Ex-Premier’s Slaying Leaves Bulgaria a Hotbed of Rumor

In his last hours, Andrei Lukanov was, as usual, a man on many missions.

The former prime minister met hurriedly with associates and told them he was ready to go public with a dossier that would expose corruption at the highest levels of Bulgaria’s Socialist government.

“He seemed happy, full of energy, no sense of danger,” said an associate who was present, Kancho Stoychev.

Then Lukanov rushed off to lunch with the U.S. ambassador at her residence in this capital. They dined on filet of beef with mushrooms and discussed a book he planned to write during an upcoming sabbatical in Washington. Theme: the polarization of Bulgarian politics.

Eighteen hours later, just after 9 a.m., Lukanov--one of Bulgaria’s most prominent and controversial figures in business and politics--stepped into the bright autumn sunshine on his quiet residential street. He approached his waiting car, then abruptly went back to his apartment building and started to ring the buzzer.

Maybe he had forgotten something and was returning for it. Or perhaps he had spotted his killer and was desperately seeking refuge. The gunman was dressed as a hobo and, witnesses would later recall, had been hanging around for several days.

Three bullets from the hobo’s Russian-made automatic pistol pierced Lukanov’s back; a fourth grazed his head. He fell dead.

The slaying of someone of Lukanov’s stature would stun any society. But in Bulgaria, a Cold War capital of intrigue that is only slowly moving away from its Communist past, his death sent tremors through the political and economic elite and fueled a relentless fury of speculation and conspiracy theories.

Blow to Confidence

Coming as it did 25 days before national elections, during a period when Bulgaria is struggling with its gravest economic crisis in decades, the Oct. 2 killing of a man who had come to symbolize both the good and bad of today’s Bulgaria only further eroded waning public confidence in the country and the future. Many in Bulgaria worry that worsening tension could destabilize a strategically positioned country and the Balkan tinderbox around it.

Was it a political murder to quiet an increasingly vocal opponent of the government? Or did Lukanov’s dealings with questionable business people seal his fate? Russian mafia? Underworld gangs? Personal vendetta?

No one doubts the slaying was a professional hit. And no one here believes this Balkan mystery will ever be solved.

“This has had a chilling effect,” a senior Western official said of the killing. “People are in shock, and there are endless theories. You had a sense of reverting to a bloody, turbulent past. Coming with so many other problems, it has helped create a negative image that Bulgaria did not need.”

Lukanov, 58 when he was gunned down, was a strong-willed man who spoke five languages and was known to shun bodyguards. Closely tied to Moscow--but equally at ease with Westerners--the white-haired businessman inspired both admiration and envy.

In short, he was a character as complicated and ambiguous as Bulgaria itself.

Born in Moscow to committed Bulgarian Communists, Lukanov trained as an economist, worked as a diplomat and was a faithful party apparatchik for years. But in 1989, as communism was crumbling elsewhere in Eastern Europe, he led a palace coup that toppled the 35-year dictatorship of Todor Zhivkov and opened the door for a transition to democracy.

Lukanov then coordinated negotiations during which Bulgarians of all political stripes devised a new governing system. He emerged as Bulgaria’s first post-Communist prime minister and served for a tumultuous year that included a default on the nation’s foreign debt.

Street protests by U.S.-backed anti-Communist political groups finally forced him to resign.

Mixed Legacy

History will debate Lukanov’s role. Crusading reformer or co-opting opportunist, he ensured that the transition in Bulgaria was peaceful, but he also ensured the continuation of the Communist Party--renamed the Bulgarian Socialist Party and given a more human face. And most important, he is widely believed to have ensured that much state capital would remain in the hands of former Communists by helping to create business groups that control large portions of the economy.

“There are people who saw him as the godfather of democracy and people who saw him as the godfather of the mafia--and some people who saw him as both,” said Nikolay Petrov, a political commentator and managing editor of the Bulgarian Business News.

Throughout the Cold War, Bulgaria was the Soviet Union’s most loyal East European ally. Despite its sensitive location--it borders two North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries, Greece and Turkey, as well as the Black Sea--no occupation troops were ever necessary. Unlike Poland or Hungary, Bulgaria was faithful to Moscow without force. There was no Prague Spring, no organized dissident movement.

Bulgaria became a center of Soviet-inspired espionage, with one of Eastern Europe’s most sinister secret police services. Bulgarian agents have been implicated in plots ranging from 1981’s attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II (an allegation never proved) to the 1978 slaying of dissident writer Georgi Markov--killed by a poison-tipped umbrella in London.

Bulgaria was also responsible for spreading communism during the 1980s by supplying weapons, money and advice to leftist governments and guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Africa, according to documents of the Communist Party Central Committee.

In fact, the party’s financial support for “revolutionary regimes” was one basis of accusations used by Lukanov’s anti-Communist opponents to imprison him in 1992. He spent six months in jail but was never formally charged or tried and was finally released.

Today, the shady goings-on of Bulgaria’s cloak-and-dagger history have evolved into a messy post-Communist reality plagued by corruption, rising street crime and the proliferation of extortion rackets said to have political connections. Yet the country is nominally democratic, with free elections and public debate.

Lukanov receives both credit and blame for the transition.

Among those who are convinced that Lukanov’s killing was political are his friends and family and many of his associates. “Somebody was very afraid of him,” said his widow, Lili Gerasimova.

The couple met while both were students in Moscow, had been married for 33 years and had two children, now adults living in the Russian capital. Gerasimova believes the slaying was specially timed: A memorial service 40 days after a death is very important in the Bulgarian Orthodox religion; 40 days after Lukanov’s murder is Nov. 10, the anniversary of the coup against the Communist government.

Stoychev, one of those who met with Lukanov the day before he died, said Lukanov told associates then that he planned to release papers that would document government corruption. Eventually, he hoped to force Socialist Prime Minister Zhan Videnov to resign.

Stoychev and Andrei Raichev, a well-known political analyst and friend of Lukanov who also attended that final meeting, belong to a dissident wing of the Socialist Party inspired by Lukanov and opposed to Videnov. Lukanov and Videnov had been feuding for some time, and the two erstwhile allies had not spoken to each other for a year, Lukanov’s associates said.

Videnov is surrounded and increasingly insulated by a powerful group of business people, and there is a widely held perception in Bulgaria that such economic groups are profiting unfairly from the sale of state enterprises and other deals. His Socialist Party came in a distant second to the anti-Communist opposition in this week’s presidential election, although a runoff will be held.

Seventeen days before he was killed, Lukanov raised a rare voice of criticism at a meeting of the Socialist Party’s Supreme Council, its governing body, and lamented a litany of what he regarded as mistaken Videnov policies.

“We cannot afford another year like this,” he told a roomful of attentive comrades.

But Videnov used a speech a week after the killing to condemn it and those who claim it was political, singling out “pseudo-commentators” in the opposition press.

“When in a country like Bulgaria they kill one of us, a leftist, in broad daylight, we have to demand responsibility from those who are to blame,” he said, “and not allow those who instigate [murder] to sic their writers on us.”

Government’s Theory

In blaming the killing on Lukanov’s business ties, members of the government are joined by some diplomats and other observers sharing similar suspicions.

Lukanov’s links to Russia were not only ideological but also commercial. He was chairman of Top-energy, a very profitable Bulgarian-Russian joint venture that supplies Russian gas to the Balkan peninsula through Bulgaria.

During the summer, the Top-energy board of directors abruptly removed Lukanov from his position, reportedly because his increasingly bitter relationship with Videnov was thought to be blocking concessions the firm needed for the opening of a new pipeline.

Soon after Lukanov was removed, Topenergy announced it had reached agreement with the government on a major new electricity-production deal.

There are other events that deepen the mystery. A couple of weeks before his death, Lukanov was approached by an envoy from the business group surrounding Videnov and offered a truce, according to associates. Lukanov refused.

He postponed by more than a month a scheduled trip to Washington, where he was to spend a four-week stint at a think tank. He went to Moscow, apparently to meet with the Topenergy executives who had dumped him.

And if Lukanov had a dossier on corruption that he was planning to release, none has been found.

In the end, some Bulgarians suggest, Lukanov may have fallen victim to the myths and structures he helped create. Like a wizard whose magical creatures turn on him, they say, he may have been betrayed by a Bulgarian system that fuses political power, organized crime and money.

Maybe.

“Ask 10 people what happened and you will get 12 answers,” political commentator Petrov said. “The truth may never be known.”