BULGARIA: Botanist’s Week

In Bulgaria’s gabby little capital of Sofia everybody had known for a week that something was about to happen. With Italy at war, it had become of the first significance that Bulgaria’s Queen loanna is the daughter of Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele and that her husband, popular little Tsar Boris III, is inclined to be pro-Italian. A year and a half ago a Bulgarian Army clique which is strongly pro-Yugoslav and pro-French staged a coup d’état and made Colonel Kimon Gueorguieff Premier (TIME, May 21, 1934. et seq.). In April 1935 Boris found a split in the Army clique, edged it out of power and put in his present Premier, the 70-year-old botanist, Andrew Tosheff, under a semi-Fascist “authoritarian” Government. Colonel Gueorguieff’s friends began to say that Bulgaria would be better off without Tsar Boris. Last week in Sofia the Tsar’s police uncovered a vast plot to overthrow the Government and perhaps to assassinate the little Tsar, his Italian Queen or both.

Moving fast. Premier-Botanist Tosheff had 30 Army officers. 30 politicians jailed on charges of high treason. Martial law was declared, Sofia’s streets were cleared at rifle point after a 10 p. m. curfew, and the Cabinet stayed on in session getting telephone reports from police headquarters on new arrests until the total had reached 255, including former Premier Colonel Gueorguieff and a delegation of returned Bulgarian exiles from Yugoslavia.

Tsar Boris, addressing an Army review as scheduled, cried grandiloquently: “Bulgaria must remain an independent country, for which the Army is the principal guarantee as long as it remains true to the spirit of its ancestors.”

To try to smooth out the bad impression all this might have made on Yugoslavia, Boris’ Foreign Minister Kiosseivanoff last week stopped off on his way home from the League of Nations and had a soothing talk with Yugoslavia’s Minister of Finance Milan Stojadinovitch.