the Carpathians, Donovan pointed out that such a withdrawl would place Bulgaria outside the German protective perimeter. This move would facilitate the defection of Bulgaria with her seven hundred thousand “well-equipped soldiers” and would be of “inestimable value” to the Allies. Such a defection, Donovan continued, could be brought about through concerted influence upon the tsar or by establishing ties with the Bulgarian General Staff or the church.¹⁹ The following day, August 3, Chief of Staff George Marshall detailed the OSS plan to a full meeting of the Joint Chiefs, agreeing at the request of General Henry H. Arnold to submit the memorandum to the Joint Staff planners for consideration.²⁰

The speed with which Donovan’s memorandum was treated reflected both the timely nature of the proposal and the tight schedule of the Joint Chiefs. At that very moment, the Chiefs were deeply involved in preparations for the upcoming Quebec Conference (Quadrant) for which they shortly departed. Thus initial review of Donovan’s proposal was assigned to the appropriate subcommittee.

Consistent with the continuing military apprehension over any proposal that might diminish available resources for the future invasion of Western Europe, the subcommittee of the Joint Staff planners concluded on August 18 that although Bulgaria’s defection would be desirable, it ought not be undertaken if it involved extensive American commitment...