It all started with my stumbling upon an article in The Nation on Georgi Markov, Bulgarian dissident writer and victim of the “umbrella murder.” Markov was assassinated on Waterloo Bridge in London on September 11, 1978 by someone associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. The killer wielded a poison-pellet-shooting umbrella. Before he was killed, Markov told the world what it was like to live under the Communist regime.

According to dear friend Wikipedia, “Between 1975 and 1978, Markov worked on his In Absentia Reports analysis of life in Communist Bulgaria. They were broadcast weekly on Radio Free Europe. Their criticism of the Communist government and personally of the Party leader Todor Zhivkov made Markov even more an enemy of the regime.”

Per Kenarov’s article, “A heavily abridged version of In Absentia Reports came out in Britain in 1983 and then a year later in the United States under the title The Truth That Killed, but the book has long been out of print. Reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, the social historian Arthur Weinberg wrote: ‘What George Orwell imagined in ‘1984’ about a totalitarian society, Markov makes real in his memoirs of life in Bulgaria under Bolshevik rule: terror, tension, oppression.’” [Ellie note: Amazon sells this out-of-print beauty for $44.]

The article also talks about a strange gap in memory. Many Bulgarian people are missing significant pieces of the communist past, even and perhaps especially while they’re nostalgic for it. There are several organizations, like Sofia Platform and Hannah Arendt Center in Sofia, that are promoting education on Bulgaria’s communist history. Lest we allow the government to alter reality.

Thanks to MFA thesis internet research, I found that article and this book. And maybe a new hero.