# Dimitar Vlahov

Dimitar Vlahov (Bulgarian: Димитър Влахов; Macedonian: Димитар Влахов; 8 November 1878 – 7 April 1953) was a politician from the region of Macedonia and member of the left wing of the Macedonian-Adrianople revolutionary movement (also known as Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO)). 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. Vlahov declared himself until the early 1930s as a Bulgarian and afterwards as an ethnic Macedonian.

## Life

He was born in Kılkış (Bulgarian/Macedonian Kukush, in present-day Greece) and attended the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. After that he emigrated to the Principality of Bulgaria and graduated from secondary school in Belogradtchik. Vlahov also studied chemistry in Germany and Switzerland, where he also took part in socialist circles. However, he graduated in these subjects from Sofia University. Here he enrolled in the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party. In 1903, Vlahov entered a military service in the reserve officer's school in Sofia. Then he worked as a teacher in the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki where he was active in IMRO. During this period, he was arrested by the Ottoman authorities. In 1905, Vlahov was released and went back to Bulgaria where he worked as a teacher in Kazanlak. In 1908, after the Young Turks revolution he began working in the Bulgarian secondary school in Thessaloniki again.
In the following years, Vlahov was politically active as a deputy in the Ottoman Parliament as a representative of the People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section). After the dissolution of this party in 1911, he became a member of the Ottoman Socialist Party and in 1912 he was again elected as a deputy to the Ottoman Parliament. During the Balkan Wars, on the recommendation of Simeon Radev, he was appointed head of the consular department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sofia. He was then sent as Bulgarian consul to Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire. During the First World War, as a reserve officer, he was appointed governor of the Shtip and Prishtina districts, then under Bulgarian rule. Later he represented the Kingdom of Bulgaria in high diplomatic and administrative positions in Odessa, Kiev and Vienna. When IMRO was re-established in 1920, Vlahov was elected as an alternate member of its Central Committee, representing the left wing. At that time he was secretary of the Varna Chamber of Commerce. Todor Alexandrov urged him to establish contact between IMRO and Soviet Russia. Krastyo Rakovski, his best man and a prominent figure in the Comintern, served as his messenger. On behalf of IMRO, Vlahov left in July 1923 for Moscow. Thus, in 1924, IMRO started negotiations in Vienna with the Comintern on collaboration between the communists and the Macedonian movement in establishing a united Macedonian revolutionary movement. Vlahov assisted in the adoption of the so called May Manifesto on the formation of a Balkan Communist Federation and cooperation with the Soviet Union. After the subsequent rift between the Organization and the Comintern, the new leadership led by Ivan Mihailov excluded him from IMRO and he was sentenced to death. In 1925, he was one of the founders of IMRO (United) in Vienna. He also became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. At the end of the 1920s he worked in France, Germany and Austria as a Comintern publicist. During this period he was pursued by IMRO and several failed assassination attempts were organized against him. In 1930, he 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. The question was also studied in the highest institutions of the Comintern and in the autumn of 1933, Dimitar Vlahov arrived in Moscow and took part in a number of meetings. Thus on 11 January 1934, the Political Secretariat of the Comintern adopted a special Resolution on the Macedonian Question. Vlahov's intervention seemed key in the adoption of this resolution since it was doubtful that the Comintern had such a clear vision of the identity issues in Macedonia. According to historian Elisabeth Barker, there was widespread belief that he was a communist agent because he accepted the Comintern's decision without a reaction. From 1936 to 1944, Vlahov lived in the Soviet Union. In November 1943, Vlahov participated in the Second Session of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia and was elected in the presidium representing Aegean Macedonia. In November 1944 he returned to the newly liberated Skopje in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia within new Yugoslavia, where he worked in high state and political positions and became a member of the Communist Party of Macedonia. On 26 November, at the First Conference of the National Liberation Front of Macedonia, he was elected its president, and at the Second Session of Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) in December he was elected a member of the Presidium of ASNOM. At the Third Session of ASNOM in April 1945 he became a member of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Macedonia.
Post-war, Vlahov argued that Macedonians had "all the elements" that make a nation. In his 1950 book Macedonia-Comments of the History of the Macedonian People, he 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, among other assertions. In July 1950, Vlahov was elected in the Committee for Foreign Affairs for members of the Federal Council as part of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Yugoslavia.
Per Ivan Katardzhiev in 1948 on a meeting of the Central committee of the Macedonian Communist Party he claimed that the decision by the IMRO (United) from 1932 on the formation of a separate Macedonian ethnicity and language was a political mistake. Based on Katardziev's opinion, Stefan Dechev maintains that Vlahov's pro-Bulgarian sentiments had remained after WWII. Later his name was removed from the Macedonian anthem. Afterwards he was gradually pushed out of his power positions from the pro-Yugoslav circle around Lazar Kolishevski. Vlahov was dismissed, because he communicated much better in Bulgarian than in Macedonian and had little political support in SR Macedonia, among other reasons. He died in Belgrade in 1953.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Though, in the 1920s Vlahov, as well as the IMRO-U as a whole, still defined the Slavs of Macedonia as Bulgarians, by the 1930s his views had evolved in support of a separate Macedonian ethnic nation that he saw, faithful to the Marxist theories on nationhood, as a product of the advent of capitalism to Macedonia in the 19th century rather than a primordial fact. For more see: Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, p. 235.
* ↑ From 1934 to 1944, the family of Dimitar Vlahov, a Bulgarian political activist from Macedonia, activist of IMARO, IMRO, IMRO (United), BCP and the Comintern, resided in the Soviet Union. It included his wife Maria and their son Gustav. At that time, D. Vlahov was recruited to work in the structures of the Comintern in Moscow, and his relatives were also employed in the Soviet capital. Documents stored in the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History reveal embarrassing differences in determining the nationality of the individual representatives of the otherwise joint family at the time. D. Vlahov and his wife Maria presented themselves as ethnic Macedonians, while in documents written or filled out by himself, their son Gustav indicated that he was a Bulgarian citizen and wrote “Bulgarian” in the nationality column. G. Vlahov’s long declared Bulgarian nationality did not prevent him later from making accusations against Bulgaria and its politics. In statements, forgetting his declared nationality in writing, he claims that he felt more Macedonian than his parents, who once defined themselves as Bulgarians. For more: Войнова, Н. Чуждестранните почетни членове на Македонския научен институт от Западна Европа и делото в защита на българската национална кауза. В: Българите в Западните Балкани (100 години преди и след Ньой). Сборник с доклади от научна конференция (09 ноември 2020 г.) и национална кръгла маса (20 ноември 2022 г.), проведени в София. С., 2023, Издание на Института за исторически изследвания при Българска академия на науките, с. 102–132. ISBN 978-954-2903-76-5.
* ↑ Diana Mishkova; Roumen Daskalov, eds. (2013). Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Two: Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions. Brill. p. 512. ISBN 9789004261914.
* ↑ Произходът на македонската нация - Стенограма от заседание на Македонския Научен Институт в София през 1947 г.
* ↑ Мемоари на Димитър Влахов. Скопје, 1970, стр. 356.
* ↑ Diana Mishkova; Roumen Daskalov (2013). Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Two. p. 517. ISBN 978-9004261914.
* ↑ Klaus Roth; Ulf Brunnbauer, eds. (2008). Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe. LIT Verlag Münster. p. 142. ISBN 9783825813871.
* ↑ Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question And The Macedonians. Taylor & Francis. p. 91.
* ↑ Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question And The Macedonians. Taylor & Francis. pp. 171–172.
* ↑ Академик Катарџиев, Иван. Верувам во националниот имунитет на македонецот, интервју за списание "Форум", 22 jули 2000, број 329.
* ↑ As the historian Ivan Katardziev pointed out many years ago, even the veterans of the left-wing IMRO (United) in the second half of the 1940s "remained only at the level of political and not national separatism." In this sense, we can say that today's definition of Macedonian national identity necessarily went through Yugoslav socialization and overt anti-Bulgarianism, and this certainly also goes through a historical narrative from Yugoslav times, which seriously ignores historical facts. Not by chance, speaking of personalities like Dimitar Vlahov or Pavel Shatev, Katardziev adds: "They practically felt like Bulgarians. For more: "Стефан Дечев: Две държава, две истории, много „истини“ и една клета наука - трета част. Marginalia, 15.06.2018.
* ↑ In conclusion, Gotse and IMRO were "children of the Exarchate", and the later ethnic Macedonia was mostly the creation of an young generation brought up from the end of the 20s of the 20th century in Belgrade or Zagreb, who had a different sensibility. The old IMRO people were not like that. It is not by chance that the distinguished historian Ivan Katardziev in an interview from the late 90s said that even one Dimitar Vlahov until the end of his life could not feel what it means to be an ethnic Macedonian, he remained with the old political Macedonianism of Gotse Delchev and Yane Sandanski, who is a very Bulgarian phenomenon. For more: Стефан Дечев: Дори македонските тълкувания за езика от Средновековието и 19 в. да са тенденциозни, защо да е невъзможно да се признае съществуването на стандартен македонски книжовен език? Marginalia, 17.12.2019.
* ↑ Pål Kolstø, Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe, Routledge, 2016, ISBN 1317049365, p. 188.
* ↑ Andrew Rossos, Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History; Hoover Institution Press Publication, Hoover Press, 2013, ISBN 081794883X, p. 238.