Mary Neuburger. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 52, Issue 4, 2017.
In April of 1917, a Bulgarian student by the name of Vasil Gerov was part of the crowd that choked the streets of Petrograd in and around Finland Station. In his unpublished memoir, he vividly describes the ‘unparalleled emotion’, the shouts of ‘Hoorah, Lenin!’ and the hush that descended as Vladimir Lenin climbed up onto a waiting car and gave his first impassioned speech to the ‘revolutionary Proletariat of Petrograd’. Gerov had spent much of the war in the Russian Imperial capital as an active member of his university’s ‘Marxist-Leninist’ group. Its members, as he later recalled in his memoirs, had spent years actively agitating against Russia’s involvement in the First World War, which caused the ‘laboring masses’ to suffer ‘hunger, misery’, and the deaths of ‘countless victims’. The group had taken to the streets in February of that year in the spontaneous riots and demonstrations, peaceful protests, and finally violent clashes that brought down the Russian Tsarist regime. And yet the war raged on, and the Russian Provisional Government created only disillusionment and further chaos. Lenin represented renewed hope and a coherent program, engendering a flurry of organization. Gerov joined the Bolsheviks as they stormed the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917, bringing down the Provisional Government and ushering in Bolshevik rule.
Until quite recently, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as well as the Civil War that followed, were explained primarily via conditions and actors that originated from within the Russian Empire. In other words, they were understood first and foremost as Russian events, albeit with a clear ‘internationalist’ dimension. Certainly Russian entanglements with the global left and the place of foreign nationals secured a place in numerous national historiographies. Such studies tend to focus on the repercussions of communist political engagement in various national contexts, or their role as conduits for Soviet domination. A hundred years after 1917, however, new scholarship continues to sharpen the picture of this period by examining how international players both understood and shaped the revolution in disparate ways. In particular, a growing body of work looks deeper into the individual and collective subjectivities of a diverse international body of committed communists. This transnational vantage point has enhanced our understanding of the various commitments and influences of local actors in and beyond Russia. Most relevant here is the way in which scholars have provided close readings of individual lives and their countless intersections across the communist world. Among other things this offers possibilities for further clarity on the thorny intersection between nationalist and internationalist sentiments, as played out in concrete action and policy formation. Perhaps equally important, is a serious questioning of assumptions about the left as perpetually Moscow dominated. While the leading role of the Soviet Union is beyond dispute, new scholarship highlights the interdependencies inherent in communist networks, as well as the ‘East-West traffic’ in ideas, goods, and influences.
In this article, I delve into the multifaceted roles and remarkable significance of the Bulgarian left in the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the tumultuous period that followed. In particular, I highlight (and, in part, complicate) what many historians have dubbed the ‘special relationship’ of the Bulgarian and Russian left and the concrete ways in which people, materials, and ideas were exchanged via various channels, by land and across the Black Sea. Gerov is just one of the largely forgotten non-Russian participants in the events of 1917, but his story is indicative of a range of larger connective threads that were woven into the international fabric of the Russian Revolutions and the consolidation of Soviet power. A few prominent Bulgarian Marxists are relatively well-known for their contributions to the Russian revolutionary era—namely Dimitŭr Blagoev, Georgi Dimitrov, and Christian (Krŭstiu) Rakovsky—but often even these figures are left out of larger histories of the revolution or global communism. Even less visible are the hundreds of men and women in the Bulgarian socialist rank and file whose meticulously penned and typed memoirs are gathering dust in the carefully catalogued folders of Bulgaria’s Central State Archive. The authors, with varying degrees of detail and emotional verve, bear witness to these events, and offer new possibilities for understanding them in light of the complex relationship of the Bulgarian-Russian left in this period of global revolutionary fervor. A careful reading of these memoirs offers a window into the different ways in which Bulgarians participated in and read the revolution through their own lens, with their own individual and collective concerns. Read in tandem with the lives of the more prominent figures noted above, their stories help bring to light the larger, and at least partially hidden, story of the importance of the Bulgarian or, perhaps more accurately, the Balkan factor in the series of events in which the Bolsheviks established, consolidated, and spread their power.
Indeed, the contributions of the Bulgarian left to the Russian (and global) revolutionary project were considerable and in many respects out of proportion to Bulgaria’s size. While only a handful were in Petrograd in 1917, prominent figures like Rakovsky and lesser-known participants like Gerov made their way to Soviet Russia’s southern flank and participated in the Soviet Civil War against the Whites. In addition, as Ukraine became the primary battlefield for the survival of the Revolutionary state, Bulgaria’s proximity made it an important ancillary cite for the larger showdown between Reds and Whites, East and West. Communists organized Black Sea crossings—primarily via Varna and Odessa—continually conveying people, goods, and ideas between Russia (and later the Soviet Union) and Bulgaria. It was via this network that Bulgarian communists received weapons for their abortive uprising in 1923, an attempt to provide momentum and credence to the notion of an ongoing global revolution. In the years that followed the Soviet Union provided a home base for Bulgarian communists, many of whom took on high profile roles in Soviet efforts to foment global revolution and defeat fascism in Europe. From the beginning, Bulgarian Communists had played important roles in the Comintern, the Soviet instrument for spreading revolution. This continued and even escalated in the 1930s and early 1940s under Georgi Dimitrov, an era in which Soviet policy towards international partners and expectations for loyalty continually changed paths. On the hundredth anniversary of 1917, it is worth revisiting the disparate Bulgarian motivations and contributions to the establishment and spread of Soviet political influence. For 1917 is best understood in light of its transnational roots and dimensions, which help explain its broad global impact and, for some, its continued appeal.
The complicated life paths of numerous Bulgarian socialists, both the prominent, and the lesser-known, reveal the strength and complexity of the Bulgarian attraction to Marxism in general and Bolshevik (or later, Soviet) Marxism-Leninism in particular. This, at least in part, hinged upon the Bulgarian ‘special relationship’ with Russia in general, and the Russian left in particular. Its roots lie in the nineteenth century, when a segment of Bulgaria’s new commercial elites began to send their offspring abroad, including to Tsarist Russia, for higher education. Bulgarian, and other Balkan, youth were exposed to radical intellectuals in cities across Europe, but in many respects Russia became the most important conduit for political radicalism—not just socialism, but also the agrarian populism of Herzen, and the anarchism of Bakunin. Between 1856-1878 an estimated 500 Bulgarians were educated in St. Petersburg, while numerous Bulgarian migrants settled in ‘New Russia’—especially Odessa. Larger and more permanent colonies had migrated to this region in the years following the 1806-12 and 1828-9 Russo-Turkish Wars. There, as in neighboring Serbia and Romania, newly educated elites formed revolutionary circles and found common cause with other revolutionaries, nationalist and/or socialist.
Leftist thought grew out of a particular melding of nation, social, and geo-political concerns unique to the nineteenth century Balkans. Under Ottoman rule for much of the century, Bulgarian revolutionaries of this era advocated national liberation from the Ottomans, bolstered by newfound leftist revolutionary tendencies and a relentless critique of Great Power politics. Socialist critiques of the West only sharpened in the post-Ottoman era, but they were also directed towards the leadership and bourgeoisie of newly emergent Balkan states. As Balkan states gained autonomy and independence in the course of the century (Bulgaria in 1878 and 1989 respectively), dissatisfaction with new borders drove nationalist political programs. Only the question of poverty and ‘backwardness’—in short the ‘peasant question’—competed in importance with the issue of how to draw (or re-draw) regional borders in light of a complex ethno-religious mosaic. As in Russia, Marxism offered a potential tool for confronting both of these challenges, as it provided a ready politics of blame and potential solution. Both Balkan backwardness and nationalist fervor could be blamed on Great Power politics and its local lackeys—the bourgeoisie—with revolution as the ultimate solution.
But Balkan socialists routinely looked beyond revolution for answers to the ever-intensifying Balkan national question. After 1878 competing claims in Ottoman Macedonia (and a lesser extent Thrace) were coupled with escalating revolutionary violence in that region. This made Balkan cooperation and a working agreement over the future of the region all the more critical. The notion of a Balkan (or Danubian) federation had long been a part of revolutionary visions for regional cooperation and a post-Ottoman future. In theory and in practice such cooperation was often fraught with tensions, but if anything, this heightened the resolve of Balkan socialists to engender cooperation through a concrete program of future federation. Since the 1870s Balkan socialists, like the prominent Serbian socialist Svetozar Marković, looked to a federal model for a political solution to Balkan nationalist antagonisms. While Marković was a socialist in the agrarian populist vein, the founding father of Bulgarian Marxism, Dimitǔr Blagoev also saw the Balkan or Danubian federation as a foundation for Balkan socialist cooperation. The idea of federation actually ran counter to mainstream Marxist thinking on the national question in the period, but it did offer a concrete solution—albeit vague in logistical details—to Balkan ethno-national concerns.
It is worth noting that beyond specifically Balkan issues, the Bulgarian left was involved in the debates, developments, and organization of a broader European, and especially the Russian, Marxist tradition from the outset. Dimitǔr Blagoev founded the first Marxist organization in Russia, the so-called ‘Blagoev Circle’ which worked closely with Georgi Plekhanov’s ‘Emancipation of Labor’ group in Switzerland to lay the groundwork for the Russian Social Democratic Party. After expulsion from Russia in 1885, Blagoev returned home to Bulgaria to found the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party in 1891. Meanwhile, another prominent Bulgarian Marxist, Christian Rakovsky, was embedded in the Marxist inner circles of Russian émigré-exiles in Switzerland, namely Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod. Rakovsky matured into an avid internationalist and, in the words of Leon Trotsky, became ‘one of the best-known figures in the European socialist movement.’ These early socialists were mired in ongoing debate on a number of issues, including gradualist or evolutionary versus more immediate revolutionary approaches to political change. By 1903 deep divisions among Marxist parties had crystalized, and both Russian and Bulgarian Social Democrats split into two branches. The Bulgarian ‘Narrows’ under Blagoev aligned with the Russian Bolsheviks, with the Bulgarian ‘Broads’ tied to the Russian Mensheviks. Rakovsky eventually fell in with the latter, a party which historians generally consider ‘European’, as opposed to ‘Russian’ in orientation. And certainly Rakovsky’s education, career, and networks had deep roots in Western Europe. But like Blagoev, he was an internationalist, connected to Russian as well as ‘European’ thinkers and actors throughout his career.
Indeed, Rakovsky harbored childhood memories of billeted Russian officers passing through his village during the momentous 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War in which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule. As an ethnic Bulgarian born in the late Ottoman Bulgaria, there was certainly a tradition of looking to Russia as ‘Diado Ivan’ (Grandpa Ivan) for support and inspiration. And yet, as he noted in his memoirs, according to ‘family memory’, one of the more ‘radical’ Russian officers staying with his family had provocatively asked, ‘We liberated you, but who will liberate us?’ For Rakovsky, then, memories of the Russo-Turkish War highlighted the fact that Bulgarian sympathies for Russia were fraught. That is to say, it was not always Tsarist Russia, or even the ‘Tsar Liberator’ that were the focus of Bulgarian sympathies. Instead Bulgarians often felt loyalty towards the Russian nation, which left considerable room for interpretation. For the Bulgarian left, the Russian left in its many incarnations seems to best represent the interests of the Russian nation (in the sense of the ‘people’). As articulated by Rakovsky, Tsarist Russia not only exploited its own people, it was one of the many ‘Imperialist’ powers that manipulated and exploited the smaller nations of the Balkans. Rakovsky was first able to concretely work towards ‘liberating’ Russians in 1905, when he famously aided the Russian soldier rebels in the battleship Potemkin, which landed on Romanian Black Sea shores. By then he had settled on his family farm in Mangalia, in the ethnically mixed Black Sea coastal region of Dobrudja (then part of Romania).
Like Blagoev, Rakovsky’s internationalism did not blind him to the particular needs and condition on the Balkan peninsula, which remained front and center in his thinking and revolutionary activities. He continued to be deeply involved in pan-European revolutionary activities, but he worked most actively with the Romanian, Bulgarian Social Democrats—whose ‘internationalism’ was always sharply attenuated with national concerns. In many respects, Rakovsky’s internationalism, which might be better labeled multi-nationalism, was a product of his cosmopolitan Balkan background. With extensive family roots on both the Bulgarian and Romanian sides of the Danube, his family had been Ottoman merchant elites. As such he was exceedingly adept at wearing many hats, and communicating with a range of social and ethnic groups. As Leon Trotsky noted after his 1913 visit to Rakovsky’s family farm:
Within fifteen minutes on a street in Mangalia, Rakovsky would switch from Roumanian to Turkish, from Turkish to Bulgarian, and then to German and French when he was talking to colonists or to commercial agents; then, finally, he would speak Russian with the Russian Skoptsi [a local religious sect], who are numerous in the adjoining district. He would carry on conversations as a landlord, as a doctor, as a Bulgarian, as a Roumanian subject and, chiefly as a socialist.
In a sense Rakovsky’s internationalism (or multi-nationalism) drew on a Balkan tradition of multilingualism, ethnic coexistence and cosmopolitanism. As other socialists, Rakovsky saw intensified regional tensions and rivalries as largely the product of modern (capitalist) conditions, and Great Power meddling. After the 1908 Young Turk revolution, Rakovsky became a major champion of the notion of federation, which seemed to provide the best model, for organizing regional socialist parties and for the political future of the region. Rakovsky would eventually look to Russia for revolutionary solutions, but only after the Bolshevik victory of 1917.
The developments of the early twentieth century, and in particular the ravages of the First World War, spurred revolutionary action in both Russia and Bulgaria. The ill effects of war bestowed moral authority on those who had opposed it from the beginning, including the Russian Bolsheviks and the Bulgarian Narrows. For Bulgaria, the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and the First World War brought almost a decade of war, with catastrophic disruptions to the supply chains for food and other commodities. Hunger and desperation on the Bulgarian and Russian fronts and homefronts opened the door to extreme politics there as elsewhere in Central Europe. The Bolshevik victory in Petrograd in October 1917 provided inspiration and credence to Blagoev’s Narrows, whose numbers grew rapidly in the final months of the war and its aftermath. Bulgarians, as the world, closely followed events in Russia, which fed the fires of local discontent.
A handful, such as the above-mentioned Vasil Gerov, participated directly in the revolutionary events in Petrograd of February and October of 1917. A close reading of Gerov’s poignant account of these events reveal the ways in which ‘international’ socialist aspirations, resonated with other kinds of personal or national objectives. As Gerov describes, for example, he was ‘doubly’ exuberant about the ‘great transition’ of October 1917 in light of his conviction that he had ‘fulfilled the mission’ of his father. His father, he explained, was a volunteer at the 1877 Battle of Shipka Pass, a critical episode in the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War. As Gerov quotes at length, in a 1915 letter his father had offered the following emotional plea:
Remember, and don’t forget as long as you live, that you are in the brotherly country whose people spilled their blood for our liberation from the Turkish Yoke. We owe them for this. I am thinking, too, of the international situation, and impending events in which you must take part in the country of our Russian brothers.
Whatever his father’s intentions, Gerov construed this appeal as a call to arms against the Tsarist regime in favor of the true saviors of the ‘Russian people’—the Bolsheviks. For Gerov, as Rakovsky and many others, the Bulgarian political debt to Russia was best fulfilled by saving their ‘Russian brothers’ from Tsarist, but also Western Imperial, domination. For supporters of the Bolsheviks, this meant active participation in global revolution in and beyond Petrograd, the newly anointed revolutionary headquarters.
This, of course, required organization and action among foreign communists within (and outside) the Soviet state. In the days following the October Revolution, Vasil Gerov and a group of other Bulgarian socialists formed a local Bulgarian committee, the first organized group of foreign socialists in Petrograd. As Gerov proudly recounted, in late 1917 ‘Lenin took notice of our efforts’ and summoned a number of young Bulgarian ‘Blagoevists’ (around eight) to his headquarters, the Smolny compound in St. Petersburg; ‘Lenin talked to us warmly. From the heart, as if we were old friends.’ Lenin reportedly thanked the Bulgarians profusely for their efforts in the revolution, and sought insight into the tumultuous political situation that was unfolding in Bulgaria. Foreign Marxists in Petrograd, like Gerov and his cohort, became important sources of information and organization via their native networks. But they also became living proof of the global nature of the revolution, its ‘international’ character.
With power established in Petrograd, the imperative of spreading global revolution became the Bolsheviks’ primary objective, and the need for active foreign communists was both symbolically and tactically critical. But so too did the Comintern—the Communist International, or ‘Third International’—track, coordinate, and debate global revolution from its headquarters in Moscow after 1919. Bulgarian were closely involved with the Comintern from its inception. Their critical role in the organization has received some scholarly attention, though primarily in the 1933-43 period, when it was directed by a Bulgarian, Georgi Dimitrov. But prior to this Christian Rakovsky was one of the founding members of the Comintern at its first congress in March 1919. Rakovsky was an extremely vocal delegate at the congress, with considerable clout, appropriately representing the Federation of Balkan Communist Parties (established in 1909), as well as the Bulgarian and Romanian parties. Gerov’s Bulgarian communist group was also at the first congress, and the newly minted Bulgarian Communist Party became one of the most active members of the organization. The BCP’s Vasil Kolarov also served as the general secretary of the Comintern’s Executive Committee from 1922 to 1924 and remained a member until it dissolved in 1943. He and Georgi Dimitrov traveled back and forth between Bulgaria and Moscow in this period, crossing the Black Sea via an ‘illegal channel’ between Varna and Odessa, that became one of the arteries for revolutionary exchange, of party members, supplies, and printed revolutionary materials between Bulgaria and Soviet Russia.
As Gerov conveyed to Lenin in 1917, Bulgaria itself was in chaos as the First World War dragged on in the Balkans. Mass unrest in Bulgaria seemed to confirm the Bolshevik notion that the Russian Revolution was the spark for global revolution. Much of it was spontaneous, but Dimitǔr Blagoev and the Narrows tirelessly coordinated party efforts across Bulgaria, bringing news of the Bolshevik victory and calls for peace. By December 1917, around 10,000 Bulgarian workers had converged on Sofia, swarming the streets and calling for peace and revolution. At the same time, Party cells among soldiers at the front circulated enormous numbers of brochures, pamphlets, appeals, and newspapers; the circulation of the Party organ, Rabotnichesko, quickly rose from 2000 to 11,500. Waves of so called ‘women’s revolts’ broke out across Bulgaria, sometimes with direct input from the Narrows, who publicly appealed to hungry workers (mainly women) to ‘seize necessary goods’ from the storehouses of local elites. Rock-wielding women in cities and villages converged upon the storehouses of municipal administrators and spontaneously redistributed foodstuffs and other goods to the assembled crowds. As Blagoev later ruminated, the ‘Imperialist war’ had transformed into a ‘social war’; it had opened Bulgarians’ eyes and sown among them the seeds of a new ‘revolutionary consciousness’.
By late September 1918, some 15,000 soldiers demanding ‘peace and bread’ were caught up in a mutinous wave of desertions, and a republic was declared in Radomir, a hamlet some 40 kilometers from Sofia. As Bulgarian (Marxist) historians would later claim, Bulgarian peasant and worker soldiers were the ‘first to follow the example of their Russian brothers’ and foment revolution on their own soil. The Radomir rebels were crushed within a week by Bulgarian and German troops, but Bulgaria’s Tsar Ferdinand nonetheless abdicated. Bulgarian communists were actively involved in Radomir, but it was the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) who provided local leadership. BANU’s leader, Alexander Stamboliski, who had considerable clout among the peasantry, had also opposed the war and he emerged as a potent rival to Blagoev’s Narrows, renamed the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1919. Stamboliski was victorious in the 1919 Bulgarian elections, but the BCP received the second largest number of votes, at 18 per cent, and their political rivalry cast its shadow over these immediate postwar years. The BCP’s stronghold was among workers and trade unions, who took to the streets in a general strike amidst plummeting living conditions in December of 1919. Stamboliski’s regime summarily crushed the strikes, using the army, allied troops and his own “Orange guard’, club-yielding peasants. Significantly, these political divisions within Bulgaria became extensions of Soviet battles with the ‘counterrevolution’, that is to say the Civil War, on its southern flank.
In this period ‘Southern Russia’ or Ukraine became the most critical stage for a showdown between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces, domestic and ‘foreign’. But developments in the near abroad, including the Balkans, were seen as closely intertwined with the success or failure of the Civil War and the Soviet project. Bulgarians (and Bulgaria) played a direct, and largely unrecognized, role in the Civil War in Ukraine. Christian Rakovsky, whom Lenin summoned to Moscow in early 1918, was a key figure in this regard. Rakovsky had joined the Bolshevik Party after the October Revolution, and he was recognized for his intellectual and political talents early on. Lenin appointed Rakovsky to head the Council of People’s Commissars in Ukraine from 1919 to 1923, effectively placing him at the Bolsheviks’ political helm in the war-torn region. As Lenin is quoted as having declared on the occasion:
The Ukraine needs a man who shouldn’t be a Russian, nor a Ukrainian, nor a Bolshevik, nor a Menshevik, nor a Bundist, nor a Social-revolutionary, nor a Borot-vist, nor a Maximalist, nor a Sionist [sic], nor … nor … This man does exist, he is Racovski.
Rakovsky’s neutrality, his flexibility, his loyalty and commitment, and, in a sense, his Bulgarianness were all assets to the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, whose ethnic diversity mirrored the Balkan mosaic that he understood so well. Rakovsky battled against forces he considered ‘bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist’ throughout this period, but he also brought his vision for a Balkan Federation to multinational Ukraine, where he faced the complex practical realities of translating theoretical ‘internationalism’ into practice.
The national question was by no means the only issue that Rakovsky faced as he was put in charge of Ukraine. Eleven successive (and/or concurrent) governments held at least pockets of power in the region over this short period. Ukraine faced total economic ruin, even starvation, and successive foreign military interventions—German, Polish, Entente. There was also a spate of local contenders for power, including various Ukrainian factions, the White Army, and of course the Bolsheviks. In constant contact with Lenin, Rakovsky was charged with herculean tasks, such as the procurement of food supplies from the highly resistant peasantry for Russian cities in the North. He was also charged with establishing political control, through regional Bolshevik diplomatic efforts with all parties in the region and coordination of the Red Army’s efforts. The Reds’ primary target was the White Army, a loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces first under General Anton Denikin (1918-9), and then under Pyotr Vrangel (1919-20), whose primary base was in the Ukraine. The Whites received Entente support mainly via the Black Sea, which was an important conduit for revolutionary and counterrevolutionary exchange. The Bulgarian and Black Sea factors, beyond—and even connected to—Rakovsky, have rarely been recognized by historians who attempt to untangle the complex political threads of this period.
Indeed, using purchased or clandestinely boarded vessels, the BCP coordinated a steady two-way flow of people, materials, weapons, and other goods, primarily between the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Varna and Odessa. The scope of this illegal ‘Black Sea Channel’ is detailed in the memoirs of several key BCP players, including Grigor Biliarov. Biliarov spent the immediate postwar years renting fishing boats from any and all sympathizers to use as courier vessels. He paid local sailors to carry goods, materials, and Comintern delegates—not just Bulgarians, but also Hungarians, Romanians, and representatives of other nationalities—to Odessa as a port of entry to Soviet Russia. As Biliarov relates in his memoirs, the Black Sea traffic in communist materials, goods, and people was so robust that the Party decided to purchase a larger, dedicated vessel in 1922. Early that year, the Soviets transferred money into an Istanbul bank, and Bulgarian operatives used the funds to purchase an American ship that had been used in the postwar occupation of Istanbul. They named it the Ivan Vazov, after the famed nineteenth-century Bulgarian author, whose most famous novel, Under the Yoke, depicts the revolutionary activities of late Ottoman Bulgaria. The Ivan Vazov’s first Black Sea run was to Sevastopol in March 1922, carrying food to help ameliorate that year’s devastating famine. The vessel made four Varna-Odessa or Varna-Sevastopol runs, laden with guns, people, and Party materials, as well as 10,000 tons of food.
The ‘Varna-Odessa channel’ was a common thread in the BCP revolutionary experience. Dragomir Vuksanov, for example, was a former officer in the Bulgarian army who had flatly refused to crush the revolt at Radomir. Attracted by Marxism and the allure of revolutionary Russia, he gathered money, a pistol, and illicit Party literature and correspondence and set off across the Black Sea in 1919 in a small fishing boat. He and a few intrepid comrades, traveling incognito as fishermen, landed in Odessa, which was then occupied by Russian Whites under Denikin. They adeptly moved through the White occupational zone to Kharkov, where the Reds were headquartered. There Vuksanov and his companions were escorted by Red Army soldiers to Christian Rakovsky, who, as mentioned above, was at the top of the Bolshevik hierarchy in Ukraine. According to Vuksanov, ‘Comrade Rakovsky was a Bulgarian and an old revolutionary who was interested in Bulgaria, and all Bulgarians who landed on Soviet soil were sent to him.’ Rakovsky met with most of the Bulgarian communists who made the Black Sea journey, asking them for updates on the situation in Bulgaria, which were then sent on to the Comintern in Moscow. Rakovsky also provided BCP volunteers like Vuksanov with ‘letters of recommendation’ for induction into the Red Army. In addition, because of Rakovsky, it was not uncommon for Bulgarian revolutionaries to get a taste of Bolshevik fame and popular enthusiasm, and an audience with prominent Bolsheviks. When Vuksanov accompanied Rakovsky—along with the famous Red Army officer Mikhail Frunze—from Kharkov to Bolshevik ‘liberated’ Odessa, for example, they were greeted by a cheering crowd on the train station platform. At a meeting of top Bolsheviks in Odessa, Vuksanov met Lenin himself. As Vuksanov proudly noted, Lenin warmly shook his hands and offered flattery: ‘the Bulgarian nation is true and loyal to the Soviet Union; it is a brave nation.’ Strongly reminiscent of Vasil Gerov, Vuksanov asserted that the reason for his participation in the revolution was first and foremost to ‘save the Russian people’.
Incidentally, Vasil Gerov, who had also gone south (from Petrograd) to fight in the Civil War, was on the same Kharkov-Odessa train with Rakovsky and Vuksanov. As he noted in his memoirs, he had gone to the Red Army’s southern front to play an active role in ‘defending the first proletariat state’ and driving Vrangel’s White Army out for good. This, he reiterated, was part of his ongoing effort to repay Bulgarians’ ‘debt to the Russian nation’, while also protecting his ‘own dear mother Bulgaria’. Not surprisingly, in the eyes of the pro-Bolshevik Bulgarian left, the fate of Bulgaria was closely intertwined with that of the fledgling Soviet state, but also with the success of global revolution. Part of that success was tied to adept negotiation with the cast of international players in the region. Rakovsky proved to be a master at such negotiations, but he also called upon trusted BCP operatives, including Gerov. Indeed, he appointed him as Soviet representative from 1920 to 1922 to aid in the International Red Cross missions to repatriate Russian and Bulgarian POWs. This assignment took Gerov back and forth across the Black Sea waters, where he too observed ‘exchanges of literature, money, weapons and ammunition between the foreign sections of the Russian Communist Party in Odessa and the BCP in Varna’.
It was not only the left that was making regular Black Sea crossings in this period. In fact, some 30,000 of Vrangel’s White Army troops, accompanied by White officers, were being settled en masse in Bulgaria, having been evacuated by ship via the Black Sea. To the BCP’s horror, Prime Minister Stamboliski had offered the fleeing Whites sanctuary in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Entente powers. The Entente occupied Bulgaria in the wake of the war and Bulgaria was in continuous negotiations over reparations in the years that followed. In addition, the Entente was in occupation of the collapsing Ottoman Empire until 1923, and it maintained a Black Sea presence, including the French occupation of Odessa and the British occupation of Varna, which it rightfully claimed was a potential conduit for Bolshevik propaganda. Bulgaria, as many Bulgarian communists noted, became a kind of ‘base’ for ‘counterrevolutionary’ activity against Russian, Bulgarian, and other communists. With Stamboliski’s support and approval, the Whites were often called upon to put down workers’ strikes in Bulgarian cities and police other kinds of leftist activities. In fact, Bulgarian authorities eventually arrested Vasil Gerov in Varna for ‘aiding the Bolsheviks’, at the request of the White Guardists—‘Denikinists’ and ‘Vrangelists’—who were abundant in the city at the time. Not surprisingly, the BCP was highly critical of Stamboliski for his seeming subservience to the Entente and willingness to host the Whites. In the end, however, Entente-backed plans to redeploy the Whites to Ukraine were foiled by the force with which the Soviets, under Rakovsky, prevailed in Ukraine.
In Bulgaria, in the meantime, tensions had developed between Stamboliski and the White officers, who saw him as little more than another brand of Bolshevik. By 1922, the Whites’ interference in Bulgarian politics had reached the breaking point, and Stamboliski expelled a number of officers, forcing internal units to disband. This only further incensed the rapidly coalescing Bulgarian forces on the right, who colluded in a bloody coup and assassinated Stamboliski in June 1923. The BCP refused to intervene on Stamboliski’s behalf, as they were embittered by his earlier pattern of cooperation with ‘counterrevolution’, as well as his ‘petit-bourgeois’ tendencies. The Comintern, however, had consistently urged the BCP to cooperate with Stamboliski, who held sway over the peasant masses and thus could ensure the desired alliance of ‘workers and peasants’. This was particularly true after Comintern announced its ‘united front’ policy in December 1921. In the face of the clear ebb in global revolution, communist parties were called upon to cooperate with a broad spectrum of ‘progressive elements’, including peasant parties. Given this new policy, the Comintern leadership denounced the BCP for its ‘neutrality’ in the face of the 1923 ‘counterrevolution’ in Bulgaria.
They dispatched, in fact, Bulgarian communist Vasil Kolarov, then general secretary of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, who arrived in Varna via motorboat from Odessa in late June to redirect BCP policy. Kolarov first met with Georgi Dimitrov, the heir apparent to BCP leadership, who he convinced to work with the Party to foment an immediate revolution in Bulgaria. Dimitrov now took the helm of Party leadership over the old and ailing Dimitǔr Blagoev (who died in 1924) and set the Party on a path of clear obedience to Comintern dictates. Dimitrov coordinated a flurry of arrangements included hasty shipments of weapons via the Varna-Odessa route to help arm the BCP and its supporters across Bulgaria. Weapons that had been shipped out of the country to Ukraine across the Black Sea for the Civil War effort were now returned for use in the insurgency. After feverish preparations, a string of coordinated revolts took place across Bulgaria over several days beginning 22 September 1923. The bulk of participants were spread across rural areas on the Danube, radicalized peasants, who were angry about the June coup and assassination of Stamboliski. While Sofia remained under tight police control, workers took to the streets in cities of the South such Plovdiv and Asenovgrad, calling for the creation of a republic of ‘workers and peasants’. The armed forces of the new prime minster, Alexander Tsankov, violently crushed the protests and some 2000 people were killed, with many thousands more wounded. Dimitrov and other top leadership slipped across the border into Yugoslavia, as police brutality and arrests of communists took its toll on participants. 1923 was an unmitigated disaster in practical terms, but it did prove Bulgarian loyalty to Moscow and the Comintern. It also became an important part of the BCP narrative of government repression and communist sacrifice, which it carried into exile and the coming struggle against ‘fascism’. 1923 had been the last hope for Bulgaria to become an immediate part of the arc of global revolution that followed the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It also became a kind of badge of Bulgaria’s martyrdom, its unflinching loyalty—more often characterized as subordination—to Moscow and the Comintern, or, perhaps more fittingly, to Russia. Indeed, Bulgarians continued to contribute to the Soviet project of shoring up the ‘first workers’ state’ and spreading world revolution from Moscow—however fraught this process became after Lenin’s death in 1923.
In the years that followed, the BCP continued to operate through various front organizations or illegal channels in Bulgaria, but conditions were far from tolerant. Communists were routinely put in prison, and between 1923 and 1925, some 5000 communists were killed outright in Tsankov’s wave of ‘White terror’. The Bulgarian Communist Party became the primary target of the 1924 ‘Law on the Defense of the State’, which accompanied Bulgaria’s political turn to the right. The repression intensified after the 1925 bombing of the Sveti Nedelia church in central Sofia while the young Bulgarian Tsar Boris was in attendance. Although the BCP did not officially order the bombing, radicalized Party members were clearly responsible, and so the BCP bore the brunt of the reprisals. The BCP’s top leadership escaped the carnage of 1923-5, and in the years that followed most fled Bulgaria, the bulk eventually settling in the USSR. The Soviet Union in effect became the new training ground for the BCP, a place of refuge but also political peril.
Christian Rakovsky’s post-1923 biography echoed the fate of scores of loyal communists, Bulgarian or otherwise. Rakovsky’s long-time association with Trotsky, as well as his ‘Balkan’ approach, fed into his growing conflict with Stalin. As Commissar of Nationalities from 1917 to 1923, Stalin had openly butted heads with Rakovsky over the ‘nationalities question’ at the 12th Party Congress in 1923. Stalin’s centralist approach clashed with Rakovsky’s disdain for anything smacking of ‘Great Russian nationalism’. By 1922-3, Rakovsky had become the primary champion of real autonomy for Ukraine and the other republics of the Soviet federation. He was hotly opposed to overt Russian dominance over other nationalities, which would be detrimental to Soviet Russia’s credibility and hence its project of spreading global revolution. In this, Rakovsky’s Balkan sensibilities, if not sensitivities, are quite clear. And he seems to have had the support of Lenin in his final days, though this fact, much like Lenin’s ‘last testament’, was purposefully hidden from the Party elite by Stalin. For Stalin, whose politics prevailed, the federation was merely a façade for centralized Russian—or, more accurately, his own—control.
Ultimately, Rakovsky met a tragic end along with many other ‘Old’ Bolsheviks, especially those with open ties to Trotsky and his left opposition. Rakovsky was removed from his base of power in Ukraine and shuffled off to become ambassador to the UK from 1923 to 1925 and then France from 1925 to 1927. After returning to the Soviet Union in 1927, he was sent into internal exile, expelled from the Comintern, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and its Central Committee. He was arrested in 1937 and was one of the defendants in the famous ‘Trial of Twenty-One’—the third Moscow show trial. Like most of his co-defendants, Rakovsky admitted his guilt under extreme duress, but unlike others who were summarily executed, he was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. He was later shot in 1942 on Stalin’s direct orders. Rakovsky was not ‘rehabilitated’—in the sense of a formal Soviet and Bulgarian recognition of his innocence—until 1984. Even the scores of unpublished BCP memoirs that bear witness to his staunch loyalty to the Bolshevik project, mostly written in the first blush of de-Stalinization, did not bring about a timely political rehabilitation.
In general, however, the BCP seems to have been least partially buffered from Stalin’s brutal purges of foreign communist parties because of the influence of Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov, who took the helm of the BCP after Blagoev’s death in 1924, became an increasingly prominent and visible figure in the interwar left. He had been involved in the Comintern since its founding, running its West European bureau in Berlin from 1922 to 1933. In 1933 Nazi officials accused him of collusion in setting the Reichstag fire, the incident infamously used as an excuse to impose authoritarian rule. At the Leipzig trial, Dimitrov’s articulate refutation of the false accusations brought him fame and clout, within and beyond the left. With his return to the Soviet Union that year, he was drawn into Stalin’s inner circle. This allowed him to personally intervene on behalf of over 800 arrested BCP members and save a significant number. Nevertheless, more than 500 members of the Party were either executed or died in the Gulag in this period.
Appointed head of the Comintern in the critical years 1934-43, Dimitrov played an important role in the communist pre-war and wartime ‘popular front’ against fascism across Europe. Dimitrov was a master at articulating the reasoning behind this embrace of a broader set of alliances against fascism, which was necessary given the rise of fascist states and parties—mortal enemies of the Soviet Union and communism—across Europe. Of course, western historians have long assumed that Dimitrov was no more than a mouthpiece of Stalin and the Comintern in the ‘popular front’ as other Comintern policies. Recent work, however, notes that he may have had significant autonomy in articulating this policy, which drew on his experiences in the Balkan communist arena. Dimitrov had long worked to foster alliances with more nationalist-oriented revolutionary organizations in the Balkans, like a branch of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) because of their ‘revolutionary potential’. This cooperation created divisions within the already fractured Macedonian movement, but the notion of a future regional federation became the working policy of Balkan communist parties throughout the interwar period and the early postwar years.
After the Red Army’s advance into Bulgaria in the fall of 1944, the BCP came to power on the strength of a new narrative of Russian ‘liberation’, this time from fascism. Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria in 1946 to become Bulgaria’s first communist leader and worked closely with communist Yugoslavia under Tito to form a Balkan federation. This wider project was shelved, taking the more modest form of a Yugoslav federation after Tito was expelled from the newly formed Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in 1948. Dimitrov died soon after in 1949, leaving behind a legacy of BCP close cooperation with Moscow, but also the favoritism that accompanies loyalty.
The Bulgarian factor in the Russian Revolutions of 1917 deserves serious reconsideration, as more than a footnote in the history of these truly international events. The Bulgarian left had a long history of involvement in Russian and European Marxism, with influential (even critical) thinkers and political leaders before and after 1917. The ‘special relationship’ between Bulgaria and Russia was intensified by the events of that year, which were read, understood, and enacted by Bulgarians with a distinct subtext. The Bulgarian debt to Tsarist Russia for ‘liberation’ was often recast as a duty to ‘save’ the ‘Russian nation’. In turn, Soviet Russia was understood as the best hope for propagating global revolution, a project in which Bulgarians played a key role—in Ukraine and beyond. This ultimately served the Bulgarian left in gaining prominence with the international communist movement and establishing communism within Bulgaria itself.