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The Case of Nikola Petkov
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14163 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
2,573 Words |
| Author
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Charles A. Moser
Charles A. Moser is professor of Slavic languages at George
Washington University in Washington, D.C. He specializes in
Russian literature of the nineteenth century, a field of study
to which Vladimir Nabokov made important contributions.
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Recently there appeared in this country a novel by Thomas McGonigle with a curious title: The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov. This work is based upon very real events: the trial and execution in September 1947 of Nikola Petkov, the man who at that time best represented the Bulgarian people's aspirations for democratic freedoms. Forty years have passed since those infamous events, and we do well to speak of them, even though few Americans know much of Bulgarian history and fewer still are acquainted with the Petkov case. But in reality, Petkov's death tells us a good deal about ourselves, since the United States was involved in the case.
Petkov was born in 1889 to a wealthy family whose members had been prominent in Bulgarian politics. They had also been the victims of political violence: Petkov's father was prime minister when he was assassinated in 1907, and his brother was murdered by agents of a vindictive regime in 1924, during a period of severe social unrest. Petkov stayed aloof from politics until the early 1930s, when he joined Dr. George Dimitrov in forming a left-wing splinter group of the Bulgarian Agrarian Union. At the time, the union was Bulgaria's largest political organization because it spoke for the peasantry, who constituted some 80 percent of the population.
Bulgarian agrarianism was part of a political current, as yet little studied or understood in the West, that was quite important in Eastern European politics between the First and Second World Wars. (There was, by way of comparison, a southern agrarian movement in the United States at the time, although it was primarily cultural and literary in nature and had no links at all to European political agrarianism.) The Bulgarian agrarians asserted the moral superiority of rural life and an agricultural economy to an urban, material way of life. They believed that Bulgaria should remain an agricultural country founded upon the peasantry. There is no more free and independent individual, they contended, than the farmer who produces virtually everything he needs for his family on his own land.
In their economic doctrine, agrarians sought to define a "third way" mediating between laissez-faire capitalism and communist collectivism. They defended the central importance of private property, especially land, although land strictly limited to the amount a single family could profitably till. If larger agricultural aggregates were necessary, they should take the form of truly voluntary cooperatives. Finally, in the political realm, the agrarians advocated that power should stem from a democratically elected parliament in which political parties should represent
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