Independent Macedonia was a conceptual project of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) to create an independent Macedonia, during the interwar period.
Independent Macedonia was a conceptual project of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) to create an independent Macedonia, during the interwar period.
The predecessor of the concept of Independent Macedonia appeared initially in the late 19th century as variant called autonomous Macedonia in the documents of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization. The organization was founded in 1893 in Ottoman Thessaloniki by a small band of anti-Ottoman Macedono-Bulgarian revolutionaries. [1] The idea then was strictly political and did not imply a secession from Bulgarian ethnicity, but unity of all nationalities in the area, then under Ottoman control. [2] During the Balkan Wars and the First World War the organization supported the Bulgarian army and joined to Bulgarian war-time authorities when they temporarily took control over mosts of Thrace and Macedonia. In this period autonomism as a political tactic was abandoned and annexationist positions were supported, aiming eventual incorporation of occupied areas into Bulgaria. However Bulgaria lost the Wars.
In the aftermath of World War I, the IMRO developed an agenda for an autonomous or even independent Macedonia, on the territories of Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, under the protectorate of the Great Powers, that meant in fact a second Bulgarian state on the Balkans. [3] [4] [5] It accepted this concept with the aim to annex the territories occupied by Serbia and Greece. [6] IMRO then had de facto full control of Pirin Macedonia (Bulgarian part), which it used as a base for hit and run attacks against Yugoslavia and Greece. It acted as a "state within a state", with the unofficial support of the right-wing Bulgarian governments. Ivan Mihailov and Aleksandar Protogerov, who assumed IMRO's leadership after Todor Alexandrov's death in 1924, changed the main task for an autonomous Macedonian state, but officially under Bulgarian control, as it was a way for a subsequent unification with Bulgaria.
By 1928, after the assassination of Protogerov, Mihailov proposed a new plan calling for unification of a pre-1913 Macedonia region into a single state, that would be independent from Bulgaria. It should be with prevailing ethnic Bulgarian element. [7] However the new state would to be supranational and cantonized, something as "Switzerland on the Balkans". [8] Nevertheless, the IMRO continued to support Bulgarian irredentism. It had close ties to diaspora organizations abroad, the most important of which was the Macedonian Patriotic Organization in the United States and Canada. The organization was suppressed by the Bulgarian army after the 1934 Military coup.
The Comintern policy on the Macedonian question rose the slogan of a united and independent Macedonia at the 5th Conference of the Balkan Communist Federation in 1923. [9] After the failure of the May Manifesto signed in 1924 by the leadership of the IMRO, which maintained the independence and unification of the region of Macedonia, and cooperation with the Soviet Union, some left-wing revolutionaries of the IMRO founded the so-called IMRO (United) in 1925 in Vienna. Its main objective was to free the region of Macedonia, and to create a new political entity which would become an equal member of the future Balkan Communist Federation. IMRO (United) was sponsored directly by the Comintern, maintaining close links with its Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov. [10] In 1934 it supported the Resolution of the Comintern on the Macedonian Question, in which for the first time, an international organization has recognized the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and language. However the IMRO (United), was not particularly influential on the revolutionary movement in the region. [11] Prior to the Second World War, thеsе views on the Macedonian question have been of little practical importance.
As the Bulgarian army as part from Axis-powers entered Yugoslav and Greek Macedonia during WWII in April 1941, former IMRO members were active in organising Bulgarian Action Committees, charged with taking over the local authorities. During the War the Macedonist ideas were partially supported by the Yugoslav Partisans, who strengthened their positions. After Bulgaria switched sides in September 1944, some former IMRO activists tried to create an independent Macedonian state. The state had to have a Bulgarian character. It would be placed under the protectorate of the Third Reich, but they failed. [12] In the late 1944, this state was dissolved and the communists founded SR Macedonia as part of Communist Yugoslavia. The local high-ranking politician Metodija Andonov-Čento, who tried to create a fully independent Macedonia, was charged of being supporter of pro-Bulgarian ideas, and was sentenced to eleven years in prison under forced labor. [13]
During the breakup of Yugoslavia several activists had agreed to make a party for a future independent Macedonia. By these circumstances the IMRO–DPMNE party was founded in 1990 in Skopje. [14] In this way an independence referendum was held in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia on 8 September 1991, that was approved by 96.4% of votes. According to some observers, 8 September was chosen as the date for the referendum to link it with the 8 September 1944 proclamation of the Independent State of Macedonia. [15] On January 15, 1992, Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the new state.
The region of Macedonia is known to have been inhabited since Paleolithic times.
The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, was a secret revolutionary society founded in the Ottoman territories in Europe, that operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ivan Mihaylov Gavrilov, known also by his short name as Vancho Mihaylov, was a Bulgarian revolutionary in interwar Macedonia, and the last leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO).
Hristo Tatarchev was a Macedonian Bulgarian doctor, revolutionary and one of the founders of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). Tatarchev authored several political journalistic works between the First and Second World War. He is considered an ethnic Macedonian in the Macedonian historiography.
Todor Aleksandrov Poporushov, best known as Todor Alexandrov, also spelt as Alexandroff, was a Bulgarian revolutionary, army officer, politician and teacher. He favored initially the annexation of Macedonia to Bulgaria, but later switched to the idea of an Independent Macedonia as a second Bulgarian state on the Balkans. Alexandrov was a member of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation (IMARO) and later of the Central Committee of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO).
The establishment of a Balkan Federation has been a recurrent topic among the peoples of the Balkans. The concept of a Balkan federation emerged in the late 19th century among left-wing political forces in the region. The central aim was to establish a new political unity: a common federal republic unifying the Balkan Peninsula on the basis of internationalism, socialism, social solidarity, and economic equality. The underlying vision was that, despite differences among the Balkan peoples, the historical need for emancipation was a common basis for unification.
Todor Nikolov Panitsa was a Bulgarian revolutionary figure, active in the region of Macedonia. He was one of the leaders of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.
Alexandar Protogerov was a Bulgarian Army general, politician and revolutionary, as well as a member of the revolutionary movement in Macedonia, Thrace and Pomoravlje. Protogerov was a Bulgarian Freemason and held a leading position in the lodge where he was a member.
Dimitar Vlahov was a politician from the region of Macedonia and member of the left wing of the Macedonian-Adrianople revolutionary movement. As with many other IMRO members of the time, historians from North Macedonia consider him an ethnic Macedonian and in Bulgaria he is considered a Bulgarian. According to Dimitar Bechev, Vlahov declared himself until the early 1930s as a Bulgarian and afterwards as an ethnic Macedonian.
Ohrana were armed collaborationist detachments organized by the former Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) structures, composed of Bulgarians in Nazi-occupied Greek Macedonia during World War II and led by officers of the Bulgarian Army. Bulgaria was interested in acquiring Thessalonica and Western Macedonia, under Italian and German occupation and hoped to sway the allegiance of the 80,000 Slavs who lived there at the time. The appearance of Greek partisans in those areas persuaded the Axis to allow the formation of these collaborationst detachments. However, during late 1944, when the Axis appeared to be losing the war, many Bulgarian Nazi collaborators, Ohrana members and VMRO regiment volunteers fled to the opposite camp by joining the newly founded communist SNOF. The organization managed to recruit initially 1,000 up to 3,000 armed men from the Slavophone community that lived in the western part of Greek Macedonia.
World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia started with the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Under the pressure of the Yugoslav Partisan movement, part of the Macedonian communists began in October 1941 a political and military campaign to resist the occupation of Vardar Macedonia. Officially, the area was called then Vardar Banovina, because the very name Macedonia was prohibited in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was occupied mostly by Bulgarian, but also by German, Italian, and Albanian forces.
The history of Macedonians has been shaped by population shifts and political developments in the southern Balkans, especially within the region of Macedonia. The ideas of separate Macedonian identity grew in significance after the First World War, both in Vardar and among the left-leaning diaspora in Bulgaria, and were endorsed by the Comintern. During the Second World War, these ideas were supported by the Communist Partisans, but the decisive point in the ethnogenesis of these South Slavic people was the creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia after World War II, as a new state in the framework of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The Independent State of Macedonia was a proposed puppet state of Nazi Germany during the Second World War in the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that had been occupied by the Kingdom of Bulgaria following the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941.
Melpomena Dimitrova Karnicheva or Krničeva, popularly known as Mencha (Менча), was a Bulgarophile Aromanian revolutionary and terrorist of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). The wife of IMRO leader Ivan Mihailov, she is known for assassinating IMRO left-wing activist Todor Panitsa.
The "May Manifesto" of May 6, 1924 was a paper in which the objectives of the unified Macedonian liberation movement were presented: independence and unification of partitioned region of Macedonia, fighting all the neighbouring Balkan monarchies, supporting the Balkan Communist Federation and cooperation with the Soviet Union.
The Macedonian Federative Organization (MFO) was established in Sofia in 1921 by former Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) left wing's activists.
The resolution of the Comintern of January 11, 1934, was an official political document, in which for the first time, an authoritative international organization has recognized the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and Macedonian language.
Svoboda ili smart, written in pre-1945 Bulgarian orthography: "Свобода или смърть" and before 1899: "Свобода или смъртъ", was a revolutionary slogan used during the national-liberation struggles by the Bulgarian revolutionaries, called comitadjis. The slogan was in use during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries.
Autonomy for the region of Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace within the Ottoman Empire was a concept that arose in the late 19th century and was popular until ca. 1920. The plan was developed among Macedonian and Thracian Bulgarian emigres in Sofia and covered several meanings. Serbia and Greece were totally opposed to that set of ideas while Bulgaria was ambivalent to them. In fact Sofia advocated granting such autonomy as a prelude to the annexation of both areas, as for many Bulgarian emigres it was seen in the same way.
Petar Traykov Girovski was a Bulgarian Army officer, later activist of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Afterwards he became close to some communist circles and after the Second World War participated in Yugoslav and Bulgarian politics.
