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'Todor Hristov Zhivkov' (; ) (September 7, 1911–August 5, 1998) was Bulgarian nationalist and the Communist leader of Bulgaria from March 4, 1954 until November 10, 1989.

Contents

Biography

What was done during the Zhivkov Era

References

External links

Biography

Zhivkov was born in the small village of Pravets, Bulgaria, the son of poor peasants. As a youth, he moved to Sofia seeking employment. Zhivkov became a Marxist and in 1932 joined the Komsomol, the youth wing of the then outlawed Bulgarian Communist Party.
During World War II, Zhivkov participated in the resistance movement against Nazi Germany. After the war, Zhivkov was backed by the Soviet Union as commander of the People's Militia. As militia (the Bulgarian Communist police) leader in Sofia, he had thousands arrested as political prisoners.
In 1951, he became a full member of the Bulgarian Communist Party's Politburo, and, in 1954, was made first secretary of the party's Central Committee. Zhivkov was also head of state (Chairman of the State Council) of Bulgaria from July 7, 1971 to November 17, 1989. Despite a coup attempt by dissident military officers and Party members in 1965, he remained the longest serving leader of any Soviet bloc nation. Todor Zhivkov was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union on May 31 1977 ^[1]
Under Zhivkov's rule, all voices of dissent in Bulgaria were harshly suppressed, and until 1962 thousands were locked up in prisons across the country. With aid from the Soviet Union, Zhivkov continued enforcing collectivized farming and building heavy industry.
A protégé of Nikita Khrushchev, and a close friend of Leonid Brezhnev, Zhivkov was known for his subservience and allegiance to the Soviet Union. He also sent Bulgarian forces to participate in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The dissident Georgi Markov, who was assassinated in London with a Bulgarian umbrella in 1978, said: "[Zhivkov] served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did." On the other hand, his close connection with Soviet leaders secured economic deals, which were often highly profitable for Bulgaria.

Zhivkov (also known in Bulgaria as "Tato") tried to promote his children, daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova and son Vladimir Zhivkov, up the Communist Party hierarchy. Lyudmila made it to Politburo member and Minister of Culture. She introduced non-Orthodox ideas from Far Eastern philosophy and promoted Bulgarian culture. Some of her activities were not well received by the Old Guard. Some sources maintain her early death in 1981 was due to Soviet meddling. Her husband, Ivan Slavkov, was promoted to chairman of the the state-controlled Bulgarian Television, and later to President of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee.
Although Zhivkov was never a despot in the Stalinist mould, by 1981, when he turned 70, his regime was growing increasingly corrupt and erratic. Near the end of his reign, he made several limited attempts to modernise Bulgaria, such as introducing scaled-down versions of Mikhail Gorbachev's ''glasnost'' and ''perestroika'', while keeping the country under his control. However, these attempts failed to prevent the collapse of his communist regime. An ill-advised campaign to Bulgarise the names of ethnic Turks in the country (which led to their mass exodus from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1989) contributed to his downfall.
Zhivkov is being remembered for the deportation of part of the Turkish ethnic minority and other ethnic related communities in the numbers of hundreds of thousands seizing their properties. As a dictator, he ruled with injustice, and harsh nationalism.
At the end of 1989, Zhivkov was ousted from the presidency and expelled from the Bulgarian Communist Party. The Communist Party subsequently gave up its monopoly on power in February 1990, and in June 1990, the first free elections in Bulgaria since 1931 were held.
Zhivkov was arrested in January 1990. Two years later, he was convicted of embezzlement of government funds in a fraudulent trial and sentenced to seven years in prison. However, due to his frail health, he was allowed to serve his term under house arrest. He was eventually acquitted by the Bulgarian Supreme Court in 1996.
Todor Zhivkov died of pneumonia in 1998. While he was refused a state funeral, it was nonetheless attended. The people of Bulgaria did not know that outside world lived better lives than they did, and thought he was the best leader they could ever get. Bulgaria now, is moving towards democracy, and is attempting to join the E.U. in the next round of admissions. In the so many previous years, Free Market Economy was shown negatively. The aim was to scare public from market freedom, and free competition rules. The State, as a monopoly, was in charge with an iron fist. Zhivkov's limited and blind vision locked the freedoms up.

What was done during the Zhivkov Era

Since the early 1950s the industrial sector in Bulgaria was in a stage of rapid growth. Nevertheless, most of the large industrial complexes like the Kremikovtsi metallurgy works and the Chervena Mogila (Red Hill) heavy industrial equipment factory were built in Zhivkov's time. Bulgaria's first, and for now only, nuclear powerplant at Kozloduy was built in the 1970s, all of the 6 reactors completed in less than 5 years. From 1975 onwards there was a big progress in high technologies, such as space exploration and computers. On 10 April 1979 Bulgaria launched its first astronaut (kosmonavt in Bulgarian) in outer space - Georgi Ivanov. In the 1980s, mass production of computers for domestic usage started - the first of its kind in the Eastern Bloc and the world. The computers were named "Pravets" - after the hometown of Todor Zhivkov. After 1989 the efficiency of Bulgarian industry dropped drastically, to recover only recently with the accession of Bulgaria to NATO and the EU.

References

1. Biography at the website on Heroes of the Soviet Union and Russia

External links

★ Official web site of Todor Zivkov

★ Last interview of Todor Zivkov