Books in Brief: Crown of Thorns

Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918-1943, by Stéphane Groueff (Madison, 420 pp., $23.95)

“ONCE upon a time, between the two wars, there was quite an engaging kingdom in the center of the Balkans called the Kingdom of Bulgaria,” writes Stéphane Groueff in the Preface to Crown of Thorns. In the turmoil that followed World War I, Bulgaria’s King Ferdinand, the autocrat, was deposed, and 24-year-old Crown Prince Boris ascended to the throne. He was serious, introspective, democratic in disposition, unsure of himself, and immensely likable. He learned to live with political realities that were none of his making: he knew when to be wily, when to be ruthless, but he never lost sight of his goal, which was to give his people a better life than they had known before him or would know after his death. For 25 years he kept Bulgaria free, in a high-wire act among contending domestic factions. And he waged a major and largely successful delaying action against the external forces that would after his death submerge Bulgaria into its present faceless condition as the Soviet Union’s most subservient satellite. Only the presence of 650,000 German troops on his borders made him sign the Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, Japan). But until Boris’s death in the fall of 1943 no Bulgarian troops fought in World War II and—extraordinarily—no Bulgarian Jews were shipped to extermination camps in Germany. In that, Bulgaria stood alone in Central and Eastern Europe. Boris died, whether of a heart attack or of poison, upon his return to Sofia after a particularly stormy session with Hitler. His death, Groueff writes, “struck the nation with an explosion of desolation. The King’s death exposed, abruptly, the hopelessness of Bulgaria’s future.” In the index to Crown of Thorns there are a chilling number of references to p. 386. It is on that page, in the Epilogue, that Groueff tells of the execution by the Soviet Union on February 1, 1945, of Prince Kyril (Boris’s brother) and the two other regents who ruled for the boy King Simeon, and of thirty other prominent Bulgarians who had served King Boris, among them Stéphane Groueff’s father. Another Ekaterinburg, a small-scale Katyn Forest. Crown of Thorns is a fascinating, eminently readable story stylishly told by the former New York Bureau Chief of Paris-Match, and tinged with sadness for his lost homeland and the good man whose best efforts could not surmount geography or the totalitarian tides of the twentieth century.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918-1943, by Stéphane Groueff (Madison, 420 pp., $23.95)

“ONCE upon a time, between the two wars, there was quite an engaging kingdom in the center of the Balkans called the Kingdom of Bulgaria,” writes Stéphane Groueff in the Preface to Crown of Thorns. In the turmoil that followed World War I, Bulgaria’s King Ferdinand, the autocrat, was deposed, and 24-year-old Crown Prince Boris ascended to the throne. He was serious, introspective, democratic in disposition, unsure of himself, and immensely likable. He learned to live with political realities that were none of his making: he knew when to be wily, when to be ruthless, but he never lost sight of his goal, which was to give his people a better life than they had known before him or would know after his death. For 25 years he kept Bulgaria free, in a high-wire act among contending domestic factions. And he waged a major and largely successful delaying action against the external forces that would after his death submerge Bulgaria into its present faceless condition as the Soviet Union’s most subservient satellite. Only the presence of 650,000 German troops on his borders made him sign the Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, Japan). But until Boris’s death in the fall of 1943 no Bulgarian troops fought in World War II and—extraordinarily—no Bulgarian Jews were shipped to extermination camps in Germany. In that, Bulgaria stood alone in Central and Eastern Europe. Boris died, whether of a heart attack or of poison, upon his return to Sofia after a particularly stormy session with Hitler. His death, Groueff writes, “struck the nation with an explosion of desolation. The King’s death exposed, abruptly, the hopelessness of Bulgaria’s future.” In the index to Crown of Thorns there are a chilling number of references to p. 386. It is on that page, in the Epilogue, that Groueff tells of the execution by the Soviet Union on February 1, 1945, of Prince Kyril (Boris’s brother) and the two other regents who ruled for the boy King Simeon, and of thirty other prominent Bulgarians who had served King Boris, among them Stéphane Groueff’s father. Another Ekaterinburg, a small-scale Katyn Forest. Crown of Thorns is a fascinating, eminently readable story stylishly told by the former New York Bureau Chief of Paris-Match, and tinged with sadness for his lost homeland and the good man whose best efforts could not surmount geography or the totalitarian tides of the twentieth century.