Background
Aleksandar Stamboliyski was born on March 1, 1879, in the village of Slavovitsa near Pazardzhik in southwestern Bulgaria.
Aleksandar Stamboliyski was born on March 1, 1879, in the village of Slavovitsa near Pazardzhik in southwestern Bulgaria.
The son of a prosperous peasant family, the young Stamboliski was elected to the Bulgarian National Assembly (Sobranie) in 1908.
By then, he had worked as a schoolmaster, studied briefly in Germany, and had risen to dominate his country's peasant party, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (.BANU). Political leader, newspaper editor, and social theorist, Stamboliski put all his talents into a campaign of opposition against Bulgaria's Tsar Ferdinand. The Agrarian leader demanded a republic, and he deplored Bulgaria's vast expenditures on the monarch's prized army. He called for the creation of a Balkan federation: in this, not in war, Stamboliski saw a solution to the age-old territorial squabbles of the region.
Stamboliski was stubborn in preserving BANU's independence. In late 1913 he refused to join a parliamentary coalition, thereby aiding Ferdinand's Austrophile protégé Radoslavov to retain power. But the monarch remained Stamboliski's bête noire. In June 1914, the anniversary of Bulgaria's defeat in the Second Balkan War stirred Stamboliski to demand publicly that Ferdinand be hanged.
Stamboliski stood fast against Bulgaria's entry into World War I. He rightly suspected from the start that Ferdinand and Radoslavov were seeking favorable terms for an alliance with the Central Powers. According to Bell, however, even a radical opponent of the regime like Stamboliski could be moved by irredentist feeling. The Agrarian party leader was willing, in the early months of the war, to see Radoslavov negotiate to obtain Macedonia and the Dobrudja. But these prizes had to come in return for Bulgaria's continued neutrality, not its entry into hostilities.
In September 1915, word came that Bulgaria had reached agreement with Berlin and Vienna and was about to plunge into the war. Sobranie leaders met first with Radoslavov, then with Ferdinand. Stamboliski minced no words. In a face-to-face meeting with the monarch, he told Ferdinand this conflict would make the throne feel "the people's wrath." Stamboliski attempted to translate this rhetoric into active subversion of Bulgaria's army. Ferdinand countered with arrest, courtmartial, and a death sentence (commuted to life in prison).
Even from behind bars, Stamboliski shaped events. He overturned attempts by the moderate Malinov to create a broad coalition government in the summer of 1918. All BANU leaders must first be released from prison, he insisted, and the government had to seek an immediate armistice. The collapse of the Macedonian front (September 1918) led to widespread disorder in the army. Released from prison, Stamboliski met with Ferdinand and agreed to visit the front to try to calm the troops. Ferdinand pledged in return to pull Bulgaria out of the war.
Stamboliski's motive in going to the front remains the subject of controversy. He subsequently claimed that he intended all the while to foment revolution. In any event, when he addressed insurgent troops at Radomir, he found they could not be persuaded to renew their loyalty to the government. The Agrarian leader found himself, possibly to his own dismay, declared president of a revolutionary Bulgarian government. The bubble burst at once. The rebels were defeated outside Sofia by forces loyal to the monarch.
Stamboliski survived this episode and entered the government in early 1919. He formed his own cabinet in the fall of that year. And it was Stamboliski himself who signed the Treaty of Neuilly (November 27, 1919), accepting a Bulgaria reduced in size, limited in its military power, and burdened with reparations payments. He solidified his Agrarian party's hold on power by early 1920 and installed a radical peasant regime that was overthrown by a military coup in June 1923. His foreign policy featured efforts to observe the terms of the peace treaty and to deal amicably with former World War I adversaries, notably the new state of Yugoslavia with its Serbian monarch and government. Seeking to solve the Macedonian issue through cooperation with Bulgaria's neighbors particularly inflamed military and nationalist groups within Bulgaria. It was these elements that brought Stamboliski down. Captured during a coup, then tortured and mutilated, Stamboliski was murdered in his native village of Slavovitsa, June 14, 1923.
Stamboliyski’s government immediately faced pressures from the political left and right, a harsh international occupation force, debt amounting to a “preposterous sum”, as well as national problems such as food shortages, general strikes, and a great flu epidemic. His goal was to transform the political, economic, and social structures of the state while at the same time rejecting the rhetoric of radicalism and its Bolshevik associations. He aimed at establishing the rule of the peasant, which comprised over 80% of the population of Bulgaria in 1920. Part of his objective was to offer each member of the dominant group an equitable distribution of property and access to the cultural and welfare facilities in all villages. The local BANU cooperative organizations known at the Druzhbi were to play a vital role in linking the peasant economy to the national and international markets in addition to offering the benefits of large scale agriculture without resorting to Soviet style collectivization.
Stamboliyski founded the BANU Orange Guard, a peasant militia that both protected him and carried out his agrarian reforms. In foreign policy, Stamboliyski abided by the terms he helped set in the peace treaty signed at Neuilly-sur-Seine in November 1919, which was eventually exploited by the extreme right factions of Bulgaria as he failed to lessen the outstanding reparations payments until 1923. Stamboliyski rejected territorial expansion and aimed at forming a Balkan federation of agrarian states, a policy which began with a détente with Yugoslavia. His administration was successful in bringing out land redistribution legislation, creating maximum property holding regulations. It also increased the vocational element in education, especially in rural areas. Being ardently anti-war himself he kept the army below the low level set by the Neuilly treaty, further angering the military by restriction their social status and opportunities for advancement. However, importantly Stamboliyski never settled the Macedonian problem.