When Communists Turned Ethnicity into a Weapon 

Marxist-Leninist doctrine claimed to abolish ethnic prejudice altogether. Proletarian internationalism promised a classless solidarity that made “nationality” irrelevant; communist states routinely accused capitalism of manufacturing racial division to keep workers divided. The myth that communist regimes were somehow immune to ethnic and racial persecution remains widespread today. Bulgaria’s treatment of its own Turkish minority proves that myth false, and does so with unusual clarity: not through wartime chaos, but through a deliberate, bureaucratically administered campaign of forced assimilation carried out in peacetime, against citizens of a state that claimed to represent them. 

Bulgaria emerged from World War II as a Soviet satellite, and by the 1980s, Todor Zhivkov had ruled the People’s Republic of Bulgaria for over three decades – the longest tenure of any Eastern Bloc leader. Facing economic stagnation and seeking to shore up a fraying sense of national unity, Zhivkov’s government turned to an old target: Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish population (as well as Pomaks and Tatars), descendants of communities that had lived in the Balkans for centuries under Ottoman rule and remained after Bulgarian independence. 

Beginning in December 1984, the state launched what it euphemistically called the “Revival Process” – a campaign to erase Turkish identity by force. An estimated 800,000 to 850,000 people were compelled to adopt Slavic names in place of their own. Speaking Turkish in public was banned. Mosques were shuttered or restricted, traditional dress and customs suppressed, and circumcision – a basic religious practice – criminalized. This was not persuasion. It was policy enforced by police, courts, and internment. 

Individual lives absorbed the full weight of this policy. Naim Süleymanoğlu, a world-record-breaking weightlifter born in Bulgaria’s Kardzhali province, had his name changed to “Naum Shalamanov” by decree in 1985 – despite being one of the country’s most celebrated athletes, personally received by Zhivkov himself. He later said the policy was the reason he no longer wished to compete for a state that denied his people’s identity. In 1986, he defected during a competition in Australia, sought asylum at the Turkish embassy, and went on to win three Olympic gold medals for Türkiye – a “Pocket Hercules” whose fame made his stolen name impossible to ignore. 

Those who resisted more directly often ended up at Belene, Bulgaria’s most notorious labor camp on an island in the Danube. In 1985 alone, over 500 Bulgarian Turks were interned there specifically for opposing the renaming campaign. The following year, they staged a month-long hunger strike. The regime’s response to dissent was not dialogue. It was incarceration. 

The policy collapsed in the open in 1989. After deadly protests that spring, Zhivkov announced on television that any dissatisfied Muslim was free to leave, and publicly demanded that Türkiye open its border, shifting blame onto Ankara for a crisis Sofia had manufactured. The state called the resulting exodus the “Big Excursion,” as though the nearly 360,000 people who fled that summer were simply tourists. They were not visiting relatives. They were being expelled, permitted to carry no more than the equivalent of forty dollars each. 

One perhaps may think that these policies may just be unique to Bulgaria and that other Marxist-Leninist regimes had spotless records on ethnic based discrimination. Contrary to this popular belief, there are many examples. In the USSR, Stalin deported countless innocents from Poland, the Baltics, Crimea, and the Caucasus for perceived collaboration with foreigners and the Axis powers. Yugoslavia detained, killed, or deported ethnic Hungarians, Italians, and German civilians under blanket charges of working with occupying Axis forces. The Khmer Rouge targeted and sadistically massacred Cambodia’s ethnic minorities. The list goes on and on. History clearly shows that communist regimes always violate their lofty promise of ethnic tolerance and harmony time and time again. 

Today, we are still dealing with the aftermath of these communist crimes. Families still don’t know what happened to their deported loved ones. Perpetrators of these abuses were never held accountable. Government archives with information on these crimes remain sealed off. And sadly, communist regimes around the globe are still perpetrating these abuses today, most notably in China.  
 
It’s time that the free world stands united against these abuses and calls them what they are: the crimes of communism.