Goryani

The Goryani movement (Bulgarian: Горянско движение) or Goryanstvo (Bulgarian: горянство: Goryanism) was an active guerrilla resistance against the Soviet-aligned People's Republic of Bulgaria. It began immediately after the Ninth of September coup d'état in 1944 which opened the way to communist rule in Bulgaria, and ended in 1956. The movement covered the entire country, including urban areas and is known to have been the first organised anti-Soviet armed resistance in eastern Europe as well as the longest lasting.

The members of the movement were dubbed Goryani (Bulgarian: Горяни: those in the forest), most likely not by themselves but pejoratively by the authorities or by street wits. Extremely scant official acknowledgements of the movement termed its members diversanti (Bulgarian: диверсанти: subversives, saboteurs and invariably stressed that they had been sent across the border by "imperialist centres".) Though helped to a significant extent by emigre Bulgarians and by foreign powers, the Goryani movement was mostly indigenous and spontaneous.

Its mode of action was traditionally Bulgarian, as practiced by the anti-Ottoman hayduti [Bulgarian хайдути: outlaws] and the anti-Nazi Partisans (pejoratively called Shumkari; Bulgarian: Шумкари, those of the bushes): the Goryani hid in remote mountains, highlands and forests, relying on a large network of yatatsi (Bulgarian: ятаци; illicit helpers) in settled communities, conducted sudden armed raids to disturb official business and withdrew before capture. Largely composed of country folk who defended their land and property from the communists, the Goryani had no discernible ideology or platform and were united by their dislike of the communist authorities.

Very little information has survived on the Goryani, whose existence was steadfastly concealed and denied by the Bulgarian communist authorities, with historical data on them carefully classified and removed and witnesses or participants intimidated into silence or eliminated. Since the movement was practically devoid of any international dimension, its history has remained remote from the mainstream of world anti-communist resistance.

The new communist government, aided by the Red Army, imposed a policy of class war through several waves of terror: extrajudicial intimidation immediately after the 9 September 1944 coup, People's Court tribunals in the mid-1940s, the elimination of opposition to the Bulgarian Communist Party in the late Forties and the hunt for "Enemies with a Party Ticket" at the close of the Forties and into the Fifties.

Armed resistance to the communists began in the immediate aftermath of the coup and reached sustainable proportions in the countryside after the execution of Bulgarian Agrarian National Union leader Nikola Petkov in 1947 and the banning of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1948. By the late 1940s, the Goryani comprised mostly country folk, members of the disbanded opposition hiding from the authorities, former soldiers and officers, former Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) activists, a handful of former pro-communist Partisans, and communists who had been associated with executed "Enemy with a Party Ticket" Traycho Kostov.

Large-scale forced land collectivisation campaigns began in the Fifties. They involved mass intimidation of the peasantry, including threats, extrajudicial imprisonment and torture, and murder. This brought a new upsurge of support for the Goryani Movement.

At first, the Goryani were poorly armed and merely hid from the authorities or agitated against them in fear of arrest. By 1947 they had banded into armed Chetas [Bulgarian, чети: bands] in highland and mountain areas.