A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  After the second elections Alexander had little choice but to nominate as prime minister Dragan Tsankov, the erstwhile champion of Uniatism who was now a fierce russophile and leader of the Liberal Party. There was sufficient truce between prince and prime minister to enable the latter to begin the construction of the new state and its apparatus. Tsankov therefore introduced a national currency based on the lev (lion), he regulated the national system of justice, and he took measures to control brigandage which had plagued the mountain areas since liberation. But it was not long before friction arose between him and the prince on constitutional issues. Alexander insisted on using for his title a Bulgarian word to which the liberals took exception, and he greatly offended the majority party by dissolving the city council in Sofia; not even the Ottomans had done such a thing, the liberals declared. On the other hand, the liberals frightened Alexander by bringing forward plans for a citizens’ militia which was to compete with if not replace the army.

  Tsankov resigned in November 1880 and was replaced by Petko Karavelov, brother of Liuben. The prince’s preference would have been for a change of constitution rather than of prime minister, but to this the Russians would not consent, fearing it might excite demands for west European interference in Bulgarian affairs. The Russian veto, however, was withdrawn in March 1881 when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. His successor, Alexander III, was more reactionary. He raised no objections in May when his namesake in Bulgaria dismissed the Karavelov government and announced he would convoke a Grand National Assembly to meet in Svishtov later in the year to consider changes to the constitution. The liberals were not unduly perturbed. They believed they had the nation with them, that this would be reflected in the election results, and that they would therefore easily dominate the GNA. Anxiety began to assail them when Alexander published his proposals for constitutional change, for these bore great resemblance to the conservative ideas expressed at Tûrnovo. Liberal fears intensified when the Russians gave Battenberg’s plans their blessing. The Russians also backed the prince in the elections held in July; Russian soldiers were available at the vote to ‘help illiterates’ and preserve order, though they placed little restraint on the pro-Battenbergist thugs who also congregated around the voting points. Only two electoral districts returned liberal deputies and not all of them reached the assembly. It would have made no difference if they had. The Svishtov GNA which met on 13 July was overwhelmingly conservative in outlook, and in less than two hours it passed all the prince’s proposals: a state council was to be introduced, the franchise was to be made indirect, the sûbranie was to be reduced in size, and civil liberties were to be restricted. Prince Alexander had in effect carried out a coup d’état.

  Plate 5.1 Alexander Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, 1879–86.

  After the coup many liberals left Bulgaria for exile in Eastern Rumelia, though Tsankov remained hoping to influence Alexander’s authoritarianism from within the principality. In fact the authoritarian regime was from the beginning weak and insecure. The fundamental political reality of Bulgaria remained unaltered: the great majority of the politically conscious part of the nation, the intelligentsia, backed the liberals and would not cooperate with the conservatives or the prince. The latter was soon to face another difficulty because when a sûbranie was elected in the autumn of 1882 its conservative majority – the liberals had boycotted the poll – showed a surprising degree of independence. This spirit of independence was to be shown primarily against the Russians.

  In the spring of 1882 the prince, desperate to find ministers who would be generally acceptable, had imported two Russian generals, Sobolev and Kaulbars, who were given responsibility for the major share of internal administration. This seemed a sensible move in that the Russians remained widely respected and popular, particularly amongst the liberals. Yet there were dangers in such a policy. Alexander’s own relations with the Russians were equivocal at the best of times, the main points of friction being on matters affecting the army. Alexander was determined to strengthen his influence over the ministry of war and the officer corps, yet the ministry was by convention held by a Russian and all officers above the rank of captain in the Bulgarian army were Russians. The appointment of Kaulbars as minister of war did nothing to improve relations in this area.

  Whilst the prince and the Russians competed for influence within the army, there were serious disagreements between the Russians and the conservatives over railways. Since 1879 the Russians had been pressing the Bulgarian government to allow them to construct a railway from the Danube in the north-east to Sofia. This would have great strategic importance in any future Russian military operations in the Balkans, but the suggestion was embarrassing for the Bulgarians. The treaty of Berlin obliged Bulgaria to complete that section of the Vienna to Constantinople trunk line which passed through Bulgarian territory. This was an expensive obligation which would more than absorb whatever funds the Bulgarians had for railway construction. The Russians nevertheless urged that the Berlin obligation be placed second to that of the Danube–Sofia line; at the same time they strove hard to secure control of the national bank which the Bulgarians had decided to establish. The two issues were obviously connected because Russian control of the bank would ensure funds were made available for the Russian railway project. These arguments the Russians pressed in the state council and the sûbranie but both bodies refused such pressures and in April 1883, with full support from the prince, the sûbranie enacted that the trunk line be built.

  The Russians were enraged but there was nothing they could do, not least because the moderate liberals shared conservative attitudes on this issue. The liberals believed that Russia, as the liberating power, had the right to dominate Bulgarian foreign policy, one liberal even arguing that Bulgaria had no need of a foreign ministry because its external affairs should be left in Russia’s hands. But the liberals did not expect Russian interference in Bulgaria’s internal affairs. After the 1883 decision on the trunk line the conservatives, the moderate liberals and the prince combined to contain Russian pressures. In September Sobolev and Kaulbars left Bulgaria and Tsankov formed a coalition government.

  The internal comprise reached in Bulgaria was based on liberal acceptance of the April 1883 railway agreement, and conservative acceptance of a return to the Tûrnovo constitution, together with the acknowledgement that any future constitutional changes could only be brought about by constitutional means. In December 1883 the sûbranie passed a constitutional reform bill which reintroduced much of the 1881 system. The conservatives then left the coalition government, believing they had secured their constitutional objectives. They had not because the December 1883 bill had been passed by very dubious means and it was repealed in the following year before it had been put into effect.

  The National Question and Union with Rumelia, 1884–1885

  The passing of the December 1883 bill embarrassed the liberals. Their ranks were already divided, particularly between those who had remained in Bulgaria in 1881 and those who had gone into exile, the latter being headed by Petko Karavelov. These divisions were sharpened early in 1884 when Tsankov announced the government had agreed to purchase the British-owned Rusé–Varna railway. Purchase of the line was another obligation laid upon Bulgaria by the treaty of Berlin and no-one could object to the government’s decision. They could, however, object to the price. And this the Karavelov wing of the Liberal Party did with some energy. When elections were held in June 1884 they were a contest not between the conservatives and the liberals but between the tsankovist and karavelist wings of the Liberal Party.

  The karavelists won and their leader formed the next government. His first act was to repeal the December 1883 constitutional legislation after which he went on to introduce two vitally important bills. The first placed the new Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) under state ownership. The second nationalised the railways; all existing and future lines in the country were to be the property of the Bulgarian State Railways (BDZh); plans wer
e also drawn up to determine the shape of the future national rail network. By this time the split between the two wings of the Liberal Party had been formalised. The karavelists formed the new Democratic Party, Tsankov’s group retaining the title of the Liberal Party.

  By the end of 1884 most of the constitutional issues raised in 1879 had been settled. The prince’s political wings had been clipped after his too rapid ascent in 1881; the conservatives had become a minor factor in the political equation; and the Russians had been rebuffed by Karavelov’s nationalist legislation on the bank and on railways. The decline of the constitutional questions meant that attention could once again focus on the issue which had been at the forefront of discussion before the constitutional debates: that of national unity.

  Ever since 1878 there had been a sizeable Macedonian presence in Bulgaria. Some Macedonians were economic migrants, many of them taking part in the construction work which liberation spawned in Sofia and other cities. Others, however, were fugitives or refugees. Most if not all Macedonians in Bulgaria at this period regarded themselves as ethnically Bulgarian and the refugees were a potential political lobby of considerable size. After the end of authoritarian rule they became more active and by 1884 had moved some distance towards forming effective organisations. Movement in this direction was encouraged by the first signs of emergent Serbian propaganda in Macedonia where the exarchist/Bulgarian cause already had to meet strong competition from the patriarchist/Greek faction. In 1885 two cheti crossed from Bulgaria into Macedonia, one of them equipped with arms taken from a Bulgarian military installation with the obvious connivance of local officials. Both bands were soon rounded up or dispersed by Ottoman forces but alarm signals had been clearly sounded, particularly in Russia. They were heeded by Karavelov. He retained enough of the liberals’ original pro-Russian attitudes still to believe that Bulgaria must do nothing in its foreign policy to anger or alienate St Petersburg. And at this period the focus of Russian diplomacy was on central Asia; it was made abundantly clear to Sofia that complications in the Balkans would be most unwelcome as they would make it much more difficult to secure Russian objectives in Asia. Karavelov therefore acted swiftly. In 1885 a number of known Macedonian activists were moved away from the western border areas and settled in central or eastern Bulgaria.

  Plate 5.2 The sûbranie (parliament) building, Sofia. Its motto means ‘Unity is Strength’. The building dates from the 1880s and replaced one destroyed by fire in 1883. The building in the left background is the Aleksander Nevski cathedral, built largely with Russian money in commemoration of the war of 1877–78 and finally completed in the early 1920s.

  Karavelov’s firm line on Macedonia focused attention on Eastern Rumelia. The internal administration of Eastern Rumelia, it had been decided in Berlin, was to be under the control of a governor general but he was to rule through an elected assembly whilst a permanent council of that assembly was to function as a form of cabinet. It had been intended by the Berlin powers that the permanent council would contain representatives of the Turkish and Greek minorities in Rumelia and an elaborate system of proportional representation had been devised for when the regional assembly elected the permanent council from its own membership. These plans were scuppered by one Bulgarian deputy who had a doctorate in mathematics from Prague. He lectured, drilled, and rehearsed his colleagues so effectively that when the vote was held the maximum possible number of posts in the council were taken by Bulgarians. Though minority rights were safeguarded in Rumelia the election of a predominantly Bulgarian permanent council meant that the province’s political machinery was entirely in Bulgarian hands.

  There was an understandable desire to emphasise the Bulgarian nature of the province. To that end the Bulgarian flag and the Bulgarian national anthem were used on every permissible occasion and as many of the province’s official institutions as possible were modelled on their equivalents in the principality. Thus the school system in Rumelia was similar to that north of the border; the literary alphabets were the same; and military training was again taken directly from the Bulgarian example.

  However, the party system which emerged from the constitutional debates in the principality did not appear in Rumelia where the dominant political elements were small, conservative oligarchies consisting of wealthy merchants and former Ottoman civil servants. Provincial politics, and not least its press, were enlivened by the arrival of the liberal refugees after the coup of 1881 but that coup acted as a hindrance to the development of political links with Bulgaria. Rumelia’s economy was more developed than Bulgaria’s and its merchants did not want the sort of upheavals which in two years had given the principality seven cabinets and two general elections; even more importantly, serious disturbances or political changes might invoke that clause of the treaty of Berlin which stated that Ottoman troops could be reintroduced into Rumelia if there were a serious threat to its internal stability and if the signatory powers of the Berlin treaty had been informed beforehand. Rumelia could not contemplate union until the principality had returned to an orderly, constitutional life.

  Another hindrance to any attempts at union between Bulgaria and Rumelia had been the attitude of the western and central European powers. Initially they had seen Bulgaria as a dependency of Russia and had therefore feared that any expansion of Bulgaria would mean an extension of Russian influence. By 1884 this view was changing. The prince’s disagreements with the Russians over the army and above all the decisions on the railway and bank questions had shown Europe that Bulgaria was not a Russian satrapy.

  As his reaction to the cheti of 1885 showed, Karavelov was not willing to anger the Russians, but there were conspiracies afoot which had no such inhibitions. Early in 1885 a Bulgarian Secret Central Revolutionary Committee (BSCRC) had been established. It advocated extremist methods and had maximalist aims. It wanted to bring about a mass rising of all Bulgarians under foreign rule and to unite them in a single state, to recreate in fact San Stefano Bulgaria. It was a hopelessly ambitious aim and Karavelov’s reaction to the 1885 cheti showed that the maximalist path would lead nowhere. With Macedonia denied to them the activists of the BSCRC concentrated instead on what seemed the easiest of their objectives: Rumelia where Bulgarians already dominated the machinery of local administration. The BSCRC became the Committee for Union; it abandoned its call for a mass uprising, deciding instead that the local, Bulgarian-dominated militia should carry out a coup. This would be rapid and could be effected before international diplomacy could be rallied to defend the status quo.

  The coup was duly carried out on 18 September 1885, although the scheduled date had been a little later. It was enthusiastically welcomed amongst the general Bulgarian population both north and south of the Balkans. Karavelov and Prince Alexander were less sure. Karavelov dithered, caught between his obvious desire to see unification and his reluctance to do anything which would anger the Russians.

  Alexander was equally concerned at Russian reactions. He had been informed of the conspiracy and of the date it was due to be carried out. But there had been endless similar rumours over the last few years and he took this one no more seriously than those which had preceded it; in August he had even assured the Russian minister for foreign affairs that there was no reason to expect any dramatic developments in the Balkans in the foreseeable future. Initially, Alexander also dithered. His mind was made up for him by Stefan Stambolov. Stambolov had been born near Tûrnovo in 1854 and had won a scholarship to a seminary in Russia. There, however, he had become involved with the narodniks and had been expelled. He had taken an active part in the 1876 rising and in the attempted Kresna-Razlog revolt in 1878. After liberation he had been elected to the sûbranie, although technically he was too young. Despite this he was made chairman or speaker of the assembly in which position he had established a reputation for toughness and efficiency. These qualities he showed again in 1885. He told Alexander that if he did not go to Plovdiv and accept the union he would be totally discredited and mi
ght as well return to Germany. Alexander went to Plovdiv. At the same time he ordered the Bulgarian army south to garrison the border with the Ottoman empire in case the sultan should try to move his army into Eastern Rumelia.

  Plate 5.3 A group described by the contemporary caption as a Volunteer Detachment of Schoolboys, 1885; the figure second from the left is clearly no schoolboy and could be a teacher. Detachments such as these helped to secure the military victory against Serbia in 1885.

  The War with Serbia and the Deposition of Alexander Battenberg, 1885–1886

  The Union of 1885 created a major diplomatic crisis. The Russians were furious, seeing Alexander’s conduct, in the light of his recent assurances, as duplicity. In retaliation the tsar ordered all Russian officers and military advisors to leave Bulgaria; the Bulgarian army was left with no officer above the rank of captain. The dangers for Bulgaria were obvious and were made greater by Greek and Serbian reactions. Both states demanded territorial compensations if Bulgaria were to be allowed to increase in size. The Greeks were contained but the Serbs were not. King Milan declared war on Bulgaria on 13 November and moved his troops towards and across Bulgaria’s unguarded north-western border. The Bulgarian forces were now required to race from one end of their country to the other; they had no senior officers to organise them, few railways to transport them, and no organised commissariat to feed them or their animals. Despite this the transfer was accomplished mostly on foot and on horseback, Bulgarian troops and Rumelian militiamen being fed en route by local inhabitants. In mid-November they faced the Serbs at Slivnitsa on the road to Sofia and in a two-day battle put the Serbs to flight. So complete was the rout that had not Austria-Hungary intervened diplomatically the Bulgarian army would have entered Belgrade.