For us, nothing good has come from the East

“I never cease to wonder how there can still be any doubt when absolutely all documents – public and accessible to every person – speak so clearly that we are occupied. Even the note with which the Soviet Union declares war on Bulgaria speaks this. We were occupied for three years – from September 1944 to December 1947. The maintenance we pay to the Red Army is over BGN 133 billion. That is, nearly 3/4 of Bulgaria’s national income goes to the maintenance and sustenance of the occupying army”.

This is what the historian Prof. Evelina Kelbecheva, university professor and screenwriter of the documentary “The Second Liberation”, told BNR.

In her words, there is a “huge gulf” between what is known as a historically accurate picture of the past and society’s refusal to see the facts:

“This continues to poison Bulgarian society. The propaganda that made this whole falsification with the “liberators” continues to this day, it was not only 45 years ago. … There are people who aggressively deny and do not recognize what is already an indisputable truth on Bulgarian-Soviet and Bulgarian-Russian relations”.

According to Prof. Kelbecheva, the clashes in front of the Monument to the Soviet Army are only “the tip of the iceberg, which is the complete distortion of Bulgarian history regarding the role of the Russian Empire and the USSR in our history”.

“There is nothing good that has come from the east for us!”, she was emphatic.

Prof. Evelina Kelbecheva emphasized that Georgi Rakovski, Vasil Levski, Zahari Stoyanov, and Stefan Stambolov separated Bulgaria from being a Transdanubia province, “as the Russians treat us”.

“The two totalitarian monsters – Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR – which then clashed, first divided Poland. These are the two powers that started World War II. I don’t know a Bulgarian textbook that mentions this fact. This fact became a reason for debate at the European level. The whole distorted and falsified history is currently the most powerful weapon of pro-Putin propaganda”.