On this day in 1989, the November plenum of the Central Committee (CC) of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) accepted the resignation of Todor Zhivkov as Secretary General of the CC of the BCP, after ruling the country for 35 years.

The demand for his resignation was organized by the member of BCP Politburo Petar Mladenov and Politburo candidate-member Andrey Lukanov, as a repercussion of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the USSR. At the plenum, the CC members accepted Zhivkov’s resignation and put Petar Mladenov in his place as BCP Secretary General. The news quickly spread, and a few days later, tens of thousands of people came out into the streets for the first free political rally.

This date marks the start of the transition of Bulgaria to democracy and a market economy. Surveys from that time show that Bulgarians’ then expected the process of transition to take no more than 10 years. In practice, however it took decades.