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In the postwar era the People’s Republic of Bulgaria was long considered one of the most faithful allies of the Soviet Union. At the latest by the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985, however, the relationship between the two states had cooled considerably. Their relations of economic exchange, which until then had been very close, also cooled around this time. The standard of living of the Bulgarian people declined noticeably, although they had hoped for greater freedoms and better benefits from the frequently promised changes to the political and economic system. Faced with a growing crisis of legitimacy, Todor Shivkov, the long-standing state and party leader, attempted to consolidate his position through a mixture of reform rhetoric and repression. At the same time, there was an increase in discrimination against the Turkish minority, a practice with a long history in Bulgarian ethnic policy.1 As early as the mid-1980s the official organs of the party and state forced members of these ethnic groups to "Slavicize" their Turkish first and last names. In spring 1989 Shivkov opened the border with Turkey and, with the help of a campaign of violence, touched off a mass exodus of more than 300,000 people. In the end, however, these actions accelerated his fall, as they completely isolated the People’s Republic of Bulgaria internationally. On November 10, 1989, the head of state was stripped of his powers by the Bulgarian leadership, by arrangement with Gorbachev. The successor to the Communist Party, renamed the Bulgarian Socialist Party ( BSP ), sought to remain in power by the parliamentary route. Its chances were reasonable, in fact, as the dissident movement in Bulgaria was relatively weak. On December 7, 1989, the opposition had formed an alliance called the Union of Democratic Forces (SDS). The spectrum of oppositional forces ranged from human rights and environmental groups by way of nonaligned union action groups to parties revived from the interwar period.
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