A Revolutionary Returns

The Sofia radio casually announced a piece of news: flashing-eyed, mop-maned Georgi Dimitroff, storied revolutionary, had come home at last. After 22 years of exile, the burly, brimstony Bulgarian had taken his rightful place as the No. 1 Communist in the Fatherland Front, his country's dominating political coalition.

A factory worker's son and a militant trade unionist, Dimitroff began making international incidents in the early 1920s. En route to the second Comintern Congress in Moscow, he was picked up in Rumania as a spy, was rescued from liquidation by Russian intervention. In 1923 he led Bulgaria's abortive Communist revolt, barely escaped with his life across the Yugoslav border.

He was in Germany at the time of the famed Reichstag fire trial in 1933, and the Nazis tried to make him a scapegoat, along with dullard Marinus Van der Lubbe and German Communist Ernst Torgler. But they found Dimitroff too hot to handle. The flimsy case against him collapsed. Once again Moscow intervened, conferred Russian citizenship on the Bulgarian and obtained his release, then sent a plane to whisk him to his new home. He was hailed as a hero. Lenin's widow and sister sent him flowers. "I am a soldier of the revolution," Dimitroff said, "and will fight where duty sends me. . . . The U.S.S.R. is my fatherland."

Stalin made him a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and chief of the Comintern. In this post, Dimitroff promoted "popular fronts" abroad. After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. he lapsed into relative silence. Now he will help keep his native Bulgaria in the Soviet sphere.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.