Word: bulgaria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late 1972, when I was covering Eastern Europe for TIME, I drove from my office in Belgrade to Sofia to write a story about Bulgaria. The situation was none too exciting in that most docile of all the Soviet satellites, but I did get a glimpse of a new breed of apparatchik. The press department of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry arranged an interview with a 34-year-old Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade named Andrei Lukanov. He spoke idiomatic English, kept the party-line claptrap to a merciful minimum and talked candidly about the "shortcomings" of a command economy...
...mention reform minded, would be a kiss of death. Jealous, older, more orthodox comrades would accuse him of "trying to start a mini-cult of personality in the bourgeois capitalist press." Lukanov reminded me that he had granted the interview "in good faith," believing I was writing about Bulgaria, not about him personally...
...conventional wisdom was promulgated by Kremlin and Kremlinologists alike. Yes, Gorbachev had created the conditions for the end of one-party rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria by putting the regimes there on notice that they were on their own. But no, he could not, would not and probably should not give up the Communist monopoly in his own country...
...BULGARIA...
...brought with it a broadened right to be demagogic and irresponsible, threatening the region's proclaimed goals of democracy, cooperation and stability. "People are able to make decisions for themselves again, and they ) are starting at grade one," says Deyan Kyurianov, a leader of Bulgaria's opposition Union of Democratic Forces. "Nationalism is easy to understand and quick to arouse...