The Revival Process () was a government-enforced assimilation campaign in the People's Republic of Bulgaria. It began on Gregorian Christmas 1984 and continued until December 1989. The state imposed new Bulgarian names on about 850,000 people, banned public use of the Turkish language, and restricted religious and cultural practices. The government declared the forced renaming complete on March 31, 1985, but restrictions on language, religion, and cultural practice remained until December 1989. In 1989, state pressure led more than 300,000 Bulgarian Turks to leave in a migration that began on May 29, 1989. After party leaders removed Todor Zhivkov on November 10, 1989, the new government under Petar Mladenov restored the right to hold Turkish names and eased religious and cultural restrictions on December 29.
Officials argued that Bulgarian Turks were descendants of Bulgarians who had been forcibly converted to Islam and Turkish culture, and presented the campaign as a restoration of Bulgarian origins. Authorities implemented the renaming campaign by surrounding Turkish villages with security forces and military vehicles, while employers carried out some name changes at official direction. Language, religious, and cultural restrictions were enforced through fines, surveillance, detention, and internal exile. Deaths occurred during state suppression of protests and opposition to the campaign and in prison camps such as the Belene labor camp, though death toll estimates vary among sources.
The campaign drew criticism from Turkish and Western officials and media outlets, human-rights organizations, and international bodies. After 1989, the Revival Process was condemned by Bulgarian political, religious, and civic institutions. Following the fall of communism in Bulgaria, legal mechanisms for name restoration were established and Bulgaria undertook minority-rights reforms. On January 11, 2012, the National Assembly of Bulgaria formally condemned the Revival Process.
Terminology The Revival Process Scholars describe the term "Revival Process" as a euphemism, but economist writes that its use has become difficult to avoid. The term was first used at a Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) Politburo meeting on January 18, 1985, by Georgi Atanasov. The term was not widely used at first, but became more common. The policy has been described as an assimilation campaign.
Bulgarian Turks In communist Bulgaria, Muslim communities overlapped, and some Slavophone Muslims and Muslim Roma identified as Turks, with the latter sometimes doing so to avoid stigma. In Bulgaria, group identity often combined religion and ethnicity; Slavophone Muslims living mainly among Turks tended to emphasize their Bulgarianness, while those living mainly among Bulgarians more often emphasized their Turkishness. Officials used disputed ethnic categories, affecting people who did not fit official labels. Turks and Pomaks were sometimes confused with each other by the state – deliberately or otherwise.
Forced assimilation Background
Turkey's 1980 military coup led the nation to move away from some elements of Kemalism and undermined Turkey's "democratic credentials" internationally. Turkey launched a military intervention in Cyprus in 1974, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was proclaimed in 1983. The BCP leadership treated these developments as security concerns, though sources do not find evidence that the Bulgarian government expected a near-term invasion of Bulgaria. Before the Revival Process, Turkey also faced Kurdish unrest and foreign-policy disputes with Greece, Iran, and the European Economic Community. Turkey also restricted some minority groups and naming practices. In 1981, Yugoslavia experienced unrest among its Muslim-majority Albanian minority. Avramov writes that the final pre-campaign discussion of the "Turkish Problem" focused on security. The Turkish minority also had a higher birth-rate than Slavic Bulgarians. Laber reported contemporary projections suggesting that, if then-current trends continued, Turks could outnumber Slavs in the 21st century.
By late 1984, communist Bulgaria belonged to organizations and treaties that protected minority rights, while continuing to implement assimilation policies in breach of those obligations. The government was concerned about potential backlash from Turkey and Western nations, and it sometimes avoided extending previous measures to Turks. According to the 1975 census, Turks made up about 8.4 percent of Bulgaria's population. Turks lived mainly in northeastern and southern Bulgaria, notably Kardzhali Province.
Scholars date Islam's introduction to Bulgaria to the 14th century, after the Ottoman conquest. Two theories explain the emergence of Turks in Bulgaria. One theory traces the Turkish community to migration from Asia Minor, while the second rejects such migration. The Bulgarian communist government said any members of the Turkish minority who felt connected with Turkey emigrated to Turkey under a limited migration treaty between Bulgaria and Turkey in effect from 1969 to 1979. It also said those who remained were Bulgarians Turkified in language and religion. Bulgarian officials also cited physical-anthropological claims, including phrenological arguments, to assert that the studied Bulgarian Turks were morphologically Bulgarian. The BCP framed the policy as part of building "real" communism and a classless society, both internally and in discussions with Soviet Union (USSR) officials.
Soviet stances on Bulgarian minority policy also influenced Bulgaria. Academic Vesselin Dimitrov linked the timing of the Revival Process to changes in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s that reduced external constraints on Bulgarian domestic policy. The renaming campaign coincided with a renewed phase of the Cold War, weakened Soviet leadership, and Konstantin Chernenko's extended illness. Avramov further refers to the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and changes in power in the USSR from 1982 to 1985. Bulgaria's consistently pro-Soviet foreign policy gave the Zhivkov government more room to pursue assimilation measures than other Soviet satellite countries had. Academic Bojkov writes that Mikhail Gorbachev also gave tacit approval to Bulgarian minority policies. Despite this, Bulgarian leaders denied Moscow's direct involvement in the Revival Process.
Academic İbrahim Karahasan-Çınar identifies several theorists of the campaign besides Zhivkov: - Central Committee secretary Georgi Atanasov - Central Committee secretary - Central Committee secretary - Central Committee secretary Aleksandar Lilov - Central Committee secretary - Internal Affairs minister Petar Mladenov - Foreign minister - Kardzhali District Committee () first secretary
Georgi Tanev said Bulgarian Turks had a strong group identity expressed through "language, tradition and customs", and that their social environment separated Turks from the body of the Bulgarian nation. He submitted proposals to the BCP Politburo on how to address this situation, provided justification of grassroots support for renaming, and later rose through the communist state hierarchy. Tanev later became internal affairs minister and received the Hero of the People's Republic of Bulgaria award, though his receipt of the award was not publicized.
Karahasan-Çınar does not list Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of Todor Zhivkov. She had been a member of the BCP's Central Committee from the mid-1970s until her death. Zhivkova championed Bulgarian culture and policies aimed at cultural revival. Although she promoted a cultural revival that emphasized foreign ties, some figures around her favored a narrower understanding of Bulgarian culture. After Zhivkova's death, many of her ideas and projects faded and her close associates were disfavored by the BCP. Dimitrov writes that this helped non-inclusive ideas of cultural revival become dominant.
Shortly before the Revival Process, the Bulgarian government introduced a new, unified identity system under the within the . The government tied the unified system to the planned mass issue of new documents by 1985. State identification cards were required for access to banks, healthcare, and wages. Those without identification cards bearing Bulgarian names were eventually prohibited from registering births or marriages as well.
Shortly before the renaming began, Internal Affairs Minister Dimitar Stoyanov stated the Bulgarian government's intentions:
Initial campaigns
From 1950 to 1951, the communist government expelled around 150,000 ethnic Turks from the country. From 1962, the government barred Slavophone Muslims from attending Turkish-language schools, and in 1972, it banned Turkish-language schools. The government forced many Muslims to change their names; by 1974, around 150,000 Slavophone Muslims and 200,000 Turks had been forced to adopt new names.
In 1971, the government adopted a new constitution that supported assimilation policies and weakened minority protections, though it still guaranteed rights relevant to the Revival Process. Officials replaced the term "national minorities" with "citizens of non-Bulgarian origin", and their discourse framed minority identities as compatible with eventual assimilation.
In 1978, the government tried to replace traditional and religious observances with approved socialist ones. It sent officials to Islamic funerals to ensure participants carried out approved socialist rites and prayed in the Bulgarian language. The prescribed rituals combined Bulgarian Christian elements with Marxist-Leninist atheism.
In the period leading up to the Revival Process, the state intensified its assimilationist education policies by promoting mixed marriages and subjected Turkish-minority teachers to ideological training. Between 1981 and 1983, authorities forced around 100,000 people, mainly Muslim Roma, to change their names. It then extended the measure to Crimean Tatars and Alians, a Bulgaria-based Shia group, shortly before the Revival Process began in 1984. The government also resolved to issue around 250,000 identity papers bearing new Bulgarian names to Muslim Roma. Before it was implemented, many people already felt the government was moving toward a campaign like the Revival Process.
Start of the Revival Process The BCP resolved on June 19, 1984, to carry out a "unification" campaign, and informed leaders of regions with substantial Muslim populations that autumn. Orders to begin preparations for the implementation of the Revival Process were issued on December 10, 1984. The Revival Process began on Gregorian Christmas 1984. A Central Committee plenum in mid-February 1985 endorsed the campaign after Zhivkov had already extended it nationwide.
Approved name lists After disputes over which names should count as Bulgarian, officials compiled a list of approved names. The list included many Christian names, including names linked to Eastern Orthodox saints and the church calendar, though it also included "neutral" names. This list was originally meant for people in mixed marriages, but it later expanded in scope. Officials did not complete the "Classifier of Bulgarian Names" before the start of the Revival Process, but the state provided indices from which people were required to choose their new names. Officials accepted some names of foreign origin, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic names, if they could be written in Bulgarian. In addition, some Bulgarian family names were of Turkish origin, which presented a dilemma to the state. The same body also sought to create an acceptable foreign-name classifier.
Renaming