Bulgaria–United States relations to work. Bulgaria became a member of the Warsaw Pact on May 14, 1955. Though no Soviet troops were stationed on Bulgarian soil, in 1968, Zhivkov sent a Bulgarian division to join Polish, Hungarian and Soviet troops to crush a popular uprising in Prague. In 1978, the Bulgarian secret police were implicated in the assassination in London of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was a correspondent for the BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle radio and the U.S. sponsored Radio Free Europe. Markov was assassinated with a poisoned umbrella on September 7, Zhivkov's birthday. The rise of democratic movements across
The miller who was a wizard, a cheat and a matchmaker The miller who was a wizard, a cheat and a matchmaker The miller who was a wizard, a cheat and a matchmaker (title in Russian "Мельник – колдун, обманщик и сват [Melnik – koldun, obmanshchik i svat]") – is a Russian ballad opera in three acts with a libretto by Alexander Ablesimov that premiered on . Its folksong-based music was long attributed to Yevstigney Fomin but is now considered to have been by Mikhail Sokolovsky, and others have contributed music to revivals. The music for the opera is nowadays agreed to be by Mikhail Sokolovsky, although for a century it