Author: Hristo Hristov

This book is result of an extensive documental research of the investigative journalist Hristo Hristov conducted with the financial support of Free and Democratic Bulgaria Foundation, headed by Dimi Panitza.

ISBN: 978-954-28-0586-1

Summary

Twenty years after Todor Zhivkov stepped down from power, investigative journalist and writer Hristo Hristov offers the most detailed biography to date of the former general secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) who ruled Bulgaria for 35 years. The author believes that two decades after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe provide enough distance to find the true character of the man who personifies most of the communist era in Bulgaria. Indeed, Bulgarian communism can hardly be understood without knowledge of Todor Zhivkov and his regime (1954-1989).

Unlike the majority of studies on Zhivkov, this study traces Zhivkov’s origins and path from his native village, Pravets, to the capital city of Sofia where he graduated at the school of printing at the State Printing House and, later, found a job at the latter. These are important years in his biography as they show that he was not the prominent communist party functionary that communist propaganda made him out to be after he took power. The author reveals facts which confirm that in 1934 Zhivkov was removed from office in the party and isolated from the BCP chapter in Sofia on suspicion of being an agent provocateur. Thus, up until 1943, when he was reappointed to the BCP’s Sofia District Committee, he did not engage in active political activity but followed his wife, Dr Mara Maleeva, to several villages in the country, where she worked as a doctor.

It has been established that in the year before 9 September 1944, when the BCP seized power in Bulgaria with the help of the Soviet Army, Zhivkov did not play the key role in the activity of the Partisan movement and, more specifically, of the Chavdar Partisan Unit, that was ascribed to him during communism. His role in the 9 September 1944 coup was also grossly exaggerated. The archival evidence and personal accounts show that Todor Zhivkov was one of the chiefs of the operative headquarters of the newly formed People’s Militia (the police). The headquarters was tasked with arresting members of the previous regime and police, an effort that escalated into mob law and liquidation of particular figures. In this connection, Zhivkov personally defended before Traycho Kostov, the leader of the party at the time, his subordinate Mircho Spasov, one of the most sinister figures in the BCP who became notorious as the perpetrator of the majority of unlawful killings. Later, immediately after the April 1956 Plenum at which Zhivkov was confirmed as First Secretary of the BCP, he recruited Spasov to the Ministry of Interior, appointing him deputy interior minister and making him one of his most trusted men in the DS (for Darzhavna Sigurnost or State Security, the Bulgarian secret service).

Todor Zhivkov was not handed power on a silver platter; in the years after 9 September 1944, he had to fight hard for his rapid rise to the BCP’s highest governing bodies – the Central Committee and the Politburo. He did this in the most Stalinist period in Bulgaria’s development as a protégé of Valko Chervenkov, one of the BCP functionaries closest to Moscow and an NKVD agent. By the beginning of the 50s, Zhivkov had become Chervenkov’s second-in-command, actively participating and supporting the purges in the party and the crackdown on the so-called “enemies within” not just in politics but also in culture. Even though he supported and practiced Stalin’s policy, after Stalin’s personality cult was denounced by the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, Zhivkov demonstrated enviable ingenuity and pragmatism, becoming the first member of the BCP leadership to adjust to the new direction of the winds blowing from the Kremlin. Thanks to these qualities of his and his successful moves to win over important allies within the party, he succeeded in convincing Moscow that he was the right man to fight against the personality cult in Bulgaria and became leader of the party with Khrushchev’s blessing.

Hristo Hristov explains in detail the two keys to Zhivkov’s political longevity – the attitude of his masters in Moscow and the total subordination of the DS to his own power interests, through which he kept tight control over society, the party and its leadership. A separate chapter is devoted to his policies and methods of winning the favour of the three Soviet leaders who were crucial to his rule – Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Special attention is also given to Zhivkov’s influence over the Ministry of Interior. One of the distinctive features of his autocratic regime is that during his 35-year-long rule no one else, not even the prime minister and the Council of Ministers, was allowed to interfere in the work of the Ministry of Interior and the DS. The interior ministers reported only and solely to Zhivkov.

The book reveals for the first time the secret mechanism through which Zhivkov bought the political loyalty of the top-level party and state apparat and created а vast system of privileges at drastic variance with the propagandized socialist morality. The arm he tacitly used to achieve this was the omnipotent UBO – the Security and Protection Directorate of the DS. The UBO, too, reported directly to the General Secretary of the BCP, who turned it into a sort of Praetorian Guard. In addition to its core duty of providing him with round-the-clock physical protection, the directorate catered for all day-to-day needs of the communist elite, to which people were admitted only with the blessing of Zhivkov himself. On the directions of the General Secretary, the chief of the UBO had the responsible task of distributing among members of the superior political caste hand-picked by Zhivkov the so-called “unaccountable expense fund” – huge amounts of money by the standards of the day, generated from smuggling and arms trafficking. Every year from 1968 onwards, these amounts were handed in cash unwitnessed against a signed acknowledgment of receipt, and they were exempt from taxes and party membership dues.

The book traces the creation and operation of Zhivkov’s office, through which he ran the country. Former political aides describe the General Secretary and his manner of work over the years, and the change in his behaviour. Documented facts are also provided about the way his staff wrote his reports and speeches. They were published in 39 volumes under the name of Zhivkov, who was paid authorship royalties for them at an expressly increased rate, amounting to 1.8 million leva between 1975 and 1989 alone. Also detailed is Zhivkov’s wrongful practice of distributing several hundred apartments and other housing units among selected party apparatchiks, cultural figures, people of the arts and athletes by setting up an out-of-law housing stock.

The author devotes special attention to Zhivkov’s economic policy, which thrice drove Bulgaria to bankruptcy – in 1960, 1977 and 1989. Top party officials as well as economic and bank managers from the communist era offer first-hand accounts of how he made single-handed decisions in the economic sphere which led to serious mistakes, and tell about his “big-is-beautiful” leanings. This policy had dire consequences in two main sectors, heavy mechanical engineering and agriculture. The author also examines the mechanisms that show Zhivkov’s attitude towards the accumulation of Bulgaria’s foreign and domestic debt, as well as the mechanisms of managing the so-called “hard currency reserve,” which was at his uncontrolled personal disposal. Former governors of the Bulgarian National Bank and economists attest to his refusal to carry out genuine economic reforms. This refusal resulted from the demagogy through which he built the biggest illusion of his regime – that life in his time was good and cheap. Zhivkov’s economic legacy was disastrous – an economy and market chained to the Soviet Union, a foreign debt of almost 11 billion US dollars, and a domestic debt of 26 billion leva.

In the context of his autocratic regime, a specific trait of Zhivkov is also highlighted – an inclination to methodically remove party and state officials whom he saw as a threat to his post or who had unwittingly failed to comply with his opinion.

Also examined is his disastrous interference in the sphere of culture and the arts, where his policy had dire consequences.

A separate chapter discusses some crimes characteristic of Zhivkov’s regime. These are the establishment of the forced labour camps at Lovech and Skravena (1959-1962); the assassinations of Bulgarian political emigrants who were critical of his policy, such as writer Georgi Markov in London (1978); the unlawful provision of more than 22 million leva to the Soviet Union to finance a special fund, codenamed “Moscow”, supporting various revolutionary movements worldwide; the attempt to turn Bulgaria into the sixteenth Soviet republic; international terrorism, as the case of Pope John Paul II and Carlos the Jackal; state-sponsored smuggling of goods, arms and banned medicinal preparations; the forced name-change of Bulgarian Turks, known as the “Revival Process”.

The book portrays not just the politician and statesman, but also the character and personality of Todor Zhivkov. It traces the changes caused by the death of his wife Mara Maleeva in 1971 and of his daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova in 1981. The subsequent break-up of his family made Zhivkov an ever more lonely person who trusted no one but his loyal nurse Anka Mladenova. Power gave Zhivkov political longevity but deprived him of normal human relationships, which were replaced by his hunting party and ever growing trust in his personal bodyguards who watched over him around the clock. He became increasingly paranoid after an attempted coup in 1965 crushed by the DS, while his fears of assassination grew after an incident in Vratsa in 1980, when a young man pushed him and he fell to the ground. He was just as lonely, mistrustful, far from his family, focused only on consolidating and keeping his power, in November 1989, when he understood that the Kremlin had decided that he was to be replaced. By an irony of fate, the inevitable resignation which follows in such cases took place on 9 November, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that became a symbol of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

The book closes with Zhivkov’s confessions (he never admitted in public his blame or a responsibility for the failures) about his mistakes and his responsibility for the dire economic straits in which he left Bulgaria. These confessions were made to prosecutors in 1990 and, thanks to the author, they have been made public and will go down in history.

Hristo Hristov uses a very wide range of sources for his documentary investigation. Unlike all other researchers, he has the advantage of being the only one in Bulgaria to have worked with a number of court case records inaccessible to the rest of the authors. In this particular case, these are records directly related to Todor Zhikvov and his 35-year-long rule: Case No. 1 of 1990, in which Todor Zhivkov was indicted for corruption and abuse of power (in 1993 he was sentenced by the Supreme Court to seven years’ imprisonment but the sentence was subsequently reversed as he benefited from the more favourable law – the new Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria, adopted in 1991, according to which the Head of State can be held liable only for high treason); Case No. 3 of 1990, in connection with the crimes in the last forced labour camp of communism in Bulgaria, the one at Lovech; as well as Case No. 4 of 1990, investigating the economic catastrophe left by the BCP regime. The author also uses a series of hitherto unresearched state archive collections, including those of the Council of Ministers and Ministry of Interior, police archives from before 9 September 1944, as well as archives of the BCP’s repressive arm, the DS.

The book was initiated and published with the support of the Free and Democratic Bulgaria Foundation, as represented by its founder John Dimitry Panitza and Executive Director Lenko Lenkov. The project became possible after the publication of Hristo Hristov’s book Ubiyte Skitnik (Kill the Wanderer) in 2005 – dealing with Bulgarian and British state policies with regard to the Georgi Markov case – which proved that an in-depth and objective study of a series of hitherto unresearched archives can reconstruct the true picture of important past events that have remained hidden in history.

The scope of the book tracing Todor Zhivkov’s path to the top of the party and the State as well as the effects of power on his personality and the collapse of his regime, make it a valuable document about the era of communism in Bulgaria.