Conversations with Stalin Read Online Free PDF Page B

in order.
    The purges were especially hard on the Communist émigrés, those members of illegal parties who had no one to turn to except the Soviet. The Bulgarian émigrés were lucky that Dimitrov was Secretary of the Comintern and a person with such authority. He saved many of them. There was no one to stand behind the Yugoslavs; rather, they dug graves for one another in their race for power in the Party and in their zeal to prove their devotion to Stalin and to Leninism.
    Kolarov’s old age was already apparent; he was past seventy and, moreover, had been politically inactive for many years. He was a kind of relic of the violent beginnings of the Bulgarian Party. He belonged to the “
tesni
” (literally, “narrow”), the left wing of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, out of which later developed the Communist Party. In 1923 the Bulgarian Communists had given armed opposition to the military clique of General Tsankov which had just previously carried out a coup and killed the peasant leader Alexander Stambuliski. Kolarov had a massive head, more Turkish than Slavic, with chiseled features, strong nose, sensuous lips, but his thoughts were of times gone by and, I say it without rancor, of inconsequential matters. My description to Kolarov of the struggle in Yugoslavia could not be a mere analysis, but was also a horrible picture of ruins and massacres. Of some ten thousand prewar Party members, hardly two thousand were still alive, while I estimated our current losses of troops and population at around one million two hundred thousand. Yet after this recital of mine all Kolarov found it appropriate to ask me was the single question: “In your opinion, is the language spoken in Macedonia closer to Bulgarian or to Serbian?”
    The Yugoslav Communist leadership had already had serious altercations with the Central Committee in Bulgaria, which held that, by virtue of the Bulgarian occupation of Yugoslav Macedonia, the organization of the Yugoslav Communist Party in Macedonia should fall to it. The dispute was finally broken off by the Comintern, which approved the Yugoslav view, but only after Germany’s attack on the USSR. Nevertheless, friction over Macedonia, as well as over questions concerning the Partisan uprising against the Bulgarian occupiers, continued and got worse as the inevitable hour of the defeat of Germany, and with it of Bulgaria, approached. Vlahović, too, had observed in Moscow the pretensions of the Bulgarian Communists regarding Yugoslav Macedonia. To tell the truth, it must be added that Dimitrov was rather different in this respect: for him the matter of prime concern was the question of Bulgarian-Yugoslav
rapprochement
. But I do not believe that even he adhered to the viewpoint that the Macedonians were a separate nationality, despite the fact that his mother was a Macedonian and that his attitude toward the Macedonians showed a marked sentimentality.
    Perhaps I discharged too much bitterness when I replied to Kolarov, “I do not know whether the Macedonian language is closer to Bulgarian or Serbian, but the Macedonians are not Bulgars, nor is Macedonia Bulgarian.” Dimitrov found this unpleasant. He reddened and waved his hand: “It is of no importance!” And he passed on to another question.
    My memory of who attended the third meeting with Dimitrov is gone with the wind, but certainly Čhervenkov could not have been absent. The meeting took place on the eve of my return to Yugoslavia, at the beginning of June 1944. It was to be devoted to co-operation between the Yugoslav and Bulgarian Communists. But it was hardly worthwhile to discuss that, for the Bulgars in fact had no Partisan units at the time.
    I insisted that military operations and the creation of Partisan units in Bulgaria should be begun, and characterized as illusions the expectation that an upheaval would take place in the Bulgarian Royal Army. I based myself on the Yugoslav