Georgi Dimitrov

Georgi Dimitrov Mihaylov, also known as Georgiy Mihaylovich Dimitrov (18 June 1882 – 2 July 1949), was a Bulgarian communist politician and revolutionary who served as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1933 to 1949, and the first leader of the Communist People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1949. From 1935 to 1943, he was the General Secretary of...

Georgi Dimitrov Mihaylov, also known as Georgiy Mihaylovich Dimitrov (18 June 1882 – 2 July 1949), was a Bulgarian communist politician and revolutionary who served as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1933 to 1949, and the first leader of the Communist People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1949. From 1935 to 1943, he was the General Secretary of the Communist International. Born in western Bulgaria, Dimitrov worked as a printer and trade unionist during his youth. He was elected to the Bulgarian parliament as a socialist during the First World War and campaigned against his country's involvement in the conflict, which led to his brief imprisonment for sedition. In 1919, he helped found the Bulgarian Communist Party. Two years later, he moved to the Soviet Russia and was elected to the executive committee of Profintern. In 1923, Dimitrov led a failed communist uprising against the government of Aleksandar Tsankov and was subsequently forced into exile. He lived in the Soviet Union until 1929, at which time he relocated to Germany and became head of the Comintern operations in central Europe. Dimitrov rose to international prominence in the aftermath of the 1933 Reichstag fire trial. Accused of plotting the arson, he refused counsel and mounted an eloquent defence against his Nazi accusers, in particular Hermann Göring, ultimately winning acquittal. After the trial, he relocated to Moscow and was elected head of Comintern. In 1946, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years in exile and was elected prime minister of the newly founded People's Republic of Bulgaria. He negotiated with Josip Broz Tito to create a federation of Southern Slavs, which led to the 1947 Bled accord. The plan ultimately fell apart over differences regarding the future of the joint country as well as the Macedonian question, and was completely abandoned following the fallout between Stalin and Tito. Dimitrov died after a short illness in 1949 in Barvikha near Moscow. His embalmed body was housed in the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum in Sofia until its removal in 1990; the mausoleum was demolished in 1999. Early life The first of eight children, Dimitrov was born in Kovachevtsi, in present-day Pernik Province, to refugee parents from Ottoman Macedonia (a mother from Bansko and a father from Razlog). His father was a rural craftsman, forced by industrialisation to become a factory worker. 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. Several of Georgi's siblings engaged in leftist political activities. His brother Nikola moved to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in Odessa. In 1908, Nikola was arrested and exiled to Siberia where he died in 1916. Georgi's brother Konstantin became a trade union leader but was killed in the First Balkan War in 1912. One of his sisters, Lena, married a future communist leader, Valko Chervenkov. Dimitrov was sent to Sunday school by his mother, who wanted him to be a pastor, but he was expelled at age 12. He then trained as a compositor, and became active in the labor movement in the Bulgarian capital. By age 15, he was an active trade union member. By age 18 in 1900, he was secretary of the Sofia branch of the printers' union. Career Dimitrov joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1902. The following year he allied himself with Dimitar Blagoev and the faction that formed the Social Democratic Labour Party of Bulgaria ("The Narrow Party", or tesniaks). In 1919, this party became the Bulgarian Communist Party when it affiliated with Bolshevism and the Comintern. From 1904 to 1923, Dimitrov was Secretary of the General Trade Unions Federation, which the Narrows controlled. In 1911, he spent a month in prison for libeling an official of the rival Free Federation of Trade Unions, whom he accused of strike-breaking. In 1913, he was elected to the Bulgarian Parliament. He opposed government policies in the Balkan Wars and World War I. In 1915, he voted against awarding new war credits and denounced Bulgarian nationalism, for which he received short prison sentences. In summer 1917, after he intervened in defense of wounded soldiers who were being ordered by an officer to clear out of a first-class railway carriage, Dimitrov was charged with incitement to mutiny, stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and imprisoned on 29 August 1918. Released in 1919, he went underground and made two failed attempts to visit Russia, finally reaching Moscow in February 1921. He returned to Bulgaria later in 1921, but then travelled again to Moscow and was elected in December 1922 to the Executive Bureau of Profintern, the communist trade union international. In June 1923, when Bulgarian Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski was deposed through a coup d'état, Dimitrov and Khristo Kabakchiev, the leading communists in Bulgaria at the time, resolved not to take sides, a decision condemned by the Comintern as a "political capitulation" brought on by the party's "dogmatic-doctrinaire approach". After Vasil Kolarov had been sent from Moscow to impose a change in the Bulgarian party line, Dimitrov accepted the Comintern's authority. In September 1923, he and Kolarov led the failed uprising against the regime of Aleksandar Tsankov, which cost the lives of possibly five thousand communist supporters during the fighting and the reprisals which followed. Despite its failure, the attempt was approved by the Comintern, and secured the positions of Kolarov and Dimitrov – who escaped via Yugoslavia to Vienna – as the joint leaders of the Bulgarian CP. The political struggle in Bulgaria intensified in 1925. Dimitrov's only surviving brother, Todor, was arrested and killed that year by royal police. After the April 1925 St Nedelya Church assault, which was a terrorist bomb attack carried out by members of the Bulgarian CP, Dimitrov was tried in absentia in May 1926 and sentenced to death, although he had not approved the attack. Living under pseudonyms, he remained in the Soviet Union until 1929, when he was ousted from his Bulgarian CP leadership role by a faction of younger, more left-wing activists. Dimitrov then relocated to Germany where he was given charge of the Central European section of the Comintern. In 1932, he was appointed Secretary General of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, replacing Willi Münzenberg. Leipzig trial Dimitrov was living in Berlin in early 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power. On the night of 27 February, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was severely damaged in an arson attack. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found near the scene of the crime and presumed to be the culprit. Hitler quickly blamed a Communist conspiracy for the arson, and the Nazis proceeded to make mass arrests. On 9 March, Dimitrov was arrested based on the evidence of a waiter who claimed to have seen "three Russians" (in reality, Dimitrov and two other Bulgarians, Vasil Tanev, and Blagoy Popov, both of whom were members of the faction that had supplanted Dimitrov in the Bulgarian Communist Party) talking in a cafe with Van der Lubbe. Dimitrov would remain in Nazi detention until the following February. His diary entries during this period tended to be "dry and elliptical, and occasionally obscure" since he knew they would be subject to examination by his captors. The Reichstag fire trial lasted from September to December 1933. Because it occurred at the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, it is often referred to as the Leipzig Trial. Dimitrov decided to refuse counsel and defend himself against his Nazi accusers, most famously Hermann Göring. Dimitrov used the trial as an opportunity to defend the Communist ideology. Explaining why he chose to speak in his own defense, Dimitrov said: I admit that my tone is hard and grim. The struggle of my life has always been hard and grim. My tone is frank and open. I am used to calling a spade a spade. I am no lawyer appearing before this court in the mere way of his profession. I am defending myself, an accused Communist. I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals. I am defending the content and significance of my whole life. For these reasons every word which I say in this court is a part of me, each phrase is the expression of my deep indignation against the unjust accusation, against the putting of this anti-Communist crime, the burning of the Reichstag, to the account of the Communists. Dimitrov's calm conduct of his defence, and the accusations he directed at his prosecutors, won him world renown. In Europe, a popular saying spread across the Continent: "There is only one brave man in Germany, and he is a Bulgarian." Among those impressed with Dimitrov was the noted U.S. attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Hays attended the Leipzig Trial and devoted a chapter to it in his 1942 autobiography. In an oft-quoted passage, Hays wrote of Dimitrov:I have never seen such a magnificent exhibition of moral courage. The man was not only brave but reckless, and selflessly so. Whenever he got to his feet, he would by force of his personality place the court, the prosecutors, the German audience, and the Nazis on the defensive. This striking characterization was cited in multiple American newspaper reviews of Hays' book and helped introduce Dimitrov's name throughout the U.S. On 23 December 1933, the verdicts were read. While Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death, the judge acquitted Dimitrov, Tanev, and Popov because of insufficient evidence to connect them to what the judge was convinced was a conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag. The three Bulgarians were expelled from Germany and sent to the USSR. Head of Comintern When Dimitrov arrived in Moscow on 28 February 1934, he was encouraged by Joseph Stalin to end the practice of denouncing Social Democrats as 'social fascists', practically indistinguishable from actual fascists, and to instead promote "united front" tactics against the threat of European fascism. In April, as Dimitrov's fame grew in the wake of the Leipzig Trial, he was appointed a member of the Executive of Comintern and of its political secretariat, in charge of the Anglo-American and Central European sections. He was being groomed to take control of the Comintern from two of the so-called "Old Bolsheviks", Iosif Pyatnitsky and Wilhelm Knorin, who had held the position since 1923. Finally, in 1934, Stalin chose Dimitrov to head the international organization. At this point, Tzvetan Todorov writes, Dimitrov "became part of the Soviet leader's inner circle." From 25 July to 20 August 1935, the 7th World Congress of the Communist International met in Moscow. Dimitrov was the dominant presence; he was elected the Comintern's General Secretary. His impassioned anti-fascist speeches at the Congress were transcribed and published in a September 1935 pamphlet, The United Front Against Fascism, which went through numerous editions over the ensuing years. During the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, Dimitrov knew about the mass arrests, but did almost nothing. In November 1937, he was told by Stalin to lure the German communist Willi Münzenberg to the USSR so that he could be arrested. Dimitrov did not object and did as he was told. He noted in his diary when Julian Leszczyński, Henryk Walecki, and several members of his staff were arrested, but again did nothing, though he did raise questions when the NKVD representative in Comintern, Mikhail Trilisser, was arrested. Leader of Bulgaria In 1946, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years in exile. After a referendum abolished the monarchy in September, Bulgaria was declared a people's republic. Later that year, he succeeded Kimon Georgiev as Prime Minister, th