Will the lessons of totalitarianism be forgotten!? On July 21, the budget committee took the first step towards closing the Commission for Disclosure of Do…
Will the lessons of totalitarianism be forgotten!?
On July 21, the budget committee took the first step towards closing the Commission for Disclosure of Documents and for Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army (KRDOPBGDSRSBNA) with arguments for savings. Despite the calls of dozens of scientists, journalists, lawyers, public figures and civil society organizations, the budget committee approved the texts in the State Budget Act for 2026 on second reading. These texts assign Deputy Prime Minister Ivo Hristov by September 15 to prepare legislative changes to close the Commission on Dossiers and transfer its functions to the State Archives Agency.
Finance Minister Galab Donev pointed out how this act will achieve savings of 6 million euros.
For almost a month, writers, university professors, artists, architects, priests wrote letters, held press conferences, and journalists published categorical resistance.
The KRDOPBGDSRSBNA itself has declared itself against the closure of the institution, calling for a broad public debate and consensus.
A significant number of checks on affiliation have not yet been completed – checks are also pending on the affiliation of individuals, members of management and control bodies of non-profit legal entities, as well as the founders of non-profit legal entities, owners and managers of advertising agencies, owners of public relations agencies and companies, participants in the privatization carried out by the Privatization Agency, etc.
The leadership of the Commission on Dossiers has sent its position to the Ministry of Finance. It is provoked by the public information that the closure of the Commission is planned in the new state budget.
“…we express our disagreement with §8 of the Draft Law of the State Budget of the Republic of Bulgaria for 2026, which provides that by September 15, 2026, the Deputy Chairman under Art. 5, para. 1, item 4 of the Organizational Regulations of the Council of Ministers shall develop a proposal for regulatory changes to close the KRDOBPGBDSRSBNA and transfer its activities to the State Agency “Archives””, the position states. The leadership of the Commission also presents its own arguments against this extreme measure.
The Commission on Files insists that “…the issue of the existence of the institution in its current form or its possible restructuring should be subject to broad public discussion and the final decision should be reached by consensus, as was the case with the Law on Access and Disclosure of Documents and on Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army in 2006.”
Here is the full text of the document:
TO
MRS. TANYA GEORGIEVA
GENERAL SECRETARY
OF THE MINISTRY OF FINANCE
DEAR MRS. GEORGIEVA,
In connection with the draft Decision of the Council of Ministers on the approval of the Draft Law on the State Budget of the Republic of Bulgaria for 2026 sent to us for coordination, we inform you that the Commission for Disclosure of Documents and for Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army (KRDOPBGDSRSBNA) has no comments regarding the draft decision and the proposed bill, in the part concerning the draft budget of KRDOPBGDSRSBNA for 2026, enshrined in Art. 28 of the bill.
At the same time, we express our disagreement with §8 of the Draft Law on the State Budget of the Republic of Bulgaria for 2026, which provides that by September 15, 2026, the Deputy Chairman under Art. 5, para. 1, item 4 of the Organizational Regulations of the Council of Ministers shall develop a proposal for regulatory changes to close the KRDOBPGSRSBNA and transfer its activities to the State Archives Agency. Some of our arguments are as follows:
The current Law on Access and Disclosure of Documents and on Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army, under which the Commission carries out its activities, is an expression of the consensus will of all parliamentaryly represented political parties in the 40th National Assembly to achieve, to the maximum extent, the opening of all documents and the disclosure of the affiliation of all persons who have held and hold public positions, as well as who have performed and are performing public activities within the meaning of this law. The law was also adopted in response to the recommendations in the Declaration of the Plenary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) of 8 July 1997, the recommendations in Resolution 1096(1996) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on measures to dismantle the legacy of the former communist totalitarian systems and those in Recommendation R/2000/13 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on a European policy on access to archives, adopted on 31 October 2000.
The collective state body established by the law was assigned three main tasks:
– to ensure the procedure for access to the documents of the State Security and the Security Service of the Bulgarian People’s Army as regulated by the law;
– to carry out a mandatory check for affiliation of the circle of persons under Art. 26, para. 1 of the law;
– to build a centralized archive of the documents of the State Security and the Security Service of the Bulgarian People’s Army, in which all documents of the bodies under Art. 1, for the period from September 9, 1944 to July 16, 1991, would be collected and stored.
Since the establishment of the Commission in April 2007, all three main tasks have been consistently and unwaveringly performed with full awareness of the importance of the archive of the State Security and the Security Service of the Bulgarian People’s Army in order to learn about this historical period and provide the public with all the information contained in the documents. The process of collecting the archival documents lasted for almost 15 years, and to this day has not been fully completed. A Centralized Archive of Documents under Art. 1 of the Act has been established, which the Commission’s foreign partners from related organizations define as one of the most modern in Europe. The Commission is part of the European Network of Official Bodies Responsible for the Storage of Secret Police Files in the Countries of the Former Socialist Camp. As of today, the organization unites institutions from eight member states – Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – as well as five associated countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Ukraine.
In parallel, mandatory background checks provide the public with information about individuals who were part of the political and public life in the country and who belonged to the State Security and the Bulgarian People’s Army, thereby providing an opportunity for every Bulgarian citizen to be informed. Citizens and researchers are provided with the opportunity to access this archive – to be able to read about themselves, their relatives, the repressions, to examine the documents and, based on them, to publish their analyses.
Over the years, the activity of checking affiliation has been expanded several times by the legislator, with additional groups of persons included in its scope, specifically for the purpose of monitoring the existence of a connection between the communist past and modern socio-political life. The latest changes, effective from 22.10.2024, provide that the verification of affiliation should also cover managers, procurators, members of a management or control body, beneficial owners and persons who directly or indirectly exercise control, in accordance with the Anti-Money Laundering Measures Act, of companies with which contracts have been concluded under the Public Procurement Act worth over 500,000 leva – for each calendar year. That is, the public should understand what part of the persons who have concluded contracts as a result of a public procurement are connected to the former State Security Service, respectively. and to the spending of public funds.
At present, a significant number of verifications of affiliation have not yet been completed. The process of checking the affiliation of individuals, members of management and control bodies of non-profit legal entities, as well as the founders of non-profit legal entities, owners and managers of advertising agencies, owners of public relations agencies and companies, participants in the privatization carried out by the Privatization Agency, etc. has not been completed.
In addition, the affiliation check is part of the reliability check under the Classified Information Protection Act, as well as part of the requirements for candidates for jurors in various courts in the country. In recent years, the affiliation check has been consistently included as a requirement in the various procedural rules for the election of bodies elected by the National Assembly.
Given that affiliation checks are currently being carried out for the described categories of persons, the question arises whether, if for an unlimited number of people in responsible positions in the administration, the judiciary, the media and business, the affiliation checks remain incomplete, is there not unequal treatment?
In this sense, would not the proposal to close the Commission thus made constitute a serious blow to the right of Bulgarian society to know the historical truth and would it not be perceived as a betrayal of the victims of the totalitarian regime, their heirs and all Bulgarian citizens who have the right to expect an objective disclosure of the facts of our country’s communist past?
We draw particular attention to the consequences that the closure of the Commission and its transfer to the State Agency “Archives” would have on the rights of citizens to access the documents under Art. 1 of the law, currently stored in the Centralized Archive of the Commission. According to the current legislation, the Commission is the only body that provides effective, specialized and relatively fast access to citizens, researchers, historians, the media, to the documents of the former repressive structures. In the event of the closure and transfer of the archive stored in the Commission to the State Agency “Archives”, access to these documents will be practically blocked for years to come.
The reasons for this are well known: the need for inventory, preparation of new inventories, harmonization with general archival rules, as well as the peculiarities of processing such a specialized and sensitive fund. Inevitably, such processes will lead to long-term delays or even to the de facto unavailability of documents for citizens. In this way, basic constitutional and legal rights to access information of public interest would be violated. This would represent a significant setback in the long-standing, continuous striving for democracy in our country, incompatible with European standards for transparency and dealing with the totalitarian legacy.
We would also like to emphasize the fact that in no country of the former socialist bloc has the process of disclosure and access to archival documents ended with the closure of the body and the cessation of its activities.
Therefore, we believe that the issue of the existence of the Commission in its current form or its possible restructuring should be subject to broad public discussion and the final decision should be reached by consensus, as was the case with the Law on Access and Disclosure of Documents and on Declaration of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian People’s Army adopted in 2006.
The Commission is ready to provide additional information and to participate in an equal and constructive dialogue on its future activities.
PLAMEN TONCHEV, CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMISSION ON DISCLOSURE OF DOCUMENTS AND ON DECLARATION OF BELONGING OF BULGARIAN CITIZENS TO THE STATE SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE SERVICES OF THE BULGARIAN PEOPLE’S ARMY
Illustration: A reconstruction in its original form of the infamous wooden portal that welcomed the camp inmates with Maxim Gorky’s quote “Yes, a man sounds proud”. However, the inscription on the inside of the portal is different and reads: “If the enemy does not surrender, he will be destroyed” / Photo: Mediapool. The Belene concentration camp (Persin Island, Danube River) was established by a confidential decision of the Bulgarian Communist Party government with Prime Minister Georgi Dimitrov on April 27, 1949. In 1953, it was closed, following Moscow’s policy of temporarily reducing repression in the camps of the Gulag penal system in the USSR. After the outbreak of the Hungarian People’s Uprising in the fall of 1956, the communist authorities reopened Belene. In 1959, the camp was closed again, after the then Prime Minister Anton Yugov stated in an interview with a Western publication that there were no more camps in Bulgaria. At the end of 1984, the communist regime reopened Belene, where it isolated 517 Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin, opponents of the so-called revival process. The last camp inmates were released in 1987.
