Ethnic Cleansing During the Cold War: The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria

In 1989 the Bulgarian communist regime expelled 360,000 Turks and Muslims to Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War period in Europe after the winding up the post war ’population transfers’ of mainly ethnic Germans in the early 1950s. This expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole mass expulsion th

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His monographs include Silesia and Central European Nationalisms (2007), The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (2009), Creating Languages in Central Europe During the Last Millennium (2015) and The Un-Polish Poland, 1989 and the Illusion of Regained Historical Continuity (2017). He also co-edited several volumes, for instance, Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950 (2016), The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders (2016) and The Social and Political History of Southern Africa’s Languages (2017).