site.btaNovember 19, 1962: Bulgaria's Longest-Serving Communist Leader Todor Zhivkov Elected PM

Sixty-three years ago on Wednesday, on November 19, 1962, the National Assembly voted Todor Zhivkov into office as Bulgaria's prime minister. He kept that position until 1971 when, after the adoption of the country's new Constitution, he was elected President of the newly established State Council (equivalent to head of State) and retained that post until his ouster in 1989.

Zhivkov ran the country single-handedly for 35 years as the longest serving leader of any Eastern Bloc country in Europe after World War II: at the head of the BCP since 1954, head of government for nine years, and head of State for 18 years.

Born in the village of Pravets, Sofia Region, in 1911, Todor Zhivkov originated from a poor peasant family. In 1929, he started work as a typesetter in Sofia and joined the youth wing of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), which was outlawed at that time. He officially joined the party in 1932 and became the head of its Second Party District Committee in Sofia. During the Second World War, he led the First Sofia Rebel Operational Zone and organized the Chavdar Partisan Brigade. After the Fatherland Front seized power in Bulgaria on September 9, 1944, Zhivkov became a BCP secretary, first in the Sofia Region in 1945, then in Sofia City in 1948. He was also promoted to membership of the party’s Central Committee that year. In 1951, he became a member of the decision-making Politburo of the Central Committee, and in 1954 he was elected First Secretary of the policy-making Central Committee.

The decisive moment in Zhivkov's political career came in 1956, at the BCP April Plenum. At that time, Bulgaria was undergoing a process of de-Stalinization. The hardline policies pursued by Valko Chervenkov - still the de facto party boss - were criticized not only by the BCP but also by the Soviet Union. Zhivkov presented himself to the party and the Soviet representatives at the Plenum as a person untainted by his predecessors' mistakes. Crucially, he enlisted the support of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and members of the Politburo. Calls for Chervenkov's departure grew louder after the plenum, and he finally stepped down as prime minister in September of that year.

When Zhivkov became party leader in 1956, he launched a purge of his real and potential rivals, replacing them with people who were personally loyal to him. This process culminated on November 4, 1962, when the Central Committee was convened to an extraordinary plenum with a single main item on the agenda: "Personal conclusions about those directly responsible for gross abuses within the State Security authorities and violations of the law between 1949 and 1956". This was the topic of a report delivered by Zhivkov himself and targeting Prime Minister Anton Yugov, a former ally and his last remaining rival in the party top. Yugov and his supporters in the BCP were blamed for the excesses and abuses committed by the State Security services in the previous decade and were offered the opportunity to resign. They complied, and on November 19, 1962 Parliament rubberstamped Zhivkov's advance to the prime ministership. He managed to stay concurrently at the helm of the State and his party for a full 33 years.