Dimitrov, Georgy Mikhailovich (1882-1949)

Bulgarian Communist revolutionary and government leader, who was also head of the Comintern from 1935 to 1943. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Dimitrov lived in Moscow, Vienna and Berlin. Soon after the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, Dimitrov and two other Bulgarians were arrested and charged with arson. They were acquitted, however, by a German court in Leipzig after a celebrated trial.

Dimitrov returned to the USSR in 1934 and was awarded Soviet citizenship. In 1935, he was elected General Secretary of the Comintern and remained in that post until the organization was dissolved by Stalin in 1943. In November 1946, Dimitrov became head of the Government of Bulgaria, and then, in 1948, General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He died in Moscow on July 2, 1949. The Bulgarians followed the USSR’s example and embalmed Dimitrov’s body, like Lenin’s, and exhibited it in a specially constructed mausoleum in Sofia. The memorial was dismantled after the Bulgarian Communist regime fell in the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989.