Vasil Glavinov
Vasil Kostov Glavinov (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Васил Костов Главинов) (1868[1] or 1869[2] in Köprülü, now Veles – 1929 in Sofia) was a Bulgarian left-wing politician from Ottoman Macedonia, and an activist of the Bulgarian workers' movement.[3] Per post-WWII historiography in North Macedonia he was a Macedonian.[4][5][6]
Vasil Glavinov | |
---|---|
Born | 1868 or 1869 Köprülü, Ottoman Empire (now Veles, North Macedonia) |
Died | 1929 Sofia, Bulgaria |
Occupation | socialist politician |
Life
Glavinov studied in his native Veles by the local Bulgarian national revival activist Yordan Hadzhikonstantinov-Dzhinot.[7] Then he worked here, before moving to Sofia in 1887. There he found employment in a brickworks, but later he went bankrupt, owing to the financial support which he gave to the first Bulgarian theatre troupe. In July 1891 on the initiative of Dimitar Blagoev, several social democratic circles united to form the Bulgarian Socialdemocratic Party (BSDP). In 1892 Glavinov became acquainted with Dimitar Blagoev's exposition of the Marxist view of history and in 1894 he entered the new Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party. In the same year, under Vasil Glavinov's leadership and in order of Blagoev, the first Social-Democratic group in Ottoman Macedonia was formed.
In 1896 Glavinov founded a Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Social-Democratic Union, as part of the Bulgarian Workers' Social-Democrat Party.[8] The last idea was probably influenced by the League for the Balkan Confederation, created in 1894 by Balkan socialists, which supported Macedonian autonomy inside a general federation of Southeast Europe. In Sofia Glavinov edited several Socialist papers. He met there one of the leaders of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO) Gotse Delchev and both became a friends. Glavinov and Delchev were feeling the lack of funds, and both decided to steal a money from Bulgarian Posts. Their friend Zlatarev took 28,000 leva from the post-office in Kyustendil and fled over the border into Ottoman Macedonia. He had passed on 25,000 leva to Glavinov and his relative Kiprov, to give it to Delchev. The IMARO didn't received the money. Glavinov maintained that both had buried the leva near a river which had subsequently flooded the area and carried it away.[9]
The first Conference of Macedonian Socialists was held on June 3, 1900, near Krushevo, where the activities of Vasil Glavinov's political group defined the basic aspects of the creation of Macedonian republic as a part of Balkan Socialist Federation. This "federative Macedonian republic," (some kind of Switzerland on the Balkans), would be with a cantonal organization, with separate territorial units for all the "national elements" living there.[10] However it would be exaggerated to see in this Macedonian socialist group an expression of national separatism. The “Adrianopolitan” part of the group's name shows its close relationship to the Thracian Bulgarians.[11] The designation Macedonian according to the then used ethnic terminology included different local ethnic groups,[12] and when applied to the local Slavs, it meant a regional Bulgarian identity.[13] During the beginning of the 20th century Glavinov was politically active in Sofia. He was arrested as one of the main organizers of the 1st May Day demonstrations in Sofia in 1902. In 1904-1905 he became more active as leader of the Macedonian-Adrianople Socialist Group.
After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he moved back to the Ottoman Empire and initially gravitated around the People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section). The newspaper "Rabotnicheska Iskra" (Worker's Spark), edited by him, described the two rivaling Bulgarian parties in the Ottoman Empire at the time: the PFP (Bulgarian Section) and the Union of the Bulgarian Constitutional Clubs. According to the newspaper, both of the parties, the former a defender of the poorer Bourgeois, the latter - of the richer, were nationalist and were led by desires of unification with Bulgaria. Because of that, Glavinov was disappointed and entered the Ottoman Socialist Party in Salonica in 1910. It was actually not a real political party, but rather a group of intellectuals. In the same year he participated also in the First Balkan Socialist Conference held in Belgrade, which important aspect was the call for a solution to the Macedonian Question. After the Young Turks had taken stringent measures against it, difficult times began for the Ottoman Socialist Party. As a consequence, on the eve of the Balkan Wars in 1911 Glavinov moved back to Sofia, where he joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Narrow Socialists).
During the Balkan wars and World War I, he was a member of the leadership of the Narrow Socialists' Organization in Sofia and of the leadership of its trade union organization.[14] Here he opposed the Balkan Wars and World War I and was sympathetic to the October Revolution in Russia. In 1919 his Narrow Socialists joined the Comintern and were reorganised as the Bulgarian Communist Party. In 1920 Glavinov was elected as a member of the Central Emigrant's Commission to the Central Committee of the Party. He was arrested several times after the 1923 Bulgarian coup d'état. After the St Nedelya Church assault on 16 April 1925 he was arrested again and afterwards Glavinov withdrеw from active political life. He died in Sofia in 1929.
References
- Bechev, Dimitar (2009). Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia. Scarecrow. p. 85. ISBN 9780810862951.
- "Glavinov, Vasil". Hrvatska Enciklopedija.
- Freedom or death, the life of Gotsé Delchev, Mercia MacDermott, Journeyman Press, 1978, ISBN 0-904526-32-1, p. 87.
- Because in many documents of 19th and early 20th century period, the local Slavic population is not referred to as "Macedonian" but as "Bulgarian", Macedonian historians argue that it was Macedonian, regardless of what is written in the records. For more see: Ulf Brunnbauer, “Serving the Nation: Historiography in the Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) after Socialism“, Historien, Vol. 4 (2003-4), pp. 161-182.
- Numerous prominent activists with pro-Bulgarian sentiments from the 19th and early 20th centuries are described in Macedonian textbooks as ethnic Macedonians. Macedonian researchers claim that "Bulgarian" at that time was a term, not related to any ethnicity, but was used as a synonym for "Slavic", "Christian" or "peasant". Chris Kostov, Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900-1996, Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 3034301960, p. 92.
- Yugoslav Communists recognized the existence of a Macedonian nationality during WWII to quiet fears of the Macedonian population that a communist Yugoslavia would continue to follow the former Yugoslav policy of forced Serbianization. Hence, for them to recognize the inhabitants of Macedonia as Bulgarians would be tantamount to admitting that they should be part of the Bulgarian state. For that the Yugoslav Communists were most anxious to mold Macedonian history to fit their conception of Macedonian consciousness. The treatment of Macedonian history in Communist Yugoslavia had the same primary goal as the creation of the Macedonian language: to de-Bulgarize the Macedonian Slavs and to create a separate national consciousness that would inspire identification with Yugoslavia. For more see: Stephen E. Palmer, Robert R. King, Yugoslav communism and the Macedonian question, Archon Books, 1971, ISBN 0208008217, Chapter 9: The encouragement of Macedonian culture.
- Clarke, James Franklin (1988); Dennis P. Hupchick (ed.) The pen and the sword: studies in Bulgarian history. East European Monographs. ISBN 0-88033-149-6, p. 140.
- The politics of terror: the Macedonian liberation movements, 1893–1903, Duncan M. Perry, Duke University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-8223-0813-4, p. 172.
- Добрин Мичев, Национално-освободителното движение на македонските и тракийските българи 1878-1944, Том 2, Македонски научен институт. 1995, ISBN 9548187256, стр. 167.
- We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 963-9776-28-9, p. 122.
- "It would nevertheless be far-fetched to see in the Macedonian socialism an expression of national ideology... It is difficult to place the local socialist articulation of the national and social question of the late 19th and early 20th centuries entirely under the categories of today's Macedonian and Bulgarian nationalism. If Bulgarian historians today condemn the "national-nihilistic" positions of that group, their Macedonian colleagues seem frustrated by the fact that it was not "conscious" enough of Macedonians' distinct ethnic character." Entangled Histories of the Balkans – Volume Two, Roumen Daskalov, Diana Mishkova, BRILL, 2013, ISBN 9004261915, p. 503.
- "The IMARO activists saw the future autonomous Macedonia as a multinational polity, and did not pursue the self-determination of Macedonian Slavs as a separate ethnicity. Therefore, Macedonian was an umbrella term covering Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Vlachs, Albanians, Serbs, Jews, and so on." Bechev, Dimitar. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Historical Dictionaries of Europe, Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 0810862956, Introduction.
- During the 20th century, Slavo-Macedonian national feeling shifted. At the beginning of the 20th century, Slavic patriots in Macedonia felt a strong attachment to Macedonia as a multi-ethnic homeland... Most of these Macedonian Slavs also saw themselves as Bulgarians. By the middle of the 20th. century, however Macedonian patriots began to see Macedonian and Bulgarian loyalties as mutually exclusive. Regional Macedonian nationalism had become ethnic Macedonian nationalism... This transformation shows that the content of collective loyalties can shift. Klaus Roth, Ulf Brunnbauer. Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe, Ethnologia Balkanica Series. LIT Verlag Münster, 2010, ISBN 3825813878, p. 127.
- Коминтернът и България (март 1919 – септември 1944), том ІІ Документи, Главно управление на архивите при Министерския съвет, Архивите говорят №37, София, 2005, стр. 1157.