Word: bulgaria
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...warming atmosphere that has drawn Eastern and Western Europe closer, one frigid holdout has been Bulgaria. Now, the tiny Balkan nation is also thawing a bit. Last week Todor Zhivkov, 55, Premier of Bulgaria and the brisk, burly first secretary of its Communist Party, made his first official trip to Western Europe, spending three days on the French Riviera and three more in Paris with President Charles de Gaulle...
...foreign currency, his government has relaxed visa requirements, and Western tourists are flocking in. In the capital of Sofia, where the population has almost tripled (to 800,000) since 1940, new Western-style apartment buildings are sprouting, and Western cigarettes and liquor are becoming plentiful. Three weeks ago, Bulgaria even staged an international trade fair, buying more than $45 million worth of Western wares...
Much of that business went to France, which has become one of Bulgaria's biggest trade partners in the West. French companies also plan to build a synthetic fiber plant, a cosmetic factory, and an auto-tire factory in Bulgaria; and last month Renault signed a $50 million deal for an auto plant 100 miles east of Sofia. Last April, after Bulgaria and France signed a new agreement that will triple trade between the two countries, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville visited Sofia and invited Zhivkov to visit France. Zhivkov was happy to oblige...
...natural order of economic geography, Communist Rumania and Bulgaria and NATO's Greece and Turkey ought to have much in common. The Iron Curtain, however, was arranged to suit Moscow's liking. Rumania and Bulgaria were assigned the role of "market gardens" within the Red bloc to feed and fuel the industrialized satellites of the Communist northern tier -East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It was a role that the southern ers resented, and now that a measure of independence suffuses Eastern Europe, they are reaching out to fill the Balkans' natural pattern...
Pursuing fresh Balkan ties, Rumanian Party Boss Nicolae Ceausescu made a point of taking his vacation in Bulgaria in July, bringing to six the number of top-level visits between the two nations this year. Long-independent Red Yugoslavia, not to be left out, has sent Premier Peter Stambolic on a working holiday to Bulgaria, and has docketed him for Greece in October. The Bulgarian Foreign Minister meanwhile has gone to Turkey, which Rumanian Premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer visited last month. And last week, in the first visit to the Aegean kingdom ever made by a Communist Premier, Maurer flew...