Gramota "For Expressing Our Gratitude".

[deValcourt]

It is widely understood that some people in the Communist leadership in Bulgaria would have been quite content becoming another republic of the Soviet Union unlike some of the other of Stalin's post-WWII "People's Democracies" he created in Eastern Europe with the help of the NKVD and then the NKGB/MGB. The Soviet security agencies essentially created models of themselves, with varying degrees of success, in each of the Warsaw Pact countries after WWII ended and the Allies split up and redrew the borders of many European nations. In Bulgaria, the new Communist security agencies were nearly a mirror image of the KGB and MVD.

I think I have sort of pieced together some things. Starting with the combined MVR and KDS (imitating the Soviet MVD - Ministry of the Interior - and KGB - state security, respectively) from the 1980s I have a document that was apparently issued with the badge. I photographed it with a badge on it to give a point of reference for the size of it.

My Bulgarian is based on a combination of the Google Translator and Russian-based guesswork. Unlike "Honored" or "Excellent" employee badges for the KGB/MVD in the SU, this "Ministry of the Interior" badge was awarded to Colonel Istiliyan Stoev Dimitrov on May 9, 1985 as an "Announcement of gratitude for your initiative, conscientiousness, dedication and positive results as Secretary of the CVS" ["CVS" is the Google Translator version of "ППО" and neither of which do I know the meaning of.]

So from this, I am gathering that the badge was one of "gratitude" for excellent service, but this could just be a translation gap.:confused:

The cover of this large award document is plastic.

Phillip