Bulgarian czar: the West is not in decline

Bulgaria has rarely been the master of its own fate. Throughout history, neighboring powers have often succeeded in imposing their will upon it. Nevertheless, Bulgaria has endured. There are few who can attest this with greater authority than Simeon II, who reigned as Bulgaria’s last czar from 1943 to 1946 and returned, after five decades of communist-imposed exile, to be elected prime minister between 2001 and 2005.

In a meeting at Vrana Palace in Sofia, the eighty-six-year-old former monarch told me that Bulgaria has missed a chance to mediate between the West and Russia. 

Simeon inherited the throne from his father, the modest, self-effacing Czar Boris III, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1943, thirteen days after returning from a turbulent meeting with Adolf Hitler. There is some evidence which suggests an assassination by poisoning, directed by German or Soviet secret services (Joseph Goebbels, for his part, accused the Italian royal family of orchestrating Boris’s death).

‘A maximalist or absolutist approach to situations is purely a populistic weapon’

Simeon bears a striking resemblance to Boris, whose portrait hangs on the wall opposite us. He speaks about his father with great admiration — and sympathy for the impossible situation in which he found himself. “My father tried his best to stall, to the very limit, the joining of the Axis, or to allow the German troops to pass through Bulgaria,” Simeon told me. At Boris’s final meeting with Hitler, he’d refused to send Bulgarian troops to the eastern front. “He paid with his life for refusing at that stage.”

Vrana Palace was built by Simeon’s grandfather, Czar Ferdinand I, on the site of a former Ottoman homestead. During Ferdinand’s autocratic personal rule, the estate, with its neo-Byzantine palace and botanical gardens, took on a level of splendor reminiscent of a fairytale; for a time, its fields were ploughed by captive elephants. On the night of March 24, 1944, as air raid sirens wailed, a formation of Royal Air Force bombers appeared in the skies above Sofia, scattering high explosives and incendiary bombs. After suffering a direct hit, the roof of the palace burst into flames. In the morning, the young czar emerged from his bunker to survey the damages. 

“One of the heavy 2,000-lb bombs fell quite close to the palace,” Simeon says. “We were in the bunker and everything shook. And the next day we went to see it with my uncle, Prince Kyril, the regent. Groundwater had come up and there was a thirty-five feet crater, and my uncle said: ‘In spring we’re going to put stone slabs around, put a few water lilies in it, and we’ll call it Lake Churchill.’”

After the Soviet army crossed into Bulgaria in September 1944, the royalist government was overthrown in a violent coup. Simeon was placed under an informal house arrest, while Prince Kyril was tried before a “People’s Court” and sentenced to death. In 1946, a referendum formally abolishing the monarchy drove Simeon and the surviving members of his family into exile. Bulgaria would spend the next four decades as a Soviet satellite.

Russia has an irregular place in Bulgarian history. On Liberation Day, commemorated every March, Bulgarians still celebrate the Russian victory in the Russo-Turkish War, an event which restored Bulgaria’s autonomy after five centuries of Ottoman rule. The somber occasion is marked by public ceremonies and a special liturgy of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. “At the end, we mention our gratitude toward Czar Alexander II. It’s in our mentality. You can’t expect people to suddenly turn against Russia, it’s something which is there. Whether one likes it or thinks it’s right, that’s another thing. But it’s there.”

Simeon, who led Bulgaria’s push for NATO membership in 2004, has grown wary of leaders who insist that Ukraine can be resolved without a negotiated settlement. He is especially critical of those who aim to return to the prewar status quo. “To say things like this, I think, is between ridiculous and pathetic.” he told me. “A maximalist or absolutist approach to situations is purely a populistic weapon, but it has no real pragmatism or logic.”

“Wishful thinking is one thing, but pragmatism is another, and here again we are now divided. NATO shores, Russia on the other side. This terrible conflict is something which is extremely dangerous and I think again, everybody must pitch in to try and cool things so we can come to a point where you can really sit across without having a fit, talking to the other side.”

In Simeon’s telling, Bulgaria is a nation which can relate to both Russian and Ukrainian demands while rooted firmly in the West. This might have allowed it to present itself as a sympathetic moderator, had cooler heads prevailed. “Bulgaria has a very specific position, not only geographic, but cultural and also religious, and this is something which few people have understood in the past and now even less unfortunately. They think that we are pro-Russian or pro-President Putin or what have you. Which is, of course, completely wrong.”

The former czar says that Bulgaria handed over its natural position as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine to Turkey. “We could have had this role precisely because of our own history, affinities, and friendships with the Ukrainian nation,” Simeon says. “It’s a shame because I think little Bulgaria could have used this present position to pass messages through, try and find dialogues instead of seeing who is for, and who is against, and who is a traitor because he said a good word for Russia.”

Ukraine is a particularly divisive issue in Bulgaria, where pro-Russian sentiments have collided with anxieties over the security and stability of the region. “Today in parliament that’s all you hear is name calling each other; who’s a Russophile and who’s a Russophobe,” Simeon told me. He points out that these contemporary political spats are nearly identical to those of the late nineteenth century, a time when Russian influence stoked similarly fierce divisions in Sofia. “It’s very unfortunate that we haven’t learned our lesson.”

Czar Simeon says he doesn’t know what the future holds. After all, “I didn’t think my children would live to see a free Bulgaria,” he reminds me. But he’s inherently skeptical of brinkmanship and the unintended consequences it might bring about. His natural instinct is that of restraint and moderation. One night, during his premiership, while dining with friends at an Italian restaurant in Sofia, he was interrupted by his security detail. “There’s a call from the White House,” they said. It was former vice president Dick Cheney, notifying him on the eve of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. “Mr. Vice President, I hope to God you know what you’re doing,” he said, in a momentary lapse of his otherwise diplomatic comportment. 

As a parting gift, I presented Simeon with a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a tome which seemed relevant, given the subject at hand. But for all his woes, Simeon does not fully subscribe to Spenglerian notions of the decline of the West. Perhaps this is because of the remarkable endurance of his “little Bulgaria,” a nation which has lived defiantly and against the odds for the better part of two millennia. “We’ve been around for thirteen centuries. In one way or another we’ve survived. And I don’t think there’s a reason for us to disappear,” he told me. “Really, I wouldn’t say that the West with its culture, my God, and with now the scientific possibilities and everything, could be on the decline. I’m not that much of a pessimist.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.