BULGARIA: Repayment

Communists long ago observed a simple (but useful) political fact: the men who are capable of governing and guiding a nation are, even in big countries, a comparatively small group. Destroy them and you have decapitated a country; after that, any political gangster with a gun in his hand can rule the headless nation as he likes.

In the small, backward countries of eastern and southern Europe, the Communists needed only to discredit, jail or kill a few men to silence all opposition. Thus, in Yugoslavia, the Communist dictatorship silenced opposition by first discrediting, then executing General Draja Mihailovich. In Hungary, they jailed the Secretary General of the majority Smallholders Party, Bela Kovacs (reported dead last week), and forced Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy into exile. In Rumania, they jailed Juliu Maniu, 74-year-old leader of the liberal Peasant Party. In Poland, Peasant Party Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk is expected to be in jail by Christmas (TIME, Sept. 22). In Albania, they fabricated an Anglo-American-inspired treason plot to justify death sentences for 16 opponents.

In Bulgaria last week the Communist-dominated Government silenced democratic opposition by hanging Nikola Petkoff after his conviction on trumped-up treason charges. Petkoff, leader of the democratic Agrarian Party, was a patriot. He fought the Nazis and spent part of the war behind German barbed wire. After the Russians put the small Bulgarian Communist Party in power, Petkoff opposed the Communists led by the old Comintern agent, Georgi Dimitroff, hero of the Reichstag-fire trial.

Said the U.S. Government in a stinging (but futile) note of protest: “The trial of Petkoff recalls to mind another trial which occurred in Leipzig 14 years ago. In that earlier trial, a Bulgarian defendant [Dimitroff] evoked worldwide admiration for his courageous defiance of the Nazi bully who participated in his prosecution. Today that defendant has assumed another role and it is now the courage of another Bulgarian [Petkoff] whose steadfast opposition to forces of oppression has evoked worldwide admiration.”

There was a curiously ironic angle to Nikola Petkoff’s legal murder. When Georgi Dimitroff awaited trial in a Nazi jail, Petkoff was one of a group of Bulgarian political leaders who arranged for Dimitroff’s 72-year-old mother, Baba Parashkeva, to visit him. Gratefully she said then: “If my son lives through this, he will repay you a thousand times.”

The hangman’s noose was Georgi Dimitroff’s fulfillment of his mother’s 14-year-old promise.