The Red Army in Bulgaria

On the morning of 8 September 1944 units of the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front under General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin (a Marshal from 12 September) crossed the Romanian–Bulgarian border in Dobruja and on the lower Danube. They met no resistance. The Bulgarian army had government orders not to fire on the Russians, and in many places the population greeted the soldiers with flowers. The same day Soviet spearheads took Silistra, Ruse and Dobrich without a fight, and on 9 September ships and landing parties of the Black Sea Fleet entered the ports of Varna and Burgas.

This was an invasion of a country with which the Soviet Union had formally been at war for three days, but which had never fought it. Bulgaria belonged to the Axis camp, yet throughout the war it had maintained diplomatic relations with Moscow and had not sent a single soldier to the Eastern Front. On the evening of 8 September, with Soviet columns already moving through the north-east of the country, the government in Sofia announced that it was declaring war on Germany. For a few hours, therefore, Bulgaria was simultaneously at war with the Third Reich, Britain, the United States and the USSR – a situation without precedent in this war. During the night of 8/9 September that government was overthrown in Sofia by a Fatherland Front coup.

An Axis ally with no war in the east

Bulgaria had tied itself to Germany in March 1941, when it joined the Tripartite Pact and let German troops advancing on Greece cross its territory. Its reward was the occupation of most of Yugoslav Macedonia, part of Serbia and Greek Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace – lands the Bulgarians had regarded as theirs since the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878. Tsar Boris III, however, resisted taking part in the war against the USSR. He explained to Hitler that the army had to watch Turkey and the Aegean coast, and that the pro-Russian sympathies of the population made it impossible to send troops against Russia. On 13 December 1941, on the other hand, Bulgaria declared war on Britain and the United States. In Sofia this step was seen as a symbolic gesture towards Berlin, but Washington responded in kind in June 1942, and from November 1943 American and British bombers based in Italy began attacking Sofia.

After Boris’s sudden death in August 1943, power on behalf of the under-age Tsar Simeon II passed to a regency council, whose strongest figure was the former prime minister Bogdan Filov. The regents wanted the same as the late tsar: to leave the war without losing the lands gained in 1941 and without a German occupation. They counted on a Western Allied landing in the Balkans to make this possible. The Normandy landings of June 1944 dashed those hopes, since the Western Allies had no intention of opening a front in the Balkans.

Neutrality declared too late

In June 1944 the regents entrusted the government to Ivan Bagryanov, a politician regarded as well disposed towards the West. Bagryanov tried to take the country out of the war before the Red Army reached the Danube. He repealed some of the anti-Jewish laws, improved conditions in the camps holding downed Allied airmen and in August sent the former speaker of parliament Stoycho Moshanov (PL) first to Ankara and then to Cairo for talks with the British and Americans. Sofia hoped that an armistice with the West would bring British and American troops into the country before Soviet ones arrived.

These calculations were upset by the Jassy–Kishinev offensive, launched on 20 August, and by the coup in Romania three days later. Within a few days the Red Army stood in Dobruja, on the Bulgarian border. On 26 August Bagryanov’s government proclaimed Bulgaria’s “complete neutrality”, announced that German troops entering its territory would be disarmed and demanded the withdrawal of those still there. In practice the Germans went on using Bulgarian railways and ports, and their ships lay at Varna and Burgas. Moscow regarded this neutrality as a fiction. On 30 August the Soviet government declared that it did not recognise it and demanded that Bulgaria break with Germany.

On 2 September Bagryanov resigned. A new government was formed by Konstantin Muraviev, leader of one of the factions of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, which had until then been in opposition. For the first time in years it included politicians from opposition parties, but not the Fatherland Front, a coalition of communists, left-wing agrarians, social democrats and a group of officers and politicians linked to Zveno. The Front rejected the cabinet posts offered to it, called Muraviev’s government an attempt to save the old regime and prepared to seize power by force. Muraviev restored political freedoms, announced the withdrawal of troops from occupied Greece and Yugoslavia and continued the talks in Cairo. At first, however, he was unwilling to declare war on Germany, fearing that it would serve as a pretext for a German occupation of the country.

The declaration of war on 5 September

In these days the question of influence in the post-war Balkans also hung over Bulgaria. Joseph Stalin had no intention of allowing a country that lay on the Red Army’s road to Yugoslavia and the Turkish Straits to leave the war through an agreement with the British and Americans. On the evening of 5 September the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, handed the Bulgarian minister in Moscow a note in which the USSR declared Muraviev’s policy a continuation of that of his predecessors, accused Bulgaria of aiding Germany and announced that from that moment it was at war with it. Soviet sources justified the step by the presence in the country of some 30,000 German soldiers and of a German fleet in Bulgarian ports. London and Washington had not been forewarned. Their representatives in Cairo informed the Bulgarian delegation that an armistice could henceforth be negotiated only with the three powers jointly.

The same day Muraviev’s government decided to break off relations with Germany and declare war on it. At the request of the War Minister, General Ivan Marinov, the announcement was, however, postponed by roughly 72 hours so that the units of the Bulgarian Fifth Army could withdraw from Macedonia before the Germans began to disarm them. The delay did not save them: as early as the beginning of September German troops had seized the headquarters of Bulgarian commands in Serbia, and some units had to fight their way back to the old border. Sofia asked Moscow several times for an armistice but received no reply.

A march without a shot

The Stavka in Moscow ordered Tolbukhin to open operations against Bulgaria on 8 September, reach the line Ruse–Karnobat–Burgas by 12 September and halt there. The task was assigned to the 46th, 57th and 37th Armies, two mechanised corps, the 17th Air Army and the Black Sea Fleet, which was to seize Varna and Burgas with seaborne and airborne landings. Any further advance would depend on how the internal situation in Bulgaria developed. The Bulgarian army then numbered over half a million men, but in the path of the Soviet thrust there were only four divisions and two brigades – and none of them had been ordered to fight.

On the morning of 8 September Soviet infantry crossed the border, and the mechanised corps, overtaking it, drove deep into the country. Bulgarian soldiers stayed in their barracks or welcomed the newcomers. The next day the spearheads reached the designated line, and Soviet ships and landing parties entered Varna and Burgas. The Kriegsmarine vessels that had been lying in these ports had already been scuttled by their own crews, and the German sailors had withdrawn into the interior of the Balkans. There were practically no combat losses; Soviet accounts call this the “Bulgarian operation” and date it to 8–9 September.

On the evening of 8 September Muraviev’s government announced its declaration of war on Germany. The date of this declaration is given variously: some accounts link it to 6 or 7 September, when the decision had already been taken, but many versions, Bulgarian ones included, place its public announcement on 8 September, after Soviet troops had already crossed the border. To Moscow it made no difference. The state of war continued, and the Soviet command did not respond to Bulgarian requests for a ceasefire.

Meanwhile revolt was spreading through the country. From 6 September miners in Pernik and tram workers in Sofia were on strike, general strikes were declared in Plovdiv and Gabrovo, and partisans were freeing political prisoners and taking power in dozens of towns and villages. In Varna a Fatherland Front committee took over the administration just before Soviet troops entered. On 8 September General Marinov tried in vain to persuade the regents to appoint a Fatherland Front government, and during the night officers linked to Zveno and the communists seized the key buildings of the capital.

Significance

The Red Army’s entry into Bulgaria was one of the most one-sided operations of the war: a state that had never fought the USSR, and had itself announced its break with Germany, was occupied without a single shot after Moscow declared war on it. The coup of the night of 8/9 September handed power to the Fatherland Front, and at 10 p.m. on 9 September Stalin ordered operations against Bulgaria to cease. On 15 September Soviet troops entered Sofia, and by the end of the month the main forces of the 3rd Ukrainian Front stood on the Yugoslav border.

Three days of formal war with Bulgaria gave the Soviet Union what an armistice concluded by Sofia with the Western Allies would not have given it: the right to occupy the country and the decisive voice on the control commission. Under the Moscow armistice of 28 October 1944 Bulgaria gave up the territories it had occupied in Greece and Yugoslavia, and its army, placed under Soviet command, fought the Germans in Yugoslavia and Hungary until May 1945. Soviet troops remained in the country until 1947, and their presence enabled the communists to seize full power. In October 1944 in Moscow, Winston Churchill and Stalin also agreed, in the so-called percentages agreement, that the USSR would retain 75–80 per cent influence in Bulgaria, which merely confirmed the situation created in September.