Dimitar Vlahov

Dimitar Vlahov (; ; 8 November 1878 – 7 April 1953) was a politician, communist activist and member of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) from the region of Macedonia. Vlahov was a member of the Ottoman Parliament, as well as a member and co-founder of People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section). He was a co-founder and leader of IMRO (United). After World War II, he took part in the government of the newly established SR Macedonia and SFR Yugoslavia. In 1946, he lost his political influence.

Life

Early life He was born on 8 November 1878 in Kılkış (Bulgarian/Macedonian Kukush/Kukuš), Ottoman Empire (present-day Greece). Vlahov attended the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. He also studied chemistry in Germany and Switzerland, He became a member of the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party. In the academic year 1903/1904, he was a teacher at the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki and a co-opted member of the Central Committee of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). After the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, he was briefly detained by the Ottoman authorities. He had criticized the anti-labor policies of the Unionists in the Parliament. Vlahov also opposed Sandanski's revolutionary tactics and favored cooperation with the ruling Young Turks, seeing it as necessary for the party's survival. He was criticized by party's members because of his lack of activity in resolving the national question.

Since 1911 he had been a member of the Thessaloniki Socialist Federation, president of the First Congress of Tobacco Workers in Macedonia, and the Kukush district elected him a member of the Thessaloniki Provincial Council in 1912. He worked as a Bulgarian consul in Odessa in 1914–1915. During the First World War, in 1916, he was appointed governor of the Prishtina district, then under Bulgarian rule. He also became the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Varna in the same year, serving until 1923. The signatories and other left-wing activists were later assassinated. He also edited IMRO (United)'s newspaper Makedonsko delo (Macedonian Cause). In 1930, the newspaper La Fédération Balkanique, which was edited by him, criticized the theory about the ethnicity of the Macedonian Slavs by Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić and viewed the majority of the Macedonian population as Bulgarian. In 1932 members of IMRO (United) put for the first time the issue of the recognition of a separate Macedonian nation in a lecture in Moscow. In the 1920s Vlahov, as well as the IMRO (United), had referred to the Macedonian Slavs as Bulgarians, but by the 1930s, his views changed and he recognized a separate Macedonian ethnicity, based on the Marxist theories on nationhood, as a product of the advent of capitalism to Macedonia in the 19th century. The wording of the 1934 Comintern resolution was apparently formulated by a Polish communist who had little knowledge of the Macedonian Question and Vlahov assisted him. In 1941, he disseminated Soviet war propaganda to the Balkans, especially Greece. According to Samuil Bernstein, who attended a conference of the Slavic Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union during the war, Vlahov reported in the conference that "the Slavic population of Macedonia is Bulgarian, and its history is an organic part of the history of Bulgaria, but in the 19th century the process of separating the Macedonians into an independent nation began."

On 5 October 1944, he left Moscow with his son Gustav and through Craiova they reached Belgrade and then Vardar Macedonia. He was a delegate in the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia and a member of its presidium.

Works and views He wanted the democratization of the Ottoman Empire.

Vlahov also wrote that the Macedonians had participated with the Bulgarians historically in common causes. He also claimed that modern Macedonians came from a fusion of Slavs with the ancient Macedonians, that Samuel of Bulgaria's empire was a Macedonian state, and that Cyril and Methodius were Macedonians' gift to Slavism.

Legacy In the original version of the song Today over Macedonia from 1941, his name was mentioned in the lyrics. At the end of the war, it was utilized as the regional anthem of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, but during the Informbiro period, his name was removed from the lyrics. Macedonian historians have emphasized the particularity of the IMRO's left-wing and they refer to the actions by him and other leftists in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of Macedonian ethnicity or at least proto-ethnicity within a part of the local revolutionary movement at his time.

Footnotes