I was a teenager when the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was murdered by agents of that country’s Communist Government in 1978 in London. His murder opened my eyes to a large extent about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain and the extent that Communist governments would go to in order to silence those who spoke against them. It wasn’t just the fact that Communist agents would kill someone for the mere use of words on the BBC, but the manner of Mr Markov’s death that shocked me. Mr Markov was killed by a poison pellet injected into his leg whilst he crossed London’s Waterloo Bridge, a pellet which has for many years been assumed may have been fired into Mr Markov by an agent carrying an umbrella modified as a deadly weapon.

The teenage me was shocked that a government would send agents right across Europe, right across the ideological divide that existed at the time in Europe to the capital of London in order to murder one of that government’s critics. Looking back on it the murder of Georgi Markov was probably one of those many seeds that were planted that grew into making me into the free speech fundamentalist that I am today.

But, in common with many people who either heard the news of Georgi Markov’s murder at the time or who subsequently came across it in the history books, I had little idea of Mr Markov’s backstory or the nature of his work. We know about his horrific murder but not much else. His story got to a large extent buried when the tumultuous events of 1989 occurred when the Iron Curtain fell and as he wrote for a Bulgarian audience in the Bulgarian language, many of us have not read his words about the situation in Bulgaria during the time of Communism. However after reading a fascinating article about Mr Markov in Eurozine, I’m going to try to seek out Mr Markov’s writings if I can. This is because Mr Markov’s story is fascinating.

Unlike some Iron Curtain dissidents, Mr Markov did not start out with the intention of being a dissident, he was one of those writers who were for a while quite happy to accept the plaudits of the Communist regime and go along with the demands of the Communists. He ended up quite close to the Bulgarian leadership and had an easy and relatively rich life. But he started to realise something was very wrong with the way that the Communists were managing Bulgaria and started to see himself as colluding with the very system that he had come to see major faults in.

Eurozine said:

Markov’s decision to abandon Bulgaria and throw away his entire career – fame, money, and privileges – was a product of his growing disgust with his own participation in the system and his frustration with the increasingly reactionary politics in Bulgaria after the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. But he also had vague hopes of making it as an artist abroad, feeling that the provincial atmosphere in Sofia was too limiting for his talent and abilities.

‘I am indeed happy with the path I have chosen, however costly it may be’, Markov wrote to his Bulgarian ex-wife, Zdravka Lekova, in a letter from London. ‘I have not regretted my actions for a second and I do not miss the pseudo-literary life in Bulgaria, and my false happiness as a literary parvenu. The coming days may be difficult and impoverished, then again I might be lucky, but the most important thing for me is that I will write the works I want to write without taking anyone’s opinion into account.’

Back then London and indeed Britain as a whole was seen as a haven for free speech. I can’t help but wonder how Mr Markov would see Britain now when it has become a country where a lack of free speech and the growth of cancel culture is now the norm?

Mr Markov eventually found work with Radio Free Europe and the BBC and this allowed him, via the medium of radio, to speak to his countrymen about his feelings about what was going on and going wrong in Bulgaria. It was Mr Markov’s radio essays on Bulgarian daily life that brought him to the ultimately lethal attention of Bulgaria’s security apparatus.

Eurozine added that despite an initial struggle to find work in writing and broadcasting in Western Europe he managed to get work with the BBC, Radio Free Europe and DW the German broadcaster which was aiming shortwave broadcasts to the Soviet bloc.

Eurozine continued:

Yet he persevered. He quickly learned the language and eventually found a job as newscaster at the BBC’s Bulgarian service. He also began to contribute regular cultural and political pieces on Bulgaria – increasingly critical in tone – for Deutsche Welle, broadcasting on short wavelengths to audiences behind the Iron Curtain. But it was Markov’s series of personal narrative essays for Radio Free Europe, In Absentia Reports About Bulgaria, that put him directly in the line of fire of State Security (the feared intelligence service back home) and turned him into one of the most reviled and dangerous enemies of the regime.

Socialist governments viewed all radio broadcasts coming from the West as conduits of ‘ideological sabotage’ – one of the worst possible crimes in their book. Markov’s indefatigable radio work was seen as particularly incendiary. In Absentia ran weekly from November 1975 to June 1978, with a total of 137 instalments, and quickly gained popularity in Bulgaria. Eloquent and engaging, written in the best tradition of narrative journalism, his essays offered an eclectic mix of personal memoir and overheard stories, vivid human portraits and entertaining anecdotes, popular history and philosophical speculation. He openly acknowledged his once privileged role in the system and exposed the secret lives of high officials and party functionaries, intellectuals and artists. However, he never forgot the people from ‘the lower depths’, those on the margins, to whom he devoted some of his most colourful writing: factory workers and university students, prostitutes and tramps. Politics aside, his writing often dealt with the everyday. He tackled such diverse topics as education, illness, sex, tourism, shopping and the fetish for western goods. In effect, Markov produced the most candid, incisive and comprehensive portrait of Bulgaria under communist-party rule, from the end of the Second World War until the late 1960s. ‘Why do the members of the Politburo not go to meetings on Thursdays?’ ran one Bulgarian joke in the late 1970s. ‘Because they listen to Georgi Markov on Radio Free Europe.’

Georgi Markov exposed the dire state of people in Bulgaria, the oppressions both petty and grand and the corruption that is present in every socialist state that has ever existed. He was another of those chroniclers of the socialist god that failed and paid the ultimate price for writing what he did.

Georgi Markov was more than his murder or the manner of his murder. He was a man who gave up a life of plenty in order to be honest about his homeland and who through his writings gave hope to those in a hopelessly oppressive situation. I feel ashamed that I only knew of Georgi Markov because of his horrific murder and will do my best to seek out his works and read them if I can. I will do this not just because they are an interesting snapshot of a particular time in history, but because I believe that his courage in leaving Bulgaria and speaking out may have lessons for us today.