With the support of characters like Zhivkov and the Soviet advisers, the Bulgarian Fatherland Front carried out a coup early on September 9. As per Stalin’s advice, the government had only three or four Communists—to be sure, they were given the key ministries of the interior and justice. They cleansed the administrative system, police, army, mayors, and so on of all “antinational elements.” Local Communists set out to settle scores, and one study estimates that they killed 3,000 to 4,000 people.4 Recently, however, two historians put the death toll far higher. Marietta Stankova suggests it was “not less than 20,000,” while Ekaterina Nikova maintains that between 25,000 to 30,000 “were killed or disappeared” during the first ten days of the takeover.5
The scale of the bloodshed was staggering and somewhat out of character in Bulgaria, with its generally easygoing political culture. When Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg visited after the war, he was struck by how civilized, reserved, and educated the people were. There was no milk, however, and one look at the children told him they were in poor condition.6 Bulgaria had a tradition of religious toleration, so that along with the Christian Eastern Orthodox, it had significant Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish minorities among its prewar population of 6.6 million. Into the Second World War, it was ruled by a generally benevolent King Boris, notwithstanding the fact that it had a fascist government and became one of Hitler’s allies. Yet it would not declare war on the Soviet Union and thus afterward was spared the kind of damage inflicted on its neighbors.
The last thing Stalin wanted there was a full-scale revolution, which might unleash a civil war. His preference was for a stable country, willing and able to marshal its army in the war still raging to the west. On September 11 and 24, Dimitrov sent long telegrams to the Communist Party’s Central Committee in Sofia, telling them in no uncertain terms to work with their partners in the Fatherland Front. They were instructed to avoid any appearance of introducing Communism, for a mere hint of such a thing would be used by enemies. Moreover there had to be “regular people’s courts, not lynch justice.” As he put it, “We must speak and act not as run-of-the-mill and irresponsible provincial agitators, but as befits sober, real Bolshevik politicians and statesmen.”7
In October, Soviet officials reinforced the point about adopting “legal means,” and a new people’s court began. Between November 1944 and April 1945, no fewer than 11,122 defendants were tried, and 2,730 were sentenced to death; 1,516 of the latter were executed. The verdicts of the major personages were announced only after checking with Dimitrov.8 Between 1944 and 1962, tens of thousands were sent to one of the country’s eighty-eight concentration camps.9
These actions blighted the reputation of Communism. Still, the party grew rapidly, for already in January 1945 it had 250,000 members, with a youth wing of 400,000. The whole country was mobilized, and Bulgaria had more activists, as a percentage of the population, than Poland or even Czechoslovakia.10
Communist leaders were summoned to Moscow for consultations with Stalin in early 1945 and, along with visiting Yugoslavs, met at his country dacha. He told them in so many words that the Soviet Union’s alliance with the capitalists was a temporary expedient. For now, they should be cautious and maintain some “ideological flexibility.”11
Local radicals did not agree with the “moderate” approach advocated by émigrés in Moscow. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services reported that the zealots were impatient and would try to make their country either into an independent Soviet republic or to integrate it into the Soviet Union.12 They called for elections to show their strength, and one was set for August.
Calling out the vote in such times is unpredictable, especially when people of conscience and courage, such as Nikola Petkov, one of the leaders of the opposition, take casting a ballot seriously. He even spoke about needing international supervision to ensure a fair process. During the war Petkov had tried to stop the deportations of the Jews from (then Bulgarian) Macedonia and Thrace. In May 1943 he was among a group of notables who wrote to King Boris, beseeching him to intercede. They said that the “mass deportation of Bulgarian citizens who enjoy the same rights as all others and who are guilty of no crime, has been condemned by the great majority of Bulgarians and aroused their compassion.” Although these and other appeals failed, nearly all of the 50,000 native-born Bulgarian Jews survived the war, and that must be to the credit of their fellow citizens.13
In the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin tried to coax the Allies into recognizing the new regimes in Bulgaria and Romania. Truman would not hear of it without proper elections. At the very least, opposition parties should be allowed to run, and to that end the Americans and British used nonrecognition to apply pressure. As the clock ticked down to the election scheduled for August 26, the Allies pointed to flagrant abuses and the terror used against non-Communist candidates. With a mere thirty-six hours to go, the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Council in Sofia postponed the voting, obviously with Stalin’s permission, but without consulting the Bulgarian government.14
In August 1945, Stalin was deeply involved in the last hectic phase of the Soviet Union’s war against Japan, but he made time for Bulgaria. He received one of the Communist delegations and instructed them to make sure that the new government had the appearance of legitimacy. He told them not to be afraid of a little opposition. “You can allow some other parties to exist outside the Fatherland Front,” he admonished, and “you can hold the elections in mid-October.”15
Petkov had been encouraged by the news that filtered out of the Potsdam Conference that summer about even moderate Western support. His opposition to the fascist wartime government had brought him into temporary alliance with the Communists, and now he wanted genuine democracy—not what the Soviets had in mind. The Allies were finally insisting on proper elections, rescheduled to November 18, and again he took heart. Unfortunately, he and others overestimated the commitment of the West, for police-state methods continued to be used to intimidate the opposition. Petkov’s secretary, for example, was arrested and died in custody. Against this background, the opposition decided to boycott the elections.
Stalin, disgruntled by the events, moved into action and on November 4 dispatched Georgi Dimitrov to Sofia. The legendary figure did not return with a sense of joy or vindication but rather harbored old grievances and acted more like an imperial envoy sent from Moscow than a native son. He was outfitted with his own Soviet guard and sealed off in a grand house, with the outer walls topped by barbed wire and searchlights. He had a direct line to the Kremlin, so that Stalin could keep things moving along. To no one’s surprise, the Communists “won” the elections, getting (as part of the Fatherland Front) no less than 88 percent of the votes.16
The results were so outlandish that the American and British foreign ministers raised the matter at their December meeting in Moscow with Molotov. They asked the Soviets to ensure that the Bulgarian government was broadened to include opposition party members.17 Stalin, putting them off, said it would be undemocratic to meddle with the results of another country’s elections. Later that day he called Dimitrov to ask him to “include one or two ministers from the opposition. Give them some kind of meaningless tasks. Obviously we are not talking here about Petkov. Someone else who is not too popular can be found.”18