HEALTH SINCE 1945: TRANSITION PERIOD

It is our privilege to begin a review for a long period of socialist health care in Bulgaria. Our plan comprise of the following materials, divided according time periods in economo-political aspect:

- First, transition period from 1945 to 1960

- Second, institutionalization period from 1960 to 1990

- Third, reconstitution period from 1990 to present time

We begin with the transition period to a socialist economy on the Soviet pattern which took longer than the immediate post-war period. Simply nationalising private industrial enterprises in the period was not enough. A system of long-term central planning to co-ordinate outputs with inputs also had to be set in place. And for such planning to include all production, the collectivisation of small-scale, private agriculture seemed necessary. Bulgarian economists typically identify the date of its completion, 1960, as the end of the transition to the Soviet system.

Each of the first three national plans followed a strategy of extensive growth. Huge amounts of capital and labour were funneled into a few branches of industrial production. These plans honour the Soviet ideology which can be briefly retold. First, the basic Soviet system for central planning is well known. So is Soviet development strategy: rapid growth of heavy industry to be achieved through concentrated investment from the state budget and a labour force augmented by peasant influx. A smaller rural labour force is left on the mechanised collective farms to produce the surplus needed to feed a growing urban population. Bulgaria's post-1948 transition to this planning system and strategy followed the Soviet pattern perhaps more closely than did any of the other Communist governments in Eastern Europe. Second, although its general pattern is familiar, the period of the first three Five-Year Plans is the most neglected in modern Bulgarian economic history. Western and Bulgarian economists have concentrated their efforts on the period since 1960, where reliable statistical evidence is more available and connections to the international economy more important /N.B. Bulgaria published no statistical yearbook in the 1950s/.

Bulgarian political history from 1949 to 1960 also makes a detailed appraisal of these years more difficult. Accompanying several changes in Bulgarian party leadership was the Soviet transition from the Stalin to the Khrushchev eras. The single line of authority from party leadership to economic policy that is a hallmark of Soviet-style economies was doubtless present, but harder for outside observers to discern. Subsequent Bulgarian scholarship has trodden too lightly on these political links to make clear the inner dynamics of economic policy.

The period began with the illness and death of the party's respected leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A sick man at least from 1947 onward, he died in April 1949 after several months of treatment in the Soviet Union. Dimitrov enjoyed international prestige on the left as the eloquent defendant in the Reichstag fire trial, staged unsuccessfully by the Nazis in 1934, and as head of the Comintern thereafter. He kept his position as Bulgarian Prime Minister during the Tito-Stalin split, despite his advocacy with Tito of a Balkan customs union and federation just a few months before the dispute erupted. Traicho Kostov, one of his logical successors and the party leader most responsible for economic policy since 1944, did not survive the purge following the Tito-Stalin split.

The actual successor, Vulko Chervenkov, had been trained in the Soviet Union for party work since his exile there in 1925. He co-ordinated propaganda for the Comintern from the late 1930s, and for the Bulgarian party's Central Committee after his return to the country in 1946. His background did not prepare him well, in other words, for overseeing the first Five-Year Plan. His two decades of Soviet exile did, however, prepare him to follow Stalin's lead after the split with Yugoslavia in 1948, and to reject any further delay in proceeding with rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation according to the Soviet experience of the 1930s. In addition, Chervenkov came to power during Stalin's last years, when the Soviet Union's own reliance on propaganda slogans and the threat of arbitrary punishment reached its post-war peak. These were distinguishing features of economic policy in both countries from 1950 until Stalin died in 1953. Chervenkov had begun his regime by expelling one-fifth of a party membership that had grown to half a million. Many of those expelled, like half of the party membership, were peasants. So were many of the unknown numbers of suspected "enemies of the people", who were sent to concentration camps in the early 1950s. All this made the atmosphere surrounding further collectivisation ominous, rather than encouraging.

The first challenges to Chervenkov's leadership none the less appeared surprisingly early in the Second Five-Year Plan /1953-1957/. The plan was itself a retreat from the harsh, sometimes counter-productive measures of the first. Criticism of Chervenkov for these excesses appeared in the Bulgarian Politburo as early as 1953, and reappeared in 1955 because of continuing agricultural problems. Khrushchev's 1956 speech exposing Stalin's "mistakes" and his "cult of personality" was perhaps the most important, but not the first step in Chervenkov's demotion. Todor Zhivkov emerged from the new generation of post-war party leaders to become First Secretary in 1954, at the age of 43, and Deputy Prime Minister in 1956. But Chervenkov was to remain the other Deputy Prime Minister until 1961. Anton Iugov, the Interior Minister during the mass arrests of 1949-1950 and one of the older generation of "home Communists" had re-emerged in 1956 as Prime Minister. Zhivkov strengthened his position in this triumvirate as the 1950s drew to a close. The influence of the other two still remained to be reckoned with until the shortcomings of the Third Five-Year Plan had become clear. Bulgarian economic policy did not therefore pass fully into the hands of Zhivkov and his post-war generation until the 1960s.

Now, before continuing to the main body of presentation, we would like to point some attention at a concise outline of the topic under consideration. Specifically, this is "Part VI" from the monumental work of the Bulgarian Academy of Science /BAS/: "The Editors of BAS. Information Bulgaria - a Short Encyclopaedia of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985"

/to be continued/.