Ethnic Cleansing During the Cold War

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 that ever breached the Iron Curtain. Not only did the 1989 ethnic cleansing trigger the end of communism in Bulgaria, but was also followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and its wide-ranging ramifications, this is the first detailed analysis of these events.