Word: bulgarians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Yakir was paraded before 300 foreign and Russian newsmen for an extraordinarily confessional press conference at Moscow's Journalists' Club. Looking remarkably fit despite 15 months of pretrail detention and interrogation, the leonine-headed dissident recited a prepared statement in a monotone while smoking Bulgarian cigarettes and sipping Caucasian mineral water. Along with his convicted codefendant, Economist Viktor Krasin, Yakir repeated the recantations that had earned them both relatively mild sentences (three years in prison and three years of exile) at their trial on charges of subversion (TIME, Sept...
...play golf with a tennis racket and he will not only oblige but win. Show up at one of his tennis matches and he may line you up for a side bet. Want to play him yourself? What kind of handicap do you want? A wet Bulgarian bear riding on his shoulders? A felled yak strapped to his side? One foot cemented to the court...
...pail of water. In a sunburst of understatement, he says: "I'm a fun guy, I'll do anything for excitement, I'm a ham." Ham? Henny Youngman is merely a ham. Bobby is an extraterrestrial peculiarity. At the antic rate he is going, yaks and Bulgarian bears may be only a step or two away...
...armies. Part of Hungary's 100,000-man army fought the Russians in 1956. On the other hand, not a shot was fired by Czechoslovakia's 225,000-man armed forces when the Soviets invaded in 1968. Would the Czechoslovaks fire at anybody else? The Bulgarian army (150,000 troops) and the 125,000 East Germans under arms are more dependable, but Poland's 275,000 troops probably could not be counted upon to do anything except defend their own borders...
Unlike most other East Europeans, Bulgarians seem genuinely friendly toward the Russian people, with whom they have ethnic, linguistic and religious affinities. To such pragmatic young Bulgarian bureaucrats as Petar Mladenov, 36, the youngest Foreign Minister in Europe, and Andrei Lukanov, 34, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, this friendliness extends even to the Soviet government. According to Lukanov, Bulgaria's transformation from an agricultural backwater into an industrial and trading power in the Balkans is largely owing to Soviet aid. "Without the U.S.S.R.," he said, "it would have been impossible for us to develop our exports...