Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

180 UNWANTED INDEPENDENCE
In 1924 this west Macedonian Slavic population in Greece paradoxically
received support from Yugoslavia for its desire to remain there. After an
agreement signed between Bulgaria and Greece, the so-called Kalvov-Politis
protocol, all the Slavs in Greece were supposed to be defined as “Bulgarians”, no
doubt with an eye to further population exchanges. Yugoslavia’s foreign minister
at the time declared that his country could not accept that the same people could
be defined as “Bulgarians” south of the border, while they were “Serbs” in
Yugoslavia. Nothing came of the protocol, 10 and the Slavic population was able
to remain in western Macedonia. At the census of 1928, the only Greek census in
which the number of Slav inhabitants was openly reported, some 82,000
“Bulgarians” were still counted. 11
It seems that open stirrings of Macedonian nationalism in the interwar period
took place above all in the Yugoslav portion of Macedonia, Vardar Macedonia.
The Macedonians were being classified there as “Serbs”— which pleased them a
lot less than being classified as Bulgarians. In interwar Yugoslavia, direct
pressure was exerted on the Macedonian population.
The communists had a following among the young intellectuals of Macedonia.
That had some significance for the later development of the Macedonian
question. A group of Macedonian communists and IMRO people began to
publish the journal Féderation Balcanique in Vienna, in 1924, with Comintern
support; the journal advocated an independent Macedonia as part of a greater
Balkan federation. The notion of neutralizing national confrontations, which
inspired this concept of a Balkan federation, had been advocated already by
Serbian socialist Svetozar Marković. For the Comintern strategists, such
conceptions were also, at the same time, ways to avoid conflicts in their own house.
The most important Macedonian leftist politician who figured as an exponent of
the “federalist” line was Dimitar Vlahov, who had begun his career as a deputy
in the Turkish parliament. 12
That the notion of a politically independent Macedonia emerged in this way for
the first time within the framework of the Comintern has been exploited
especially by the Greek side as a justification for characterizing the Macedonian
nation as an “invention” of the Comintern. This is naturally nonsense. In reality,
what happened in the Comintern reflected only the discussions among
Macedonian communists and other leftist forces at home. The Macedonian
communists already made a clear distinction between Macedonians and
Bulgarians in the interwar period, becoming very militant about this during the
Second World War, while the population itself only showed a growing
disinterest in this particular question.
After the overthrow of peasant leader Alexander Stamboliski in 1923, IMRO
developed, in its Bulgarian exile, into an extreme, right-oriented, terrorist
conspiracy whose attacks not only in Macedonia but also in Bulgaria itself stirred
up fear. Within Bulgaria at the time, IMRO figured as a state within the state. At
the end of the 1920s, a certain Vance Mihajlov launched brutal attacks on his
“federally” attuned rivals within IMRO, in order to seize control of this