A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  Hristo Botev was born in Kalofer in 1848, the son of teacher. He received his basic education at home before winning a scholarship to study in Odessa. He, like Karavelov, became influenced by and associated with the populists, and after a brush with the tsarist police returned to Kalofer in 1867. He taught in a number of schools and was profoundly influenced by the Paris Commune. In 1872 he was in Bucharest where he became involved with the Bulgarian revolutionaries. He never attained the same prominence in the organisational structures as Karavelov or Levski, but he was soon widely known and admired for his writing, above all for his poetry. He was to lose his life in the struggle for liberation in 1876. Of the three most notable heirs of Rakovski only Karavelov, who died in the second half of 1878, lived to see an independent Bulgaria.

  The death of Levski was a shattering blow to the revolutionaries in Bucharest. Karavelov and the left-wing Botev could not cooperate and when the BRCC was reconstructed in 1875 Botev was not a member. A new figure in its inner circles was Georgi Benkovski, a brilliant organiser who had been born in Koprivshtitsa in the early 1840s. The Bulgarian lands were now divided into four revolutionary districts based on Tûrnovo, Vratsa, Sliven and Plovdiv.

  In 1875 the Ottoman empire was facing difficulties in Bosnia where a revolt had broken out over changes in the taxation system. In the following year the disorders spread and were soon to lead to war between the empire and Serbia. To the Bulgarian revolutionary conspirators this seemed too good an opportunity to miss. In April 1876 leaders of the fourth revolutionary district met in Oborishte in the woods between Pangiurishte and Koprivshtitsa. After three days of discussion it was agreed that a simultaneous rising should be staged in all four districts; it was to begin in May. However, the Ottoman authorities learned of the preparations and sent an armed unit to Koprivshtitsa. The revolutionaries had decided at Oborishte that were this to happen the revolt would be brought forward and action was taken on 19 April. The April Uprising had begun. The insurgents had few arms and no heavy weapons, though some rudimentary cannons were fashioned from cherry trees.

  Plate 4.6 The greatest of Bulgaria’s national activists and martyrs, Vasil Levski, born in Karlovo in 1837. This photograph is said to have been taken in 1870, three years before his execution in Sofia.

  Plate 4.7 A wooden cannon captured from the Bulgarian insurgents by the Turks, January 1877.

  In terms of its immediate achievements the April Uprising can hardly be judged other than a disastrous shambles. In the Sliven district no more than sixty men rallied to the revolutionaries’ call, whilst in Tûrnovo there was little or no response except in a few monasteries. In the Vratsa district no-one at all joined the uprising. The major action here was when Botev, having hijacked an Austrian steamer on the Danube, landed with his cheta and advanced about twenty kilometres southwards. They were soon surrounded and slaughtered by bashibazouks, or Ottoman irregular detachments, many of whose members were Bulgarian Muslims, and who were being used extensively because the main body of the regular army was deployed against the Serbs.

  If the rising in Sliven, Tûrnovo and Vratsa may be seen as farcical tragedy, in Plovdiv the tragedy was unalloyed. Here Benkovski and his flying column had been active and had persuaded a number of villages to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries. But Benkovski and his men were no match for the local bashibazouks. The latter wreaked a terrible vengeance on villages which had joined the rebels, particularly in Bratsigovo, Perushtitsa, and above all Batak where five thousand Bulgarian Christians, mostly women and children, were said to have been killed, many of them being herded into the local church and burned alive.

  Plate 4.8 A contemporary Russian periodical described this as ‘The peaceful visit of the bashibazouks to a Bulgarian village’.

  The April Uprising was over. It had not dislodged Ottoman power but it had irreversibly changed the nature of that power in Bulgaria. National consciousness which, in the political sense, had been at a low level was immeasurably raised; the moral power of the Porte, such as it was, had been destroyed. Furthermore, the nature of the Bulgarian question had been transformed. European newspapers had relayed the stories of the massacres in graphic detail and opinion had been outraged. In Russia, Britain, and elsewhere there were increasingly loud calls for action to prevent any further outrages. The Bulgarian question had become a European one.

  In December 1876 the ambassadors of the European powers in Constantinople met to discuss a programme of reforms to be introduced into the Ottoman empire. Agreement on the contents of such a programme was not difficult to achieve, but it proved impossible to persuade the sultan to consent to European supervision of its application. In April 1877 Russia declared war on the Ottoman empire.

  Map 4.2 Bulgaria according to the treaties of San Stefano and Berlin.

  Most observers had expected an easy Russian victory but it did not come about. The Ottoman forces dug in in Pleven to the north of the Balkan mountains and could not be dislodged for five months. An advanced detachment of the Russian army under General Gurko did manage to take Tûrnovo and then force its way through the Balkan range only to be repulsed at Stara Zagora by a large Ottoman force recently returned from the war against Serbia. The Russian forces retreated to the Shipka pass where they were subjected to ferocious enemy attacks. The Russian commander was helped by the newly formed Bulgarian militia, the opûlchenie. When Pleven finally surrendered the Russians could advance with ease. In January 1878 Sofia was taken and in the following month a truce was signed at Adrianople. On 3 March a preliminary peace was signed at San Stefano.

  The peace of San Stefano envisaged a vast new Bulgarian state stretching from the Danube in the north to the Rhodopes in the south, and from the Black Sea in the east to the Morava and Vardar valleys in the west; San Stefano Bulgaria included some of the Aegean coast, though not Salonika, and the inland cities of Skopje, Ohrid, Bitola and Seres. In territorial terms this was as much as any Bulgarian nationalist could have hoped for or even dreamed of.

  It was, however, just what the statesmen of Britain and Austria-Hungary had feared. They saw the new Bulgaria as an enormous wedge of potential Russian influence in the Balkans and they demanded that the boundaries be redrawn. The treaty of Berlin of July 1878 satisfied British and Austro-Hungarian demands. San Stefano Bulgaria was dismembered. The Bulgarian principality was to be confined to a small area between the Balkan mountains and the Danube; the region between the Balkan mountains and the Rhodopes, southern Bulgaria, was to form a new autonomous unit of the Ottoman empire to be known as Eastern Rumelia; Macedonia was to return to Ottoman rule with a promise that its administration would be reformed; and the Morava valley in the north-west, including the important towns of Pirot and Vranya, was to go to Serbia.

  The Bulgaria of the treaty of Berlin was 37.5 per cent of the size of the San Stefano variant. For every Bulgarian, however, the real Bulgaria remained that of San Stefano. The new Bulgarian state was to enter into life with a ready-made programme for territorial expansion and a burning sense of the injustice meted out to it by the great powers.

  The peace of San Stefano and the treaty of Berlin differed little in their provisions for the internal structure of the new state. Bulgaria was to be a principality with a Christian prince who was to be elected by the Bulgarians and confirmed by the powers; he was not to be a member of a major ruling European dynasty. Bulgaria was to remain a vassal state of the sultan whose suzerainty it was required to acknowledge. The principality was to be allowed a militia but it was not to construct fortresses; it was to assume all the international obligations previously entered into by the Ottoman empire in terms of foreign debt payments, railway building, tariffs and the protection of foreign citizens through the so-called Capitulations. Before the prince was elected an assembly was to be convened at Tûrnovo to devise a new constitution for the principality.

  Eastern Rumelia was to remain under the direct political and military authority of the sultan, though the latter was not allowed to b
illet bashibazouks in the province, nor was he to quarter passing Ottoman troops on the population. The maintenance of order was to be the responsibility of an Eastern Rumelian gendarmerie whose ethnic composition was to reflect that of the local population and whose officers were to be appointed by the sultan. The senior official in Eastern Rumelia was to be the governor general who was also to be appointed by the sultan, subject to confirmation by the signatory powers; his period of office was to be five years.

  With the signing of the treaty of Berlin, despite its many shortcomings from the Bulgarian point of view, the modern Bulgarian state had been born. Unlike the Bulgarian church it was the creation more of external than internal forces.

  5 The consolidation of the Bulgarian State, 1878–1896

  The Constituent Assembly and the Tûrnovo Constitution

  The assembly which was to devise Bulgaria’s political system met in Tûrnovo in late February 1879. It contained a mixture of elected and nominated deputies, the latter including representatives of the Turkish, Greek and Jewish minorities.

  The assembly also contained deputies from Bulgarian lands outside the new principality. This indicated that the great passion over borders had not subsided. Indeed, there had been attempts to rekindle the struggle in Macedonia. Activists in Bulgaria staged a rising in the Kresna-Razlog region of eastern Macedonia, but it was not well coordinated and was suppressed with ease. The territorial question, however, was still the first preoccupation of the delegates when they assembled in the mediaeval capital, and a vocal faction amongst them urged that they disperse and the assembly be disbanded; better, they argued, unity under Ottoman authority than a division of the nation between the free and the enslaved. Others supported this argument with suggestions that Bulgaria should seek a compromise similar to that granted to the Hungarians in 1867. A more moderate view urged that the Tûrnovo assembly be postponed rather than dissolved, and that the breathing space be used to draw up a petition which a delegation should then take around the European capitals. The Russians were embarrassed by all this. They feared that any postponement of the assembly might lead to international complications which, in their enfeebled post-war condition, they could not afford. The Bulgarians were told that it was not in the assembly’s power to communicate directly with the governments of the great powers, though there was no reason why private messages should not be sent to the powers’ consuls in Tûrnovo.

  Map 5.1 Bulgaria, 1878–1912.

  Such messages were sent after the constituent assembly had debated the issue of national unity. That debate took up the first week of the assembly’s deliberation and focused upon a report drawn up by a special commission appointed by the delegates to study the national question. The report favoured the moderate faction which had argued that the disbandment of the assembly would only anger the powers and make matters worse. The week-long debate was intense but the report’s recommendations were finally approved. The highpoint of the proceedings had been a speech from the Exarch Antim who quoted Jeremiah chapter 31, verses 16 and 17:

  Thus saith the Lord; refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, said the Lord; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy.

  And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, thy children shall come again into their own border.

  Before the constituent assembly convened, Sofia had been chosen as the capital of the new principality. Although small, Sofia had two advantages: it was at the crossroads of the north-east to south-west and north-west to south-east routes across the Balkans, and it offered easy access to the coveted lost lands of Macedonia and the Morava valley.

  With the territorial issue decided early in March the constituent assembly began work on defining the principality’s political system. The draft constitution was presented by Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, the head of the Russian Provisional Administration which had governed Bulgaria since the war. His draft was amended by a commission elected by the assembly which presented its recommendations early in April. Two tendencies immediately became apparent. Those later to be grouped under the label ‘conservative’ argued for a system which placed real power in the hands of the small number of wealthy Bulgarians. The peasant masses who made up 90 per cent or more of the population, the conservatives argued, were too immature to be entrusted with real power; after five centuries of Ottoman domination they were too suspicious of the state as an institution and would too easily treat their new one as they had their old. This was anathema to the other group, the ‘liberals’. They believed the peasants and the village councils were the repositories of national political wisdom; they rejected outright the paternalism of the conservatives and stressed that the equal distribution of political power throughout the nation was a natural consequence of its basic social homogeneity.

  These opposing attitudes were fully developed during the debate on the nature of Bulgaria’s parliamentary system. The conservatives wanted a second chamber to reinforce the power of the wealthy minority; a senate, they said, would check the enthusiasms of the lower chamber. The liberals saw no need for a second chamber. It would be needlessly divisive and it would be a dangerous dilution of natural, healthy, peasant democracy.

  Although the two hundred and thirty or so delegates included only twelve from the villages so beloved of the liberals, liberal views enjoyed massive support in the assembly. The second chamber was rejected. The single-chamber parliament (sûbranie) was, however, to have two variants. Copying the example of the Serbian constitution, there was to be an ordinary and a Grand National Assembly. The ordinary assembly was to meet every year in October, after the harvest had been taken in, was to sit for two months, and was to be elected for a three-year period. The Grand National Assembly (GNA) was to have twice as many elected deputies together with prominent members of the church, the judiciary and local government. The GNA was to be called to elect regents, choose the head of state, to sanction changes in the state’s boundaries, or to change the constitution, a two-thirds majority being necessary in the latter case.

  All sane male citizens over twenty-one were allowed to vote for both assemblies, and all literate males over thirty were eligible for election. The obligations of each citizen were to obey the law, to pay taxes, to send all children to school for at least five years, and to send all healthy males to the army for two years.

  Executive power was to lie with the prince but was to be exercised via a council of ministers or cabinet chosen from the assembly. The prince could appoint and dismiss ministers; he nominated the chairman of the council of ministers, or prime minister, and he could prorogue the assembly.

  An important section of the constitution dealt with the church. The general convention in the Orthodox church is ‘One Church, One State’, but if that were now applied the exarch would have to leave Constantinople and settle in the principality. Were he to do that he would lost contact with the members of the exarchate in Macedonia, Thrace, the Morava valley and even Eastern Rumelia. This would be an immense blow for the Bulgarian nation, one equal to that inflicted by the tearing up of the San Stefano treaty, because in 1878 members of the exarchate living outside the confines of the principality outnumbered those within it. The Tûrnovo constitution therefore decided that the church in the principality was to be an inseparable part of the Bulgarian exarchate, and that the highest body of the Bulgarian church, the holy synod, was to have its seat in Sofia. The exarch, however, was to remain in Constantinople.

  The constitution also decided that the prince must confess the Orthodox faith, only the first prince being exempt from this ruling. That first prince, the assembly decided, was to be Alexander of Battenberg, a candidate whom all the great powers found acceptable. Alexander arrived in Bulgaria early in July 1879.

  Constitutional Conflicts, 1879–1883

  Alexander had much to commend him to the Bulgarians. He was young, he was handsome and above all he had served with the tsar’s forces in the war of 1877–8. Unfortunately, h
is paternalist instincts made it almost impossible for him to work with the liberals who dominated Bulgarian politics, and who had now organised themselves into the Liberal Party. The liberals won the first elections held in September 1879 and the second which took place early in 1880 after Alexander had dissolved the first sûbranie. Constitutional issues arising from this contest between the executive and legislature were to dominate Bulgarian politics for the first five years of the new state’s existence.