A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  The Recognition of Prince Ferdinand

  The new prime minister was Stoilov. He began his period in office by relaxing some of the strict controls which Stambolov had imposed. Amongst those who benefited from this policy were the Macedonians in Bulgaria who were now able once more to equip bands for operation in the Ottoman empire, much to the displeasure of the Russians. This displeasure Stoilov could ill afford. If it were not his immediate objective, Stoilov had to achieve some progress towards recognition; he had to succeed where Stambolov had failed. Movement towards this goal was made much easier by two external events. First, in Asiatic Turkey a series of massacres of Armenians made some believe that the Ottoman empire had entered its final death throes. Second, Tsar Alexander III died in November 1894. His successor, Nicholas II, was more pliable and both Russian and Bulgarian statesmen realised that the two states must cooperate if they were to maximise their gains from any collapse of the Ottoman empire. In 1895 the first sign of a thaw in Russian attitudes appeared when a sûbranie delegation was given permission to visit Russia to lay a wreath on the grave of Alexander III. From this visit it became clear that in return for the recognition of Ferdinand the Russians would make one major demand: that Prince Boris be received into the Orthodox faith.

  This faced the Bulgarian regime with a difficult choice. Conversion would be immensely popular amongst the Bulgarian people as a whole, as would reconciliation with the Russians who had liberated them: how could a Bulgarian government refuse a price which the people were eager to pay for an item which they all wanted to purchase? And, it was pointed out, the king of Romania had recently agreed to the conversion of his son. The difference was that the king of Romania was a Protestant. He did not have the pope to answer to, nor did he have staunchly Catholic families, his own and his wife’s, to contend with. Stoilov wisely left the decision to Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s was not a conscience frequently troubled but in this case he felt a genuine dilemma, pulled in one direction by his feelings for his mother and his wife and, no doubt, his own immortal soul, and in the other by the obvious political advantages to be gained from accepting Russia’s terms. He decided in favour of the latter. He knew that recognition and reconciliation with Russia would bring greater internal cohesion. He knew too that with the situation in the Ottoman empire deteriorating the Macedonian question was bound to become more acute, and should it become critical and his freedom of action be restricted because he had not mended his fences with Russia, he would have failed his adopted nation and would personally be in grave danger of deposition or worse. On 3 February 1896 it was announced that Prince Boris would receive an Orthodox baptism on 14 February; Tsar Nicholas II, though he would not attend in person, would stand as godfather. Two weeks later, on the anniversary of the signing of the peace of San Stefano, the sultan, with Russian backing, recognised Ferdinand as prince of Bulgaria and governor general of Eastern Rumelia. Within a few days all the great powers, Russia included, had done likewise.

  Ethnic and Social change after the Liberation

  Before the outbreak of the April uprising about a third of the population of what was to become Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia were ethnic Turks, almost all of whom were Muslim. The atrocities of 1876 naturally created amongst the Christian Bulgarians an urge to take revenge. This was to some extent gratified during and immediately after the war of 1877–8. A number of Muslims fled during the conflict and there was some destruction of Muslim buildings and cultural centres; a large library of old Turkish books was destroyed when a mosque in Tûrnovo was burned in 1877, and Sofia, which one Russian soldier had described as ‘a forest of minarets’, lost most of its mosques, seven of them in one night in December 1878 when a thunderstorm masked the noise of the explosions arranged by Russian military engineers. In the countryside a number of Turkish villages were burned and there were many instances of ethnic Turks being driven from land which was coveted by local Bulgarians.

  Such events are the depressing feature of wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, but they were not repeated in peacetime Bulgaria. The treaty of Berlin insisted upon freedom of worship for all faiths and outlawed discrimination on the basis of religion. It also guaranteed the property rights of Muslims who chose to reside outside the principality whilst retaining land within it.

  After 1878 Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia abided by the letter of these international laws. But no amount of legislation could prevent Muslim emigration from both areas. There was some cultural pressure on Muslims. A decree of the Russian Provisional Administration, for example, had declared the rice-paddies of the Maritsa valley a health hazard because they were breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This was no doubt true but Muslims could not help but see the decree as an attempt to make more difficult the growing of their staple food.

  More important were laws regulating land tenures and taxation. Regulations affecting land unworked for three years, a period later extended, meant that absentee Turks forfeited their property, whilst in Eastern Rumelia in 1882 the imposition of tax on land owned rather than on the produce it yielded again hit many Muslim landowners; they were accustomed to leave part of their land fallow and if taxes were levied only on produce this had no financial penalty which it obviously did have when a tax based on ownership increased the amount to be paid without any compensating increase in the amount earned. Many of the Muslims left simply because they could not adjust psychologically to living in a Christian state and society. They did not comprehend the way in which women appeared unmasked in public or, even worse, mingled in society at mixed dinner parties, theatrical excursions, balls or picnics. Many Muslims resented the fact that a number of mosques were taken from them. Some of these were reverting to Christian places of worship, but others were given over to secular usage; some became storehouses, one a printing-house, and one even a prison. Even more distasteful to many Muslim families was conscription into a Christian army. Muslim soldiers did not have to wear the cross on their uniforms but they did have to obey Christian officers, observe Christian festivals, and in many cases eat Christian food. In later years exemption from military service for Muslims was made easier but conscription was in force for the first ten years after 1878, a time of maximum disorientation and demoralisation for the Turkish and Muslim population. This makes the loyalty and courage of the Muslims during the war of 1885 all the more remarkable.

  Many Muslims, however, had not stayed long enough in Bulgaria to be involved in that war. There was a steady stream of emigration and by 1900 the Turkish element, as measured by mother-tongue, had declined from about 33 per cent in 1875 to 14 per cent of the total population. In absolute terms the Turks were 728,000 in 1880/84 (the figures being for the principality in 1880 and Rumelia in 1884) but only 540,000 in 1900. In the same years the number of Greeks increased from 53,000 to 71,000.

  The liberation produced great economic and social as well as ethnic change, and this affected all communities. The majority of the population remained rural and for many villages the departure of Muslims and the relaxation or non-observance of laws forbidding the ploughing up of village communal land or forests meant that there was no land shortage in Bulgaria and an increasing population could be absorbed without any significant increase in agricultural productivity. This perpetuated the small self-sufficient peasant holding which had characterised most of the Bulgarian lands before liberation.

  The Bulgarian peasant farmer continued to feed himself and his family but the liberation did bring him nearer the European market and European manners. In the early 1880s most inhabitants of Sofia still had a cow or two grazing on nearby meadows under the care of the cowherd whom most city districts employed; they had all but disappeared by the turn of the century. At liberation the only form of street cleansing in the new capital were the packs of wild dogs which roamed the city and which killed three people in 1882. The dogs were put to the sword in 1884 and by the turn of the century Sofia had modern amenities such as municipal transport and abundant fresh water piped in
from the nearby mountains.

  Other towns did not fare so well. The traditional textile producing centres along the foothills of the Balkan mountains withered when they were exposed to greater competition. In Sopot in 1883 women burned bales of imported cloth and attacked the home of the importer. The traditional, workshop-based producers, organised into their old-fashioned and protectionist guilds, could not survive. In 1880 there had been seventy lace-making workshops in and near Gabrovo; in 1900 there were twenty-three, and Gabrovo had survived the post-liberation whirlwind better than most areas.

  Cheap, high-quality imports from Europe were one cause for the decline in traditional manufacturing. Another was the loss of traditional purchasers such as the Ottoman army; Samokov had supplied cloth for two army corps and had had a flourishing metal-working industry, but by 1900 it had declined from being a major Balkan city to a small and depressed provincial town. Some traditional industries were crippled because the new political frontiers separated them from sources of raw materials or from established markets. Vidin declined because its natural hinterland was in that part of the north-west of the Bulgarian lands assigned by the treaty of Berlin to Serbia. Kotel, which had grown rich by fattening sheep and goats in the Dobrudja and then driving them to market in Adrianople and Constantinople, now found its grazing grounds cut off by the new Bulgarian–Rumanian border, and its markets beyond the Bulgarian–Rumelian and then the Bulgarian–Ottoman frontiers.

  Changes in social habits and customs also weakened traditional industries. Many of these new habits were the result of conscription which gave many of the younger generation of peasants their first experience of urban life. And the changes were more pronounced in the Bulgarian than in the Turkish or Pomak communities. That leather-making workshops survived in a healthy state only in Sliven and Haskovo was because there were sizeable Turkish populations in those areas and they continued to wear the traditional footwear and the broad leather belts which Bulgarians were discarding as old-fashioned. The casting off of the belt damaged the knife-making industry. This was already suffering because it was facing competition from small, cheaper Austrian and German products, because it had been excluded by new tariffs from its established markets in Romania and the Ottoman empire, and because the suppression of brigandage in the 1880s lessened the need to carry a knife for self-protection; now the adoption of western-style belts meant that anyone attempting to carry the old-style large knife would not be able to keep his trousers in a socially acceptable position. The processors and workers of precious metals had relied chiefly on local wealthy Turks for their purchasers; when the latter departed the industry was ruined. The same fate befell the slipper-makers; Christian Bulgarians were not likely to adopt Muslim footwear. Western porcelain became popular and, having the additional advantage of being cheap, soon replaced, in the towns at least, the copper tableware which most Bulgarians had previously used. Beds too became more modish, very much to the cost of the craftshops which for generations had produced the carpets and cushions on which the Bulgarians had until then been content to sleep.

  Some manufacturers were able to adapt to changed conditions. Some aped western styles in products such as clothes or furniture, whilst a few even moved over to factory production, importing German or British machinery in order to do so; between 1888 and 1893 seven new textile mills and ten new leather works were opened in Gabrovo, three of them joint stock companies. Another saviour for some depressed areas was to begin producing goods to cater for the new tastes. When, during the war of 1885, a German revisited the Bulgaria he had last seen in 1878 he rejoiced to find that now beer was available; by the mid-1890s there were twenty-nine breweries in the country and commercial distilling was also being developed.

  In a country as backward and as poor as Bulgaria industrial advances could not come without government help. Under the early liberal administrations there had been attempts, few of them successful, to make civil servants wear clothes made of local cloth, and the government had drawn up a strategic plan for the development of the railway network. This developed only slowly; in the winter of 1888 Stambolov found that the quickest way to get from Tûrnovo to Plovdiv was to take a ship from Varna to Constantinople. By the mid-1890s the trunk line had been completed, Yambol had been linked to Burgas, and the mines at Pernik joined to Sofia, but there was still no line across the Balkan mountains and the roads remained in a woeful state. Any improvement in either form of transport would require massive investment. There were no internal sources of capital; there was no financial infrastructure and the few wealthy merchant concerns were found in a limited number of urban centres; if any peasant made money he was less likely to invest it in productive concerns than to set himself up as a moneylender because here the largest profits were to be made. And external sources of credit would be almost as meagre as long as Bulgaria remained an international outcast.

  * In Bulgarian the suffix -shtina attached to a personal noun means the times, attitudes, atmosphere and events associated with that person.

  6 Ferdinand’s personal rule, 1896–1918

  Stoilov’s Programme for Modernisation

  Because the early liberal governments had been preoccupied with constitutional issues and Stambolov’s first concern always had to be internal security, it was not really until the Stoilov administration came to power that a systematic attempt to develop the Bulgarian economy could be made. Stoilov, who had once declared that he wished to make Bulgaria ‘the Belgium of the Balkans’, was eager for the task. In 1894 his government passed the encouragement of industry bill. Industries which were included within one of nine defined categories and which had capital of 25,000 leva and at least 20 employees were to receive state encouragement; the chief beneficiaries were mining and metallurgy, textiles and the construction industry. State encouragement was to take the form of free grants of land for factory building together with financial help for the construction of any necessary road or rail links, preferential rates on the state railways for finished products, free use of state or local authority quarries and water power, tax advantages, preference in the awarding of state contracts even if the native products were more expensive than imported ones, and a monopoly in supplying certain items within specified geographic limits. Further acts in 1905 and 1909 both widened the scope of industries eligible for encouragement and lowered the qualifications necessary to receive it.

  If home industries were to be stimulated, however, they would need protection from cheap western imports. Any substantial alteration in the Bulgarian tariff regime had been impossible whilst Ferdinand was unrecognised but in 1896 Stoilov was able to raise the general import duty from 8 to 14 per cent; in 1906 it rose to almost 25 per cent. There were a number of exceptions, particularly if the imported items were ones which would help domestic industrial growth, but the only goods allowed in completely duty free were equipment for making silk, coke-fired samovars, and, somewhat mysteriously, church bells.

  Stoilov also helped stimulate commerce. In 1894 the government began work on developing the harbours at Varna and Burgas, work which was completed in 1903 and 1906 respectively. Regulations which had frustrated the development of local banking had already been relaxed by Stambolov in 1893, and in the following year Stoilov hoped further to stimulate local commercial activity by the creation of chambers of commerce. In 1897 commercial law was codified.

  Stoilov’s efforts to modernise the Bulgarian economy enjoyed some success. In 1894 there were 72 factories with 3,027 workers in encouraged industries; in 1911 there were 345 factories employing 15,886 workers, and between 1904 and 1911 the value of production in this sector trebled. On the other hand, the number of workers per factory changed very little and only just before the first world war did it begin to move ahead of the 1894 figure; this showed the tenacity of the small unit of production. Nor was there any significant change in the structure of industry. Food, drink and textiles completely dominated Bulgarian factory production, and even if this were also the case i
n all other Balkan countries, it indicated that progress towards a modern industrial economy was quantitative rather than qualitative. Railway building also continued with the total track rising from 220 kilometres in 1880 to 1,566 kilometres in 1900 and 2,109 kilometres in 1912, by which time the basic network as outlined in Karavelov’s legislation of 1884 had been completed. Trade too increased and by 1911, with a total value of 384,000,000 leva, it was 60 per cent above the level of the early 1890s. At the same time government expenditure had risen nine-fold from 20,000,000 leva in 1880 to 181,000,000 in 1911. Internal sources could not support such expenditure and the shortfall was covered by foreign loans, the sums borrowed rising by 70 per cent in the decade after 1900. Yet at 149.25 leva Bulgaria’s per capita debt was lower than any of its neighbours.

  The Establishment of Ferdinand’s Personal Rule

  The recognition of Prince Ferdinand in 1896 was a turning point in Bulgarian history. The constitutional preoccupations of the first years of statehood and the insecurity caused by non-recognition could now be set aside. Order and stability, it seemed, had been achieved and Bulgaria could now progress to economic restructuring and the pursuit of its foreign policy objectives. But the stability of the late 1890s was apparent rather than real and had been bought at considerable cost.

  Between 1879 and 1884 the executive and the legislature had competed for dominance. The executive had made a major advance with the coup of 1881 but had failed to capitalise on its advantages. Alexander Battenberg did not use to the full the powers he had secured for himself, not least because he was restrained by fear of Russian disapproval. In 1883 and 1884 the legislature seemed to recapture the high constitutional ground and with the formation of the Karavelov government the liberals appeared to be in a commanding position. But the liberals had been damaged in the struggle of the past five years and their weaknesses began to appear at their moment of victory with the split between Karavelov and Tsankov.