Болгарский анархист в «красной» Одессе (судьба Желю Грозева)
Bulgarian Anarchist in the “red” Odessa (the Fate of Zheliu Grozev)

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the biography of the famous anarchist and terrorist Zheliu Grozev, the formation of an anarchist group, and repressions against Bulgarian anarchists in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. It highlights the GPU-NKVD’s (the State Political Administration of the People’s Commissariat for State Security) use of Bulgarian political emigres from the International Organization of Assistance to Revolutionary Fighters and the Odessa International Sailors Club, who trained personnel for the «world revolution», for Soviet intelligence and sabotage activities (“active intelligence”), against other countries. In Odessa, it was formed a colony of Bulgarian revolutionaries and political emigres including about 20 anarchists, who fled from Bulgaria in 1923–1926. Anarchist Zheliu Grozev, being in Odessa in 1925, became an employee of the „Foreign Sailors’ Club” at the MOPR. „The Bulgarian section” of the Interclub engaged in recruiting Bulgarian sailors for reconnaissance, „political smuggling”, campaigning and propaganda, and establishing illegal ties with Bulgaria.In 1937, the Chekists arrested Z. Grozev in the case of the “anarchist underground in Odessa”, accusing him of “terror”, “counterrevolution”, and “distribution of anarchist literature among young people”. In the same year, Z. Grozev was sentenced to 8 years in prison and died in a Siberian camp in 1942. Most of the Bulgarian political emigres to the USSR shared the same fate.The research is based on a positivistic approach using specially historical methods: chronological, systemic, historical-biographical and historical-comparative.

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