The Bulgarian Communist government tried to repress Vanga’s activities, but visitors continued to come. The situation changed in the mid-1960s, which were marked by the growing influence on her father of Lyudmila Zhivkova (1942–1981), the young and brilliant daughter of Bulgarian Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov (1911–1998). Zhivkova, who was promoted to several key political positions in the 1970s, was interested in esotericism, Theosophy, and parapsychology. She was also an admirer and collector of the works of Roerich. The Bulgarian Communist state decided to embrace, rather than fight, the Baba Vanga phenomenon. Vanga became a state employee, with a regular salary. She was provided with a new home in the village of Rupite, a secretary, and a driver. In exchange, the authorities organized her consultations and kept the money paid by Vanga’s clients. In the words of [social anthropologist Galia] Valtchinova, she became a “state-socialist enterprise,” a unique case of state-managed clairvoyance.
Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke.
To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will. Soviet policy after the beginning of the second world war was precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito. If all this does not constitute manifestations of imperialism, if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words.
These different blocs in the Turkish Empire...always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native peoples, Turkey has lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt, and Tripoli. In this way, the Turkish Empire has dwindled almost to nothing.
Mehmed Talat, Quoted in "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility" - by Taner Akçam, Paul Bessemer - History - 2006 - Page 92
