22 Facts About Aleksandar Stamboliyski

Aleksandar Stoimenov Stamboliyski was a Bulgarian politician who served as the Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 1919 until 1923.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski opposed the country's participation in World War I and its support for the Central Powers.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison in 1915 due to his opposition to Bulgaria joining the Central Powers in WWI.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski joined the government in January 1919, and was appointed prime minister on October 14 of that year.

On March 20,1920, the Agrarian Union won national elections and Aleksandar Stamboliyski was confirmed as prime minister.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski was ousted in a military coup in June 1923.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski attempted to raise a rebellion against the new government, but was captured by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which detested him for renouncing Bulgarian national interest on the region of Macedonia, was brutally tortured, and killed.

However, before this grand counter-insurgence was to transpire, Aleksandar Stamboliyski had to work himself up the ranks of the nation's political scene as the leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union.

On September 25,1918, in order to gain the BANU's acceptance, the regime was forced to release a number of political detainees, most notably Aleksandar Stamboliyski, who had been sentenced to life in prison after his meeting with Tsar Ferdinand to protest the war effort on 18 September 1915; two weeks before Bulgaria entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers.

Rayko Daskalov issued a declaration under his name and that of Aleksandar Stamboliyski, which named Bulgaria a people's republic and the monarchy of Tsar Ferdinand was denounced and told to surrender to the new provisional government headed on paper by the BANU leader.

The mutineers managed to enter Bulgaria's capital where Tsarist forces, led by general Aleksandar Stamboliyski Protogerov, crushed the rebellion killing an estimated 2,000 soldiers and arresting an estimated 3,000.

Unlike many of his supporters, Aleksandar Stamboliyski was able to escape the fate of imprisonment or execution and, instead, went into hiding until he was to re-surface in the political arena during the reign of Tsar Boris III.

However, because the election was so close, Aleksandar Stamboliyski was forced to form a government coalition between the agrarians and the left-wing parliamentary parties.

From his complete acquisition of power in March 1920, until his death on 14 June 1923, Aleksandar Stamboliyski ruled Bulgaria with a strong personality leading many to remember him as a kind of strongman, dictator, or thug.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski's goal was to transform the political, economic, and social structures of the state while at the same time rejecting the rhetoric of radicalism and its Bolshevik associations.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski founded the BANU Orange Guard, a peasant militia that both protected him and carried out his agrarian reforms.

In foreign policy, Aleksandar Stamboliyski abided by the terms he helped set in the peace treaty signed at Neuilly-sur-Seine in November 1919, which was eventually exploited by the nationalist factions of Bulgaria as he failed to lessen the outstanding reparations payments until 1923.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski rejected territorial expansion and aimed at forming a Balkan federation of agrarian states, a policy which began with a detente with Yugoslavia.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski's administration was successful in bringing out land redistribution legislation, creating maximum property holding regulations.

Yet in the 1923 coup of Alexander Tsankov in June, 1923, the Bulgarian Communist Party refused to come to the aid of Aleksandar Stamboliyski and following the coup the Communist Party was forced "underground" by the Tsankovist Terror that followed the coup.

From his native village, Aleksandar Stamboliyski was organizing a counter-insurgence that was large in number but weak in arms.

Aleksandar Stamboliyski was blinded in his torture and his head was cut off and sent to Sofia in a box of biscuits.