Background on Theodore Yantshev
On June 23, 1946, a young Bulgarian refugee, Theodore Konstantin Yantshev, arrived in Baltimore as a stowaway aboard the S.S. Juliet Victory, intending to seek asylum in the United States. Born in Sofia on Jan. 17, 1926, to Konstantin Dimtshev Yantshev and Antoinette Robert Goinareva, Yantshev was studying electrical engineering at the Bulgarian University of Technical Sciences in 1945-1946 when he became a student leader in the anti-Communist Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (Bulgarian Peasant Party), and allegedly a friend of the party head, Nikola Petkov. The tightening of Communist power in Bulgaria early in 1946, however, and the threat to his safety convinced Yantshev to flee.
From Baltimore, Yantshev headed to Boston with the help of an American sailor, and secured work at the Red Coach Grill, a restaurant in the Back Bay, where he absorbed enough English to find work as an electrician, and by November, he reached his goal by landing an electrical technician at MIT. His luck did not hold. When police conducted a routine investigation into a burglary in July 1947, they discovered that Yantshev lacked appropriate papers and handed him over to the FBI.
Through a local minister, Yantshev began to marshal support in hopes of delaying or preventing deportation. Reuben H. Markham, the Balkan expert for the Christian Science Monitor, offered valuable assistance and Attorney William Gray of the Boston firm Powers and Hall provided legal counsel. Winning Yantshev's release on bond, Gray quickly went about calling in Massachusetts politicians to intervene, including John F. Kennedy, Leverett Saltonstall, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Richard Wigglesworth. Nevertheless, Yantshev was ordered to be deported on August 7, 1947, and after some minor delays, he obtained a passport and "voluntarily" left for Argentina on Apr 27, 1948.
Once settled in Argentina, Yantshev began putting together his case, retaining Powers and Hall to support his application for admission to the United States under the Bulgarian immigration quota. With the quota flooded by requests from Bulgarian refugees, however, it took years for Yantshev's name to come up, and by the time it did in April 1955, Yantshev had married an Argentine woman and claimed to have fallen on hard times. Claiming financial distress due in part to the need to assist his remaining family in Bulgaria, he never returned to the U.S. In the face of Yantshev's hardships in 1958, Powers and Hall dropped their pursuit of unpaid funds for legal services rendered.
