Word: sofia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late 1972, when I was covering Eastern Europe for TIME, I drove from my office in Belgrade to Sofia to write a story about Bulgaria. The situation was none too exciting in that most docile of all the Soviet satellites, but I did get a glimpse of a new breed of apparatchik. The press department of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry arranged an interview with a 34-year-old Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade named Andrei Lukanov. He spoke idiomatic English, kept the party-line claptrap to a merciful minimum and talked candidly about the "shortcomings" of a command economy...
...Dmitri Shostakovich, who once taught him composition (Rostropovich quit the Moscow Conservatory when Shostakovich was dismissed for having offended Stalin's sensibilities). He laid more at the graves of Sergei Prokofiev, David Oistrakh and Emil Gilels. The next day, at another cemetery, he paid his respects to his mother Sofia and to Andrei Sakharov, whom he called "the greatest man of the 20th century...
...bronze equestrian statue of Czar Alexander II dominates the cobblestone square in front of the parliament building in Sofia. It was erected by grateful Bulgarians to commemorate Russian victories in 1877 and 1878 that ended five centuries of Turkish rule over the Slavic nation. Since the resignation of Stalinist dictator Todor Zhivkov last November, that statue has become the rallying point for a revived nationalist movement using the old hatred of the Turks to fight new political battles. Day after day, thousands of Bulgarians ignored sub-zero temperatures to gather around it. They shook their fists and cheered rabble-rousing...
...Warsaw the new year brought the implementation of an unprecedented plan to transform the Polish economy into a capitalist one. The cold turkey blueprint is well drafted, but initially it is likely to accelerate the nation's hyperinflation and cause serious unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. In Sofia the communist government held its first set of talks with opposition leaders. But already the new government was faced with another challenge: a countrywide general strike and mass protests against the restoration of religious and cultural freedom to the country's minority Turks. Havel's government set out on a course of economic...
Wherever they are on the paths to reform, most countries in the region stand to gain if Czechoslovakia's effort to revamp or abolish Comecon makes any headway at the organization's meeting in Sofia this week. Since intra-bloc commerce claims an average of 70% of each country's trade, replacing the noncompetitive barter system with bilateral, hard-currency agreements could free industries to turn their attention to non-Comecon nations. Historically, the Comecon system has encouraged inefficiency, low-quality production and poor planning. "It made each country in the bloc more anxious to consume than to produce," says...