Guarding the “Southern Border” in Communist Bulgaria: Policies, Practices, Experiences

Abstract

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. Soon after the establishment of communist rule in Bulgaria, the state’s “Southern border” (with Turkey and Greece) became its most staunchly guarded borderline, stimulated by the ideological interpretation of the two countries as imperialist states that posed a direct threat to the entire socialist bloc. Since the early 1960s—copying the strategies applied to the Berlin Wall—various new measures were introduced by the communist state to make this borderline even more impermeable, involving the actions of military institutions, propaganda units, and the local population. The current article analyzes the guarding of the “Southern border” in communist Bulgaria and interprets it as an element of the overall strategy of these years to put borderline areas under strict supervision and control. The article presents the main steps in the organization of Border Troops in Bulgaria after 1944 and the various political, educational, and cultural policies developed by the communist state to create loyalty among the soldiers, the military staff, and the population in general. On the basis of archival materials, published memoirs, and literary texts, the article reconstructs the maintenance of constant alert about illegal trespassing, the organization of “voluntary troops” for border-guarding, the training of the young generations, and the romanticizing of the border guard service in those years. In the last part, emphasis is paid to the discrepancies between the propaganda messages and the reactions of the local population, which outline the multi-faceted encounters with ideological policies at the edges of this staunchly guarded world.