Why the communist regime of Bulgaria wanted Markov isolated or dead, is not in doubt. Markov, left Bulgaria in 1969 and proceeded to write and broadcast details of what life was actually like behind the iron curtain. He worked for the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe. Markov reported on the cultural life of his homeland Bulgaria. He sketched how, after 1956:
.... the regime’s power and very existence no longer relied on unrestrained physical terror, but instead functioned much more subtly through a widespread, ubiquitous form of social and material corruption. ...
The corruption and nepotism that plagued all spheres of life, the attempt to control intellectuals and the populace through a feudal system of privileges based on ideological subservience or personal connections—one where individual worth and talent had little to do with social advancement—created what was perhaps the regime’s gravest crime: the manufacture of mediocrity.....
Markov received the best medical treatment possible after he was attacked. Here is how the review describes these events:
[O]n September 7, 1978, while working at the BBC...in London, Markov stepped out to park his car in a better location..... By the bus stop on Waterloo Bridge, a stranger bumped into him, and Markov felt a slight sting in the back of his right thigh. When he turned around, he saw the stranger leaning down to pick up his umbrella. He didn’t know it yet, but he had just been shot with a 1.52-millimeter platinum-iridium pellet containing a minuscule quantity of poison, most probably ricin, a highly toxic vegetative glycoprotein made from castor beans. It is believed that the umbrella was just a diversion and that the pellet was released from a pen-like device. Four days later, despite the best attempts of British doctors to save him, Georgi Markov was pronounced dead
Hristov's book details attempts made to silence him, Hristov, during his pursuit of the story of Markov's life. Although this research is subsequent to the 1989 fall of communism in Bulgaria, there is still a sustained campaign to discredit Markov. Kill Georgi Markov’s Cat (2006), by Angelina Petrova, is not the only book to attack Markov by suggesting among other things, that he was actually an agent of the Bulgarian secret police.
Petrova ...[has] since been revealed as [a] former SSS ...[agent]. Petrova’s book in particular, [is] an ad hominem attack on Markov, ...[painting] him as a selfish, dishonest person, a womanizer, whose work has no literary value whatsoever. She proposes that the CIA could have killed Markov, or that his death was not a murder: he might have died from sepsis due to a cat scratch or even the bubonic plague.
Who murdered Markov, why is the truth still so difficult to ascertain, and how is it that men like Markov surface in history, bravely risking their lives, not just for some idea of freedom, but to examine and publicize how men are subjected to a governmental coercion without the use of violence? These questions are illuminated in Hristov's biography of Georgi Markov.
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