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  Books

BOOKS IN INTERNET

Bulgarian doctors and students of medicine - victims of the communist terror of 1944-1989

Tales from the Dark: Testimonies about the Communist Terror
Published by The Assistance Centre for Torture Survivors - ACET
The book presents several typical stories of sufferings, experienced by thousands of people during the communist regime in Bulgaria. These are authentic experiences of the people who survived the communist concentration camps, political wards of prison, false accusations and trials, death sentences, forced displacement, exile and deprivation of the rights to study, work, or freely choose the place of residence, and all kinds of physical and psychological terror. The book includes a confession of the second generation.

Insane psychiatry
Anatolii Prokopenko
Anatolii Prokopenko's shocking book, based on materials from the state archives that have not been published before and using the archives of the Soviet Union Communist Party Central Committee. About one of the uttermost methods of violence used by the Soviet governance - bringing "punitive" psychiatry against people of different political opinion.
In Russian

The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs

The Truth That Killed
by Georgi Markov
1983

Georgi Markov paid for these memoirs with his life. He was one of
Bulgaria's leading novelists and playwrights, his work known
throughout the Eastern bloc; he was a member of a privileged
elite; he was feted by the Prezident, Todor Jivkov. In 1969 he
defected. Settling in London, he began to write his memoirs for
Radio Free Europe. They were brodcast weekly over two and a half
years, reaching five million people, more than half of Bulgaria's
total population. Markov received messages that Jivkov was
enraged by the broadcasts; he was warned that if he did not stop
writing for Radio Free Europe he would be killed. Hi continued. On
7 September 1978 he was shot by an assassin on a London bridge
with a miniscule pellet full of a rare and exceptionally deadly
poisson which, four days later, killed him.

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Murderous Red
by Christo Troanski

Publishing Workshop AB
Sofia 2003

Defined as a thriller-chronicle by the author, the book "Murderous red" retells about the crimes of the Bulgarian communists in their illegal period and from the time of establishment of the (so-called) "people's power" accompanied by mass murders, destruction of the Bulgarian state system and the Bulgarian society as well. Publications in the Bulgarian and the Macedonian press are referred, as well as archival documents, testimonies of contemporaries, victims and their relations, memories of Bulgarian and Macedonian politicians, militaries, and revolutionaries and of communist functionaries.
In Bulgarian.

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The People's Tribunal in Bulgaria in 1944-1945"
by Peter Semerdjiev
1997

The role of the [communist] party committee in [the town of] Sliven and my role, as its secretary was not limited to my participation in deliberations on the composition of the people's tribunal and the control on the trials. The severity of each convict's penalty was another issue where no decision would ever be made without taking my opinion in consideration or coordinating with my guidance. The sentence was usually decided upon in my office where I called the people's prosecutor Peter Filipov and Mara Eneva as a member of the panel of the people's tribunal. No objections have ever been made on behalf of both to my suggestions and clarifications concerning certain convicts. I recall Mara Eneva's complaint that one of the panel members in their conversations opposed her statements in favor of death sentences and was of the opinion that there should be no severe punishment and death sentences.
In Bulgarian.
 

The Bulgarian Gulag
Witnesses

A collection of documentary stories of concentrations camps in Bulgaria
Editors: Ekaterina Boncheva, Edvin Sugarev, Svilen Patov, Jean Solomon
Sofia, 1991

"Every story in this book features a turbulent life story that does not end, but starts with the camp. Follow displacements, periodic interviews by the militia, social isolation, impossibility to exercise one’s profession, various harassment on one’s relatives, children. A smashing apology of human suffering that no repentance could redeem. Even now, after so many years, many of these people are scared. Some asked us not to publish their names. I understand them and I think their fear is not baseless. That is why it is our duty to remember their past, to inscribe their pain in the history of these shameful decades. Because it is an old truth that whoever does not remember their past will be damned to live it again."
Edvin Sugarev
 

Gulag: A History
by Anne Applebaum
2003

A narrative account of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Based on archives, interviews, new research and recently published memoirs, the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system. It also describes daily life in the camps: how people lived, worked, ate, slept, fought, died and survived.

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The Stalinist Penal System:
History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930-53

by J.Otto Pohl
1998

Using information from the newly opened Soviet archives, Part One of this work examines the incarceration of Russians and the development of the Gulag system of labor camps and labor colonies. Part Two describes the mass exile of Soviet citizens and others to areas of forced settlement.

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Voices from the Gulag
Life and Death
in Communist Bulgaria

by Tzvetan Todorov, Robert Zaretsky
2000

One of the most terrible legacies of our century is the concentration camp. Countless men and women have passed through camps in Nazi Germany, Communist China, and the Soviet bloc countries. In Voices from the Gulag, Tzvetan Todorov singles out the experience of one country where the concentration camps were particularly brutal and emblematic of the horrors of totalitarianism—communist Bulgaria.
The voices we hear in this book are mostly from Lovech, a rock quarry in Bulgaria that became the final destination for several thousand men and women during its years of operation from 1959 to 1962. The inmates, though drawn from various social, professional, and economic backgrounds, shared a common fate: they were torn from their homes by secret police, brutally beaten, charged with fictitious crimes, and shipped to Lovech. Once there, they were forced to endure backbreaking labor, inadequate clothing, shelter, and food, systematic beatings, and institutionalized torture.

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Trap for Contras
(Kapan za kontri)
by Gancho Savov

Publishing Workshop AB
Sofia 1998

Literary figure and opinion journalist Gancho Savov was political prisoner from 1974 to 1985. The book features the repressive mechanisms of communist regime, Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) methods, of the "other world" and the inmates' lives there, about some of the Bulgarian prisoners of consciousness.
 

The Bulgarian Guillotine
(Bulgarskata gilotina)

The People's Tribunal's Secret Mechanisms
by Polya Meshkova, Dinyu Sharlanov

1994

A historic documentary examination of the judicial repression of the Bulgarian communist party, following the entering of Soviet troops in Bulgaria, with representatives of Bulgarian statehood and civil society, breaking grounds for the Sovietization of the country.
 

Free in Prison
(Na svoboda v zatvora)
by Pastor Christo Kulichev

 
 

I Give the Floor to My Dossier (Davam dumata na moeto dossier)
by Archimandrite Gavril Belovezhdov

 
 

Catholics in Bulgaria 1878-1989.
A Historical Study
by Svetlozar Eldarov

Sofia, 2002

The study is based mainly on unfamiliar and unused documentary material from archives in Sofia and the country, including the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Public Worship (MFARW), the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox, State Security, Catholic dioceses and parishes, etc. It also draws on all significant publications on the subject in Bulgaria and abroad, as well as on unpublished manuscripts of Catholic clerics.
   

Documents of the Roman Catholic Trials in Bulgaria in the 1950's
(Dokumenti ot katolicheskite procesi prez 50-te godini)
by Archimandrite Gavril Belovezhdov

Sofia, 2001

The indictment of the show trial against the Roman Catholic clergy in 1952, , testimonies, verdicts, interview protocols, operative reports, memos by the Directorate of Denominations from the late 1980's.
Historic study of the Bulgarian Roman Catholic community. The communist party's attitude to the Roma Catholic Church is illuminated with documents from the Central Party Archive and the archives of the Third Directorate for Combating Counter-Revolution, Second Directorate for Counter-Espionage, Sixth Directorate for Combating Ideological Sabotage, and other Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) structures.
 

Uniatism in the Fate of Bulgaria. Stories from the History of the Bulgarian Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite
(Uniatstvoto v sydbata na Bulgaria)
by Svetlozar Eldarov

Sofia, 1994

Documentary features from the history of the Bulgarian Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite. The piece "The Bulgarian Catholics' Golgotha" sums up the repressions against Catholics in Bulgaria after 1944.
 
To Be Kept Forever
(Da se zapazi za vechni vremena)

Sofia, 2002

First and last volume of the Information bulletin of the Commission for the Disclosure of Documents and for Identification of Affiliation to the Former State Security or the Former Intelligence Department of the General Staff, which commission was disbanded by the Law on the Protection of Classified Information, adopted in April 2002. Contains reports and motions by the interior minister, decrees and Politburo rulings from the period 1949 - 1989 on organizing the work of Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) and the Ministry of the Interior.
 

War
(Voina)
Yana Yazova

1994

 
 

The Prison at Belene
(Zatvora - Belene)
Krum Horozov

Album of drawings and descriptions of the concentration camp on Persin Island, near Belene, established in 1949.
 

The Hillmen
(Goryanite)
Documents

Volume 1, 2002

Collection of documents from The Archives Speak (Arhivite govoryat) series of the Directorate of Archives of the Council of Ministers. Contains information on the armed resistance against the communist regime in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1949. Featuring reports and memos by Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) operatives, interview protocols, investigative cases and criminal court trials.
 

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the State 1944-1953
(Bulgarskata pravoslavna crkva i darzhavata 1944-1953)
Daniela Kalkandjieva

1997

Study on the relations between the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the state in 1944 -1953 on the basis of rich archive material. The mechanisms through which the autonomous Bulgarian Orthodox Church was subjugated to the totalitarian state are revealed. Many unknown or barely known documents, facts and events are published.
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