A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 13
In subsequent years the executive rapidly regained the ground it had lost. The events of 1886 had shown that the army had to be kept under control if it were not to become the dominant factor in Bulgarian political life. And it was much easier for the executive than the legislature to exercise this control.
After the departure of Alexander Battenberg only the inveterate russophiles would contest the need to increase executive power. Stambolov did not create but he greatly elaborated on the existing police and informer networks and once boasted that a bee could not cross the coast at Varna without his knowing about it.
Plate 6.1 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, prince of Bulgaria, 1887–1908, King of the Bulgarians, 1908–18.
By the mid-1890s it was established practice for an incoming government to fill administrative posts with its own supporters. This trafficking in political office, which was by no means confined to Bulgaria, was known in Bulgarian as partisanstvo. But by the mid-1890s there were, for the first time, more young men qualified for civil service posts than there were jobs available for them. This unemployed intelligentsia tended to drift towards opposition groups which promised them jobs when that group was included in government. Parties thus became less and less organisations dedicated to the pursuit of political principles than mechanisms for satisfying the lust for office.
This aspect of partisanstvo also encouraged the splintering of parties: if there were ten rather than three opposition parties there were ten rather than three groups offering the prospect of high office. Whereas in the 1880s the liberals had split on constitutional issues and in 1886 Stambolov had formed his National Liberal Party to distinguish himself from the pro-Russian liberal groups, in later years splits in all parties were to occur over trivial issues or over personalities. And the more parties there were the easier it was for the executive to play one off against the others.
The executive had also learned well the art of electoral management which had been practised since liberation. Turn-out was generally low in Bulgarian elections and control could easily be exercised at the polling station or in the processing of the results. Elections by the turn of the century were seldom exercises to measure public opinion and to tailor a government’s composition to it; they were more often carried out simply to provide a newly appointed cabinet with a dependable majority in the assembly. And by 1900 it was the prince who determined when the composition of a government should be changed and an election held.
Ferdinand had established control over the ministry of war in 1893 and because he had always insisted he should supervise foreign policy he had equal control over the ministry for foreign affairs. When he considered it time to change government he simply had to instruct one or both of these dependent ministers to resign and the incumbent cabinet would be paralysed and forced out of office.
In 1881 Alexander had engineered a coup and given himself powers he failed to use. Ferdinand simply operated the existing system to construct his personal rule. But that rule did not go unchallenged.
Social Crisis and the Emergence of the Agrarian Movement, 1895–1908
After the union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia in 1885 the railways in the latter remained under the ownership of the Oriental Railway Company (ORC) rather than being incorporated into the BDZh. The main route involved was the Rumelian section of the Vienna–Constantinople trunk line. This became an increasingly irksome factor because the ORC’s tariffs were twice as high as those of the BDZh, this seriously disadvantaging the exporters of southern Bulgaria when world agricultural prices were falling disastrously. When the encouragement of industry act was passed the ORC refused to agree to the preferential rates which the BDZh was required to offer encouraged industries; once again southern Bulgarians, this time the industrialists, were greatly discriminated against vis-à-vis their northern colleagues. Stoilov was dependent on the votes of southern Bulgarian unionist deputies for his majority in the sûbranie and he had to act.
He could not, however, nationalise the ORC lines as this was diplomatically too dangerous. Nor could he purchase it. The ORC’s chief shareholder was the Deutsche Bank and given the growing interest in Germany in the Berlin to Baghdad railway project there was no prospect of the line being sold. Stoilov had to bypass the ORC with a parallel line.
The parallel line was a disaster. Work had not been long in progress when it was realised that there would never be enough money to complete it. An attempt to purchase the operating rights on the ORC in Rumelia was frustrated by Germany and the German banks, and by 1899 the government in Sofia had been forced into a humiliating agreement under which it promised to build no line in southern Bulgaria which would compete with the ORC. The latter was also to take over the Yambol–Burgas line, in clear contravention of the December 1884 railway act which had stated that all lines in the principality should be state owned. The ORC’s assumption of control over the Yambol–Burgas line showed that the company did not consider southern Bulgaria to be part of the principality; it was another unwelcome reminder of the imperfections of the 1886 treaty of Bucharest and the inadequacies of the personal union which it sanctioned. In return the ORC did promise to grant preferential rates in conformity with the encouragement of industry act.
The embarrassments caused by the parallel line had excited more public anger than any issue except Macedonia. Part of that anger was caused by the fact that the government had been forced to borrow relatively large sums of money on the foreign markets to finance a project which came to nothing. And the loans had to be paid for, despite the fact that the government was already in desperate financial straits. Internal revenues had to be increased. Industry and commerce had recently been marked out as recipients rather than providers of government revenue and therefore the burden was to fall upon the land. In November 1899 the government announced that for the years 1900–4 the land tax, which had been introduced in 1894 as part of Stoilov’s modernising programme, would be replaced by a tithe in kind.
This infuriated the peasants. The tax burden on them had almost doubled in the years 1887 to 1897 whilst in the towns, where most of the taxes were spent, the increase had not been as great. Taxation on land had see-sawed between cash and kind and, the peasants suspected with justification, the type levied was that which would yield more revenue for the government; now, just as world wheat prices seemed at last to be moving upwards, the peasant would have less grain to sell. The peasants were in desperate need of cash, many of them having been forced into the hands of the usurer because they could not repay the loans they had taken out to purchase vacant Muslim land. The north-east of the country, with its concentration on grain production, was the most severely hit by the decision to levy the tax in kind, and it was here that the reaction against the new tax regulations was most intense.
There had already been stirrings of new organisations in this area and a number of local activists called a meeting in Pleven in December 1899. From this meeting was to emerge the body which soon became the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) which was the most original and important political body to emerge in post-liberation Bulgaria. Its ideology had not been clearly formulated and as yet its leaders would not allow that it was anything more than a pressure group; it was not, said its leaders, a political party and it had no objectives other than to ‘raise the intellectual and moral standing of the peasant and to improve agriculture in all its branches’. But it could not be anything but a political phenomenon, and within months Stoilov acknowledged that it was the true representative of the peasant and the strongest political force in the land.
Such a powerful body was bound to come into conflict with the established order. In series of clashes between agrarian supporters and the police in the spring of 1900 in the Dobrudja villages of Daran Kulak and Trûstenik a number of peasants were killed. A summer of intense agitation followed and when the second congress of the new organisation met in December there was a much sharper political edge to its proceedings.
Stoilov’s credi
bility had been destroyed by the parallel railway fiasco and the agrarian movement. In December 1900 he resigned. In February 1901 one of Bulgaria’s few genuinely open elections took place. In the new sûbranie were twenty-eight agrarians. The established parties still dominated the assembly and a government was formed with Karavelov, the leader of the Democratic Party, as prime minister. His minister for foreign affairs was Stoyan Danev, the leader of the Progressive Liberals (tsankovists) who were the other main party in the new coalition. One of the first acts of the new administration was to abolish the tithe in kind.
Of the twenty-one agrarian deputies elected in 1901 sixteen soon defected to established parties. This strengthened the growing pressure within the movement for a more open commitment to political activity, and in a congress convened in October 1901 this faction had its way; the title of Bulgarian Agrarian National Union was now adopted. In 1908 BANU polled one hundred thousand votes and took twenty-three seats, the next largest non-government party having forty-six thousand votes and five seats. The growth in agrarian support had two main causes. At the local level the agrarian movement was becoming increasingly associated with the intelligentsia, primarily teachers, priests and agricultural advisors, and also with the burgeoning cooperative movement which was rescuing the peasant from the clutches of the usurer and therefore gaining great respect in the villages. Second, in 1906 Aleksandûr Stamboliiski was appointed editor of the party newspaper, Zemedelsko Zname (Agrarian Standard). He soon became the dominant figure in the movement.
In the party paper Stamboliiski codified agrarian ideas for the first time. The movement’s objective was justice for all in a society devoid of extremes and excesses; this applied especially to landed property, and land was to be taken from those who had too much to be given to those who had too little. Stamboliiski believed that human nature had two aspects, the individual and the social, the former requiring private property and the second developing as society became more complex. This rejected the marxist notion that economic development simplifies social relationships, and marxism was also rejected when Stamboliiski argued that society was divided not into classes based on the ownership of the means of production, but into estates or occupational categories, the most important of which was the agrarian. There was some anti-urbanism in agrarian ideology, and particular scorn and hostility were directed to those whose labour was unproductive: the bureaucracy, the legal profession, the church hierarchy, the monarchy, and the army. Stamboliiski was not overtly republican, that would have invited too much interference from the authorities, but his republicanism was implicit. In foreign affairs he showed little interest in territorial acquisition and looked forward to the solution of Balkan national problems through the creation of a Balkan agrarian federation.
Radical opinion was not confined to the agrarian movement. In 1892 the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party was founded and in 1894 it won four seats at the general election. In 1897 it secured six seats and in 1901 eight, though five of the latter were immediately disqualified. In 1903 the party split. The extremists, known as ‘narrows’, rejected cooperation with the established political parties, called for the subjection of the trade unions to party needs, and demanded the confiscation of all private property including that of the peasant. The moderates, or ‘broads’, were prepared to work with the radical bourgeois parties in the sûbranie, to tolerate some private property, and to open membership of trade unions to all, irrespective of their political affiliations. The party split was replicated in the trade unions and did much to weaken the socialists in the years before the first world war.
The splits in the socialists’ ranks meant that they could not take full advantage of the urban discontent which followed the rise in the cost of living in the 1900s. This discontent was registered in a number of strikes, including those by printers and miners in 1905 and by railwaymen in 1906–7, but industrial action secured few positive gains. There was also action on the streets by students. They rioted in 1905 in support of the revolutionaries in Russia, and in January 1907 they joined with striking railwaymen to pelt Ferdinand with snowballs when he opened the new national theatre in Sofia. The university was then closed and all its academic staff sacked.
The most serious outburst of unrest in the 1900s was not social, however, but ethnic. In 1906 the arrival in Bulgaria of Neophytus, the newly appointed patriarchist bishop of Varna, sparked off a series of anti-Greek riots, the worst of them being in Anhialo (Pomorie). Much of the anger directed at the Greeks had its origins in events in Macedonia.
The Macedonian Crisis and the Declaration of Independence, 1900–1908
The Macedonian problem was nothing if not complex. By 1900 it was dominated by two factors. The first was the international situation. In 1897, after yet another crisis in Crete, the Ottoman empire and Greece had gone to war, and within a few weeks the Greek army had been smashed in the plains of Thessaly. The war had two main results as far as Macedonia was concerned. The first was that it reversed the opinion which had been gaining ground since the Armenian massacres of 1894 that the Ottoman empire was about to dissolve; a crisis in the Balkans was not, after all, inevitable. The Russians sighed with relief and turned their attention to their internal problems and to the Far East, agreeing with Austria-Hungary that the Balkans should be kept ‘on ice’. The second result of the 1897 war was that the Porte now felt that it had little to fear from Greece and, loyal to its traditional practice of dividing its potential opponents, began to favour the patriarchist cause in Macedonia at the expense of the exarchist and Serbian.
The other dominating factor in the Macedonian problem was that two rival Macedonian organisations had appeared. The first had been founded in Macedonia in 1893 and is best known to history by the name it later assumed, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, or IMRO. IMRO’s objective was an autonomous Macedonia to be achieved by a mass uprising; some factions in the organisation hoped that an autonomous Macedonia would then become part of a Balkan, socialist federation. The second organisation was the Supreme Committee established in 1894. It also called for an autonomous Macedonia but wanted this to be the prelude to the incorporation of the area into Bulgaria in much the same way that autonomous Rumelia had joined Bulgaria in 1885. The supremacists had no faith in a mass uprising and planned instead to use cheti which would produce such disorder that the Porte would have to cede autonomy, probably after intervention by the great powers, much in the way they had after 1876; in 1895 one supremacist band captured the town of Melnik and held it for two days.
The activity of the supremacist bands, which was connived at by Ferdinand and his officials, threatened to melt the ice in the Balkans and therefore angered the Russians. Between 1900 and 1902 the Bulgarian government was in negotiations with St Petersburg for financial help. When Danev, who had become prime minister in January 1902, went to the Russian capital in the following month he was told that such help would be forthcoming only on certain very harsh conditions. The Bulgarians were to put an end to the incursions into Macedonia, and they were to agree to the appointment of a Serb to the critical post of administrator of the Skopje diocese. The Bulgarians had no choice but to accept, even though the latter condition was a huge blow to their cause in northern Macedonia. Danev returned to Sofia and took some measures against the Macedonian activists. They were not enough and in October, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the victory in the Shipka Pass, the celebrations of which were attended by a number of prominent Russians, a supremacist band crossed into Macedonia and tried to raise a rebellion in Gorna Djumaya, the present-day Blagoevgrad.
Russian and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy now went into action. A reform scheme for Macedonia was drafted and the Russian foreign minister, Count Lamsdorff, appeared in Belgrade and Sofia to demand once more an end to the incursions. This time the Bulgarian government had to bite the bullet. In February 1903 Danev introduced into the sûbranie a bill dissolving all Macedonian organisations and calling for the arrest of their leaders.
After two days of intense debate the bill was passed. Shortly thereafter Danev resigned and a new administration was formed by the National Liberal Party, the stambolovists, though the premiership went not to the party leader, Dimitûr Petkov, but to the non-party General Racho Petrov who was a close confidant of Prince Ferdinand.
With the dissolution of the organisations inside Bulgaria the focus of the Macedonian question was entirely on Macedonia itself. In January 1903 the central committee of IMRO, meeting in Salonika, had taken a fateful decision: their long-planned mass uprising would be staged in the coming summer. The central committee had been hustled into this decision. The supremacists had not yet been dissolved and the central committee feared further incursions from their bands would frighten the Ottoman forces into a more advanced state of readiness. The central committee also feared that the reform scheme produced by Austria-Hungary and Russia would be implemented and improve the situation in Macedonia to such an extent that there would be no response to calls for a mass uprising. In April the Ottoman forces were put on their guard by a series of anarchist bomb outrages, and in May IMRO suffered a devastating blow when it lost its most able leader, Gotse Delchev, in a chance encounter with a group of Ottoman soldiers.
Despite these setbacks the rising took place as planned on 15 August, St Elijah’s Day, or Ilinden in Slavonic. A few days later, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Preobrazhenie, a rising was staged in the Adrianople province. The Ilinden-Preobrazhenie rising attracted more support than previous attempts to incite the Christians of the Ottoman Europe and administrative centres were established at Krushevo in Macedonia and Strandja in eastern Thrace. But the rebels could not survive without foreign help. And that help could only come from Bulgaria because IMRO was seen as essentially pro-Bulgarian by the Serbs and Greeks. But Bulgaria dared not act alone. To do so would alarm the other Balkan states and would enrage Russia and Austria-Hungary, besides which after the 1897 war no Balkan state was anxious to face the Ottoman armies alone. The rising therefore proceeded to its inevitable, grim conclusion. The embryonic administrations of Krushevo and Strandja were suppressed, and the rebellion’s supporters savagely punished. Many exarchist villages were destroyed, their crops burned, their cattle seized, and their teachers and priests packed off to exile in Asia Minor. Thousands of weary refugees trudged into Bulgaria, some of them going on from there to the New World; those who had remained in Macedonia could often find shelter and sustenance only from patriarchist or Serbian organisations. It was a blow from which the exarchist cause in Macedonia never fully recovered.