Bulgarian General Strike 1919-1920

The power vacuum created by the collapse of established political parties in Bulgaria, at the end of the First World War, was filled by a coalition government led by Aleksandur Stamboliiski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU). At first, the urban bourgeoisie welcomed BANU as agents of order. However, Stamboliiski's ideas and policies quickly gained him powerful enemies on the right and on the left. The first major challenge to the Stamboliiski government came from an alliance of social democrats with the Bulgarian Communist Party, who were competing for power with the agrarians.

The communists were full of confidence. As living standards in the towns continued to plummet their support increased, particularly in the trade unions and, on December 24, 1919 they joined with the social democrats to stage a day of protest in Sofia. It was the first time the two socialist factions had cooperated since their split in 1903, and that cooperation continued when the transport and telegraph workers went on strike. Two days later a general strike was called. Stamboliiski unhesitatingly declared martial law and ordered his minister of internal affairs, Alexander Dimitrov, to use force when necessary. Strike leaders were arrested, ration cards of their families were withdrawn and some were evicted from their homes. To enforce these measures and break the opposition Stamboliiski used the army, allied troops, the police and the Orange Guard, a paramilitary peasant force under the control of BANU. On January 5, 1920 the general strike was called off.

Some of the transport workers and the miners in Pernik continued to strike for another six weeks. Stamboliiski mobilized tens of thousands of his Orange Guard to break the strike centered on the mines of Pernik, 32 kilometers southwest of Sofia. With pitchforks, shovels and their hallmark clubs (tsepinitsa), the peasants of the Orange Guard stormed the Pernik complex, expelling the miners from the shafts. By mid-February 1920, the strikers had been completely defeated.

The communists remained locked in a political war with the agrarians. Their younger leaders, Vasil Kolarov (a lawyer educated in Switzerland and groomed by Blagoev as his successor), Georgi Dimitrov (a printer who rose in the labor movement in Sofia), and others viciously assailed Stamboliiski in their press and the National Assembly, while he threatened mockingly on occasion to ship them to the workers' paradise. Their ties to Soviet Russia, it should be noted, were not simply ideological; emissaries traveled regularly and clandestinely to Moscow, and in 1922 the Bolsheviks entrusted Kolarov with the crucial job of general secretary of the Comintern.

References

Concise History of Bulgaria, 149-51; Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 397; Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism, 347; Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, 82; Bulgaria - A Country Study.

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