DEATHS OF LAST 'OLD BOLSHEVIKS' LEAVE CHERVENKOV BOSS IN BULGARIA
Ruches, Pyrrhus J.
Deaths of Last 'Old Leave Chervenkov Boss in Bulgaria By PYRRHUS J. RUCHES BULGARIA today it Stalin's Balkan pivot, the base of Soviet Intrigues for the conquest of the Near East, Stalin's...
...Alexander Tsankov, offered a higher price, IMRO suddenly repudiated its agreement with the Communists...
...1949, tho Bulgarian Government announced that he had gone to the Soviet Union "for medical treatment'' and that Kolarov was acting as Premier...
...THE PEASANTRY, forming more than four-fifths of Bulgaria's population, were antagonistic to communism...
...The Communists and their followers were being rallied for a putsch...
...For a union of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia might give Dimitrov and Kolarov greater independence from Moscow,— a desire shared also by Tito...
...Four of them got life imprisonment...
...Kolarov and Dimitrov went into hiding with a price on their heads...
...Kolarov, who had just reached Russia, was called on the carpet by Zinoviev...
...between two wings of the capitalist class...
...CP leader Blagoyev was himself an Unredeemed Macedonian separatist born near Kastorio in Greek Macedonia, and the Communists could count on many supporters within IMRO's armed bands...
...After coming to power tn 1919, Stamboliisky had dissolved Parliament in February 1920, and ruled with the support of his peasant following...
...In 1903, Dimiter Blogoyev and his young lieutenants, Kolarov, Dimitrov and Kirkov, broke away from the right wing Bulgarian Social Democrats' and founded the Tesnyaki or "narrow - heads," after the example of V. I. Lcn'n in Russia...
...Petersburg University, was a close friend of the youthful Lenin...
...Only in Plevna was it capable of resistance...
...There is no doubt whatever that...
...KOLAROV FOUND the Bulgarian party almost completely demoralized...
...Kolarov was to regret another blunder...
...In spite of their distaste for the formerly unknown Croatian ex-laborer Tito, and his absurd posturing, Dimitrov and Kolarov attempted to cultivate good relations with Yugoslavia...
...There, another Comintern tonguelashing awaited them...
...Deported "P**ssj»JJjgr...
...Two years after the split, Kolarov became a member of the* narrow-heads' Central Committee...
...It was escorted by a fine turnout of police and military troop...
...Chervenkov became premier...
...Disguised and hastily provided with false identification papers, the two coconspirators were smuggled across the Yugoslav border and dispatched to Vienna, where they hid in the Soviet Embassy pending entrance into Russia...
...Subsequently, Kolarov, at the Fifth Comintern World Congress on June 23, 1924, publicly recanted his errors...
...The'party had thrown in the towel and offered its collective head to Tsankov...
...Stamboliisky seektng friendly relations with Greece and Yugoslavia, had to decree the IMRO's suppression—an act which cost him his life...
...The Tesnyaki grew slowly, for the "broad-heads" or moderate socialists, led by such leaders as Khrustov Pastouhov, had much more support among Bulgaria's tiny working class...
...Kolarov, as Secretary-General of the Tesnyaki rushed off to the Communist conferences at Zimmerwald and Stockholm to sign the opening manifesto...
...Rumors sprang up abroad concerning the connection between these events and Dimitrov's Russian journey, and the Bulgarian legation in Washington issued a clumsy denial which virtually affirmed those rumors: It was, said tho legation, "strange as well as regrettable that a State Department spokesman should suggest that Bulgaria's recent purges might have had something to do with Dimitrov's departure for Russia...
...REMARKABLE EVENTS followed Dimitrov's departure for Russia...
...Only u few months before the Tllo-Cominform struggle became public, Dimitrov put his proposal to Moscow only to be turned down by an enraged Stalin...
...Communist successes convinced party leaders that seizure of power and proclamation of a Bulgarian Soviet Republic would be possible in a short time...
...Fyrrhas J. Ruches is an expert en Balkan affairs who has contributed to The' New Leiiet, thox CmthvHc Digest and other: publications...
...His first notable political victory came in 1913 with his election to Bulgaria's Sobrania or parliament...
...according to which they would get a Soviet Bulgaria and IMRO an autonomous Macedonia...
...Moscow was in a dither...
...On a Sunday morning in June 1925, white the heads of the Bulgarian Government were attending services in Sofia Cathedral, a bomb placed beneath the building exploded, but caused no injuries...
...is a struggle for power...
...Kostov was charged with Titoism...
...The Communists proposed an alliance between themselves and IMRO...
...This, however, may have been nominal for, contrary to what one might expect, there were no visible signs of jealousy between the two at any time, e...
...But, when the "white terror" actually materialized, overthrew Stamboliisky, and set up an ultra-reactionary regime, the Communists proclaimed their neutrality, sat back and did nothing...
...With his passing, the last link with Bulgaria's "Old Bolsheviks" snapped...
...The early postwar years witnessed *he growth of Bulgaria's Communist party from 3,000 members during the war, to 26,000 in 1919 and 40,000 in 3922...
...KHOLAROV SPENT the following years in Russia...
...The Communist party of Bulgaria was born and a new era began...
...Four months later Pasha called an emergency IMRO conference at Gorno Djumaya to consider . renewed Communist Comitadji collaboration...
...Tito himself, simmering over the failure of Dimitrov and Kolarov to join him openly in his anti-Cominform revolt...
...Dimitrov, now Premier, and Kolarov, Vice Primier, found that Stalin wanted .more than ideological obedience and discipline...
...Stalin was master of the Balkans and Dimitrov fc Co...
...Kolarov died...
...Once more, Kolarov had bet on the wrong horse and lost...
...Before even the Plevna section could be rallied, Tsankov's troops entered the city and arrested the six local leaders...
...a STALIN DECLARED WAR on Bulgaria and invaded it in 1944...
...On the heels of tho conquering army, Dimitrov and Kolarov returned to the land which had hunted, jailed and exiled them twenty-one years before...
...The familiar Communist pater peccari did not avail Dimitrov for, on April 14...
...No party stood in greater readmess in 1919 than the Tesnyaki to join in the proclamation of the Third International...
...Kolarov's aide on this momentous occasion was a self-educated worker from Radomir—Georgi Dimitrov...
...Meanwhile, the reactionary National Democratic Alliance competed with the Communist party for IMRO backing...
...Traicho Kostov, First Deputy Premier and u follower of Dimitrov and Kolarov was removed from his post by the man who was then actual—and was soon to become also titular—ruler of Bulgaria, Vulko Chervenkov...
...Kostov was shot...
...Dimitrov, more energetic and less tntelUectual than Kolarov, his senor, was especially favored by Stalin, who made him Comintern Secretary-General after IhoBsMliilsg Mala, Kolarov Bulgarian CP...
...Dimitrov boasted that "It is in Bulgaria alone that all the attempts of the bourgeoisie to establish the white terror have been without avail...
...Blagoyev's death in 1924 Had thado Kolarov the acknowledged leader of the Bulgarian Communist party...
...is) not in this conflict...
...was between two bourgeois cliques to which the working class could afford to be neutral, can now see the best proof of their error by the bloody persecution of tho labor organisations.*' Kolarov was ordered to return seeretly to Bulgaria to prepare an immediate uprising against Tsankov...
...Accordingly, the leader of the IMRO's rightist majority, Todor Alexandrov, signed a secret IMRO-Communist pact, and the party laid its putsch plans...
...In spite of what had already happened, Kolarov persuaded the Balkan Communist Federation to adopt a pro1 MRO-posRion in its report of May 1, 1924, in which the Federation repeated a Bulgarian CP pledge that all efforts at another Macedonian minority exchange would be resisted by the Communists...
...On June 23, the Comintern Executive repudiated the Bulgarian party's defeatist manifesto and ordered it to go "forward into the battle against the white coup d'etat— Those who held the mistaken belief that the struggle...
...It was to remain prostrate for twenty years...
...Deaths of Last 'Old Leave Chervenkov Boss in Bulgaria By PYRRHUS J. RUCHES BULGARIA today it Stalin's Balkan pivot, the base of Soviet Intrigues for the conquest of the Near East, Stalin's success could bring the Bulgarian Communist army— alongside the Soviet army— to the gates of Salonika, or even Istanbul...
...Zinoviev bluntly asserted in lmprecorr (Comintern press organ), on October 10, 1923: "The Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist party did not grasp the call of the hour and proved incompetent for the rapid regrouping of forces which would have enabled it to joi.i hands with the peasants against the Whites...
...Filtering through the crowds wars many...
...Bulgaria was then a moderate dictatorship under Alexander Stamboliisky and the Agrarian party...
...somewhat erratically took It out on Rostov by accusing him of fascist and Tsarist sympathies at the very moment he wan being tried as a Titoistl Kolarov became a virtual prisoner...
...But when the National Democraitc Alliance chieftain, Dr...
...He demanded the pound of flesh which varf his tribute from a conquered enemy nation...
...Thus, the Tesnyaki became the first non-Russian Bolshevik party...
...At 1:45 in the afternoon of January 23, 1950, Vasil Kolarov—the last of four men who half century ago dreamed of communizing the Balkans—was dead...
...THE FOLLOWING DECADE was Kolarov's busiest...
...Action by the latter was thus paralyzed and the "white terror" was, in fact, unleashed...
...i *oIaroV was playing his last act baton: a packed house...
...Both he and Dimitrov atoned for their disgrace by attaching themselves to Joseph Stalin, who was then exterminating part/ opposition...
...Kolarov still counted on the left wing of IMRO led by Aleko Pasha...
...Blagoyev, the founder of RabocJiec, the first Marxist newspaper in the Russian capital and a graduate of St...
...Subsequently, Kolarov^wwr abroad to study in France and Switzer land, settling upon his return in 1900 at Philippopolis...
...He settled in Moscow in 1928, receiving the position of Director of the International (Communist) Agrarian Institute...
...In their moment of triumph, the Bulgarian leaders began to taste their bitterest defeat...
...Stalin's "comrade and beloved brother," Georgi Dimitrov, died in a Soviet sanatorium twenty miles from tho Kremlin...
...the attacks of armed bourgeois bands in Bulgaria, will shortly be overcome by the revolutionary trade union movement...
...The funeral cortege df Vasil Petrov Kolarov was an impressive thing...
...Pasha's followers thereupon (led to Vienna, where they set up a rival IMRO led by Dimitar Vlahov, (now Tito's Deputy Minister...
...A year later, the Rod Flag flew from the Black Sea to the Adriatic...
...The bomb plot was traced to two ex-CP members, Yekov and Minkov, who had long been repudiated by the party for their extremism...
...Attacks against the government by the Communists, who characterized Stamboliisky as "The Bulgarian Mussolini," became more frequent...
...On June 9, 1923, Tsankov's reactionaries, Alexandrov's IMRO faction, and a group of ultra-rightist army officers overthrew Stamboliisky and took him for a one-way ride...
...In and out of Sofia's prisons, he managed to hold onto this seat until 1923...
...Kolarov and Dimitrov, therefore, needing firm allies elsewhere, had sought an alliance with the IMRO, or Macedonian Comitttdji, the Balkan murder society which wanted to detach Bulgaria's, Yugoslavia's and Greece's Macedonian provinces anrl unite them into an independent country under IMRO leadership...
...The party was outlawed on December 12 and Central Committee member Khristov Kabakchev was thrown into prison...
...But the man who gave his life to make this passible will never see it...
...It was filled with trips abroad as delegate to international socialist conferences at Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910, to the Congresses of the old Second International and the Balkan Socialist Conferences before World War I. With Bulgaria's entrance into the war—opposed from the first by Lenin's Bulgarian comrades—the Tesnyaki permanently abandoned the Second International...
...The discussions ended in rioting between followers of Aleko Pasha and Todor Alexandrov in which those leaders were killed...
...Six days later, the Communist Central Committee declared that "the Communist party...
...That, however, did not deter the Bulgarian Ok hi una (secret police) from using the incident to.crush the last vestiges of Bulgarian Communism...
...Imprisoned and exiled time and again, Kolarov had spent fifty-three of his seventy two years in the service of world communism...
...because) it...
...stalwart plainclothesrnen...
...were his Bulgarian satraps...
...police to Constantinople, he organi^|jt|Knfirst socialist party in Bulgaria in 188OT^ohis party in 1897 came twentv-ycar^gn*sgfsi) Kolarov, then a student of law ""•%afcl*ji!t theory...
...The Sofia streets through, which it slowly passed were crowded with inhabitants...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 9
