Todor Zhivkov
Todor Zhivkov , Bulgaria's last and longest-serving Communist leader, was born into a peasant family in 1911 and was a minor party functionary before emerging as Mayor of Sofia after World War II. The reasons for his rise are still the subject of much conjecture: his record of wartime service with the Chavdar partisan brigade is now known to be a fiction put about by servile biographers, and none of Bulgaria's party bosses regarded the affable and inoffensive Zhivkov as a serious political threat until it was too late. In 1954, within three years of joining the Politburo, he secured the post of First Secretary or Party Leader with the approval of Moscow, and elbowed aside the old Stalinist, Anton Yugov, to claim the premiership in 1962. He survived a coup in 1965 - a murky affair blamed on "ultra-leftists" at the time, but subsequently attributed to nationalist army officers. Zhivkov was never a great ideologist: most of his political innovations were designed to wrongfoot opponents rather than introduce real social change. In foreign policy he slavishly followed the Soviet line, enthusiastically sending troops to help crush the Prague Spring in 1968. He tried to counterbalance this closeness to the USSR by pumping up Bulgarian nationalism at home, presenting Communist Bulgaria as the natural culmination of the national struggles of the past. Consistent with this policy were the extravagant celebrations marking 1300 years of the Bulgarian state in 1981, and persecution of Bulgaria's ethnic Turkish population in the years that ensued. It's for this abuse of Turkish human rights that the Zhivkov years will be long remembered in Turkey and the West. However Zhivkov also presided over a period of full employment and rising living standards - until the Bulgarian economy started going wrong in the early 1980s - and he's still spoken of with some affection by elderly Bulgarians bewildered by the economic changes of the last decade. When "reform Communists" ditched Zhivkov in November 1989, it suited them to make the erstwhile dictator the scapegoat for all that was wrong in Bulgarian society. He was accordingly arrested on a charge of "embezzling state funds" and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment - although he continued to lead a comfortable, if somewhat restricted, existence under house arrest in Sofia. He remained in combative spirits, giving interviews to anyone who would listen and accusing Mikhail Gorbachev of being the one who orchestrated his downfall. According to Zhivkov, a skilful self-publicist to the end, his own form of perestroika was much more logical and consistent than the "anarchy" brought forth by the former Soviet leader. When Zhivkov died on August 5, 1998, fears that his funeral would provoke a wave of pro-Communist sentiment proved unfounded. The Bulgarian Socialist (ie former Communist) Party did succeed in hijacking the event, turning it into an anti-government political meeting - rather ironic when one considers that they'd expelled Zhivkov from their ranks barely nine years before - but only 10,000 elderly mourners were there to listen
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