Eurasia Press & News
But it had a dark side to it, nevertheless. Some 300,000 ethnic Turks were forced to leave their homes in the 1980s, after the regime attempted to Bulgarian-ise them by force.
Information about the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the Ukraine of 1986 was concealed from the population, while debris charged with nuclear radiation rained on the country.
Intellectuals were silenced, prosecuted, and in some cases murdered – a fate that befell exiled dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978.
Yet the public reaction to Zhivkov after he lost his grip in 1989 was curiously meek.
In 1990, he was arrested and indicted on five accounts – none of which included his persecution of dissidents or the flagrant suppression of democratic rights and norms.
Instead, he was charged over the drive to force ethnic Turks to adopt Bulgarian names and with abuse of state powers.
Confined to his house in that period, the prosecution opened another three cases against him in the early 1990s, for illegal distribution of state apartments, cars and money, for running “death camps” for political opponents, and for granting uncollectible loans to developing states and fellow communist parties
But before his death in 1998, he was found guilty only on one count – for the illegal distribution of state assets. And after his death forced the courts to drop the remaining indictments, the final verdict has been left to historians and researchers.
But they have less and less to go on. Apart from Zhivkov’s own memoirs and books, which he published after 1989, there has been little systematic research into his personal role in the communist system.
Now, as the courts have fallen silent and the researchers belatedly try to document what they can, Zhivkov’s memory is increasingly blurred.
He has no lack of fans on the street among those who remember only the stability, modest prosperity and relative equality of the old days.
Walking around his hometown of Pravets, many recall Zhivkov as the great philanthropist and believe they owe him much.
“It was much better in his time,” said one elderly man, voicing the opinion of many pensioners. “I am sorry I couldn’t live my retirement under socialism.”
Pravets retains many of its acquisitions from the socialist era: tidy, paved squares, well-maintained greenery, an artificial lake, street lights, a highway to Sofia , and perhaps most significantly its status as a town, bestowed 25 years ago, which helped it leave behind the humiliating position of a mere village.
All these assets Pravets owes to Zhivkov, who did not hesitate to spend state money on satisfying his personal emotional attachments – a fact that the local people clearly remember.
The central square is still named after Zhivkov, the local council keeps up an exhibition home dedicated to the former leader, and grateful citizens even put up a monument to him – the only one in the country – after his death.
The Zhivkov memorial home, built when he was in power, displays an extensive collection of presents that the former leader received from other countries.
Visitors can admire a set of firearms donated by Brezhnev, a small copy of the Taj Mahal from the state of India , a porcelain vase with his image on it, presented by the “working people of Uzbekistan”, and several hundred other objects.
His descendants think this is as it should be. “School textbooks contain little about what happened after September 9th [1944],” said Evgenia Zhivkova, his granddaughter and a socialist member of parliament.
“They tell more of the negative sides and speak of Zhivkov as of a totalitarian dictator, but they never mention the cultural and economic development [of his times].”
Most recent researchers into state archives think differently.
“Zhivkov certainly was a dictator, as he ruled all on his own, in person,” said Tatyana Vaksberg, a journalist who has spent more than five years looking at Politburo documents to research her documentary on the exodus of the ethnic Turks.
She says the courts failed to reach more verdicts against Zhivkov because the prosecution had not been reformed enough to prepare strong indictments.
“If he was sued by The Hague today he would be indicted on at least eight points, including unlawful imprisonment, torture, deportation and the plunder of public and private property,” added Vaksberg.
While the younger generation has been left to work out its own image of the Zhivkov time, researchers complain that the public memory of Zhivkov has become superficial.
“It seems the memory of Zhivkov has been frozen onto the level of jokes [about him] and there is no reflection,” said Diana Ivanova.
