By Cain O’Mahoney
The failure of the anti-fascist movement after World War One
In this occasional series on the revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Cain O’Mahony looks at Bulgaria and the failure of the anti-fascist uprising in the period between 1919 and 1923.
Bulgaria was occupied by the Ottoman Empire for over 500 years, until it was finally ‘liberated’ or captured by imperist Russia in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. After that, Russia was often referred to in Bulgaria as ‘Grand Father Ivan’, with the new Bulgarian nation state based on a miniature version of Imperial Russia, with allegiance to the Orthodox Church and its own Tsar.
Bulgaria remained for a long time a peasant-based society, but industrialisation, particularly around the capital of Sofia, saw the rise of an industrial bourgeoisie, a capitalist class, that looked west to German and Austrian capitalism, rather than eastwards to more economically ‘backward’ Russia.
As in the rest of Europe, industrialisation brought together a new proletariat, a a small industrial working class, and along with it the establishment of a Social Democratic Workers Party (SDWP) in 1891.
The SDWP was not immune from the class antagonisms rocking the Social Democratic parties across the rest of Europe, and the it split along ‘Menshevik-Bolshevik’ lines in the Russian fashion, with the right wing forming the ‘Broads’ – aiming to build a ‘broad base’ amongst all classes – and the ‘Narrows’, who would base themselves on Marxism and the proletariat.
Early Marxism in Bulgaria was described by the Russian Bolsheviks as ‘doctrinaire’ – with very much a contemplative, theoretical discussion-circle mentality. Before the First World War, Trotsky attended the Narrows conference, as a fraternal delegate from the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party.
He was dismayed to report that the organisation’s general secretary gave a speech that lasted five hours, only to be outdone by the speech of the organisation’s president, which lasted six! The Narrows eventually went on to form the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), but it’s main barrier to growth was Bulgarian society itself.
Over 80 per cent of the population were peasantry. There were at this stage only 100,000 industrial workers in Bulgaria. Even so, the BCP recruited 40,000 of them, which was a magnificent achievement. At this stage, it was the only country outside Russia where the communists had taken the lead of the workiing class, eclipsing the Social Democrats, from whom the communists had split.
But the isolation in the industrial working class, surrounded by an ocean of peasantry, compounded the BCP’s ‘peaceful propaganda’ mentality, and the communists made no attempts to build amongst the peasantry. In their elitist view, Marxism was only for the proletariat, and it was impossible to build amongst the peasantry because of their low class consciousness. In reality, the BCP had become comfortable in its little proletarian enclave.
During the First World War, the main anti-Tsarist, anti-war movement was an agrarian one. The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), led by Alexander Stamboliiski, built mass support amongst the peasantry. Thus, in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe after 1917, it was BANU that made the biggest gains, not the BCP.
Representing the pro-German/Austrian view of the city-based capitalist class, in 1915, the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand, foolishly took the state into the war on the German side. This was hugely unpopular, in particular with the mass of the peasantry, whose children were providing the cannon fodder. There was a widespread feeling that Bulgaria should be fighting alongside Grand Father Ivan, especially as Germany’s ally was the hated Ottoman Empire.
In 1918, the Bulgarian Army mutinied and general strikes rocked the cities. Such was the revolutionary mood that Ferdinand was forced to abdicate and parliamentary democracy introduced. However, the monarchy survived, after Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his ‘liberal’ son, Tsar Boris III. In the parliamentary elections, Stamboliiski’s BANU swept the board, gaining a huge majority.
Stamboliiski brought in widescale land and social reform. He redistributed land in favour of the peasants, organised co-operatives, and brought in legislation that put a maximum limit on property ownership and broke up the former huge estates of the wealthy.
Stamboliiski boasted that he had found the ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialist revolution, declaring: “Today there are only two interesting social experiments; Lenin’s and mine” (Maria Todorova, In Bulgaria, the Permanent Revolution ended in disaster, Jacobin, 2013).
But Stamboliiski was no Lenin. His moves infuriated the Bulgarian capitalist class. Stamboliiski’s rural idyll, of what were now thousands of small peasant holdings, was a fetter on profitable capitalist development and the expansion of the Bulgaria economy in this new age of steam, iron and steel.
At the same time, his ‘middle way’ and anti-industrial stance lost him potential allies within the working class. Stamboliiski was hostile to the BCP fearing that they would build a peasant base, as the Bolsheviks had succeeded in doing in Russia.
He also made further enemies amongst the nationalist groups by signing away Bulgarian territory and renouncing claims on disputed regions in the Balkans as part of the postwar armistice. Particularly incensed were the fiercely nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), ethnic-Bulgarian Macedonians who wanted Macedonia returned to Bulgarian control.
Despite the open hostility of the capitalist class, Stamboliiski refused to arm the peasants for the inevitable coming confrontation – typical of petit-bourgeois populists. Although he claimed to speak on behalf of the peasants, he was fearful of arming them and instead, he set up a peasant-based ‘Orange Guard’ paramilitary unit, which harassed both capitalists and communists alike.
In 1923, backed by funds from Mussolini, now in power in Italy, and support from White Russian armies, fascist elements in the Bulgarian Army ousted Stamboliiski in a vicious coup and unleashed a White Terror against the peasants. Despite being warned of the threat, Stamboliiski had been dismissive. As Zinoviev pointed out, speaking on behalf of the Communist International (Comintern),
“A few days before the White seizure of government, the Officers who had remained faithful to Stamboliiski drew his attention to the counter-revolution in preparation against him, but he was not concerned about it, and answered with perfect self-satisfaction that as he possessed the majority in Parliament – 242 Deputies – he had no fear of being overthrown…” (Zinoviev, The Import of Events in Bulgaria, 18 October, 1923).
Stamboliiski had not understood that ‘democracy’ is only ever a means to an end for capitalism, to be dispensed with when their profits and their rule are threatened. Stamboliiski went on the run, trying to raise a peasant army, but he met a brutal end. Captured by the IMRO, they cut off the hand that had signed the armistice treaties, and then, to curry favour with the new fascist regime, returned his head to Sofia in a biscuit tin.
However, the BCP, still smarting from the harassment they had received at the hands of Stamboliiski, also made the gravest of errors. Instead of forming a united front with BANU and other workers and peasants parties against the fascist takeover, incredibly, they stood aside.
The BCP Central Committee, as doctrinaire as ever, ruled that this was a fight between the ‘industrial bourgeoisie’ and the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’, and therefore they would remain neutral. This was a suicidal policy, because as soon as the Bulgarian bourgeoisie had seen off Stamboliiski they would immediately turn on their hated class enemy, the communist-led working class.
Part 2 of Cain O’Mahony’s article on the history of communism in Bulgaria will look at the abortive 1923 uprising and subsequent events following the rise of Nazism.
[Top picture from Wikimedia Commons, here.]
