740.00119 Control (Bulgaria)/1–845: Telegram

The United States Representative in Bulgaria ( Barnes ) to the Secretary of State

20. Numerous observers of the political scene here see in the National Committee of the Fatherland Front which is dominated by the prison-hardened and Russian-trained female secretary, Zola Dragoicheva, the instrument that is being fashioned to turn Bulgaria into a Soviet state.

The most recent evidence of such designs on the part of the Bulgarian Communists and possibly the Russian authorities is found in articles that have appeared in the newspapers of the Fatherland Front and of the Communist party. These articles are based on resolutions passed at meetings of district committees of the Front at the end of December and elaborate the theme that the people speak through the National Committee of the Fatherland Front, that never before has Bulgaria experienced such a popular mass movement as that which supports the Committee and on which the present government is based.

The January 3 issue of the organ of the FF explains that “special committees” must exist within all Bulgarian institutions and be created at once “to assure” that all useful and vital forces of the nation collaborate in the building of the new state. The article adds that the political work of the special committees should be carried on in such a manner as to so ascertain that all officials and employees of each institution are “gained” to the cause of the FF.

It seems obvious to many of us here that once the Central Committee of the FF becomes the repository of the superior political power of the state, no obstacle will exist to a shift from the present system of collective cabinet responsibility to one of the commissars appointed at will by the political bureau (the National Committee of the FF).

Repeated to Moscow as 10 and to Caserta as 8.

Barnes