400 pages of a novel-type text, whereby documentary narrative and fiction complement each other. Murderous Red's stunning truthfulness of plot is breathtaking. In this book, everybody - victims and torturers alike - are authentic. Their behavior is dictated by the circumstances they are drawn into by a vicious reality - the Red Terror. Violence, paralleled by demagoguery, is the communists' principal tool for seizing and preserving power in Bulgaria. In the chronicle of the featured events, it is invariable, taking forms from armed insurgency (the so-called September uprising of 1923) to heinous terrorist bombing (of the Sveta Nedelia cathedral in Sofia in 1925), to the inspiration of chaos (such as the "Macedonian fratricides" of the early 30's), to guerrilla warfare during World War II, to the ensuing, after the September 9, 1944 coup, St. Bartholomew's nights supplemented by the infamous "People's Tribunal". This leitmotif has been defended by hundreds of facts, disclosing the hateful core of the "revolutionary" and, particularly, of the administrative practices of Bulgarian communists.

For them, it did not suffice to destroy the foundations of European Bulgaria's statehood - their party undertook the goal of annihilating, once and for all, in Bolshevik fashion, the freedom of thought, individual entrepreneurship, and private property. Not for nothing in mid-September 1944, their vengeful fist pounded on the prosperous groups of society. There were the dissidents, not sharing their ideology, who validated Lenin's words: "The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy we manage to shoot dead, the better". Literally in two or three months, without trial and verdict, as many as thirty thousand were killed and later declared "disappeared without trace" in the Official Gazette.

The author reveals the machinery of this unprecedented in the Bulgarian history carnage in detail. It's scriptwriter was the communist leadership, mostly in political secretary Traicho Kostov and interior minister Anton Yugov, but the strings were pulled from Moscow by Georgi Dimitrov, "the great leader", who coordinated his instructions with Beria's all-powerful KGB, often with Stalin himself. From here on, the vicious plan's implementation - forming special execution squads, compiling the black lists, the arrests of the doomed and their departure to afterlife - was entrusted to a gang of high-ranking operatives. Among those, with their enviable endeavors stood out Slavcho Radomirski, Radenko Vidinski, Todor Zhivkov, Mircho Spasov, but, no doubt, the first place went to Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) colonel Lev Glavinchev, a cut-throat with long experience from the party's underground period.

Glavinchev is the book's main character. A former executor of killings against the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), coach and inspirer of the so-called Black Angels, terrorists ambushing and killing their victims on Sofia's streets in the late fall of 1943. He personally shoot, strangulated, smashed skulls. Mostly in the capital and vicinities. And the party had people like him, Glavinchevs, handy everywhere across the country. And they rolled up their sleeves.

Most often - without the use of firearms. The doomed were taken to deserted remote places and killed with the tools they used to dig their graves.

This way "disappeared without trace" industrialists, merchants, magistrates, book publishers, physicians, store proprietors, landowners. High-ranking officials, army officers and clergy were not spared. Under Dimitrov's instruction, special attention was paid to "fascist" intelligentsia - journalists, writers, scholars, teachers, public figures.

In the same way, a year or two later, Glavinchev settled accounts with the surviving operatives of the former VTO, as well as with some less-cooperative activists of the opposition. Without the help of the court of justice. His leading maxim was the saying of Cheka (KGB's ancestor) founder Felix Dzerzinski: "For an execution, we do not need evidence, interviews, suspicions". What matters is the directive of the "most progressive party" to be carried out.

About the Author

Christo Troanski has published several collections of poems and prose books. He has received national literary and journalistic awards, among them the prestigious Panitsa Award, 1997. Murderous Red was selected by the Literaturen Vestnik newspaper as one of the "12 best books in Bulgaria for 2003". It was nominated for the Helicon bookstore chain yearly award as well.

Translation from Bulgarian by Dr. Neli Hadjiyska and Dr. Valentin Hadjiyski