Brian Boeck

As the sole defendant in one of last, high-profile show trials conducted in communist Europe, Ivan-Asen Georgiev is by no means an obscure figure. However, his story has been interpreted for far too long from an intelligence perspective rather than a humanities one. I view Georgiev as a capable intellectual who believed that his collaboration with the West would ultimately benefit both Bulgaria and the world. By pairing wide-ranging archival evidence from Bulgaria with recently declassified documentation from American archives, I plan to recover Georgiev’s unheralded contributions to the de-escalation of the Cold War and establish his important role in the wider history of American understanding of the socialist world.