Todor Zhivkov
Encyclopedia
Todor Khristov Zhivkov (7 September 1911 – 5 August 1998) was a communist politician and leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) from March 4, 1954 until November 10, 1989.

He became First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party
Bulgarian Communist Party
The Bulgarian Communist Party was the communist and Marxist-Leninist ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 1990 when the country ceased to be a communist state...

 in 1954 and remained on this position for 35 years, until 1989, thus becoming the longest-serving leader of any Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

 nation, and one of the longest ruling non-royal leaders in history. His rule marked a period of unprecedented political and economic stability for Bulgaria, marked both by complete submission of Bulgaria to Soviet rule and a desire for expanding ties with the West. His rule remained unchallenged until the deterioration of East-West relations in the 1980s, when a stagnating economic situation, a worsening international image and growing careerism and corruption in the BCP weakened his positions. He resigned on November 10, 1989, under pressure by senior BCP members due to his refusal to recognize problems and deal with public protests. Only two months later, in January 1990, the People's Republic of Bulgaria and its Communist regime ceased to exist.

Early life

Zhivkov was born in the Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

n village of Pravets
Pravets
Pravets is a town in central western Bulgaria, located approximately 60 km from the capital Sofia.Pravets has a population of 4,512 people. Mountains surround it, which allows for a mild climate with rare winds. In the outskirts there is a small lake used for fishing and recreation...

 into a peasant family. In 1928, he joined the Bulgarian National Youth Union (BSNM), an organisation closely linked with the Bulgarian Workers Party (BRP) – later the Bulgarian Communist Party
Bulgarian Communist Party
The Bulgarian Communist Party was the communist and Marxist-Leninist ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 1990 when the country ceased to be a communist state...

 (BKP). The following year he obtained a post at the Darzhavna pechatnitsa, the official government publisher in Sofia
Sofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...

. In 1932, he joined the BRP proper, later serving as secretary of its Second Borough Committee and as a member of its Sofia County Committee. Although the BRP was banned along with all other political parties after the uprising of 19 May 1934, it continued fielding a handful of non-party National Assembly Deputies and Zhivkov retained his posts at its Sofia structure.

During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, Zhivkov participated in Bulgaria's resistance movement against the country's alignment with Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

. Only the upper classes in the bigger cities had pledged alliance to the Nazis. In 1943, he was involved in organising the Chavdar
Chavdar
Chavdar was a 16th-century semi-legendary Bulgarian hajduk voivode, a leader of a band of outlaws and a protector of the people against Ottoman injustice. Hajduks would usually take to the woods and wage guerrilla warfare on the ruling Turks. One of the greatest hajduk figures in Bulgarian...

 partisan detachment in and around his place of birth, becoming deputy commander of the Sofia operations area in the summer of 1944. Under his rule, many fellow former combatants with Chavdar were to rise to positions of prominence in Bulgarian affairs. He is said to have coordinated partisan movements with those of pro-Soviet army units during the 9 September 1944 uprising.

Rise to power

After 9 September 1944, Zhivkov became head of the Sofia
Sofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...

 police force, restyled as the Narodna Militsiya (People's Militia). He was elected to the BKP Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...

 as a candidate member in 1945 and a full member in 1948. In the run-up to the 1949 treason trial against Traicho Kostov
Traicho Kostov
Traicho Kostov Djunev was a Bulgarian politician, former President of the Council of Ministers and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party....

, Zhivkov criticised the Party and judicial authorities for what he claimed was their leniency with regard to Kostov. This placed him in the Stalinist hardline
Hardline
In politics, hardline refers to the doctrine, policy, and posturing of a government or political body as being absolutist and sometimes authoritarian. The hardline position is usually extremist and uncompromising....

 wing of the Party. In 1950, Zhivkov became a candidate member of the BKP Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...

, then led by Vulko Chervenkov
Vulko Chervenkov
-Biography:Chervenkov was born in Zlatitsa, Bulgaria. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1919 and participated in communist youth group activities and newspaper editing. He took part in the failed 1923 September Uprising and was sentenced to death, but was allowed to emigrate to the...

, leading to a full membership in 1951. In the years which followed, he was involved in countering countryside resistance to forced farm collectivisation
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...

 in north-western Bulgaria.

After Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

's death, an emphasis on shared leadership emerged. Chervenkov stood down as BKP first secretary in 1954 and Zhivkov took his place, but Chervenkov retained some of his powers as prime minister
Prime minister
A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...

. Bulgarian opinion at the time interpreted this as a self-preservation move by Chervenkov, since Zhivkov was a less well known figure in the party. After Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

 delivered his famous secret speech against Stalin at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

 20th Congress, a BKP Central Committee plenary meeting was convened in April 1956 to agree to adopt a new Krushchevite line. At that plenum, Zhivkov criticised Chervenkov as a disciple of Stalin's, had him demoted from prime minister to a cabinet post, and promoted former Committee for State Security
Committee for State Security
The Committee for State Security , popularly known as State Security was the name of the Bulgarian secret service during the Communist rule of Bulgaria and the Cold War ....

 (DS) head Anton Yugov
Anton Yugov
Anton Tanev Yugov was a leading member of the Bulgarian Communist Party served as Prime Minister of the country from 1956 to 1962. Anton Tanev Yugov is Honorary Citizen of Tirana, Albania....

 to the post of prime minister. It was at this point that he became the de facto leader of Bulgaria. Since then, Zhivkov was associated with the "April Line," which had anti-Stalinist credentials. At the BKP 8th Congress in late 1962, Zhivkov accused Yugov of anti-Party activity, expelled him from the BKP and had him placed under house arrest
House arrest
In justice and law, house arrest is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to his or her residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all...

. As prime minister, Zhivkov then held both of Bulgaria's leading political and government posts. Though the post of head of state was traditionally reserved for the leader of the surviving pro-Communist faction of the BZNS Bulgarian Agricultural National Union, the "Zhivkov Constitution" adopted by referendum in July 1971 promoted him to chairman of the new Council of State
Council of State
The Council of State is a unique governmental body in a country or subdivision thereoff, though its nature may range from the formal name for the cabinet to a non-executive advisory body surrounding a head of state. It is sometimes regarded as the equivalent of a privy council.-Modern:*Belgian...

 (president), giving him de jure control of Bulgarian affairs in addition of his already present de facto control.

Economic

In the mid-1950s, Soviet-style centralized planning produced economic indicators showing that Bulgarians were returning to their prewar lifestyle in some respects: real wages increased 75%, consumption of meat, fruit, and vegetables increased markedly, medical facilities and doctors became available to more of the population, and in 1957 collective farm workers benefited from the first agricultural pension and welfare system in Eastern Europe.

In 1959 the Communist Party borrowed from the Chinese Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...

 to symbolize a sudden burst of economic activity to be injected into the Third Five-Year Plan (1958-1962), whose original scope was quite conservative. According to the revised plan, industrial production would double and agricultural production would triple by 1962; a new agricultural collectivization and consolidation drive would achieve great economies of scale in that branch; investment in light industry would double, and foreign trade would expand. Following the Chinese model, all of Bulgarian society was to be propagandized and mobilized to meet the planning goals. Two purposes of the grandiose revised plan were to keep Bulgaria in step with the Soviet bloc, all of whose members were embarking on plans for accelerated growth, and to quell internal party conflicts. Amalgamation of collective farms cut their number by 70 percent, after which average farm acreage was second only to the Soviet Union among countries in Eastern Europe. Zhivkov, whose "theses" had defined the goals of the plan, purged Politburo members and party rivals Boris Taskov (in 1959) and Anton Yugov
Anton Yugov
Anton Tanev Yugov was a leading member of the Bulgarian Communist Party served as Prime Minister of the country from 1956 to 1962. Anton Tanev Yugov is Honorary Citizen of Tirana, Albania....

 (in 1962), citing their criticism of his policy as economically obstructionist. Already by 1960, however, Zhivkov had been forced to redefine the impossible goals of his theses. Lack of skilled labor and materials made completion of projects at the prescribed pace impossible. Harvests were disastrously poor in the early 1960s; peasant unrest forced the government to raise food prices; and the urban dissatisfaction that resulted from higher prices compounded a crisis that broke in the summer of 1962. Blame fell on Zhivkov's experiments with decentralized planning, which was totally abandoned by 1963. Despite this, by 1960 the value produced by heavy industry matched that of light industry, and food processing for export grew rapidly. Throughout the second phase, budget expenditures consisted primarily of reinvestment in sectors given initial priority. The completion of collectivization in 1958 had shifted 678,000 peasants, about 20 percent of the active labor force, into industrial jobs.
By the early 1960s, however, changes to the system were obviously needed to achieve sustained growth in all branches of production, including agriculture. Specific incentives to reform were shortages of labor and energy and the growing importance of foreign trade in the "thaw" years of the mid-1960s. Consequently, in 1962 the Fourth Five-Year Plan began an era of economic reform that brought a series of new approaches to the old goal of intensive growth. In industry the "New System of Management" was introduced in 1964 and lasted until 1968. This approach intended to streamline economic units and make enterprise managers more responsible for performance. In June 1964, about fifty industrial enterprises, mostly producers of textiles and other consumer goods, were placed under the new system. Wage
Wage
A wage is a compensation, usually financial, received by workers in exchange for their labor.Compensation in terms of wages is given to workers and compensation in terms of salary is given to employees...

s, bonuses, and investment funds were tied to enterprise profits, up to 70% of which could be retained. Outside investment funds were to come primarily from bank credit rather than the state budget. In 1965 state subsidies still accounted for 63% of enterprise investment funds, however, while 30% came from retained enterprise earnings and only 7% from bank credits. By 1970 budget subsidies accounted for only 27% of investment funds, while bank credits jumped to 39%, and retained enterprise earnings reached 34%. The pilot enterprises did very well, earning profits that were double the norm. By 1967 two-thirds of industrial production came from firms under the new system, which by that time had embraced areas outside consumer production.
Before the end of the 1960s, however, Bulgarian economic planning moved back toward the conventional CPE approach. Many Western analysts attributed the Bulgarian retreat from the reforms of the 1960s to tension caused by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. International events may well have played a role, but the timing of the retreat and the invasion suggest another component: dissatisfaction among the Party elite with the results and ideological implications of the reform. For example, in July 1968, one month before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria's unorthodox, three-tiered pricing system was eliminated. The party leadership had never accepted the concept of free and flexible pricing for some products, which was an important Bulgarian departure from centralized planning in the 1960s. Resistance to reform was further encouraged by a series of cases in which major enterprise directors used newly decentralized financial resources to line their own pockets. However, some of the recentralization measures, such as the creation of an agricultural-industrial complex, also received domestic criticism. Both Western and domestic customers remained dissatisfied with the quality of many Bulgarian manufactures. Party meetings and the press criticized monopolistic abuses resulting from irrational decisions at the top and poor implementation of rational policies at the enterprise level.

After a relative stagnation in the 1970s, the New Economic Model (NEM), instituted in 1981 as the latest economic reform program, seemingly improved the supply of consumer goods and generally upgraded the economy. In an effort to remedy the chronic distribution problems
Shortage economy
Shortage economy is a term coined by the Hungarian economist, János Kornai. He used this term to criticize the old centrally-planned economies of the communist states of the Eastern Bloc...

 of the central economy, higher economic institutions became financially accountable for damage inflicted by their decisions on subordinate levels. Complexes or associations were given explicit freedom to sign their own contracts with suppliers and customers at home and abroad. However, NEM was unable to drastically improve the quality or quantity of Bulgarian goods and produce. In 1983 Zhivkov harshly criticized all of Bulgarian industry and agriculture in a major speech, but the reforms generated by his speech did nothing to improve the situation. A large percentage of high-quality domestic goods were shipped abroad in the early 1980s to shrink Bulgaria's hard-currency debt, and the purchase of Western technology was sacrificed for the same reason, crippling technical advancement and disillusioning consumers. The NEM proved to be a failure, and GNP growth between 1981 and 1982 was only 2.9%. By 1984 Bulgaria was suffering a serious energy shortage because its Soviet-made nuclear power plant
Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant
The Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant is a nuclear power plant in Bulgaria situated north of Sofia and east of Kozloduy, a town on the Danube river, near the border with Romania. It is the country's only nuclear power plant and the largest in the region...

 was undependable and droughts reduced the productivity of hydroelectric plants. Bulgaria marked significant progress in scientific research by sending two men in space
Bulgarian astronaut program
The Bulgarian astronaut program began in 1977 when members of the Bulgarian People's Air Force where trained for space tasks. Bulgaria is the only country from the Intercosmos program to send two cosmonauts into space in a time when space missions were reserved to the world...

 and supplying 70% of all electronics in the Eastern Bloc, but infrastructure remained poorly developed well into the late 1980s.

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

 visited Bulgaria and reportedly pressured Zhivkov to make the country more competitive economically. This led to a Bulgarian version of the Soviet perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

 program. After a round of failed experimental measures, in January 1989 the Party issued Decree Number 56. This decree established "firms" as the primary unit of economic management. In a fundamental departure from the socialist prohibition of private citizens hiring labor, as many as ten people could now be hired permanently, and an unlimited number could be hired on temporary contracts. This last round of reforms by the Zhivkov regime confused rather than improved economic performance. However, statistics on growth for 1986-88 still indicated a 5.5% annual rate, up from the 3.7% rate achieved during the previous five-year plan.

Social

Even before Zhivkov, Bulgaria made significant progress in increasing life expectancy and decreasing infant mortality rates. Consistent social policies led to an increase in life expectancy to 68.1 years for men and 74.4 years for women. In 1939 the mortality rate for children under one year had been 138.9 per 1,000; by 1986 it was 18.2 per 1,000, and in 1990 it was 14 per 1,000, the lowest rate in Eastern Europe. The proportion of long-lived people in Bulgaria was quite large; a 1988 study cited a figure of 52 centenarians per 1 million inhabitants. One of the first mass HIV testing programs was initiated under Zhivkov, and as of October 1989, some 2.5 million people in Bulgaria, including about 66,000 foreigners, had been tested for HIV, and 81 Bulgarians were diagnosed as HIV positive. Increases in real incomes in agriculture rose by 6.7 percent per year during the 1960s. During this same period, industrial wages increased by 4.9 percent annually. Availability of consumer durables significantly improved in the 1970s. According to official statistics, between 1965 and 1988 the number of televisions per 100 households increased from 8 to 100; radios increased from 59 to 95; refrigerators from 5 to 96; washing machines from 23 to 96; and automobiles from 2 to 40. Available automobiles were primarily Soviet Fiats, some of which were manufactured in Bulgaria.

In the postwar era, and especiallt under Zhivkov, housing in Bulgaria improved significantly as more and better-quality homes were built. However, many of them were cramped - the average home in Bulgaria had three rooms and an area of 65 square meters. Housing remained one of the most serious shortcomings in the Bulgarian standard of living throughout Zhivkov's rule. Residential construction targets in the Five-Year Plans were regularly underfulfilled. Consequently, families often waited several years for apartments; in Sofia, where overcrowding was at its worst, the wait was as long as ten years.

The educational system, despite the addition of ideological subjects, remained relatively unchanged after the beginning of the Communist era. In 1979 Zhivkov introduced a sweeping educational reform, claiming that Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 teachings on educating youth were still not being applied completely. Zhivkov therefore created Unified Secondary Polytechnical Schools (Edinni sredni politekhnicheski uchilishta, ESPU), in which all students would receive the same general education. The system united previously separate specialized middle schools in a single, twelve-grade program heavily emphasizing technical subjects. In 1981 a national program introduced computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

s to most of the ESPUs.

Foreign

Although the Zhivkov regime often advocated closer relations and multilateral cooperation with Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

, Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

, Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...

, and Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, a number of traditional issues barred significant improvement until the late 1980s. Without exception Zhivkov imitated or supported Soviet twists and turns such as Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Substantial historical and economic ties supplemented the ideological foundation of the relationship. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bulgaria improved its diplomatic relations with nations outside the Soviet sphere. The 1970s was a period of closeness between Brezhnev's USSR and Zhivkov's Bulgaria. Zhivkov became Hero of the Soviet Union
Hero of the Soviet Union
The title Hero of the Soviet Union was the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, awarded personally or collectively for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society.-Overview:...

 in 1977. Yet, though Bulgarian émigré dissident Georgi Markov
Georgi Markov
Georgi Ivanov Markov was a Bulgarian dissident writer.Markov originally worked as a novelist and playwright, but in 1969 he defected from Bulgaria, then governed by President Todor Zhivkov...

 wrote that "[Zhivkov] served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did," in many ways he can be said to have been exploiting the USSR for political purposes, with Bulgaria serving a buffer between the USSR and NATO. Thus, he claims in his memoirs that the USSR had become "a raw material appendage to Bulgaria," something obliquely confirmed by Gorbachev when he wrote in his memoirs that "Bulgaria was a country which had lived beyond its means for a long time." An example of how the "raw material appendage" was exploited was the trade in Soviet crude oil. This would be shipped to Bulgaria's modern refinery
Refinery
A refinery is a production facility composed of a group of chemical engineering unit processes and unit operations refining certain materials or converting raw material into products of value.-Types of refineries:Different types of refineries are as follows:...

 in Burgas
Burgas
-History:During the rule of the Ancient Romans, near Burgas, Debeltum was established as a military colony for veterans by Vespasian. In the Middle Ages, a small fortress called Pyrgos was erected where Burgas is today and was most probably used as a watchtower...

 at subsidised prices, processed, and resold on world markets at a huge premium.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bulgaria gave official military support to many national liberation causes, most notably in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, (North Vietnam
North Vietnam
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam , was a communist state that ruled the northern half of Vietnam from 1954 until 1976 following the Geneva Conference and laid claim to all of Vietnam from 1945 to 1954 during the First Indochina War, during which they controlled pockets of territory throughout...

), Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

, Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....

, Angola
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa
Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in East Africa that juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the easternmost projection of the African continent...

, and the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

. In 1984 the 9,000 Bulgarian advisers stationed in Libya for military and nonmilitary aid put that country in first place among Bulgaria's Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...

 clients. Through its Kintex arms export enterprise, Bulgaria also engaged in covert military support activities, many of which were subsequently disclosed. In the 1970s, diplomatic crises with Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

 and Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

 were triggered by Bulgarian involvement in coup plots.

Under Zhivkov Bulgaria's policy toward Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...

 and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 was determined largely by the position of the Soviet Union. Events such as the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...

 automatically distanced Bulgaria from the West; then, in the early 1980s Soviet efforts to split NATO by cultivating Western Europe brought Bulgaria closer to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....

 - a position that continued through the 1980s. Even back in the 1970s, Zhivkov actively pursued better relations with the West, overcoming conservative opposition and the tentative, tourism-based approach to the West taken as early as the 1960s. Emulating Soviet détente policy of the 1970s, Bulgaria gained Western technology, expanded cultural contacts, and attracted Western investments with the most liberal foreign investment policy in Eastern Europe. As in 1956 and 1968, however, Soviet actions altered Bulgaria's position. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, which Bulgaria supported vigorously, renewed tension between Bulgaria and the West. Alleged Bulgarian implication in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 exacerbated the problem and kept relations cool through the early 1980s. A 1988 application for membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was refused because of the Turkish assimilation program, after widespread expectations of success.

Bulgarian relations with Greece, a traditional enemy, were stable throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in spite of major government changes in both countries. Zhivkov made this stability a model for the overall Balkan cooperation that was a centerpiece of his foreign policy in the 1980s. In 1986 the two countries signed a declaration of good-neighborliness, friendship, and cooperation that was based on mutual enmity toward Turkey and toward Yugoslav demands for recognition of Macedonian
Macedonians (ethnic group)
The Macedonians also referred to as Macedonian Slavs: "... the term Slavomacedonian was introduced and was accepted by the community itself, which at the time had a much more widespread non-Greek Macedonian ethnic consciousness...

 minorities in Bulgaria and Greece. An important motivation for friendship with Greece was to exploit NATO's Greek-Turkish split, which was based on the claims of the two countries in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

. In early 1989, Bulgaria signed a ten-year bilateral economic agreement with Greece.

Cultural

Until the late 1980s, Zhivkov successfully prevented unrest in the Bulgarian intellectual community. Membership in the writers' union brought enormous privilege and social stature, and that drew many dissident writers such as Georgi Dzhagarov and Lyubomir Levchev into the circle of the officially approved intelligentsia. On the other hand, entry required intellectual compromise, and refusal to compromise led to dismissal from the union and loss of all privileges. The punishment of dissident writers sometimes went far beyond loss of privileges. In 1978 émigré writer Georgi Markov
Georgi Markov
Georgi Ivanov Markov was a Bulgarian dissident writer.Markov originally worked as a novelist and playwright, but in 1969 he defected from Bulgaria, then governed by President Todor Zhivkov...

 was murdered in London for his anticommunist broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Blaga Dimitrova
Blaga Dimitrova
Blaga Nikolova Dimitrova was a Bulgarian poetess and Vice President of Bulgaria from 1992 until 1993.-Life:...

 was harshly denounced for her critical portrayal of party officials in her 1982 novel Litse.

Zhivkov also softened organized opposition by restoring symbols of the Bulgarian cultural past that had been cast aside in the postwar campaign to consolidate Soviet-style party control. Beginning in 1967, he appealed loudly to the people to remember "our motherland Bulgaria". In the late 1970s, Zhivkov mended relations with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church
Bulgarian Orthodox Church
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church - Bulgarian Patriarchate is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church with some 6.5 million members in the Republic of Bulgaria and between 1.5 and 2.0 million members in a number of European countries, the Americas and Australia...

. Zhivkov's extensive campaign of cultural restoration provided at least some common ground between him and the Bulgarian intelligentsia. In 1980 Zhivkov had improved his domestic position by appointing his daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Todorova Zhivkova was the daughter of Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, who reached the rank of senior Bulgarian Communist Party functionary and Politburo member. Her life remains uniquely controversial and colourful in the history of Communist Bulgaria and that of the Soviet...

 as chair of the commission on science, culture, and art. In this powerful position, Zhivkova became extremely popular by promoting Bulgaria's separate national cultural heritage. She spent large sums of money in a highly visible campaign to support scholars, collect Bulgarian art, and sponsor cultural institutions. Among her policies was closer cultural contact with the West; her most visible project was the spectacular national celebration of Bulgaria's 1,300th anniversary in 1981. When Zhivkova died in 1981, relations with the West had already been chilled by the Afghanistan issue, but her brief administration of Bulgaria's official cultural life was a successful phase of her father's appeal to Bulgarian national tradition to bind the country together.

Sports also prospered during Zhivkov's rule. From 1956 to 1988, Bulgaria won an unpredecented 153 Olympic medals and numerous European and world competitions in sports as diverse as volleyball
Volleyball
Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules.The complete rules are extensive...

, rhythmic gymnastics
Rhythmic gymnastics
Rhythmic gymnastics is a sport in which individuals or teams of competitors manipulate one or two pieces of apparatus: rope, clubs, hoop, ball, ribbon and Free . An individual athlete only manipulates 1 apparatus at a time...

 and wrestling
Wrestling
Wrestling is a form of grappling type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling holds. A wrestling bout is a physical competition, between two competitors or sparring partners, who attempt to gain and maintain a superior position...

.

Dissent

Regardless of whether he wore one of his many interchangeable "Stalinist" and "liberal" masks, Todor Zhivkov was never tolerant of dissent. The DS was a feared tool of control, and overt opposition largely stayed underground until the late 1980s. He even went as far as to order longtime dissident Georgi Markov
Georgi Markov
Georgi Ivanov Markov was a Bulgarian dissident writer.Markov originally worked as a novelist and playwright, but in 1969 he defected from Bulgaria, then governed by President Todor Zhivkov...

 murdered in London with a poisoned umbrella. In Zhivkov's time, Bulgarians found it extremely difficult to travel abroad.

Zhivkov was particularly intolerant of dissent within the Party. When Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

 announced his reform program, Zhivkov made a show of copying it, believing that Gorbachev wasn't really serious about glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...

or perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

.
However, he showed his true colours when he expelled several members of a human-rights watch group from the Party. Soon afterward, when several intellectuals announced the formation of the "Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost," he arrested the leaders and threw them out of the Party.

Nepotism and insistence on predanost

Zhivkov promoted his children, daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Todorova Zhivkova was the daughter of Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, who reached the rank of senior Bulgarian Communist Party functionary and Politburo member. Her life remains uniquely controversial and colourful in the history of Communist Bulgaria and that of the Soviet...

 and son Vladimir Zhivkov, in the BKP hierarchy. Lyudmila became Politburo member and introduced non-orthodox ideas as head of the arts. Son-in-law Ivan Slavkov
Ivan Slavkov
Ivan Slavkov was a Bulgarian sports boss linked to the Communist-era nomenklatura. He served as the President of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee between 1982 and 2005 and was a member of the International Olympic Committee between 1987 and 2005.During the Communist regime in Bulgaria, Slavkov...

 was made chairman of Bulgaria's state television company and later became president of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee
Bulgarian Olympic Committee
The Bulgarian Olympic Committee is a non-profit organization serving as the National Olympic Committee of Bulgaria and a part of the International Olympic Committee...

.

Apart from promoting his family, Zhivkov instituted a complex system of privileges which extended to former Resistance figures, Party members and prominenti of the sciences, arts and manufacture. In the early 1960s, he was instrumental in constructing a large set of housing, financial, educational, electoral and other benefits to be granted to a large category of people called "Active Fighters against Capitalism and Fascism" who had ostensibly been members of the rather modest Bulgarian Wartime resistance and which was expanded to absurd proportions. Without necessarily receiving great remuneration (pay differentials under Zhivkov were within the 5:1 range, with the overwhelming majority of salaries being within the 3:1 range), Party members and DS informers received very significant perquisites which involved access to accommodation, luxury imported goods, hard currency, the ability to travel abroad, superior medical and dental treatment and unhindered entry to higher education for their children. The scope of these privileges broadened as they rose in the Party hierarchy. Eminent artists, scientists and "Heroes of Socialist Labour" (mostly collective farmers and shop-floor workers) received similar privileges. Established in the early years of Zhivkov's terms in power, Corecom
Corecom
Corecom was a chain of hard-currency stores during the Communist rule in Bulgaria . Goods were often priced cheaper than in the West, however, they were still inaccessible for most Bulgarians because the national currency, the lev, was not accepted at the stores...

 was a retail chain in which foreigners could shop with hard currency, but its main customers were privileged Bulgarians close to the Zhivkov regime.

In Zhivkov's Bulgaria, money had lost many of its traditional properties, being replaced by sets of complex personal and family material and career considerations which have been described as "feudal." This hampered the prosecution in post-Zhivkov fraud and corruption trials, since no venality could be proved against those charged: they had merely received goods in kind and services which moreover had been their "legal due."

Zhivkov reserved a special attention for his birthplace of Pravets. In the 1960s this small village was declared "an Urban Community," becoming a town a decade later. In 1982 Bulgaria's first Apple ][ clone personal computer was named the Pravets. The grateful citizens of Pravets responded by erecting a heroic statue to Zhivkov which he duly had taken down, ostensibly to prevent a personal cult growing around him. It was re-erected after his death.

Throughout his tenure of power, Zhivkov surrounded himself with those who exhibited predanost (loyalty, devotion, the desire to proffer all). In his reminiscences, Vladimir Kostov, a Bulgarian secret agent who defected to France in 1978, recalls how the powerful minister of internal affairs would suffer nervous episodes before meeting Zhivkov lest his predanost should fail to come across sufficiently expressively.

Image

Throughout his term of power, Todor Zhivkov's dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

 and poor manners made him the butt of many acerbic jibes and jokes in Bulgaria's urbane circles. While the feared DS secret police was commonly said to persecute those who told political jokes, Zhivkov himself was said to have "collected" them. His popular nickname was "bai Tosho" (approximately "Ol'Uncle Tosho") or occasionally (and later), "Tato" (a dialectal word for "Dad" or "Pop"
Father
A father, Pop, Dad, or Papa, is defined as a male parent of any type of offspring. The adjective "paternal" refers to father, parallel to "maternal" for mother...

). Markov tells a story of how Zhivkov reproached a popular newspaper cartoonist for modifying his signature to resemble a pig's tail, yet did not persecute him. A handful of "licensed" satirist dissidents such as Radoy Ralin
Radoy Ralin
Radoy Ralin , born Dimitar Stoyanov , was a famous Bulgarian dissident, poet, and satirist.After the downfall of the Communist regime, he was urged to run for Parliament, but adamantly refused....

 enjoyed some popular prominence.

Zhivkov survived the Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...

, Khrushchev's fall in late 1964, an attempted Stalinist-Maoist coup d’état in 1965, his daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Zhivkova
Lyudmila Todorova Zhivkova was the daughter of Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, who reached the rank of senior Bulgarian Communist Party functionary and Politburo member. Her life remains uniquely controversial and colourful in the history of Communist Bulgaria and that of the Soviet...

's death in 1981, Brezhnev's death
Death and funeral of Leonid Brezhnev
On 10 November 1982, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the third General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the fifth leader of the Soviet Union, died a 75 year-old man after suffering a heart attack following years of serious ailments. His death was officially acknowledged on 11...

 in 1982, and Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

's post-1985 reforms.

Fall

As it turned out, the mass expulsion of ethnic Turks proved to be the beginning of the end for Zhivkov. He was the target of near-unanimous condemnation from the international community. Even the Soviets protested. Gorbachev already did not think much of Zhivkov; he had lumped Zhivkov in with a group of inflexible hardliners that included East Germany's Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 until 1989, serving as Head of State as well from Willi Stoph's relinquishment of that post in 1976....

, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

's Gustav Husak
Gustáv Husák
Gustáv Husák was a Slovak politician, president of Czechoslovakia and a long-term Communist leader of Czechoslovakia and of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia...

 and Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

's Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...

. However, after the Turkish episode, he was determined to see Zhivkov gone. The Turkish affair also alarmed several high-ranking Bulgarian officials as well, including Prime Minister  Georgi Atanasov
Georgi Atanasov
Georgi Ivanov Atanasov was a leading member of the Bulgarian Communist Party who served as Prime Minister from 1986-1990. Atanasov supported the move to oust Todor Zhivkov as Chairman of the State Council, joining Petar Mladenov in leading the opposition...

, Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov
Petar Mladenov
Petar Toshev Mladenov was a Bulgarian communist diplomat and politician. He was the last Communist leader of Bulgaria from 1989 to 1990, and briefly the first President of democratic Bulgaria in 1990.-Early life and career:...

 and Finance Minister Andrey Lukanov
Andrey Lukanov
Andrey Karlov Lukanov was a Bulgarian political figure.-Biography:Lukanov was born in Moscow, USSR, in the family of Karlo Lukanov, , a Bulgarian communist emigre....

. They began plotting to remove him, but had to move discreetly given the ubiquity of the DS.

That October, Mladenov organised a CSCE
CSCE
CSCE may refer to* Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange which merged to form the New York Board of Trade* Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe...

 environmental summit in Sofia. He invited an independent group of Bulgarian environmental activists, Ecoglasnost, to participate. Ten days into the conference, several Ecoglasnost activists and supporters were brutally beaten up by DS and militia officers--on orders from Zhivkov. They then collared 36 other opposition activists, drove them to the countryside and forced them to walk back to Sofia. Amid near-unanimous international condemnation, Mladenov, Lukanov and Atansov decided that Zhivkov had to go. In a critical step, they convinced Defence Minister Dobri Dzhurov to support them.

The plotters struck on 8 November, a day before a Politburo meeting. Dzhurov met Zhivkov in private and told him that he needed to resign, and there was enough support on the Politburo to vote him out. Zhivkov was taken by surprise and tried to marshal support, to no avail. An hour before the next day's meeting, Dzhurov gave Zhivkov an ultimatum--unless he resigned, the Politburo would not only vote to oust him, but have him arrested and executed for treason. Seeing the writing on the wall, after the motion passed, Zhivkov resigned, officially for reasons of age and health. Mladenov was named the new party leader.

While he was initially shown reverence in public in removal, by January 1990 he was removed from the BKP and was arrested on a number of fraud and nepotism charges. Two years later, he was convicted of embezzling government funds and sentenced to seven years in prison. Due to old age and frail health, he was allowed to serve his term under house arrest
House arrest
In justice and law, house arrest is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to his or her residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all...

. He was eventually acquitted by the Bulgarian Supreme Court in 1996. Zhivkov retained his lucidity and interest in public affairs until his death (from pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

) in August 1998, aged 86. His funeral was widely attended.

After his death all charges against Todor Zhivkov were dismissed.

The Porcupine, a fictional account of the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, a barely disguised Zhivkov, was written by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...

 and published in Bulgarian and English in 1992.

Aftermath and legacy

While Zhivkov's economic policy was largely successful, its collapse after his fall makes it questionable how the economy was really developed. A most telling verdict on Zhivkov's rule and its aftermath is the "demographic problem". His Turkish/Muslim policy produced an effect diametrically opposed to the one he aimed for.

Political and social

After Zhivkov fell from the presidency and was expelled from the BKP, the Party gave up its monopoly on power in February 1990 and allowed Bulgaria's first democratic elections for 59 years in June 1990. As the Soviet Bloc in the face of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (SEV, Comecon), the Warsaw Pact Organization and the USSR itself collapsed, by 1992 Bulgaria entered a period of transition from socialism to a free market economy and democracy. To this extent, the political ideology and foreign policy orientation of Zhivkov's era were entirely reversed.

On the other hand, Bulgaria's post-transition political, business, military, academic and artistic elites, as well as Bulgaria's large and active organised crime underworld, comprised almost entirely the scions of Communist eminenti who rose to prominence during Zhivkov's long rule. In this sense, the personnel element of his rule has endured and looks most likely to endure unchallenged for the foreseeable future.

Zhivkov's onslaught on Bulgaria's Muslims and Turks radicalized and united what had been scattered and quiescent minorities. Since 2001 (and also from 1991–1994) the DPS (Movement for Rights and Freedoms
Movement for Rights and Freedoms
The Movement for Rights and Freedoms is an ethnic Turkish party in Bulgaria. The MRF is a member of the Liberal International and considers itself a liberal party, rather like the Swedish People's Party - party of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland...

) party, composed almost entirely of Bulgarian Turks, has held the balance of power in Bulgarian politics. Thus, a major Zhivkov project produced the very opposite effect from that intended. In the early 2000s, there appears no prospect of an alternative scenario to the prevailing one in which the DPS is a desired partner in any governing coalition.

A most damaging process, which emerged during the early years of Zhivkov's rule, was the "demographic problem" which saw traditionally large Bulgarian village families emigrate to industrial cities where they tended to have one child or none at all. Measures which were undertaken during his regime, consisting mainly of fines for families without children and limiting abortion, were largely ineffective. As a result, at the turn of the 21st century the Bulgarian population was widely expected to decline from a 1990 high of nine million to some five million within a generation.

Economic

On the other hand, after very significant reverses and difficulties in the 1940s and '50s, the Bulgarian economy developed apace from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s. Most of today's large industrial facilities such as the Kremikovtsi
Kremikovtsi
Kremikovtsi is an industrial district of Sofia, Bulgaria. It is located to the northeast of the capital. The Kremikovtsi Steel Complex which is close to the neighbourhood is one of the largest industrial enterprises in Bulgaria and the Balkans...

 steelworks and the Chervena Mogila engineering works were built under Zhivkov. Bulgaria's nuclear power station, AEC Kozloduy, was built in the 1970s, all six large reactors commissioned in under five years. This, and Bulgaria's many coal-fired and hyrdoelectric power stations, made the country a major electric power exporter. By the 1970s, the focus switched to high technologies such as electronics and even space exploration: on 10 April 1979 Bulgaria launched the first of two kosmonavti (cosmonauts), Georgi Ivanov
Georgi Ivanov
Major general Georgi Ivanov Kakalov is a retired Bulgarian military officer and the first Bulgarian cosmonaut. He was a member of the National Assembly of Bulgaria in 1990.-Early life and military career:...

, aboard Soviet Soyuz spaceships and later launched its own space satellites. Having been among the first nations to market electronic calculators (the Elka
Elka
ELKA or Elka may refer to one of the following:*An Italian Synthesizer manufacturer, now defunct. Notable units include; ELKA Synthex, ELKA Rhapsody, ELKA X-55, and the ELKA MKxx series of MIDI controllers . Notable customers include Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and, Supertramp...

 brand, since 1973) and digital watches (Elektronika
Elektronika
Electronika is the brand name used for many different electronic products such as calculators, electronic watches, portable games and radios in the Soviet Union and, nowadays, in Russia...

, since 1975), in 1982 the country launched its Pravets
Pravetz series 8
Pravetz were Bulgarian computers, manufactured mainly in the town of Pravetz but also components and software were produced in Stara Zagora, Plovdiv and other.- History :...

 personal computer (a near-"Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...

 clone") for business and domestic use. In the mid-1960s an economic reform package was introduced, which allowed for farmers to freely sell their overplanned production. Shortly after that Bulgaria became the first and only Eastern Bloc country which locally produced Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...

. Mass tourism developed under Zhivkov's direction from the early 1960s onwards.

However, this Bulgarian economy was exceptionally susceptible to Soviet largesse and Soviet-bloc markets. After the Soviet crude oil price shock of 1979, it entered a very severe recession from which it hardly recovered in the 1980s. After the early-1990s loss of Soviet and Comecon markets, this economy (unused to competing in a free market environment) entered prolonged and significant contraction. Zhivkov-era industrial facilities were largely unattractive to investors, many being left to decay. Great numbers of specialist personnel retired and died without being replaced, or else emigrated or left their state jobs for more lucrative private employment. As agriculture declined, tourism has emerged as almost the sole Zhivkov-era industrial survivor. It is however widely regarded that incompetent administration after 1989 had a much greater effect on the decline of the economy, as even successful industries declined.

External links

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