Yantshev, Theodore

Theodore Konstantin Yantshev was born on January 17, 1926 in Sofia, Bulgaria to Konstantin Dimtshev Yantshev and Antoinette Robert Goinareva. He attended primary shcool in the city of Burgas, and in 1945-1946 attended the Bulgaria University of Technical Sciences in Varna to study electrical engineering. He was president of an anti-communist organization at the university, and through this position was an intimate of Petkov, leader of the Bulgarian Peasant Party, who was subsequently executed for his opposition to communism. Yantshev found himself in danger for his anti-Communist activities, and, with the help of an American naval officer, escaped to the United States as a stowaway on the American ship S.S. Juliet Victory in the spring of 1946. In June of that year he came to Boston, where he was employed at an electrical engineering laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In July of 1947, Yantshev's presence came to the attention of United States immigration authorities and a warrant for deportation back to Bulgaria was issued against him. Yantshev had support from many people in his struggle to obtain a visa to enter another country in order to escape deportation and persecution in Bulgaria, including attorney William Gray and his successor Francis Newton at Powers and Hall, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, Kroum S. Jordon, Pastor of the Federated Church of Orleans, East Orleans, Massachusetts, Reuban H. Markham, the Balkan and Central European correspondent for the Christian Science Moniter and Mary G. Markham, a member of the Washington bureau of the Research and Publications Service of the National Committee for a Free Europe, both of whom had met the Yantshev family as Bulgarian educational missionaries, struggled on his behalf to obtain a visa to another country in order to escape deportation and persecution in Bulgaria.

In April 1948, Yantshev obtained a passport to go to Argentina, where he had an uncle and from where he planned to apply to re-enter the United States legally. In Argentina he worked as an electrical technician until his number on the Bulgarian quota for immigration to the United States came up, at which point he applied for readmission. Once again a drawn-out struggle was necessary, as his application was rejected and an appeal faced a lengthy process. Since Yantshev had no relatives living in the United States, he was required to prove that his admission would be an asset to the country, in his case as an electrical technician in the growing defense industry. By April of 1955, when a visa to enter the United States was finally granted, Yantshev had married an Argentinian citizen, which would allow him to enter the United States legally as her husband without the visa, but economic hardships and threats against his family in Bulgaria from the communists prevented him from doing so.