Todor Zhivkov (1911-1998) was the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the head of the Bulgarian government for 35 years, from 1954 to 1989.

Todor Zhivkov was born on September 7, 1911, in the village of Pravets, 40 miles northeast of Sofia, in the Balkan mountains of Bulgaria. His father, a poor peasant, was a leather worker in Gabrovo. Zhivkov became a printer's apprentice at the State Printing Office in Sofia, attending its trade school from 1929 to 1932. The printing office was a traditional stronghold of socialist-minded workers, and Georgi Dimitrov, a leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party, had begun his career as a labor organizer there. Zhivkov fell in with the Communists, becoming a member of the party's youth league in 1930. He joined the party itself in 1932. In the next two years he rose to secretary of the party's committee for the Third Urban District of Sofia.

After an aborted uprising in 1923, the...