Bulgaria's number two, who ran the repression and fell to a Stalinist purge
At the trial he withdrew his pre-trial confession and in his final statement tried to say it had been extracted under torture.
A leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and, from his underground years, the second man to Georgi Dimitrov, later a Politburo member and deputy prime minister. From the Fatherland Front government of September 1944 he ran the party's central committee secretariat and pressed for maximum use of the death penalty, yet as economic chief he clashed with Stalin over Soviet purchase prices for Bulgarian tobacco. Arrested in 1949 and tried for British espionage and collusion with Tito, he was the only defendant in an Eastern European show trial to retract his confession in court, was hanged on 16 December, and was rehabilitated in 1956.
Career Timeline
- 1920Joined the Bulgarian Communist Party
- 1924Sentenced to eight years for distributing communist press
- 1931Central Committee member, editor of party papers
- 1937Politburo member and Central Committee secretary
- 1942Sentenced to life while organising underground resistance
- 1945–48First secretary of the Central Committee
- 1946–49Deputy prime minister and minister of electrification, in charge of economic policy
- 1949Removed, arrested, tried and hanged