by Andrew Bache
Andrew Bache hadn’t always intended to join the diplomatic service and working for the Foreign Office wasn’t his intention in his early years. But having worked for a large accountancy company, he decided that accountancy wasn’t really his calling and felt himself drawn to the work at Foreign Office. His job there eventually took him to Malaysia, Cyprus, Austria, Japan, Turkey, as well as Romania and Denmark where he was appointed Ambassador in the 1990s. For a short period of his career, between 1966 and 1968, Andrew Bache found himself in Bulgaria, where he served as Second Secretary in the Political and Economic Section at British Embassy Sofia.
“Life was totally different from anything I had experienced and I think totally different from what most people believed it to be.” – Andrew Bache
[At the time I came to Sofia], Bulgaria was deep behind the Iron Curtain and in fact was the blueprint for what the Soviet Union would like to have established outside its borders. It was seen as a Slav state, loyal to Moscow, ready to do its bidding and was therefore given a lot of help from Moscow to develop properly and make its way. So it was interesting from the point of view of studying the communist system and we were thrust into it for the first time. Life was totally different from anything I had experienced and I think totally different from what most people believed it to be.
We were able to do quite a lot of travelling in the country. I travelled all over. It’s a beautiful country, for the most part. But as far as the political regime was concerned, it was stable, and trying desperately to get 5 year plans going, 1 year plans going and to introduce as much technology as they could. All with the backing and support of the Russians. As far as the West was concerned there was contact but it was very much at arms length.
They allowed a certain amount of contact through scholarships, and a number of Bulgarians came over to Britain on scholarship schemes. Others were allowed to travel out for specific purposes, but deep bilateral contact was very difficult. Of course there was a certain amount of hope. They always wanted to attract western investment into the country if it could be brought in under the terms they wanted. There wasn’t much investment in Bulgaria, as I recall, for obvious reasons.
I think we had embassies in each of the communist bloc countries, they were certainly listening posts for what was going on and there was a certain amount of bilateral work to be done inevitably, not least on the consular side, although I wasn’t involved in that. Certainly we needed to study the political developments in the country and in terms of the surrounding area. After all Bulgaria was a neighbour to Yugoslavia and was one of the main supporters of Moscow.
The Bulgarians themselves looked very loyal and the idea of fellow Slavs was strong in the country. So one didn’t expect there to be a dramatic change.
This article is part of an extensive interview of Andrew Bache for British Diplomatic Service Oral History Project (BDOHP), a project run by Churchill College, Cambridge. The copyright to the article belongs to BDOHP. It has been published with BDOHP permission.