Bulgaria Baulks at Russia's Price for WW2 Documents

Bulgaria has refused to pay over 23,490 US dollars for 23,500 pages of the so-called "trophy archives" - archive material taken to the USSR by the Soviet army at the end of the Second World War, the Bulgarian news website Dnevnik reported on Tuesday.

Moscow demands the payment for copies of original documents, containing information about Bulgaria's war reparations under the Neuilly-sur-Seine peace treaty, signed in 1919 after Bulgaria's defeat in the First World War.

"Those documents are not of great importance for the Bulgarian state. But there are also documents from the Second World War - from the Bulgarian army's headquarters, from the navy - for me, those are the important documents," the president of the State Archives Agency of Bulgaria, Mihail Gruev, told BIRN on Tuesday.

Russia's State Archive has insisted that Bulgaria buy the offered copies in order to obtain other parts of the "trophy archives".

Large amounts of archives were taken from states allied to Nazi Germany after they were defeated and occupied by the Soviet army in 1944-1945.

Bulgaria, which the Red Army occupied in September 1944, reportedly handed over 32 bags of documents that were transported to Russia by ship from the Lom harbour in northern Bulgaria in October 1944.

It is unclear what materials were inside the bags as no inventory was kept.

In 1995, Russia adopted a law on protecting so-called cultural valuables obtained from enemy countries as "trophies", which effectively bans return of the originals to their countries of origin.

Gruev said he had tried to negotiate the return of the documents in 2014 and 2015 but added that the decision was political and "has to be taken at high state level, probably the highest.

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