Sofia- The unthinkable happened when the Wall fell in Berlin on November 9, 1989. Something equally unthinkable occurred a day later in Bulgaria, when Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov stepped down after a reign of more than three decades. That stunning development surprised even the most hopeful opponents of the regime, including philosopher Zhelyu Zhelev, the leading dissident at the time.
"I knew the Communist regime was at its end, but I did not think it would go so quickly and so easily," Zhelev told the German Press Agency dpa. Instead of "that miracle," he says, he had expected a "civil war and ethnic conflicts."
Despite Zhivkov's unwillingness to go, he was overthrown in a coup within the all-powerful Politburo, the Communist Party policy- making body comprising the country's most powerful people.
According to Zhelev, the putsch within the Communist Party was the breaking point in Bulgaria's turn towards democracy and away from dictatorship and staunch support of the Soviet Union. Less than a year later, Zhelev was Bulgaria's first freely elected president.
The coup occurred at a November 10 morning meeting of the Bulgarian Communist Party Politburo during which, in the presidential residence on the outskirts of Sofia, the country's most powerful functionaries turned on the strongman.
"Zhivkov was practically manhandled into a resignation," says Zhelev, who is now 75.
Though nobody had expected the rapid demise of the regime, it was clear that Zhivkov's days were numbered given developments elsewhere in the former East bloc.
Amid the sense of coming changes, "there already was a political opposition," coalescing slowly, but increasingly courageous since the start of 1988, Zhelev recounts.
The first protests against the regime began October 26, a response to objections to the government's environmental policies. These protests had been preceded by growing private discontent with the regime from the general public, which turned to Western radio for news and interviews with dissidents.
Looking even further back, it's possible to see the start of Zhivkov's downfall in January 1989, when former French president Francois Mitterand invited 12 activists to a breakfast at the French embassy while Mitterand was visiting Bulgaria.
"This gave the opposition an additional boost," said Zhelev, who had organized the dissidents into a club that fomented the principles of glasnost and prestroika (openness and restructuring) that had been pushed to the forefront in the Soviet Union by its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The media, still under tight state control, released the news of Zhivkov's resignation the evening of November 10. Zhelev heard the news earlier from a fellow dissident and quickly started conveying it to people whom he trusted at Sofia University.
When the formal announcement was picked up by the official media, celebrations began in the student cafeteria. "Everybody was hugging, and wine flowed in abundance," Zhelev says.
Just a week later, at the first large demonstrations, the opposition was already divided in two camps, one asking for a shift toward "Socialism with a human face," and the other, radically anti- Communist, seeking deep reforms leading Bulgaria to membership of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But the protesters were united in one respect. They all carried signs proclaiming: "Zhelev - president!"
"It was bitterly cold in those days, but we pressed for the dismantling of the Communist system with almost daily vigils and protests," Zhelev remembers. At that time he was leading the opposition alliance SDS in negotiations with the still-ruling Communists.
Their talks eventually produced an agreement on the first multi- party elections, held in June 1990. The victory in those polls went to the Communists, who renamed their organization the Socialist Party of Bulgaria.
"It could have hardly been different, with the opposition still so young," Zhelev says.
Zhivkov, charged with abuse of power, was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison. He spent most of that sentence living in luxury under house arrest. Few other members of the regime were prosecuted.
