Revolution 1989 (31 page)

Most Bulgarians were not aware there
was
a ‘Turkish question’. Ethnic Turks comprised about 900,000 people, 10 per cent of Bulgaria’s population, concentrated in two main areas in the north-east and the far south of the country. They were descendants of the Ottomans who had ruled Bulgaria for centuries, though now they were a powerless minority. They had lived at peace with their neighbours for many generations on good agricultural land where they had been industrious and efficient farmers. Though Islamic in some customs, few practised any religion. They were well educated and seemed an integrated part of Bulgarian society. ‘It was hard to tell who was an ethnic Turk and who wasn’t, except by name,’ said Ionni Pojarleff, a physicist who lived in Sofia but for years had a country home in one of the so-called Turkish villages. ‘We were all oppressed together. But then from the mid-1980s the regime went for the Turks - and that changed everything. ’
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It was a brutal campaign launched by the Bulgarian dictator in a cynical attempt to take the minds of his subjects from the grim and decaying condition of the country. Todor Zhivkov had held power since 1954. While he seemed on the surface still to have an iron grip and he was as feared by the people as ever, there were signs in the mid- 1980s that he was starting to ail. Bulgaria, like neighbouring Romania, had never been a democracy. It had gained independence only in the 1870s and was run along the lines of an ancient Eastern-style despotism as much as a Communist one. Zhivkov’s rule was absolute and personal, like that of a pasha or occidental potentate. Though he was not a monster on the scale of Ceauescu, he could be vicious. There were harsh camps in his Balkan gulag, such as the notorious two at Skravena and Belene, where thousands of political prisoners had been sent until the mid-1960s. Zhivkov had murdered hundreds of opponents and possessed a loyal secret police force, the Sigmost, as his sharp sword and hefty shield.

Before he became the supreme leader he was in charge of the Party’s private army, the People’s Militia, and had organised the purges in the late 1940s against ‘deviationists’. He knew how to use brute force. But he never sought to be a living god. He just wanted to stay in power, where he could continue to embezzle money on a grand scale which he could stash away in Switzerland, and tour the country at his leisure staying at the two dozen well-appointed mansions that he had appropriated for his family’s use. A short, squat, pug-faced figure, he could be ‘Uncle Tosho’, with some folksy charm when he chose to display it, who spoke the language of common Bulgarians. But as his long-time Foreign Minister, Petar Mladenov, used to say in private, ‘Zhivkov is morbid, suspicious and maniacally ambitious.’
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He had emerged as an orthodox Stalinist, but for three decades he tacked and trimmed when that was required. It was when he felt threatened that he played the nationalist card and began the barbaric forced assimilation of the Turks. Earlier, in the 1970s, the regime had compelled Bulgaria’s 100,000 or so Slavic Muslims - known as Pomaks - to change their Islamic names. That had been accompanied by relatively little trouble or overt opposition. Though around 500 Pomaks were jailed for refusing to comply with the law, there had been limited violence. In 1985, Zhivkov banned education in Turkish, closed down Islamic cultural centres and said he was ‘encouraging’ the Turks to change their names. Hundreds of thousands had done so by the middle of 1987 when the campaign was said to be completed. A Zhivkov aide said it had been ‘entirely voluntary because a spontaneous groundswell of pride in Bulgaria swept throughout the country’. Away from the capital, and any publicity, the truth about the assimilation campaign emerged later. The militia had conducted their night raids on hundreds of villages, nearly 1,000 ethnic Turks had been killed and more than 25,000 imprisoned.
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While Turkish villages were being despoiled, major building works were proceeding apace in another part of rural Bulgaria. Pravets, around 120 kilometres east of Sofia, was being turned into a ‘model village’ of some 4,200 inhabitants. One of the few motorways in the country linked it directly with the capital. Some light industrial plants were established there for the first time. New equipment was provided for the collective farm and for a few private plots where individuals were - exceptionally in Bulgaria - allowed to work on their own land. Many homes were rebuilt, including the once-modest house where Todor Zhivkov was born on 7 September 1911. It was opened as a museum eulogising the heroic role played by the leader in Bulgaria’s struggle for socialism, his sacrifice as a partisan fighter during the war and his inspirational leadership of the country over the decades. Zhivkov, a printer in the state-owned stationery office for most of his early life, had in fact been a minor functionary in the Communist underground in the 1930s, and never took part in any partisan action during the resistance against the Nazis. He became a leading figure in the Communist movement only after the war when he was the much-loathed head of the Sofia police.

 

Nationalism was a double-edged sword for the dictators in the satellite regimes. It was hard for a Communist leader who had been placed in his position by the Soviet Union to wield it effectively for long. The public would remain silent from fear, but in private people would ask inconvenient questions about the country’s colonial status as part of the Soviet empire. In Bulgaria’s case there were further complications. Bulgaria had long and close cultural ties with Russia. The Tsars had liberated the Bulgarians from Ottoman rule and the two countries were traditional allies. The languages were similar. They both used the Cyrillic alphabet. Historically they had both been Orthodox in religion. After World War Two, Bulgaria seemed the most slavish of all the satellite states. Its first Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, was born Bulgarian but had been exiled for nearly two decades. He was an astute Bolshevik activist who became world-famous after he was accused (wrongly) by the Nazis of starting the Reichstag fire. He lived in the USSR for many years as the feared head of the Comintern. He was a Soviet citizen when Stalin sent him back to Sofia to turn Bulgaria into a Communist state along Soviet lines.

After Dimitrov died in 1949 a vicious power struggle ensued in Sofia. Zhivkov was selected, with Moscow’s backing, as the Bulgarian leader in 1955. When Zhivkov took power he outdid any of the other socialist leaders in obsequious greasing to whomever held power in the Kremlin. The joke often went around Sofia that when Khrushchev (later it was attributed to Brezhnev) met Zhivkov he asked, ‘Todor, do you smoke?’. The reply came quick as a flash: ‘Why, should I?’ It was no joke when in 1972 Zhivkov approached Brezhnev and requested that Bulgaria should be allowed to join the Soviet Union as the sixteenth republic. Brezhnev wisely turned the idea down.
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Zhivkov had remained in power for three decades by the straightforward expedient of doing whatever Moscow requested of him. But now his relationship with the Soviet Union was cooling. The main reason, though not the only one, was financial. The Soviets gave the Bulgarians, along with the other COMECON countries, a giant subsidy in the form of cheap oil. Bulgaria immediately turned round and sold it to the West at world market prices and pocketed the difference in hard currency. When the Soviets found out about the scam they were furious. The Bulgarians, like most of the other satellite states, were heavily indebted to the West - by more than US$ 10 billion in the mid-1980s. The Bulgarians used their debt levels as an excuse, which infuriated the Soviets further. When oil prices were high and rising, the Bulgarian wheeze was an annoyance. The Soviets were themselves receiving high revenues. But after oil prices started to collapse in the mid-1980s the Soviet Union lost almost half of its foreign earnings. It began heading towards economic catastrophe and Moscow’s resentment of Bulgaria mounted. Officials in the Kremlin never forgave Zhivkov, least of all Mikhail Gorbachev, who said it was ‘entirely unacceptable that Soviet citizens should make sacrifices this way to help Comrade Zhivkov’.
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To Gorbachev, the Bulgarian dictator was one of what the Soviet leader’s aides called a ‘gang of four’ hardline men, hangovers from a different era, who refused to move with the times and embrace the ‘new thinking’ that would save communism. The Soviet leader linked him with Honecker, Husák and Ceauescu. He was losing patience with them. Gorbachev was an enigma to Zhivkov, now in his mid-seventies and long corrupted by power and lavish living. Initially Zhivkov did what he had always done and imitated the top man in Moscow. He welcomed perestroika and glasnost. He spoke admiringly of Gorbachev and came up with his own reform plans, grandiloquently called ‘Keynotes of the Conception about the Further Construction of Socialism in Bulgaria’. The proposals went further than the Soviet Union’s, particularly about liberalising trade and introducing private enterprise. But he did not mean any of it. His big mistake was that he did not think Gorbachev believed any of the reform ideas either. He imagined it would be enough simply to make sweeping statements, agree with the Soviet leader whenever he was asked an opinion, but in reality do nothing. When he realised Gorbachev was serious he tried to distance himself from the Soviets. But it was too late.

Domestically, he was beginning to face the kind of opposition he had never encountered before. It was still muted, but he now had to find new ways of dealing with dissent. Zhivkov had been adept at cultivating and flattering the intelligentsia to keep them on his side. Occasionally he would revert to the brutal methods of the past, but on the whole, as the essayist and historian Maria Todorova said, ‘he was successful at corrupting and dividing . . . us while not creating martyrs’. That mixture of bribery and intimidation had worked for a long time. No longer. There was still no samizdat publishing in Bulgaria, but for the first time dissidents ceased their isolation. They began to hold meetings, if not to form even semi-official groups. They did not dare, yet, to talk about dismantling communism, let alone attack the supreme leader. That was too dangerous. But they discussed forming independent trade unions like Solidarity and, particularly, they talked about the environment. A beautiful old border town on the Danube in the north of the country, Ruse, was being destroyed by pollution from Giurgiu, a chemical plant in Romania that was spewing poison into the air. Scores of people from the town and nearby villages were suffering from severe lung disease. The historic monastery at Rila in the south-west of the country, one of Bulgaria’s most important tourist destinations, was threatened by a scheme to dam two tributary rivers of the Danube for a hydroelectricity plant. The Traika plain, near the border with Greece, once had the best agricultural land in Bulgaria. For the last decade it was being polluted by a ferrous metal plant. Bulgarian cities were clogged with air pollution seventeen times the European average. Protest was beginning to grow under a loose organisation calling itself Ecoglasnost.
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Zhivkov was not seriously worried about a few environmental campaigners, though he detested the idea of a free trade union that might stir up the workers. He still held all the levers of power in his hands. He and a few cronies of his own age retreated further into their own world, in Uncle Tosho’s case increasingly fuelled by alcohol. When, in the late 1980s, a French journalist, Sylvie Kaufmann, went to interview him the appointment was fixed for 10 a.m. Zhivkov began by offering his interviewer a brandy. She refused, having just finished breakfast. He drank several. During their talk he was often incoherent. ‘It was embarrassing,’ she said. ‘When he meant to say Gorbachev he would instead say Brezhnev. The translator would try to correct him but he said Brezhnev again anyway.’
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NINETEEN

Moscow, Thursday 28 May 1987

 

ON A WARM SPRING EVENING, almost shirt-sleeve temperature, everything seemed calm, still and normal in Red Square. An amateur artist had set up an easel at one of the traditional positions to capture rays of sunlight on the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. A few tourists were milling around the entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum. Others were investigating the windows of the GUM department store to see if anything new or interesting had arrived recently to buy. But, as usual in the Russia of those days, it had not. What was unusual, shortly after six o’clock, was a faint buzzing sound above downtown Moscow and the sight of a small, low-flying, light propeller plane. No private aircraft existed in the Soviet Union, so its presence was a mystery. The white plane disappeared from view for a short while. Then, suddenly, it reappeared on the ground. Its wheels were heard on the cobblestones outside the Spassky Gate leading to the Kremlin and it came to a halt almost in the middle of Red Square.

The painter thought it was some sort of aeronautical display or sports event, as this was Border Guards Day, a minor national holiday. Some foreign visitors became excited as they imagined it might be Mikhail Gorbachev’s plane. His office was only about 300 metres away. A few security men stood about, looking bemused but doing nothing. The aircraft’s engine switched off, the propeller blades stopped turning and out stepped a slim, intense, dark-haired young man wearing spectacles and a red aviator’s suit. He announced himself as Matthias Rust, a nineteen-year-old bank clerk from Hamburg, who had come to the Soviet capital on a ‘mission of peace’. A friendly crowd gathered around him and he signed autographs, munching bread that well-wishers had thrust into his hands. Looking earnest, he explained that he had brought with him a twenty-two-page plan to abolish all weapons and to end the Cold War. He said he wanted to meet the Soviet leader to discuss it. After about three-quarters of an hour of total confusion he was finally taken away by police.
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The brave and bizarre adventure of Matthias Rust had begun a fortnight earlier. On 13 May he rented from his flying club outside Hamburg a Cessna 172-B, one of the smallest commercial planes on the market, and headed first across the Baltic to Norway. He stayed there a few days and then flew to Finland. Just after 1 p.m. on 28 May he took off from Helsinki’s Malmi Airport, telling Finnish air traffic control that he was heading for Stockholm. Immediately after his final contact with them he turned east. Helsinki controllers tried to reach him to tell him he was off his course to Sweden, but he had switched off his radio. Soviet military radar spotted him at 14.29 as soon as he crossed into their air space on the Finland/Estonia border, flying at around 1,800 feet. They assigned his plane a ‘contact’ number - 8255 - used by suspected enemy planes. But then a series of confusing accidents, mistakes and misjudgements led to one of the most humiliating embarrassments for the Soviet military since World War Two.
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