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.
Go, Gotse, GO!
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.
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.
Culture Shock
OK, you've been to Greece, Turkey, and possibly southern Italy. You've kind of got used to manic drivers, street dogs, piles of litter, and Roma women approaching you with offers to read your palm. You had a dodgy tummy in Athens; you developed aches, pains and allergies in Istanbul; and your purse got nicked in Naples. You think you've seen it all? Bulgaria can still surprise you.
Psychologists explain the term "culture shock" as being a feeling of anxiety produced when a person moves to a completely new environment. Generally, it sets in within a few weeks of coming to a new place, or when the plumbers have done the bathroom, whichever comes first. You don't speak the language, the BBC World Service can only be heard on Short Wave, you don't know how to use the bank machines, and you are desperately trying to simulate personal creativity when dealing with the waiters in your local restaurant.
Feel you want to leave? Don't! Here are my Top 10 characteristically Bulgar events and occurrences likely to induce a bout of culture shock - and my proven ways of dealing successfully with them.Read More...