After 1989, the rapid dissolution of state socialism forced most Bulgarians to reckon with the political bearings and visions of a regime that had seemed strong and stable. Others were returning home after bearing the brunt of the so-called ‘Revival Process’ — the Bulgarian Communist Party’s final attempt at assimilating the Turkish and Muslim populations through a systematic policy of name-changing and the suppression of traditional attire and religious customs. That campaign drove 360,000 Turks and Muslims to seek refuge in Turkey between June and August 1989, culminating in what amounted to de facto ethnic cleansing — recognised as such by the Bulgarian Parliament only in 2012.

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During that summer, the Party euphemistically depicted the long queues of those fleeing at the border and the gatherings at various train stations as ‘the great excursion’ of tourists heading off on their summer holidays. That rhetoric concealed not only the aftermath of the ‘Revival Process’ but also the history of the so-called ‘May Events’ of 1989 — the almost forgotten resistance of Turkish and Muslim populations that unfolded through freedom walks, hunger strikes, and grassroots protests demanding civil rights, religious freedom and the liberalisation of visa requirements.

The ‘May Events’ of 1989 put the Communist authorities under severe pressure, and they eventually allowed the ‘unpatriotic citizens’ to leave the country. Historicising both the resistance of Turks and Muslims and the overlooked complicity with the Party’s assimilation campaign would do more than uncritically explore the horrifying crimes of the ‘Revival Process’, in which victims have been portrayed only as passive. It would, for instance, unsettle the received account of the country’s peaceful transition to democracy, situating it within the far wider regional violence that erupted in Romania and tore Yugoslavia apart. It could also illuminate Bulgaria’s decoupling from the Global South during the late Cold War and the erosion of its already incoherent posture towards peoples’ decolonial efforts on the world stage.

Bulgaria’s Geopolitical Anxiety

While the echoes of the ‘May Events’ of 1989 resonated deeply in Turkey and across the Muslim world, the years of late socialism laid bare an age-old Bulgarian anxiety that neither socialism nor, later, the democratic transition succeeded in eradicating from the depths of society.

Before 1989, the final stage of the ‘Revival Process’ took place between November 1984 and late January 1985, following the tragic events of the summer of 1984. The bomb attacks at Plovdiv Central Railway Station and at Varna Airport convinced the Party that the country faced an existential security threat. In the Party’s reading, both events were the work of rising Turkish terrorism, which was gathering momentum through a subversive network of local Turkish agents, whose intent was to turn Bulgaria’s southern regions into a ‘Third Turkish Republic’. The Party’s geopolitical anxiety stemmed from the conviction that Turkey could easily replicate its 1974 invasion of northern Cyprus in Bulgaria, relying on the support of the Bulgarian Turkish population.

This misperception entered the Party’s secret intelligence reports, now declassified, which purported to show Turkey’s ambition to extend its geopolitical control over Greece, Cyprus, Iraq and Syria. Turkey’s so-called ‘new Ottoman plan’ never materialised, however, proving the Party’s intelligence wrong. Even as state violence against Turks and Muslims intensified during the 1980s, Turkey neither intervened in nor lent external support to the grassroots resistance that was led by members of the Turkish minority and that gave rise to the ‘May Events’ of 1989.

Among the leaders and spokespersons, Ahmed Doğan stood out: in 1985 he presented himself as a Marxist doctoral student and a prominent figure of the ‘Turkish national liberation movement in Bulgaria’. He was, however, an informant for State Security (Darzhavna Sigurnost), the regime’s secret police — as were other leaders of the Turkish movement, such as Mehmed Riza........

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