The Fatherland Front coup in Bulgaria

At 6.25 a.m. on 9 September 1944 the voice of retired General Kimon Georgiev came over the loudspeakers of Radio Sofia. He announced that a Fatherland Front government had taken power in Bulgaria “to save the country” and read out the composition of the new cabinet, which he himself headed. A few hours earlier, at around two in the morning, several hundred soldiers of the capital’s garrison, led by junior officers, had seized the War Ministry, the main post office, the telephone exchange, the radio station and the railway station without a fight. The government of Konstantin Muraviev, formed only a week earlier, ceased to exist. Bulgaria, whose north-east had since the previous day been occupied by the Red Army, changed sides in the war and changed its political system in a single night.

Chronologies record under 9 September that the Fatherland Front overthrew the government and declared war on Germany. The first part is accurate; the second needs qualifying: war on Germany had already been announced by Muraviev’s government on the evening of 8 September, and the new cabinet upheld that decision and extended it to Hungary. Nor was the coup the work of the Front alone as a mass movement. It was planned and carried out by officers linked to Zveno, the elite political group of Georgiev and General Damyan Velchev, in cooperation with the leadership of the communists and the partisans. Chronologies also record the Red Army’s entry into Sofia on 16 September, an event that Soviet accounts date to 15 September.

The Fatherland Front

The Fatherland Front was founded in 1942 on the initiative of the Bulgarian communists, who were then operating under the name of the Bulgarian Workers’ Party and whose leader, Georgi Dimitrov, directed them from Moscow. Alongside the communists it was joined by the left-wing agrarians of Nikola Petkov’s “Pladne” group, some of the social democrats, and Zveno. This last group was an unusual ally for the communists. Its leaders, Georgiev and Velchev, had staged a coup in 1934, after which Georgiev ruled for several months as prime minister of an authoritarian government before Tsar Boris removed them from power. They had influence in the officer corps, which the communists lacked, and in 1944 they shared with them a hostility towards the regents and the conviction that Bulgaria must go over to the side of the USSR.

The Front also waged an armed struggle. In 1943 the communists formed the People’s Liberation Insurgent Army (NOVA), whose partisan units operated in the mountains of Bulgaria and occupied Macedonia. The government fought them with the gendarmerie, the police and the army; both sides resorted to brutal reprisals. By the summer of 1944 the partisans numbered, according to various estimates, from several thousand to over ten thousand. After the coup in Romania on 23 August, the communist leadership decided to seize power by force at the first opportunity. The date was postponed several times, and when Muraviev’s government was formed on 2 September, the Front rejected the four ministerial portfolios it was offered, regarding the new cabinet as an attempt to save the old regime.

The night of 8/9 September

The last days of Muraviev’s government were marked by chaos. On 5 September the USSR declared war on Bulgaria; on 6 and 7 September miners in Pernik and tram workers in Sofia went on strike, and partisans came down from the mountains into towns and villages. On 7 September the government legalised the banned parties, dissolved fascist organisations, lifted the restrictions imposed on Jews and persuaded Bogdan Filov to withdraw from the regency council. On 8 September, as Soviet troops were crossing the border, the War Minister, General Ivan Marinov, tried to persuade the remaining regents, Prince Kiril and General Nikola Mihov, to appoint a Fatherland Front government. They refused. Marinov, who was in contact with the conspirators, did nothing to stop them, and in the new government he became commander-in-chief of the army.

The composition of the future cabinet was settled on the afternoon of 8 September at Georgiev’s house by Georgiev himself, Velchev, Petkov and the communist Dobri Terpeshev. They agreed that the communists, Zveno and the “Pladne” agrarians would each receive four portfolios, the social democrats two, and two would go to non-party figures. The communists obtained the key ministries of the interior and justice, and Velchev the War Ministry. In the evening a group of officers met in the War Ministry itself, divided up the tasks and set the time of the operation for two in the morning.

The coup in Sofia was a military putsch in the tradition of the Bulgarian coups of 1923 and 1934, not a popular uprising, as communist historiography later portrayed it. Historians estimate that some 450 people in all took part, most of them soldiers obeying their commanders’ orders: the training company of the Military School, a sapper battalion, anti-aircraft searchlight batteries and a motor transport company. The largest unit of the garrison, the 1st Sofia Infantry Division, remained neutral thanks to its chief of staff. The communists had few forces in the capital at the time. Within a few hours the conspirators had taken all the most important buildings almost without a shot being fired.

In the morning the regents were brought from their mountain residence at Chamkoria to the War Ministry. They signed the decree appointing Georgiev’s government and were then arrested. Muraviev and his ministers were also detained, and soon afterwards Filov and members of earlier cabinets. Georgiev’s radio address became the signal for Front committees and partisans across the country, who took over municipal and district offices, police stations and prisons. In most places they met no resistance. Clashes took place in Sofia, Plovdiv, Pernik, Shumen and Haskovo, where on 12 September partisans captured the barracks of an artillery regiment at heavy cost.

On the evening of 9 September a delegation of the new government flew to Bucharest to ask for an armistice from General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin, commander of the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front, who was promoted to Marshal three days later. At 10 p.m. Joseph Stalin ordered hostilities against Bulgaria to cease. Georgiev’s government upheld the declaration of war on Germany and declared war on Hungary as well.

The Red Army in Sofia

On 9 September Soviet troops were still in north-eastern Bulgaria, on the Ruse–Burgas line. The coup in Sofia took place without their involvement, although it is hard to imagine it without their presence in the country and without Moscow’s earlier declaration of war. Once hostilities had ceased, the 3rd Ukrainian Front moved on west and south, now as an army allied to the new government. Soviet troops passed through the country without disarming the Bulgarian army or removing the local Front authorities. On 11 September the first representatives of the Soviet command flew into Sofia from Bucharest.

According to Soviet accounts, the first Red Army units entered Sofia on 15 September. Many chronologies, especially Western ones, give 16 September as the date of the entry. The inhabitants, worn out by the air raids of the winter and spring of 1944, for the most part welcomed the soldiers warmly. By the end of September the main forces of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had reached the Yugoslav border, where they prepared for the advance on Belgrade.

Terror and the People’s Court

The seizure of power in Sofia was almost bloodless, but the weeks that followed were not. On 10 September the police were disbanded and a People’s Militia was formed, made up largely of former partisans, and more than 8,000 political prisoners were released. On 12 September the government issued a decree ordering the arrest of all ministers who had held office since 1941, deputies of the government majority and senior officers. At the same time, across the country, local Front committees and partisan units began settling scores with political opponents, former officials, policemen, priests and teachers. Extrajudicial executions peaked at the end of September and in October 1944. The number of victims is disputed: estimates of those killed and missing in the first months after the coup range from several thousand to several tens of thousands.

In December 1944 the government set up the so-called People’s Court to try those responsible for drawing Bulgaria into the war on Germany’s side and for crimes committed during it. More than 11,000 people appeared before its panels, and over 2,600 death sentences were handed down. On 1 February 1945 the first panel sentenced to death the regents – Prince Kiril, Filov and General Mihov – together with dozens of former ministers, advisers to the tsar and deputies; the sentences were carried out the same night. Muraviev received life imprisonment. These trials also punished genuine war crimes, but above all they served to eliminate the entire pre-war political elite.

Bulgaria on the Allied side

At the end of September Bulgarian units were withdrawing from the occupied Greek and Yugoslav territories, while the new army, in which the communists quickly filled the posts of deputy commanders for political affairs, prepared to fight the Germans. In October 1944 three Bulgarian armies attacked the German forces withdrawing from Greece and Macedonia in southern Serbia and Macedonia, supporting the Soviet Belgrade offensive. Later the Bulgarian First Army fought alongside the 3rd Ukrainian Front in Hungary and on the Drava, reaching Austria in May 1945. According to Bulgarian figures, Bulgarian losses in this fighting exceeded 12,000 killed.

On 28 October 1944 representatives of Georgiev’s government signed an armistice with the three powers in Moscow. Bulgaria undertook to hand back the occupied territories to Greece and Yugoslavia, and control of the country until the conclusion of peace passed to an Allied Control Commission, formally headed by Tolbukhin but in practice by his deputy, General Sergey Biryuzov. The Russians had the decisive voice in it. Bulgaria was not granted the status of an allied state, but it kept Southern Dobruja, regained from Romania in 1940.

Significance

The coup of 9 September ended Bulgaria’s participation in the war on the Axis side and opened the Red Army’s road to Yugoslavia and Hungary. For Bulgaria itself it marked the beginning of a transformation of its political system. In 1946, after a referendum, the monarchy was abolished and the nine-year-old Tsar Simeon II left the country. In November that year Georgi Dimitrov became prime minister, and in September 1947 Nikola Petkov, who had turned from an ally of the communists into the leader of the opposition, was executed. Georgiev, who in 1944 had opened the communists’ path to power, remained a minister in their governments, while Velchev died in exile in Paris. Throughout the communist period 9 September was celebrated as a national holiday, and the coup was presented as a popular uprising against fascism. Present-day Bulgaria judges these events differently: for some it was the end of the alliance with Hitler, for others the beginning of Soviet occupation and communist terror.