For much of the Zhivkov era , Bulgarian conformity to Soviet wishes became a cliché of East European politics, with the country jokingly referred to - even by Bulgarians themselves - as the sixteenth republic of the USSR. However, this pliability did have its advantages: Bulgaria obtained cut-price Soviet oil, electricity and raw materials, and was relieved of the duty of hosting significant Soviet garrisons.

With access to education and employment consistently denied to people who failed to conform, most Bulgarians had no choice but to grudgingly accept rigid Party control of public life, although this passivity was made easier to bear by the Communist system's achievements in the social sphere. Given adequate food, guaranteed work, schooling and medical care, and the prospect of an apartment in the future, people were generally prepared to tolerate low wages, shortages of consumer goods and the lack of many liberal freedoms.

The West's image of Bulgaria under Zhivkov was almost wholly negative, coloured by the country's slavish adherence to Soviet foreign policy, and the fearsome reputation of the Dârhavna Sigurnost or DS , the state security police. The assassination of dissident writer Georgi Markov , who was killed after being stabbed by a poison-tipped umbrella on London's Waterloo Bridge in 1978, gave the Bulgarian security services a reputation for subterfuge and cruelty. Subsequent allegations that the DS had abetted a plot to kill the pope in 1981 suggested that Bulgaria did the kind of dirty work with which not even the KGB would wish to soil its hands.

However, it was the Party's manipulation of nationalism that seemed to Western eyes to be the most distasteful aspect of the regime. On the surface, attempts by the Party to present socialist Bulgaria as a homogeneous national state, the logical culmination of centuries of struggles for freedom, seemed to start off innocently enough. Vast amounts of money were spent on the monuments and festivities celebrating the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state in 1983, and resources were channelled into the restoration of historical monuments associated with Bulgaria's past greatness.

However, there wasn't much room in Zhivkov's Bulgaria for people of different ethnic origin. Ever since the 1950s smaller minorities like the Vlachs and Islamicized Gypsies had been encouraged to drop their traditional names and adopt Bulgarian ones. The campaign moved on to the pomaks (Muslim Bulgarians) in the 1970s, and to the million-strong Turkish minority in the 1980s. Those who refused to Bulgaricize their names were refused work, housing, or worse still, sent to concentration camps such as Belene and Lovech. Opposition to the name-changing campaign sparked violence in 1984, and led to a mass exodus of Bulgarian Turks in summer 1989, provoking outrage from human rights groups across the world. All this led to a further deterioration of relations between Bulgaria and the outside world - even Bulgaria's socialist allies were increasingly embarrassed to be associated with it.