Bulgarians Want to Honor Victims of Stalinist Era Purges

Several thousand protesters Saturday demanded an official funeral service for the victims of Stalinist era purges, including a Communist Party chief who was hanged after a show trial 40 years ago.

The demand from members of the pro-democracy movement came during a rally here commemorating the former party leader, Traicho Kostov, who was convicted of spying and stirring up hostility against the Soviet Union.

An unidentified speaker at the rally accused Vasil Kolarov, who was premier at the time, of conspiring to arrange Kostov’s execution on Nov. 16, 1949, and of sending hundreds of people to camps in the Soviet Union.

Others said Kostov was killed because he resisted Soviet orders on trade.

The crowd chanted “We want the names of the killers!” expressing outrage over a Stalinist terror campaign in Bulgaria in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Around the time of the Kostov trial, 1,080 people, including party and military officials, were prosecuted, the official news agency BTA said Friday. No official publication has ever said how many people died in the purges.

The rally came amid swift political developments in Bulgaria, where hard-line Communist Party leaders have been ousted in the face of large pro-democracy demonstrations. In one concession, officials have condemned the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of neighboring Czechoslovakia.