Tsola Dragoicheva

Born Aug. 22, 1898, in the city of Biala-Slatina. Bulgarian state and political figure, Hero of Socialist Labor of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (1963), Hero of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (1968).Became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1919. The daughter of a worker.

Dragoicheva graduated from the Higher Pedagogical Institute in 1921. She participated in the antifascist uprising of 1923 and was sentenced to death in 1925 for revolutionary activity, but the sentence was commuted to lifelong hard labor and she was amnestied in 1932. Elected to the Central Committee in 1937 and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1940, Dragoicheva was arrested in 1941 and placed in a concentration camp, from which she escaped; she was sentenced to death in absentia in 1942. She participated in the uprising of Sept. 9, 1944. From 1944 to 1948, Dragoicheva was chief secretary of the National Committee of the Fatherland Front, chairman of the Bulgarian Women’s Committee, member of the Council of the International Democratic Federation of Women, and chairman of the National Peace Committee. Minister of the Postal Service, Telephone, and Telegraph and of Railroads from 1947 to 1957, Dragoicheva was elected chairman of the National Committee of Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship in 1957, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Fatherland Front in 1963, and member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1966. She has been awarded the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Between Nations (1972), two Orders of G. Dimitrov, and the Order of Lenin.