Revival Process

The "Revival Process" or the "Process of Rebirth" (Bulgarian: Възродителен процес, romanized: Vazroditelen protses) refers to a policy of forced assimilation practiced by the communist Bulgarian government in the 1980s (1984-1989). It was the culmination of a series of repressive assimilationist campaigns directed at the country's Turkish minority. The "Revival Process" was in turn followed by the forced expulsion of over 300,000 Muslims in 1989.
Like with the "Big Excursion", the name "Revival Process", under which this campaign of forced assimilation is most well known, is euphemistic and ambiguous. It likewise originated from the statements and official correspondence of the socialist Bulgarian government while it carried out the policy.
Bulgarian Turks constitute a substantial portion of Bulgaria's Muslim population. While the country had different campaigns for assimilation of Pomaks in the 1960s and 1970s, the "Revival Process" was against the Turkish and the small Tatar minority of the country.
According to the 1975 Bulgarian census, the last taken before the start of the "Revival Process" which recorded ethnicity, "Turks" made up around 8.4% of the Bulgarian population of 8.7 Million. This was down from the final census taken before the start of the Communist era in 1946 where "Turks" comprised 9.6% of the population. The Muslim population was concentrated primarily in the country's northeast and southeast (particularly Kardzhali Province).
The People's Republic of Bulgaria officially practiced State Atheism, in line with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and religious expression was tightly controlled. However, the state viewed domestic Muslims, whether practicing or not, as either the Bulgarian victims of Ottoman religious and cultural assimilation - wayward Bulgarians - or Turkish interlopers. Though the regime had long encouraged assimilationism to some degree, as the Eastern Bloc wavered in the 1980s, the Zhivkov regime leaned more heavily into Bulgarian ethno-nationalism to prop itself up and stepped up repression of the Muslim population in particular.
The policy of the Bulgarian Communist Party towards ethnic and religious minorities evolved during the forty year course of one-party rule. The draconian policies that characterized the "Revival Process" were not the first such efforts on the part of the Bulgarian People's Republic.
While Bulgaria had a large Turkish minority, until Zhivkov's removal from power, the Bulgarian regime denied the existence of any native Muslims of non-Bulgarian origin and insisted that such Muslim populations were descended from Bulgarians who had been forcibly converted to Islam under Ottoman Rule. In line with this view, education policy was also gradually made more assimilationist. In 1962, Pomaks were banned from attending Turkish-language schools, and in 1972, Turkish-language schools were banned altogether.
Following on from the ban on the Turkish language in schools, the government forced many Slavophone Muslims to Bulgarianize their names in the early 1970s. By 1974, 150,000 "Pomaks" and 200,000 "Turks" had been forced to Bulgarianize their names.
In 1978, the regime attempted to phase out traditional and religious holidays and observances in favor of approved socialist observances and rites. Officials were sent to Islamic funerals to ensure that the proper Socialist rites were carried out and prayers said in the Bulgarian language.
Just before the start of the "Revival Process" proper, the regime initiated a new round of limited forced Bulgarianization. Between 1981 and 1983, around 100,000 people, mainly Muslim Roma were forcibly Bulgarianized. The measure was extended to a number of Crimean Tatars and Alians (a Shia group, also referred to as Alevi or Kizilbash) mere months before the "Revival Process" began in earnest in 1984.
While many Muslims had thus already been forced to Bulgarianize their names, in 1984 the regime in Sofia decided to take the name-changing process to its conclusion. All ethnic Turks were to assimilate by changing their Turkish names. Turks were made to choose from a pre-approved list of "'real'" Bulgarian names in lieu of their original "Islamo-Arabic" names. Initially, only Turks living or born in the Rhodopes region in the country's southeast were required to change their names, but the requirement was ordered expanded to "all districts where there is such [a Turkish] population" in December 1984, which was carried out a month later in January 1985. By March 1985 the Bulgarian Government announced that "Bulgarisation" had been completed, and the Bulgarian Turks were provided with several newly issued documents for identification.
The creation of an ideologically coherent list of approved "Bulgarian" names proved to be a challenge for the authorities. While many had been made to change their names previously, the regime sought to develop a comprehensive "'Classifier of Bulgarian Names'" only in 1984. In the face of difficulties regarding the acceptability of foreign names (given names and surnames of Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, or some other non-Bulgarian origin) and the association between both foreign and "Bulgarian" and religion, the decision was eventually made to draft a list of 5,000 purely "Bulgarian" names, including those with a relationship to the Orthodox Christian calendar. Acceptable "Bulgarian" names were not just those of Slavic or Christian origin however, non-Islamic foreign names were also sometimes deemed acceptable. While this list was not completed prior to the start of the "Revival Process", some name indexes were available by that time.
The methods employed by the state to coerce Turkish villages to agree to "Bulgarisation" were particularly violent. According to one eyewitness account by an ethnic Bulgarian: "The [Turkish] village was surrounded by militia and/or special internal troops or regular army trucks or even light tanks. The village thus isolated, the mayor, the Communist Party secretary, and a few officials were then summoned and asked to sign a declaration that the village(rs) be given Bulgarian names... They were handed lists of Bulgarian names and then usually allowed twenty-four hours to consider. Most of these men agreed to cooperate and were thus held up as models for the rest of the village... Those who refused to comply, however, were taken by the militia from their homes... Eventually they signed. Those who still refused were held in a cellar for several days, abused, threatened, and beaten. If they still persisted, then imprisonment ensued."
Beyond the Bulgarianization of the names of living Muslims, Bulgarian authorities began to enforce other assimilation measures during the "Revival Process". During that time, Muslims were not allowed to bury their dead in Islamic cemeteries and were made to deface the Islamic or Arabic inscriptions and symbols on their ancestors graves. Store and restaurant owners were also prohibited from serving women in traditional Islamic dress. The pre-existing ban on Islamic circumcision was strictly enforced, and Muslim parents were required to sign documents promising not to circumcise their child. Officials regularly inspected Muslim boys to ensure they remained uncircumsized, and if a couple were found to have violated the ban, both the parents and the individual who had performed the circumcision faced punishment.
Similar to the system of government-controlled religious organizations which exists in the People's Republic of China today, Bulgaria tightly regulated the practice of Islam in the country. The People's Republic of Bulgaria formally employed a loyal Chief (Grand) Mufti along with regional Muftis throughout its reign. Unsurprisingly, the state-employed Chief Mufti expressed his support for the "Revival Process", declaring that "...There have been no cases of preventing or in any way restricting Muslims from performing religious rites and services."
Resistance to the "Revival Process" among the Turkish population itself, however, was strong. For example, in spite of regulations, many Muslims continued to secretly practice their faith and instruct their children in the Turkish language and Islamic religion. Once the necessary structures had been established, organized opposition began in earnest and opposition became increasingly visible. Turks and Muslims organized large-scale protests demanding the restoration of their rights and original names.
Rather than fight, however, many Turks initially attempted to escape the renaming process. While the international borders of the People's Republic of Bulgaria were generally closed, Turks sought refuge within the country. Many fled into the forests and other inaccessible areas to hide from the state while others attempted to flee for the big cities (where the re-naming process was slower and more cumbersome). Regardless, such escape attempts generally failed.
Muslims who refused to assimilate faced imprisonment, expulsion, or internment in the reactivated Belene labor camp, situated on an island in the Danube river. Some who were sent to Belene died. While the number of civilian casualties is not definitively known, according to Turkish sources, anywhere from 800 to 2,500 died between November 1984 and February 1985. Other observers, meanwhile, estimate the number of casualties at more than 1,000, though that number is likely to rise considerably when including the number of people who died of neglect or suicide in Belene.
In spite of the high number of fatalities among the Muslim community, organized armed resistance to the "Revival Process" never arose. Explanations for why resistance remained non-violent are varied (in contrast to contemporaneous armed movements in places like Northern Ireland). Rumen Avramov, who was an economic advisor to Bulgaria's first non-communist president, Zhelyu Zhelev, claims that the extreme level of repression carried out by the People's Republic of Bulgaria prevented the development of armed opposition.
Over 600 unorganized acts of "terror" were officially recorded by Sofia during the 1980s, with the regime blaming Turks and Muslims for the acts, as well as their opposition groups. Of those alleged 600 attacks, the vast majority cannot be explained conclusively. Regardless, at least some of the attacks did occur. For instance, 7 people lost their lives occurred in the village of Bunovo.
It is possible that some of the attacks were carried out or entirely fabricated by the Bulgarian regime in order to drum up support from the non-Muslim population. For example, upon the opening of secret police archives after the fall of the Communist regime, it was discovered that the perpetrators of two high-profile attacks allegedly committed by Turks in 1984, one at the Varna airport and another at the Plovidv rail station, were agents of the secret police.
As a result of Muslim resistance to Bulgarianization and the "Revival Process", the government concluded that a subset of the Muslim population was intractable and could not be assimilated. The emigration of this subset was thus to be encouraged actively.
In 1989, the "Revival Process" reached its apogee. In an event euphemistically referred to as the "Big Excursion", over 300,000 left Communist Bulgaria for Turkey between 30 May 1989 and 22 August 1989 (Bulgarian: Голямата екскурзия, romanized: Goliamata Ekskurziya. While the government of the Bulgaria maintained that the migration of Muslims to Turkey was voluntary, many Bulgarian Turks had been coerced into leaving the country.
On 10 November 1989, Todor Zhivkov was forced to resign, and the new Bulgarian government restored the right of Bulgarian citizens to have Turkish names. Not all who had been forced to change their names, however, restored their original names. Today, many Bulgarians of legacy (non-immigrant background) Muslim origin born during or after the "Revival Process" bear Bulgarian names, and as part of the collective trauma from the event, some are left to wonder what their name would have otherwise been.
On 11 January 2012, the Bulgarian Parliament officially condemned the "Revival Process" and recognized the events of 1989 as ethnic cleansing. While some Bulgarian mainstream parties have been rebuked for their continued disregard for the events of 1989, the "Revival Process" is widely condemned.
In November 2002, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church declared all victims, including non-Christian victims, of the Bulgarian communist regime to be martyrs.
At a 2000 speech at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example, keynote speaker and head of the National Security Agency Michael V. Hayden, made only non-specific reference to the "Revival Process" that he observed while stationed in Sofia during the Cold War because the audience would not have understood the "facts and context necessary to follow his talk." This illustrates the limited remembrance of the "Revival Process" abroad.
Even in Turkey, memory of the "Revival Process" is limited and testimony by victims is limited.
Throughout the "Revival Process", many sought refuge abroad in countries other than Turkey, especially in Austria, Germany, and Sweden. Many also found refuge in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States.
One 2012 study found that Bulgarians generally blame the politicians of the time for the "Revival Process". When asked who bore the blame for the campaign, respondents blamed the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, and the Secret Police. Some respondent even blamed the Soviet Union and Leonid Brezhnev (who died in 1982). The same study also found that victims do not generally blame ethnic-Bulgarians and are inclined to forgive them, with much blame instead heaped on fellow-Muslim "traitors" who collaborated with the regime.