Part 19 (1/2)
Because the party congress meets so infrequently, it delegates its functions to the Central Committee that it elects. Election of Central Committee members is also a pro forma action wherein the congress unanimously approves the list of names provided by the party leaders.h.i.+p.
The Central Committee is a large working party organ, which in 1973 included 147 members and 110 candidate (nonvoting) members. The committee is charged with the administration of party work between sessions of the congress and the implementation of party policies presented by the leaders.h.i.+p. For the performance of its duties, the Central Committee has fourteen permanently operating departments and six schools and inst.i.tutes, the latter ostensibly to promote political educational goals. As set forth in party statutes, plenary sessions of the committee are to be held at least twice a year, and special sessions may be called from time to time.
Within the Central Committee sits the nine-man permanent Secretariat headed by the first secretary who, by party structure, is the most powerful man in the country. The Secretariat is elected by the Central Committee during the party congress, but the election, once again, is merely formal approval of the members already selected by the top party leaders.h.i.+p. Since 1954 the position of first secretary has been continuously held by Zhivkov, who also heads the State Council and is therefore the head-of-state. In addition to the first secretary, six other secretaries and two members complete the composition of the Secretariat. The main function of the Secretariat is to supervise the implementation of party policy.
Sharing the center stage of political power with the Secretariat is the Politburo, elected by the Central Committee in the same manner as the Secretariat. In effect the Politburo is a self-perpetuating body, and any change in members.h.i.+p is dictated by the members themselves. Composed of eleven members and six candidate members, all Politburo members belong to the Central Committee. They provide collective political leaders.h.i.+p in both party and government.
The Politburo is the policymaking and decisionmaking branch of the party. In theory the eleven members of the Politburo are equal, but in practice the party first secretary occupies the topmost position of power in the party and is therefore first among equals in the Politburo.
Such is the concentration of political authority in the top bodies that multiplicity of members.h.i.+p by party officials in any or all of the central party organs is more the rule than the exception.
Members.h.i.+p
After the successful coup d'etat in September 1944, communist party members.h.i.+p grew with unprecedented speed. From prisons and internment camps and from self-exile abroad, party leaders began to converge in Sofia to restructure the party and to form a new government. Party members a.s.sisted by sympathizers helped fill the necessary manpower requirements as functionaries and working groups in the new coalition government. A period of intensive recruitment and propaganda followed that swelled the number of members from 15,000 to 250,000 in just four months. By the time the Fifth Party Congress convened in December 1948, party members.h.i.+p reached 500,000. This was in part due to the merger of the Social Democrats with the BKP in August 1948. In large part, however, Bulgaria's egalitarian peasant society--coupled with indiscriminate recruitment using hardly any criteria for qualification--produced a predominantly peasant members.h.i.+p. Workers accounted for slightly over one-fourth of the total members.h.i.+p as compared to one-half made up of peasants.
Ironically, the intense campaign for new members was accompanied by wide-scale purges within the party during a power struggle between the Stalin faction and the home faction of the BKP. Led by Chervenkov, the Moscow-oriented leaders succeeded in getting rid of their political opponents and soon after established a Stalinist kind of government in the country. Observers noted that this was aimed not only at weeding out undesirable party elements but, more important, at increasing the number of workers and consequently achieving a numerical balance with the peasant members.
Once in full control of the party and government, the BKP hierarchy turned its attention to more systematic methods of recruitment. By the time the Eighth Party Congress convened in November 1962, the BKP had 528,674 members plus 22,413 candidates. It was also at about this time that the Zhivkov government relaxed the open police terror and pardoned 6,000 political prisoners, most of them Communists.
The Ninth Party Congress, held in November 1966, provided new regulations concerning party composition and acceptance of new members.
Qualifications of candidates had to be checked thoroughly, and only those qualified could be accepted. Education as the main criterion of selection was emphasized among target groups of workers, peasants, specialists, women, and young people. As a result of this improved recruitment procedure, the new members after the congress were 44.3 percent blue-collar workers and 32 percent women. Of this group, it was estimated that 60.4 percent had at least a secondary education.
It was reported by the Secretariat that district (_okrug_) party committees after the Ninth Party Congress showed improvement in ”content, style and methods of their work,” and that they understood better the political approach in guiding local economic tasks as well as leading primary party organs in the political and organization work of their const.i.tuencies. Furthermore, over 77 percent of full-time secretaries of local party committees and about 90 percent of chairmen of cooperative farms had higher or secondary education. Formal training as well as in-service education was given serious attention. Educational training for party members includes two-year university courses, short courses, seminars, informal meetings, and conferences of local party committees.
Statistics reported in 1971 showed that 25.2 percent of about 700,000 members of the BKP were women. Increasingly more important positions were a.s.signed to women in the party hierarchy. In the same period (1971) there was a woman member of the Politburo, several women members of the Central Committee, and two women ministers. Not only were women active in party activities, but they could also be found in boards of management of government enterprises.
Party Congresses
Party statutes formerly stipulated that congresses would be held every four years, but a decision was made to extend the interval to five years after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had made the same change.
Decisions of the congresses appear as party statutes that usually reflect the desires of the leaders.h.i.+p and the circ.u.mstances that necessitated the additions, deletions, or amendments to already existing statutes. The most important innovations embodied in BKP statutes emerged from congresses beginning with the Sixth Party Congress, held in 1954, and continuing through the Tenth Party Congress, held in 1971.
The Sixth Party Congress abolished the position of general secretary and in its place created the post of first secretary, again following the lead of the Soviet party, which had done the same thing after Stalin's death a year earlier. Party leader Chervenkov, who was premier and a Politburo member, kept those posts and allowed the election of Zhivkov as first secretary. Zhivkov was then an unknown functionary who had risen from the ranks of the Sofia party structure. Aside from the usual exhortation for party unity and the changes in six Politburo positions as well as an increase in Central Committee members.h.i.+p, the Sixth Party Congress was uneventful. Zhivkov's rise to power did not take place immediately, and a period of intraparty struggle ensued as he gradually consolidated his authority as first secretary.
The Seventh Party Congress, held in June 1958, proved even more uneventful. It pa.s.sed the Third Five-Year Plan for the development of the economy, the fulfillment of which was drastically reduced to three years even before the ink was dry on the doc.u.ment. With Central Committee approval, new plans for economic targets were prepared; meanwhile, Zhivkov prepared an elaborate propaganda campaign to push this program through. Zhivkov's Theses, as the collection of instructions have come to be known, advocated increased cultivation and production in agriculture and industry to obtain yields that were double those of previous plans. An unprecedented flurry of activity followed on the heels of extensive media coverage. Aided by the press, the Agitation and Propaganda Department under the Central Committee's direct supervision launched a vast campaign that surpa.s.sed even those efforts in neighboring countries.
This period is characteristically known as Bulgaria's Great Leap Forward, patterned after the Chinese experience, and historians put forth political and economic motives for such an economic experiment.
Politically, after Nikita Khrushchev started his de-Stalinization policy in the Soviet Union, the Bulgarian repercussion was evident in Chervenkov's disenchantment with the Soviet trauma and his looking favorably instead toward the Chinese example. The Great Leap Forward was neither a spectacular success nor a dismal failure and achieved no more than the expected progress in three year's time. The ensuing period marked a return to earlier patterns and heralded the end of Chervenkov's political career and the concurrent elevation of Zhivkov. The election of Zhivkov's friends--Stanko Todorov and Mitko Grigorov--to full members.h.i.+p in the Politburo gave him added support. Khrushchev's visit as the head of a large Soviet government delegation did not hurt Zhivkov but rather gave convincing proof of Khrushchev's support of the Bulgarian first secretary. Anton Yugov was premier at this time, but it was not long before he too was purged, the final blow coming only hours before the start of the Eighth Party Congress.
The Eighth Party Congress in 1962 marked the end of the open opposition to Zhivkov's leaders.h.i.+p. With Chervenkov and Yugov out, Zhivkov was in full control. A month earlier, in October 1962, a special plenum of the Central Committee announced Zhivkov's a.s.sumption of government power as premier while retaining the first secretarys.h.i.+p of the party. In the economic sector, the Twenty-Year Plan of Economic Development--patterned on that of the Soviet Union--had been pa.s.sed. It featured more realistic goals in contradistinction to its predecessor. As usual, heavy industrial priorities ranked high in the development plan.
In November 1966 the Ninth Party Congress was held in Sofia. During the deliberations changes were made within the Politburo whereby Zhivkov's former protege, Grigorov, was dropped from members.h.i.+p without an explanation and Todor Pavlov, a theoretician of Marxism, and Tsola Dragoycheva, head of the National Council of the Fatherland Front, were added as full members. Boyan Bulgaranov and Ivan Mihailov, both older party members, were retained--a move that indicated the influence of older functionaries over young potential leaders. Economically, the congress supported principles of new management, tying political progress with economic advancement.
Collectively the aforementioned congresses accomplished little. On the contrary the 1971 congress introduced considerable changes in the sociopolitical and socioeconomic patterns of growth--among them the drafting and adoption of a new const.i.tution (see ch. 8).
Tenth Party Congress
Whatever political changes are visible in Bulgaria are the result of the Tenth Party Congress held in Sofia from April 20 to April 24, 1971. It was attended by 1,553 delegates representing roughly 700,000 party members, a ratio of about one delegate for every 450 members.
Additionally, foreign representatives from eighty-nine countries were on hand. Leading the Soviet delegation were Brezhnev, general secretary of the Soviet party, and four other high-ranking officials.
As is customary, Zhivkov opened the congress with his usual state-of-the-nation address, extolling Bulgarian-Soviet ties and stressing friends.h.i.+p between the two countries. Included in the agenda were the adoption of a new five-year economic plan; discussion and adoption of the new party program; discussion and approval of the new const.i.tution; the election of party members to the Central Committee, Politburo, and Secretariat; and a change in party statutes calling for a congress every five years instead of four.