Forced labour camps in Communist Bulgaria

As in other Eastern Bloc states, Communist Bulgaria operated a network of forced labour camps between 1944 and 1989, with particular intensity until 1962. Tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to these institutions, often without trial.

The Red Army entered Bulgaria in September 1944 and immediately, partisans exacted reprisals. Tens of thousands were executed, including active fascists and members of the political police, but also people who were simply of the non-Communist intelligentsia, members of the professional and bourgeois classes. Merely displeasing a Communist cadre could lead to execution. These massacres were actively encouraged by Georgi Dimitrov, who sent a telegram from Moscow a week after the Soviets' arrival in Sofia calling for the "torching of all signs of Bulgarian jingoism, nationalism, or anti-Communism". On 20 September, the Central Committee called for "anti-Communist resistance" and "counterrevolutionaries" to be exterminated.

A People's Tribunal was created in October 1944. This special court pronounced 12,000 death sentences, with over 2,700 eventually being executed. (In contrast, in 1941-1944, the years of active Communist resistance, 357 people were executed for all crimes.) In early 1945, a government decree allowed for the creation of Work Education Centers (TVO in Bulgarian). These were in fact concentration camps. The decision was approved by all parties in the Fatherland Front, including those whose members soon found themselves in the centers. One category of inmate included pimps, blackmailers, beggars and idlers, while the other comprised all those judged as political threats to the state's stability and security. The power to execute this decree fell to the Office of State Security within the Ministry of the Interior. Over the next decade, a series of laws and decrees strengthened the state police's powers.

Not all people the regime found undesirable were put in forced labour camps. Deportation – forced resettlement in distant provincial areas – was another method employed. Between 1948 and 1953 some 25,000 were deported.

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