Previously unthinkable changes began occurring in Bulgaria’s political life during the eighties - a time when external attitudes towards the country began to deteriorate rapidly. This was underlined by several significant events.
The Communist party had decided to show willingness to explore new ideas in order to bring unity to the community and combat certain economic problems it faced at the time. At the end of 1984 a decision was taken that rocked the country – a violent act was introduced whereby traditional Muslim names were changed by force to sound more Bulgarian affecting about 850,000 Bulgarian Turks.
Propagandists dubbed the violence a “revival process”. The internal and external consequences for Bulgaria from this process opened wounds that will not heal for decades to come. It was condemned by the whole world and the country fell into international isolation.
A couple of years prior to this, in 1982, Bulgaria’s name was connected to an attempt to assassinate the Pope, John Paul II. Although it was never proven, this affected the country’s reputation negatively. This story was very similar to the infamous “Bulgarian umbrella murder” – a story that shocked the world several years earlier.
Evidence of the crisis in power was the emergence of the dissident movement in 1988. As in other countries in Eastern Europe, it usually occurred among the intelligentsia and was stimulated by the process of “glasnost” and “perestroika” under Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.
At the end of the eighties informal political and professional groups also began to form in Bulgaria. These included a number of writers, artists, actors, and directors. Party leadership understood the threat and claimed the intelligentsia was exhibiting a sort of demagogic, speculative concept of democracy and glasnost.
Activation of certain circles of the intelligentsia triggered a negative reaction towards them from ruling party elite and retaliatory action in the familiar style of the Communist party. Ultimately, however, the transfer of power in Bulgaria was carried out by politicians from the upper echelons of the party and the state.
This development had its external causes too. The Communist system had begun to change, something unheard of before. In this sense the ongoing changes in Bulgaria were part of the general economic and political climate of transformation in socialist countries during the turbulent decade.
The Soviet Union, mainly occupied with its economic troubles, gradually eased the grip of political and economic control imposed on the rest of the socialist bloc since the 1940s. Countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia began to introduce informal organizations and trade unions which were not connected to any of the official Communist institutions. Similarly, in Hungary, new policies, distant from the known principles of planned socialist economy, began to flourish. In the GDR, in turn, financial difficulties caused a noticeable rise in social and political tension in the latter half of the eighties, which the authorities could not contain.