Continued from Epoch of the communism …

In 1947 nationalization of industrial property, banking, transport, mining was carried out. Opposition was crushed by means of judicial and extra-judicial reprisals. Finally, all "bourgeois" parties were disbanded, save a group of subservient BANU functionaries as a facade of presumably "two party" system. At the 5th congress of the BCP (1948), Georgi Dimitrov declared its domination and announced that the country had to build socialism in historically shortest terms.

What followed in the next decades was more or less orthodox realization of the Soviet model. Bulgaria experienced massive industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry. Before World War II, Bulgarian industry contributed only 17 per cent of net national income. As a result of heavy industrialization program in 1985 about 60 per cent of the national income was generated in the industrial sector, and only 13 per cent in agriculture. But new industrial enterprises, gigantomanic in some cases, were economically ineffective and required enormous state subsidies. By the mid-1980s, the potential of growth of such type of economy was exhausted, and foreign loans and import of Western technologies did not help much. The only lasting result was piling of useless industrial equipment and accumulation of huge (by Bulgarian standards) debt of $ 11 billion, mostly to Western European and Japanese banks.

Since the early 1950s agriculture was subjected to "mass collectivization". Land was taken from the peasants, and they were herded in cooperative farms. These were also ineffective, and required large subsidies from the state budget.

In political terms Bulgaria had not seen many changes during the 45 years of Communist rule, since the system remained principally unmodified and inert. After denunciation of Stalin's "cult of personality" Todor Zhivkov was made first secretary of the party mostly because of obvious mediocrity. He outmanoeuvred potential rivals, and assumed enormous power. Under his rule, Bulgaria was unquestionably loyal to Moscow, and was unaffected politically or ideologically by the upheavals in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or in Poland in 1980. Despite political reprisals and stifling atmosphere of police surveillance, there were less protests or dissidence. Although standard of life was low, socialism had an appeal for the mass of population with guaranteed full employment, free medical service, price controls, social benefits, and even slackened work discipline, and corresponded to primarily egalitarian set of mind.

Todor Zhivkov, who by the late 1980s was one of the longest ruling Communist dictators and had outlived five Soviet leaders despite loyalty to Moscow, was lukewarm to Gorbachev's perestroika. That is why legal opposition first took form in the Club of support of glasnost and perestroika founded by Dr Zhelev and other intellectuals in the winter of 1988. Zhivkov's regime was discredited internally and before the world by the counterproductive results of the "regeneration campaign", that is, forced Bulgarianization of ethnic Turks by replacing their Turkish-Arabic names with Christian-Slavonic, which started in 1984-1985. When Zhivkov opened the border in 1989, the exodus of about 300,000 Turks followed. Seeing that he had lost confidence of Moscow, Mr Zhivkov's colleagues from Politburo of the BCP, deposed him on November 10, 1989. This event, whose significance is disputed by some analysts and historians, falls more or less, into the pattern of revolutions in Eastern Europe that swept away Communist regimes and put an end to the Soviet bloc.