Bulgaria Under Živkov
Živkov’s relative reformism was expressed above all in a certain tolerance towards cultural debate. He himself loved meeting intellectuals, to whom he assigned salaries that his critics call “satraphs”, giving them a social status that divided them from society. Dissident G. Markov (who was killed in London by the Bulgarian secret police) used to sarcastically say that poets and writers “were paid not to write, but not to write”. This relative tolerance, however, prevented the formation of a broad and…