1,500 Workers for One Plant: Todor Zhivkov Admits Tech Gap
By Roy Castellano ·
Todor Zhivkov masked an industrial nightmare with diplomatic praise, admitting Bulgaria needed 1,500 workers to run a plant that Japan operated with only 400.
On April 27, 1970, Aldo Moro, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, sat across from Todor Zhivkov, the Prime Minister and First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The setting was Sofia. The occasion was an official visit, the first Moro had made abroad following a prolonged governmental crisis.
What follows is a stenographic record of their conversation, provided in an English translation from the Cold War International History Project. On the surface, the exchange is a study in diplomatic choreography: mutual praise for the other's scholarship or statecraft, toasts to friendship, and an agreement that the world is becoming "smaller and more interconnected." But beneath the pleasantries, Zhivkov is preoccupied with a specific, quantifiable failure: the efficiency of the Eastern Bloc relative to the West.
1,500 Workers in Vratza
Zhivkov spent a significant portion of the meeting attempting to correct the Western perception of Bulgaria as merely an "agricultural country." To prove Bulgaria was developing at a "rapid rate," he cited UN Economic Committee data and compared his nation's export and import volumes favorably against Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey.
Yet the most revealing moment comes when Zhivkov admits the qualitative gap in technology. He tells Moro that Europe is lagging behind America by "1.5 to 2 times." He offers a stark example from a fertilizer plant built in Vratza. The plant was supplied by a Belgian trade company, but the operational reality was an industrial nightmare of inefficiency. Zhivkov notes that while a similar plant in Japan requires 400 people to operate, the Vratza plant requires 1,500.
For a man of the war-plans school, this is the only metric that matters. You can claim a "noble ambition" to catch up with advanced countries, but a nearly four-fold deficit in labor efficiency is not a gap; it is a chasm. Zhivkov acknowledges that both he and Moro are "confronted" with this American technological hegemony, noting that even the Japanese successes are built upon American technologies.
700 Million Rubles
To bridge this gap, Bulgaria was pivoting toward electronics. Zhivkov highlights agreements signed for the period of 1971-1975 to export electronics valued at 700 million rubles to the Soviet Union. He mentions the rapid opening of electronics plants—six already working, with a total of ten expected by mid-year.
This industrial shift was designed to solve a "contradiction" in the Bulgarian-Italian trade balance. Until then, trade had been largely unilateral: Bulgaria exported agricultural products and imported Italian machinery and equipment. Zhivkov argues that the possibilities for this specific kind of trade had been "exhausted." He sought a "qualitatively new basis" for cooperation, moving toward an exchange of industrial and machine-building products in both directions.
Moro, representing a country that the public record identifies as having significant development disparities between its north and south, finds common ground here. He suggests that Italy and Bulgaria can "exchange experience" in solving regional economic problems. He points to the Industrial Reconstruction Institute (IRI) and the supply of pipes as a concrete example of how trade could be broadened.
Peace as a Global Necessity
When the conversation turns to security, the language shifts to the high-altitude abstractions of the era. Zhivkov speaks of avoiding a "third world war," which he asserts would "definitely be a nuclear war." He links the stability of the Balkan Peninsula directly to the peace of the Mediterranean, arguing that the two cannot be separated.
There is a calculated confidence in Zhivkov's delivery. He tells Moro that "communism will rule in the world not by means of war," claiming instead that it "will win without a war." It is the rhetoric of a man who believes that industrialization and state-led consolidation—such as the "gigantic consolidation" of the agricultural sector discussed at a party Plenum that same day—are the true weapons of the conflict.
Moro responds with the careful neutrality of a statesman, agreeing that peace is a "global necessity" and appreciating Bulgaria's efforts to maintain good-neighborly relations in the Balkans. He frames the dialogue as a step toward "peaceful mutual coexistence," a phrase that serves as a diplomatic shroud for the underlying competition for technological and economic survival.
The meeting ended with formal greetings to the Italian Prime Minister. The record does not note whether the "qualitatively new basis" for trade ever materialized or if the 1,500 workers in Vratza were ever reduced. Eight years after this conversation in Sofia, Aldo Moro would be kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades.