“Today there are only two interesting social experiments: Lenin’s and my own,” said Alexander Stamboliiski, the leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU), which ruled the country after World War I. He had high hopes for his government. It succeeded in passing far-reaching land reforms and changes in health care, education, taxation, and the judiciary — all in favor of the peasantry who, at the time, made up around 80 percent of the population. This peasants’ party attempted not a socialist experiment but a third way between capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet this definition of its ends also brought worsening relations with the rival formation on the left, namely the communists. Ultimately, it precipitated a huge counterrevolutionary wave, mounted by the opposition parties.

A hundred years on, we remember the tragic collapse of this experiment. Indeed, this year marks the centenaries of the counterrevolutionary military coup that brought down Stamboliiski on June 9, 1923, and the abortive September Uprising that followed, often celebrated — even if with some exaggeration — as one of Europe’s first “anti-fascist” insurrections. The fallout was bloody and marked the beginnings of a de facto civil war in Bulgaria, which lasted until the end of World War II.

BANU had been the major antiwar party in World War I and was the dominant force in Bulgarian politics after the Central Powers’ defeat in 1918. In postwar elections it won 28 percent support in 1919, 39 percent in 1920, and 54 percent in 1923, with a majoritarian electoral system giving it absolute control of parliament and the freedom to impose its ideology of a peasant dictatorship. Its economic and social policies engendered powerful opposition. Yet remarkably, the leaders of the June 1923 coup did not dare cancel out most of these reforms, even after BANU itself was disbanded. Also preserved was its original experiment introducing labor as an alternative to military service.