Word: petkoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was a curiously ironic angle to Nikola Petkoff's legal murder. When Georgi Dimitroff awaited trial in a Nazi jail, Petkoff was one of a group of Bulgarian political leaders who arranged for Dimitroff's 72-year-old mother, Baba Parashkeva, to visit him. Gratefully she said then: "If my son lives through this, he will repay you a thousand times...
...Bulgaria last week the Communist-dominated Government silenced democratic opposition by hanging Nikola Petkoff after his conviction on trumped-up treason charges. Petkoff, leader of the democratic Agrarian Party, was a patriot. He fought the Nazis and spent part of the war behind German barbed wire. After the Russians put the small Bulgarian Communist Party in power, Petkoff opposed the Communists led by the old Comintern agent, Georgi Dimitroff, hero of the Reichstag-fire trial...
Said the U.S. Government in a stinging (but futile) note of protest: "The trial of Petkoff recalls to mind another trial which occurred in Leipzig 14 years ago. In that earlier trial, a Bulgarian defendant [Dimitroff] evoked worldwide admiration for his courageous defiance of the Nazi bully who participated in his prosecution. Today that defendant has assumed another role and it is now the courage of another Bulgarian [Petkoff] whose steadfast opposition to forces of oppression has evoked worldwide admiration...
...Petkoff's "treason" consisted of his outspoken stand against Bulgaria's Communist-dominated regime. When the U.S. protested against his sentence, both Bulgaria and Russia replied that it was "a pure Bulgarian home question." Nevertheless, Bulgaria, which had just concluded a peace treaty with the Allies, would like to be admitted to the U.N., and the Petkoff sentence stood in the way. If the National Assembly ratified the Constitution (as it was sure to), Bulgaria would no longer be obliged to execute Petkoff, and the U.S. would have no talking point. Best of all, since Petkoff...
...convicted men were leaders of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party. Wrote Warsaw's Communist paper, in a blood-chilling front-page editorial titled The Analogy: "In Bulgaria, the leader of reaction, Nikola Petkoff [see above] has been seated on the defendant's bench next to his subordinate, Ivanoff. In Cracow, Mierzwa [Mikolajczyk's subordinate in the Polish Peasant Party] is seated on the bench. Will the similarity of events end there...