Daughters of the KGB (35 page)

Although there were some minor actions against vessels of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, Bulgaria did not formally declare war on the USSR. Summoned to Rastenburg by Hitler in August 1943, Boris refused to hand over the Bulgarian Jews; nor would he agree to send troops to the increasingly hard-pressed eastern front. A few days after returning to Sofia, Boris attended a dinner at the Italian embassy and died the following day, with poisoning suspected. As a result of his refusal to participate in the Final Solution, Bulgaria ended the war with an
increased
Jewish population.
¹

On 23 August Romania reversed its pro-German policy and declared war on Germany, allowing the Red Army to cross its territory and reach the Bulgarian frontier. Stalin declared war against Bulgaria on 5 September, the day on which Agrarian Party Prime Minister Konstantin Muraviev abolished all anti-Semitic laws the Germans had imposed. Three days later, Muraviev declared war on Nazi Germany, but it was too late to qualify as a friend of the USSR because the Red Army was already crossing the border.

In a swift and relatively bloodless coup that deposed Muraviev’s seven-day-old government, which was attempting to make peace with the Western Allies, the pro-Soviet Fatherland Front took over the reins of government under Kimon Georgiev. He ordered the Bulgarian armed forces not to resist the Soviet invasion, and signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR on 9 September. All these geopolitical manoeuvres caused considerable strife within Bulgaria, principally between pro- and anti-German factions. Also, the Bulgarian ground troops in Macedonia had to fight their way free from their erstwhile German allies in order to regain their native soil.

After the Red Army’s arrival on Bulgarian soil Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s blue-eyed boy who had controlled all the foreign Communist parties for him in his capacity as boss of the Comintern, arrived to commence his very hands-on style of rule. The Fatherland Front was ostensibly a merger of political parties that would run the country with an appearance of democracy. Yet, its first priority was to purge anyone who had a record of thinking independently. In the usual Soviet way, they were declared to be fascists and imprisoned or executed in two purges: in Dimitrov’s own words, ‘the wild one’ and the judicial one. Figures for the victims arbitrarily killed range as high as 138,000.
²
Dimitrov’s Minister of Defence, General Ivan Genaro, later boasted to KGB General Sudoplatov, ‘Bulgaria is the only socialist country without dissidents in the West because … we wiped them out before they were able to escape [abroad].’
³

That was a euphemism for the massacre of tens of thousands of Bulgarian intellectuals, non-Communist politicians, journalists and academics under a programme supervised by Dimitrov to crush any sense of Bulgarian nationality.
⁴
A notable exception was made for Tsar Boris’s widowed consort and her 8-year-old son, Prince Simeon, who were allowed to take into exile at least some of their personal wealth – which makes one suspect some shady deal behind the scenes.
⁵

A very different sort of woman operated the Fatherland Front’s network of local search-and-kill committees. She was a violent and ruthless ex-partisan named Tsola Dragoicheva, who had spent several years in a concentration camp. Her technique was to compile random ‘black lists’ of
possible
opponents for trial in ‘people’s courts’. As happened to other activists, she herself eventually fell foul of the system in 1949 and was put out to grass, but not imprisoned or executed.
⁶

Bulgaria after 1945.

Among the early moves of Dimitrov’s regime in Bulgaria was the reform of the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet by removing letters that did not exist in the Russian alphabet – itself reformed by Lenin in 1917. The argument was that these letters were bourgeois and elitist, therefore not permissible in the new ‘socialist’ Bulgaria. This move was pushed through despite strong opposition from surviving writers, educators and others, who resented this distancing of their orthography from Old Slavonic, simply to fall in line with Soviet practice. As from 27 February 1945 only documents written in the modified alphabet had legal effect in Bulgaria. It was a strange priority when nearly half a million Bulgarian soldiers in three armies were still fighting in Yugoslavia to hamper the withdrawal of German forces in Greece. Also in 1945, with Dimitrov’s aid, the KGB started mining high-grade uranium ore at Bukovo, only forty miles from Sofia. After the ore from Jáchymov was analysed and found to be low in uranium content, Bukovo became the most important source of fissile material for the Soviet A-bomb.
⁷

In whatever alphabet, Kimon Georgiev must have seen the writing on the wall. He was ousted from his party and political functions, which were taken over by Georgi Dimitrov the following year. Stalin’s faithful follower, however, then tried to do a deal with Yugoslavia’s Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, on the grounds that they were all ‘southern Slavs’, which is the meaning of Yugo-slavia. That failed because Tito was not interested in an equal union, only in absorbing Bulgaria as an additional republic in his Yugoslavian federation.

As in all the other satellite states, the pro-Moscow regime set up a KGB clone: Komitet za Darzhavna Sigurnost (KDS) or Committee of State Security. In line with the organisation of the ‘mother house’, so to speak, the First Chief Directorate was dedicated to foreign intelligence; the Second Chief Directorate was for counter-espionage; of the Sixth Chief Directorate, the first department organised and snooped on intellectuals and artists, the second spied on university staff and students, and the third kept watch on priests and ‘unreliable elements’ like Jews, Armenians and Turks. Early in 1945 a decree of Interior Minister Anton Yugov established the first of what would be a nationwide network of concentration camps for alleged enemies of the regime.

Nikola Petkov, leader of the Agrarian Party, was accused of being an ‘agent of a foreign power’. He replied to the accusation in parliament by pointing out that Dimitrov had been a Soviet citizen until two days before taking office, and was obviously therefore an agent of a foreign power, whose capital was in Moscow. Spared until the peace treaty was signed in Paris in February 1947, he was then arrested in a fight with KDS men on the floor of parliament, given a fake trial and hanged as a traitor.
⁸

Dimitrov was completely out of touch with his fellow Bulgarians, having lived in exile for twenty-two years, but that probably made it easier to turn the country of his birth into a carbon copy of Stalin’s Russia. He brought with him a hard core of comrades who had spent years in the USSR, but they were already old men; the senior in-country politician was Traicho Kostov, who was considered likely to inherit Dimitrov’s power. He showed his loyalty to Dimitrov by managing the Red Terror of 1944–6, but was himself purged in March of 1949 for stubbornly trying to prevent the wholesale post-war looting of Bulgaria to feed Soviet industry.

A visibly very sick man, Dimitrov travelled to Moscow for medical care and died there in July of the same year, prompting rumours that he had been quietly done away with because Stalin considered him too well known in the international Communist movement to be put on trial as a ‘Titoist deviationist’. Dimitrov’s brother-in-law Vulko Chervenkov – who had served in Russia as an agent of NKVD under the code-name ‘Spartak’ and been principal of Moscow’s Marx–Lenin school for indoctrination of the foreign comrades – manoeuvred his way into the dual posts of General Secretary of BKP and prime minister, which gave him total power. He expelled 100,000 of the 460,000 party members to purge BKP of any non-Stalinist or nationalist influences which might impede his crash programme for the collectivisation of agriculture, rising from 12 per cent of the total arable area in 1950 to 61 per cent by 1953, with productivity dropping as a result. International trade was restricted to other members of the Soviet bloc.

By 1952 his repression was at its height, with a network of 100 concentration or forced labour camps in a population of only 8 million people. Run by the Interior Ministry, the Bulgarian Gulag was called Trudovo-Vazpritatelni Obshchezhitiya (TVO), echoing faithfully the deceptive title of the Soviet Gulag camps
ispravitelno-trudoviye lagery
or corrective labour camps. Tens of thousands of alleged ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were locked up and brutally treated by criminals working for the camp administration, as in the Allgemeine-SS camps. The most infamous Bulgarian camp was Belenè, on Pirin island, which lies in the middle of the Danube.

Starting in 1949 the Bulgarian state waged war on the Evangelical Church with what was called ‘the Pastors’ Trial’, in which thirteen pastors were convicted of counter-revolutionary activities and received sentences of varying lengths in Belenè for proclaiming Christianity in an atheist state. Pastor Haralan Popov survived thirteen years in the camps and later published his autobiography, translated into English as
Tortured for His Faith.
At least the pastors knew why they were being punished; most detainees had no idea why they were there because, under Bulgarian law,
anyone
could be imprisoned for six months without trial. They were then released and immediately rearrested for another six months; in 1962 the period of incarceration without trial was increased to five years. Eventually Belenè held up to 7,000 inmates in grossly inadequate conditions, but while the pastors were there the camp already held seventy-five women and 2,248 male prisoners – which number included Konstantin Muraviev, the last non-Communist prime minister, who had surprisingly not been executed and would survive his incarceration.

The Belenè camp was closed officially after 1959, but used between 1985 and 1989 for Bulgarian Turks who refused to change their names and surnames to Bulgarian ones in a government ‘programme of national unity’. Today Belenè is still a prison, but the other half of Pirin island is a nature reserve. Second for brutality to Belenè was the camp at Skravena, where 1,643 infants and children were held under the Russian system of
krugovaya poruka
, or collective responsibility, which punished the entire families of ‘criminals’. Other notable concentration camps were at Kutsiyan, Rositsa, Bogdanov Dol and Bobov Dol, Nozharevo, Bosna and Chernevo, where what were called in the USSR
byvshye lyudi
or ‘former people’ – like army officers, landowners, Agrarian Party members, social democrats, anarchists and also Communist resistance heroes – were removed from the Stalinist society they might otherwise have ‘polluted’. The camp at Lovech in central Bulgaria was infamous throughout the eighteen years of its existence for the brutality of the guards, beating inmates working 18-hour days and hired out as slave labour on nearby collective farms and construction sites until they died of malnutrition and abuse, the corpses piled up by the latrines until there were enough to justify despatching a truckload for burial in mass graves. So terrified were inmates of being reported by a fellow prisoner for saying something that could be misinterpeted that many spoke only when no one else was in earshot, just enough to make sure they had not lost the power of speech.

In overall charge of the camps was Vice-Minister of the Interior Mircho Spasov, who not only visited them, to see conditions for himself, but threatened guards whom he considered not to be brutal enough. Many infants arrested with their parents were simply killed in transit or on arrival at the camp; those who survived spent up to the first ten years of their lives there, witnessing scenes of violence and murder. Many emerged with lifelong physical or psychological problems, to find themselves debarred from higher education. Some of these victims later banded together under the banner ‘Children of the Camps’ to demand compensation from the post-Communist governments, but this has so far been refused on the grounds that they were
too young to suffer from the experience
.
⁹

In addition to those sent to the camps, some 25,000 people were forcibly exiled to remote corners of the country. As to how so many ‘enemies of the people’, and ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ were identified in the first place, in 1972 the author was directing a BBC TV film in and around the Black Sea resort of Slunchev Bryag – Sunny Beach, in English. Inside the beautifully laid-out
turisticheski compleks
itself there were no indications that one was in a country ruled by a totalitarian regime; indeed Bulgarian law had wisely been suspended in the resort to encourage Western visitors to come and enjoy themselves in an atmosphere without ubiquitous fear. However, as the BBC team found when filming outside this privileged area, life was very different for the locals. The film crew was accompanied everywhere by a French-speaking ‘liaison producer’ from Bulgarian Television, who wrote a report of where we had been and what had been done at the end of each day. I had a certain sympathy for him, trying not to be obstructive to us and yet please his masters. When setting up for a shot of the endless sandy beaches, open sea and blue skies, he would say, ‘Do not point the camera north. That is forbidden,’ or ‘We cannot stop here. It is better to drive on a few miles.’ As to why filming to the north with a 20:1 zoom lens was not a good idea, the reason may have been a forced-labour camp reputed to be somewhere in that direction, whose 250 inmates worked and died in a quarry, breaking rocks for the construction of a luxury villa for party fat cats to take their holidays in. On another day, after recce-ing some ancient ruins outside the resort, the author noticed a plaque on a house wall in the nearby village. Able to read Cyrillic script, he asked what exactly it meant. There was an embarrassed pause until the ‘liaison producer’ said, ‘This is the house of a BKP member.’