Word: bulgarias
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Even as Moscow attempts a public change of face, it is also trying to preserve as much of its espionage empire as possible. The Soviet Union once could count on East Germany to penetrate West Germany, Czechoslovakia to target military and industrial sources in the West, and Bulgaria to carry out assassinations. Now, however, the KGB's symbiotic relationship with Warsaw Pact agencies is threatened by reformist governments in the region. Though these countries' foreign operations have not yet been curtailed, some spies -- especially East Germans -- are trying to come in from the cold. Last month Markus Wolf, the former...
...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...
Earlier this month, after a political knock-down-and-drag-out in which the reformers routed the last of the Old Guard, Lukanov emerged as Prime Minister of Bulgaria. He is a key member of a new, Gorbachevite leadership that is liberalizing the economy, is ready to share power with non-Communists and looks likely to do well in the free, multiparty elections it plans to hold in May. It would be nice to say you read about him here first, in a scouting report 17 years ago. But then maybe you wouldn't be reading about...
...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...