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The Pogrom over the Writers after 9 September
1944 – Moral and Culturological Aspects
by
Tzveta Trifonova
Literary historian and critic and the Literature
Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
It seems to me that the tragic fate of the creative
and intellectual elite before World War II has not been studied
and has not been demonstrated before the contemporaries, nor has
an analysis been made of the moral and spiritual consequences for
Bulgarian society and for the national culture. Nevertheless, it
is a joyous fact that the time has come at long last to remember
the names of the people who defended the democratic values, the
independent spirit and the freedom of conscience along the thorny
path of the Bulgarian State.
The date of the communist coup – 9 September 1944
– was a signal for revenge and the start of blood-drenched Bacchanalia
on the territory of the entire country. The victims of the class
wrath were not only politicians, businessmen, lawyers, civil servants,
police and army officers. The self-proclaimed “people’s revengers”
attacked the Bulgarian intellectuals with the same zealousness:
teachers, priests, journalists, writers, editors, artists, professors,
lecturers and all kinds of people of the pen, of culture and of
the spirit perished without trial or sentence in the cities, little
towns and villages. It would be logical to ask ourselves why was
the country’s cultural elite branded and persecuted as the most
dangerous “enemy of the people”? The indictment produced by the
Sixth Panel of the so-called “People’s Tribunal” attached the following
qualifications to the cultural elite: “career-seeking intelligentsia
that had lost its touch with the people”, “public evil that needs
to be cut out so that it would not contaminate the public organism”,
“mercenaries of the pen and of speech”, “instigators and collaborationists”
of the persons responsible for the national catastrophe, etc. The
answer is very well known: propped on the bayonets of the occupiers,
the communist upper crust followed the example of the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917-1921. Without choosing its means, it showed determination
to deprive the nation of the voice of free speech, and – as it proclaimed
itself – “to cut the democratic values from the public organism”,
to obliterate the notions of democracy, freedom and fatherland from
public space, the carrier of these notions being the patriotic intelligentsia.
Thinking people are a barrier before any dictatorship, therefore
the first task of usurpers is terror and genocide on a mass scale
against the intellectual class.
Outstanding representatives of Bulgarian culture
perished without trial or sentence in the first wave of the red
terror: Danail Krapchev – journalist, writer and editor of the Zora
[Dawn] newspaper, Yordan Badev – literary critic, Nencho Iliev-Sirius
– writer, Konstantin Gindev – talented young poet, Boris Roumenov
– satirist, Professor Lyubomir Vladikin, Rayko Alexiev – humorist,
satirist and cartoonist, publisher of the Shtourets [Cricket]
newspaper, beaten to death in prison. The writer Dimiter Babev disappeared
one year later.
Here I shall cite for the first time an unpublished
documentary episode concerning the repressions against the artists
and writers during the first days after the coup, because it is
a typical detail of the frustration of the public atmosphere during
the fatal days of the coup. Marin Petkov, employee in the administration
of the Zora newspaper, speaks about the death of Danail Krapchev,
famous journalist, patriot, publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the
Zora newspaper – the most prestigious Bulgarian newspaper
between the two world wars. On 10 September 1944, Petkov went to
the town of Gorna Djumaya, together with relatives of Krapchev,
to look for the body of the murdered man. He rejected the suicide
version by citing the testimony of a woman eyewitness: “Krapchev
was murdered under my window. We were living on the ground floor.
The house was on two streets. Seeing him, several people rushed
towards him and started lynching him with stones and wood. I only
heard him say: ‘People, people, Bulgarians, come to your senses!’
When he collapsed, two youngsters shot him with their guns ….”1
Not only the raging lawlessness but also the addressee of the victim’s
last words is noteworthy. They are strongly reminiscent of a similar
exclamation by the national hero before the liberation from Ottoman
domination, Vassil Levski, and they show that the mentality of the
people had changed very little after the Liberation: docile and
fearful before the dominant and the strong, but just as cruel and
merciless to the weak and to the fallen.
However, the atrocities of the “revengers” to the
Bulgarian artists and creative individuals did not stop with their
mean murder. Months later, an absurd scenario was staged: the so-called
“Second People’s Tribunal,” established specially for trying journalists
and intellectuals, announced that these people were “missing”, “absent”
or “deceased” and tried them post factum in order to legitimise
the illegal confiscation of their entire property. The same tragic
fate befell also the writer Dimiter Shishmanov – Minister of Foreign
Affairs, Professor Boris Yotsov – outstanding Slavonic scholar and
linguist, Minister of Education. Their enormous creative potential,
their books and their merits to the science and culture of Bulgaria
did not count as an argument in their favour. Quite on the contrary,
it was a pretext for the bitterness and cruelty of the self-proclaimed
judges. The defence attorneys of Professor Boris Yotsov pointed
in vain to thirty orders and documents testifying to the fact that
the education minister defended communist teachers who had been
fired and reinstated them in the schools from where they had been
dismissed.2
A second large group of writers, journalists, scholars,
artists and intellectuals were thrown into the Central Prison in
Sofia and were given sentences of different length, combined with
confiscations and fines. Among them were the writers Zmey Goryanin,
Fani Popova, Yordan Stoubel, Dimiter Simidov, Georgi Kanazirski,
Boris Makovski, the cartoonists Konstantin Kamenov, Alexander Bozhinov
and Alexander Dobrinov, the journalists Hristo Bruzitsov, Krustyo
Velyanov, Atanas Damyanov and Stefan Damyanov, Stefan Tanev, Matey
Bonchev-Brushlyan, Dr. Peter Djidrov, Dimiter Gavriyski, who wrote
for the leading daily papers in Bulgaria: Zora, Utro,
Dvenvik, Slovo, etc., as well as dozens of other eminent
figures in the sphere of culture. That group also included Professor
Stefan Konsoulov, Professor Georgi P. Genov, the literary historian
Professor Mihail Arnaoudov, Minister of Education in Bagryanov’s
government for two months. Their life in prison is colourfully described
in the miraculously preserved notes of Zmey Goryanin, Sketches
and Stories.3 Even when they
were at such a critical moment in their lives and their endurance
was put to the test, these internationally famous scholars succeeded
in preserving their dignified behaviour and continued to live with
their science and with their ideas. Their example has proven that
only a man of the spirit is capable of bringing light, sensibility
and nobility during times of sinister arbitrariness and social cataclysms,
that only man’s creative genius has the strength of withstanding
the sinister downfalls of history.
A part of the intellectuals who passed through
the cells of the State Security and of the Central Prison were dispatched
without trial or sentence directly to concentration camps that had
been established under a special law and were given the name of
labour-correctional communities: Bogdanov Dol, Koutsiyan, Rossitsa,
Sveti Vrach, Belene, Doupnitsa, etc., where the writers Dimiter
Talev, Slavcho Krassinski, Chavdar Moutafov, Pavel Spassov, Zvezdelin
Tsonev and Yordan Vulchev, as well as the artists Alexander Bozhinov,
Alexander Dobrinov and Konstantin Kamenov, were sent. A new phenomenon
– political-literary toponymy – emerged in the geography of the
Bulgarian literature. It linked the colourful names of small villages,
localities and small towns in the countryside with the saga of prominent
writers and creative artists. The spiritual elite of Bulgaria were
banished to mines and stone quarries, to be replaced in the cultural
centres by aggressive ignorance, marginal individuals and vulgarity.
The concentration camps turned into coexisting spaces accumulating
the energies of violence and the suffering, amongst which the freedom-loving
spirit of the Bulgarian nation waned and died.
New martyrs were added to the prisoners of the
first wave shortly after 9 September 1944 in 1946-1947: together
with thousands of opposition figures from the Nikola Petkov Bulgarian
Agrarian People’s Union and the Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party,
emblematic names of the legal opposition became victims of terror,
having stood up against the hegemony of the camouflage Fatherland
Front: Trifon Kounev and Tsveti Ivanov – Editors-in-Chief of the
newspapers Narodno Zemedelsko Zname [People’s Agrarian Banner]
and Svoboden Narod [Free People], and also writers, journalists,
public figures and freedom fighters. Standing at the crucial historic
dividing line, they were condemned to suffer both for their political
and moral compromises, and for their dignified and valiant fight
to defend the democratic ideals and the independence of Bulgaria.
Together with political leaders like Nikola Petkov and Krustyu Pastouhov,
the writers carried on their shoulders the heavy cross of their
re-enslaved nation and proved that the real artist is ready for
self-sacrifice to defend his national dignity.
During the autumn of 1944, more than 30 thousand
peaceful Bulgarian citizens were killed: slaughtered with axes,
bludgeoned to death, shot at point blank, thrown off cliffs into
precipices, burned, hanged or buried alive. The sense of impunity
and arbitrariness, encouraged openly or behind the scenes by the
leaders of the ruling Communist Party, notably Georgi Dimitrov,
Traycho Kostov, Tsola Dragoycheva and Anton Yugov, made the public
atmosphere fraught with aggressiveness of the reactions and with
frenetic hatred. Mass paranoia, thirst for blood and vindictiveness
flared. Frenetic mobs shouting death slogans attacked homes and
offices, lynched, stampeded and clubbed to death innocent people
in the streets merely because a finger had been pointed at them
as “enemies of the people.” That was not a nationwide revolution,
nor an uprising, nor a civil war, because there were no two fighting
armed groups, as in 1923 during the insurgence. That was a political
slaughterhouse. Life and the individual had lost their value, humanity
was trampled and forgotten in the gigantic social and geopolitical
collision. After World War II, when Bulgaria did not have even one
casualty at the frontline, instead of peace and a spirit of constructivism
on the basis of the protected status quo, the country was involved
in a catastrophic psychological situation of self-extermination
and moral genocide. The land of Bulgaria was covered with thousands
of secret graves, its tolerant people were desecrated by fratricide
and were stained with the blood of its own worthiest and most talented
sons. The mass act of insanity reveals how it is possible with the
mechanisms of ideology and politics to bring to extremes the mentality
of the community so as to be directed in the service of party, power
and imperialist goals. The unabated wartime aggression of the masses
was easy to manipulate and to transform into political revenge-seeking
by ideological profiteers and central offices of the party. The
normal behavioural thresholds of the extremist individual were deliberately
undermined in the direction of regression and barbarianisation so
as to serve hidden power goals. And again, literature anticipated,
caught and depicted the shadows of horror, fear and death in the
spiritual space of Bulgaria. The writer Yana Yazova, a contemporary
and witness of the events, recreated both concrete events and the
frenzied rhythm of historical time, revealing its paranoid symbols
and states. In her political and psychological novel War,
which was published in 2001, i.e., 25 years after her death and
55 years after the actual events, Yana Yazova documented the social,
political and existential psychological motivations of terror and
hatred, depicting the traumatically distorted mentality and the
images of the “revengers” susceptible to manipulation, as well as
the sufferings of the defenceless victims. Her valiant and hence
tabooed book identified yet another emblematic image next to the
gallows and the cross, derived as mythologems of the supreme sacrifice
in the name of man and the national spirit, and that new image was
the pit: the muddy pit of disgrace, of cowardice in the dark hours
of the night and satanic malice, which swallowed not merely the
individual victims, but also the bright human thought and the idea
of Christian humaneness. The scourge of the literary word has slashed
the “wolf’s time” in the history of Bulgaria after 9 September 1944,
when obscurantism and anti-morality reigned, while Christian morality
and tradition were trampled upon, denied and desecrated. According
to the writer, the transformations in Bulgarian life are not so
much social as they are spiritual and ethical, moreover in the downward
movement of dehumanisation.
However, there is more tragedy in real human biographies
than in any literary work, because they prove the disastrous role
of political violence over the spirit, over the mentality and physics
of the human individual. I shall trace back the destiny of several
of the outstanding creative figures who became victims of the catastrophic
political and social transformations.
Even after the barbaric murders and the judiciary
arbitrariness during the 1944-1947 period, Bulgarian writers remained
guilty for life in the eyes of their torturers and executioners,
and were branded forever as “enemies of the people”, “former fascists”
and “former people” – as has been documented in the State Security
files. Even after passing through courts, prisons and concentration
camps, after being physically devastated, morally humiliated and
materially and financially degraded, the old intellectual elite
nevertheless remained in the focus of attention of the secret services
and continued to be the principal target of individual active investigation
and operational surveillance. The authors who were in all school
textbooks during the period between the two wars were treated not
as personalities, but as “objects.” Exhausted, sick and robbed of
all their possessions, they were subjected to permanent torture
and harassment by the repressive services. After they were expelled
from the Union of Bulgarian Writers already back in 1944,4
they were thrown out of all cultural institutions, and were ousted
from public and literary life. They were deprived of the right to
creativity and of access to media and publishers. Their books were
banned, destroyed or hidden in the so-called secret files until
1990.5 Doomed to isolation and
silence, the writers became defenceless and voiceless victims of
numerous outrages. I shall list below the so-called “measures” as
they have been documented in the secret State Security files: prison,
investigation, interrogation; deportation to concentration camps;
depriving of residence permit in the cities and coercive deportation
of their families; expulsion from the Union of Bulgarian Writers
and ban on the publishing of their books; depriving them of their
jobs and of means of subsistence and medical treatment; moral pressure,
control and dictatorship over their creative will; confiscation
of personal archives, manuscripts, documents and correspondence;
breaking into their homes, secret and open searches; interception
of correspondence and telephone tapping; surveillance through agents;
coercive public humiliation through self-criticism and repentance;
humiliation of their human and creative dignity through mentors
and guarantors; mental harassment of their family members; dooming
them to intellectual and emotional solitude by turning their friends
and relatives into informers and traitors. It is not even possible
to list the inventions and the methods of inquisition and control
over the individual, but their range, diversity and mass scale revealed
to a sufficient degree the atmosphere of dictatorship and oppression
of the individual, of creativity and the spirit, as the principal
characteristic feature of the new social system.
Tsveti Ivanov, Editor-in-Chief of the opposition
newspaper Svoboden Narod [Free People] was formally sentenced
for his pacifist article “Don’t Destroy All Bridges.”6
The truth is that his life was ruined as a result of his active
role in the fight of the legal opposition against the communist
dictatorship that was gaining momentum and on account of his numerous
journalistic articles. The journalist was kept in isolation in cell
No. 107 of the Central Prison in Sofia and was subjected to interrogations
for 15 hours a day for one month. In addition to the external pressure
and the traumatic circumstances, the conscience of that intellectual
was burdened also with his own recapitulations and torments. Experiencing
bitter moments of depression on account of the mistakes of his party,
the Bulgarian Workers’ Social-Democratic Party, and a sense of guilt
for having collaborated with the communists, Tsveti Ivanov came
to the thought of suicide, as can be seen from the reports of the
investigator. In a letter to his sister Vyara he also shared that
he was thinking of hanging himself in his prison cell with his face
towel. According to him, that was the only way of “crying out –
a deafening cry for humaneness and love for man.”7
The stress experienced broke irreversibly the prisoner’s mentality
and spirit. One of his friends and future professor of medicine,
Dr. Ivan Roumenov, testified that Tsveti fell gravely ill in prison
of “blood poisoning, bad teeth and stress, and we nearly lost him.”8
Doctor friends of his saved him after he came out of prison, but
there was no salvation for him in a general perspective, because
he was marked by the hatred of the communist rulers. He was arrested
for the third time and was sent to the concentration camp on the
island of Belene in the Danube on 5 March 1950. His end is an eloquent
proof of the inhuman nature of the communist tyranny. After pricking
himself on a rusty nail in Belene, Tsveti was denied a tetanus shot
with the argument that “there are no syringes for the likes of him.”
He developed tetanus with blocking and paralysis of the respiratory
muscles. Such was the meaningless death of a man who was only 36
at the time, one of the most brilliant Bulgarian journalists, a
man with European thinking and tolerance. A ray of reason and noble
spirit went out in Bulgaria, and the Bulgarian national culture
was deprived of one of its indisputable creative talents.
Trifon Kounev, humorist, poet, satirist,
– Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Narodno Zemedelsko Zname [People’s
Agrarian Banner], President of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and
Director of the National Theatre, active public figure and member
of the Standing Committee of the Nikola Petkov Bulgarian Agrarian
People’s Union, was the victim of a cruel campaign in the media
in 1946-1947, public beatings9
and judiciary arbitrariness. He was tried twice for the same thing:
for his preface entitled “Some Clarifications by the Author” to
his book of feuilletons Small and Tiny as Camels (1946) and
for one sentence he spent six years in the communist prisons in
Sofia and in Sliven.10 After
the first five months in prison, he was released as Member of Parliament
in the Sixth Grand National Assembly. However, the writer suffered
a heart attack on 5 June 1947, when the opposition agrarian leader
Nikola Petkov was stripped of his immunity and was arrested directly
in Parliament, after shameful scenes of beatings and humiliation.
Soon afterwards the trial was renewed and the 68-year-old writer
was sentenced to five years imprisonment. The humiliations and the
suffering broke his strong peasant physical stamina and the author
of the “tiny camels” fell severely ill with heart failure and diabetes.
His file is full of petitions by his sister Gena Mileva to the Ministry
of the Interior and Georgi Dimitrov for the very sick man to be
at least transferred to the prison in Sofia so that she could take
care of him. One year of his sentence was pardoned, but the prisoner
refused to come out of jail (an unimaginable ethical paradox!) because
he felt that he had betrayed the other prisoners who were not released.
He was also plagued by the feeling of rejection and solitude out
of jail, in the radically changed and alien environment to him.
The writer understood well that there was no boundary between prison
and freedom in the totalitarian system and that the individual was
equally enslaved both inside prison and outside. And he was right
in this, since in the last three years his life was again the “object”
of interest on the part of the secret services, being surrounded
by dozens of informers and full-time agents who followed every step
and every word of the poor man. The fate of Tsveti Ivanov and Trifon
Kounev testifies to the destructive influence of the political repression
on a person’s life and creative potential. The burden of psychological
pressure and physical suffering ruined the health and broke the
spirit of these creative individuals, and none of the two even thought
of writing anything or creating a work of art or literature. Conversely,
feeling oppressed under the burden of a hostile reality, both men
saw death as a salvation. The attitude to the famous artists, public
figures and spiritual leaders demonstrates that the dictatorship
of the proletariat was genetically marked by hostility and hatred
for free thought, for the independent spirit and for the bearers
of morality, cultural values and the spiritual prosperity of the
nation being not among its priorities.
This is the same situation as a result of which
the unique artist of the Bulgarian-Macedonian antiquity Dimiter
Talev barely survived in the Koutsiyan concentration camp, after
his camp mates took him out half-dead from a pile of coal that collapsed
over him. Already suffering from gastric ulcer and utter exhaustion,
he was deported for six years together with his family to the small
town of Loukovit, where he lived in misery without having the right
to work and to publish.11 His
novel The Iron Candlestick – the work of his life and a masterpiece
of classical Bulgarian novels – spent six years in some drawer of
Georgi Karaslavov after it was completed in 1946, probably to prevent
it from eclipsing Karaslavov’s novel Ordinary People. The
writer’s drama caused by the forced isolation was devastating for
him: his life was devoid of meaning if he could not express the
tragic epos of the fights and sufferings of Macedonia that were
heaving in his soul. However, that was not the only tragedy in his
life. The pressure over him became more and more perfidious: in
1951, the authorities forced Dimiter Talev to repent in public and
to castigate himself for his patriotic emotions and writings in
the past while he was editor of the Macedonia newspaper and
a close associate of the eminent Macedonian opposition leader Ivan
(Vanche) Mihaylov. That was the condition for his readmission to
the Union of Bulgarian writers and for the subsequent publishing
of his works. In the meantime, the State Security conducted a special
campaign under the code name “Samouilov” with the aim of involving
the ill writer in the counterintelligence system instead of writing
his brilliant books. The most painful torture and humiliation in
the martyr’s biography of the “former fascist” – as the secret services
qualified him – was the outrage against his son, who was summoned
to the Ministry of the Interior while he was still in high school
to sign a declaration that he would be loyal to the authorities.
Even after Talev’s rehabilitation and after the four volumes of
his epic saga about the Bulgarian National revival period were published,
the surveillance and spying continued: a sketch of his apartment,
which was made so as to allow easy breaking in, dates back to 1958.
Numerous informers and neighbourhood agents continued to snoop around
and to report on him. Paid ideological mentors criticised his historical
chronicles for their lack of correct Marxist-Leninist world outlook
and at the same time pressured him to write a novel about the socialist
system. Nevertheless, they were unable to break the spirit of the
writer, fanatically dedicated to his spiritual mission. During the
six years of relative freedom, although he was very ill, Dimiter
Talev performed a real creative and moral feat by managing to publish
his remarkable tetralogy and the novels about King Samouil, as well
as a number of other works. However, the intensive campaigns of
the secret services were successful and they attained their goal:
total exhaustion of the writer until his gastric ulcer degenerated
to cancer that took Talev’s prematurely and he passed away in 1966,
in spite of the belated honours and awards.
Svetozar Akendiev Dimitrov, with pen name Zmey
Goryanin, was one of the most prolific and popular authors in
the 1930s and 1940s, author of a large number of works: more than
30 historical novels, fiction and short stories, of hundreds of
epigrams and lyrical poems, a talented story-teller of children’s
fairy-tales and nursery rhymes. In addition, he was a Renaissance
man with encyclopaedic interests, keen and diverse interests in
the arts and in the world. The strong love for the heroic past of
the Bulgarian nation, the patriotic feelings and pride permeating
his books, were presented as his political sin and as an unpardonable
crime after 9 September 1944. After he was arrested and sentenced
by the People’s Tribunal for “anti-Serbian chauvinism” and for his
stories on Macedonia during World Ware II, Zmey Goryanin spent one
year in prison, but did not stop writing secretly political epigrams,
poems and autobiographical notes. After he came out of prison, all
doors related to his career were slammed in his face. His books
were included in the lists of prohibited publications as “fascist
literature” and many of them cannot be found in the libraries even
now. The controlled “freedom” in which he found himself was maybe
even more painful than the freedom that had been taken away from
him, because the constant surveillance and the invisible threat
provoked a constant anxiety and tension in the sensitive mentality
of the artist. There is a strange paradox that we discovered in
the life of Zmey Goryanin after 9 September 1944: the physician
who undertook the treatment of his shattered nervous system and
of his strong stomach pain subsequently proved to be the informer
who kept watch on him, provoked him with conversations on political
topics and reported about him to the State Security services.12
That socialist doctor with a state security mentality and a split
personality was also a case study in the sphere of psychopathology.
Just like the two-faced Janus, he easily stepped from one role into
the other: a friend and a traitor, a healer and a henchman. He pretended
that he was treating the physical suffering of the writer, while
behind the scenes he provoked psychological harassment against him
by causing searches of his home to be made, his documents to be
confiscated and all his contacts monitored. It became transparent
in which of his two roles he was more efficient by the fact that
the delicate psychological frame and the fragile physical condition
of his patient could not withstand the stress and he found himself
in one of the saddest medical institution: the psychiatric hospital
in Kourilo near Sofia. The morbid condition of his soul and body
gradually transformed his gastric ulcer into incurable cancer. Tormented
by his diseases and by his enslaved everyday life, by the misery
and above all by the prohibition to work, Zmey Goryanin hid in small
remote monasteries. However, the vigilant eye of the secret services
did not leave him in peace even there until his last breath.
In addition to the misery and isolation, the great
intellectuals were also subjected to moral harassment and arbitrariness
by the communist party bosses. They were forced to make humiliating
public confessions and to repent. I already mentioned Talev’s self-incrimination
in the Pirinsko Delo newspaper.13
Vladimir Vassilev was also forced to write a letter of repentance
to the communist dignitary Vulko Chervenkov. The poet Slavcho Krassinski
maligned himself and repented twice in public, always for his book
of feuilletons entitled Failed Revolutionaries. The ignorant
political scum forced the capable and the talented people of Bulgaria
to fall at their feet and to beg for mercy as criminals, confessing
on their own and in public that they were part of the slave mass
and that nothing distinguished them from the docile cringing crowd.
After such a moral suicide, the writer could not be anything else
but a pitiable clown in the eyes of the rulers and in the eyes of
the nation as well. He was deprived for life of his influence and
public prestige, deprived of dignity, valour, independent and elevated
spirit. However, Bulgarian society was even more damaged by the
political Jesuitism, having been deprived methodically of its moral
authorities, of its humane ideals and artistic values. It is becoming
morally and spiritually impoverished, losing its civilisational
guidelines and is turning into a pitiable crowd concerned solely
with its biological survival and day-to-day prosperity, and this
is the crowd of slavery and fear that is convenient to the power
of every oligarchy. In the space emptied of spiritual values, talented
art and free speech were artificially substituted for decades with
propaganda surrogates of “active fighters against fascism” and obsequious
individuals, and they were imposed upon society. The hatred of the
literary apprentices towards the recognised creative figures and
the cultural achievements was indeed “strong, deep and in their
blood” – as the communist author Orlin Vassilev bragged.14
For a long period of time the psychological climate of Bulgaria
was poisoned by the class hatred, it was the leitmotif in the social
and interpersonal relations of the socium, and the young generations
were brought up on it. The cultured language of communication and
tolerance was substituted by the language of hatred, of division
and of spite. Crudeness, vulgarity and simplistic vocabulary settled
in public speech, spread through the media, penetrated permanently
into the mentality and behaviour of the so-called socialist person.
The psycholinguistic discourse was one of the catalysts in which
the brutal character of the dictatorship became blatantly manifested:
the aggressiveness, the ugly names used and the illiteracy were
addressed at first to the so-called “enemies of the people”, but
they subsequently turned into speech characteristics signifying
self-destructive cruelty of the socialist society and of the political
system. Language and speech were perceived not as a haven of spirituality
and as a historical value, they were not likewise the identification
code of the ethnic community, but they turned instead into a hollow
propaganda or hypocritical phraseology, devoid of sacred meaning,
of substance and of authenticity.
The web of spies and snoopers of the secret services
around the old cultural figures was something amazing and it was
thrown over all spheres of life. In addition to the full-time agents
and career officers, it also consisted of secret agents on the payroll
of the organisation, anonymous voluntary collaborators from the
residential neighbourhood or apartment building, and informers at
the job. The highest number of agents and informers recruited were
among the fellow party-members of the “objects” of the surveillance.
Another vulnerable and easily accessible group, in the perception
of the political police, were the former political figures, above
all the supporters of Ivan (Vanche) Mihaylov and agrarians, people
from the concentration camps from Nikola Petkov’s agrarian party
and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, all of whom
were frightened and broken, because they had suffered the greatest
cruelties and atrocities after the coup. The drastic examples in
that respect can be seen in the dossiers of Trifon Kounev, Dimiter
Talev and the Moutafov family, which have already been described
in the book Writers and Secret Files.
However, the culmination in the repressive saga
was the recruitment or infiltration of agents among the circles
of relatives and friends, even in the family of the person subjected
to the repressions. The aim of the authorities was to desecrate
and break the most intimate relations, the blood relations among
the people and Bulgarians to be deprived of the love and trust of
the closest people around them, of the moral support of their families
and their closest relatives. Thus, miserable and lonely, the persecuted
man turned into a defenceless and dependent victim in the vigilant
eyes of the authorities. Human depravity of such a type has been
documented in Trifon Kounev’s dossier, e.g., agent “Makedonski,”
who reported about the letters of his brother-in-law and about his
father Hristo Statev, former members of Nikola Petkov’s agrarian
party and emigrants in Austria, as well as an agent under the name
of “Uncle” concealing a relative of the writer.
An encroachment upon all real relations, the destruction
of the intimacy and trust in interpersonal contacts is the least
pardonable and the most antihuman crime of the State Security. This
encroachment undermined not only the private communities, it destroyed
irreparably essential ethical and spiritual pillars of the nation:
conscience and morality. Instead of love and confidence, tolerance
and charity for half a century, the mentality of the Bulgarians
was infested with fear, hatred, suspicion, meanness, egotism and
careerism. The moral characteristics of the community were deliberately
atrophied and eradicated, so that it could be mentally adapted to
a misanthropic doctrine. Its main aim was to depersonalise and subordinate
man, transforming him into a spineless and lonely creature, deprived
of high aspirations and unfamiliar with freedom, pride and dignity
of the moral values. However, that image mirrors the paranoia
of fear as a dominant characteristic in the psychology of the
ruling party and of the community. The rulers were also irrepressibly
afraid: not of imaginary enemies, not of actions and resistance,
but of the thoughts and feelings of the oppressed and disillusioned
docile subjects. This is the reason behind the aspirations to penetrate
the motivations, the mechanisms of the consciousness of the individual,
so that “its chip could be changed” – a recent wishful thinking
of the present rulers. The information gathered by an all-permeating
and powerfully organised network of control was an important instrument
of psychological processing. It took a keen interest in everything
connected with the origin, family, the past, the family, the children,
the friends and the acquaintances, the work, the books, the material
and financial status, the intimate life, the health, the everyday
life, the meetings, the walks and food of the “unexterminated enemies”
(according to the terminology of the State Security). In addition
to the concrete person, life per se was also intercepted,
and it had a secret shadow patched up by pieces of slander and pieces
of reports by the informers. In addition to being oneself, a person
became someone else as well, and life was no longer a gift and beauty,
it became an evil-smelling swamp, misery, meanness, scheming, treacheries
and mass paranoia. This degenerate monster, conceived in the secret
lairs of power, was filled only with the meanest and the basest
that could be invented about man, because the valuable, the noble
and the humane were ruled out by default and imperatively: everyone
was an enemy and a scoundrel unless otherwise proven. The watchdogs
of the system operated with the parallel virtual reality invented
by them and substituted the real person and the reality of life
with the paranoia and nightmares of power. The shadow-dossier accompanied
man at every time and in every place that he went. Such were the
sufferings of the Bulgarian martyrs until they left this world and
their ungrateful fatherland. There was no leniency for any of them
while they were alive and even after their death. Removal from the
operational files of surveillance was possible only when the “objects”
were one step from the grave or actually in the grave. However,
even then, the revenge and the spite were fierce and active in a
typical communist fashion. Trifon Kounev was deprived of his Sofia
residence permit three months prior to his death, and the agents
accompanied him all the way to his grave to report on who attended
the funeral and what speeches were made. The last “operational plan
for the activities of the agents”15
against the polyphonic artist, thinker and architect Chavdar Moutafov
was drafted on 4 January 1958, when he was on his deathbed. Crushed
and incurably ill of pulmonary emphysema since his sufferings in
the concentration camp, and broken by the incessant aggression against
his family, the writer died on 13 January 1958, but the “Architect”
secret file was closed as late as on the 21st.
Obituaries and speeches at the grave of Vladimir
Vassilev were forbidden, after the authorities had isolated the
famous literary critic and eminent builder of Bulgarian culture
from the literary life in the country during his lifetime and had
doomed him to misery.16 That
humiliating scene demonstrates how for two decades the obsequiousness,
docility, auto-censorship, careerism and introvertness had already
turned into a socio-psychological climate and also into the immanent
nature of the socialist worker, if he succeeded in subordinating
even the famous and talented names of socialist art, judging from
the people who accompanied the editor of the Zlatorog literary
magazine on his last journey.
The examples outline the gigantic scale of an unimaginably
bloated metastasis sucking the vital and intellectual sap of the
Bulgarian nation. It corrupted and morally crippled several generations
by paying to its enormous number of collaborators not for their
constructive efforts in favour of society, but for idleness, espionage
and reporting. Such were the people launched by the State Security
machine into various careers, they stood at the head of diplomacy
and the institutions, the administration and the economic enterprises,
their main task being to suppress and bully the intelligent, talented
and capable people.
Dozens of remarkable names faded in cultural memory
over the years, thousands of titles in Bulgarian and foreign literatures
were plunged into oblivion. The earlier European enlightenment and
education of the Bulgarians was deliberately lowered and provincialised
in the rigid fetters of the quasi-scientific canons of “Marxism.”
Being wrung from its old and strong classical roots, from the Christian
literary tradition and from the world cultural background, Bulgarian
literature fell to the low level of everyday existence and was marginalised,
being infinitely alienated from the existential secrets of the human
being. Dominated by propaganda rhetoric, full of falsehood and petty
themes, it modelled and “educated” the surrealistic person of the
20th century: rigid, half-educated, without historical
memory, torn away from the enormous metaphysical world, without
high ideals, unaware of the great classical art and of the vanguard
trends, light years behind the philosophy of the new civilisation.
And that was compensated by complacency, a full stomach and lack
of responsibilities, thriving in the “socialist camp” and in the
anonymous existence of the herd psychology.
At the end of the day, it was the metastasis of
terror that undermined and toppled the system that it had created
and nurtured. Unfortunately, it swallowed the entire state as well.
We continue to reap the harvest of the barbaric atrocities over
the class of the intellectuals to this day: the ignorance and national
nihilism, moral and social degradation, and their horrifying drastic
manifestations like the inhuman cruelty of murderers of children
and of their fathers, or beast-like mutants without any conscience
or moral values, ready to sell their children for a handful of silver
pieces and other depressing examples of the tragic everyday life
of Bulgaria, which is standing at the threshold of Europe as an
unwanted beggar in its tattered rags.
This is also the tragic and comic finale of the
era whose starting signal was given by the sinister date for Bulgarian
history: 9 September 1944.
1 Unpublished memoirs.
2 Interrogation of Boris Yotsov in the
Archives of the Ministry of the Interior. Answer of Professor
Boris Yotsov to the People's Tribunal on Case No. 1/1944, with
submitted evidence in writing. Sofia, 15 December 1944 (in Bulgarian).
3 NMBL Archive, a.u. 666/79 (in Bulgarian).
4 Minutes No. 4 of the Union of Bulgarian
Writers, 19 November 1944, State Historical Archives, f. 551,
a.u. 4 (in Bulgarian).
5 List of fascist literatures subject
to expropriation under Decree XII of the Council of Ministers.
Sofia, 6 October 1944 (in Bulgarian).
6 Secret file of Tsveti Ivanov in the
Archive of the Ministry of the Interior, Fund No. 2, op. 2, a.u.
101. Case No. 282/1946 (in Bulgarian).
7 Ibidem.
8 Memoirs of Professor Ivan Roumenov,
State Historical Archives, a.u. 55 (in Bulgarian).
9 Rabotnichesko Delo daily, No. 356/12
June 1946, An Incident with Nikola Petkov and Trifon Kounev (in
Bulgarian).
10 Secret file of Tsveti Ivanov in the
Archive of the Ministry of the Interior, Fund No. 3, op. 2, a.u.
212. File No. 4609 of the Second Court. Indictment No. 15266/1946
(in Bulgarian).
11 Secret file of Dimiter Talev in the
Archive of the Ministry of the Interior, Fund No. 3, op. 2, a.u.
112. Statement of facts sent to Deputy-Minister Roussi Hristozov,
who was responsible for the State Security. Sofia, 3 June 1948
(in Bulgarian).
12 Archive of the Ministry of the Interior,
File No. 16549, sheet 6 (in Bulgarian).
13 Otechestven Front daily, No.
390/1945 (in Bulgarian).
14 Otechestven Front daily, No.
390/1945 (in Bulgarian).
15 Dossier of Chavdar Moutafov, sheet
40 and sheet 1.
16 Vladimir Vassilev. Work, Personality,
Fate, Sofia, 1997 (in Bulgarian); Svilenov, A. Critical
Triptych for Vladimir Vassilev (in Bulgarian); Stamatov, V.
Let Us Wash the Shame a Little at Least, Sofia, p. 246-248
(in Bulgarian).
Translation into English: Nedyalka Chakalova
The International Condemnation
of Totalitarian Communism: the Initiative of the European People's
Party. The Bulgarian Perspective.
Excerpts from the reports presented
at the Colloquium in Koprivshtitsa (Bulgaria) 24-26 September 2004
Compiled by Vassil Stanilov, Edited by Nadejda Iskrova
Vassil Stanilov Literature Workshop, Sofia 2004
ISBN 954-8248-30-1
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