SOFIA -- A former Bulgarian student expelled from his communist-run university for protesting the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s has been honored by the same institution more than 55 years later.
Seventy-six-year-old Alexander Dimitrov was 21 when he and two fellow history students challenged official Eastern Bloc silence by passing out protest leaflets after Warsaw Pact tanks crushed Prague Spring reforms in 1968.
“What we did, we did,” Dimitrov told RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service, “not because God is looking at us but to be proud of ourselves.”
Dimitrov, Eduard Genov, and Valentin Radev were all expelled from Sofia University, sentenced to prison terms in 1969, and persecuted for decades.
Radev died in Sofia in 1995, and Genov, who was initially jailed for three years but served eight more for an escape attempt, helped found a rights group before Bulgaria expelled him in 1988 and died in the United States in 2009.
Earlier this month, on January 17, Sofia University honored Dimitrov and his late classmates for their contributions to freedom and democracy in a ceremony in one of the same lecture halls they and their classmates attended more than a half a century ago.
Dimitrov said he never regretted his actions despite the decades of persecution.
“The whole of [what are now] the Czech Republic and Slovakia took to the streets, and we stand here and bleat? We couldn’t just do nothing,” Dimitrov told RFE/RL.
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1968: How The Soviet Union Crushed The Prague Spring
The three got away with distributing one round of leaflets after thousands of troops from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland rolled into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, killing at least 130 people and allowing Moscow to derail budding reforms.
At the time, Bulgarian Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov was more than a decade into his three-decade rule and eager to please the Soviet leadership in Moscow.
The flyers demanded, “Out from Czechoslovakia with the troops of puppet Zhivkov.”
But while Dimitrov, Genov, and Radev were preparing a second round of flyers in October 1968, a childhood friend of Dimitrov’s turned them in to Bulgarian State Security and they were sent to Sofia’s central prison.
Dimitrov and Radev spent two years in prison each, and Genov 11 years.
Dimitrov and Radev endured decades of surveillance and harassment in Bulgaria, while Genov was ultimately expelled from the country.
“We all hoped that what happened in 1989, when Soviet communism collapsed, would happen in 1968, but apparently it was too early,” Dmitrov said.
Dimitrov, who calls himself a “born historian,” said that after “they overthrew Zhivkov on a Friday” -- November 10 -- “on Monday I went and asked for my student rights to be reinstated.”
Dimitrov was accepted to Sofia University and majored in history, two decades after he, Genov, and Radev had made some of their own history.
All three -- Genov and Radev posthumously -- were honored for their contributions to democracy and human rights by the Czech and Slovak Republics to mark the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring in 2018.