Georgi Pirinski, Jr.

Who is Georgi Pirinski, Jr.?

Georgi Pirinski is a Bulgarian politician of the Bulgarian Communist Party and after 1990 of the Bulgarian Socialist Party.

Born in New York City, U.S. in the emigrant family of Communist functionary Georgi Pirinski, Sr., he has roots from Pirin Macedonia. His mother Pauline was born in New York City and was a member of the Young Communist League at the City College of New York. She was a professor of English at Sofia University. His father found refuge in the U.S. after he participated in the unsuccessful Communist uprising against the Bulgarian regime in 1923 and was expelled from the U.S. as an undesirable alien about 1951. While a convinced communist, Pirinski did show some flashes of independent thinking, such as expressing disagreement in a private conversation with foreign visitors in 1970 at the decision of Bulgarian media to downplay the U.S. moonwalk the previous year. In the late 1970s, Pirinski was an aide to then Deputy Prime Minister Georgi Lukanov and then at the age of 31 became Bulgaria's youngest deputy minister. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1974, but political opponents later argued that the renunciation was judicially null.