Bulgarian Communist Party

Logo of the BKP

The Bulgarian Communist Party ( BKP for short ; Bulgarian Българска комунистическа партия Bălgarska Komunističeska Partija ) was the name of the Bulgarian Socialist Party from 1919 to 1924 and from 1948 to April 1, 1990. It was the leading party in the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1990 The official party newspaper between 1948 and 1990 was the Rabotničesko delo ("The Workers' Matter ").

history

Until 1945

The roots of the party lie in a social democratically oriented workers' party in Bulgaria, known as Tesni socialisti (Eng. "Narrower socialists" ), which was founded in 1903. The first party leader was Dimitar Blagoev , followed by Georgi Dimitrov . The party was against the First World War , sympathized with the October Revolution in Russia and joined the Communist International when it was founded in 1919 as the Bulgarian Communist Party . In 1923 she initiated an uprising in Bulgaria , which was bloodily suppressed. In 1925 she initiated several attacks against dignitaries of the church, high-ranking officers and politicians, and against the Tsar Boris III. , including the Sveta Nedelja Cathedral bombing which killed over 200 people and injured over 500.

In 1938 the party merged with the Labor Party to form the Bulgarian Labor Party . In 1948 it merged with the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (despite the resistance of right-wing Social Democrats around Kosta Lultschew ) and became the Bulgarian Communist Party again .

The BKP dominated the Patriotic Front coalition , which came to power in 1944 towards the end of World War II through a coup with the support of the Red Army . She organized the execution processes of the so-called People's Courts, in which the last members of the government such as Bogdan Filow , Petar Gabrowski , 8 other advisers to the Tsar , 22 ministers of the Filov cabinet, the former Prime Ministers Dobri Boschilow and Ivan Ivanov Bagrjanow and another 66 members of the Bulgarian parliament were put to death were convicted. Between September 9th and 12th, several hundred leading figures were captured, murdered or disappeared forever by the communists. These days went down in Bulgarian history as the days of the red terror .

From 1945

Dimitrov was a member of the party's Central Committee from its inception until his death in 1949 and was Bulgaria's head of state since 1946.

After Dimitrov's death, the party was led by Valko Chervenkov , a radical Stalinist who oversaw a variety of party cleansing operations under Moscow's leadership. The Bulgarian Communist Party joined the newly founded Cominform alliance in 1948 . The exclusion of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia there was also followed by “purges” of Titoism suspects domestically, e. B. against Trajtscho Kostow . Thousands of party members and alleged counter-revolutionaries were arrested. In May 1954, a year after Stalin's death, Chervenkov was deposed.

The party chairman from 1954 to 1989 was Todor Zhivkov , who supported the Soviet Union with conviction and was close to it even after Nikita Khrushchev was deposed by Leonid Brezhnev . During this time, the assimilation processes against the Bulgarian Muslims and Turks began, with the result that more than 300,000 people left the country.

Since 1990

The call for political reforms that flooded Eastern Europe in 1989 forced Zhivkov to resign and the party moved in a reformist direction. On January 15, 1990, the party stripped its claim to leadership from the constitution. In the same year it broke away from Marxism-Leninism and renamed itself the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). However, she has not distanced herself from her communist past and the crimes associated with it (as of 2009).

As a result, some members split off and formed their own parties. They used the name Bulgarian Communist Party to be able to continue their tradition. However, these parties have only a small number of supporters. One of them, the Communist Party of Bulgaria with Alexander Paunow, is part of the coalition for Bulgaria , which is led by the BSP. Another notable party led by Vasil Petrov Kolarov and Mincho Petrov Mintschew Party of Bulgarian Communists , however, took as part of the Bulgarian Left Coalition that of the German party Die Linke was inspired (along with Balgarskata Lewiza ) to the 2009 parliamentary elections in part . The grandson of the former communist leader Vasil Kolarov accused the BSP of betraying socialist ideas and of being removed from the left political spectrum, calling it a right-wing party and claiming that his grandfather criticized it.

The coalition for Bulgaria won 17.1% of the vote and 48 out of 240 seats in the 2001 elections. In the parliamentary elections on June 25, 2005, the coalition won 34.2% of the vote and 82 out of 240 seats and ruled in a three-party coalition with the liberal NDSW and the minority party DPS . After the parliamentary elections in 2009, in which she only achieved 17.7% of the vote and 40 seats, she was together with the DPS opposition party. The Bulgarian Left Coalition won 8,762 or 0.21% of the vote in these elections, remained without a mandate and then dissolved again. After the elections in May 2013 , the BSP and the DPS were able to form a minority government that was tolerated by the Ataka , but this collapsed after around a year and a half and in the subsequent elections in October 2014 , the proportion of the BSP-led party alliance decreased to 15.4 % of the vote and 39 seats.

Chairman of the party

• Dimitar Blagoew (1903-1924)
• Wassil Kolarow (1924-1933)
• Georgi Dimitrov (1933-1949)
• Walko Chervenkov (1949–1954)
• Todor Zhivkov (1954–1989)
• Petar Mladenow (1989–1990)
• Alexandar Lilow (1990)

literature

• Michail Gruev: Organizational Development, Idea Processes and Internal Struggles in the Bulgarian Communist Party during the 1970s and 1980s. In: Uwe Backes , Günther Heydemann , Clemens Vollnhals (eds.): State socialisms in comparison. State Party - Social Policy - Opposition (=  writings of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism 64). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-525-37077-3 , pp. 379-387.

Web links

Commons : Bulgarian Communist Party  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Крум Благов: 50-те най-големи атентата в българската история . Retrieved July 14, 2012.
2. ↑ January 15, 1990. Tagesschau (ARD) , January 15, 1990, accessed on February 15, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Interview with Wassil P. Kolarow  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Results on the website of the central election commission ( memento of the original from February 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.