A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 17
On 19 May 1934 the army stepped into the breach. Taking advantage of yet another dispute amongst ministers as to who should have which cabinet office, pro-Zveno officers with strong connections to the Military League seized power. The coup was orchestrated by Colonel Damyan Velchev, but he chose not to become prime minister, this position being taken by his co-conspirator, Colonel Kimon Georgiev.
The Rule of the Devetnaiseti, May 1934–January 1935
The devetnaiseti (the ‘19thers’), as Velchev’s group became known, ruled for only a short period but with considerable vigour and much in conformity with the ideas of Zveno.
They suspended civil rights and set up the directorate for social renewal which was given great influence over the press and other publications, over the arts, and in the organisation of youth activities; its objective was ‘to direct the cultural and intellectual life of the nation towards unity and renewal’. One way in which unity was to be fostered was by changing Turkish topographical names to Bulgarian ones, and more such name changes took place under the devetnaiseti than at any other point in pre-war Bulgaria. Party political divisions were to disappear and the parties themselves were dissolved. So too were most existing trade unions, and in those that remained all officials had to be approved by the central government authorities. Plans to establish one large union, the Bulgarian Workers’ Union, were drawn up and were implemented by the successor government. Although the Bulgarian Workers’ Union was technically a voluntary organisation, by 1936 120,000 out of a total of 145,000 industrial workers had joined it. Membership was not by occupational category but by estate; the devetnaiseti, copying the Italian fascists, had divided society into seven estates: workers, peasants, craftsmen, merchants, intelligentsia, civil servants and members of the free professions. The estates were also to provide the basis for the election of three-quarters of the members of the new sûbranie, the existing one having been dissolved.
Rationalisation and centralisation, much championed by Zveno, were also very much a feature of the devetnaisetis’ programme. In the central administration the number of ministries was decreased, as was the number of civil servants. Nearly a third of the latter lost their jobs, many of them being replaced by others of a more dependable political disposition. The banks were also rationalised and centralised in a series of reforms which included the amalgamation of nineteen commercial banks into the Bulgarian Credit Bank, one purpose of this reform being to establish greater central control over provincial banks.
Central control over local government was increased to a degree unparalleled since the liberation of 1878. The sixteen existing regions were reformed into seven provinces and the 2,600 village communes made into 837 units. Elected mayors were replaced by centrally appointed figures all of whom had to have either a legal training or a civil service rank equal to that of officer status in the army. The new local councils were to be half appointed and half elected, with the franchise for the latter being based on the seven social estates.
Since the fall of Stamboliiski Bulgarian foreign policy makers had tended to regard Italy as the great power most likely to provide the patronage a small state such as Bulgaria needed. The devetnaiseti wished to break away from this association. In July 1934 they recognised the Soviet Union, but their main hope was for an understanding with Yugoslavia. This would relax Balkan tensions and would make it easier to improve relations with Britain and France. The main obstacle to better relations with Belgrade was, of course, the mihailovist enclave in Petrich. The devetnaiseti took resolute action. They moved in the army. In what proved to be a surprisingly easy and immensely popular operation the mihailovists were dispersed. They did not disappear but they were no longer the formidable force they had been since the early 1920s. Furthermore, the feuding between various Macedonian factions which had taken over eight hundred lives in the decade before 1934 greatly subsided.
The devetnaiseti had proved effective conspirators and energetic rulers, but they were not expert politicians. There were divisions within Zveno on the advisability of creating a mass party organisation to sustain the government, one faction fearing that to do so would give new life to the party system. More importantly, there had been no decision as to what to do about the king, an issue on which both Zveno and the Military League were divided. Velchev was generally acknowledged to be in the republican camp and when rumours began to circulate that he was about to promulgate a new constitution it was assumed that this would greatly reduce royal powers.
Velchev and Georgiev, being preoccupied with the government’s full programme of reforms, did not have time to guard their political backs. They were therefore relatively easy prey to a plot by their royalist opponents who in January 1935 manoeuvred them out of office and made General Pencho Zlatev prime minister. By April of the same year the royalists had removed Zlatev and installed a civilian, Andrei Toshev, in the prime ministerial chair.
The Personal Rule of King Boris, 1934–1941
The king had been angered by the officers’ intervention in the political arena in 1934 and he was determined that they should not dominate the country. But if he were to establish his own supremacy he had to find a means to build bridges with the nation and he had to secure himself against further action by the military.
When appointing Toshev in April 1935 Boris had issued a declaration promising to return the country to an ‘orderly and peaceful life’. He also stated that there was to be no turning back and although the directorate for social renewal was to be abolished most of the reforms introduced since May 1934 were to remain. Toshev’s task was now to contain the military, to work out a new constitution, and to construct a new popular movement. He made no progress on any of these fronts, and he resigned in November after it was discovered that Velchev had slipped back into the country with the intention, it was presumed, of conspiring against the king. Toshev’s successor was Georgi Kioseivanov, a diplomat very much open to influence from his royal master.
The Velchev conspiracy made the containment of the military easier. Velchev himself was tried and sentenced to death in February 1936, his life being spared by that royal prerogative which he had wanted to abolish. The following month Boris used the revelations of the Velchev trial to justify his dissolution of the Military League. Immediately afterwards he toured the country’s most important garrisons in an attempt to bolster his image amongst the office corps.
In the declaration of 1935 Boris had promised a return to constitutional government but under a new constitution which would correspond to ‘the present complications and to the requirements of the times’. Amongst these complications were, it was believed, a potential threat from the left. The communists had been encouraged in 1931 and 1932 by their successes in local elections, and then in 1933 when their leader in exile, Georgi Dimitrov, had made a fool of Göring in the Reichstag Fire trial in Leipzig. In 1935 the Comintern had switched its strategy to the Popular Front making the communists more ready to cooperate with other parties. In 1936 there were enthusiastic celebrations of May Day, and the communists boasted that they had cells in every garrison in the country. Credibility was given to this chilling statement when army officers in Plovdiv showed support for the traditionally communist tobacco workers who had gone on strike. Meanwhile, after the January 1936 elections in Greece the small communist group held the balance of power in the Athens parliament. Nor had the fear of the right entirely disappeared. Tsankov’s National Social Movement had not been classified as a political party and had therefore survived the ban on such bodies. At its 1936 congress it changed its statutes to make it more of a fascist organisation, and its public support seemed to grow with every fresh triumph Hitler recorded. The Nazis, like most Bulgarians, wanted to revise the peace settlement of 1919.
The old parties, though proscribed, continued to lead a shadowy existence and in May 1936 a number of them formed the ‘Petorka’, or group of five, to demand a return to the Tûrnovo constitution. Later this regrouped as the People’s Constitutional
Bloc which included some members of the Democrat Party, a radical agrarian faction and the communists.
Plate 7.3 Boris III, King of the Bulgarians, 1918–43, with Princess Maria Louise, Crown Prince Simeon and Queen Giovanna.
By the beginning of 1936, sensing these and other dangers, Boris was in no hurry to rush into constitutional reform. He did not want to return to the old system and did not feel he could work with the older generation of politicians. He decided that there should be a slow return to ‘a tidy and disciplined democracy imbued with the idea of social solidarity’, that the constitution should be amended gradually, and that any changes introduced should be tested in local elections before a new sûbranie, due in 1937, was convened. Local elections were accordingly held in January 1937 after a number of changes had been decreed. Before voting all electors were to sign a statement attesting that they were not communists; voting was to be spread over three Sundays to enable the police to concentrate units where they were thought most needed; married women and widows were able to vote for the first time if they wished, though voting for males was to be compulsory; and rural voters were required to have primary and the urban electorate secondary education. The local elections went off to the government’s satisfaction but it was not to be until March 1938 that a general election was held. Before then further changes had reduced the size of the sûbranie to 160 deputies and proportional representation had been abandoned in favour of carefully constructed single-member constituencies. Despite these measures the People’s Constitutional Bloc still managed to win over sixty seats, though five communists and six agrarians were soon expelled from the assembly. That assembly, however, was never entirely pliable and at the end of 1939 Kioseivanov dissolved it, holding fresh elections spread over December 1939 and January 1940. Before the poll yet more restrictions were imposed on the opposition, particularly with regard to their freedom of movement during the short campaign, and the government vote rose accordingly. But having secured this majority Kioseivanov was sacked and replaced by Bogdan Filov.
Filov was an avowed pro-German and his appointment reflected the fact that in Bulgaria, as elsewhere in Europe, the overriding political problems were now in foreign rather than domestic affairs.
After the fall of Stamboliiski the strategy of Bulgarian foreign policy had been to redress Neuilly through ‘peaceful revisionism’ via the League of Nations with Italy as its patron within that body, the first objective being the implementation of article 48 giving Bulgaria economic access to the Aegean. The relationship to Italy had been symbolised by the marriage of Boris to an Italian princess in 1930, but in other respects reliance on Italy had not produced results. In the early 1930s Italy began to move away from Bulgaria whilst the League of Nations declined in effectiveness, particularly after the Nazis took power in Germany. By then Bulgarian policy makers were looking towards Yugoslavia as a means of avoiding isolation but with little hope of real success as long as the Macedonian enclave in Petrich continued to operate. That problem had been resolved by the devetnaiseti and Boris and his advisors were anxious to maintain the momentum towards better relations with their western neighbour. In 1936, as a gesture of goodwill to Belgrade, Kioseivanov banned all demonstrations calling for the dismantling of the treaty of Neuilly, and in January 1937 Bulgaria received its reward when a pact of friendship with Yugoslavia was signed. This was of little more than symbolic significance but it did procure Yugoslav diplomatic backing and in July 1938 the Salonika agreements allowed Greece to remilitarise Thrace and Bulgaria to disregard the arms limitation clauses of the treaty of Neuilly, which in fact the Sofia government had been doing for some time.
By 1938 all European diplomacy was dominated by the German resurgence. The Munich settlement in September and the Vienna award which followed it in November, by virtually destroying Czechoslovakia, ruined the little entente upon which Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania had relied for their security; both Yugoslavia and Romania now became more conciliatory towards Bulgaria. But Munich had another effect. After the Vienna award Bulgaria was the only power defeated in 1918 not to have received back some of its lost territory. It was a point frequently made by the more vociferous of Bulgarian nationalists and especially by those amongst them who championed a pro-German foreign policy.
Boris would not listen to them, fearing that Germany might plunge Europe once more into war. Boris believed Bulgaria’s best interests were served by peace or, failing that, neutrality without commitment to any great power; he once despairingly remarked, ‘My army is pro-German, my wife is Italian, my people are pro-Russian. I alone am pro-Bulgarian.’
When war did come in September 1939 he immediately declared Bulgaria’s neutrality. And for months he remained deaf even to the most alluring of siren calls. In October 1939 the Soviets approached him with the suggestion of a Soviet–Bulgarian mutual assistance pact and Soviet support for Bulgarian claims in the Dobrudja, but Boris refused. He did so again, this time to the Balkan entente powers when they offered Bulgaria membership in February 1940, Boris calculating that this would commit Bulgaria too much to the allied side.
Yet the pro-axis pressures were mounting, not least because the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 meant that friendship with Germany would not mean offending Russia and therefore disturbing the majority of peasants who still revered the liberating power of 1877–8. Early in 1940 Bulgaria concluded a commercial treaty with Moscow which allowed the import of Soviet books, newspapers, and films, and in August of the same year the first visit for many years of a Soviet football team occasioned widespread popular pleasure.
In September 1940 Nazi–Soviet cooperation brought the Bulgarians their first territorial revision. After the Nazi conquest of Scandinavia and France Stalin demanded compensation in the east. This was made at the expense of Romania which was so much weakened that it also lost northern Transylvania to Hungary and in the treaty of Craiova signed on 7 September 1940, was forced to return the southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria.
Whilst these benefits were being reaped a number of internal changes appeared to bring Bulgaria closer to Germany, on which it was already heavily reliant for manufactured goods, including armaments. A youth organisation, Brannik (Defender) was established to instil discipline and patriotic sentiments; one of Bulgaria’s very few outspoken anti-semites, Petûr Gabrovski, was made minister of the interior in February 1940; and in the summer the masonic lodges, to which most Bulgarian politicians belonged, were dissolved. In October the defence of the nation act consolidated these measures and others which had been taken against the communists. It also extended anti-semitic legislation enacted earlier in the year. At the same time steps were taken to increase Bulgaria’s war-readiness. In May the compulsory labour service was placed under military control; a directorate of civilian mobilisation was set up which had the right to regulate manufacturing in time of war; and, again in the event of war, the ministry of agriculture was given much greater powers to requisition food and control prices.
Bulgaria had been placed on a potential war footing, but it was not yet known if it would go to war and, if so, on which side. After the fall of France and the treaty of Craiova, however, pressures from Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union outweighed those from the west. In October Mussolini offered Boris access to the Aegean if Bulgaria would join in the forthcoming Italian assault on Greece. Boris refused. In the following month another offer of a mutual assistance pact came from Moscow. This time the deal was for Bulgaria to take Thrace and the USSR the Dardanelles; the Soviets were also to have use of Bulgarian naval bases on the Black Sea. Boris knew that the Soviets had used different language in Berlin when talking of this deal, nominating Bulgaria as ‘a Soviet security zone’. The Baltic states had been described in those terms shortly before they were incorporated into Stalin’s empire a few months earlier.
The situation changed early in December when for the first time Hitler had a pressing reason for direct help from Bulgaria. Mussolini’s attack on Greece had not p
rospered and Hitler, fearing an allied landing in the Peloponnese, had decided to occupy Greece, whence he could also harry British supply lines through the Mediterranean. His troops would need the right of passage through Bulgaria. On 8 December 1940 some forty German staff officers arrived in Sofia for secret discussions. Thereafter an increasing number of German tourists entered Bulgaria; they were all male, they all had short hair and shiny boots, and it was not the tourist season. The Americans made a last effort to persuade Boris that in the long run Britain, with the moral and material backing of the USA, was bound to win the war, but it was to no avail. In February Bulgaria consented to the construction of a pontoon bridge across the Danube and on 2 March agreed to allow German forces to cross Bulgaria en route to Greece. The day before Filov had travelled to Vienna to sign the agreement by which Bulgaria became a member of the German–Italian–Japanese tripartite pact.
Bulgaria was in effect now a member of the German alliance and the British minister left Sofia. Not until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, did Bulgaria declare what it chose to describe as ‘symbolic’ war on Britain and the United States. Immediately after the sûbranie ratified this declaration the king disappeared. He was found hours later deep in prayer in a remote and dark corner of Sofia’s Aleksandûr Nevski cathedral.
Bulgaria and the Second World War, 1941–1944
The Germans attacked Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. By the end of that month the Balkans had been partitioned between the axis powers, and Bulgaria’s share was the western territories lost in 1918, western Thrace including the islands of Samothrace and Thassos, and Serbian Macedonia except for an undefined strip in the west under Italian rule. The Germans retained control of Salonika and Bulgaria was not given full ownership of its new territory lest it pocket its gains and leave the axis. The Bulgarians, however, saw this as the reunification of their nation, and if liking for the Germans was far from universal, British attempts to incite the Bulgarians to revolt against them met with no response whatever.