The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov

Histories of Ruling Communist Parties

John D. Bell

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780817982065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Since the days of Dimitur Blagoev, a member of the first Marxist group in Russia and a founder of Bulgarian communism, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) was closely identified with its Russian counterpart. In the waning days of the Soviet Bloc, the best-known fact about Bulgaria was that it modeled itself closely on the USSR and was allegedly linked to KGB terrorist activities.Those similarities were more than superficial. The internal factions in the early history of the party, the emphasis on personal leaders and democratic centralism, the foreign policy of the pre–World War II united front, the partisan experience in the war, industrialization and collectivization, Stalinization and de-Stalinization—all these developments in Bulgaria reflected the Russian experience. Nonetheless, their extent and effect were inevitably colored by Bulgaria's size, its role in the complicated politics of Eastern Europe, and, of course, the fact that the BCP did not come to power in Bulgaria until after World War II and occupation by the Red Army.Under Todor Zhivkov, the head of the BCP from 1954 until its near demise in 1989, Bulgaria continued its close collaboration with the USSR while reviving some elements of Bulgarian national culture. Zhivkov, unlike his Soviet mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, proved an enduring leader whose anticorruption campaigns and attempts to professionalize the Bulgarian bureaucracy were relatively successful. But even at the time this history of the BCP was written, in 1986, before the fall of the Soviet Union, the path of Bulgaria's future was uncertain.

1

Origins to 1917

Bulgaria, a nation composed primarily of peasant smallholders in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, would seem an unlikely setting for the emergence of a socialist movement. But if the classic prerequisites—industry and a self-conscious proletariat—were lacking, the substitutes frequently encountered in the underdeveloped world were not. Bulgarian Marxism was born in the ranks of the country’s young intelligentsia, and it was nurtured there until forces from outside the society brought it to power.

BACKGROUND

In the decades before the liberation of 1878, a quickening of economic life in the Bulgarian lands, the spread of literacy and education, and the creation of a press and ultimately an independence movement saw Bulgarians break out of the shell of isolation that had marked five centuries of Ottoman and Phanariot domination. Bulgarian communities in Constantinople, Romania, and Russia fostered and supported this national revival. Many who participated in it, especially those young Bulgarians who studied in Russian schools or universities, encountered socialist or narodnik (populist) ideas. Several of Bulgaria’s future statesmen, including some of its most conservative leaders, passed through a stage of infatuation with some form of socialism, most often of a vague or utopian variety. For example, the poet-martyr Khristo Botev, claimed today as a precursor of Bulgarian Marxism, wrote moving indictments of social injustice, but his work was in the age-old tradition of those who side with the weak against the strong; Botev’s poetry was not the product of a “scientific” analysis of society. In any case, by the 1870s most educated Bulgarians focused on the achievement of national independence as a solution to all problems.¹

And the liberation did bring fundamental political, social, and economic changes. National liberation was achieved. The Tŭrnovo Constitution promised Western-style government, with civil rights, limited monarchy, and a National Assembly elected on the basis of universal male suffrage. Turkish landlords fled or were driven from the country, and their estates were broken up for distribution to the peasantry.² It seemed that the dreams of the national awakening were being realized, and that Bulgaria would find its place in the mainstream of European civilization. But Bulgaria was not to become the “Belgium of the Balkans.” In the following years neither its economy nor its democracy flourished.

Bulgarian Marxist historians have officially designated the years from 1878 to 1900 as the “era of the development of capitalism.” They point to the abolition of feudal relations in the countryside; the decline of handicraft production; and the creation of a state apparatus, banking system, and other institutional forms characteristic of a capitalist society.³ These changes were structural, however, and were not matched by actual development. As Alexander Gerschenkron concluded from his study of the Bulgarian economy before World War I: “All causes [for industrialization] were present, but the effects failed to materialize.”⁴ His view is supported in both the 1895 report of the Bulgarian Economic Society, which complained of declining argriculture and stagnant industry, and the recent (1982) authoritative study of Balkan economic history by John R. Lampe and Marvin Jackson.⁵ Bulgaria remained a country composed overwhelmingly of peasant smallholders, with fewer than 6,000 factory workers according to the statistics of 1894. Between 1880 and 1910 the proportion of the population in towns of over 2,000 inhabitants actually declined slightly.⁶

Nor was the picture brighter in political life. The Bulgarian historian Ilcho Dimitrov has argued forcefully that Bulgaria never became a genuine “bourgeois democracy.” On the contrary, the effort to transplant Western political forms to countries such as Bulgaria, which lacked Western traditions or a comparable economic and social base, produced only stillbirths or deformities.⁷ The reign of Prince Alexander Battenberg (1879–86) was marked by a struggle between Liberals and Conservatives over the limits of royal authority, the suspension and restoration of the constitution, union with Eastern Rumelia, and the victorious war against Serbia. It concluded with the kidnapping and abdication of the prince himself. Beneath the turbulent surface of Bulgarian political life a tide was running whose effect was to undermine the country’s fragile, paper democracy.

From the beginning, authority was actually in the hands of a politically active elite composed of the country’s few large landowners, merchants, lawyers, clergymen, officers, teachers, and those educated in Bulgarian communities abroad. After the liberation, these men took the reins of government, staffing the civil service and officer corps of the new state.⁸ By the mid-1880s their number had expanded beyond the country’s capacity to find useful work for them, and each year the educational system produced a new crop of intellectuals and lawyers seeking careers in the civil or military bureaucracies. This overproduction turned politics into a struggle for patronage and caused a proliferation of political parties. The Liberal Party suffered its first schism in 1884, when its conservative wing, under Dragan Tsankov, broke away to form the Progressive Liberal Party. Two years later the party split again, this time between the followers of Petko Karavelov and Stefan Stambolov. Repeated fission eventually produced, besides the Progressive Liberals, the Democrats under Karavelov, the National Liberals under Stambolov, the Young Liberals under Dimitŭr Tonchev, the Liberals under Vasil Radoslavov, and the Radical Democrats under Naicho Tsanov. The remnants of the Conservative Party regrouped as the National Party, led by Konstantin Stoilov. There were few or no differences in principle among these parties, as their shifting blocs and alliances came to attest. The goal of each was to secure the power of patronage and access to the state treasury for the party “chief” and his supporters. They became “corporations for the exploitation of power.”⁹ The broad population lacked the education, organization, and experience to act as a brake on political degeneration. Its role in government was reduced to paying taxes and casting ballots in what were more and more frequently rigged or meaningless elections.

After the abdication of Prince Alexander, actual power passed to Stefan Stambolov. As president of the National Assembly, regent after Alexander’s abdication, and prime minister, he secured the unification of the country, found an occupant for Bulgaria’s vacant throne, fought off Russia’s heavy-handed attempts to dominate the government, and acquired in the process an international reputation as one of Europe’s “strong men.” Under his rule political life lost its comic-opera features and acquired a more sinister complexion. Establishing a virtual dictatorship, Stambolov executed, imprisoned, or exiled his political enemies and suspended freedom of the press. Although many of the repressive features of his regime ended after he was deposed in 1894, subsequent political standards did not rise even to the level that preceded Stambolov.

The beneficiary of Stambolov’s legacy was Prince Ferdinand I of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1886–1918), whose character and policies shaped Bulgarian and Balkan politics to the end of the First World War.¹⁰ Possessed of a high order of political cunning, Ferdinand remained in the background during the first eight years of his reign. In 1894 he suddenly dismissed Stambolov and had him murdered the following year. By encouraging the fragmentation of the political parties and cultivating the good will of the military, Ferdinand extended his personal authority over the government, especially in the field of diplomacy, where he was obsessed with the dream of making Bulgaria the dominant power in the Balkans. Through “his skill in calculating the psychological moment for driving each batch of swine from the trough of power,” he made the political parties the pillars of his regime.¹¹ During Ferdinand’s reign, vast public corruption was added to the evils of Bulgarian political life. Nearly every minister who served under him was later charged with filling his pockets at public expense. According to the report of the Russian ambassador in 1915, “the corruptness of the men in power here, and in general of the leading figures in politics and society, is so great and so instilled in their flesh and blood that I am able to confirm that it is difficult to achieve anything here without bribery.”¹²

The economic stagnation and political degeneration that characterized this era inspired the popular saying “Ot tursko—po losho” (worse than the Turkish times). Among those members of the intelligentsia who were outside of the political establishment—the country’s schoolteachers were the core of this group—the conditions inspired an inclination toward more radical programs and ideologies.

DIMITŬR BLAGOEV AND THE FOUNDING OF BULGARIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Dimitŭr Blagoev was born on 14 June 1856 in Zagorichane, a large Bulgarian village in the Kastoria region of southern Macedonia, which now belongs to Greece.¹³ His father was a poor peasant, who soon migrated to Constantinople to supplement the family income with work as a dairyman. Although far from the centers of the Bulgarian national awakening, Zagorichane was not untouched by it. In 1868 Georgi “Dinka” Konstantinov, an ardent Bulgarian patriot who had absorbed revolutionary ideas in Russia, settled in the village as a teacher, “planting the first seed of human consciousness in many young hearts” [as Blagoev wrote later] before he was expelled from the village in 1870. In that year Blagoev, too, left Zagorichane to join his father in Constantinople. For two years he worked as an apprentice cobbler and then entered the Bulgarian school run by Petko R. Slaveikov, one of the great figures of the Bulgarian national revival.

Slaveikov was on the lookout for able young Bulgarians, particularly ones from Macedonia, who could be trained to promote the national cause. He found in Blagoev an apt pupil. In 1875 Slaveikov arranged for Blagoev to enter the high school in Gabrovo, but his studies were interrupted by the April 1876 uprising in which Blagoev took part. When the Turks crushed the rebellion, Blagoev escaped to Stara Zagora, but with the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war he was uprooted again. He fled to Tŭrnovo, where he found Slaveikov, who arranged for him to finish his studies in Russia. When Blagoev arrived penniless in Odessa at the end of 1878, the Bulgarian community there helped him to enter the local seminary, where he met Yanko Sakŭzov, son of a Shumen merchant and later his principal rival for the leadership of Bulgarian socialism. Neither man found the seminary appealing. Both soon left—Sakŭzov for Western Europe, Blagoev for an Odessa high school and then, in 1880, for St. Petersburg.

As a student first in the faculty of physical science and mathematics and then of law, Blagoev was quickly drawn to radical student circles and narodnik ideology. When the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 failed to transform Russia, Blagoev, like many other narodniki, including Georgi Plekhanov, became skeptical of prevailing revolutionary assumptions and began to seek new answers. During the winter and spring of 1882–83, after reading works by Lasalle and the first volume of Marx’s Capital, Blagoev became a socialist. During the following winter, he won over a group of about ten persons who worked to agitate for Marxism among the students and to make contact with workers. This was the first organized Marxist group to be formed on Russian soil.

Calling itself the Party of Russian Social Democrats...