It has been nearly two decades since the collapse of the Soviet block. Regardless of how important this event was in the history of Eastern Europe, it failed to generate an adequate interest in the West. On the contrary, the attraction of the south-eastern fringe of the continent in particular seems to have diminished with time. The wars in Bosnia and Kosovo briefly brought the Western Balkans into the spotlight but they also cast a further blight upon the less turbulent Bulgaria and Romania. This is certainly not to say that such anonymity is uncustomary, at least for Bulgaria. In the course of the last fifty years or so, the dead silence weighing upon Bulgaria was only rarely interrupted by short-lived episodes that earned world media's attention. The ‘umbrella murder’ on London Bridge of the dissident writer Georgi Markov, the alleged Bulgarian connection in the attempt on Pope John Paul II's life, and the Libya trial of Bulgarian medics seem among the few stories to break through that indifference. Even the 10 November 1989 palace coup that overturned Todor Zhivkov, the long-lived communist dictator, had the misfortune of being overshadowed by the collapse of the Berlin Wall a day earlier.

It is from the starting point of this near-complete indifference towards Bulgaria that Richard Crampton begins his narrative. The implicit aim of Bulgaria is to bridge the gulf of the missing ‘political rapport between Bulgaria and Britain … [and] the absence of cultural contacts’ (p. 3). Regretfully, it is questionable whether Crampton's efforts lessen the dividing distance. Of course, such a ‘gargantuan task’ is beyond the power of a single book (though Bulgaria is the third study Crampton has published on Bulgarian history).

The book is extremely critical of what Crampton inventively calls the ‘Tûrnovo political system’. Its main features were ‘instability of the political parties; the manipulation of those parties and their leaders by the prince, and by partizanstvo, the system of clientelism and political jobbery which made that manipulation possible’ (p. 146). The fragile and deeply fractured Tûrnovo system was, according to Crampton, the main impediment to economic development (p. 295). It was soon to alienate the peasants, nearly three-fourths of the Bulgarian population, and to create a widening gap between peasantry and intelligentsia, ‘the alliance between whom had produced the national revival’ that led to the liberation from the Ottomans in 1878 (p. 179).

At first, the Tûrnovo system caused popular indifference and growing alienation of the Bulgarian peasants from ‘foreign bureaucracy’. It was not long, however, before the peasantry succeeded in gaining a political representation through its own party, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU). Crampton's sympathies seem to be with BANU, which he claims was ‘the most original political phenomenon to appear in modern Bulgaria’ (p. 159). Communists, the other alternative to the Tûrnovo system that emerged during the inter-war period, never managed to become as influential as Agrarians. Their main disadvantage was that ‘there were so few workers, the vast majority of those espousing socialist ideas being teachers, lawyers, students, or other members of intelligentsia’ (p. 186). Following this main line of reasoning, however, at times Crampton tends to find partizanstvo in peculiar places. The gigantic ideologically driven cleansing of over 30,000 officials executed by the communists immediately after they assumed office in 1944 is, to him, little more than ‘partizanstvo on a massive scale’ (p. 311).

If the third Bulgarian state (1878–1944) is characterized as a general failure (given the false democracy and the phlegmatic economic growth), Crampton is far more ambiguous in his assessment of the communist period. He offers a scrupulous account of the terror, the concentration camps, and the Stalinist purges. Impervious to any ideological biases, Crampton is also not blind to the enormous structural changes accomplished by the regime (industrialization, almost complete literacy, migration from rural to urban centres). In an important contribution to the existing literature, Crampton rightfully points out that ‘the communists could bring Bulgaria into the modern era but they were to find it much more difficult to adapt to the post-modern era’ (p. 370). Switching from extensive to intensive modes of development seemed to be a hard task for the post-communist cabinets. Trying to avoid the indispensable but painful microeconomic adjustments, Bulgaria was slow in pressing economic and political reform agenda. It was the financial collapse of 1996–7 that ‘brought about a real structural change’ and made possible NATO and EU membership.

It is to be doubted how successful this book is in its monumental goal ‘to lessen this regrettable divide’ between Bulgaria and the English-speaking world (p. 4). By putting the history of modern Bulgaria under scrutiny, however, Crampton's Bulgaria might certainly contribute to the building up of a pool of academic knowledge about that distant European ‘periphery’. Let us hope, as Crampton rightly suggests at the end of his book, that Bulgaria's accession to the European Union would bridge the gulf of indifference and ‘anchor Bulgaria more firmly than it has ever been in Europe’ (p. viii).