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On September 5th, 1944, Stalin declared war on Bulgaria under
the pretext that the Bulgarian government had been providing shelter
to nazi armies. In actual fact, the last German troops had left
Bulgaria by August 1944, during the term of Prime Minister Ivan
Bagryanov, whose government had explicitly declared neutrality and
had decreed that any German units that refused to leave the country
were to be disarmed by force. It was that same government that had
repealed all anti-Semitic legislation in Bulgaria and declared an
amnesty for the communist guerrillas and terrorists. For its part,
the new government, formed on September 2nd by the then parliamentary
opposition and initially headed by Konstantin Muraviev, promptly
declared war on Germany and entered into separate negotiations for
armistice with the US and Britain.
The declaration of war by Stalin on Bulgaria was quickly
followed by an all-out invasion of Bulgaria by the Red Army, launched
on September 8th, 1944. In such conditions, a gang of communists
acting on instructions from Moscow and aided by some army officers
that had allowed themselves to be won over for the communist cause,
stormed the building of the War Ministry and proclaimed themselves
to be the new government of Bulgaria. This was an act similar to
what Quisling had done in Norway back in 1940, yet no one condemned
the event as a coup d'etat. Significantly, unlike the Soviet citizens
and members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Georgi
Dimitrov, Vassil Kolarov and Vulko Chervenkov, who did not arrive
in Bulgaria until a year later, Quisling had never been a German
citizen, neither had he ever joined the National-Socialist Workers'
Party.
To this day, the Bulgarian communists maintain
that at least Stalin should be given credit for liberating Europe
from 'fascism'. In fact, what the Red Army did was replace the nazi-installed
occupation regimes in Eastern Europe with a much more abhorrent
variety of totalitarianism. Moreover, in the cases of Bulgaria and
Romania, there were no nazi-installed occupation regimes in the
first place; in fact, these countries were ruled by sovereign governments,
brutally swept aside by Stalin's stooges to clear the way for the
Soviet onslaught.
The events of early September 1944 marked a culmination
in the centuries-old aspirations of the Russian Empire to crush
Bulgaria on its way to seizing Constantinople and the Straits. It
was in pursuit of that goal that, in the 18th and 19th century,
Russia waged a long series of wars on the Ottoman Empire, as a result
of which Bulgaria came within a hair's breath of being swallowed
whole in 1878. Only the intervention of the European Powers spared
us the plight of becoming a Russian province; instead, by force
of the San Stefano Peace Treaty, Bulgaria was forced into indefinite
occupation. Russia's sinister interest in the Bulgarian lands as
a mere 'annoying obstacle' on its way to the Straits was highlighted
yet again during talks between Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and
his nazi counterpart Ribbentrop and with Hitler in November of 1940.
It was that Russian reluctance to reorient its expansionist appetites
from Central Europe and the Balkans towards the Persian Gulf and
India that brought to an abrupt end the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August
24th, 1939, and the Treaty of Friendship and Borders of September
28th of the same year. Of course, the main reason why the clash
between communist Russia and nazi Germany was inevitable was that
both Stalin and Hitler were set on conquering the world, and since
there was only one world to conquer, one of them was bound to destroy
the other.
Translation from Bulgarian
by Boyan Damyanov
Plamen Simeonov Tzvetkov was born in Berlin,
Germany, in 1951. Since 1994 he has been a lecturer with the New
Bulgarian University. In 1999 he presented a doctoral thesis and
was awarded a Doctorate in History (D.Litt./D.Sc.). Until the year
2001 Dr. Tzvetkov was employed at the Institute of History of the
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and since February of 2002 is a Full
Professor of Modern and Recent World History at the New Bulgarian
University.
Prof. Tzvetkov’s academic interests largely cover the political
and diplomatic history of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Europe and the
world at large during the 20th century, as well as the
early history of the Bulgarian people, more specifically the issue
of the origin of Bulgarians.
Prof Plamen Tzvetkov has published more than 10 monographs, over
50 research papers and articles and well over 300 essays. Special
mention is due to a major monograph A History of the Balkans:
A Regional Overview from a Bulgarian Perspective, in two
volumes, published in San Fransisco, USA, by The Edwin Mellen Press
(1993), and his participation, in collaboration with Stéphane
Courtois, Joachim Gauck, Alexandre Iakovlev, Martin Malia, Mart
Laar, Diniou Charlanov, Lioubomir Ognianov, Romulus Rusan, Erhart
Neubert, Ilios Yannakakis, Philippe Baillet, in a group effort
titled Du passé faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire
du communisme en Europe [Let’s Make Tabula Rasa from the
Past! History and Memory of Communism in Europe] (Paris, Robert
Laffont, 2002), to which he contributed the article “Après
Staline, Todor Jivkov!” [“After Stalin, Todor Zhivkov!”], essentially
representing a view of European History from a Balkan perspective.
Prof. Tzvetkov has also authored a series of books on the smaller
and medium-sized players in European politics on the eve of World
War II, as well as a monograph bearing the somewhat defiant title,
Are Bulgarians Slavs?
Married, with three children – a daughter and two sons.
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