As a specialist on the Balkans, I was asked to comment on why Bulgaria is choosing Russia and did not join the sanctions against Kirill.
After decades of studying the Balkans, I have arrived at the following conclusions.
Bulgaria: An Unfulfilled Love of Greatness*
The attitude toward Patriarch Kirill is a continuation of Bulgaria’s relationship with Russia. That is why it is impossible to discuss this issue without considering the broader context.
Bulgaria is one example of an unfulfilled historical love, a love of greatness. It is the story of a small, proud nation that once fought for its independence and, at a certain stage, even aspired to become a regional leader in the Balkans, largely thanks to Russian support.
But then came decades of disappointment, defeats, and humiliation. Russia, which for a long time was perceived in the Bulgarian national imagination as a liberator and a natural protector, did not become the guarantor of Bulgarian greatness. On the contrary, it preferred to build a system of dependencies in the Balkans and create new vassals, including through support for Serbia as an independent center of power. For Bulgaria, this became one of the painful lessons of history: love for an empire does not guarantee reciprocity.
The attempt to find a new patron in Germany also ended in disaster. Bulgaria found itself on the losing side in two world wars, which only deepened the sense of historical unfulfillment. Instead of the expected rise came defeat, territorial losses, and the feeling that history had once again passed the country by.
This was followed by a period of harsh Soviet dictatorship and close control from Moscow. Unlike many other Balkan countries, Bulgaria was integrated particularly deeply into the Soviet system. Yet the paradox is that even this experience of dependency did not lead to a profound reassessment of relations with Russia. In the mass political imagination, the causes of Bulgaria’s misfortunes are often sought not in the very logic of dependency, not in the abandonment of its own strategic agency, but rather in the belief that “someone destroyed” an allegedly stable and just order.
Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union genuinely improved its economic situation. Yet it could not fully satisfy the country’s historical frustrations. On the contrary, its peripheral position within the EU largely reinforced a sense of secondary status. Bulgaria gained access to markets, funds, and institutions, but it did not receive the symbolic recognition it had sought for so long.
This is precisely where the ground for political nostalgia emerges. Some politicians in countries pushed to the margins of the historical process attempt to regain significance through a posture of perpetual opposition: “Baba Yaga is against it.” If it is impossible to offer a grand project of one’s own, one can at least demonstratively obstruct someone else’s. If it is impossible to become a center of power, one can turn resentment into political capital.
In this sense, Bulgarian sympathy toward Russia and irritation with Ukraine among part of society have not only a geopolitical but also a psychological dimension. Ukraine today is doing precisely what Bulgaria once wanted to do itself: fighting for independence, for historical agency, for the right to be not the periphery of an empire but an independent political center. For that reason, Ukrainian resistance may evoke not only solidarity but also latent envy, irritation, and a painful reminder of unrealized ambitions of its own.
Like Hungary, Bulgaria carries within it a nostalgia for greatness that never came to fruition. This nostalgia drives part of the political class to seek old-new partners, above all in Moscow. Yet the problem is that a return to Russia does not bring greatness. It merely reproduces the old dependency, in which a small country once again hopes to gain significance not through its own ideas, institutions, and projects, but through proximity to someone else’s empire.
The historical tragedy of Bulgaria does not lie in the fact that someone deprived it of greatness. The tragedy is that a significant part of its political imagination still seeks greatness in another’s shadow.
Aleksey Pavlov for LF
