Todor Zhivkov
Todor Zhivkov led communist Bulgaria for thirty-five years, from 1954 to November 1989, longer than any other ruler in the Soviet bloc, a printer's apprentice and wartime partisan who rose as the man the Soviet embassy could rely on and stayed by never once contradicting Moscow, offering in 1963 and again in 1973 to make Bulgaria the sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union, an offer Moscow declined. He ran a state whose secret service was suspected of the umbrella murder in London in 1978 and of the attempt on the pope in 1981, forced the country's Turks to take Bulgarian names in 1984 and drove three hundred thousand of them across the border in 1989, and was removed the day after the Berlin Wall opened by his own politburo, who had seen the wind. He was born in 1911 in the village of Pravets, joined the party in 1932, and was a middling partisan commander in the last months of the war, whose role in the coup of 9 September 1944 grew with every retelling. He rose through the Sofia party, backed Khrushchev against the Stalinist Chervenkov in 1954, and had the party leadership at forty-two and the premiership by 1962. The regime he built was the most orthodox in the bloc and, after 1956, the least violent: no Prague spring, no Solidarity, a police state that ran on informers and jobs rather than on camps. The economy was tied to the Soviet Union's cheap oil and open market, which gave Bulgaria the highest growth in Eastern Europe for two decades and a computer industry built on copied IBM machines. His daughter Lyudmila, who ran culture until she died in 1981, gave the regime a nationalist flavour and Bulgaria its celebration of 1,300 years of statehood. The revival process of 1984 to 1985, the forced renaming of the Turkish minority, and the opening of the border to let them leave in the summer of 1989, was his last campaign and the one that finished him abroad. Gorbachev's Moscow withdrew its support, and at a politburo meeting on 10 November 1989 the foreign minister Mladenov and the defence minister removed him. He was tried in 1992 for embezzlement and sentenced to seven years, served under house arrest, and was acquitted on appeal in 1996. He died in Sofia in 1998, unrepentant, with a crowd at the funeral.
- Lived: 1911 CE – 1998 CE
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: general secretary, head of state, politician
