site.btaCC-DB: Our Duty to Honour Communist Regime Victims, Defend Historical Truth

It is Bulgaria’s duty to bow to the victims of the communist regime, condemn the perpetrators, and not allow historical truth to be silenced or distorted, said Continue the Change–Democratic Bulgaria MP and Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria leader Atanas Atanassov.

He read a declaration on behalf of his parliamentary group from the rostrum of the National Assembly on Friday.

“Our duty does not end with remembrance, it requires a daily struggle against the banality of evil,” the declaration said.

Atanassov noted that Sunday marks 81 years since “the dark February 1, 1945,” when in a single day the People’s Court sentenced to death three regents, 67 members of Parliament, 22 ministers, as well as generals, colonels and public figures. A total of 147 death sentences were handed down. Without being allowed to bid farewell to their families, the sentences were carried out the same night by firing squad near a bomb crater by the Central Sofia Cemetery.

The MP quoted Tsola Dragoycheva, a senior figure in the Communist Party leadership at the time, as saying: “Never in my life have I slept so blissfully as on the morning of the executions, after the last shots had faded away.” These words remain among the starkest testimonies to the scale of the evil on which the criminal communist regime in Bulgaria was built, he added. 

Atanassov said that after 1944 Bulgaria was occupied by the Red Army and a puppet government was installed, which began administering justice through decree-laws. During the four months of the People’s Court’s existence, the statistics were “more than horrifying” - 135 mass trials across the country, more than one trial per day, 28,630 arrests, 10,900 indictments, and 9,550 sentences, including 2,730 death sentences. The following decades marked some of the darkest pages in the past century of Bulgarian history, CC-DB said, adding that the trauma in the nation’s memory would never be erased.

“Most of the red executioners left this world without repentance. The same applies to their successors, who have never renounced or condemned this bloody barbarity. There is still a monument in Bulgaria to the executioners - to the Soviet occupier, he added. While Bulgaria has set aside only one day to commemorate the victims of the communist regime, small Latvia has many such days,” Atanassov emphasized.

“In a state where there is no rule of law, this is a form of organized crime,” Atanassov said, quoting jurist Zhivko Stalev.