BULGARIA IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIME. A REPORT OF THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OF THE US SENATE (1953)
BULGARIA IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIME. A REPORT OF THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OF THE US SENATE (1953)

Summary/Abstract: In the heated years of the Cold War, especially the beginning of 50s, the need of the political community to be informed about the developments behind the Iron Curtain became more urgent. This led to various analytical attempts, one of them being the subject of our paper.In 1951, the Library of Congress prepared a study referring to the Soviet Union, especially with a focus on the conditions in which the people of the Soviet federation could (and will) become more and more against the Soviet government („Communist oppression”). The study was prepared at the request of the US Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Two years later, the same committee voted for enlarging the analysis for the rest of the Communist states, from Eastern Europe and, moreover, to publish them, as a Senate document, under the title “Tensions Within the Soviet Captive Countries”.First of the analysis was dedicated to Bulgaria. Romania, Bulgaria, Democratic Republic of Germany, Poland, Albania, and Hungary followed. The focus was on the Russian/Soviet grip on these countries, the Communist takeover and the liquidation of the old prewar society, the relations between workers and the communist power, the minorities, the intellectuals, and the conditions of living. The main conclusions, for Bulgaria, were that society was under siege, imprisoned by force into a Communist cell from which Bulgarian society hoped to be relieved, including by passive and active resistance. Similar conclusions were to be found in the rest of the analyses, despite the fact that their structure of them was different from a country to another. The accent of possible anticommunist resistance, underground or public, against Communist rule, was a key point of these analyses, in a period of intense anticommunist rhetoric, as that of mccarthyism.

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