Bulgaria: Defeat and Nationalist Demobilization During the Peasant Era

Zabad, Ibrahim M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-13747-2_3

Bulgaria: Defeat and Nationalist Demobilization During the Peasant Era

Ibrahim M. Zabad²

Chapter
First Online: 31 March 2019

244 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter explores the aftermath of the Bulgarian defeat in WWI and how it brought to light an exceptional and unique experiment in national humility, providing an example of why defeats in wars need not create a collective identity crisis, irredentism, revanchism, and subsequently aggressive foreign policies. This is an understudied and extremely interesting case because it is notably a ‘most likely case’ for radicalization: the breeding grounds of political radicalism were present but not the predicted outcome. Indeed, interwar Bulgaria experienced conditions similar to those of Germany and Hungary after WWI and yet did not experience the emergence of powerful revisionist/revanchist movements. The chapter demonstrates how, in the immediate aftermath of WWI, Bulgaria accepted its defeat, moved beyond the torments of humiliation, and embarked on a course of internal development and reconstruction and moderate, anti-irredentist, and anti-revanchist foreign policy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 69.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
The Treaty of San Stefano was signed by the Ottomans and Russians to conclude the Ottoman-Russo War of 1877–1878. The treaty established an extended Bulgarian state that came to be known as San Stefano Bulgaria, Greater Bulgaria, or Historic Bulgaria. Indeed, the day the treaty was signed, March 3, 1878, was celebrated by Bulgarians as Liberation Day. However, Bulgaria’s neighbors and the Great Powers became worried that such an extended state would become a forward bastion of Russian influence and hegemony in the Balkans. Subsequently, they rejected the treaty and replaced it, few months later, with the Treaty of Berlin, which truncated San Stefano Bulgaria and returned some territories to the Ottoman Empire. Bulgarians remember the Treaty of Berlin as that which dismembered historic, greater, San Stefano Bulgaria. Indeed, much of Bulgarian foreign policy became obsessed with the restoration of San Stefano borders, an obsession that led to Bulgarian involvement in several wars and further loses.
2.
These conditions have been cited by historical research as the conditions necessary for the emergence of radical/extremist/revanchist politics. See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005); Juan J. Linz, “Political Space and Fascism as a Late-comer,” in Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism, eds. Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980).
3.
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 326.
4.
There were few fascist organizations, the most important of which were the National Social Movement (NSD), Union of Bulgarian National Legions (SBNL), and Warriors for the Advancement of the Bulgarian Spirit (RNB or Ratniks). However, these movements “remained unable to secure sufficient popular support to take power or to threaten the security of the state apparatus, as these movements did in Romania. As such Western scholarship has broadly regarded the Bulgarian case as one in which fascism was not a viable political force.” See James Frusetta, “Fascism to Complete the National Project? Bulgarian Fascists’ Uncertain Views on the Palingenesis of the Nation,” East Central Europe 37, no. 2–3 (2010), 281–282. Fascism did not “assume its state-like basis in Bulgaria” and attempts to create fascist organizations proved unpopular and were met with ridicule in various satirical publications during the 1920s. See Boyan Obretenov, Baptized with Fire and Spirit: The Historical Destiny and Nature of the Bulgarian Intelligentsia. Translated by Sofia Press Team (Sofia: Sofia Pres, 1987), 59.
5.
Frusetta, “Fascism to Complete the National Project?,” 288–289.
6.
James Frusetta and Anca Glont, “Interwar fascism and the post-1989 radical right: Ideology, opportunism and historical legacy in Bulgaria and Romania,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42, no. 4 (2009), 556–550.
7.
Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention (Budapest: Central European Press, 2009), 504–513.
8.
Maya Kosseva, Antonina Zhelyazkova and Marko Hajdinjak. “Catching up with the uncatchable: European dilemmas and identity construction on Bulgarian Path to Modernity,” in Modernity and Tradition: European and National in Bulgaria, eds. Maya Kosseva, Antonina Zhelyazkova and Marko Hajdinjak. International Center for Minority Studies and International Relations, 2012, 13–64.
9.
The Treaty of Neuilly (November 1919) was the peace settlement that concluded Bulgarian involvement in WWI and confirmed its status as a loser. Bulgaria lost its Aegean coastline to Greece and most of its Macedonian territory to Yugoslavia. It also had to give back Dobruja to Romania and to pay heavy reparations. The dreams of Bulgaria as a potential regional power in the Balkan ended.
10.
Bulgaria achieved its ‘autonomy’ as a principality of the Ottoman Empire in 1878 but declared its full independence in 1908.
11.
Tatiana Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946: The Challenge of Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 22.
12.
John Bell, “Modernization through Secularization in Bulgaria,” in Diverse Paths to Modernity in Southeastern Europe: Essays in National Development, ed. Gerasimos Augustinos (Westport, CT: Green wood Press, 1991), 21–22.
13.
Obretenov, Baptized with Fire and Spirit, 45.
14.
Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946, 22.
15.
Ibid., 33–37.
16.
Richard Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria (London: Haus Publishing LTD, 2009), 54.
17.
Victor S. Mamatey, “The United States and Bulgaria in World War I,” American Slavic and East European Review 12, no. 2 (1953).
18.
Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 1918–1941 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 241–242.
19.
Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 76–77.
20.
John D. Bell, Peasants in Power: Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899–1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 130.
21.
Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 241–242.
22.
Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Bulgaria, and Protocol and Declaration signed at Neuilly-sur-Seine, 27 November 1919: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Treaty_of_Neuilly.
23.
Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria.
24.
Frusetta, “Fascism to Complete the National Project?,” 284–285.
25.
A Bulgarian officer wrote of the harsh conditions on July 20, 1918, “We are naked, barefoot and hungry. We will wait a little longer for clothes and shoes, but we are seeking a quick end to the war. We are not able to last much longer. And here (at the front) it is difficult, but we shall endure it; however, we are not able to endure what is happening in our villages. There they are ransacking and confiscating everything, and we are going barefoot and hungry.” See Richard C. Hall, “‘The Enemy is Behind Us’: The Morale Crisis in the Bulgarian Army during the Summer of 1918 War,” War In History 11, no. 2 (2004), 219.
26.
Richard Crampton, Bulgaria 1878–1918 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983).
27.
Richard Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000), 140.
28.
The Second Balkan War ended on July 31, 1913, and Bulgaria joined WWI on October 15, 1915.
29.
Plamen K. Georgiev, The Bulgarian Political Culture (Gottingen: V&R unipress, 2007).
30.
Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, ed. Michael E. Brown (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 278.
31.
The Ottoman occupation of Bulgaria ended the last period of national independence. James F. Clarke observed a ‘progressive decline of national consciousness’ in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria in 1393; from that time on, Bulgarians had minimal contacts with the outside world, contacts that nonetheless served to reawaken ‘fading memories of former independence.’ See James F. Clarke, “Serbian and the Bulgarian Revival (1762–1872),” American Slavic and East European Review 4, no. 3–4 (December 1945), 141–142.
32.
Clarke, “Serbian and the Bulgarian Revival,” 141.
33.
Nicos Mouzelis, “Greek and Bulgarian Peasants: Aspects of Their Sociopolitical Situation during the Interwar Period,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 1 (1976), 92–93.
34.
Ivelin Dimitrov Sardamov, “Mandate of history: War, ethnic conflict and nationalism in the south Slav Balkans,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 1998), 231–232, 236.
35.
Michael B. Petrovich, “The Russian Image in Renascence Bulgaria (1760–1878),” East European Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1967), 91.
36.
Petrovich, “The Russian Image,” 93.
37.
Ibid., 98–99.
38.
Clarke, “Serbian and the Bulgarian Revival,” 145.
39.
Petrovich, “The Russian Image,” 103.
40.
Ibid., 103.
41.
Sardamov, “Mandate of history,” 234–244.
42.
Maria Todorova, “The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism,” in Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter F. Sugar (Washington, DC: The American University Press, 1995), 76.
43.
Petrovich, “The Russian Image,” 104–105.
44.
Katrin Bozeva-Abazi, “The Shaping of Bulgarian and Serbian National Identities, 1800s–1900s” (McGill University, Montreal, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2003), 52.
45.
Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946, 7.
46.
Diana Mishkova, “Symbolic Geographies and Visions of Identity: A Balkan Perspective,” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 2 (2008), 241.
47.
Bistra-Beatrix Volgyi, “Ethno-Nationalism during Democratic Transition in Bulgaria: Political Pluralism as an Effective Remedy for Ethnic Conflict” Post-Communist Studies Programme Research Paper Series. Paper Number 003 (YCISS, 2007), 11–12.
48.
Clarke, “Serbian and the Bulgarian Revival,” 145.
49.
Volgyi, “Ethno-Nationalism during Democratic Transition in Bulgaria,” 11–12.
50.
Todorova, “The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism,” 75.
51.
Ibid., 74–75.
52.
Balázs Trencsényi, “Peasants into Bulgarians, or the Other Way Round: The Discourse of National Psychology,” in Locations of the Political, ed. S. Gorman (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, Vol. 15, 2003), 2–3.
53.
Aleksandur Kiossev, “The Debate about the Problematic Bulgarian: A View on the Pluralism of the National Ideologies in Bulgaria in the Interwar Period,” in National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe, eds. Ivo Banac and Katherine Verdery (New Haven, CT: Yale Russian and Eastern European Publications, Yale Center For International And Area Studies, 1995), 204.
54.
Ivaylo Ditchev, “The Eros of Identity,” in Balkans as Metaphor, ed. Savic Beilic (MIT: 2002), 2.
55.
Trencsényi, “Peasants into Bulgarians,” 3.
56.
Hristina Ambareva, “Image-Making and Personal Identity,” in Philosophy Bridging Civilizations and Cultures: Universal, Regional, National Values in United Europe, ed. Sonya Kaneva. Proceedings XXIV Varna International Philosophical School (Sofia, IPhR-BAS, 2007).
57.
Coming to terms with the psychology of the common folk as a source of identifying a national Bulgarian character….
58.
Trencsényi, “Peasants into Bulgarians,” 9.
59.
Evelina Kelbetcheva, “Between Apology and Denial: Bulgarian Culture during World War I,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, eds. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 215.
60.
Marin V. Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism,” in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, eds. Peter Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 145.
61.
Todorova, “The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism,” 84.
62.
John R. Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 100–102.
63.
Sardamov, “Mandate of history,” 225–226.
64.
Kelbetcheva, “Between Apology and Denial,” 218.
65.
Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), 333. Notice that no party carried the conservative label.
66.
T. Tchitchovsky, “Political and Social Aspects of Modern Bulgaria,” The Slavonic and East European Review 7, no. 20 (1929), 283.
67.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 19.
68.
Nissan Oren, Revolution Administered: Agrarianism and Communism in Bulgaria (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 3.
69.
Mouzelis, “Greek and Bulgarian Peasants,” 97.
70.
Georgi Karasimeonov, “Between Democracy and Authoritarianism in Bulgaria,” in Cleavages, Parties, and Voters: Studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania, eds. Kay Lawson, Andrea Rommele, and Georgi Karasimeonov (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1999), 39.
71.
The egalitarian structure did not mean that peasants completely lacked political organization or political awareness. Indeed, when Bulgaria received its independence in 1878, some newspapers (e.g. Marista of August 8, 1878) reported peasant activities protesting the Treaty of Berlin . Peasants also met the French ambassador and presented him with a formal protest upon which he inquired as to how the peasants were familiar with events in Berlin; they responded by saying that “We always read the newspapers and learned from them about the injustice done to Bulgaria.” Indeed, there was a ‘stream of petitions’ demanding the liberation of Macedonia and its independence along with memoranda to the Great Powers written and signed by the peasants and sent to European consuls in Russia and Istanbul. See Katrin Bozeva-Abazi, The Shaping of Bulgarian and Serbian National Identities, 50–52.
72.
Oren, Revolution Administered, 5–7.
73.
Mouzelis, “Greek and Bulgarian Peasants,” 96.
74.
Mishkova, “Literacy and Nation-Building in Bulgaria, 1878–1912.”
75.
Political divisions were even apparent at the time of independence; there were the traditional conflicts between the young and the old—what roughly translated into liberals and conservatives. The liberals/the young were radical nationalist revolutionaries who believed in Bulgarians’ capacity to govern themselves and to realize the dream of historic Bulgaria. This trend later grew into the Liberal Party. The ‘old’ or conservatives were suspicious of radical change and more interested in education, schools, and church; they believed in receiving help from abroad and did not have much confidence in Bulgarian capacities for self-governance; indeed, some even called for a “dualistic kingdom within the framework of the Ottoman Empire.” These men were “more cautious, more reasonable and more difficult when it came to making decisions for changes.” They eventually established the Conservative Party. See Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946, 5–6. Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bulgarian left had four political parties, the two social-democratic parties—the left-wing and the right-wing socialists—the Bulgarian People’s Agrarian Union, and the Radical Democratic Party. There were six bourgeois parties but without fine distinctions or clear-cut differentiation as their domestic politics platforms were similar. See Karasimeonov, “Between Democracy and Authoritarianism in Bulgaria,” 41.
76.
Mishkova, “Literacy and Nation-Building in Bulgaria, 1878–1912.”
77.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, vii–viii.
78.
John D. Bell, “Populism and Pragmatism: The BANU in Bulgarian Politics,” in Populism in Eastern Europe: Racism, Nationalism, and Society, ed. Joseph Held (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 24.
79.
Bell, “Populism and Pragmatism,” 24–26.
80.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 30–32.
81.
Ibid., 33.
82.
Ibid., 37.
83.
Bell, “Populism and Pragmatism,” 32.
84.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 37.
85.
Ibid., 33.
86.
Karasimeonov, “Between Democracy and Authoritarianism in Bulgaria,” 43.
87.
Stephane Groueff, Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918–1943 (New York: Madison Books, 1987), 75.
88.
Ibid., 75–76.
89.
Oren, Revolution Administered, 9–10.
90.
Gerasimos Augustinos, “Diverse Paths to Modernity,” in Diverse Paths to Modernity in Southeastern Europe: Essays in National Development, ed. Gerasimos Augustinos (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 5.
91.
L. S. Stavrianos, “The Balkan Federation Movement A Neglected Aspect,” The American Historical Review 48, no. 1 (1942), 40.
92.
The communists stood watching while the Agrarians were being toppled; the monarch almost certainly knew of the coup.
93.
Mouzelis, “Greek and Bulgarian Peasants,” 89–90.
94.
Bell, “Populism and Pragmatism,” 21.
95.
Ibid., 21.
96.
Richard Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 144.
97.
John Lampe, “Belated Modernization in Comparison: Development in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to 1948,” in Diverse Paths to Modernity in Southeastern Europe: Essays in National Development, ed. Gerasimos Augustinos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 36.
98.
Tchitchovsky, “Political and Social Aspects of Modern Bulgaria,” 284–285; Lampe, “Belated Modernization in Comparison,” 36.
99.
Tchitchovsky, “Political and Social Aspects of Modern Bulgaria,” 285.
100.
John D. Bell, Peasants in Power: Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899–1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946.
101.
John Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 100–102.
102.
Gheorghe Zbuchea, “Varieties of Nationalism and National Ideas in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe,” in Politics and Culture in Southeastern Europe, eds. Răzvan Theodorescu and Leland Conley Barrows (Bucharest: UNESCO-CEPES, 2001), 240.
103.
Sardamov, “Mandate of history,” 266.
104.
Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism,” 145.
105.
Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001), 158.
106.
Victor Roudometof, “The Social Origins of Balkan Politics: Nationalism, Underdevelopment, and the Nation-State in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria, 1880–1920,” Mediterranean Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2000), 158; Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy, 175.
107.
Oren, Revolution Administered, 5–7.
108.
Ibid., 5–7.
109.
Bell, Peasants in Power, 146.
110.
Lampe, “Belated Modernization in Comparison,” 36.
111.
Bell, “Modernization through Secularization in Bulgaria,” 20.
112.
The agrarian government set a precedent in its refusal to be subservient to or dominated by the military bureaucracy, which until the agrarian experiment had been the single most important influence on Bulgarian political culture. The military bureaucracy was the largest occupation group in Sofia before the war, and it represented an end for the aspiring, but also had a corrupting power through the practice of partisanstvo (placing political allies in civilian positions).
113.
Elie Podeh mentioned that a state education system is often used as an instrument of collective socialization; the purpose is to raise a generation of young people into certain beliefs as those beliefs are expected to shape collective identities and behavior. See Elie Podeh, “History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948–2000),” History and Memory 12, no. 1 (2000), 65–66.
114.
Bell, “Modernization through Secularization in Bulgaria,” 23.
115.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski, 95.
116.
Bell, “Modernization through Secularization in Bulgaria,” 23.
117.
Ibid., 24.
118.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski, 113–114.
119.
Ibid., 121–122.
120.
Stavrianos, “The Balkan Federation Movement,” 40.
121.
Stephane Groueff, Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918–1943 (New York: Madison Books, 1987), 76.
122.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 107–108.
123.
Stavrianos, “The Balkan Federation Movement,” 41; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 150–151.
124.
Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 151–152.
125.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 88–89.
126.
Stavrianos, “The Balkan Federation Movement,” 40.
127.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 121–122.
128.
Frusetta, “Fascism to Complete the National Project?,” 285.
129.
The new electoral law made the administrative counties, not the districts, the electoral college, which gave advantages to the agrarian constituents; the law also ended the PR system.
130.
Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946, 55.
131.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 122.
132.
The liberals at the turn of the century were split into three political factions that subsequently became fully fledged political parties; the split began in 1883–1884; one wing solidly Russophile established an independent political party, the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) in 1899. Another group, the followers of Radoslavov in 1886–1888, formed a party—the Liberal Party (LP). Then Stambolov’s liberals created their own, the Stambolov’s People’s Liberal Party (Kostadinova 1995, 14), which called for an independent Bulgaria, especially from Russia, and supported the monarchy as a necessary step along the road to modernization. This party actively ruled Bulgaria from 1887 till 1894. In 1896, some liberals led by Petko Karavelov created another party, the Democratic Party (DP).
133.
Crampton, Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski: Bulgaria, 113–122.
134.
Oren, Revolution Administered, 5–11.
135.
Kostadinova, Bulgaria 1879–1946, 14–15.
136.
Oren, Revolution Administered, 5–7.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Political Science, St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, NY, USA
Ibrahim M. Zabad

Authors

Ibrahim M. Zabad
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ibrahim M. Zabad .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Zabad, I.M. (2019). Bulgaria: Defeat and Nationalist Demobilization During the Peasant Era. In: The Aftermath of Defeats in War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13747-2_3

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13747-2_3
Published: 31 March 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13746-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13747-2
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics