In Bulgaria the communism was more brutal, in Czechoslovakia it was subtler
Petr Popov was born on November 21, 1940, in Brno as the first child of an insurance company staff member and a Bulgarian-born student of construction engineering. After 1945, his father worked on the reconstruction of roads and bridges destroyed by the war, in the late 1948 he was arrested and deported, as “a technical expert and right-wing element” back to Bulgaria, where he was followed by his family. He studied at the grammar school in Plevno and then went on to study construction engineering at the university in Sofia. He worked as a designer of concrete constructions all across Bulgaria and in 1970, after a short stay in Austria, he returned to Czechoslovakia, where worked in Kovoprojekta state company and in the Institute for Inventions and Discoveries. He associated with intellectuals afflicted with normalisation checks and engaged, after 1989, in local politics.
