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- 1921
- 1926
- 1943
- 1944
- 1945
- 1946
- 1947
- 1947
- 1950
- 1950
- 1950
- 1952
- 1952
- 1955
- 1956
- 1959
- 1962
- 1966
- 1967
- 1970
- 1972
- 1973
- 1976
- 1977
- 1978
- 1979
- 1980
- 1981
- 1981
- 1982
- 1983
- 1984
- 1985
- 1986
- 1987
- 1988
- 1989
- 1989
- 1989
- 1990
- 1997
- 2009
- 2011
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1921
White Russians
The Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Civil War forced into exile several generations of educated people. Hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés escaped across the Black Sea and settled down in 1919-1921 in Serbia and Bulgaria.
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1926
White Brotherhood
The spiritual movement of the White Brotherhood was founded by the Bulgarian philosopher Petar Deunov when he returned to his country after studying in the US. His followers passionately recall the beginnings of their movement.
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1943
Dimitar Peshev
In March Bulgaria's pro-Nazi government decided to defy Berlin and halt the deportation of Bulgaria's 50.000 Jews. This was down to the actions of one man - Dimitar Peshev. Just two years later he found himself on trial for his life.
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1944
Dual Liberators
In September the Red Army crossed the Danube and entered Bulgaria. It ignored the announcement of the Bulgarian government to leave the Axis and declare war on Germany, hoping to avoid a Soviet occupation.
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1945
My beloved uncle
The arrest and execution after questioning in the Soviet Union of General Nikola Mihov, a prominent Bulgarian army commander at the turn of the XX century, a national hero of the Balkan Wars and WWI.
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1946
Soviet Justice in Bulgaria
Bulgarian Communist leader and Komintern apparatchik Georgi Dimitrov returns from Soviet exile. Andrei Vishinsky pays a visit to Bulgaria's new Communist rulers.
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1947
Liquidation of the Opposition
Encouraged by Moscow and with the Soviet Army present in the country, the Bulgarian communists decided to move more forcefully to destroy the parliamentary opposition.
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1947
Brutal reform
This propaganda newsreel presents the collectivisation of the Bulgarian countryside as an almost joyful process. In reality it was methodically planned and brutally executed.
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1950
Moscow Propaganda
Early Communist newsreel reporting that in central Sofia a main hub for spreading of propaganda has opened its doors, "the hub will follow closely the Soviet example".
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1950
Peace Fighters
Four years before "Bulgaria’s Stalin" Valko Tchervenkov was toppled, we see his successor Todor Zhivkov boarding a plane with an official Bulgarian delegation on its way to a "World Peace Congress" in Warsaw.
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1950
Bulgaria's best friend
This propaganda newsreel from 1950 presents the Soviet Communist leader Stalin as "Bulgaria's best friend".
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1952
Blackberries in the Camp
Former camp inmates tell of the horrors in a Bulgarian Communist Forced Labour Camp. Some 12,000 men and women passed through these camps.
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1952
What saved us
A former camp inmate tells of her years in Bulgaria's Communist Forced Labour Camps. The Belene camp on the Danube alone is believed to have held 7,000 people in 1952.
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1955
Moscow-Belgrade-Sofia
The three men briefly running the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death--Khrushchev, Bulganin and Mikoyan--arrive in Sofia. A day earlier they had been in Belgrade, trying to heal the rift with Tito going back to 1948.
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1956
Autumn 1956
After the Hungarian revolution and the Soviet assault on Budapest in October and Nomember, oppression followed quickly in Sofia. This propaganda newsreel shows the new Bulgarian Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov.
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1959
The Youngest Inmate
Kolyo Vutev is one of the few surviving inmates of the Lovech camp, the harshest of Bulgaria's Communist camps.
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1962
Bulgaria Summer
East German ORWO home movie from a holiday in Bulgaria. Featuring Sofia, Melnik, Rozhen, Rila, the Black Sea coast.
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1966
The Arts Guilds
Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's Communist leader for 35 years, regularly met writers and artists. Here is one of those gatherings in the mountain resort of Borovets.
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1967
Summer in Bulgaria
Amateur film footage showing the capital Sofia and the Black Sea coast, filmed by two East German tourists.
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1970
Visit to Bulgaria
Amateur film footage from our collection, shot by West German tourists on holiday in Bulgaria in the early 1970s.
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1972
Cold War Music
The story of Maestro Alipi Naidenov - conductor, musician, teacher and mentor to hundreds of young Bulgarians, who crossed the "Iron Curtain" to follow their passion for music in Italy.
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1973
Mountain Republic
In that winter the populations of two remote Muslim villages of Communist Bulgaria staged a remarkable protest against the state, spending three months camped out in the main square. Their action was crushed by the authorities.
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1976
Moscow Lessons
The Bulgarian Communists followed closely the Soviet example in every aspect of life -- in the theory, as well as in the practice. Their efforts to copy the ritual, the body language of their Soviet masters, were often striking.
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1977
Georgi Markov in a BBC Studio
Georgi Markov was one of the few open critics of Bulgarian Communism, a writer and a broadcaster, a BBC journalist.
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1978
Sunny Beach
Rare footage filmed by a British couple, holidaying in Bulgaria under the watchful eye of the State Security.
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1979
Why they killed my son?
Georgi Markov’s mother, Rayka Markova, on BBC Panorama. Broadcast only months after her son’s death.
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1980
700 days in the army
Angel Toshev from Sofia about the obligatory military conscript service of his generation.
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1981
Summer in Bulgaria
Footage filmed by a West German visitor, who travelled up and down the Bulgarian Black Sea coast in 1981.
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1981
Yaruzelski in Sofia
Soon after the introduction of martial law in Poland in December 1981, the new military leader General Jaruzelski received a warm welcome in Sofia from Bulgaria's leader Todor Zhivkov and his entourage.
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1982
24 May Parade
Bulgaria's Communist leader Todor Zhivkov at a traditional parade on the day of the Cyrillic Alphabet and Bulgarian Culture in Sofia.
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1983
Symbols of power
Kostadin Chakarov, an advisor and personal assistant to Todor Zhivkov, the Communist ruler of Bulgaria, remembers the rituals of power of that time and the annual parades to mark the takeover in 1944.
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1984
Man of the Desert
Photographer Dimitar Deynov accompanied the Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov around the world for decades. He remembers a surprise moment in the desert with the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. .
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1985
Cold War Frontier
Maria Kichukova from the remote village of Brashlyan on Bulgaria's border with Turkey remembers the often sinister attempts to stop people running away from the Communist state to the West - via Turkey.
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1986
Chernobyl Sofia May Day Parade
Tens of thousands of Bulgarians mark Labour Day by marching past their Communist leaders in Sofia. Unknown to them, just four days previously a fire at Chernobyl had caused the world's worst nuclear disaster.
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1987
A Story of Faith
Maria Zabova, who has been the bell ringer of Sofia's Alexander Nevski Cathedral for more than thirty years, about her faith under Communism and the risks then to be persecuted for coming to church.
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1988
Sofia Prison
A reporter's visit to Sofia's Central Prison, testing the limits of the official Glasnost and Perestroyka line.
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1989
Bulgarian Spring
BBC World Service Radio interview with Bulgaria's first democratically-elected President, Zhelyu Zhelev, at the time still a dissident.
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1989
Mass Exodus
Georgi Simidchiev - an eyewitness to the dramatic events around the mass exodus to Turkey of 300.000 Bulgarian ethnic Turks in the summer of 1989 and the campaign against them by the Bulgarian authorities.
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1989
Students demand freedom
December 1989. Students in the Bulgarian capital Sofia call for the abolition of Article 1 of the Constitution of the country. It would mean dropping the ruling role of the Communist Party across society.
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1990
A Day in Life
The future Foreign Minister of Bulgaria Solomon Passy - confident that one day his country will be a member of NATO.
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1997
Back from the Brink
President Petar Stoyanov brought political enemies together to agree on a settlement that would pull the country back from the brink of civil unrest.
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2009
Sofia Time Machine
Dimitar Tuchkov - a collector, restorer, entrepreneur from Sofia about a unique XIX century house in the Bulgarian capital.
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2011
Museum1944-1989
28 years after the end of Communism, Bulgaria still has no museum about the time it acted like the Soviet Union's 16th republic. An eclectic collection was put together in Sofia in 2011, focusing on art from that period.
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