e time of readjustment after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953,
Bulgaria's police state period gradually came to a close. In the postwar
period until then, the country had had police machinery modeled on that
of Stalinist Soviet Union, with state security troops (secret police)
and garrisoned interior troops equipped like mobile army infantry units.
The state security troops, the garrisoned interior troops, and the
regular police forces are estimated to have totaled about 200,000 men.

Although state and internal security organs have been shifted among
ministries and renamed, and there has been an occasional move to abolish
them, they continue to exist in Bulgaria. Although the organizational
form is probably much the same as before, that is, an internal security
force and a state security police, the security apparatus has only a
fraction of its former personnel and has been shorn of its more
arbitrary powers. According to some observers, Bulgaria has emerged from
a police state, wherein security forces held arbitrary powers of arrest
that instilled fear in the people, to a police bureaucracy in which the
militia meddles in peoples' lives to the point of public frustration.
People no longer have reason to fear the tyranny of a secret police, but
they have developed a strong resentment of the petty militia regulations
that affect their daily lives.

State security functions--those that deal with espionage, treason, and
the group of so-called political crimes aimed at undermining or
upsetting the system--have been performed by a separate secret police
organization that was typical in communist systems, particularly during
the Stalinist period. An overriding preoccupation with state security
has not been as prevalent in Bulgaria as in many communist countries,
because the communist government had established itself firmly in
control of the country in a relatively short time. Nonetheless, a
sizable secret police force existed for many years and, after a reign of
terror lasting until 1948, the secret police contributed to a general
atmosphere of repression that lasted until the mid-1950s. After that
time most police functions were assumed by the People's Militia, and the
secret police faded into the background, greatly reduced in size and
importance but still functioning within one of the government
ministries.

After the unsuccessful coup d'etat of April 1965, there was a resurgence
of secret police activity with the creatio