September 7, 2026: 115th Birth Anniversary of Todor Zhivkov 2026

Balgarianovinite.com September 7, 2026, marks the 115th anniversary of the birth of communist leader Todor Zhivkov (1911-1998). Born in the village (now town) of Pravets (Northwestern Bulgaria), his first job was as a typesetter at the State Printing House in Sofia. He joined the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1932 and held its top position between March 1954 and November 10, 1989, making him the longest-serving communist leader in Europe. He was Chairman of the Council of Ministers between 1962 and 1971, and Chairman of the State Council between 1971 and November 17, 1989. He was a deputy in the 6th Grand National Assembly (1946-1949) and in the 1st to 9th National Assemblies (1949-1989). On December 13, 1989, he was expelled from the Bulgarian Communist Party.
A monument to Zhivkov was unveiled in his native Pravets on September 8, 2001, to mark what would have been his 90th birthday.
Following is the original English-language news story with which BTA’s External Service covered the centenary of Todor Zhivkov:
112 BULGARIA – TODOR ZHIVKOV – 100TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY
A Century after his Birth, Bulgarians Have Mixed Feelings about their Longest Serving Leader
Sofia, September 7, 2011 (Lyubomir Gigov of BTA) -Ambivalence and survival: these seem to be the only characteristics on which cheerers and jeerers agree about Todor Zhivkov (1911-1998), the longest serving leader in modern Bulgarian history, who was born 100 years ago on Wednesday.
Twenty-two years after his ouster and thirteen years after his death, Bulgarians remain divided as ever about the legacy of the 35-year-long Zhivkov era and about the person who lent his name to it.
Fond Memories
Quite a few have good reason to remember him with affection and gratitude. The top Communist nomenklatura and their friends and relations benefited from an enormous system of perks and privileges instituted by Zhivkov: living in spacious apartments and villas, access to luxury consumer goods imported from the West and to hard currency, unrestricted travel and study for their children abroad, exclusive medical and dental treatment, and even unaccountable cash allowances for hand-picked members of the superior political caste.
Thanks to his special attention, his native village of Pravets (60 km northwest of Sofia) rose to town status in 1981 and prospered. Bulgaria’s first personal computer (a near Apple-II clone), named Pravets, started to be assembled there in 1982. Small wonder local residents revere Zhivkov’s memory, keep the house where he was born as a museum, and have named after him the town’s main square and promenade boulevard which leads to his monument, unveiled in 2001.
“He is a ruthless dictator for many, but numerous others regard him as an intuitive and rustically smart maverick, or even as a self-made, talented statesman. Many think he alone possessed the magical political key to govern the otherwise ungovernable Bulgarian soul,” writes journalist Boyko Vassilev.
Zhivkov presided over a vigorous development of the Bulgarian economy between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, with construction of steelworks and heavy engineering plants, nuclear, thermal and hydroelectric power stations, and a focus on electronics and space exploration. Bulgaria even became the first and only Eastern Bloc country which locally bottled Coca-Cola. The tourism industry developed as well, with seaside and mountain resorts attracting holidaymakers from both East and West.
To be fair, even common people are now nostalgic for the Zhivkov era, when everybody had a secure job and a home and when essentials such as food, clothing and a fortnight’s seaside holiday were affordable to all. He projected a “man of the people” image: congenial simplicity, a peculiar sense of humour, and language full of outrageous blunders mixing his local dialect with boiler-plate cliches. This made him the butt of countless political jokes and contributed to fostering an endearing, often benevolent public idea of the late leader, who is still referred to by the fond, quasi-respectful nicknames of “Tato” (“Daddy”) and “Bay Tosho” (“Old Uncle Tosho”). “It seems the memory of Zhivkov has been frozen onto the level of jokes [about him] and there is no reflection,” says journalist and researcher Diana Ivanova.
Dark Side
To the less materially minded, however, his autocratic regime was a brutal dictatorship. Since July 1971 Zhivkov served concurrently as General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) and President of the State Council (head of state), concentrating absolute power in his hands. Never tolerant of dissent, he ruled with an iron grip, ruthlessly cracking down on any attempt to challenge his control in party and state and periodically purging potential rivals. In the course of decades, the “number two” held the most insecure position in the party hierarchy. Many “heirs apparent” saw their careers crumble in a day on trumped-up charges of corruption or a “compromising” family background.
His human rights record is appalling. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s he himself ordered or at least knew about the extermination of a number of critics of the regime in the forced labour camps near Lovech and Belene. But people were sent there or into internal exile or faced other forms of repression for much less: telling political jokes, listening to Elvis Presley, or dancing the twist. Every citizen’s actions and words were closely monitored – by a friend, colleague or relative – and reported to the sinister State Security. Unlike elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria lacked an organized dissident movement or even prominent individual dissidents, which testifies to the effectiveness of his approach.
Zhivkov allegedly ordered assassination attempts against Bulgarian emigres who criticized his polices, including writer Georgi Markov in London on September 7, 1978 (according to one theory, the “Bulgarian umbrella” murder was intended as a “birthday present” for Zhivkov). The 1984 decision to force Bulgaria’s Turkish minority to change their names and abandon their ethnic heritage was probably taken by Zhivkov himself. As a result, some 300,000 ethnic Turks were compelled to emigrate to Turkey. “If he was tried in The Hague today, he would have been indicted on at least eight points, including unlawful imprisonment, torture, deportation, and plunder of public and private property,” journalist Tatyana Vaksberg said in 2006.
Zhivkov is held personally responsible for the devastation of agriculture as a result of forced cooperativization and the ensuing rural exodus; the waste of billions invested in money-losing industrial complexes; a short-sighted close attachment of Bulgaria to the Soviet Union, which accounted for two-thirds of the country’s foreign trade; and, above all, a foreign debt of more than 10,000 million US dollars. His economic policies drove Bulgaria to default in 1960, 1977 and 1989. As to the environment, his worst sin was the hushing up of the proportions of the radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. As a result of the news blackout, Bulgarians were among the few nations in the world who did not take adequate precautions.
Nepotism and cronyism thrived during the Zhivkov era, spreading from the First Family down to the country’s cultural, artistic, scientific and sporting elite. Logically, a cult of his personality grew, which he tolerated and even encouraged – even though he had made it to the top thanks to a denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult. He surrounded himself with sycophant intellectuals, and there were two academicians, one novelist and one poet in his famous hunting party. His works (or, to be more precise, the works of his speechwriters) were collected in 39 volumes, and their translation and publication in various countries were arranged, making Zhivkov the most published Bulgarian author worldwide.
“He was not a Janos Kadar or a Dubcek, but he was not a Ceausescu, either,” sociologist Andrei Raichev said, reacting to his demise.
Foreign Policy
His foreign policy also defies a good-or-bad evaluation. His choice as First Secretary in 1954 was vetted by Nikita Khrushchev – and he was brought down in a palace coup in 1989 with the explicit support of Mikhail Gorbachev. Zhivkov’s slavish loyalty to Moscow earned Bulgaria the dubious reputation as the Soviet Union’s closest satellite. On two occasions (in1963 and in 1973) he allegedly offered Leonid Brezhnev to incorporate Bulgaria into the Soviet Union as a sixteenth republic. Georgi Markov wrote that Zhivkov “served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did”. On the other hand, he exploited the USSR for political purposes, with Bulgaria acting as a buffer between the Soviets and NATO.
Zhivkov claims in his Memoirs that the USSR became “a raw materials appendage to Bulgaria”. Thus, Sofia received Soviet crude oil at subsidized prices and processed and resold the products on world markets at a huge premium. Besides this, only the Soviet market could absorb low-quality, shoddy goods made in Bulgaria.
Zhivkov was apparently unable or unwilling to keep pace with Gorbachev’s experiments with political and economic reforms.
Once he said that Bulgarians should “lie low” and wait for the storm of perestroika to blow over. On other occasions, he claimed that he had actually pioneered the reforms himself, starting them back in 1956. Shortly before his death, he revealed that he had tried to form a united anti-Gorbachev front of the communist party bosses in Eastern Europe but they let him down.
Survivor
He survived the World War II resistance, and his grossly exaggerated “partisan” record and role in the 1944 communist takeover (he was even given personal credit for the rescue of Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust) is offset by rumours that he was an agent provocateur of the royal political police.
Ingratiation with Soviet leaders and total subjugation of the Interior Ministry and State Security explain his phenomenal political longevity. Zhivkov outlived – physically if not politically – the BCP, the USSR, every other Communist leader in Eastern Europe, and even communism. He also survived a single noteworthy coup conspiracy against him, plotted in 1964-1965 by nationalist-minded army officers.
Even after his ouster, only one of four cases in which he was charged reached the court (for unlawfully spending the equivalent of 24 million US dollars in public funds on Western cars, entertainment and luxury apartments for relatives and favoured aides) – and a seven years’ prison sentence he received in 1992 was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1996. Apart from a seven-month pre-trial detention (January-July 1990), he never went to jail, being allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest at his granddaughter’s villa because of his advanced age.
As one of the many ironies of his life and times, Zhivkov enjoyed a growing popularity after his fall. Basking in a sustained media attention, he emerged as a sort of elder statesman or even a father figure for former, incumbent and aspiring politicians, who came to see him openly or secretly. He remained unrepentant (adamantly refusing to seek a pardon when he was convicted) and a militant self-promoter until the end of his life.
Bulgaria’s post-transition political, business, military, academic and artistic elites, as well as the country’s large and active organized crime underworld, consist almost entirely of the scions of Communist eminenti who rose to prominence during his long rule. As long as capitalism fails to deliver, the Zhivkov myth is likely to endure. LG/LG

September 7, 2026: 115th Birth Anniversary of Todor Zhivkov 2026 THE NEWS FROM BULGARIA – NEWS AGENCY 2009-2025 2026-09-07 05:53:00

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БЪЛГАРИЯ НОВИНИТЕ – ИНФОРМАЦИОННА АГЕНЦИЯ 2009-2026 2026-09-07 05:53:00