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
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella when Steven Stapleton was working as a signwriter in London in 1978. Completing a job at an independent recording studio, he engaged in conversation with the studio's engineer, Nick Rogers. Rogers, frustrated with the advertising and voice-over work the studio brought in, expressed a wish to work with more experimental bands. Stapleton informed Rogers that he was in such a band and a studio date was arranged. Stapleton, however, was lying and had to hurriedly put something together. He called his friends John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, telling them to get hold of an instrument of some sort. Thus, the