The coup d'état of 9 September 1944

Episode 02 · Period covered: September 1944 · Reading time: 5 min

Companion article to episode 02 of the Cold War Bulgaria podcast.

9 September 1944 is the founding date of the Bulgarian communist regime. For forty-five years it was celebrated as a popular revolution; the archives opened since show a far more controlled political operation, whose outcome was largely written in advance.

The night of 9 September

The Fatherland Front (Отечествен фронт), a coalition bringing together Communists, left Agrarians, Social Democrats and officers of the Zveno group (Звено), seized the ministries of Sofia during the night. On paper, an alliance of parties. In reality, a structure dominated by the Bulgarian Communist Party, whose cadres held the decisive posts, beginning with the Interior and Justice.

The timing was in no way accidental: the Red Army had crossed the Bulgarian border three days earlier, on 6 September, after the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on the 5th. The coup therefore took place while Soviet troops were already in the country.

The façade of pluralism

The new government presented itself as a broad coalition, respectful of the political balance. Kimon Georgiev, a Zveno officer and not a Communist, took its head. The portfolios were distributed among the components of the Front.

This appearance did not fool attentive observers for long. The Communists held the Interior (and therefore the police), Justice, and soon the levers of the security apparatus. The Allied Control Commission, supposed to supervise the transition on behalf of the three great powers, was in fact dominated by the Soviet representatives; their British and American counterparts exercised no more than an observer's role.

The People's Court

Repression followed immediately. The trials of the People's Court, between December 1944 and April 1945, constituted the central instrument for decapitating the old state.

The toll is known: 9,155 convictions, of which 2,730 death sentences were carried out. Among the victims were the three regents of the young Tsar Simeon II (including Prince Kiril, the sovereign's uncle), former prime ministers, dozens of ministers and deputies, and senior officers.

Measured against the Bulgarian population of the time, some seven million inhabitants, this purge was proportionally among the most severe in Europe. It did not target only Germany's collaborators: it eliminated in advance any elite capable of constituting a political alternative.

The referendum of 1946

Two years after the coup, the question of the form of the state was put to the country. The plebiscite of 8 September 1946 returned 95.6% in favour of a republic.

As always with this type of ballot, the figure tells us more about the degree of control over the process than about actual opinion. The Bulgarian monarchy, founded in 1878, came to an end. Tsar Simeon II, aged nine, left the country with his family for an exile that would last half a century. He was to return to Bulgaria in 1996, then become the country's prime minister between 2001 and 2005, a unique case in contemporary European history.

The Petkov trial

The elimination of the legal opposition culminated in the trial of Nikola Petkov, leader of the Agrarian Union, in August 1947.

Petkov was no marginal figure. The son of a former prime minister who had been assassinated, and himself a member of the resistance, he had sat in the first Fatherland Front governments before breaking with the Communists in 1945. He embodied the legal opposition, the kind that contested through proper forms.

His trial, held for treason, resulted in a death sentence. Despite forceful diplomatic protests from London and Washington, he was hanged on 23 September 1947. The United States had just ratified the peace treaty with Bulgaria; the execution took place a few days later. The message was clear: Western protests would change nothing.

With Petkov, the last organised opposition disappeared. The Agrarian Union was dissolved, its cadres imprisoned or brought into line.

The Dimitrov Constitution

The legal framework of the new regime was adopted in December 1947. The Dimitrov Constitution, named after Georgi Dimitrov, former general secretary of the Comintern who had become head of the Bulgarian government, was drafted with the direct assistance of Soviet jurists and modelled on the Soviet Constitution of 1936.

The text proclaimed the People's Republic of Bulgaria, enshrined state ownership of the means of production and organised a single-assembly system. It remained in force until 1971, when it was replaced by the so-called Zhivkov Constitution.

1948: the lock closes

By the end of 1948, the sequence was complete. The Bulgarian Communist Party held a total monopoly over political life. The Social Democratic Party had been absorbed, the Agrarians reduced to a token role within the Fatherland Front, an arrangement they would retain until 1989.

The state security apparatus, expanding rapidly, was already integrated into the Soviet intelligence network. The next phase could begin: forced collectivisation, heavy industrialisation, trials of communist leaders themselves.

What the chronology tells us

Four years separate the coup from the complete closing of the system. That span is instructive.

Each stage prepared the next and gave it legitimacy. The coalition made the coup presentable. The court gave judicial form to the elimination of opponents. The referendum gave a popular appearance to the end of the monarchy. The constitution gave legal form to the result.

It is this gradual method, more than sheer violence, that characterises the communist seizure of power in Bulgaria, and that partly explains the regime's unusual stability in the following decades.

Sources

• Bulgarian Central State Archives (Централен държавен архив), Sofia
• Stalin collection, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (РГАСПИ / RGASPI), Moscow
• Declassified CIA assessments (CREST programme)

Translations of the documents cited are the author's own.