From 1944 the Bulgarian communist authorities operated camps to which people could be sent without trial by administrative decision. The largest was on Belene island in the Danube, opened in 1949, where inmates drained marshland and farmed; those sent there included opposition politicians, Protestant pastors convicted in the 1949 'Pastors' Trial', peasants who resisted collectivisation and, in the 1980s, ethnic Turks who refused the compulsory name changes of the 'Revival Process' recorded separately in this atlas. After a partial closure, the system's last and harshest camp opened at Lovech in 1959, where inmates broke stone in a quarry; 149 people are recorded as having died from abuse at Lovech and the adjacent women's camp at Skravena before both were closed in 1962. Detainees also included people held for 'social parasitism' or 'loose morals' rather than any political offence. A Bulgarian parliamentary and party inquiry examined the camps in 1990, and Belene continues to operate as a prison, which has complicated commemoration; former inmates have campaigned for recognition and access to files.
The Bulgarian communist state interned political opponents and people classed as socially undesirable in labour camps by administrative order
The census of 31 December 1946 counted 7,029,349 people. The state commission and later scholarship, notably the work of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the files of the Belene and Lovech camps, put the number sent to camps by administrative order at roughly 12,000-23,000 between 1944 and 1962, with about 5,000 held at Lovech in 1959-62 alone.
The documented figure of 149 deaths from abuse relates to Lovech and Skravena in 1959-62 and comes from the 1990 inquiry. Totals for the whole camp network are not established; survivor accounts and later journalism suggest several hundred more died at Belene and elsewhere from beatings, malaria, hunger and shootings of those said to be escaping, but no register has been published.
Internment without trial, quarry and marshland labour and fatal beatings were documented by the Bulgarian commission of inquiry established in 1990 and in survivor memoirs published from the 1980s onward.
Bulgaria