Economic In the mid-1950s, Soviet-style centralised planning produced economic indicators showing that Bulgarians were returning to their prewar lifestyle in some respects: real wages increased 75%, consumption of meat, fruit, and vegetables increased markedly, medical facilities and doctors became available to more of the population, and in 1957 collective farm workers benefited from the first agricultural pension and welfare system in Eastern Europe. In 1959, the Communist Party borrowed from the Chinese
Great Leap Forward to symbolise a sudden burst of economic activity to be injected into the Third Five-Year Plan (1958–1962), whose original scope was quite conservative. According to the revised plan, industrial production would double and agricultural production would triple by 1962; a new agricultural collectivisation and consolidation drive would achieve great economies of scale in that branch; investment in light industry would double, and foreign trade would expand. Zhivkov, whose "theses" had defined the goals of the plan, purged Politburo members and party rivals
Boris Taskov (in 1959) and
Anton Yugov (in 1962), citing their criticism of his policy as economically obstructionist. Already by 1960, however, Zhivkov had been forced to redefine the impossible goals of his theses.
Corecom was established as a means to sell Western-made luxury goods to foreign tourists and Bulgarians that held special monetary certificates, thus acquiring western hard currency – which had been in short supply as many Western governments did not allow the exchange of their currencies for their Eastern Bloc equivalents. Specific incentives to reform were shortages of labour and energy and the growing importance of foreign trade in the "thaw" years of the mid-1960s. Consequently, in 1962 the Fourth Five-Year Plan began an era of economic reform that brought a series of new approaches to the old goal of
intensive growth. Outside investment funds were to come primarily from
bank credit rather than the
state budget. In 1965 state subsidies still accounted for 63% of enterprise investment funds, however, while 30% came from retained enterprise earnings and only 7% from bank credits. For example, in July 1968, one month before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria's unorthodox, three-tiered pricing system was eliminated. The party leadership had never accepted the concept of free and flexible pricing for some products, which was an important Bulgarian departure from centralised planning in the 1960s. After a relative stagnation in the 1970s, the New Economic Model (NEM), instituted in 1981 as the latest economic reform program, seemingly improved the supply of consumer goods and generally upgraded the economy. In an effort to remedy the
chronic distribution problems of the central economy, higher economic institutions became financially accountable for damage inflicted by their decisions on subordinate levels. Complexes or associations were given explicit freedom to sign their own contracts with suppliers and customers at home and abroad. By 1984 Bulgaria was suffering a serious energy shortage because its
Soviet-made nuclear power plant was unreliable and droughts reduced the productivity of hydroelectric plants. In 1985, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev visited Bulgaria and reportedly pressured Zhivkov to make the country more competitive economically. This led to a Bulgarian version of the Soviet
perestroika program. After a round of failed experimental measures, in January 1989 the Party issued Decree Number 56. This decree established "firms" as the primary unit of economic management. In 1939 the mortality rate for children under one year had been 138.9 per 1,000; by 1986 it was 18.2 per 1,000, and in 1990 it was 14 per 1,000, the lowest rate in Eastern Europe. However, many of them were cramped – the average home in Bulgaria had three rooms and an area of . The educational system, despite the addition of ideological subjects, remained relatively unchanged after the beginning of the Communist era. In 1979 Zhivkov introduced a sweeping educational reform, claiming that
Marxist teachings on educating youth were still not being applied completely. Zhivkov therefore created Unified Secondary Polytechnical Schools (
Edinni sredni politekhnicheski uchilishta, ESPU), in which all students would receive the same general education. The system united previously separate specialised middle schools in a single, twelve-grade program heavily emphasising technical subjects. In 1981 a national program introduced
computers to most of the ESPUs. Without exception Zhivkov imitated or supported Soviet twists and turns such as Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Substantial historical and economic ties supplemented the ideological foundation of the relationship. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bulgaria improved its diplomatic relations with nations outside the Soviet sphere. Yet, though Bulgarian
émigré dissident
Georgi Markov wrote that "[Zhivkov] served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did", in many ways he can be said to have exploited the USSR for political purposes, with Bulgaria serving a buffer between the USSR and NATO. Thus, he claims in his memoirs that the USSR had become "a raw material appendage to Bulgaria", something obliquely confirmed by
Gorbachev when he wrote in his memoirs that "Bulgaria was a country which had lived beyond its means for a long time." An example of how the "raw material appendage" was exploited was the trade in Soviet
crude oil. This would be shipped to Bulgaria's modern
refinery in
Burgas at subsidised prices, processed, and resold on world markets at a huge premium. In 1963 and 1973, the Zhivkov regime made requests – it is unclear how far these were in earnest – that Bulgaria be incorporated into the USSR, both times because the Bulgarian government, having engaged in bitter polemics with
Yugoslavia over the
Macedonia naming dispute, feared a Soviet–Yugoslav reconciliation at its own expense. In 1963, following the decision of
Patriarch Alexy I of Moscow to recognise the autonomy of the
Macedonian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian leaders openly declared that there was no "historic Macedonian nation". In the face of Moscow's post-1953 efforts to reach out to Belgrade and Athens, Zhivkov seems to have calculated that a policy of unswerving loyalty to the Kremlin would ensure that it remained more valuable for the USSR than non-aligned Yugoslavia or NATO-affiliated Greece. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bulgaria gave official military support to many national liberation causes, most notably in
North Vietnam,
Indonesia,
Libya,
Angola,
Afghanistan, the
Horn of Africa, and the
Middle East. In 1984 the 9,000 Bulgarian advisers stationed in Libya for military and non-military aid put that country in first place among Bulgaria's
Third World clients. Through its Kintex arms export enterprise, Bulgaria also engaged in covert military support activities, many of which were subsequently disclosed. In the 1970s, diplomatic crises with
Sudan and
Egypt were triggered by Bulgarian involvement in coup plots. Events such as the invasions of Czechoslovakia and
Afghanistan automatically distanced Bulgaria from the West; then, in the early 1980s Soviet efforts to split NATO by cultivating Western Europe brought Bulgaria closer to
France and
West Germany – a position that continued through the 1980s. Even in the 1970s, Zhivkov actively pursued better relations with the West, overcoming conservative opposition and the tentative, tourism-based approach to the West taken as early as the 1960s. Emulating Soviet détente policy of the 1970s, Bulgaria gained Western technology, expanded cultural contacts, and attracted Western investments with the most liberal foreign investment policy in Eastern Europe. In 1986 the two countries signed a declaration of good-neighborliness, friendship, and cooperation that was based on mutual enmity toward Turkey and toward Yugoslav demands for recognition of
Macedonian minorities in Bulgaria and Greece. An important motivation for friendship with Greece was to exploit
NATO's Greek-Turkish split, which was based on the claims of the two countries in
Cyprus. In early 1989, Bulgaria signed a ten-year bilateral economic agreement with Greece.
Cultural Until the late 1980s, Zhivkov successfully prevented unrest in the Bulgarian intellectual community. Membership in the writers' union brought enormous privilege and social stature, and that drew many dissident writers such as Georgi Dzhagarov and Lyubomir Levchev into the circle of the officially approved intelligentsia. On the other hand, entry required intellectual compromise, and refusal to compromise led to dismissal from the union and loss of all privileges. Markov tells a story of how Zhivkov reproached a popular newspaper cartoonist for modifying his signature to resemble a pig's tail, yet did not persecute him. A handful of satirist dissidents such as
Radoy Ralin enjoyed some prominence during Zhivkov's tenure, although Ralin was not favoured by the authorities due to his sharp satire. at the opening of the new Plastchim factory in
Botevgrad, circa 1980 Zhivkov also softened organised opposition by restoring symbols of the Bulgarian cultural past that had been cast aside in the postwar campaign to consolidate Soviet-style party control. Beginning in 1967, he appealed loudly to the people to remember "our motherland Bulgaria". In this powerful position, Zhivkova became extremely popular by promoting Bulgaria's separate national cultural heritage. She spent large sums of money in a highly visible campaign to support scholars, collect Bulgarian art, and sponsor cultural institutions. Among her policies was closer cultural contact with the West; her most visible project was the spectacular national celebration of
Bulgaria's 1,300th anniversary in 1981. When Zhivkova died in 1981, relations with the West had already been chilled by the Afghanistan issue, but her brief administration of Bulgaria's official cultural life was a successful phase of her father's appeal to Bulgarian national tradition to unite the country. Sports also prospered during Zhivkov's rule. From 1956 to 1988, Bulgaria won an unprecedented 153 Olympic medals and numerous European and world competitions in sports as diverse as
volleyball,
rhythmic gymnastics and
wrestling. == Controversy ==