Never Forget What the Fascists Did
In Bulgaria, campaigns that equate Communism with Nazism aren’t about defending democracy against “Russian meddling,” they’re about rehabilitating Bulgarian fascism and its complicity in the Holocaust.
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But why should a celebration of the defeat of Nazism be considered unwelcome intrusion? The answer owes to the specific anniversary being commemorated — the events of September 9, 1944, the day when the Fatherland Front took over the government. Uniting an anti-Nazi coalition of Communists, Agrarians, Social-Democrats, and military generals, the Fatherland Front came to power against the backdrop of the arrival of Soviet troops. This date is thus usually considered the beginning of socialism in Bulgaria, paving the way for the Communist Party takeover in 1947.
Every year, this anniversary (known as 9/9) triggers debates and denunciations. Liberals never miss an opportunity to bewail the events of 1944 and the “criminal deviation of history” which Bulgarian socialism supposedly represented. But this year, the Russian exhibition added an international dimension to the traditional “September 9 debate.” The problem, for many, was that the defeat of Bulgaria — a Nazi-allied, but sovereign country — was integrated into a general celebration of the liberation of central-eastern Europe from Nazi occupation.
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Yet even the legitimacy that might be implied by the word “revolution” is now denied it. Indeed, if during the socialist era 9/9 was celebrated as a revolution, after 1989 it was relabeled a “coup.” As historian Alexander Vezenkov notes, this particular “coup” had the unusual feature that power was immediately handed to a civilian force — the Fatherland Front. But denying that this was a “revolution” has another purpose. Even despite years of vilification, the word “revolution” still invokes mass participation and thus implies a degree of democratic consent, whereas “coup” usually refers to some illegitimate and factional assumption of power.
The Right cannot admit that there was a “revolution,” because this would be to acknowledge that the events of 1944 in any way responded to the aspirations of the mass of Bulgarians, rather than just the Russian “occupiers.” This is also allied to a prominent trend in the post-1989 liberal public sphere — at the source of a continuing historical revisionism — which denies that there was ever such a thing as a Bulgarian fascism, such as might have needed to be fought against. This denial of the basic legitimacy of anti-fascism makes it easier to portray it as a fraudulent, antidemocratic politics imposed by a foreign imperial power.
This historical revisionism necessarily has short shrift for the facts — after all, pre-1944 Bulgaria was anything but democratic. Aside from being a Nazi ally, it was a constitutional monarchy with weak parliamentary life disrupted by coups, suspensions of the constitution, paramilitary violence, and a royal dictatorship that suspended party political life from 1934 until 1944. In January 1941, eight months after it joined the Axis, Bulgaria drafted a Law for the Protection of the Nation which stripped the Bulgarian Jews of civic and political rights and launched a state terror against them.
As an Axis ally, Bulgaria shipped all the Jews from territories it had occupied in Greece and Macedonia to the Treblinka extermination camp. While the Bulgarian government was not explicitly Nazi, it did have overt fascist leanings and created or tolerated a number of fascist organizations. If Bulgaria did, indeed, avoid falling under the Nazi jackboot like neighboring Yugoslavia or Greece, the domestic regime was certainly pro-fascist and provided good enough reasons for the homegrown opposition to fight it. In fact, an anti-fascist resistance emerged even before Bulgaria joined the Axis: it was certainly not just “imported” on the bayonets of the Red Army.
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The Foreign Ministry statement also reiterates another common talking-point of the Right, namely, that in 1944 one totalitarianism replaced another. Any celebration of the defeat of Nazism is replaced by the complaint that Bulgaria was “forcefully shut out from Europe by the Soviet invasion.”
The purported moral equivalence of Nazi and socialist “totalitarianisms” then justifies a second move, claiming that socialism was the worse of the two since it 1) lasted much longer, and 2) unlike Nazism, it violated the sacred right to private property. The latter point was made by politicians like Zhelyu Zhelev, the first democratically elected Bulgarian president and a liberal philosopher who introduced the notion of totalitarianism to Bulgaria. Of course, the fascists in power did violate some private property, for example that of the Jews, but it seems that this was a small price to pay for Bulgaria’s Axis membership and the preservation of capitalism in general.
Indeed, if numerous declarations from the European Parliament have explicitly put Communism and Nazism on an equal footing, liberals’ actions betray a preference for one “totalitarianism” over the other. One of the sponsors of the controversial recent European Parliament motion on historical memory, the Bulgarian MEP Andrey Kovatchev, even invited Dyanko Markov — a member of the interwar Nazi paramilitary group known as the Bulgarian National Legions — to the European Parliament. Markov rode the 1990s wave of rehabilitation of interwar fascists: on one solemn occasion, honoring the “victims of Communism,” he excused the deportation of the Jews to Treblinka by calling them “an enemy population.” He spoke those words in the Bulgarian Parliament, no less.
The other Bulgarian MEP who sponsored the European Parliament motion, Alexander Yordanov — a politician from the early liberal anticommunist opposition — publicly insists there was never fascism in Bulgaria. It is worth emphasizing that these MEPs are members of the ruling European People’s Party — the respectable “center-right” — and not from some fringe extremist party.
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Jana Tsoneva
October 9, 2019
Jacobin