The Bulgarian Gulag
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.
The Bulgarian umbrella
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.