REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Margarita KARAMIHOVA: Different Generations, Different Shared Memories … 257
10.11.1989 and after
On 10 November a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian
Communist Party accepted the resignation of the long-term party and state leader Todor
Zhivkov. Historical facts and following development of the country leave no place for
doubt that it was internal coup within the Communist Party leadership that lead to Todor
Zhivkov’s demise 2 .
The reason for this statement considers the fact that there was no strong anti-communist
movement in Bulgaria and following governments were entirely dominated by
communists (i.e. socialist). The Bulgarian dissident movement was much weaker than
those in countries like Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Most of newly emerging
pro-Perestroyka associations called for reforms within the socialist system. Some of them
attempted to change the system from within; others wanted to overthrow it and fight for
democracy but still in the frames of Perestroika. One center of dissent was an
environmental movement, which focussed on air pollution from badly run factories in
neighboring Romania. Another was made up of Bulgarian intellectuals who were opposed
to assimilatory politics directed toward Turks in Bulgaria. Neither movement implied
fundamental criticism of the Bulgarian socialist regime. However, the more important
forces for change came from within the party. Zhivkov resigned in November 1989 and in
December the Party gave up its monopoly on power. The result of the 1989 "revolution"
was to return reform-minded ex-Communists to power.
Seizing power, new communist rulers brought in practice:
1. New way of managing long-term communist elite strategy with indisputable
contribution of state security structures;
2. Political engineering aimed to face challenges of contemporary world (political, social
and economical mimicry) in each and every structure of the society, with special attention
on minority issues.
Turkish minority in Bulgaria
In the course of 20 th century all Bulgarian governments have pursued long-term
assimilation policies aiming to either assimilate Turks or to force them to leave the
country. In general, assimilatory policies were conducted since independent from
Ottoman Empire Third Bulgarian Kingdom was established (1878).
After the communist takeover on 9 September 1944, the Turks in Bulgaria became
targets of a carefully elaborated policy carried out by the new regime. In the beginning, in
unison with the Soviet model, the policy was adopted to accept Turks as an ethnic
community within the Bulgarian nation with equal rights and their own identity, to
involve them actively in the ‘building of the new socialist republic’, and to improve their
economic and educational level. Simultaneous with the aspiration to increase the level of
education of the Bulgarian Turks, the Bulgarian government initiated decisive steps to
counteract the influence of religion among the Muslim population (Marushiakova,
Popov :10-11).
On 16 April 1951 the Political Bureau of Communist Party took decision for ”Special
care when working with Turkish population“. Based on it, the major departments of Sofia
University “Climent Ohridski” opened special Turkish sub-departments (where the
2 Recent archival sources revealed that Zhivkov was ready to leave his powerful positions a year
earlier.