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.

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