Historical Events
Bulgaria · Events 6
Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupation
The peace of Brest-Litovsk was a dictated settlement between a Soviet Russia whose army had melted away and an undefeated Germany. In the talks that opened in December 1917 three lines split the party: revolutionary war, "neither war nor peace", and immediate peace. After the German offensive of February 1918 Lenin staked his resignation on acceptance and the treaty was signed on 3 March. Russia gave up its rights over Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland and a third of its population, while Germany installed a Hetman in Ukraine, sent troops into Finland's civil war and planned duchies under its own umbrella in the Baltic. Germany's defeat in November voided the treaty, but the vacuum left by Article 12 of the armistice, which kept German troops in the Baltic, and the meeting of the Red Army, national governments and Whites in it became the stage for the borderland wars of the following year.
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
Bulgaria: From the Fatherland Front to the Kostov Trial
After the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September 1944 and crossed the frontier on the 8th, the Fatherland Front of Communists, Agrarians, Zveno and Social Democrats took power in Sofia in the early hours of the 9th. The People's Court executed the regents and ministers on 1 February 1945, and the Bulgarian army fought alongside the Red Army in Yugoslavia and Hungary. The Agrarian Union split in 1945 between Petkov's opposition and those who stayed in the Front; after the referendum of 1946 abolished the monarchy, the Grand National Assembly election of October gave the Communists a majority and the opposition 28 per cent. In 1947 Petkov was arrested in parliament and executed in September, and in December the Dimitrov constitution and the nationalisation law were passed. The Social Democrats were merged into the Communist Party in 1948, and at the Fifth Congress in December Dimitrov defined people's democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1949 Dimitrov died and the deputy prime minister Kostov was tried and executed.
The Founding of the Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was a collective-defense alliance signed on May 14, 1955, in Warsaw by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European socialist states. The immediate trigger was the October 1954 Paris Agreements, which set West Germany on course for rearmament and NATO membership. The Soviet Union began preparing the alliance at the November 1954 Moscow Conference; the treaty was signed four days after West Germany entered NATO. The preamble identified a remilitarized West Germany in NATO as a threat to peace-loving states, and Article 4 committed signatories to render immediate assistance, including armed force, in the event of armed attack in Europe. Marshal Ivan Konev was named supreme commander, and a Political Consultative Committee was established. Yet the Warsaw Pact was more facade than substance: the USSR already controlled Eastern Europe through bilateral treaties and stationed troops, and Nikita Khrushchev conceived the new organization as a bargaining chip, to be traded for a pan-European collective security system that would also dissolve NATO.
The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 led by Alexander Dubček. Its “socialism with a human face” — easing censorship, widening freedom of expression and movement, and economic reform — won broad popular support. But the Soviet Union defined it as a break from the bloc and, in August 1968, occupied Czechoslovakia with the armies of five Warsaw Pact states.
The Revolutions of 1989
In 1989 one-party communist systems fell in quick succession across Eastern Europe. Hungary opened its border, Poland reached free elections through round-table talks, the Berlin Wall came down, and in Romania Ceaușescu was executed. The decisive difference was that Gorbachev, unlike in 1956 and 1968, renounced armed intervention.