On the question of the role of The Orange Guard in the internal political plans of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union in 1920–1923

Abstract

In 1919, one of the political parties in Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Agricultural National Union, created an illegal militarized wing, which was called The Orange Guard by contemporaries. Having come to power in 1920, the Union, instead of relying on official power structures, such as the army, gendarmerie and police, was forced to continue developing its own paramilitary structure. There are very few documents of that period disclosing its composition, number, purpose and methods of solving problems. Information about it in historiography is fragmentary, despite the direct participation of the guard in all dramatic phases of the internal political struggle of that period. During the Second World War, the archives of the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission came to the disposal of the Red Army as a trophy of war. From 1920 to 1927, the delegates of the commission performed supervisory functions over the observance of the requirements of the military section of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine by the government of Bulgaria defeated in the First World War. A number of documents related to the activities of this formation were found in the Russian State Military Archives in the fonds 1707k. This article is devoted to an analysis of a document that is supposedly a charter on the staffing of The Orange Guard.

Acknowledgements
The study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and by the National Science Fund of Bulgaria, project no 20-59-18007.

Received: 14.10.2021.

Citation
Dubovik O., Ermishin L. On the question of the role of The Orange Guard in the internal political plans of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union in 1920–1923 // Slavic Almanac. 2022. No 1–2. P. 48–67 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2022.1-2.1.03