Gold on Tobacco Road

The least-known and most loyal of Russia's Eastern European satellites is little Bulgaria (pop. 8.5 million). TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott recently visited some of the country's major urban, industrial and agricultural centers and sent this report:

On Ruski Boulevard, in the heart of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, looms one of the oddest monuments in the Communist world: a huge equestrian statue of Alexander II, Czar of All the Russias from 1855 to 1881. While Moscow abounds with likenesses of Lenin and Peking with those of Mao, Sofia has chosen to preserve an image of the Emperor who helped liberate Bulgaria from Turkish rule in 1878. The Bulgarians still feel that they owe a historic debt of gratitude to Russia's rulers.

At times that debt has proved costly. Until recently, the Soviet Union regarded the country as its own private vegetable patch, vineyard and Tobacco Road. Bulgarians have labored under an ultra-orthodox Communist regime to keep Russian consumers supplied with farm produce, cigarettes and heady red wine. Total economic dependency, combined with brutal political and intellectual repression, assured Bulgaria's status as the most benighted nation in the Soviet bloc.

Massive infusions of Russian capital, raw materials and technology are pushing Bulgaria into the industrial age. A major reason for Bulgaria's windfall lies in its geographic position. The only trustworthy Soviet satellite in the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria is bordered by relatively independent Rumania, maverick Yugoslavia, and two NATO member states, Greece and Turkey. Expanding Soviet interest in the nearby Middle East and Mediterranean has given this 43,000-sq. mi. enclave new strategic importance. Although the Kremlin is so confident of Bulgarian loyalty that no Russian troops are stationed there, the Soviets have deployed "Frog" and "Skud" ground-missile installations, which are manned by Bulgarians.

Even without armed divisions, the Soviet presence in Bulgaria is exceptionally high-powered. The Kremlin's emissary to Sofia, Vladimir Bazovsky, acts more like an imperial proconsul than an ambassador. Bazovsky's staff includes high-ranking "advisers" to the Bulgarian armed forces and secret police. Such supervision seems scarcely necessary, however; Bulgaria's Moscow-trained leadership has maintained a tighter grip on its people than any other Soviet-bloc government. Party Leader Todor Zhivkov, 61, who has been in power for 18 years, presides over the oldest Politburo in Eastern Europe (average age of full members: 64). Perhaps that is appropriate for a country where the prominence of yogurt in the diet is thought to promote longevity. The new head of the State Committee on Art and Culture, which rigidly controls intellectual life, is Zhivkov's stern, thin-lipped daughter Liudmila, 30.

Unlike most other East Europeans, Bulgarians seem genuinely friendly toward the Russian people, with whom they have ethnic, linguistic and religious affinities. To such pragmatic young Bulgarian bureaucrats as Petar Mladenov, 36, the youngest Foreign Minister in Europe, and Andrei Lukanov, 34, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, this friendliness extends even to the Soviet government. According to Lukanov, Bulgaria's transformation from an agricultural backwater into an industrial and trading power in the Balkans is largely owing to Soviet aid. "Without the U.S.S.R.," he said, "it would have been impossible for us to develop our exports to the point where we are now the world's largest exporter of electrical trucks and hoists." As it happens, virtually all the trucks and hoists are shipped to Communist countries and are sold at unrealistically low prices. Still, Russia provides a broad and stable market for Bulgarian exports, and, thanks to Soviet aid, the country now proliferates with steel mills, chemical plants, oil refineries and a huge, top-secret uranium-processing plant.

Bulgarians take pride in their 210,000 passenger cars--twenty times as many as in 1960--even though most of them are owned by bureaucrats. Lukanov told Talbott that "we are already producing enough food for two Bulgarias"; yet vegetables and meat are often scarce and expensive because of the enforced exports to the Soviet bloc. The regime apparently plans to reduce some of these inequities. It was announced that 412 million leva ($382,500,000) of this year's 7.11 billion leva ($6.6 billion) national budget would be used to increase wages and workers' benefits.

Comfort. In spite of enduring contradictions, there is an overwhelming impression in Bulgaria of modest but widespread comfort, prosperity in the villages around the capital and impressive organization in agriculture. Sofia is striking for its many sumptuously planted parks, its wide-domed churches brightly lit at night and the yellow cobblestones that pave the main boulevards. City residents, proud of their distinctive cobblestones, have successfully persuaded the municipal authorities to abandon plans to replace them with asphalt. One woman journalist explained, "We couldn't let them tear up our streets," adding, "after all, they're paved in gold."

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