Georgi Dimitrov

Июль 24, 2022

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2. The Comintern: Institutions and people Dr Nikolaos Papadatos, University of Geneva Global Studies Institute Email: nikolaos.papadatos@unige.ch
3. INDEX 1 Georgi Dimitrov: Biography 2 Dimitrov and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party 3 Dimitron and
4. Georgi Dimitrov: Biography Georgi Dimitrov was born on 18 June 1882 (o.s.) in the village of
5. Macedonia was restored to the Ottomans, its Pirin area having been subdued after an uprising centered
6. Expelled two years later, Dimitrov then became an apprentice in the printing house of Ivan Tsutsev.
7. Dimitrov and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party Dimitrov soon fell under the sway of Bulgarian Social
8. They where expressing mainly three different approaches: Blagoev distrusted the peasantry as a dangerous petit bourgeois
9. He was a secretary at the ORSS founding congress, served on its General Workers’ Council, and
10. Dimitron and the Balkan wars In October 1908 Bulgaria proclaimed its independence from the Ottoman Empire.
11. The tesniaks put up a determined campaign for peace and a Balkan federation. Dimitrov, who had
12. Dimitrov and the other tesniak deputies repeatedly voted against the war credits. The party joined the
13. Taking on the assignment, Stamboliski nevertheless formed a common cause with Blagoev, on the argument that
14. Dimitrov was elected to the Communist CC. The party’s program, for all its Leninist overtones, remained
15. Dimitrov, during the strike action of 1919–1920, he went underground with the BKP leadership. In June
16. In February 1921 Dimitrov finally made it to Moscow, where he met Lenin and represented the
17. Given Blagoev’s illness and advanced age and Kolarov’s absence in Moscow, it was Kabakchiev and Dimitrov
18. After news of the planned insurgency was leaked to the Tsankov government, it ordered the arrest,
19. Moreover, the exiled leadership of Kolarov and Dimitrov— the Foreign Committee, which soon removed to Vienna—
20. He represented the BKP and the Balkan Communist Federation at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern
21. When the Foreign Bureau of the BKP was reconstituted in Moscow, in August 1930, Dimitrov was
22. It was under these circumstances that the ECCI sent Dimitrov to Germany, where he acted as
23. More precisely: On 27 February 1933, in the midst of a violent election campaign, the Reichstag
24. Meanwhile, Dimitrov, two other Bulgarian Communists (Blagoi Popov and Vasil Tanev), as well as the principal
25. Dimitrov’s defense had four important elements. despite enormous obstacles placed in his way by the judges,
26. Finally, he criticized the Social Democratic leaders, Dimitrov exacted from Goebbels the admission that the Nazis
27. In fact, by 1 April Stalin was already encouraging him to strike against the “incorrect” views
28. Germany’s growing strength and aggressiveness—her denunciation of the disarmament clauses in the Versailles treaty and Hitler’s
29. Dimitrov stressed that fascism was a “substitution of one state form of class domination of the
30. Dimitrov dominated the congress so thoroughly that his elevation to the position of the Comintern’s secretary-general
32. Comintern: between internationalism and “nationalism” Stalin freely expressed a hierarchy of nationality preferences. He argued that
33. Under the circumstances, it is not unusual to encounter certain lesser Communists promoting specific national aspirations
34. According to one letter sent by Dimitrov to Stalin on 1 July 1934: “III. Regarding the
35. The decision of Comintern’s dissolution was taken as early as April 1941, when the USSR was
36. Dimitrov immediately took Stalin’s idea “of discontinuing the activities of the ECCI as a leadership body
37. The German attack on the Soviet Union appeared to give the Comintern a new lease on
38. The Soviet agencies were taking over parts of the Comintern operations, Stalin initially being more worries
39. Likewise, the Red Army Intelligence Directorate took its cut a day later. But the unkindest cut
40. An example of this policy: Let’s see the archives “STRICTLY SECRET SUBJECT TO RETURN WITHIN 48
41. A group of Iranian Communists, former political prisoners, has begun to revive the Communist Party of
42. Considering the special conditions of Iran (joint occupation with the British, the democratic and subversive work
43. 3. Strengthening friendly relations between Iran and the Soviet Union; 4. Completely eradicating the agent network
44. In fact, although Dimitrov protected various foreign Communists after 1939—for example, his secretary Kozovski—he certainly cooperated
45. Dimitrov’s approach to this issue went through several phases. In Dimitrov’s letter to Tito (1 June
46. In the spring of 1944 Dimitrov maintained that the Macedonians were a populace (население), an ethnic
47. Tito “to explain to the Maced[onian] comrades that to all intents and purposes they ought not
48. They want Albania, too, and even parts of Austria and Hungary. This is unreasonable. I do
49. The Yugoslavs kept pursuing the exchange of Pirin Macedonia for the “western borderlands,” that is, the
50. The Soviet party organ Pravda publicly disavowed Dimitrov’s remarks on 29 January. Stalin now argued, albeit
51. Dimitrov certainly smarted from Stalin’s lashes of February 1948. This was the lowest point in his
52. His most obvious human failing was a curiously discreet sort of vainglory that promoted his historical
53. Back in Moscow in 1934, he seems to have broken up with Kiti Jovanovic´, an emigre
54. Georgi Dimitrov died in Moscow on 2 July 1949. He was succeeded in his duties by
55. Archives: Documents
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The Comintern: Institutions and people
Dr Nikolaos Papadatos, University of Geneva
Global Studies

Institute
Email: nikolaos.papadatos@unige.ch

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INDEX
1 Georgi Dimitrov: Biography
2 Dimitrov and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party
3

Dimitron and the Balkan wars
4 Dimitrov and the Komintern
5 Dimitrov in Germany
6 Dimitrov and the popular front
7 Comintern: between internationalism and nationalism
8 The last period of the Comintern
9 Dimitrov and the Balkans
10 Conclusion
11 Archives: Documents

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Georgi Dimitrov: Biography
Georgi Dimitrov was born on 18 June 1882 (o.s.)

in the village of Kovachevtsi, near Radomir, some sixty-four kilometers west of Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. His parents were from Pirin Macedonia—the northeastern part of Macedonia, which the Ottomans had recognized in 1878 as part of the autonomous Principality of Bulgaria, under the Ottoman sovereignty. This concession, part of the Treaty of San Stefano (3 March 1878), was the consequence of a military defeat that Russia had inflicted on the Ottoman Empire in a war waged in the support of Bulgarian insurgents (1877–1878). At the ensuing Congress of Berlin (June–July 1878) the European statesmen reduced Russia’s gains and the territory of autonomous Bulgaria.

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Macedonia was restored to the Ottomans, its Pirin area having been

subdued after an uprising centered in the towns of Kresna and Razlog. Many Macedonians then fled to the Principality of Bulgaria, among them the twenty-seven-year-old Dimituˇ r Mikhailov Trenchov of Razlog, who settled in Kovachevtsi, on a tributary of the Struma River. The family of the seventeen-year-old Parashkeva Doseva from Bansko, a town on the Pirin Range, had settled in Kovachevtsi a few years earlier, having fled, too, from Ottoman repression. Mikhailov and Doseva were married three years later. Georgi Dimitrov was their oldest son. The family soon moved to Radomir and then to Sofia.
Dimitur Mikhailov learned the hat-making trade from his brother in-law, who, like Doseva, belonged to a small group of Bulgarians that had been won over to Protestantism by American missionaries. The Protestant ethic evidently determined the life of the hatter’s family, which drew a modest income from Dimitur’s fur-hat shop. That ethic also figured in Georgi’s initial rebellion. His mother wanted him to become a pastor and in 1892 had him attend Sunday school classes at the missionary chapel.

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Expelled two years later, Dimitrov then became an apprentice in the

printing house of Ivan Tsutsev. Soon afterward he printed an anti-religious broadsheet titled Kukurigu (Cock-a-Doodle- Doo) and distributed it by stealth at the church after the Sunday service. Still, an echo of a youthful allegiance remained.
The Dimitrovs, a family of working-class militants, seem to have had an affinity for printers’ ink. Konstantin, like his older brother Georgi, was a printer by trade and a union activist. Nikola, who moved to Russia, was a member of the Bolshevik Odessa organization and died in exile in Siberia in 1916.
Todor, an underground activist of the BKP Sofia organization, was arrested and killed by the royal police in 1925. The elder of his two sisters, Magdalina (Lina), was married to the printer Stefan Hristov Baruˇmov. The younger, Elena (Lena), followed Dimitrov into exile, where she married another exiled Bulgarian Communist, Vulko Chervenkov, Dimitrov’s successor at the helm of the BKP.

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Dimitrov and the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party
Dimitrov soon fell under the

sway of Bulgarian Social Democracy. He read the works of Dimitur Blagoev (1856–1924), the leading Bulgarian Marxist, who as a student at St. Petersburg founded the first Marxist organization in Russia—the Party of Russian Social Democrats, in 1883–1884. Dimitrov then studied G. V. Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) and the works of Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky, and V. I. Lenin.
The Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, established in 1901, soon became a battlefield for fractional interests. The pursuit of purely proletarian class politics was difficult in an agrarian country whose margin of industrial workers would rise to no more than twenty thousand by 1909.
The two factions of the party: Dimitur Blagoev’s (tesniaks) against the (shiroki) led by Yanko Sakuzov.

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They where expressing mainly three different approaches:
Blagoev distrusted the peasantry as

a dangerous petit bourgeois influence on the party. Mistrust of the peasantry in a land of countless peasant smallholders became also the mark of the Tesniaks—members of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (Tesniaks Socialists), or BRSDP(t.s.)—and later of their Communist successors.
Blagoev opposed the idea that the trade unions could be independent of the party and pursue purely economic goals. He argued for the political nature of trade union struggle and party control.
Blagoev rejected the idea of coalitions with nonsocialist parties, including the newly formed Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS).
Dimitrov was received into the party in the spring of 1902 and from the beginning identified with the tesniak faction. Dimitrov was a delegate to the BRSDP(t.s.) congress (July 1904) at Plovdiv, where it was decided to form the party-affiliated General Federation of Trade Unions (ORSS).

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He was a secretary at the ORSS founding congress, served on

its General Workers’ Council, and in August 1904 became the secretary of its Sofia council. A protege of Georgi Kirkov, Blagoev’s closest associate, who was responsible for the work of the trade unions, Dimitrov was soon elected secretary of the BRSDP(t.s.) Sofia organization.
Active in the tesniak operations against the “anarcho-liberals”—the party faction that resisted Blagoev’s “bureaucratic centralism”—he was arrested in the course of the Pernik miners’ strike (June–July 1906). At this time he married Ljubica (Ljuba) Ivosˇevic´ (1880–1933), a Serbian seamstress, proletarian poet, and trade union activist, whom Dimitrov met at Sliven in 1903.

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Dimitron and the Balkan wars
In October 1908 Bulgaria proclaimed its independence

from the Ottoman Empire. Prince Ferdinand, who used the occasion to assume the title of tsar, felt threatened by the Young Turk revolutionary regime that had overthrown the autocracy in July 1908 and established a parliament in Istanbul, to which the Bulgarian deputies, too, were invited. This was the overture to a series of Balkan conflicts that would reflect the interests of regional mini-imperialisms and their sponsors among the Powers.
In 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria joined Greece and Montenegro in a war against the Turks (October 1912–May 1913). The Balkan allies scored a convincing victory but then fell out among themselves over the division of Ottoman possessions in Europe. In the Second Balkan War (June –July 1913), the bulk of the allies, now joined by Romania and Turkey, attacked Bulgaria and, after a series of debilitating defeats, wrested from it portions of newly acquired territories in Macedonia and Thrace, as well as parts of Bulgarian Dobruja. In these two wars Bulgaria lost 58,000 soldiers, an additional 105,000 being wounded.

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The tesniaks put up a determined campaign for peace and a

Balkan federation. Dimitrov, who had been admitted to the BRSDP(t.s.) Central Committee (CC) in 1909 and to the secretary ship of the ORSS in 1910, having been subjected to several arrests and a brief prison term afterward, now entered the parliament along with practically the whole tesniak leadership in the elections of 1913 and 1914. He served as the secretary of the tesniak parliamentary group. In May 1914 he also became a member of the Sofia municipal council. But the greatest challenges still lay ahead, beginning with the war crisis of 1914.
At the beginning of the First World War the Bulgarian government carefully weighed the prospects of the warring alliances, in hopes of siding with the winner and thereby regaining the territories lost in the Second Balkan War and, if possible, to increasing them. In September 1915 Tsar Ferdinand finally became convinced that the Central Powers would prevail. Bulgaria mobilized and attacked Serbia within a month. The BRSDP(t.s.) took a consistently antiwar stance throughout the hostilities.

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Dimitrov and the other tesniak deputies repeatedly voted against the war

credits. The party joined the Zimmerwald movement and sided with Lenin on everything except on demands for a new International. Dimitrov’s personal commitment to internationalism was expressed in his parliamentary speeches in which he condemned the Bulgarian army’s savage repression of the Serbian insurgents in the Toplica district, west of Nisˇ, in February 1917. During the summer of 1917, at Tuˇ rnovo, Dimitrov defended a group of wounded soldiers, who had been set upon by a raging colonel in an officers’ railway compartment. Dimitrov was prosecuted for inciting disobedience, stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and imprisoned on 29 August 1918.
By September 1918, as soldiers started agitating for the cessation of hostilities, the Allies breached the Salonika front and crushed the Bulgarian defenses in Macedonia. In the ensuing stampede the retreating soldiers, calling for peace and a new government, proceeded to Sofia. Ferdinand called upon the Agrarian leader Aleksandur Stamboliski (1879–1923), whom he released from prison, to pacify the approaching mutineers.

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Taking on the assignment, Stamboliski nevertheless formed a common cause with

Blagoev, on the argument that the tesniaks and the BZNS, the leading Bulgarian opposition party, could jointly establish a democratic republic. True to his anti-peasant stand, Blagoev turned down the offer. Stamboliski wavered, proceeded to the insurgent camp at Radomir, argued for an end to the insurrection, and then, on 28 September, accepted the presidency of the insurgent republic and the resumption of the march to Sofia.
The Radomir republic ended almost as soon as it started. On 28 September Bulgaria sued for peace, armistice was signed, and Ferdinand was obliged to abdicate, to be succeeded by his son, Boris III (1894–1943). The imprisoned Dimitrov was uninvolved in these decisions. It was later claimed that he had transmitted a written recommendation to the BRSDP CC that favored unwavering involvement in the uprising. Not that the Radomir incident hurt the tesniaks. The party renamed itself the Bulgarian Communist Party (Narrow Socialists), or BKP(t.s.), in May 1919 and then made its peace with the Comintern.

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Dimitrov was elected to the Communist CC. The party’s program, for

all its Leninist overtones, remained Blagoevist—particularly in its intransigence toward peasant views.
The Communists did not accept Stamboliski’s invitation to join a coalition government. Nor did they support the Treaty of Neuilly (27 November 1919), the peace agreement signed by Stamboliski that deprived Bulgaria of considerable territory (Thrace, pivots on the Yugoslav border) and imposed heavy reparations on the country. After the strikes of 1919–1920, the Communists eyed Stamboliski’s government with increased distaste. Stamboliski, who admittedly relied on a club-wielding peasant paramilitary force, the Orange Guard, was called the Balkan Mussolini.
On 9 June 1923, the anti-Stamboliski coalition of right-wing officers moved against the government to overthrow it and then murdered the prime minister. The BKP CC, in an official proclamation, called the putsch “an armed struggle . . . between the urban and rural bourgeoisies.”

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Dimitrov, during the strike action of 1919–1920, he went underground with

the BKP leadership. In June 1920, together with Vasil Kolarov (1877–1950), Blagoev’s second-in-command, he attempted to reach the Soviet Union in a fishing boat that lost its way in a storm and was captured by the Romanian border guards in Dobruja.
Released in July, he made a second attempt in December 1920, this time by way of Vienna. Obliged to wait for passage to Moscow, he went to Livorno, Italy, to attend the congress of the Italian Socialist Party (15 January 1921), where he observed the Comintern’s splittist strategy against the Socialist leadership.
Dimitrov’s colleague Hristo Kabakchiev (1878–1940), the leading intellectual of the BKP, represented the Comintern at Livorno. His efforts and those of the Italian leftists produced a split and the emergence of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

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In February 1921 Dimitrov finally made it to Moscow, where he

met Lenin and represented the BKP at the Fourth All-Russian Trade Union Congress (May 1921) and the Third Congress of the Comintern (June–July 1921). Back in Bulgaria in November 1921, he returned to Moscow a year later for the Second Congress of the (Red) International of Trade Unions (Profintern) in November–December 1922.
Having been elected to the Executive Committee of the Profintern, his primary preoccupation continued to be the Bulgarian Communist trade unions, which he helped build to a force of thirty-five thousand by April 1924.
During the Bulgarian coup d’Etat (June 1923) Aleksabdar Stamboliyski’s government and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union in general were replaced by Aleksandar Tsankov.

Dimitrov and the Komintern

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Given Blagoev’s illness and advanced age and Kolarov’s absence in Moscow,

it was Kabakchiev and Dimitrov who shared the greatest responsibility—together with the BKP secretary Todor Lukanov—for the neutrality policy of 1923.
In May 1934 Dimitron declared that he had made a fatal error. “On June 9, 1923”, he stated, “after the Fascist coup d’Etat, a so called, “neutral” policy was adopted which did not intent to take part in the struggle of the Bulgarian fascist reaction against the Stambouliski government whose peasants took the defense. (RGASPI, 495/195/1, f.22).
In his report (23 June 1923) to a plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), Karl Radek condemned the spinelessness of the BKP that had led to “the greatest defeat ever suffered by a Communist Party.”

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After news of the planned insurgency was leaked to the Tsankov

government, it ordered the arrest, on 12 September, of some two thousand Communist officials, mainly among the middle cadres. Operating from the underground, Kolarov and Dimitrov ordered an uprising for 22–23 September (it was ill prepared), and then proceeded to Ferdinand, in the Vratsa district of northwestern Bulgaria, where they established the supreme military revolutionary committee together with their comrade Gavril Genov and two Left Agrarians.
The authorities relied on the White Russian emigres (Wrangelites) and the Macedonian irregulars. By 28 September Kolarov and Dimitrov ordered a retreat into Yugoslavia, where they led some two thousand Communist insurgents.
The defeat of the September uprising contributed to the growing fractionalism in the BKP but did not unduly harm Communist standing in Bulgaria.

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Moreover, the exiled leadership of Kolarov and Dimitrov— the Foreign Committee,

which soon removed to Vienna— gained significant prestige out of this Comintern-managed affair, which was subsequently dubbed the first organized antifascist uprising.
In February 1924 the Comintern endorsed the conduct of Kolarov and Dimitrov, and in May 1924 the underground BKP conference at Vitosha seconded the Comintern’s endorsement.
During this period Dimitrov traveled to Moscow on several occasions. He represented the BKP in the ECCI delegation that escorted Lenin’s coffin from Gorky to Moscow in January 1924.
Back in Vienna at the end of February 1924, he headed the emigre BKP apparatus, directed the work of the Balkan Communist Federation (BCF), the coordinating body of the Comintern Balkan sections that cultivated the various Balkan national-liberation and minority movements, and served as the ECCI emissary to the Communist Party of Austria (KPO).

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He represented the BKP and the Balkan Communist Federation at the

Fifth Congress of the Comintern and the Third Congress of the Profintern in Moscow, during the summer of 1924, where he became a candidate-member of the ECCI and a member of the Profintern’s Executive Committee. From 1925 on, he was increasingly in Moscow, although he attended to assorted Comintern business in Vienna and Berlin.
Already in December 1927 and January 1928, at the BKP conference at Berlin, the delegates of the Young Communist League—Georgi Lambrev, Iliya Vasilev, and Petur Iskrov—started attacking the 1923 leadership. By May 1929, following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (July–September 1928) with its line of “class against class,” the leftist youth leaders started taking over the BKP.

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When the Foreign Bureau of the BKP was reconstituted in Moscow,

in August 1930, Dimitrov was effectively demoted, having been appointed its candidate-member. Admittedly, Dimitrov and Kolarov bent with the wind and offered no doctrinal alternative to the new line. As their influence waned and as their behavior in 1923 came to be attacked as “defeatist,” they stood guard and waited for better times. Particularly disturbing to Dimitrov was the new leadership’s renunciation of the whole tesniak heritage.
Remember: This party of Tesniek became in 1919 the Bulgarian Communist Party.
“The Tesnieks expressed, according Dimitrov, an intransigent policy towards the social-democratic parties and the absolute and complete subordination of private life, personal and individual interests to the interests of the proletariat”.

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It was under these circumstances that the ECCI sent Dimitrov to

Germany, where he acted as the political secretary of the BCF and, after April 1929, as the leading member of the Comintern’s West European Bureau. Frequently sent on various Comintern missions from Berlin to Moscow, throughout Germany, and in many other West European countries, Dimitrov was in Berlin when Hitler assumed the chancellorship in January 1933. Paradoxically enough, Popov and Tanev, who were arrested with Dimitrov in March 1933 in the Reichstag fire case, were his factional opponents and belonged to the “left sectarian” wing of the BKP leadership. It was this arrest and Dimitrov’s performance in the dock that revived the influence of the increasingly marginalized revolutionary.

Dimitrov in Germany

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More precisely:
On 27 February 1933, in the midst of a

violent election campaign, the Reichstag building was partially destroyed by fire. The police captured a Dutch laborer—Marinus van der Lubbe—in the gutted edifice. On 9 March 1933, ten days after the torching of the Reichstag and in the sixth week of Adolf Hitler’s chancellorship, the Nazis arrested Dimitrov and ultimately charged him with participating in a plot to burn the Reichstag. The arrest, which was vaunted as a victory against Communist terrorism, was helpful not only to the Nazi campaign in the Reichsrat elections of 5 March 1933, but in initiating a series of measures that gave full dictatorial powers to the Nazis. After the passage of the Enabling Act (23 March 1933) they had a mandate to give more powers to the German central government, impose a Nazi control over the civil administration and the judiciary, ban or dissolve all political parties except the Nazi Party, begin a series of anti-Jewish measures, and outlaw all strikes and free unions.

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Meanwhile, Dimitrov, two other Bulgarian Communists (Blagoi Popov and Vasil Tanev),

as well as the principal defendants—van der Lubbe and Ernst Torgler, the latter a Communist deputy in the Reichstag and the president of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) parliamentary group—awaited trial in a Germany. They became the subjects of a vast defense campaign, whereby the Communists. It was this trial—the Leipzig fire trial, which lasted from 21 September to 23 December 1933—that gave Dimitrov the status of an international celebrity. His audacity in cross-examining and confronting his accusers and the prosecution witnesses, among them the Nazi leaders Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels, anticipated the resistance to fascism that the Communists squandered in the atmosphere of the “Third Period” (1928–1935). Now that the Nazis were entrenched, the slogan “After Hitler, our turn!” lost all of its sectarian appeal. Dimitrov, himself suspected as a “Right deviationist,”1 had won the day and rescued a party vocation that had been in doubt for a decade.

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Dimitrov’s defense had four important elements.
despite enormous obstacles placed in

his way by the judges, he was consistently on the offensive, in intimating that the Nazis had set the Reichstag aflame—or directly accusing them of having done so. Dimitrov repeatedly stated that van der Lubbe—“a declasse worker, a rebellious member of the “scum” of society”—was a “miserable Faustus,” while “Mephistopheles has disappeared” (an allusion to the club-footed Goebbels).
Dimitrov boldly defended “Communist ideology, my ideals,” as well as the Communist International and its program of proletarian dictatorship and the “World Union of Soviet Republics.”
He presented himself as a patriotic Bulgarian Communist who resented the racialist Nazi charge that he hailed from a “savage and barbarous” country: “It is true that Bulgarian fascism is savage and barbarous. But the Bulgarian workers and peasants, the Bulgarian people’s intelligentsia are by no means savage and barbarous.”

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Finally, he criticized the Social Democratic leaders, Dimitrov exacted from Goebbels

the admission that the Nazis “do not share the bourgeois viewpoint that there is a fundamental difference between the Social Democratic and the Communist parties [ . . . ] When, therefore, we accused Marxism in general and its most acute form—communism, of intellectual instigation, and maybe even of practical implementation of the Reichstag fire, then this attitude by itself meant that our national task was to destroy, to wipe off the face of the earth the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party”.
The fact that this admission was exacted from Goebbels, that Dimitrov paid compliments to the Anarchists (while disclaiming that van der Lubbe could be a “genuine” Anarchist), that he provoked Goring into making threats once Dimitrov was “out of the courtroom,” still received far greater attention in the West than in the councils of the Comintern. The court sentenced van der Lubbe to death on 23 December 1933, after having simultaneously acquitted Dimitrov, Popov, Tanev, and Torgler for lack of evidence.
Dimitrov’s returned to Moscow on 27 February 1934 as was granted Soviet citizenship by the USSR in order to avoid the death sentence.

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In fact, by 1 April Stalin was already encouraging him to

strike against the “incorrect” views of the Comintern leaders on the nature of the Austrian “insurrection.” By the end of May Dimitrov was nominated to make a report at the forthcoming Comintern congress. There remained the uneasy task of dispersing, by argument or constraining influence, the array of reservations among the hardened veterans of the previous Period about cooperation with the Social Democrats and the other antifascists.
Remember: The Communist attitude, emerged from the early Communist view that fascism was evidence of capitalism’s decay. The defense of the capitalist order through terror was evidence of the coming revolutionary dawn. This policy was pursued even after Hitler banned the KPD, Communist statements continuing to portray Nazism as a passing phenomenon well into the fall of 1933. And when armed resistance against fascism commenced—in Austria (February 1934), it was the Social Democrats, not the Communists, who took up arms against Chancellor Dollfuss’s fascist dictatorship. In this context, Dimitrov’s militancy in the Leipzig dock represented a significant departure from the simplicity of the above declarations and was a major contribution against fascism .

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Germany’s growing strength and aggressiveness—her denunciation of the disarmament clauses in

the Versailles treaty and Hitler’s policy of remilitarization—prompted departures from the Soviet policy of unremitting hostility toward the Western democracies.
The Franco-Soviet alliance (May 1935) and the earlier entrance of the USSR into the League of Nations represented an important success of M. Litvinov’s Foreign Commissariat over the revolutionary aspirations of the Comintern.
In this decisive change—which increasingly transformed the Communist International from the headquarters of world revolution to an auxiliary in the struggle against fascism—Dimitrov played a leading role—hence his central function at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern (July–August 1935).
There is little doubt that the Comintern’s about-face of 1935 represented the most momentous change in the history of Stalinized communism.

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Dimitrov stressed that fascism was a “substitution of one state form

of class domination of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois democracy— by another form—open terrorist dictatorship.” Hence, it was not a matter of indifference whether the bourgeois dictatorship took a democratic or a fascist form. The task at the moment was to create a “wide anti-fascist Popular Front on the basis of the proletarian united front.
Dimitrov proposed new negotiations with the Social Democrats, his aims (and those of the Soviet leadership and the Comintern) were significantly broader. He was proposing an opening to all enemies of fascism, beyond the working class and its parties—including peasants, liberal elements, and the confessional groups.
Nor did he fail to chastise the Communists for their inattention to the motifs of patriotism and national pride, which became successful recruiting themes for the fascist upsurge in many countries.

Dimitrov and the popular front

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Dimitrov dominated the congress so thoroughly that his elevation to the

position of the Comintern’s secretary-general at the end of the proceedings came as no surprise. Other secretaries of the ECCI elected at the Seventh Congress were D. Z. Manuilsky, Otto Kuusinen, Palmiro Togliatti (Ercoli), Wilhelm Pieck, Andre Marty , and Klement Gottwald.
Dimitrov’s speech had the effect of cadence breaking on a militant organization whose rank and file clearly craved some way out of their isolation. The Popular Front strategy, with its stress on combat against fascism and its war preparations, necessarily softened the struggle against capitalism and hence diluted the Comintern’s raison d’être of class war and world revolution, hence the Comintern transformed into a coalition controlled by the USSR.
This paradox is explained by the emergency the new definitions of Soviet state interest, not necessarily that of the Comintern member parties that were now obliged to abandon the search for revolutionary opportunities.

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Comintern: between internationalism and “nationalism”
Stalin freely expressed a hierarchy of

nationality preferences. He argued that the destruction of Poland in 1939 was justified because Poland was a “fascist state” that oppressed the Ukrainians and Belorussians (7 September 1939).
The same approach was expressed about Turkey: “We shall drive the Turks into Asia. What is Turkey? There are two million Georgians there, one and a half million Armenians, a million Kurds, and so forth. The Turks amount to only six or seven million” (25 November 1940).
These aspects, established “ideologically” after the VII Congress of the Comintern, where the outcome of Stalin’s thinking on Russia’s international role. It was marked by a certain “nationalism”. Moreover, the period of the nonaggression pact with Germany, led to a “healthy nationalism”. The question is “nationalism or state interests”?

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Under the circumstances, it is not unusual to encounter certain lesser

Communists promoting specific national aspirations and territorial demands.
Hungarian leader Matyas Rakosi hoped that after the war Hungary would retain Transylvania and Carpatho-Ukraine.
Czech Communist Zdenek Nejedly probably was not pleased to learn that his Polish comrades wanted to retain Tetschen.
Nor was it pleasing that the Czechoslovak leadership evidently wanted to expel the Hungarian minority after the war.
These political problems were connected to the organisational problems of the Comintern.

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According to one letter sent by Dimitrov to Stalin on 1

July 1934:
“III. Regarding the Comintern Leadership
It is essential to change the methods of work and leadership in the Comintern, taking into account that it is impossible effectively to oversee from Moscow every detail of life of all 65 sections of the Comintern, which find themselves in very different conditions (parties in the metropolis and parties in the colonies, parties in highly developed industrial countries and in the predominantly peasant countries, legal and illegal parties, etc).
It is necessary to concentrate on the general political guidance of the Communist movement, on assistance to the parties in basic political and tactical questions, on creating a solid Bolshevik leadership in the local Communist parties, and on strengthening the Communist parties with workers while reducing the heavy bureaucratic apparatus of the ECCI.
It is essential to further promote Bolshevik self-criticism. Fear of this [self-criticism] has at times led to failure to clarify important political problems (questions of the current stage of the crisis and of the so-called military-inflationary juncture, the assessment and lessons of the Austrian events, etc.).
It is impossible to change the methods of leadership and work in the Comintern without partially renewing the cadres of the Comintern workers.
It is especially essential to secure close ties between the Comintern leadership and the Politburo of the VKP(b)”.

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The decision of Comintern’s dissolution was taken as early as April

1941, when the USSR was still treaty bound to Nazi Germany. In fact, the Comintern was the principal victim of the “healthy nationalism” that Stalin increasingly promoted after the passing of the Popular Front. Stalin took advantage of the CPUSA’s formal withdrawal from the Comintern, whereby the American Communists satisfied US legal requirements while remaining in close contact with Moscow, to note that the “International was formed in Marx’s time in the expectation of an imminent international revolution”.
The Comintern, too, was formed in such a period in Lenin’s time. “Today”, stated Stalin, “the national tasks of the various countries stand in the forefront. But the position of the Com[munist] parties as sections of an international organization, subordinated to the Executive Committee of the CI, is an obstacle” (20 April 1941).

The last period of the Comintern

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Dimitrov immediately took Stalin’s idea “of discontinuing the activities of the

ECCI as a leadership body for Communist parties for the immediate future” to Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti. Both found the idea “basically correct” (21 April 1941).
By 12 May 1941 Zhdanov told Dimitrov that the resolution on discontinuing the activities of the Comintern, which was being prepared, “must be grounded in principle,” as hostile interpretations would have to be parried. In any case, “our argumentation should evoke enthusiasm in the Com[munist] parties, rather than create a funereal mood and dismay,” but again, the “matter is not so urgent: there is no need to rush; instead, discuss the matter seriously and prepare.”

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The German attack on the Soviet Union appeared to give the

Comintern a new lease on life. In fact, despite the growing demands of the emergency, the dissolution was merely postponed. Moreover, the Comintern was marginalized in another way. On the very day of the attack (22 June 1941) Stalin told Dimitrov that “for now the Comintern is not to take any overt action,” but also that the “issue of socialist revolution is not to be raised. The Sov[iet] people is waging a patriotic war against fascist Germany. It is a matter of routing fascism, which has enslaved a number of peoples and is bent on enslaving still more.”
Dimitrov felt these changes quite directly after the removal of the Comintern staff to Kuibyshev and Ufa in the fall of 1941. He noted that the Comintern and he himself were not in evidence at public occasions. For the first time in many years he was not on the Moscow honor presidium on the anniversary of the revolution. Generally, he accepted that there was “no need to emphasize the Comintern!” (7 November 1941).

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The Soviet agencies were taking over parts of the Comintern operations,

Stalin initially being more worries about the vanguardism of specific Soviet services (for example, the Red Army intelligence) than about the subordination of the CI (27 August 1941). But by 11 November 1941 Dimitrov agreed to combine the Comintern operations in Belgium, France, and Switzerland with Soviet military intelligence. Joint actions with the “neighbors” (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD) also increased. Yet when Dimitrov tried to use foreign commissariat personnel abroad, Molotov protested (21 February 1941).
The figure of P. M. Fitin, the chief of the Fifth (Intelligence) Directorate of the NKVD (1940–1946), increasingly loomed large in Comintern operations, not only because his network serviced (and controlled) many of the Comintern’s communications. In 1943, when Stalin finally dissolved the Comintern, Fitin went to see Dimitrov “about using our [Comintern] radio communications and their technical base in the future for the needs” of the NKVD (11 June 1943).

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Likewise, the Red Army Intelligence Directorate took its cut a day

later. But the unkindest cut of all was the decision to continue the Comintern operations within the Department of International Information (OMI) of the VKP(b) CC: “In order not to let enemies exploit the fact that this department is headed by Dimitrov, it was decided to appoint Shcherbakov head of the department and Dimitrov and Manuilsky his deputies. This decision is not to be announced; rather, organize and conduct the department’s work internally” (12 June 1943). The Communist International became a secondary department of the Soviet CC, and Dimitrov a subaltern of Stalin’s chief political commissar in the armed forces.
Stalin’s decision to dissolve the Comintern came at the end of the organization’s steady decline. The purges played an important part, Dimitrov himself having offered no resistance to Stalin’s suggestions that he lure the “Trotskyist” Willi Munzenberg back to Moscow or to the arrests of Moskvin, Knorin, and the other leading Comintern officials.

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An example of this policy: Let’s see the archives
“STRICTLY SECRET
SUBJECT TO

RETURN WITHIN 48 HOURS
Reproduction prohibited TO THE 4TH PART OF THE SPECIAL SECTOR
OF THE VKP(b) CC, MOSCOW, THE KREMLIN
[Handwritten across the top of the text: "I agree with Cde. Dimitrov
[V]/ Molotov 10 December
Cde. Stalin agrees. I sent to Cde. Dimitrov. Molotov"]
CABLE
from KUYBYSHEV sent at 2325 9 December 1941
arrived at the VKP(b) CC for decipherment at 0730 10 December 1941
Incoming Nº 4202/sh
MOSCOW, VKP(b) CC, to Cdes. STALIN, MOLOTOV, BERIA, and MALENKOV.

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A group of Iranian Communists, former political prisoners, has begun to

revive the Communist Party of Iran. They have created a temporary bureau, identified one comrade (Arashes-Oganesyan) for liaison with the IKKI [Executive Committee of the Communist International], and turned to us for directions. They are also requesting prompt agreement to send their delegate to us. According to the materials of the Personnel Department of the IKKI and on the basis of information of NKVD officials who have been in touch with them locally, these Iranian Communists can be considered completely honest revolutionaries and pro-Soviet people.
At the same time a People's Party with a democratic program has been created in Iran by a democratic figure Suleiman Mirza. Mirza has been fighting for democratic reform in Iran for 30 years now. Some Iranian Communists also participate in this People's Party.

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Considering the special conditions of Iran (joint occupation with the British,

the democratic and subversive work of the Nazis and their agents, the wariness and hostility of part of the Iranian ruling circles, we think that the revival of the Iranian Communist Party, which was always a small sectarian group, would hardly make a difference at the present time, but would definitely cause certain difficulties and complications. This will strengthen suspiciousness and dissatisfaction in the ranks of the ruling circles and provide more opportunities for German agents to frighten the Iranian bourgeoisie with the danger of the Sovietization of Iran, and indeed they make the British themselves suspicious with respect to the Soviet Union, which is supposedly striving to Sovietize Iran.
Therefore I would suppose that in the present situation the Communist Party ought not be revived but that the Communists ought to operate in the People's Party and pursue a policy of:
1. Fighting for the democratization of Iran;
2. Defending the interests of the workers;

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3. Strengthening friendly relations between Iran and the Soviet Union;
4. Completely

eradicating the agent network of fascism in Iran and suppressing anti-Soviet
propaganda.
Along with this, the Communist should work to create trade unions and peasant organizations. I also consider it inadvisable for a delegate from the Iranian Communists to be sent to us since this fact will be also used by our enemies in Iran. One of our suitable comrades under suitable legal cover, who could help the Iranian comrades in pursuing this policy, could be sent instead.
If there are to be no other instructions from you I am thinking of sending the Iranian comrades advice to this effect.
DIMITROV
Deciphered at 1220 10 December 1941. Six copies printed. Kozlov,
Nezlobin, Luk'yanova. [Stamp: draft and cipher text destroyed] Illegible signature

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In fact, although Dimitrov protected various foreign Communists after 1939—for example,

his secretary Kozovski—he certainly cooperated with Yezhov and Beria during the purges. Nor was he more than an intermediary in Spanish policy.
As the Comintern declined and acquired new camouflage, Dimitrov increasingly concentrated on the Balkan questions. Although he did not return to Bulgaria until November 1945, more than a year after the Soviet takeover, he was deeply involved in the affairs of his native land, which he would soon dominate as the de facto party leader and prime minister.
The growing success of Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia created new conditions in the Balkan region, favorable to Yugoslav solutions for such thorny issues as that of Macedonia. Precisely because under the Stalinist dispensation nationhood was the decisive element in territorial claims, it was very important to decide whether the Macedonians were a separate nationality or simply a Bulgarian regional group.

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Dimitrov’s approach to this issue went through several phases. In Dimitrov’s

letter to Tito (1 June 1942), Macedonians were not mentioned among the Yugoslav peoples, then defined as Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Slovenes. During the same period, Macedonian Communists Dimitar Vlahov and Vladimir Poptomov were cited by Dimitrov among the Bulgarian Communist activists in Moscow (15 June 1942). And after Tito formed the Antifascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia at Jajce, Bosnia, Dimitrov instructed Tito that the inclusion of Vlahov and Tomov [Poptomov] among its members was a mistake, although the former was recognized as a “Macedonian publicist” (26 December 1943). Soon thereafter Dimitrov discussed “framing the question of Bulgaria’s nation[al] unification in connection with Macedonia, Thrace, and Dobruja” (14 January 1944). The Foreign Bureau of the BKP took up the question on 2 March 1944.

Dimitrov and the Balkans

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In the spring of 1944 Dimitrov maintained that the Macedonians were

a populace (население), an ethnic conglomerate made up of “Bulgars, Mac[edonians], Slavs, Greeks, Serbs,” but not a nation (нация), there being no evidence of Macedonian national consciousness (национальное сознание). Practically, this meant that Macedonia could not exist as a “separate state,” but only as a unit in a South Slavic federation made up of “Bulgars, Serbocroats, Montenegrins, Slovenes, and Macedonians” (22 April 1944). This was Dimitrov’s preferred solution, as evidenced in his negotiations with Tito on the “formation of a union between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia that actually amounts to a federation of South Slavs (consisting of Bulgars, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Slovenes) extending from the Adriatic to the Black Sea,” as he formulates it in the entry of 27 September 1944.
Since Dimitrov envisioned the “ethnic” federation only within the dualist scheme, and since Bulgaria, as a defeated Axis country, really needed Yugoslavia’s international sponsorship, his thinking on Macedonia evolved following 27 October 1944, when he was still entreating.

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Tito “to explain to the Maced[onian] comrades that to all intents

and purposes they ought not to raise the question of annexing Bulg[arian] Macedonia.” By 21 December 1944, he recognized the Macedonians as a people (народ) with full right to self-determination and argued that in compensation for “annexation of the Macedonian territories belonging to [Bulgaria] since 1913 to Macedonia within the limits of Yugoslavia if its population desires it,” the districts of Bosilegrad and Caribrod that had been ceded to Yugoslavia in 1919 by the Treaty of Neuilly might be restored to Bulgaria.
Stalin, however, was opposed to the “ethnic” federation, which he saw as a Yugoslav attempt at “absorption of Bulgaria.” He favored a dualist federation, “something along the lines of the former Austria- Hungary.” In any case, being increasingly suspicious of Tito’s intention he saw Yugoslav policy as excessive: “The Yugoslavs want to take Greek Macedonia”.

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They want Albania, too, and even parts of Austria and Hungary.

This is unreasonable. I do not like the way they are acting.” Implicit in this criticism was disapproval of the Yugoslav position in Greece, where the Communists were pursuing a collision course with the West. Tito encouraged Aris Velouchiotis and member of the Greek Politburo to continue the war based on the assumption that the Red Army would come to their aid. Stalin’s policy towards Greece was a pragmatic one and not an ideological one.
The federative schemes soured thereafter. Dimitrov quickly detected the prevailing mood with Stalin against the “unhealthy sentiments” of the Yugoslavs, who were subject to a “certain degree of ‘dizziness with success’ and an inappropriate, condescending attitude toward Bulgaria and even toward the Bulg[arian] Com[munist] Party” (8 April 1945). And by the fall of 1945 there were irritations with the Yugoslav introduction into Pirin Macedonia of the new Macedonian linguistic standard, which was regarded as “Serbianization”— and in part certainly was.

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The Yugoslavs kept pursuing the exchange of Pirin Macedonia for the

“western borderlands,” that is, the Bosilegrad and Caribrod districts (15 and 22 April 1946). But at the Bled conference, held in Yugoslavia in early August 1947, Dimitrov and Tito agreed that “we should not work for a dir[ect] joining of the Pir[in] region to the [Yugoslav] Mac[edonian] republic” (1 August 1947). Ultimately, state interests and Stalin’s interventions prevented any resolution of the Macedonian question or the attendant issue of Yugoslav-Bulgarian union.
At the meeting, Dimitrov was the whipping boy in Stalin’s outbursts against Tito. On 24 January Stalin sent Dimitrov a sharp letter questioning his statements at a Bucharest press conference, where Dimitrov had spoken about the inevitability of a federation that would unite all East European people’s democracies, including Greece.

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The Soviet party organ Pravda publicly disavowed Dimitrov’s remarks on 29

January. Stalin now argued, albeit inconsistently, that all schemes for an Eastern federation—Yugoslav-Bulgarian or otherwise—were harmful; that is, that these measures played into the hands of the “founders of the Western bloc,” especially because everybody assumed that Moscow backed the initiatives of Belgrade and Sofia. Worse still, the Yugoslavs were bringing an army division to a base close to the Greek-Albanian border. Stalin considered this move tantamount to providing a pretext for American intervention. Moreover, he was convinced that the ploy had excited exaggerated hopes in the Greek Communists, who, in his view, where facing great difficulties during their civil war.
Under the circumstances, the Yugoslavs were duty-bound to “restrict” the Greek partisan movement. “We are not bound by any ‘categorical imperatives.”
Stalin argued: “The key issue is the balance of forces” (10 February 1948).
And Dimitrov replied:
- Dimitrov certainly.

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Dimitrov certainly smarted from Stalin’s lashes of February 1948. This was

the lowest point in his relations with Moscow. Stalin chided him for giving too many interviews, for trying to impress the world, and speaking as if he were still the “general secretary of the Comintern giving an interview for a Commun[ist] newspaper.” Taking aim at Tito, Stalin charged Dimitrov with carrying on “like the Komsomol activists who fly like butterflies right into the burning flames.”

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His most obvious human failing was a curiously discreet sort of

vainglory that promoted his historical accomplishment at Leipzig. On his sixty-first birthday he received birthday greetings from Maurice Thorez, La Passionaria, and Togliatti, from Spaniards, Bulgarians, Germans, and co-workers—but not from the Soviet leaders (18 June 1943).
Dimitrov was a deeply emotional man. He gloried in natural beauty, as during his treatments in southern Crimea in 1938. His personal life was complicated and full of tragedies. His first wife, Ljubica Ivosevic Dimitrova, who suffered from incurable mental disease, committed suicide in Moscow on 27 May 1933, while he was in the Moabit prison in Berlin. After he visited her resting place at the Moscow crematorium on 28 May 1934, he wrote, in a cri de coeur, that he felt “so lonely, so terribly personally unhappy”.

Conclusion

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Back in Moscow in 1934, he seems to have broken up

with Kiti Jovanovic´, an emigre Serbian Communist. During the same year he married Rosa Fleischmann (Rozi), a Sudeten Jewish Communist from Boskovice in southern Moravia, whom he had met in Vienna and courted since 1927. Their only child, Dimitur Dimitrov (Mitia), named after Georgi Dimitrov’s father, was born in 1936. The child died on 3 April 1943 from diphtheria, which was diagnosed too late. Dimitrov was mourning for him precisely at the time when the Comintern was being dissolved: “Such a remarkable little boy, a future Bolshevik, reduced to nothing” (5 April 1943).
Illness accompanied Dimitrov in his last decades. He suffered from diabetes, chronic gastritis, a diseased gall bladder, and a variety of other ailments. Although he had to go to hospitals and health spas at some very trying periods of Soviet history, these were no mere political illnesses—“No luck!” he wrote after another painful bout of illness on 11 October 1943—but his chief malady was the inability to offer resistance to Stalin.

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Georgi Dimitrov died in Moscow on 2 July 1949. He was

succeeded in his duties by Vasil Kolarov and, when Kolarov died in 1950, by Dimitrov’s brother-in-law Vulko Chervenkov, the chief Stalinizer of Bulgaria. He, in turn, was eased out of office after Stalin’s death by Todor Zhivkov, with whom the Communist regime ended in 1989. There were thus forty years from Dimitrov’s death to the transition. Dimitrov’s embalmed body was removed from his mausoleum in the center of Sofia in 1990 and cremated, his ashes being laid to rest next to the graves of his parents in the family plot at the city cemetery. In August 1999 the new authorities tried to demolish the mausoleum with explosives. The initial effort failed. The cube-shaped marble building merely leaned leftward.

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Archives: Documents

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