General Dzhurov detailed a murdered soldier and 136 mines in Kosice
By Roy Castellano ·
Troops entered Czechoslovakia without anti-tank missiles or gun training, later purging editors and hunting "terrorists" after NSO Nikolov was kidnapped and murdered.
The 12th APC Infantry Regiment crossed the state border into the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic at 04:05 on August 21, 1968, entering through the Matevce post. They were part of an Allied Forces Group tasked with "rendering help to the Czechoslovak people." By the time they reached Kosice, 120 kilometers from the border, the "help" looked like a street battle.
According to a September 30 report by Army General Dobri Dzhurov, the Bulgarian Minister of National Defence, translated by the Cold War International History Project, the regiment encountered automobile and tram barricades in the center of Kosice. A crowd of young people attacked the column with stones and bricks, smashing the windows of 40 to 50 automobiles and tearing the antennas off five radio-transmission units. The column slowed to a crawl, moving at 4 to 5 kilometers per hour as soldiers struggled to keep the drivers in their seats.
Missing Missiles and BT-60s
From a planning perspective, the operation began with the kind of friction that keeps war-plans analysts awake. The Bulgarian units had been staged in the USSR—specifically the Lvov and Pre-Carpathian regions—since late July. Dzhurov admits that during the final preparations between July 30 and August 20, "some defects in the armored equipment" emerged.
The 12th APC Infantry Regiment had failed to pack the necessary ammunition for its anti-tank guided missile battery. Even worse, the personnel had not yet fired the machine guns of their new BT-60-PB armored carriers. In the high-stakes environment of a Warsaw Pact intervention, arriving in a foreign capital with unfamiliar weaponry and missing munitions is a failure of basic readiness. Dzhurov notes that these faults were only "quickly eliminated" with the help of Soviet officers before the border crossing.
The Barricades at Kosice
While the march from the border to Kosice was quiet, the situation deteriorated in the town of Rozhniava. Dzhurov records that the crowd refused to clear the route within a one-hour deadline, despite appeals from the local Czechoslovak Communist Party Regional Committee Secretary. This is where the friction turned into fire.
The report states that "for the first time the Counter-Revolution opened fire on the regiment units," leaving three holes in one vehicle. The Bulgarian response was a textbook application of overwhelming force to clear a bottleneck. The regiment pushed a tank company and an APC company to the front of the Soviet rear column. They fired into the air and then directly at the attackers, using the armored vehicles to shelter the sides of the route and force the column through.
By August 22, the 12th Regiment had secured Zvolen and Banska Bystrica, seizing control of the airport, post office, radio stations, and the "Smer" newspaper publishing house. The cost of the initial push was modest in terms of blood: no deaths, but 21 injured soldiers and eight injured officers, with injuries ranging from broken cheekbones and noses to glass shards in the eye.
Terrorists and Prostitutes in Banska Bystrica
Once the occupation shifted from movement to garrison duty, the Bulgarian command began identifying what they termed "underground counter-revolutionary organizations." Dzhurov’s report lists three distinct threats in the region controlled by the 12th Regiment: a terrorist group targeting railway transport, a youth hooligan organization in Banska Bystrica whose members had sworn to kill Bulgarian servicemen, and a "prostitute organization" aiming to compromise the forces by offering young women to the soldiers.
The report claims these groups had already begun operating, firing at sentries guarding the Zvolen airdrome and water sources. The 22nd APC Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, discovered a warehouse containing 136 railroad mines and a significant cache of explosives, including plastic explosives and fuses.
Control was maintained through aggressive censorship. When the Smer newspaper published an article titled "Defeated but not conquered" on September 11, the Bulgarian unit commander, acting on Soviet instructions, closed the publishing house and arrested the editor-in-chief and his deputy. The paper was only allowed to resume publication after the editorial board was purged.
The Murder of NSO Nikolov
By late September, Dzhurov suggests the local mood was shifting. He cites greetings from Czechoslovak officers, including a Major Kubinek Anton who claimed the Bulgarian troops had arrived "on time to defend the achievements of our working class." However, the report also records a darker reality of the occupation.
Discipline within the ranks was generally good, though Dzhurov notes one case of a suicide attempt and the attempted desertion of Private Konstantin Petrov Stoyanov. More severe was the fate of NSO Nikolov of the 22nd APC Infantry Regiment. On September 9, Nikolov was kidnapped and murdered 40 kilometers from his camp.
Dzhurov concludes his report by noting that Czechoslovak services had arrested three of the four suspected murderers, but the investigation remained in progress as of September 30.