Thousands were killed in forced labour camps but the thugs responsible evaded conviction

by Hristo Hristov, Dnevnik Daily

Marin Georgiev's nightmare began in April 1961. A shepherd from Straldzha, he was peacefully minding his sheep when two State Security plainclothes agents arrested him. Georgiev was sent to a labour camp in Lovech without trial. His crime? He had refused “voluntarily” to give his land and livestock to the collective farms, the only type of holding permitted in Communist Bulgaria.

Georgiev endured a year of hell in Lovech, comparable to the treatment suffered by Nazi concentration camp prisoners. “As soon as we'd arrived, the older inmates beat us. They gave us stained, filthy clothes and shaved our heads. We slept in a kind of barn, in triple bunk beds, without any mattresses, just a blanket. Everybody had to work, whether fit or ill.” Georgiev still remembers three of the camp's officers, who behaved “like animals”. Their names were Gogov, Gazdov and Goranov.

Tags: communism, crumes

Bulgaria has become the only former Warsaw Pact country to have a stooge for president

by Stoyana Georgieva, Mediapool

Abraham Lincoln famously said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Perhaps the masses are more malleable than Lincoln thought, at least in present-day Bulgaria. President Georgi Parvanov, it transpires from recently declassified documents, was an informer for DS, or Darzhavna sigurnost - the Communist-era secret police, the Bulgarian equivalent of Stasi and Securitate.

Tags: politics, Bulgaria

Writer Georgi Markov's 1978 assassination in London continues to puzzle and perplex as several post Communist governments have failed to disclose who pulled the trigger and who gave the orders

by Anthony Georgieff

On Waterloo Bridge in Central London, on 7 September 1978, a man was "accidentally" stabbed with an umbrella. Four days later, at St James's Hospital in Balham, that man died in excruciating pain. The autopsy at Wandsworth Public Mortuary revealed a tiny pellet had been injected into his thigh. The pellet had gone undetected on the X-rays. It was later taken to the Chemical Defence Establishment in Porton Down. A team of forensic experts, including a CIA operative, examined the pinhead-sized object and found it to be concave, with two tiny holes in it. But it was empty.

The man who died was Georgi Markov, a 37-year-old writer from Bulgaria who had defected to the West and wasworking for the BBC World Service. His radio programmes, critical of the Communist regime in Bulgaria, were also beamed, on a freelance basis, from Radio Free Europe, an American-sponsored operation based in Munich, Germany.

Tags: communism

Tags: culture, Bulgaria