SOFIA -- A new book in Bulgaria paints a picture of criminality during the communist era as being far worse than Bulgarians knew at the time.
In From Thefts To Murders. Criminal Offenses In Bulgaria (1944-1989), Sofia-based historian and educator Stefan Ivanov sets out to debunk misconceptions, fueled by decades of secrecy and propaganda, that the Soviet satellite was a haven from the kind of violent crime that plagued Western, capitalist societies.
Using official data from communist-era archives on murder, rape, robbery, and terrorism, Ivanov shows that crime under communism was far worse than contemporary accounts suggest. While there was a surge in serious crime immediately after the fall of communism, Ivanov and other experts suggest that the lack of transparency before 1989 led to disappointment in the postcommunist era and misplaced notions of previously living in a safer world.
Speaking to RFE/RL's Bulgarian Service, Ivanov described "a myth that's based on a distorted public memory because people tell themselves, 'But we lived very well, we came home at night without being afraid, we didn't lock our doors.'"
"They believe this because they didn't have the information and they didn't know the real picture," he said.
Much of his research involved official Interior Ministry files and other documents that were off-limits to the public before the fall of communism, and much of the material in the book is previously unpublished.
In both absolute numbers and per capita annual figures, there were twice as many violent deaths in the four decades of communist rule than in the years since the ousting of longtime leader Todor Zhivkov, a former police chief, in November 1989.
In 1945, for example, there were 509 murders in Bulgaria -- excluding political killings. The lowest number of murders he counted was 111 in 1961. During the last decade of communism, 1980-89, there were between 159 and 210 murders every year, or an average of 195. That is more than twice the annual average of the most recent decade available in the Interior Ministry archives, 89 murders in 2012-21, according to RFE/RL research.
In international terms, the numbers also looked more dire than Sofia was letting on. Communist Bulgaria had between 2.3 and 6.6 intentional homicides per 100,000 citizens, according to Ivanov. Murder rates in developed countries in the same period were between 1.9 and 2.8 per 100,000, he says, and in developing countries, the rates were between 3.5 and 5.8 per 100,000.
In light of such data, Ivanov said, "We can conclude that in the period under consideration, intentional killings were a bigger problem [for Bulgaria] than for most European countries."
Ivanov unearthed multiple instances in which Bulgarian authorities appeared to keep a tight lid on serial killings and other violent tragedies that could reflect poorly on society.
In a notable case from October 1979, Bulgaria's national police force, the People's Militia, received a report of a gruesome discovery: Officers called to the basement of an abandoned building in the capital found a bloodied, disfigured corpse. The victim, listed in the police report as a 19-year-old woman of "easy" virtue, had suffered 35 stab wounds to the chest, neck, and back. Even investigators were shocked at the brutality of the crime.
Before he was caught, her 23-year-old murderer -- who had worked for a spell within the Interior Ministry -- would kill five women in all, with the fifth corpse surfacing the following April in a small lake in West Park, a wooded area overlooking Sofia. The man had also committed numerous rapes, assaults, robberies, and other crimes. Aware of the murders but under the tight control of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the media never reported details of the killer or his crimes.
Similar silence surrounded the cases in 1954 of a 26-year-old man who confessed to a staggering 512 rapes; and a series of murders in the 1980s by a killer from the southern village of Rozovo. In 1984, the public learned next-to-nothing about terrorist attacks in the Black Sea resort city of Varna and Bulgaria's second city of Plovdiv.
"Public memory and people's personal expectations very seriously diverge from the actual picture that is described in these documents," Ivanov told RFE/RL.
His findings reveal several periods of rising crime. For instance, thefts increased during the period of collectivization in 1944-59, when communist authorities were aggressively confiscating agricultural lands from owners. "Basic goods" like food and clothes were being stolen -- and kept rather than resold, according to the Interior Ministry figures -- which Ivanov says points to a more prolonged food crisis in Bulgaria after World War II than in much of the rest of Europe. "People stole to eat and to have clothes to wear," he said.
Other figures not made public under communism point to a connection between collectivization and mass migration from agricultural areas to Sofia and other big Bulgarian cities. "This is also a criminogenic factor and increases the number of crimes," the author said.
Ivanov argues that censorship and the official concealment of information about criminality, including acts such as terrorism that targeted society more broadly, served to lull the public into a misleading sense of security. "People lived in the deceptive calm that everything was OK and that made it easier for criminals [to operate]," he said.
Tihomir Bezlov, a crime researcher and senior analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy, a public-policy institute in Sofia, praises Ivanov's book and said part of what makes it "profoundly engaging" is that many of its statistics were hidden from view for so long. "Consequently, the average Bulgarian citizen often perceives the communist era as a time devoid of crime," Bezlov said. "For instance, [the book] delves into the presence of serial killers, a topic no one talked about before 1990."
Bezlov said Ivanov's interviews with former investigators, close tracking of specific cases, and "descriptions of unchecked violence against suspects" all shed light on communist-era crime and how it was solved in Zhivkov's Bulgaria.
But he expressed doubt "that one or even several books can alter the tendency to romanticize the past."
Bezlov also says he was struck by the disparity revealed in Ivanov's book between the size of the People's Militia, which was the criminal police agency with around 10,000-12,000 officers, and State Security (DS), Bulgaria's equivalent of the Soviet KGB, and its 200,000 or so agents. "In this context, State Security ranked third in the Soviet bloc, trailing behind [in size] the East German Stasi and the Romanian Securitate," Bezlov said.
There is little doubt that the lack of news and statistics on murder, robbery, and other crimes hid much of it from the eyes of the public, Bezlov says, but it was also because "socialist societies were believed to be fair, with minimal poverty and unemployment." The lack of media coverage of crime before 1990 is "a crucial factor [that] warrants investigation," he said, especially since it "stands in stark contrast to the media landscape after 1990" with its headlines and newscasts dominated by crime.
Bezlov said many Bulgarians' perceptions of life after communism were "influenced by the significant trauma of high crime rates in the 1990s," when the murder rate was a "staggering" 5.8 per 100,000, nearly on par with the United States, which in 2022 had 6.3 murders per 100,000 people.
The current rate in Bulgaria is a moderate 1.3. Nevertheless, Bezlov added, "individuals residing in Bulgaria still harbor the perception that crime rates in the country remain alarmingly high."
Ivanov, too, notes the rise in crime in the initial years of democratic transition. But, he added: "Nothing starts by itself. All this is a process."
