- Kovachevtsi
-Georgi Dimitrov Mikhaylov (Bulgarian: ?????? ???????? ????????), also known as Georgi Mikhaylovich Dimitrov (Russian: ??????? ?????????? ????????), (June 18, 1882 ? July 2, 1949) was a Bulgarian Communist politician. He was the first Communist leader of Bulgaria, from 1946 to 1949.
-Early careerGeorgi Dimitrov was born in Kovachevtsi in today's Pernik Province, as the first of eight children to working-class parents from Pirin Macedonia (a mother from Bansko and a father from Razlog). His mother, Parashkeva Doseva, was a Protestant Christian, and his family is sometimes described as Protestant. The family moved to Radomir and then to Sofia. Dimitrov trained as a compositor and became active in the labor movement in the Bulgarian capital.
Dimitrov joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1902, and in 1903 followed Dimitar Blagoev and his wing, as it formed the Social Democratic Labour Party of Bulgaria ("The Narrow Party") - the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1919, when it affiliated to Bolshevism and the Comintern. From 1904 to 1923, he was Secretary of the Trade Union Federation; in 1915 (during World War I) he was elected to the Bulgarian Parliament and opposed the voting of a new war credit, being imprisoned until 1917. In 1906, Dimitrov married his first wife, Serbian emigrant milliner, writer and socialist Ljubica Ivo?evi?, with whom he lived until her death in 1933.
In June 1923, when Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski was deposed through a coup d'état, Stamboliyski's Communists allies, who were initially reluctant to intervene, organized an uprising against Aleksandar Tsankov. Dimitrov took charge of the revolutionary activities, and managed to resist the clampdown for a whole week. He and the leadership fled to Yugoslavia and received a death sentence in absentia. Under various pseudonyms, he lived in the Soviet Union until 1929, when he relocated to Germany, where he was given charge of the Central European section of the Comintern
Leipzig trial and Comintern leadershipIn 1933 he was arrested in Berlin for alleged complicity in setting the Reichstag on fire (see Reichstag fire). During the Leipzig Trial, Dimitrov's calm conduct of his defence and the accusations he directed at his prosecutors won him world renown.
During the Leipzig Trial, several German aviators who had been trained in secret in the Soviet Union were arrested. They were released when, after secret negotiations, the Bulgarian communists Dimitrov, Vasili Tanev and Blagoi Popov tried in Leipzig were allowed to leave for the Soviet Union. There Dimitrov was awarded Soviet citizenship. The massive popularity he enjoyed made him an asset of Joseph Stalin's government, and Dimitrov was appointed General Secretary of the Comintern from 1934, remaining in office until the organisation's dissolution in 1943. He asserted himself as a Stalinist during and after the Great Purge. While in the Soviet Union, Dimitrov married his second wife, the Czech-born Roza Yulievna, who gave birth to his only son, Mitya, in 1936. The boy died at age seven of diphtheria. While Mitya was alive, Dimitrov adopted Fani, a daughter of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
In 1935, at the 7th Comintern Congress, Dimitrov spoke for Stalin when he advocated the Popular Front strategy, meant to consolidate Soviet ideology as mainstream Anti-Fascism ? a move later exploited during the Spanish Civil War.
Leader of Bulgaria
Joseph Stalin and Georgi Dimitrov, Moscow, 1936In 1944, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years in exile and became leader of the Communist party there. After the onset of undisguised Communist rule in 1946, Dimitrov succeeded Kimon Georgiev as Premier, while keeping his Soviet Union citizenship. Dimitrov started negotiating with Josip Broz Tito on the creation of a Federation of the Southern Slavs, which had been underway since November 1944 between the Bulgarian and Yugoslav Communist leaderships. The idea was based on the idea that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were the only two homelands of the Southern Slavs, are separated from the rest of the Slavic world. The idea eventually resulted in the 1947 Bled accord, signed by Dimitrov and Tito, which called for abandoning frontier travel barriers, arranging for a future customs union, and Yugoslavia's unilateral forgiveness of Bulgarian war reparations. The preliminary plan for the federation included the incorporation of the Blagoevgrad Region ("Pirin Macedonia") into the Socialist Republic of Macedonia and the return of the Western Outlands from Serbia to Bulgaria. In anticipation of this, Bulgaria accepted thousands of teachers from Yugoslavia who started to teach the newly-codified Macedonian language in the schools in Pirin Macedonia and issued the order that the Bulgarians of the Blagoevgrad Region should claim ? Macedonian identity.
However, differences soon emerged betw
See more
Discover the collectors' agenda!
Discover the agenda
