Word: bulgaria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Scotland Yard pushed its investigation of the London deaths, suspicion centered on Bulgaria's security service. Both Markov and Kostov had been well-known intellectuals in Bulgaria, with friends in the Politburo. Before defecting in 1969, Markov had won national acclaim as a writer and TV commentator. One of his later plays, The Assassins, dealt with a plot to kill a general in a police state. His defection, and his subsequent BBC and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, had been an embarrassment to the Sofia government and triggered a shake-up in its propaganda establishment. The 1977 defection of Kostov, formerly...
During the past year, Bulgaria's President Todor Zhivkov has been trying to improve relations with the West. Bulgaria claims that Markov and Simeonov were liquidated by Western intelligence services seeking to besmirch the country's image. To lend credence to that pitch, the regime offered to help British authorities dealing with the case. It was an offer the British just might be able to refuse...
This equation is repeated in one form or another throughout Eastern Europe. The Hungarian regime of Janos Kadar displays a limited amount of internal liberalisation, again in some accomodation to the Catholic Church, but externally remains the Soviet Union's devoted ally. Bulgaria has perhaps the weakest dissident movement and the genuine racial affinity her people feel with Russia is underlined by the historical fact of being saved by them from the fate of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire...
...Thracians were a tall, gray-eyed, fair race, renowned mercenaries in Homer's time, fearsome cavalrymen and deadly as centaurs. They were born guerrillas with a passion for ornament, especially gold. Ancient Thrace included what is now modern Bulgaria, south-east Yugoslavia, European Turkey and part of north-eastern Greece, but the Museum of Fine Arts' current exhibition of Thracian Treasures consists only of artifacts discovered in Bulgaria. It is a sumptuous collection of objects that were the compensation if not theraison d'etre for a savage and uncertain life...
Offers of aid came from the U.S., Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Luxembourg. The Swiss offered to send specially trained dog teams to help sniff out any remaining bodies. But while digging out from the disaster, President Ceausescu still had time to order an investigation into shoddy construction practices revealed by the earthquake on the outskirts of Bucharest, where new and ostensibly sturdy buildings developed glaring cracks in their walls...