Partisans of Stiv Naumov Battalion, set up in November 1943 in Gorna Prespa.Formation of the 51st Division in Shirok Dol, October 1944.
History
Resistance under question
Partisans of the 4th Macedonian Brigade in August 1944.
After the Bulgarian takeover of Vardar Banovina in April 1941, the Macedonian communists fell in the sphere of influence of the Bulgarian Communist Party.[8] They thought that the ordinary Macedonian people believe in Bulgaria's role as liberator and that no Macedonian wants to fight against the Bulgarian soldiers.[9] Nevertheless when the USSR was attacked by Nazi Germany in June, some form of anti-Axis resistance started, with the emergence of Macedonian Partisan military units. Initially they had no real success.[10] The problem arose at the end of 1941, when CPY lost its contact with the local communists due to its leaders withdrawal into Bosnia and because the Bulgarian forces captured Lazar Koliševski, whom the CPY had appointed to led the Macedonian communists.[11] The role of the Bulgarian communists, which avoided organizing mass armed resistance in the area, was also a key factor.[12] Although several Macedonian partisan detachments were formed through the end of 1942 which fought battles against the Bulgarian, Italian, German and Albanian occupation forces and despite Sofia's ill-managed administration, most Macedonian Communists had yet to be lured to Yugoslavia. Between 1941 and 1943, Tito sent five emissaries to Macedonia, to persuade his ill-disciplined comrades, but their efforts had limited success, and the Regional Committee of the Communists in Macedonia was de facto under the control of the Bulgarian Communist Party.[13]
Resistance in development
To change that, in the beginning of 1943 the MontenegrinSvetozar Vukmanović-Tempo was sent by Tito as an assistant to the HQ of the Macedonian partisan forces. One of his objectives was to destroy the influence of the BCP in Macedonia and to fight against any form of Macedonian autonomism. He would have to "Macedonize" the struggle’s form and content, and to give it an ethnic Macedonian facade. One of his main achievements was also that the wartime pro-Bulgarian trend receded into the background of pro-Yugoslav one. Tempo was able to capitalize on the growing contradictions towards Bulgarian authorities, which during 1942 were involved into a policy of centralization, contradicting their initial agenda to respect Macedonian autonomy. Yugoslav communists proclaimed as their aim the issue of unification of the three regions of Macedonia – Yugoslav, Greek and Bulgarian, and so managed to get also Macedonian nationalists. As result the Communist Party of Macedonia (CPM) was formed on 19 March 1943 in Tetovo, then in the Italian occupation zone. In May 1943 Mihajlo Apostolski was promoted to Major General and during the Second Session of AVNOJ he became a member of the Presidency of AVNOJ. Apostolski became the commander of the General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Macedonia.[14]
Formation of the People's Liberation Army of Macedonia
The resistance started to grow in the summer of 1943 with the capitulation of Italy and the Soviet victories over Nazi Germany.[15] The date of the creation of its major unit, the Mirče Acev Battalion, on August 18, 1943 on Mount Slavej[16][pageneeded] between Ohrid and Kičevo, then in the Italian occupation zone, is officially celebrated today in North Macedonia as the Day of the Army of the Republic of North Macedonia. On 11 November 1943, the 1st Macedonian Kosovo Shock Brigade was formed in western Macedonia by merging two Vardar Macedonian and one Kosovo battalion. The second — larger ethnic Macedonian military unit was the 2nd Macedonian Shock Brigade, formed on 22 December 1943 just across the border in Greek Macedonia.[17][pageneeded] On 26 February 1944 in the village of Zegljane, near Kumanovo, the 3rd Macedonian Shock Brigade was formed. These three brigades were the nucleus of the National Liberation Army of Macedonia, which after constant battles became stronger in numbers. Meanwhile, the second session of AVNOJ recognized the Macedonians as a separate nation for the first time in November 1943. From 8,000 partisans in the summer of 1944, until the final military operations in the Yugoslav National Liberation War in April 1945, the National Liberation Army of Macedonia had increased to three corps, seven divisions and thirty brigades, all with a total of 100,000 regular soldiers.[18] Chronological composition by the number of the members of MNLA (partisans, their helpers, etc.) was as follows:[19]
↑ Macedonian: Народноослободителна војска и партизански одреди на Македонија, НОВ и ПОМ, romanized:Narodnoosloboditelna vojska i partizanski odredi na Makedonija, NOV i POM Serbo-Croatian: Narodnooslobodilačka vojska i partizanski odredi Makedonije
References
↑ "Вчера и денес: Македонија" Јован Павловски, Мишел Павловски. Скопје, 2000.
↑ The Bulgarian occupation forces in the Yugoslav part of Macedonia were received as liberators and pro-Bulgarian feeling ran high in the early stages of the occupation. Neither the Communists’ position regarding a separate Macedonian nation nor the idea of a Yugoslav federation met with much response from the Slav population, which nurtured pro-Bulgarian sentiments. The local Communists, led by M. Satorov, splintered off from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and joined the Bulgarian Labour Party (Communists), with the slogan “One state, one party”. The subsequent dissatisfaction with the occupation authorities was due to social factors (high-handedness, heavy taxation, contempt for local sensitivities) rather than national ones. This was also why Tito’s resistance movement in Yugoslav Macedonia failed to develop till 1943. For more see: Sfetas, Spyridon. “Autonomist Movements of the Slavophones in 1944: The Attitude of the Communist Party of Greece and the Protection of the Greek-Yugoslav Border.” Balkan Studies 35, no. 2 (1995): 297–317. (299)
Popovski, Jovan (1962). НОБ на Македонија[National Liberation War of Macedonia] (in Macedonian). Skopje.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Stojanovski, Aleksandar; Katardžiev, Ivan; Zografski, Dančo (1988). Историја на македонскиот народ[History of the Macedonian Nation] (in Macedonian). Skopje.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
The Yugoslav Partisans, or the National Liberation Army, officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, was the communist-led anti-fascist resistance to the Axis powers in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans are considered to be Europe's most effective anti-Axis resistance movement during World War II.
The Socialist Republic of Macedonia, or SR Macedonia, commonly referred to as Socialist Macedonia, Yugoslav Macedonia or simply Macedonia, was one of the six constituent republics of the post-World War II Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and a nation state of the Macedonians. After the transition of the political system to parliamentary democracy in 1990, the Republic changed its official name to Republic of Macedonia in 1991, and with the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, it declared itself an independent country and held a referendum on 8 September 1991 on which a sovereign and independent state of Macedonia, with a right to enter into any alliance with sovereign states of Yugoslavia was approved.
The League of Communists of Macedonia was the Macedonian branch of the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia during the period 1943 – 1990. It was formed on the basis of the Regional Committee of Communists in Macedonia under the name Communist Party of Macedonia during the antifascist National Liberation War of Macedonia in World War II. It retained that name until April 1952.
The Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia was the supreme legislative and executive people's representative body of the communist Macedonian state from August 1944 until the end of World War II. The body was set up by the Macedonian Partisans during the final stages of the World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia. That occurred clandestinely in August 1944, in the Bulgarian occupation zone of Yugoslavia. Simultaneously another state was declared by pro-Nazi Germany Macedonian right-wing nationalists.
World War II in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia began on 6 April 1941, when the country was invaded and swiftly conquered by Axis forces and partitioned among Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their client regimes. Shortly after Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, the communist-led republican Yugoslav Partisans, on orders from Moscow, launched a guerrilla liberation war fighting against the Axis forces and their locally established puppet regimes, including the Axis-allied Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and the Government of National Salvation in the German-occupied territory of Serbia. This was dubbed the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution in post-war Yugoslav communist historiography. Simultaneously, a multi-side civil war was waged between the Yugoslav communist Partisans, the Serbian royalist Chetniks, the Axis-allied Croatian Ustaše and Home Guard, Serbian Volunteer Corps and State Guard, Slovene Home Guard, as well as Nazi-allied Russian Protective Corps troops.
Metodija Andonov-Čento was a Macedonian statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the People's Republic of Macedonia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War. In the Bulgarian historiography he is often considered a Bulgarian. The name of Čento was a taboo in Yugoslav Macedonia, but he was rehabilitated during the 1990s, after the country gained its independence.
Andon Kalchev was a Bulgarian army officer, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian-backed Ohrana, a paramilitary formation of Bulgarians in Greek Macedonia during World War II Axis occupation. He was active outside the Bulgarian occupied area of Macedonia, under the tolerance of the Italian and German authorities which used him in their fights with rival Greek EAM-ELAS and Yugoslav Communist resistance groups. Because of his collaborationist activity, he was sentenced to death by Greek military tribunal, and was executed by firing squad on 27 August 1948.
Mihailo Apostolski was a Macedonian general, partisan, military theoretician, politician, academic and historian. He was the commander of the General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Macedonia, colonel general of the Yugoslav People's Army, and was declared a People's Hero of Yugoslavia.
The National Liberation Front, also known as the People's Liberation Front, was a communist political and military organization created by the Slavic Macedonian minority in Greece. The organization operated from 1945–1949, most prominently in the Greek Civil War. As far as its ruling cadres were concerned its participation in the Greek Civil War was nationalist rather than communist, with the goal of secession from Greece.
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 collaborationist 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 use of very name Macedonia was avoided in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was occupied mostly by Bulgarian, but also by German, Italian, and Albanian forces.
Mirče Acev was a Macedonian organizer of the Yugoslav communist resistance in Vardar Macedonia during World War II. He graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law in Yugoslavia, after which he became a commander of the Yugoslav Partisans and was declared a People's Hero of Yugoslavia, on 29 July 1945.
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 Tsardom of Bulgaria following the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941.
The Drama uprising was an uprising of the population of the northern Greek city of Drama and the surrounding villages on 28–29 September 1941 against the Bulgarian occupation regime. The revolt lacked organization or military resources; the Bulgarian Army swiftly suppressed it, with massive reprisals. The revolt had guidance from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).
The Stracin–Kumanovo operation was an offensive operation conducted in 1944 by the Bulgarian Army against German forces in occupied Yugoslavia which culminated in the capture of Skopje in 1944. With the Bulgarian declaration of war on Germany on September 8, followed by Bulgarian withdrawal from the area, the German 1st Mountain Division moved north, occupied Skopje, and secured the strategic Belgrade–Nis–Salonika railroad line. On October 14, withdrawing from Greece, Army Group E faced Soviet and Bulgarian divisions advancing in Eastern Serbia and Vardar Macedonia; by November 2, the last German units left Northern Greece.
The Croatian Partisans, officially the National Liberation Movement in Croatia, were part of the anti-fascist National Liberational Movement in the Axis-occupied Yugoslavia which was the most effective anti-Nazi resistance movement. It was led by Yugoslav revolutionary communists during the World War II. NOP was under the leadership of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and supported by many others, with Croatian Peasant Party members contributing to it significantly. NOP units were able to temporarily or permanently liberate large parts of Croatia from occupying forces. Based on the NOP, the Federal Republic of Croatia was founded as a constituent of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia.
Day of the Macedonian Uprising is a public holiday in North Macedonia, commemorating what is considered there as the beginning of the communist resistance against fascism during World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia, on October 11.
The Regional Committee of Communists in Macedonia was the provincial communist organization in Vardar Macedonia from 1939 to 1943.
"Gotse Delchev" Brigade was a military unit composed of conscripts and volunteers from the region of Macedonia. The brigade was named after the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization revolutionary Gotse Delchev.
Liman Kaba was a Yugoslav partisan and a member of the communist resistance in Vardar Macedonia.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Yugoslav Partisans 
