(Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin's close confidant and t...)
Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin's close confidant and trusted ally, served as secretary general of the Communist International (Comintern) from 1934 to its dissolution in 1943. In this revealing collection of more than fifty top-secret letters, the real workings of the Comintern emerge clearly for the first time. Drawn from classified Soviet archives only recently opened to Russian and American scholars, these letters offer unique insights into Soviet foreign policy and Stalin's attitudes and intentions while the Great Terror of the 1930s was in progress and in the years leading up to the Second World War. Annotated by the editors to provide the historical context in which these letters were written, the collection is vivid and startlingly significant. The letters confirm the complete dependence of the Comintern on the Kremlin, while also exposing bureaucratic manoeuvering, backbiting, and jockeying for influence. These messages cast much new light on the Soviet confusion about policies toward foreign Communist parties, and they uncover the extent to which Stalin shaped the Comintern. Stalin's perspectives on America, French communism, and the Spanish Civil War are recorded, as are his differences with Mao Zedong and with Marshal Tito at important turning points. With the publication of these letters, the history of twentieth-century communism gains authentic new evidence about a critical decade.
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(Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian ...)
Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian and Soviet official, one of the most prominent leaders of the international communist movement and a trusted member of Stalin's inner circle. Accused by the Nazis of setting the Reichstag fire in 1933, he successfully defended himself at the Leipzig Trial and thereby became an international symbol of resistance to Nazism. Stalin appointed him head of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935, and he held this position until the Comintern's dissolution in 1943. After the end of World War II, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria and became its first communist premier. During the years between 1933 and his death in 1949, Dimitrov kept a diary that described his tumultuous career and revealed much about the inner working of the international communist organizations, the opinions and actions of the Soviet leadership, and the Soviet Union's role in shaping the postwar Eastern Europe. This document, edited and introduced by historian Ivo Banac, is available in English in this volume. It is a useful source for information about international Communism, Stalin and Soviet policy, and the origins of the Cold War.
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(Georgi Dimitrov (1882 1949) was a Bulgarian Communist p...)
Georgi Dimitrov (1882 1949) was a Bulgarian Communist politician. He was the first Communist leader of Bulgaria, from 1946 to 1949.
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(Like every human being, I had struggles in life. I had ba...)
Like every human being, I had struggles in life. I had battles, I faced hardships, I had defining moments. But I also experienced life to the fullest, I had breathtaking moments, I had joy, I had happiness. What I did was to grab my pen and a sheet of paper and I expressed immediately my emotions and feelings. Each poem is personally experienced and felt by me and each poem has its own story behind. Enjoy!
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Georgi Dimitrov was born on June 18, 1882, in the village of Kovachevtsi, District of Pernik, near Sofia. His parents, poor peasants, came from Bulgarian Macedonia, then under Turkey, where American Protestants conducted successful missionary activities.
Dimitrov trained as a composer.
At age 12 he quit school, apprenticing as a printer and working (in 1903) in the printing shop of the American college at Samokov.
He was elected a member of Parliament first in 1913, serving until 1923.
In 1918 he was briefly jailed for antiwar activities.
Blagoev's choice of successor to the leadership of the Narrows early fell on Vasil Kolarov, a lawyer educated in Geneva, Switzerland, and well acquainted with Georgi Plekhanov and European socialist leaders. Through the 1920's Dimitrov remained outranked and largely overshadowed by Kolarov. When the Narrows chose not to ally with the Agrarians of Alexander Stamboliiski in 1918 a bitter enmity developed during Stamboliiski's administration (1919 - 1923). Together with Kolarov and other Narrows, Dimitrov led the prolonged transportation strike which threatened to turn into an armed clash with the Agrarians.
After the establishment of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Narrows affiliation with it as the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) it was Kolarov who maintained the liaison by travelling to Soviet Russia. His standing with Lenin and other Soviet leaders became such that he was made the Comintern's general secretary in 1922.
Dimitrov's first trip to Moscow was in 1921 to attend the third congress of the Comintern and take part in the establishment of the Red International of Trade Unions, or Profintern. In the mounting crisis between the Agrarian government and its enemies on the right, ending in its overthrow in June 1923, Blagoev kept the BCP neutral and passive. To straighten out this mistaken course, the Comintern resolved that BCP should make an alliance with the overthrown Agrarians (or a "united front, " in Lenin's precept) and stage an armed insurrection. Kolarov was dispatched with full powers to implement the decision. With Dimitrov and other BCP leaders who accepted the Comintern fiat, Kolarov threw the party into a futile insurrection in September 1923 which sputtered for a few days and ended in a bloodbath. He and Dimitrov escaped to neighboring Yugoslavia and thence to Vienna and Moscow where Kolarov resumed his functions at the Comintern and Dimitrov entered the ranks of its operatives.
In the ensuing ten years Dimitrov rose through various assignments involving the Balkan, Austrian, and German communist parties to the post of chief of the underground Bureau for Western Europe of the Comintern, headquartered in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. In that capacity he ran, under various aliases, a vast secret network of operations designed to keep the European communist parties in line with Soviet policies. It was in Berlin that the Gestapo arrested him on March 9, 1933, as it looked for culprits in the arson of the Reichstag (Parliament) building. The Reichstag fire trial, held in Leipzig and Berlin, catapulted Dimitrov to world prominence. In the courtroom the prosecution tried to make a case against five defendants: Marinus van der Lubbe, a dim-witted Dutch Communist who was caught in the act; Ernst Torgler, the leader of the Communist members of the Reichstag; Dimitrov; and two other Bulgarians, Blagoi Popov and Vasil Tanev. The imperial court, still not Nazified, found only van der Lubbe guilty and sentenced him to death; Dimitrov and the others were acquitted. After Dimitrov's arrest, the Comintern launched a camouflaged campaign, headquartered in Paris, to mobilize world public opinion against the Nazis. A so-called World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, made up of leftists and well-meaning liberals from various countries, set up a counter-trial in London which succeeded in embarrassing and affecting the German trial. At Leipzig, Dimitrov himself was impressive in his self-defense, especially in the confrontations with Goering and Goebbels, who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution, although he apparently knew, according to Ruth Fischer and Arthur Koestler, that he would be set free under a deal between the Gestapo and the GPU, the Soviet secret police. Indeed, soon after his acquittal he was given Soviet citizenship and taken to Moscow by special plane. As a reward, and to capitalize on Dimitrov's new fame, Stalin put him in charge of the Comintern. He remained in charge of the Comintern until its dissolution in 1943 and enjoyed a close relationship with Stalin during the tense period of the Great Purge and the years of World War II. From this vantage point of prestige and power he also made himself the undisputed leader of the Bulgarian exiles in the USSR and of the BCP in Bulgaria. Dimitrov's chance to govern Bulgaria came after the Soviet Union declared war on the country in September 1944 and a coalition of BCP, Agrarians, and other anti-Fascist elements (the "Fatherland Front") took power. He returned from the Soviet Union in November 1945 amidst a mounting crisis between the BCP and the Agrarians led by Nikola Petkov and others in the coalition over BCP's drive, with Soviet support, to establish a Soviet system in Bulgaria. In November 1946 he became prime minister. He died on July 2, 1949, at the Borovikha Sanatorium near Moscow. His body, like Lenin's in Moscow, is on public display in a mausoleum in Sofia.
(Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949) was a high-ranking Bulgarian ...)
(Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin's close confidant and t...)
(Georgi Dimitrov (1882 1949) was a Bulgarian Communist p...)
(Like every human being, I had struggles in life. I had ba...)
A devout Protestant, his mother wanted him to become a clergyman, but according to his Marxist biographers, he rebelled against "the religious mysticism in which he was brought up at home" and turned to atheistic socialism.
He became active in the nascent labor union movement and in 1902 joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Labor Party. As the party split in 1903 into "Narrow" (doctrinaire Marxist) Socialists, led by Dimitrov Blagoev, and "Broad" Socialists, Dimitrov took the side of Blagoev, who used him in the struggle for control of the labor unions.
In charge of the Comintern, Dimitrov enunciated in 1935, at the seventh congress of the Comintern, the new line that Fascism, not the Western democracies, was the enemy and that the tactic to fight it was popular (or united) fronts - that is, coalitions of the Communists with anti-Fascist forces - in various countries.
He presided over the destruction of all opposition and the Sovietization of Bulgaria by the harshest methods of the Stalin era. Among the victims was Petkov, who was put through a sham trial and executed; in its protest the U. S. government pointed to the contrast in Dimitrov's role in the Reichstag fire trial and the judicial murder of Petkov.
In foreign policy Dimitrov toed Stalin's line and, while Stalin approved it, pursued the old Marxist vision of a Balkan federation of socialist states which was to be implemented by first federating Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
With the break between Stalin and Tito in 1948 Dimitrov abandoned the idea and took his place dutifully behind Stalin.
In 1906, Dimitrov married his first wife Ljubica Ivošević. She died in 1933. Dimitrov then married his second wife Roza Yulievna Fleishmann, who gave birth to his only son, Mitya, in 1936. The boy died at age seven of diphtheria. Dimitrov adopted Fani, a daughter of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
