Life Means Death

On Bulgaria's Riviera, the season had been rather dazzling. At Varna, most fashionable of the Black Sea resorts, the crowning event was a bathing-beauty contest. A happy photograph of the winner and runners-up reached the U.S. last week.

The same sunny mood seemed to envelop the framers of Bulgaria's new Constitution, which abolished the death penalty. This was good news for Bulgaria, for Russia and for Nikola Petkoff, secretary of Bulgaria's Agrarian Party, whom the Bulgarian Government recently condemned to death for treason.

Petkoff's "treason" consisted of his outspoken stand against Bulgaria's Communist-dominated regime. When the U.S. protested against his sentence, both Bulgaria and Russia replied that it was "a pure Bulgarian home question." Nevertheless, Bulgaria, which had just concluded a peace treaty with the Allies, would like to be admitted to the U.N., and the Petkoff sentence stood in the way. If the National Assembly ratified the Constitution (as it was sure to), Bulgaria would no longer be obliged to execute Petkoff, and the U.S. would have no talking point. Best of all, since Petkoff is 54 and a diabetic, life imprisonment might prove to be almost as conclusive as execution.

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