My paper aspires to develop and elaborate the national discourse that the Bulgarian Communist Party (henceforth BCP) used in order to legitimise its power after the Second World War. So far literature has paid attention to several factors underpinning the struggle of Bulgarian communists to consolidate their power: high discipline ...
(Show more)My paper aspires to develop and elaborate the national discourse that the Bulgarian Communist Party (henceforth BCP) used in order to legitimise its power after the Second World War. So far literature has paid attention to several factors underpinning the struggle of Bulgarian communists to consolidate their power: high discipline of the Party membership and maintenance of party structure and function during the harsh period of the Second World War, prestige gained by the resistance movement and the victory of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, and a series of authoritative measures and means of violence mainly due to the presence of the Red Army, such as terror, purges, authoritative control of key ministries, and elimination of the opposition. Undoubtedly, all of the above factors played a crucial role in the establishment of the communist power. However, means of violence cannot effectively explain the popularity that the BCP and the Fatherland Front enjoyed in the post-war period. Moreover, the communist regimes could not rely only on means of violence: they needed means of consent to legitimise the new regime, gain the support of the masses, maintain the Fatherland Front united, and navigate political antagonism with the opposition.
My paper goes beyond tactical political manoeuvres (maintenance of the unity of the Fatherland Front, salami tactics and development of clientele networks) focusing on the national discourse as articulated by the communists. The in-depth analysis of this discourse relies on archival material and primary sources. This discourse recast earlier discursive elements from the French revolution (identification of people, nation, and state) and from the October revolution (identification of people, state, and the Party). As the Party was identified with the nation, challenging the Party became synonymous with challenging the nation. The schema “if you are not within the Fatherland Front, you are against Bulgaria” was taken for granted.
This discourse was all-embracing and operated in a set of key policy domains: security apparatuses (People’s Army and Militia), the justice (including the People’s Courts), the economy (first and foremost concerning the modernisation project of the BCP), the constitution and governance, and the elimination of the opposition. Identifying the nation, the people, the state, and the Party in all these domains, the Bulgarian communists effectively began to articulate what we might call a totalitarian discourse as it negated the separation of the various domains of social life. The totalitarianism of the nation-state constituted the discourse of the BCP in its efforts to legitimise its regime, pacify Bulgarian society, re-build and modernise the Bulgarian state.
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