During the 45 years of its existence, the communist regime in Bulgaria went bankrupt twice - in 1960 and 1987, and has been on the verge of bankruptcy in 1978, Dnevnik daily reported.

In order to hide the first bankruptcy and to pay off the debt to the Soviet Union, General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) Todor Zjivkov personally, without notifying the parliament or the party leadership, sold Bulgaria's strategic gold reserve.

This revealed secret documents from the Economical Catastrophe deed from 1990. This deed as supposed to clarify the economical crash of the country, which lead to the fall of communism in 1989. The investigation has been broken off in 2005 without results, Dnevnik said.

In 1990, the political heirs of Zjivkov announced the official bankruptcy of the country, and then-premier Andrei Lukanov announced a one-sided moratorium on payment of the external debt, which was more than $10 billion.

The investigation collected close to 1 200 documents from the archives of the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), Bulgarian International Trade Bank, Finance Ministry, International Trade Ministry, Economy and Planning Ministry, Kinteks, secret party and government decisions, among others. These documents showed how Bulgaria had been led to bankruptcy twice by the leadership of the Communist Party and how it had been kept alive artificially by credits from western countries and banks after 1987, Dnevnik said.

In practise, socialist Bulgaria had become insolvent after the first 15 years, because of irresponsible use of international loans, which by 1960 had amounted to 3 billion leva. Besides western banks, Bulgaria had enormous debts to the Soviet Union, for which the leaders of BCP had been criticized by Nikita Khrushchev. Zhivkov proposed to Krushchev to buy Bulgaria's strategic gold reserve in order to pay back part of the debts to Moscow, Dnevnik said.

In 1987, when Bulgaria went bankrupt for the second time, foreign debt had reached $6 billion and then-director of the BNB, Vasil Kolarov, told Zjivkov that that state's annual income was not enough to cover payments of international debts. Continuation of the economy was only possible through further loans, which raised foreign debt in the following two years to $10.5 billion.

The secret documents scattered the myths of the developed agriculture, heavy industry, electronics and war-industries, which until today were still considered the prides of socialism, Dnevnik said. The documents showed that the crisis in these areas became clear in the beginning of the 1980s.