Eastern Bloc

On August 13th, we celebrate the anniversary of the rise of the Berlin Wall, writes BGNES.

After World War II, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union occupy Germany and its capital, Berlin. When the Soviet Union imposed the Berlin blockade in 1948, the great tensions between the Western allies and the USSR came to light.

Former German Chancellor and statesman Helmut Kohl, the longest-serving postwar Western leader, died at the age of 87 on June 16.

Cuba’s Bay of Pigs has been invaded again, this time not by U.S.-backed anti-Castro forces, but by millions of red, yellow and black landcrabs.
Each year, after the first spring rains, the crabs march for days from the surrounding forests to the bay on Cuba’s southern coast to spawn in the sea, wreaking havoc along the way.

Ismail Kadare said in an open letter distributed to media on Wednesday that he asked two weeks ago for the files held on him by the Sigurimi - Albania's Communist-era secret police - to be opened up so he can discover who spied on him.

"I inform you that I requested the opening of my file two weeks ago, without putting any condition or restriction [on it]," he said in the letter.

Albania's government has made public the files of the sinister Directorate of State Security Sigurimi from the time ofthe communist dictator Enver Hoxha, reported BGNES.

There are millions of documents collected in tens of thousands of files of people persecuted by the regime.

During the rule of Hoxha, over 100,000 people were arrested and thrown into camps.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev has appointed a Cold War-era intelligence officer as his security and defense adviser.

Ilian Alipiev has held different operative positions at the ministries of interior and defense, the President's press office recalls.

Almost 26 years after the fall of Communism in Albania,  those persecuted by the intolerant Stalinist regime have little hope that the state will ever identify around 6,000 remains of people who were executed or died in regime camps and prisons.

An Administrative Court in Tirana has ordered Albania's main intelligence agency, SHISH, to de-classify reports of the former Communist-era Sigurimi secret police and its data on the number of people kept under surveillance during the last decade of the Communist regime.  

Part of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) demanded change of leadership of the party and refused joining GERB.

Part of the Union in Sofia published on Facebook a declaration blaming the unsatisfactory result of Traycho Traykov during the presidential elections on a lack of clear support from the leadership of the party, especially from the leader Bozhidar Lukarski.

Bulgarians mark on November 10 the 27th anniversary of events that led to the demise of the communist regime.

The anniversary comes in the run-up to a presidential election that has been reinforcing the "communism"-"anti-communism" divide in a society where an increasing number of young voters do not remember the dramatic first years of democracy, let alone Communism itself.