Blagoi Simeonov Popov ( bg, Благой Симеонов Попов) (22 November 1902 – 28 December 1968) was a Bulgarian Communist activist and Comintern executive who was one of the co-defendants along with Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Tanev in the

Leipzig trial The Reichstag fire (german: Reichstagsbrand, ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of ...

. After the trial, Popov moved to

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

in February 1934. Popov studied there until 1937 when he was caught up in the

Stalinist purges The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...

. He would spend the next seventeen years in a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

Gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...

until he was officially rehabilitated in 1954.

References

* 1902 births 1968 deaths Bulgarian communists People from Pernik Province Bulgarian people imprisoned abroad Soviet rehabilitations Bulgarian expatriates in the Soviet Union Foreign Gulag detainees {{Bulgaria-bio-stub