The daily resistance of the Turkish minority against the policies implemented during the Bulgarian Communist Party rule

Nation-state policies towards minorities can be labelled to two main group as liberal-integrative and oppressive-discriminatory. During the Cold War period from 1945 to 1989, Bulgarian communist governments followed the oppressive and discriminatory policies. The Bulgarian state, giving priority to the building of "united socialist Bulgarian nation," ignored the identities of ethnic and religous minorites. Thus, the Turkish minority, as the largest ethnic and religous minority of Bulgaria, also experienced the assimilation policies in many fields of life. This dissertation measures and interprets how the several groups of Turks in Bulgaria perceived the policies towards them during the Cold War period and what kinds of resistance strategies they adopted against the discriminatory and oppressive treatment by the state. Methodologically this study mainly draws on semi-structured interviews as qualitative data collection method. After interviews with twenty witnesses of the period from different regions, occupation, educational-background and gender, the answers were analyzed according to content analysis method. In addition, Bulgarian intelligence reports, official documents of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and the memories of the Turks of Bulgaria were used in this study to shed light on their daily lives, opinion, feelings and coping methods under pressures and restrictions. This dissertation, theoretically inspiring from the Subaltern Studies, attempt to explain the life experiences of Turkish minority as a disadvantaged group from their own eyes on their own terms and to create an awarenes about their non-organizational, everyday and informal experiences and responses, which contributed to their political awareness and perhaps to the future pluralism of Bulgarian politics. Keywords: Turks in Bulgaria, Bulgarian Politics, Minorities in Bugaria, Power, Resistance, Nationalism, Subaltern Groups, Practices of Everyday Life