THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION NEVER DIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP08C01297R000400240004-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: March 1, 1968
• Content Type: REPORT

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SOUTHEAST EUROPE SERIES
Vol. XV No. 3
(Yugoslavia)
THE "MACEDONIAN QUESTION" NEVER DIES
by Dennison I. Rusinow
[DIR-3-'68]
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DENNISON I. RUSINOW,
who writes from Yugoslavia
on Eastern Europe, has main-
tained an interest in Adriatic
Europe since 1952, when he
specialized in the problems
of the Habsburg Successor
States as a Rhodes Scholar at
Oxford University and trav-
eled in this connection to Vienna, Trieste, and
Belgrade. He returned to the area in 1956 as an
officer of the United States Sixth Fleet. In 1958
he was awarded a fellowship by the Institute of
Current World Affairs, and after a year's resi-
dence in Vienna he moved to St. Antony's College,
Oxford, where he continued his study of recent
Italian, Yugoslav, and Austrian history. He holds
a B.A. from Duke University, and an M.A. and
D.Phil. from Oxford. While at Oxford, Mr. Rusinow
held an appointment as Extraordinary Lecturer at
New College, teaching modern history, international
relations, and political institutions. He joined the
AUFS in 1963.
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UNIVERSITIES FIELD STAFF, INC.
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University of Wisconsin
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SOUTHEAST EUROPE SERIES
Vol. XV No. 3
(Yugoslavia)
THE "MACEDONIAN QUESTION" NEVER DIES
The San Stefano Trauma Again?or When Is a Macedonian Bulgarian?
by Dennison L Rusinow
Belgrade
March 1968
It will never appear on a Balkan calendar of coming cultural or
political events, but it is almost as certain to occur as the Dubrovnik
Festival or the Plovdiv Fair. The "Macedonian Question"?that ninety-
year-old territorial, political, and cultural dispute involving Bulgaria,
Serbia (later Yugoslavia), sometimes Greece, and even Albania?is a
hardy perennial of the Balkan scene, and one that can be counted on to
continue to produce irredentist claims, the adventurous speculations of
outside Great Powers, terrorism and assassination, and/or the lately
more popular if less spectacular offering, an efflorescence of scholarly
and pseudo- scholarly polemics focused on the sensitive question: is there
a Macedonian nation?
In the winter of 1967-68 the polemical harvest was larger and
richer than in any recent year?one of the few sectors, a Belgrade cynic
has been heard to say, in which both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria have ex-
ceeded planned production figures. Many foreign and domestic observers
have consequently been speculating about the motivations and intentions
of both the attack and the verbal counterattack. Are the Bulgars really
raising a territorial issue again? Or is there a simpler, domestic rea-
sons for the apparent Bulgarian press campaign? If so, why are the Yugo-
slays making such a fuss? Are there other, domestic reasons for their
apparently exaggerated response? What sinister role, if any, are the
Russians playing?
The occasion for the latest revival of the Macedonian question has
been provided by the ninetieth anniversary of the signing on March 3,
1878, of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano, which liberated Bul-
garia from Ottoman rule. In preparation for the anniversary, a series
of commemorative articles appeared in various Bulgarian periodicals
in December 1967 and January 1968; and several familiar themes, to
Copyright C MS, American Universities Field Staff, Inc.
[DIR.-3-'68]
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which the Yugoslays are known to be hypersensitive, have been replayed:
heroes and events which in Yugoslavia are claimed as "Macedonian" are
listed as "Bulgarian"; the anniversary of the Ilinden revolt of 1903 against
the Turks, which took place on the soil of present-day Yugoslav Mace-
donia, is claimed as a Bulgarian holiday; Ohrid, in western Yugoslav
Macedonia, is described as a Bulgarian bishopric, one of Bulgaria's three
historic capitals, and a proud center of Bulgarian culture.
Most specifically and alarmingly, the frontiers of the Treaty of
San Stefano's Bulgaria, which would have included all of Yugoslav Mace-
donia and parts of southern Serbia, eastern Albania, and Greek Macedonia,
are considered to have been the "just" and "ethnic" frontiers of the Bul-
gar nation. The Congress of Berlin, by revising the San Stefano dispen-
sation, therefore committed an injustice: "The Bulgarian state could not
gain her national frontiers," a Sofia professor wrote in the Bulgarian
Communist party's official newspaper, Rabotnichesko Delo, on January
12, 1968, "because under the Berlin Agreement parts of what are unques-
tionably parts of the Bulgarian nation remained as vassals under the Sul-
tan (southern Bulgaria, Macedonia, etc.). New struggles and progressive
wars had to be started for their liberation and unification, which, however,
could not be realised in full because of the corruption of the dynasty and
the ineffectiveness of Bulgarian diplomacy." 1
The existence of a separate "Macedonian" nation is thus explicitly
denied, and the territory of Yugoslav Macedonia is implicitly still Bul-
garia irredenta.
The Yugoslav press reacted strongly. Questions were asked in
Parliament; and in Yugoslav Macedonia the republican legislature, the
Central Committee of the League of Communists, and the republican
executive of the Socialist Alliance all debated the problem and passed
resolutions, as did the Federal Conference of the Socialist Alliance in
Belgrade. 2 On January 22 the Bulgarian Ambassador to Yugoslavia was
summoned to the Foreign Ministry to hear a formal protest from Deputy
Foreign Minister Mia PaviCevi6; but in February the Belgrade press
complained that the Bulgarian campaign had not abated.
Press polemics on the Macedonian question are hardly novel, even
in the period of improved Yugoslav-Bulgarian relations that began after
Nikita Khrushchev passed the word to Sofia in April 1962; for in the past
thirty months alone, according to my certainly incomplete file, the sub-
ject has come up on at least seven different occasions. This time, how-
ever, the Bulgarian attitude appears to the Yugoslays to be more "official,"
because the leading role in advertising it has been played by official party
and army publications like Rabotnichesko Delo and Narodna Armija, as
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well as by such more traditional if less authoritative vehicles as the
review Slavljani. The Yugoslays have also noted, with apprehension, that
the Bulgarian position appears to enjoy a new Soviet "imprimatur" in the
form of a third volume of The Liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish Op-
pression, covering the period of the Berlin Congress and written co-
operatively by a group of four Soviet and three Bulgarian historians, which
was published in Moscow early in 1968.
For a detached foreign observer, the answer is deceptively simple.
The Bulgars are historically correct; it is difficult, unless one juggles
the sources, to speak of a Macedonian national consciousness or there-
fore of a Macedonian nation in 1878 or 1903. But the Yugoslays are politi-
cally correct, for in terms of most accepted definitions, including clas-
sical Marxist ones, both a Macedonian nation and a national consciousness
do exist today. Therefore, the Yugoslays feel that they may legitimately
query the intentions of those who again publicly challenge the existence
of this nation, even though they use perfectly valid historical arguments,
within the context of a campaign to "put patriotism on the agenda" (as one
Belgrade journalist phrased it) for a new generation of Bulgars.
The distinction between historical and political justifiability is
not made?and perhaps it cannot be?by the Yugoslav press. There was
a hint of it, however, in a dispatch from the Moscow correspondent of
Politika (Belgrade) on February 12, 1968, in which, in commenting on the
new third volume of The Liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish Oppression,
he complained not about the reproduction of historical documents in which
Macedonians of the 1870's called themselves Bulgars and demanded union
with Bulgaria, but about the failure of the Soviet and Bulgarian editors
to add any commentary or footnote disclaiming contemporary validity in
1968 for such an identification.
From San Stefano to Bled and Back Again
The piece of Balkan geography historically called "Macedonia"
belonged to the Ottoman Empire from the fourteenth century until its
"liberation" in the First Balkan War of 1912-13. Since then, like ancient
Gaul, it has been divided in three parts: 52 per cent of the total area
belongs to Greece ("Aegean Macedonia"), 38 per cent to Yugoslavia ("Var-
dar Macedonia"), and 10 per cent to Bulgaria ("Firm n Macedonia," or in
recent official Bulgarian terminology, the "District of Blagoevgrad"). 3
It is impossible to arrive at a genuinely objective determination
of the ethnic structure, because many of the inhabitants are not quite
certain what to call themselves and therefore tend to shift their national
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allegiance to suit the prevailing political winds in the districts where they
live. In Bulgaria's Pirin Macedonia, for example, out of a total popula-
tion of Z81,000 inhabitants, there were 188,000 "Macedonians" recorded
in the 1956 census, but only 8,750 "Macedonians" in the census of 1965.
The one certainty is that the population of Aegean Macedonia (now 1.7 mil-
lion in all) is overwhelmingly Greek?at least since the Greek-Bulgarian
population transfers following World War I and the exodus of thousands
of the remaining "Slavophones" after the Greek civil war ended in 1949?
while there are almost no Greeks in Yugoslavia or the Pirin district. A
sizable Turkish minority, the residue of the Ottoman Empire, is scattered
throughout Vardar Macedonia (where there were 131,000 Turks of a total
population of 1.4 million in the 196 1 Yugoslav census), and Albanians
(183,000 in 1961) constitute local majorities in several western districts.
Most of the rest of the inhabitants of Vardar and Pirin Macedonia
are Slays, the overwhelming majority of whom speak a South Slavic lan-
guage, or dialect, roughly halfway between Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian,
but somewhat closer to the latter. Before 1870 most of these Slays who
called themselves anything at all seem to have referred to themselves
as "Greeks," which was primarily a religious identification with the then
Greek-dominated Orthodox Christian Church in European Turkey. (By
the same religious logic, the Serbo-Croatian-speaking and undeniably
Slavic Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sandjak are even today
often bewilderingly referred to?and refer to themselves?as "Turks";
the resulting confusion in their own minds still sometimes leading them
to emigrate to Turkey!) 4 However, after the establishment of a separate
Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate in 1870, the Greek and Bulgarian churches
competed for the loyalty of these Macedonian Slays, and those who chose
the Exarchate came to call themselves Bulgars; as theretofore they had
been Slays without a specific national consciousness, it was then a short
and easy step from a religious allegiance to ethnic identification.
The misery of the Christian peoples of European Turkey had
meanwhile led to uprisings in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria, bringing
Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania into war with Turkey in 1877.
The peace treaty subsequently imposed on the Turks by the victorious
Russians, and signed at San Stefano on March 3, 1878, created a "Greater
Bulgaria" which included all of the disputed ethnic patchwork of geographic
Macedonia, except for a few southern Greek communes, plus the Pirot
and Vranje districts of today's southern Serbia and the K9rrce region of
southeastern Albania.
This Bulgaria, created by the Treaty of San Stefano, however, is
a state that never was; for, as everyone who has ever taken a course in
modern European history knows, the other great powers, alarmed at the
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prospect of a Russian-satellite Bulgaria dominating the Balkan peninsula
and both approaches to the Turkish straits, forced the Russians to the
conference table again. At the Congress of Berlin, three months after
the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano, Greater Bulgaria was undone:
Macedonia was returned to the Sultan and inner Bulgaria itself was par-
titioned into an autonomous principality in the north, open to Russian
influence, and a semi-autonomous Turkish province of "Eastern Rumelia"
in the south, with a Christian governor appointed by the Sublime Porte.
The partition of inner Bulgaria was ended eight years later, after the
Bulgars themselves defied all the powers (including Russia) by annexing
Eastern Rumelia; but Macedonia remained unhappily Turkish for another
generation, coveted in whole or in part by Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Greeks were no longer
serious contenders for the national allegiance of the Slays of today's Var-
dar and Pirin Macedonia. Their place as the competitor of the Bulgars
had been taken by the Serbs, who temporarily turned the main focus of
their own aspiration for national expansion from their kinsmen in Bosnia-
Herzegovina (under Austro-Hungarian occupation after 1878) to their
kinsmen in what they came to call "South Serbia." If the Bulgars could
reinforce a somewhat dubious ethnic claim to Vardar Macedonia with
memories of the First and Second Bulgarian Empires and a Bulgarian
capital and cultural and religious center at Ohrid, the Serbs could support
an even more dubious ethnic claim with their more recent memories of
the fourteenth-century Empire of Tsar Stevan Duan, who had been crowned
at Skopje. Great power politics also played a role: from the 1880's until
after 1903 Serbia was a client state of Austria-Hungary, encouraged by
Vienna to expend Serbian irredentist energies in the south rather than in
Austrian-occupied Bosnia; while Bulgaria was considered (not always
correctly) a Russian satellite, supporting Russian interests in seeking
to restore the territorial dispensation of San Stefano. The Hapsburg Drang
nach Sudosten and the Russian thrust toward warm seas?those two over-
worked favorites of the geopoliticians?intersected in Macedonia. The
habit of looking for machinations of the great powers behind any revival
of the Macedonian question, noticeable again in recent weeks, has a long
and respectable past.
Like all such ethnic contests of the period (for example, those
along the borderlands of the German and Italian nations, in Carinthia,
Styria, West Hungary, Istria, the Italian Tyrol, etc.), the Serbo-Bulgar
competition was waged with the aid of rival schools, churches, reading
rooms, and cultural societies. But in the Balkans, under Turkey, the
struggle also inevitably assumed more violent organizational forms:
e.g., the notorious Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization,
known as IMRO, was founded in the 1890's to foment terrorism and an
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eventual armed rising. From the beginning and throughout its long and
faction-ridden history, there were always two currents in IMRO, one
aspiring to a Bulgarian annexation and the other dreaming of an autono-
mous Macedonia; some adherents of the latter current eventually became
Communists and the protagonists of today's (Yugoslav) Socialist Republic
of Macedonia. In this context, one must understand the contemporary
Yugoslav-Bulgarian dispute over the relics of such IMR0 heroes as Gotse
Deltchev and of the IMRO- sponsored and unsuccessful "Ilinden" (St. Elias
Day) revolution of 1903. Do they belong to Bulgaria or to Yugoslav Mace-
donia?
Propaganda, terrorism, and open rebellion had failed to liberate
Macedonia. The joint intervention of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian
Emperors, in the form of the Marzsteg agreement to impose reforms
on the Sultan in order to de-fuse the "Balkan powder keg" after the Ilin-
den bloodletting, failed to ameliorate the condition of the Christian inhab-
itants of the unhappy province, and so did the Young Turk Revolution of
1908. When all else had failed, the aspirant Balkan states at last swal-
lowed their rivalry and agreed to a joint attack on Turkey and a division
of the territorial spoils, with the Bulgars scheduled to get the lion's
share of Macedonia. 5 The First Balkan War ended in victory for the
Christian aggressors and the expulsion of Turkey from all but a toehold
in Europe; however, Austria-Hungary and Italy then intervened to pre-
vent Serbia from annexing northern Albania, which had been conquered
by a Serbian army. The excuse given?and valid enough?was that the
non-Slavic Albanians, too, should have a national state of their own, but
a more serious reason was to prevent the landlocked Serbs from gaining
access to the Adriatic, where the Austrians feared that a Serbian port
might in reality be a Russian port. The Serbs demanded compensation
from Bulgaria in the form of a larger share of Macedonia; the Bulgars
demurred and launched a preventive war against their former allies?
which they promptly lost.
In 1878 the Bulgars had been cheated of all of Macedonia and more;
in 1913 they were cheated of most of Macedonia and were unconsoled by
the small fragment, the Struma and Strumica valleys, that they did get.
This bitterness has poisoned Bulgarian domestic and foreign politics
ever since and was the major reason for their entering both World Wars
on the German (because anti-Serb, anti-Yugoslav, and anti-Greek) side.
It was, of course, also the losing side in both wars, but each time initial
victories brought the Bulgars temporary occupation of most of the coveted
terra irredenta, where their behavior, despite good intentions, did not
increase the number of their supporters. On the other hand, the ethnic
policies of the Serbs, who ruled Yugoslavia between the wars and who
insisted that the Macedonians were also Serbs, do not seem to have won
many friends there either.
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Both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria emerged from World War II with
new, revolutionary, Communist regimes; and it was generally assumed
that both were satellites of the Soviet Union?a Stalinist realization of
a Tsarist dream. This apparently identical status, plus a common and
internationalist ideology, also suggested that a new and co-operative
approach to the Macedonian question might be expected. The Third Inter-
national had, after all, devoted much attention to national problems, in-
cluding the Macedonian, and had evolved a consistent and generally liberal
ideological position on the subject. For Marxist-Leninists, national con-
flicts are derivative, being either the reflection of class divisions along
ethnic lines ("oppressor" and "oppressed" nations) or artificially engen-
dered by rival national bourgeoisies in pursuit of narrow class interests.
For Communists in power, the ideology prescribes a gingerly mixture of
liberal cultural policies and strict party-political control in order to tame
inherited acute ethnic divisions until such time as the successful building
of socialism and liquidation of class enemies can render these divisions
irrelevant and harmless.
Ideological principles, however, are always subject to varying
interpretations under differing conditions and to tactical modifications;
and in coping with the Macedonian question both the Yugoslav and Bul-
garian Communist parties had long displayed an understandable tendency
to favor interpretations which suited their distinct and basically contra-
dictory national aspirations. During most of the interwar years, the
Communist International had adopted a view which roughly accorded with
the hopes of the Bulgarian party (incidentally, the most important of the
Balkans), and the reluctant Yugoslav and Greek comrades were bullied
and cajoled into agreeing, to the detriment of their domestic popularity.
From 1923 until 1935 the Comintern declared itself in favor of an "autono-
mous and independent Macedonia and Thrace," implying the separation
of these provinces from Yugoslavia and Greece, and also in favor of the
eventual inclusion of this independent Macedonia in a federation of Balkan
Communist republics, which more generally implied the total disintegra-
tion of Yugoslavia into its national components. Only after the Nazi threat
became dominant, and the Comintern shifted to the advocacy of a Popular
Front against fascism, did it seem expedient to favor the survival of Yugo-
slavia; and in the end it was the Germans and Italians, not the Communist
International, who espoused and successfully exploited separatist move-
ments in the South Slav state, and incidentally gave most of Yugoslav and
Greek Macedonia to their Bulgarian ally.
During the war years, ironically, it was the Yugoslav Communists
who found it to their interest to realize a modified version of the old
Comintern answer to the Macedonian question: i.e., Yugoslavia itself
should constitute that federation of Balkan Communist republics in em-
bryo, on the basis of the autonomy of its major ethnic units, and Mace-
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donia should be one of these republics. Politically, and even ideologically,
this was a solution with much to commend it: if a Macedonian nation did
not exist, it was necessary to invent one, because once Macedonians are
neither Bulgars nor Serbs, but themselves, the ground has been cut out
from under the poisonous rival irredentisms of Sofia and Belgrade. The
"invention" of a Macedonian nation, autonomous within a federal Yugo-
slavia, was therefore designed to provide a definitive solution to the
"Macedonian Question," liquidating a classic "powder keg of Europe" and
taming the "Greater Serbian and Greater Bulgarian chauvinists" who had
made life so unpleasant for so many people between the wars.
An autonomous republic might also prove tactically useful, inci-
dentally, in weakening the position and appeal of those Macedonians, in-
cluding most of IMR0 and not a few leading Communists, who still pre-
ferred either incorporation in Bulgaria or an independent Macedonian
state. Even on the presupposition of an Allied victory, without which
there would be no more Yugoslavia, it was by no means a foregone con-
clusion that a restored Yugoslav state would include Vardar Macedonia.
During the first years of the war, the Bulgarian and Yugoslav Communist
parties had competed, like good bourgeois nationalists, for control of the
Communist movement in the Vardar region, and for a time the Bulgars
had the best of the argument. Indeed, it was not until the summer of
1943 that a Titoist Partisan armed rising, or even a Titoist Macedonian
Communist party, could be organized in the Bulgarian-occupied south.
There is also evidence that as late as 1946 some Macedonian separatists,
Communist or otherwise, were still active in the region.
At least for a time, it was now Tito, and not the Bulgarian (or
Greek) Communists, whose solution enjoyed the support of Stalin and even
apparently of Georgi Dimitrov, the aging Bulgarian former head of the
Comintern who returned after the war to become Prime Minister of his
homeland; and on this basis Tito projected a larger design. It was only
natural that an autonomous Macedonia should include all members of the
Macedonian nation, and therefore natural that Vardar, Pirin, and even-
tually Aegean Macedonia should be reunited, but this time within a federal
Yugoslavia. It would be equally natural that the Bulgars, linked to the
Yugoslays by blood and now also by ideology, should also join the federa-
tion, realizing at last the Land of (all) the South Slays that nineteenth-
century advocates of the Yugo-Slav idea had originally had in mind. Then
perhaps one could think in terms of a wider confederation, including all
the Communist republics of the Balkans... .
The history of this grand design, and of its failure, is the central
theme of the well-known history of the Tito-Stalin quarrel. For present
purposes it is only important to note that for four years, from 1944 to
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1948, the Bulgarian Communist regime was forced to accept the Yugoslav
argument that the Macedonians constitute a separate nation. They also
actively, if reluctantly, prepared Pirin Macedonia for unification with
Vardar Macedonia inside Yugoslavia, although they sought to postpone
the evil day by insisting that unification could come only after federation
between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. This was the substance of a Tito-
Dimitrov agreement signed at Bled, in Slovenia, in August 1947, and re-
affirmed in a Yugoslav-Bulgarian Treaty of Friendship signed at Sofia
when Tito returned the visit the following November. Whenever the Bul-
gars have subsequently raised the ghost of San Stefano, the Yugoslays
reply by exhuming the Bled Agreement.
The best brief summary of the fluctuations in the Bulgarian re-
gime's position on Macedonia since the end of World War II is that of
Evangelos Kofos, in the conclusions to his valuable study of the problem,
Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia:
In less than twenty years since liberation, the
Bulgarian communists five times adopted totally
contradictory views on the Macedonian issue.
Thus, in 1944-1948 not only did they relinquish
in favor of the Yugoslays their territorial claims
over Macedonia, but even accepted the Yugoslav
theory that the Slav inhabitants of Macedonia as
a whole were "Macedonian," i.e. a new ethnic
group. Following the Tito-Cominform split?from
1948 to 1954?the Bulgarians passed to the offen-
sive by advocating the establishment of a Bulgarian-
sponsored Macedonian state within a Balkan com-
munist federation. By official act, the "Macedo-
nians" became Bulgarians again. Only when the
new Soviet leadership thought it expedient to try
to bring Tito back to the communist fold in 1955,
did Bulgaria drop her pretensions over Macedonia
and acquiesced to recognition of the existence of
ethnic "Macedonians" even inside Bulgaria. But,
this was only a short-lived retreat which lasted
only for the duration of the new Soviet-Yugoslav
rapprochement. In 1958, amidst sharp criticism
of the Yugoslav "revisionists" by the entire Soviet
bloc, the Bulgarians lost no time to declare their
independence on the Macedonian issue, welcome
back the "Macedonians" as "Bulgarians" and do
away with the theory of the "Macedonian nationality".
But Moscow's new international orientations brought
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about a new reconciliation with Belgrade. As a
result Sofia found itself abandoning the polemics
on the Macedonian issue. There were indications
that following the Tito-Zhivkov meeting in Bel-
grade in January 1963, the Bulgarians might
harden their position to Yugoslav demands. How-
ever, Soviet-Yugoslav relations have not apparently
reached perfection to compel the Bulgarians to
decide definitely whether "Macedonians" do exist
outside the People's Republic of Macedonia.6
Why Today's Polemics?
Kofos' summary was written in 1964. Since that time, as we have
seen, polemics have not in fact been abandoned, nor have the Bulgars
decided that "Macedonians" exist in Yugoslavia?much less in Bulgaria.
In September 1965, Tito paid an official visit to Bulgaria. It was, signifi-
cantly, the first time that he had been there since the meeting with Dimi-
troy in November 1947, although he had visited every other Eastern Euro-
pean Soviet ally at least once since the latest Soviet-Yugoslav rapproche-
ment began in 1961. The Western press speculated that Macedonia had
been discussed, although it was not mentioned in speeches or the com-
munique; but on the way home, speaking in Pirot on the Yugoslav side of
the border, Tito referred to difficulties that occur when "some historians
write and interpret the history of our people according to their own will."
Minor press polemics continued at irregular intervals during the
next two years, and in November 1966 there was a more serious incident
when a delegation of Yugoslav Macedonian writers walked out of a meeting
with Bulgarian writers in Sofia. The Macedonians were protesting the
insistence of the Bulgars that their joint communique be published in
Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, and not in Bulgarian and Macedonian; the
Bulgars having refused to recognize the separateness (from Bulgarian)
of the Macedonian language, even though it is the official language of the
Socialist Republic of Macedonia, which their conference partners officially
represented.
The Yugoslav press repeatedly denounced the head of the Bulgarian
writers' association (an appointee of Prime Minister Todor Zhivkov),
speaking of "deliberate political tendentiousness with clearly revanchist
implications"; and the dispute was considered serious enough to bring
Zhivkov to Belgrade in December 1966, on his way home from Budapest,
for talks with Tito and the Yugoslav Macedonian party leader, Kr ste
Crvenkovski. The New York Times quoted "an informed Communist source"
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as saying that during the autumn of 1966 the Bulgarian Ambassador in
Belgrade had been sending embassy officials to Yugoslav Macedonia to
"study the conditions for the establishment of a separate Macedonian
Socialist republic under Bulgarian guidance." 7 In May 1967, during prepa-
rations for an official visit by Prime Minister Zhivkov to Belgrade (which
was cut short by the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war), Crvenkovski him-
self went to Sofia for further talks about the Macedonian problem.
Against this background, the intensity of the Yugoslav reaction to
the present, more widespread, and higher-level series of verbal "attacks"
by Bulgaria on the territorial integrity of their country is a little more
understandable. Indeed, the Bulgarian polemics seemed the last straw
?coming at the end of a year in which many Yugoslays had become curi-
ously hypersensitive to real or imagined "attacks" on their country and
society from all sides. 8
Bulgarian motives are more obscure, and from Belgrade one can
only report Yugoslav speculations about them. Two simplicist explana-
tions enjoy wide circulation. One holds that the Bulgarian regime is in
trouble at home, where its enduring unpopularity has recently been aggra-
vated by inflation, business stagnation, and comparisons with the relative
independence and prosperity of all its neighbors; therefore, the rulers
of Bulgaria, like good students of Bismarck, are distracting the attention
of their people from domestic woes by drumming up a popular foreign
issue and threat. The other explanation views the Russians as playing
their Bulgarian pawn against the Yugoslays as a reminder, on the eve of
the Budapest preparatory conference for a world Communist conference,
that there are ways and means of making life uncomfortable for Commu-
nist mavericks who do not play the game Moscow's way.
There are alternative explanations, related to the above but more
sophisticated and not mutually exclusive; the difference between them
depends on whether or not one chooses to include a Russian factor. Ac-
cording to Yugoslav officials who would like to play down wider or more
alarming implications of the recent campaign, domestic considerations
provide an adequate motivation, and involvement in polemics with Yugo-
slays, although undesirable, has been something of an accidental by-
product. The Bulgarian regime has lately engaged in a self-conscious
and purposeful glorification of Bulgarian history. Party and government
leaders are tired of being viewed, both at home and abroad, as puppets
of the Soviet Union; and they have noted the success and popularity that
neighboring regimes seem to have enjoyed because they identified them-
selves with the national aspirations and history of their peoples. They
are therefore establishing a claim to being Bulgarian as well as Commu-
nist, socialist successors to Khan Krum, Samuilo, the Exarchate, and the
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Bulgarian national revolutionaries of the nineteenth century. Given the
nature of Bulgarian history, however, any glorification of it inevitably
carries with it a head-on collision with Yugoslav historical sensitivities;
and this is what happened in the winter of 1967-68.
Considering the need that Bulgarians should also feel for better
relations with Yugoslavia, one at this point may ask why officials in Sofia
have decided that the presumed domestic value of emphasizing San Stefano
is worth the cost in terms of an inevitable Yugoslav reaction. The most
common high-level Yugoslav answer is interesting: i.e., the Bulgars do
not understand what is happening in Yugoslavia today; they are misinter-
preting the current open Yugoslav debate about the role of the party and,
especially, about internal inter-republican and inter-nationality relations
?interpreting these as signs of Yugoslav weakness, even of a tendency
toward the disintegration of the state. Therefore, they feel that they can,
at the moment at least, challenge the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia
with impunity, because the Yugoslays are in no condition to react with
more than verbal protests. They may also be speculating on the possi-
bility that aggravated ethnic disputes within Yugoslavia really will lead
to its disintegration, believing that it would therefore be useful to have
another reminder of their latent claim to Vardar Macedonia on record.
The Yugoslays who offer this interpretation would like, for obvious
reasons, to leave the Russians out of the story, but this is not entirely
easy. The arrangements for the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary
of San Stefano, presumably including the scope and emphasis of publica-
tions about the event, were made by the Soviet-Bulgarian Friendship Asso-
ciation, a joint and official agency. It would be naive to suppose that the
Russian participants were either uninformed of Bulgarian plans or un-
aware of their implications, and that they did not enjoy some power of
veto.
If Soviet knowledge and approval, if not instigation, are therefore
clear, Soviet motivation is not. It is difficult to see what the Russians
have to gain from an aggravation of Yugoslav-Bulgarian relations at the
present time, despite the superficial attractiveness of the theory that
the Russians would like to remind Belgrade of the trouble that they can
make for Yugoslavia if they want to. Perhaps the explanation is to be
found not in Soviet concern for their relations with Yugoslavia but for
their relations with Bulgaria, their last reliable ally in Southeastern
Europe. In keeping such an ally reliable?and also to forestall Bulgarian
flirtations with an independent foreign policy in the style of Rumania or
Yugoslavia?reminders of past Russian favors lavished on the Bulgars,
at the expense of Serbs, Rumanians, and others, would not be amiss. As
the Yugoslav press has noted, with sarcasm, San Stefano was not a Bul-
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garian victory, but a Russian one bestowed on Bulgaria in the pursuit of
Russian imperial interests.
The most that Yugoslav officials will say about a putative Soviet
involvement in the present campaign is that the Russians have assured
them through diplomatic channels that there is none. Still, the Yugoslays
wish they would say this publicly and in print.
Are Macedonians (Still) Bulgars?
If the more alarmist interpretations of Bulgarian intentions are
correct, and the Bulgarians really are speculating on a second disinte-
gration of Yugoslavia, seeing themselves as successors in Macedonia,
then it would appear that the Bulgars continue to believe that most of the
one million "Macedonians" of the Republic still consider themselves?or
at least could be persuaded to consider themselves?Bulgarians.
It seems highly probable that the Bulgars are wrong in this evalua-
tion, if indeed they do make it. 9 For a social scientist, in fact, the fasci-
nation of Macedonia lies in precisely the story of the "creation" of a "new"
nation in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, a complex process
involving the interplay of emotional, historic, social, and political factors,
personal ambitions, and the laws of bureaucracy and power. It is diffi-
cult to be categorical, because no really competent observer is also ob-
jective, but for many like myself, who hope to substitute objectivity for
specialized competence, it is at least clear that most of our friends from
the Vardar region now think of themselves as Macedonian and are proud
of it.
Their defense of their new status continues to be directed not only
against Bulgarian pretensions, but also against Serbian. Thus they were
led, in defiance of their heretofore apparent economic community of in-
terest with the other less-developed southern republics, into a de facto
alliance with the developed republics, Croatia and Slovenia, and to intro-
duce the economic reform of 1965 and the purge of the Serbian leader,
Aleksandar RankoviC, and his Serb-dominated political police in 1966.
Similarly, their struggle for a separate Macedonian Orthodox
Church, partly successful in 1958 and completely so last year, dates back
to 1944 and is by no means purely an "invention" of the regime and party
to cater to their Macedonian comrades, as the Serbian Orthodox Church
seems to want to believe. Even for non-religious Macedonians, an iden-
tity of ethnic and religious self-consciousness somehow still seems neces-
sary: when they identified with the Greek Orthodox Church, they called
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themselves Greeks; when they became Exarchists, they became Bulgars;
the Serbian annexation of 19 13 meant annexation by the Serbian Church.
To put the seal on Macedonian nationhood it was therefore necessary to
establish a Macedonian Church?or, more precisely and with a final touch
of irony, to re-establish the ancient and autocephalous Archbishopric of
Ohrid, which the Macedonians claim was Macedonian, although the Bul-
gar s claim it was Bulgarian.
If excesses are committed these days, they are usually in the name
of the Macedonian nation, and are directed against the minorities that
comprise nearly 30 per cent of the population of the Republic. As the lat-
est outbreak of Yugoslav-Bulgarian polemics over Bulgarian pretensions
to Macedonia slowly passed from the front pages, a Plenum of the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Macedonia met to consider
the problem of "inter-nationality relations" inside the Republic. It seemed
evident from the tone and content of the principal speeches that the trouble
had been serious, and had revolved around the ancient dilemma of every
new nation-state: if Macedonia is the land of Macedonians, how much tol-
eration can there be for un-Macedonian behavior by members of minority
groups, especially when the very existence of a Macedonian nation is still
being challenged? The minorities?especially the most numerous, the
Albanians (13 per cent) and Turks (9.3 per cent)?were assured that Mace-
donian would not be imposed on them as an exclusive state language, that
they would not (or should not) be subject to discrimination in employment
(the republic has the highest unemployment rate in Yugoslavia), and that
Macedonia should be considered their home too.")
It would seem that some Macedonians are not only enjoying their
sense of national identity, but are also demonstrating that they are not
at the bottom of the ethnic pecking order. The last of the assurances
given to the minorities also suggests, however, that another kind of worry
may be bothering government and party leaders in Skopje. At the Plenum,
Krste Crvenkovski made a point of attacking the concept of an ethnic
"vertical link-up," which would lead members of each nationality, where-
ever they live, to look to their own political and cultural center. He cited
the danger for Bosnia-Herzegovina, if the Bosnian Serbs were to look to
Belgrade and the Bosnian Croats to Zagreb for leadership; but he seemed
to be thinking of the 183,000 Macedonian Albanians, living for the most
part in a compact area adjacent to the Autonomous Province of Kosovo-
Metohija, where Albanians are in a majority and where recent reforms
suggest that they may come to enjoy a genuine autonomy. Does Crven-
kovski fear a demand from the Albanians of Tetovo, Gostivar, and Debar
for annexation to the neighboring Province if the Macedonians do not treat
them nicely?
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The Macedonians of Yugoslavia are still struggling with their
identity and its implications. In the midst of such turmoil, it is pleasant
to discover that at least some of them are at peace with themselves. I
am thinking of several Macedonian friends?hardworking business people
with a healthy Balkan interest in politics, but personally uninvolved. One
has a brother living in Bulgaria, where he fled in the interwar years, and
therefore is presumably a good Bulgar, but this does not matter; my
friend and her family are happily Macedonian and laugh at Bulgarian pre-
tensions. I recently asked them to whom they thought such contested his-
torical personalities as Saints Kliment and Naum and historic monuments
as Ohrid and Skopje belong? I thought that they would have to choose
between the Bulgarians and the Macedonians, but they replied promptly,
and apparently without political forethought: "To Old Slavonic culture?
to the Slays who wrested the Balkans from Byzantium." It seemed a
sensible and conclusive answer.
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NOTES
1. As quoted by Nedeljne Informativne Novine (NIN), Belgrade, February 4, 1968.
2. A total of seventeen articles on the subject in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Skopje
newspapers have come to my attention, but these are presumably only a representa-
tive fraction of the Yugoslav counterattack published since the beginning of 1968.
3. There is no statement about Macedonia that cannot be disputed by someone, a
fact that holds true even for these percentages and names. It depends on what is
included in the geographic definition, and whose labels are accepted.
4. According to Borba (Belgrade) March 10, 1968, some 350 Muslim families,
made up of 4,000 members, who are not ethnically Turkish, have emigrated to Turkey
in the past five years from the district of RoIaj (total population, 17,000!) in the
Montenegrin Sandjak.
5. Actually, and of interest in the light of later developments, the secret territo-
rial annex to the Serbo-Bulgarian treaty of alliance provided for partition of what is
today the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia only if it should prove impossible to es-
tablish an autonomous state there, and stipulated that partition should be arbitrated
by the Russian Tsar.
6. Evangelos Kofos, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia (Thessaloniki:
Institute for Balkan Studies, 1964). Part Two of Kofos' book, from which I have bor-
rowed heavily in writing this Report, is the best available study of the Macedonian
question in later years and makes extensive use of previously unpublished documents.
Also useful is Robert Lee Wolff's now classic survey, The Balkans in Our Time
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); and for the earlier period (1878-1886),
see Charles Jelavich, Tsarist Russia and Balkan Nationalism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1962).
7. David Binder, "Ethnic Disputes Erupt in Balkans," New York Times, Decem-
ber 7, 1966.
8. See Dennison I. Rusinow, Ghosts That Haunt Yugoslavia's Foreign Policy
(DIR-1-'68) and Tito Between Neo-Cominform and Neo-Nonalignment (DIR-2-'68),
American Universities Field Staff Reports, Southeast Europe Series, Vol. XV, Nos. 1
and 2, February 1968.
9. At least some of the more qualified of them do not. One Western historian,
recently resident in Sofia, reports that most of his colleagues accept the existence
of a separate Macedonian nation today. As historians, their quarrel is with Yugo-
slav colleagues who want to project the existence of this nation back to the nineteenth
century or even earlier.
10. See especially the Plenum speeches of Krste Crvenkovski and VanEo Apostolski
in Nova Makedonija (Skopje), March 2 and 3, 1968, and Borba (Belgrade), March 3.
The Plenum took a surprisingly mild line on the issue of "Greater Bulgarian chau-
vinism," which had been announced as the principal item on the agenda, but which
was treated as a peripheral matter.
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