Todor Zhivkov
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Todor Hristov Zhivkov (Bulgarian: Toдор Xpиcтoв Живков; pronounced /ˈtɔdɔr ˈxristɔf ˈʒifkɔf/; (September 7, 1911–August 5, 1998) was the Communist leader of Bulgaria from March 4, 1954 until November 10, 1989.
Biography
Zhivkov was born in the small village of Pravets. The son of poor peasants, he moved to Sofia as a youth, seeking work and a better future for himself. As a young man, Zhivkov took the ideals of Marxism to heart, and in 1932 he joined the Komsomol, the youth wing of the illegal Bulgarian Communist Party.
During World War II, Zhivkov rose up in the Party, and he helped organise a resistance movement against the German Reich, the People's Liberation Insurgent Army. After the war, Zhivkov began to take increasingly important posts in the new Soviet backed government, one of these being commander of the People's Militia. During as time as a militia leader, he had thousands arrested for political reasons.
In 1951, he became a full member of the Politburo, and in 1954 was made first secretary of the Central Committee, the youngest of any of the Eastern bloc leaders. 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 became the longest serving leader of any of the Eastern bloc nations.
Under Zhivkov's rule, all voices of dissent in Bulgaria were harshly subdued, with thousands being locked up in prisons across the country. Zhivkov also collectivized farming and emphasized industrial technology in the Bulgarian agricultural sector. Substantial financial aid from the USSR aided Bulgaria's industrialization.
A protégé of Nikita Khrushchev's, and a close friend of Leonid Brezhnev, Zhivkov was known for his firm, almost servile, allegiance to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. He twice proposed that Bulgaria merge with the Soviet Union#redirect , citing their common alphabet and common Slavic heritage as justifications. He also sent Bulgarian troops to participate in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The dissident Georgi Markov, who fell victim to an assassination attempt with a Bulgarian umbrella in 1978, said: "[Zhivkov] served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did." Albania's Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha labelled Zhivkov: "A third-rate cadre, but one willing to do whatever Khrushchev, his ambassador, or the KGB would say." [link]
Zhivkov 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 strange ideas related to Far Eastern philosophy which were not welcomed by the Old Guard. Some sources maintain her early death in 1980 was due to Soviet meddling. Her husband, Ivan Slavkov, was made a boss of the state-controlled Bulgarian Television, and later President of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee. Meanwhile, Vladimir led a playboy style of life. His drinking bouts made it impossible to promote him further than the top ranks of the Komsomol.
Although Zhivkov was never a despot in the Stalinist mold, by 1981, when he turned 70, his regime was growing increasingly corrupt, autocratic 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 the communism and his own ouster. An ill-advised campaign to Bulgarise the names of the ethnic Turks in the country (which led to their mass exodus from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1985) contributed to his downfall.
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 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. He was refused a state funeral.
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