Bulgaria. The communists of the Patriotic Front seize power. Over the next three months, they fire 30,000 public employees: police officers, civil servants, priests, doctors, and teachers. 11,122 people are tried and 2,618 sentenced to death, of which 1,046 are actually executed. Unofficial executions range from 3,000 to 18,000, depending on the source. This is one of the swiftest and most brutal official purges of the postwar period, despite Bulgaria never having been actually occupied or implicated in large-scale Nazi atrocities. But perhaps the reason lies precisely here: while in other Eastern European nations, the intelligentsia had already been destroyed by the Gestapo, in Bulgaria the communists must do it themselves.
