A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 16
Another major item of BANU legislation which survived the fall of the regime was the compulsory labour service introduced in June 1920. This required all males between twenty and forty to perform a total of eight months labour, whilst unmarried females between sixteen and thirty were to perform four months. The labour service was usually carried out on public works such as road or school building, and until October 1921 it was impossible to purchase exemption. The compulsory labour service no doubt benefited the nation but it aroused suspicion amongst the allies not least because it was organised along military lines, used military terms for its officials, and originally had a former general as its director.
The BANU government carried out many other reforms. A progressive income tax was introduced. Dwarf-holders who received land were required to consolidate separate strips into one holding before they were allowed to purchase more land from the state land fund. Secondary schooling was made compulsory, its vocational content was increased, and a massive school-building programme produced over eleven hundred new schools. At the same time the teaching profession was purged of communists.
In foreign policy Stamboliiski sustained his pre-war lack of interest in territorial expansion. This pleased the victorious allies, as did the fact that he kept well away from Lenin’s revolutionary regime. After Stamboliiski had toured European capitals in 1920 Bulgaria became the first defeated state to be admitted to the League of Nations.
Also pleasing to the allies was the agrarian leader’s desire for good relations with his western neighbour. The main problem was that posed by the Macedonian organisations. These had become fragmented but one of them, that led from October 1923 by Ivan Mihailov, had established a virtual state within the state at Petrich where the Bulgarian, Greek and Yugoslav borders met. From here the mihailovists launched raids into Greek or Yugoslav Macedonia. There was little Stamboliiski could do to contain these irreconcilables but he did attempt to purge the frontier police of Macedonian sympathisers. In November 1922, when he was at last allowed to visit Belgrade, he used the Yugoslav capital as the venue for a vehement denunciation of the Macedonian extremists, and in March 1923 he signed the Nish convention by which Bulgaria and Yugoslavia agreed to cooperate in the struggle against those extremists; in the following month the Bulgarian government banned all organisations suspected of terrorist activities, suppressed their newspapers, and confined their leaders to internment camps.
Naturally the Macedonians were greatly angered by these measures. Nor were they the only ones dissatisfied with agrarian rule. All sections of the nation suffered from the corruption which, though always a feature of Bulgarian life, reached enormous proportions under the agrarians, especially amongst the petty officials appointed by BANU to administrative posts in the villages. But it was in the urban areas that resentment was most bitterly felt.
The working class could not escape the effects of inflation which by 1923 had reduced the leva to a seventh of its 1919 value; and the tough action taken against the strikers of 1919–20 and other measures to limit communist activities increased resentment. For the more wealthy townspeople the regulations limiting personal and business accommodation were intensely hated. Amongst professionals the lawyers had clear reasons for dissatisfaction but they were not the only ones to bear grudges or harbour fears. Doctors were alarmed by agrarian talk of forcing many of them to work in remote villages. Teachers resented action taken against the communists in their ranks and even more so the rule that all teachers had to be periodically reelected; academics so resented governmental interference with the autonomy of the university that in 1922 they went on strike; even the Academy of Sciences was angry, not least because of the minister of education’s obsessive and eventually unfulfilled desire to reform the alphabet. The church, too, had a number of causes for complaint. The religious content of the school curriculum had been reduced, church property had been subjected to the land redistribution acts, and the holy synod had been moved to Rila, its Sofia headquarters being turned into an agronomy institute. The professional civil servants meanwhile were disturbed by the propensity of the government to bypass official, state channels in favour of BANU party organisations which were becoming a byword for corruption. The Orange Guard, for example, were taking over some of the functions of the police; local BANU organisations, the druzhbi, rather than local government officials were told to draw up the fine details of the land reform scheme; and the druzhbi rather than the village or urban district councils were given the major role in the periodic reelection of teachers.
An extremely important element of the discontented in the towns were the former army officers who had been decommissioned as a result of the treaty of Neuilly. They had lost status as well as their careers and their livelihood. They knew that there had been little Stamboliiski could do to ameliorate the terms of the treaty but they greatly resented his apparently dismissive attitude towards the military profession, and even more so the fact that he did not even maintain the army at the permitted level of 20,000 men. Nor did they like the increasing use of the Orange Guard for state rather than purely party purposes. In 1922 a number of discontented officers formed the Military League. There was another military force in Bulgaria in the early 1920s. Over thirty thousand refugees from the Russian civil war under the command of General Wrangel had entered the country and they brought with them a quantity of heavy weaponry. In May 1922 Stamboliiski dissolved their organisation; amongst the population at large this was a welcome measure but Stamboliiski had created yet another group with cause for resentment.
The old political parties were also fearful and angry. They had established an electoral alliance, the Constitutional Bloc, and some leaders had formed a smaller, closer-knit organisation, the National Alliance. They feared Stamboliiski intended to establish a republic and a one-party state, their fears being greatly fuelled late in 1922 by the forcible disruption of the National Alliance’s plans for a series of rallies culminating in a march on Sofia; Mussolini had ‘marched’ on Rome that October. Their fears increased when Stamboliiski abolished proportional representation and called an election in April 1923. BANU romped home with 212 deputies to the BCP’s 16 and the Constitutional Bloc’s 15.
After the election a conspiracy was formed consisting of some mihailovists from Petrich, the National Alliance, the Military League and even some social democrats. The conspirators informed the king of their intentions and, calculating correctly that the communists would remain inert, acted in the early hours of 9 June 1923. The agrarian regime was dismantled in hours, though it was not until 14 June that Stamboliiski was found and brutally tortured to death by his Macedonian captors. A new government was formed under the premiership of Aleksandûr Tsankov, an academic economist.
The Bulgarian communists had stood idly by in June 1923 but for so doing they were severely criticised by Moscow and told to redeem their honour. This led to an abortive communist uprising in September 1923. The Tsankov government had no difficulty in suppressing it and used it as an excuse to impose further restrictions on individual rights and political liberties.
Within less than four months the two most radical factors in the Bulgarian political arena had been immobilised. In effect the left had been dealt a seemingly crippling blow.
The Rule of the Democratic Alliance, 1923–1931
After seizing power Tsankov fashioned a new grouping, the Democratic Alliance, to provide him with reliable support in the sûbranie. The Democratic Alliance was a coalition of the National Alliance, the Military League, the mihailovists, and a motley collection of factions from the Democratic and Nationalist Parties.
Initially Tsankov’s rule was firm but tinged with attempts at consensus. A defence of the realm act was passed in November 1923 which once again banned terrorism and gave the government powers which it used to influence the elections held that month. The act was also used in April 1924 to ban the BCP, confiscate its property, and dissolve its trade union; using the same legislation the eight BCP depu
ties elected in November 1923 were deprived of their seats in March 1925. Yet at the same time the government repealed very little of agrarian legislation and continued with the programme of land reform enacted by Stamboliiski.
Any pretence at conciliation ended in 1925. On 16 April a bomb planted by the communists exploded in the roof of Sofia’s Sveta Nedelya cathedral during a state funeral due to be attended by the king and the entire political establishment. Amazingly no prominent figure was amongst the one hundred and twenty or so fatalities. The bomb unleashed a ferocious reaction. Martial law was declared and thousands of left-wing activists were detained. Many of the detainees disappeared and there were rumours that some of them had been fed into the furnaces of the Sofia police headquarters. The fate of others was all too clear: they were executed in public.
Violence was not a communist or a government monopoly. In the early 1920s there had been further divisions in the ranks of IMRO with one faction calling for cooperation with the communists. This led to more feuding and consequent assassinations in Sofia and elsewhere. The mihailovists meanwhile retained their hold on the Petrich enclave and continued their guerilla activities in Serbia and Greece. After one raid in October 1925 the Greek army moved into southern Bulgaria; that it withdrew without further complications was one of the League of Nations’ more notable successes.
Despite this help from the League of Nations the internal excesses which Tsankov had allowed were making Bulgaria into a pariah state. The king had already suggested to leading army officers that changes had to be made, but as yet his political standing was weak and his words went unheeded. International bankers were more effective. By 1925 Bulgaria was in desperate need of a loan. In an astute move it asked for one to help finance welfare schemes for the thousands of Macedonian refugees most of whom were still living in abject poverty. The refugees, the government argued, were a fertile recruiting ground for communist or Macedonian extremism, and could only be kept immune from such viruses by an injection of welfare spending, particularly if that spending were directed towards providing them with land of their own. The League of Nations was persuaded but in London where the bulk of the cash would be raised there were doubts. It was made clear that a government headed by Tsankov would never be in receipt of such a loan. In January 1926 therefore he resigned and was succeed by Andrei Lyapchev, the leader of the Democratic Party and himself a Macedonian. The loan was then granted and over 650 village communes used the funds received from it to provide land for Macedonian refugees.
Plate 7.2 Sveta Nedelya cathedral, Sofia, after its bombing by the communists on 16 April 1925.
Lyapchev relaxed many of the restrictions imposed by Tsankov. Trade unions were allowed to function again and in 1927 the communists reformed under the title the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (BWP) and had soon established attendant trade union and youth organisations. The Macedonians were also allowed to continue their often murderous activities.
By 1926 the tsankovist terror was over, the Bulgarian left had been eliminated, and the right had not, outside the ranks of the mihailovists, produced any significant movement. The moderate centre was therefore in control. It did not acquit itself well. The Lyapchev government had no great legislative programme and it fell into a form of aimless drift. This applied to the political scene as a whole. The agrarians, deprived of power and of the leader who had dominated them, splintered to such a degree that it was later said they had fragmented not into wings but feathers. Even the communists, renowned for their cohesion and discipline, showed signs of division. On the right a group around the journal Lûch (Ray) called for cooperation with other parties, a view strongly opposed by the ‘left sectarians’ who seized control of the party in 1929. The old sûbranie parties split even more. In 1926 there were nineteen identifiable factions within the assembly; by 1934 there were twenty-nine. Lyapchev took one step to counter drift in this sector. He introduced an Italian-style bonus system whereby the faction securing most of the votes in an election was awarded an automatic majority in the sûbranie. This system was in place in time for the 1927 elections which the Democratic Alliance won, albeit with a reduced majority.
By the end of the decade and in the early 1930s there were increasing calls for radical action. One such call came from Zveno (Link), an organisation founded in 1930 with a small membership associated with a newspaper of that name. The zvenari were of the intelligentsia and were avowedly élitist. They were also étatist, advocating increased power for a centralised and rationalised administration. They were authoritarian and saw in the political parties the origin of most of the ills besetting the country, believing that the present system encouraged politicians to put party before country. In foreign affairs they wanted better relations with Yugoslavia and were therefore hostile to the Macedonian organisations. They had powerful support from a number of republican-minded army officers and members of the Military League.
The hour of the zvenari had not yet come. When general elections were held in June 1931 the electorate was preoccupied with the intensifying economic crisis triggered by the world depression. It was an open election for which PR was reintroduced. Victory went to the People’s Bloc which took 47 per cent of the vote and 150 seats as opposed to 31 per cent and 78 seats for the Democratic Alliance. The latter was now a broken force and it fell apart, Tsankov shearing away to form his own, avowedly fascist National Social Movement.
The People’s Bloc consisted of factions from the Nationalist, Radical, and National Liberal Parties, together with one group of agrarians, the first time that any BANU faction had been back in office since the coup of 1923. The prime minister of the new government was the leader of the Democratic Party, Aleksandûr Malinov, but in October ill-health forced him to make way for his party colleague, Nikola Mushanov.
Any hopes entertained by the peasantry that the return to government of BANU, albeit only one faction of the party, would bring about an improvement in the peasants’ lot were soon dashed. In part this was because the government had to weather the worst part of the great depression. In the five years from 1929 to 1934 peasant incomes fell by 50 per cent, urban unemployment soared, and even for those lucky enough still to be in work real wages fell by almost a third. The government took a number of steps to cope with the crisis. Debt obligations were reduced by 40 per cent and the repayment periods extended; Hranoiznos, a government grain purchasing agency, was introduced in 1930, and encouragement was given to crop diversification, particularly into higher-price export commodities such as fruit and vegetables. But setting these efforts aside, the People’s Bloc ministers did little to endear themselves to popular opinion. Whilst the peasants were experiencing almost unparalleled hardships the ministers, the agrarians no less than the others, were engaged in a grotesque exercise of self-enrichment accompanied by the most unseemly squabbles over the spoils of office. It was against this background that the communists secured notable successes in the local elections of November 1931 and took control of Sofia city council in February 1932. The government waited a year before dissolving the council. Another beneficiary of the depression was Tsankov’s National Social Movement which began to find an increasing number of adherents, particularly amongst the young of the towns and cities.
Bulgaria also faced difficulties abroad. A series of Balkan conferences in the early 1930s had failed to secure significant moves towards unity in the peninsula because Bulgaria could never accept that existing borders were permanent, a condition upon which the other states insisted if Bulgaria were to be included in any agreement. For this reason Bulgaria was not included when the Balkan entente was signed in Athens in February 1934. The combination of Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Romania had an ominous similarity to the hostile coalition of the second Balkan war. Foreign relations were further complicated by the mihailovists who became even more extreme in their utterances. In June 1933 Mihailov himself called for an attack on the Yugoslav embassy in Sofia which he called a ‘nest of vipers’. In the following month a convent
ion in London included in its definition of an aggressive state the support of or failure to suppress any subversive groups operating on that state’s territory. Under this description Bulgaria could easily be branded an aggressive state and because of its isolation would then be in an extremely vulnerable position.
By the spring of 1934 external and internal tensions were rising. Tsankov had called a large rally for 21 May and confidently expected an audience of over fifty thousand; the rally was to coincide with a private visit to Bulgaria by Hermann Göring. There seemed no-one able or willing to curb the Macedonians or restrain the fascists. The agrarian left was too divided, the communists would be suppressed, the old parties were enfeebled, Zveno talked much but did little; only the army and the king were left.