Raĭkin, Spas, 1922-

Biographical Note

A Bulgarian-American historian, Raikin served as secretary of the Central Executive Board, Bulgarian National Council, from 1960 to 1963.

Born to a poor peasant family, Raikin herded cows and sheep until he was admitted to the Plovdiv Theological Seminary. He graduated with honors and went on to study in the School of Theology in Sofia University and teach in the Sofia Theological Seminary. Once the Bulgarian Communists had solidified their power, they intensified their religious persecution, drafting Raikin into the army, where he served his time in a military labor camp. In 1951, he and several of his friends escaped from the camp and formed a partisan group in the Rhodope Mountains in southern Bulgaria. Evading the Communists, they managed to cross into Greece, where he received a scholarship from the World Council of Churches to study theology at the University of Athens. He went on to study at the universities in Geneva, Basel, and King's College in London, finally taking a graduate degree in political science at Columbia University in New York. In New York, Raikin became a social worker who helped resettle Bulgarian refugees in the United States under a State Department Program, as well as a staff member in the Travelers Aid Society. It was in that capacity that he was directed to meet Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return from Russia. Raikin found a hotel room for Oswald, his wife, and baby, and handed him a check that paid for their move to Fort Worth, Texas. His account of this event is in the Warren Commission Report and is discussed in dozens of works on the Kennedy assassination.

Raikin's academic career was mostly with East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1966 until his retirement in 1991. He published some twenty books on Bulgarian history, politics, and culture from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. He was also active in Bulgarian and East European anticommunist exile organizations.

Additional biographical information may be found in box 1.

From the guide to the Spas T. Raikin papers, 1922-2011, (Hoover Institution Archives)