Today (yesterday - ed.) We bow to the memory of the people shot on the night of February 1, 1945 after their conviction by the so-called "people's court". Whenever we express such respect for the victims, we encounter counter-voices - they were employees of a "fascist regime" that killed Bulgarians (partisans, Yatacs, etc.). This debate will not subside in Bulgaria. The supporters and adherents of the half-century-old Bulgarian communism will not admit the fact that their ancestors acted according to the rules of armed lawlessness, authorized by the Stalinist occupation of Bulgaria in September 1944. The victims of Stalinist terror and their heirs will not bow their heads before the historical arrogance and irresponsibility of the communist executioners and their heirs. This wound in Bulgarian history is open and continues to bleed.
This was recalled on "Facebook" by Ognyan Minchev.
But it bleeds far from only for reasons of moral negligence or lack of courage for everyone to take their responsibility. The wound will bleed because the gap that has opened in Bulgarian society continues to produce current political and civil confrontations, in which the heirs of the Stalinist executioners continue to defend their "rightness" and "legitimacy" to give away - to sell Bulgaria to the retrograde Genghisid empire in its modern Putinist incarnation.
The Stalinist terror in Bulgaria was more powerful and more ruthless for one main reason. Stalinist Moscow was all too familiar with the historical attempt of the Russian Empire to subjugate the newly founded Bulgarian state after 1878 and turn it into a buffer imperial province or gubernia.
The plans of the Asiatic Department failed, and Bulgaria emancipated itself as a relatively independent European state under the conditions of the late 19th century. The failure of the empire came primarily from the fact that the Bulgarian Renaissance elite and the advocates of a free Bulgaria did not succumb to imperial brutality. Stefan Stambolov headed the state, punished the Russophile coup plotters - servants who had betrayed Bulgarian freedom to their masters in Petersburg. The empire had not calculated this "small" circumstance: the rebels, who had put "their heads in the bag" in the battle with the Ottoman Empire, would not hesitate to do so in the fight against Russian imperialism.
Learned from their historical experience, the Stalinist satraps decided to eradicate the Bulgarian national elite to the bottom.
Here, who was guilty of something, who was innocent, who was deserving or simply a valuable person did not matter. Moscow authorized the Bulgarian communists to physically destroy the Bulgarian national elite. In the first weeks after September 9, between 20 and 30 thousand people were killed without trial or sentence - wealthier people, administrators, employees, entrepreneurs, priests, teachers... Were there people involved in crimes among them - yes, there were. A decent state punishes through fair justice. Communist terror punished according to the principle of "along the dry forest and the harsh". After the mass murders, the "people's court" issued post-factum sentences for partial "legalization" of terror. This "court" was no less a travesty of justice than the uncontrolled carnage of September-October 1944.
The destruction of the Bulgarian national elite was supposed to turn the Stalinist servants of the Bulgarian Communist Party into a new "elite" - more precisely, into a colonial administration of Moscow in Bulgaria. For half a century, the Bulgarian communists played exactly this role.
They did not allow the slightest resistance - among the miraculously surviving citizens, able to overcome fear and preserve their dignity. They ruthlessly destroyed them until the very end of their dictatorial rule. Thus, Bulgaria met the opportunity for freedom in 1989 without a national elite. The colonial administration of the Bulgarian Communist Party prepared for a new metamorphosis - to become the elite of post-communist Bulgaria. For a decade and a half, the regime's political police took control of the country's economy through the "great criminal revolution", turning it into a neo-communist oligarchy. The weakness and inexperience of the opposition forces gave the post-communist colonial elite additional chances to reinstall themselves in a new leading role in the nation.
And yet Bulgaria managed to get back on its feet - despite the reckless theft, despite the conquered country, despite the servile mentality of the communist colonial elite reincarnated in democratic institutions.
We entered the EU, we entered NATO - but we preserved Moscow's dominance in energy, corruption, misanthropic propaganda. Today the empire is preparing for a new step towards another takeover of Bulgaria.
The agency that brought Reshetnikov's man to the top of the Bulgarian state in 2016 is today preparing him for a new all-powerful role. It is expected that that part of the Bulgarian public, which preserves its irrational Russophilism, Europhobia and dissatisfaction with the status quo, will support him.
Bulgaria was created on the border of three worlds - the European, the Eurasian and the Middle Eastern.
Bulgarian society remains a "two-faced Janus", even though its majority is pro-European. It is enough for the Eurasian minority to be well organized, to be led by a pumped-up populist project, and for the European powers to be inert, complacent and unconscious of the real priorities and threats to the present and future of the Bulgarian nation - and here is a new Eurasian project in action. It may not repeat the previous waves of imperial invasion in detail - in its content this new project will have the same goal - to tear Bulgaria away from its natural European environment of development and subjugate it as a Eurasian colony, governed by local servile nothings.
Honoring the memory of the victims of February 1, we recall a bitter lesson - and the better we remember it, the less risk there is of repeating the most traumatic pages of our national history. May God forgive the victims of the so-called "people's court"!