Hey guys, some time ago I started thinking about an event that might very well have brought Bulgaria out of Eastern Bloc as early as the 1960s and I wonder what you think of that.
Some Basic Assumptions
Now, we all know that according to the Brezhnev doctrine (tested in practice by Khrustchev back in 1956 in Hungary) no country that formed part of the Soviet sphere of influence was allowed to leave it without facing the threat of a Red Army intervention. However, there are a couple of factors that might have worked in favor of Bulgaria should it have decided to pursue a non-alignment or even pro-Atlantic policy.
Let's look at the map. The Red Army leaves Bulgaria as early as 1947, with Stalin apparently fully certain of the local communists' loyalty to Moscow. To the east, Yugoslavia breaks with Stalin shortly afterwards whereas the northern neighbor of Romania is rewarded for its enthusiastic participation in the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by withdrawing the Soviet troops from its soil in 1958.
I'm not a military expert but it does seem to me that in this case, should Bulgaria ever decide to break with the USSR, the Soviets would have pretty much no land access to it. The Yugoslavian route would, obviously, be out of the question and I find it extremely unlikely that Gheorgiu-Dej (not to mention Ceaușescu after him) would have allowed for any Red Army units to reenter his country so soon after working painstakingly to have them removed.
The only way, thus, would be by the sea but I highly doubt the probability of such an endeavor's success. While the Soviets wouldn't find it hard to deploy a fleet towards the Bulgarian coast, the country in question lies just next to Greece and Turkey, two of the biggest naval powers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In my view, it's likely that should the Bulgarian revolutionaries (be it the opposition or some reform-minded communists) request an emergency withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and UN-sanctioned international neutrality, the US would have gotten a pretty valid excuse to have the Turks set up a safety cordon around the Bulgarian coast by the time the Crimean fleet would approach it. That would be a risky move on the part of NATO but I seriously doubt that Khrustchev or Brezhnev would have actually gone to war over the rather insignificant Bulgaria. And even if NATO stayed put, I can't quite picture the USSR pulling off a regular naval invasion against one its former satellite state and claiming it was for the good of the Bulgarians. It's one thing to go nicely right across the border like they did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it's something totally different actually being forced to bomb the Bulgarian ports and trying to send their troops ashore. The pictures alone would have dealt a terribly devastating blow to the Soviets' international prestige.
So that pretty much does it for the Soviet threat (mind you, these are just my personal guesses, feel free to speak your mind if you think I'm being overly optimistic). But what about the other "brethren" neighbors? Yugoslavia would have stayed put, I have no doubt about that. Tito never cared the slightest bit about other people's democracies as long as they left him alone. It's Romania that I'm worried about though. Would they or wouldn't they?
I'm not exactly familiar with the state of the two countries' military potential but it seems rather obvious that Romania would have won in the long run. Still, I don't think they would have done it as smoothly as the Soviets did in their own interventions. Also, while a land Soviet invasion would probably have triggered an anti-counterrevolutionary sentiment (due to the high probability of a Soviet victory), I can't quite imagine many Bulgarian communists being especially enthusiastic about turning into Romania's puppets. Also, in the case of Romania's intervention, NATO would have felt much more secure responding accordingly or even going to a small-scale war. Granted, this one bit relies heavily on when the rebellion would have occured. During Gheorgiu-Dej's time, a Soviet-backed Romanian invasion would have been more likely. But had the Bulgarians waited until the 1970s, things would have turned much more awkward. Ceaușescu would have already denounced crashing the Prague Spring; he would have lost all international credibility had he decided to meddle with Bulgaria's internal affairs, especially considering his improving relations with the West.
The Alternate History
In December 1972, Todor Zhivkov is forced to resign by a group of military-backed intra-party conspirators who promptly get in touch with the American and Turkish embassies and announce a unilateral withdrawal of Bulgaria from the Warsaw Pact as well as organizing free elections within the coming months, having concluded that the old-style Soviet-inspired socialism had failed to meet the people's needs. They change the name of the party to "Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party" and kickstart a couple of show trials against Zhivkov and some other widely disliked figures. The opposition is allowed free access to the press and television, popular celebration mixes with feelings of confusion and chaos.
The Turkish navy sets up a cordon around the Bulgarian coast within less than a week. Brezhnev is furious but finds himself unable to do anything beyond throwing around empty threats. The Crimean fleet doesn't even leave the port. Instead, Bulgaria starts being trashed by the communist press, especially in the Soviet Union and East Germany, its new leadership called traitors and agents of the West. All Bulgarian students and workers in the USSR are sent back home effective immediately, much of their possessions confiscated. Student marches of support for Bulgarian sovereignty, held in Warsaw, Berlin, Prague and Budapest under the call "Red Hands off Bulgaria!", are quickly dispersed, college lecturers are being fired for as much as mentioning the country, regardless of context, and even very distant relatives in Bulgaria almost guarantee losing party membership. The USSR breaks diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, other satellites, save for Romania, follow suit. The subject becomes a taboo in the Romanian press but Ceaușescu himself assures President Nixon over the phone that he will do nothing to prevent the Bulgarians from choosing their own path as long as the Western powers will remain clear that whatever happened there did not and in fact never could apply to Romania in the future.
The crisis ends by February 1973. Globally, little has changed, except Bulgaria is now an officially non-aligned state pursuing a pro-American policy. The Bulgarian Social Democrats win the elections in a landslide but find themselves largely unwilling to pull off any major reforms, in spite of Western pleads. While the reformed communists make vague promises about big-scale privatization projects, few state-owned companies end up in private hands and those that do hardly ever follow any transparent acquisition process. Few and incoherent policies regarding relaxing labor laws lead only to massive lay-offs and little improvement in terms of output. While 1973 notes some decent economic growth, the rate for 1974 is only 1.2% and the country falls into recession starting in 1975, from which it doesn't recover until 1977. The average yearly rate of inflation for the years 1973—1980 reaches an astonishing 39%. Matters are complicated further by the 1973 oil crisis and the proverbial nail in the coffin is the fact that the country is cut off from the Soviet market as a result of an Eastern Bloc-wide embargo on Bulgarian imports. In order to put a curb on the giant-scale unemployment, the government actively tries to encourage the Turkish minority to emigrate; in the years 1975-1985 more than 200,000 Turks seize the opportunity and leave either for Turkey or West Germany. Some of them will return to Bulgaria in the 1990s.
The popular discomfort slowly builds up and leads to massive strikes and riots. The worst occur in June 1978 in Varna, when hundreds of the local shipyard's workers face the prospect of being made redundant: the fighting against the indiscriminately brutal police forces claim the lives of as many as thirty six people (including two police officers) with more than a hundred and fifty wounded. Pictures of "Bloody Monday" as well as of the long lines of people standing outside of shops in Sofia and skyrocketing unemployment rates are being widely circulated across the Eastern Bloc under the banner of "Bulgarian misery" as a warning of what happens to those who decide to break with socialism.
In order to divert the public opinion's attention away from the fallen economy, the Social Democratic government finally allows its friends at courts to press charges against Zhivkov and some of the members of his former circle. The 1979 ruling to drop the charges on account of "lack of evidence" sparks country-wide riots that lead to eight deaths and almost a hundred people wounded. The parliament, aware of Bulgaria's standing on the brink of a civil war, decides to proclaim new elections to be held in 1980, in which a newly founded Conservative Party, formed from some of the former anti-communist opposition, proves supreme (in a no small part thanks to its remarkably catchy slogan "This time let's do it the right way" as well as generous if mysterious campaign sponsors from the United States and West Germany) and sets down to some long-overdue reforms.
Having struck a deal with the International Monetary Fund regarding pardoning an overwhelming majority of the Bulgarian debt, the government formulates new laws to ease the process of setting up enterprises, a plethora of state-owned companies are privatized with what even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher describes as "commendable zeal". Following a devaluation going into effect in 1981, a tight monetary policy leads to the inflation rates reaching as much as 600% in 1981 only to drop to 50% in 1982 and come back to the acceptable levels in 1983. The 25% unemployment of 1980 is reduced to a little over 10% just five years later. The economic growth for 1982 records 6.5% and for 1983 as high as 8.9%, remaining impressive throughout the rest of the decade.
While in the 1970s, the propaganda losses for the Soviet Union regarding Bulgaria leaving the Eastern Bloc and setting up a dangerous precedent are largely mitigated by the country's subsequent economic collapse, the recovery of the 1980s proves much harder to handle. Even though Bulgaria is largely separate from the "core" Soviet sphere of influence, the idea that a dismantled socialist economy will start picking up with right free market policies in place makes its way into Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even the Soviet Union itself. The Kremlin, on the other hand, is more than desperate to keep the rest of the satellite countries in check. Bulgaria is automatically banned from participating in the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics (which, in all fairness, it would probably have missed anyway): during the opening ceremony, a "spontaneous" crowd of Russian spectators displays a banner saying "No to Bulgarian revisionism!".
The USSR decides to pay much closer attention to Eastern Europe, disregarding Afghanistan in the process (the Red Army pulls out of that country as early as 1982). The trade union Solidarność in Poland is crashed pretty much in its infancy in 1980 after Brezhnev warns General Jaruzelski that any leniency on his part towards the rebelling workers will result in a Soviet intervention. In the long run, however, this heavy-handed policy does little to deter opposition in the satellite countries.
The rise of Mikhail Gorbatchev in the USSR prompts a thaw in the Bulgarian-Soviet relations: the two countries reopen their respective embassies in 1986. During his first official visit in 1988, Gorbatchev remarks that "the Bulgarian model provides a valuable lesson to the people of the Soviet Union and may teach us what to do and what to avoid in order to dynamize our economy". The Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, whose construction was put on hiatus following the revolution, is scheduled to be rebuilt from scratch, this time using French and Italian technology, with the first unit starting operating in 1987 (most of the expenses having been covered by the United States and United Kingdom, willing to boost the image of a post-socialist success). After a two-year delay, the first line of the Sofia metro is opened to the public right before Christmas 1989, again with generous foreign funds behind it. An unsuccesful attempt to restore monarchy under the returning Tsar Simeon (the 1991 referendum on the matter being rejected by almost 60% of the voters) as well as the marginalization of some of the less enterpreneurial Bulgarians cast some shadow over the otherwise decent record of the conservatists, which nevertheless is enough for them to lose the 1992 elections. The Social Democrats, however, generally don't retract from the established practice and the two parties continue to form governments at different points in time, not differing largely in their outlook on the economy and, most importantly, the integration with the European Community (as evidenced by joining the European Free Trade Association in 1981).
In spite of major objections on the count of President Mitterand, fearing that Bulgaria, much like Greece beforehand, is simply not ready to join the European institutions, Chancellor Kohl is able to persuade Brussels that West Germany will take much of the costs associatied upon itself and that the propaganda pros of accepting a former socialist country into the European ranks outweigh the economic cons. In a sign of graditude, Bulgarians end up overwhelmingly supportive of the German reunification. The pro-German feelings in the country are so strong that they actually lead to a minor diplomatic incident, when in June 1991 the National Assembly pushes a resolution in memory of "the brave soldiers of Germany and other nationalities who perished in the fight against bolshevism". The subsequent scandal causes the Soviet ambassador to be recalled from Sofia and Bulgaria gets quite a lot of flak from the German press for its "embarassing" resolution but ultimately, the matter fades out of the public mind.
Meanwhile, a near total lack of enthusiasm from either party in regards to purging former agents of the regime from high positions (mostly due to the fact that many of them happened to have moved into what would later become the Conservative Party during the transition period) remains a bugging issue: in 1982, while taking a walk in a park, Zhivkov is shot dead by an unknown assailant, widely thought to have been hired by members of the former secret police wishing to convince the public opinion that aggressive pursuit of decommunization policies might lead to excessive violence. It largely works.
By the time the rest of the Eastern Bloc collapses, Bulgaria is already rather well integrated with the West. The stock exchange and first McDonald's restaurant established in Sofia in 1976 and 1984 respectively are symbols of the country's rough transition to capitalism. Bulgaria becomes a hotspot for Greek and Turkish tourists looking for low priced vacation. New investments and construction projects pop up everywhere, the late 1980s and the 1990s are commonly referred to as the golden age, with the 1990 accession to NATO, the soccer team's winning the bronze medal at the 1994 World Cup (having beaten Sweden on penalties) and, most importantly, joining the European Union in 1995, following the 1994 referendum in which 79.4% of the voters approved of the project, alongside Austria, Finland and Sweden as some of the crowning achievements (even though Bulgaria will remain one of the community's poorest member state, second only to Portugal, all the way until the 2004 enlargement). In 2002, the country adopts the euro as its official currency (which poses little problem seeing as the lev had been pegged to the German mark as early as 1987).
Bulgaria benefits greatly from the fact that it broke with socialism sooner than her neighbors, which now allows her to exert some considerable influence over them. Young Bulgarian enterpreneurs, the first generation to have been raised in a free market economy, find employment in some of the East European countries as advisors. Quite a few Bulgarian companies established after 1980 make their way into Serbia and Macedonia following the Yugoslav Wars, many of the international brands of products had selected Bulgaria as their base of operations for the post-communist Europe. At the turn of the 21st century, its GDP per capita is roughly on a par with that of Greece and surpasses it after the latter crumbles into debt crisis (the financial upheaval deals Bulgaria a major blow too, especially due to the bursting of the real estate bubble that had been inflated throughout the last decade, however they end up able to lift themselves up relatively quickly, unlike their southern neighbor). It's still rather lacking in terms of infrastructure, the foreign capital clearly dominates the domestic one (with German, Italian and Turkish being some of the most prominent), many of the former communist officials are still in positions of power and corruption is widespread but nevertheless the country does enjoy the reputation of the one in Eastern Europe that most definitely "made it". Bulgaria is generally looked up to as a pattern to follow by most East European countries, most notably Serbia and Romania, some of whose citizens end up migrating there. The organization of the 2012 Euro tournament is awarded to the joint Turkish-Bulgarian bid (after Bulgaria unsuccesfully tried to host the 2008 tournament alone), however the Bulgarian team, in spite of high hopes concerning the 40th anniversary of the "Swift Revolution", fails to impress, not even making it past the group stage.
Conclusive Remarks
So that's my little story and I wonder what you would add or change in its course. While I'm not Bulgarian myself, I do think it's a fascinating turn of events that we're discussing here and one that would in all likelihood have turned out for the better for the whole country compared with the real timeline.
Some Basic Assumptions
Now, we all know that according to the Brezhnev doctrine (tested in practice by Khrustchev back in 1956 in Hungary) no country that formed part of the Soviet sphere of influence was allowed to leave it without facing the threat of a Red Army intervention. However, there are a couple of factors that might have worked in favor of Bulgaria should it have decided to pursue a non-alignment or even pro-Atlantic policy.
Let's look at the map. The Red Army leaves Bulgaria as early as 1947, with Stalin apparently fully certain of the local communists' loyalty to Moscow. To the east, Yugoslavia breaks with Stalin shortly afterwards whereas the northern neighbor of Romania is rewarded for its enthusiastic participation in the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by withdrawing the Soviet troops from its soil in 1958.
I'm not a military expert but it does seem to me that in this case, should Bulgaria ever decide to break with the USSR, the Soviets would have pretty much no land access to it. The Yugoslavian route would, obviously, be out of the question and I find it extremely unlikely that Gheorgiu-Dej (not to mention Ceaușescu after him) would have allowed for any Red Army units to reenter his country so soon after working painstakingly to have them removed.
The only way, thus, would be by the sea but I highly doubt the probability of such an endeavor's success. While the Soviets wouldn't find it hard to deploy a fleet towards the Bulgarian coast, the country in question lies just next to Greece and Turkey, two of the biggest naval powers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In my view, it's likely that should the Bulgarian revolutionaries (be it the opposition or some reform-minded communists) request an emergency withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and UN-sanctioned international neutrality, the US would have gotten a pretty valid excuse to have the Turks set up a safety cordon around the Bulgarian coast by the time the Crimean fleet would approach it. That would be a risky move on the part of NATO but I seriously doubt that Khrustchev or Brezhnev would have actually gone to war over the rather insignificant Bulgaria. And even if NATO stayed put, I can't quite picture the USSR pulling off a regular naval invasion against one its former satellite state and claiming it was for the good of the Bulgarians. It's one thing to go nicely right across the border like they did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it's something totally different actually being forced to bomb the Bulgarian ports and trying to send their troops ashore. The pictures alone would have dealt a terribly devastating blow to the Soviets' international prestige.
So that pretty much does it for the Soviet threat (mind you, these are just my personal guesses, feel free to speak your mind if you think I'm being overly optimistic). But what about the other "brethren" neighbors? Yugoslavia would have stayed put, I have no doubt about that. Tito never cared the slightest bit about other people's democracies as long as they left him alone. It's Romania that I'm worried about though. Would they or wouldn't they?
I'm not exactly familiar with the state of the two countries' military potential but it seems rather obvious that Romania would have won in the long run. Still, I don't think they would have done it as smoothly as the Soviets did in their own interventions. Also, while a land Soviet invasion would probably have triggered an anti-counterrevolutionary sentiment (due to the high probability of a Soviet victory), I can't quite imagine many Bulgarian communists being especially enthusiastic about turning into Romania's puppets. Also, in the case of Romania's intervention, NATO would have felt much more secure responding accordingly or even going to a small-scale war. Granted, this one bit relies heavily on when the rebellion would have occured. During Gheorgiu-Dej's time, a Soviet-backed Romanian invasion would have been more likely. But had the Bulgarians waited until the 1970s, things would have turned much more awkward. Ceaușescu would have already denounced crashing the Prague Spring; he would have lost all international credibility had he decided to meddle with Bulgaria's internal affairs, especially considering his improving relations with the West.
The Alternate History
In December 1972, Todor Zhivkov is forced to resign by a group of military-backed intra-party conspirators who promptly get in touch with the American and Turkish embassies and announce a unilateral withdrawal of Bulgaria from the Warsaw Pact as well as organizing free elections within the coming months, having concluded that the old-style Soviet-inspired socialism had failed to meet the people's needs. They change the name of the party to "Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party" and kickstart a couple of show trials against Zhivkov and some other widely disliked figures. The opposition is allowed free access to the press and television, popular celebration mixes with feelings of confusion and chaos.
The Turkish navy sets up a cordon around the Bulgarian coast within less than a week. Brezhnev is furious but finds himself unable to do anything beyond throwing around empty threats. The Crimean fleet doesn't even leave the port. Instead, Bulgaria starts being trashed by the communist press, especially in the Soviet Union and East Germany, its new leadership called traitors and agents of the West. All Bulgarian students and workers in the USSR are sent back home effective immediately, much of their possessions confiscated. Student marches of support for Bulgarian sovereignty, held in Warsaw, Berlin, Prague and Budapest under the call "Red Hands off Bulgaria!", are quickly dispersed, college lecturers are being fired for as much as mentioning the country, regardless of context, and even very distant relatives in Bulgaria almost guarantee losing party membership. The USSR breaks diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, other satellites, save for Romania, follow suit. The subject becomes a taboo in the Romanian press but Ceaușescu himself assures President Nixon over the phone that he will do nothing to prevent the Bulgarians from choosing their own path as long as the Western powers will remain clear that whatever happened there did not and in fact never could apply to Romania in the future.
The crisis ends by February 1973. Globally, little has changed, except Bulgaria is now an officially non-aligned state pursuing a pro-American policy. The Bulgarian Social Democrats win the elections in a landslide but find themselves largely unwilling to pull off any major reforms, in spite of Western pleads. While the reformed communists make vague promises about big-scale privatization projects, few state-owned companies end up in private hands and those that do hardly ever follow any transparent acquisition process. Few and incoherent policies regarding relaxing labor laws lead only to massive lay-offs and little improvement in terms of output. While 1973 notes some decent economic growth, the rate for 1974 is only 1.2% and the country falls into recession starting in 1975, from which it doesn't recover until 1977. The average yearly rate of inflation for the years 1973—1980 reaches an astonishing 39%. Matters are complicated further by the 1973 oil crisis and the proverbial nail in the coffin is the fact that the country is cut off from the Soviet market as a result of an Eastern Bloc-wide embargo on Bulgarian imports. In order to put a curb on the giant-scale unemployment, the government actively tries to encourage the Turkish minority to emigrate; in the years 1975-1985 more than 200,000 Turks seize the opportunity and leave either for Turkey or West Germany. Some of them will return to Bulgaria in the 1990s.
The popular discomfort slowly builds up and leads to massive strikes and riots. The worst occur in June 1978 in Varna, when hundreds of the local shipyard's workers face the prospect of being made redundant: the fighting against the indiscriminately brutal police forces claim the lives of as many as thirty six people (including two police officers) with more than a hundred and fifty wounded. Pictures of "Bloody Monday" as well as of the long lines of people standing outside of shops in Sofia and skyrocketing unemployment rates are being widely circulated across the Eastern Bloc under the banner of "Bulgarian misery" as a warning of what happens to those who decide to break with socialism.
In order to divert the public opinion's attention away from the fallen economy, the Social Democratic government finally allows its friends at courts to press charges against Zhivkov and some of the members of his former circle. The 1979 ruling to drop the charges on account of "lack of evidence" sparks country-wide riots that lead to eight deaths and almost a hundred people wounded. The parliament, aware of Bulgaria's standing on the brink of a civil war, decides to proclaim new elections to be held in 1980, in which a newly founded Conservative Party, formed from some of the former anti-communist opposition, proves supreme (in a no small part thanks to its remarkably catchy slogan "This time let's do it the right way" as well as generous if mysterious campaign sponsors from the United States and West Germany) and sets down to some long-overdue reforms.
Having struck a deal with the International Monetary Fund regarding pardoning an overwhelming majority of the Bulgarian debt, the government formulates new laws to ease the process of setting up enterprises, a plethora of state-owned companies are privatized with what even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher describes as "commendable zeal". Following a devaluation going into effect in 1981, a tight monetary policy leads to the inflation rates reaching as much as 600% in 1981 only to drop to 50% in 1982 and come back to the acceptable levels in 1983. The 25% unemployment of 1980 is reduced to a little over 10% just five years later. The economic growth for 1982 records 6.5% and for 1983 as high as 8.9%, remaining impressive throughout the rest of the decade.
While in the 1970s, the propaganda losses for the Soviet Union regarding Bulgaria leaving the Eastern Bloc and setting up a dangerous precedent are largely mitigated by the country's subsequent economic collapse, the recovery of the 1980s proves much harder to handle. Even though Bulgaria is largely separate from the "core" Soviet sphere of influence, the idea that a dismantled socialist economy will start picking up with right free market policies in place makes its way into Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even the Soviet Union itself. The Kremlin, on the other hand, is more than desperate to keep the rest of the satellite countries in check. Bulgaria is automatically banned from participating in the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics (which, in all fairness, it would probably have missed anyway): during the opening ceremony, a "spontaneous" crowd of Russian spectators displays a banner saying "No to Bulgarian revisionism!".
The USSR decides to pay much closer attention to Eastern Europe, disregarding Afghanistan in the process (the Red Army pulls out of that country as early as 1982). The trade union Solidarność in Poland is crashed pretty much in its infancy in 1980 after Brezhnev warns General Jaruzelski that any leniency on his part towards the rebelling workers will result in a Soviet intervention. In the long run, however, this heavy-handed policy does little to deter opposition in the satellite countries.
The rise of Mikhail Gorbatchev in the USSR prompts a thaw in the Bulgarian-Soviet relations: the two countries reopen their respective embassies in 1986. During his first official visit in 1988, Gorbatchev remarks that "the Bulgarian model provides a valuable lesson to the people of the Soviet Union and may teach us what to do and what to avoid in order to dynamize our economy". The Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, whose construction was put on hiatus following the revolution, is scheduled to be rebuilt from scratch, this time using French and Italian technology, with the first unit starting operating in 1987 (most of the expenses having been covered by the United States and United Kingdom, willing to boost the image of a post-socialist success). After a two-year delay, the first line of the Sofia metro is opened to the public right before Christmas 1989, again with generous foreign funds behind it. An unsuccesful attempt to restore monarchy under the returning Tsar Simeon (the 1991 referendum on the matter being rejected by almost 60% of the voters) as well as the marginalization of some of the less enterpreneurial Bulgarians cast some shadow over the otherwise decent record of the conservatists, which nevertheless is enough for them to lose the 1992 elections. The Social Democrats, however, generally don't retract from the established practice and the two parties continue to form governments at different points in time, not differing largely in their outlook on the economy and, most importantly, the integration with the European Community (as evidenced by joining the European Free Trade Association in 1981).
In spite of major objections on the count of President Mitterand, fearing that Bulgaria, much like Greece beforehand, is simply not ready to join the European institutions, Chancellor Kohl is able to persuade Brussels that West Germany will take much of the costs associatied upon itself and that the propaganda pros of accepting a former socialist country into the European ranks outweigh the economic cons. In a sign of graditude, Bulgarians end up overwhelmingly supportive of the German reunification. The pro-German feelings in the country are so strong that they actually lead to a minor diplomatic incident, when in June 1991 the National Assembly pushes a resolution in memory of "the brave soldiers of Germany and other nationalities who perished in the fight against bolshevism". The subsequent scandal causes the Soviet ambassador to be recalled from Sofia and Bulgaria gets quite a lot of flak from the German press for its "embarassing" resolution but ultimately, the matter fades out of the public mind.
Meanwhile, a near total lack of enthusiasm from either party in regards to purging former agents of the regime from high positions (mostly due to the fact that many of them happened to have moved into what would later become the Conservative Party during the transition period) remains a bugging issue: in 1982, while taking a walk in a park, Zhivkov is shot dead by an unknown assailant, widely thought to have been hired by members of the former secret police wishing to convince the public opinion that aggressive pursuit of decommunization policies might lead to excessive violence. It largely works.
By the time the rest of the Eastern Bloc collapses, Bulgaria is already rather well integrated with the West. The stock exchange and first McDonald's restaurant established in Sofia in 1976 and 1984 respectively are symbols of the country's rough transition to capitalism. Bulgaria becomes a hotspot for Greek and Turkish tourists looking for low priced vacation. New investments and construction projects pop up everywhere, the late 1980s and the 1990s are commonly referred to as the golden age, with the 1990 accession to NATO, the soccer team's winning the bronze medal at the 1994 World Cup (having beaten Sweden on penalties) and, most importantly, joining the European Union in 1995, following the 1994 referendum in which 79.4% of the voters approved of the project, alongside Austria, Finland and Sweden as some of the crowning achievements (even though Bulgaria will remain one of the community's poorest member state, second only to Portugal, all the way until the 2004 enlargement). In 2002, the country adopts the euro as its official currency (which poses little problem seeing as the lev had been pegged to the German mark as early as 1987).
Bulgaria benefits greatly from the fact that it broke with socialism sooner than her neighbors, which now allows her to exert some considerable influence over them. Young Bulgarian enterpreneurs, the first generation to have been raised in a free market economy, find employment in some of the East European countries as advisors. Quite a few Bulgarian companies established after 1980 make their way into Serbia and Macedonia following the Yugoslav Wars, many of the international brands of products had selected Bulgaria as their base of operations for the post-communist Europe. At the turn of the 21st century, its GDP per capita is roughly on a par with that of Greece and surpasses it after the latter crumbles into debt crisis (the financial upheaval deals Bulgaria a major blow too, especially due to the bursting of the real estate bubble that had been inflated throughout the last decade, however they end up able to lift themselves up relatively quickly, unlike their southern neighbor). It's still rather lacking in terms of infrastructure, the foreign capital clearly dominates the domestic one (with German, Italian and Turkish being some of the most prominent), many of the former communist officials are still in positions of power and corruption is widespread but nevertheless the country does enjoy the reputation of the one in Eastern Europe that most definitely "made it". Bulgaria is generally looked up to as a pattern to follow by most East European countries, most notably Serbia and Romania, some of whose citizens end up migrating there. The organization of the 2012 Euro tournament is awarded to the joint Turkish-Bulgarian bid (after Bulgaria unsuccesfully tried to host the 2008 tournament alone), however the Bulgarian team, in spite of high hopes concerning the 40th anniversary of the "Swift Revolution", fails to impress, not even making it past the group stage.
Conclusive Remarks
So that's my little story and I wonder what you would add or change in its course. While I'm not Bulgarian myself, I do think it's a fascinating turn of events that we're discussing here and one that would in all likelihood have turned out for the better for the whole country compared with the real timeline.
