Abstract

After the defeat in World War I Bulgaria was forcibly demilitarized within the new Versailles system of world order. The disarmament and the destruction of surplus arms and ammunition were closely monitored by delegates of the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission of the victorious countries. However, the remaining small arms served as the basis for many processes and events during the interwar period in Bulgaria. Among them are the September 1918 uprising, the chain of political assassinations, the armed struggle of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, the June 1923 military coup d’état, the September 1923 armed uprising. To date, historians have not reached a consensus on the quantity of small arms withdrawn from legal circulation. Moreover, the total number of weapons in the possession of the Bulgarian army at the end of World War I has not even been clarified. However, these questions seem important for assessing the significance of the armed struggle in the internal political history of both Bulgaria and the Balkan region. This article examines the process of concealment of small arms and weapons of the Bulgarian army against the background of latent and obvious confrontation between the new political power, represented by the leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union and the military authority. Previously unexploited sources have enabled to study in detail the ways the weapons had been hidden from the international commission’s control. The quantitative assessment of the weapons which were taken out of legal circulation is based on the analysis of the available data and sheds a new light on such aspects of the interwar crisis as the involvement of the Bulgarian army in concealing small arms and special military equipment, the ways of weapons acquisition by opposition forces, and the revival of the country’s military power aft er the inter-allied military control ended. The author also questions the opinion which has been accepted in historiography about the organization of large-scale arms smuggling by the Soviet Russian government to the Bulgarian Communist Party in August–September 1923.