The Bulgarian Leadership and the Polish October of 1956
The Bulgarian Leadership and the Polish October of 1956

Summary/Abstract: In the countries of East Central Europe, where the Stalinist political model was introduced at the end of the 1940.s, social and political crises occurred under similar conditions and shared many attributes. The nature of their social contradictions and the forms they took were also similar. These crises differed primarily in terms of the degree to which society participated in them and the severity of the accompanying social tensions. Historical and cultural differences between the countries in question and differences in their economic development were very important in this regard. One of the main areas of interests in East European historiography during the past two decades has been the postwar domestic policy of the countries of East Central Europe. In particular, documents have been examined that could provide information about social and political crises in the various countries of the former Soviet bloc. Less attention has been paid to comparing crisis processes and the effects of different crises on social attitudes and on the policies of the communist leaderships of other .allied. communist countries. In Bulgaria, these issues have been the subject of two monographs by Iskra Baeva, a docent at the History Department of Sofia University.1 The author of the present article, basing himself on information contained in newly uncovered archival documents, has also set forth the reactions of the Bulgarian leadership to the social and political conflicts in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in several publications.

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