A-Infos (en) Anarkismo.net: History, The Anarchist-Communist Mass Line: Bulgarian Anarchism Armed

The Anarchist-Communist Mass Line ---- In the early 20th Century, anarchism 
entrenched itself as a mass organisational movement in Czechoslovakia, Hungary 
and Poland - anarchists having already been active in the 1873 uprisings in 
Bosnia and Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian control. But it was primarily in 
Bulgaria and its neighbour Macedonia that a remarkable case of anarchist 
organising arose, in the midst of the power-play between the great powers. This 
poorly-studied movement not only blooded itself in national liberation struggles 
and armed opposition to both fascism and Stalinism, but developed a notably 
diverse and resilient mass movement, the first to adopt the controversial 1926 
Platform of the Ukrainian Makhnovist exiles in Paris 2 as its lodestone.

For these reasons it is vital that the revived anarchist-communist movement in 
the new millennium re-examine the legacy of the Balkans. This article, which 
begins mid-stream in 1919, is a version of an extract from the two-volume work 
on anarchism & syndicalism, Counter-Power, co-written by Lucien van der Walt, a 
global history and theory of the movement, which is due to be published in book 
form by AK Press in the USA in 2008.

The Anarchist-Communist Mass Line

Bulgarian Anarchism Armed
By Michael Schmidt (ZACF, South Africa)
with the assistance of veteran Bulgarian anarchist Jack Grancharoff 1
Kindly proof-read by Will Firth.

In the early 20th Century, anarchism entrenched itself as a mass organisational 
movement in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland - anarchists having already been 
active in the 1873 uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian 
control. But it was primarily in Bulgaria and its neighbour Macedonia that a 
remarkable case of anarchist organising arose, in the midst of the power-play 
between the great powers. This poorly-studied movement not only blooded itself 
in national liberation struggles and armed opposition to both fascism and 
Stalinism, but developed a notably diverse and resilient mass movement, the 
first to adopt the controversial 1926 Platform of the Ukrainian Makhnovist 
exiles in Paris 2 as its lodestone. For these reasons it is vital that the 
revived anarchist-communist movement in the new millennium re-examine the legacy 
of the Balkans. This article, which begins mid-stream in 1919, is a version of 
an extract from the two-volume work on anarchism & syndicalism, Counter-Power, 
co-written by Lucien van der Walt, a global history and theory of the movement, 
which is due to be published in book form by AK Press in the USA in 2008.

The Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB)
In the hot year of 1919, at the height of the global worker’s revolt against 
capitalism, Bulgarian anarcho-syndicalists (the first groups having been 
established in 1910) and the core of the old Macedonian-Bulgarian Anarchist 
Federation (a nucleus of which had been founded in 1909) called for the movement 
to reorganise. The Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) was 
founded at a congress opened by the anarchist guerrilla Mikhail Gerdzhikov 
(1877-1947), a founder of the Macedonian Clandestine Revolutionary Committee 
(MTRK) in 1898 and commander of its Leading Combat Body during the 1903 
Macedonian Revolt. His forces, only about 2,000 strong and armed with antique 
rifles, managed to defeat a Turkish garrison of 10,000 well-armed troops, 
setting up a liberated zone in the Strandzha Mountains of Thrace, centred on the 
Commune of Tsarevo (Vassiliko) – an action that was a key factor in the collapse 
of the Ottoman Empire. The FAKB founding congress was attended by 150 delegates 
– not counting those representing underground organs. The FAKB was organised as 
a clandestine federation of four regional anarchist-communist “unions” 
sub-divided into study groups, syndicalist groups and combat groups. Its 
membership was restricted to militants only, but its public activity included 
propaganda tours of all cities and villages. The FAKB suspended the revived 
post-war Rabotnicheska Misl (Worker’s Thought) and assigned the honour of its 
mouthpiece to Gerdzhikov’s Probuda (Awakening), but also decided that each 
affiliate could run its own press. According to Grancharoff:

     Anarchism succeeded in becoming a popular movement and it penetrated many 
layers of society from workers, youth and students to teachers and public 
servants. The underground illegal activities of the movement continued.

Thus the FAKB helped found, and worked alongside, organisations like the 
Bulgarian Federation of Anarchist Students (BONSF), as well as a federation of 
anarchist artists, writers, intellectuals, doctors and engineers, and the 
Federation of Anarchist Youth (FAM) which had branches in towns and villages and 
all the bigger schools. So it can be seen that the FAKB consisted of 
syndicalist, guerrilla, professional and youth sections which diversified 
themselves throughout Bulgarian society. During the 1919/1920 transport strike, 
the anarchists planned to arm the workers, but the strike was betrayed by the 
leftist political parties and savagely crushed, with Probuda banned. A key FAKB 
militant was Georgi Sheytanov (1896-1925),3 called Sheitanoff by Grancharoff, 
who hailed from the eastern city of Yambol, became an anarchist as a teenager 
and was forced to flee into exile in France at the age of 17 after having 
escaped from the prison where he had been placed for burning the records of the 
local courthouse. Sheytanov returned to Bulgaria to carry on clandestine 
anarchist agitation in 1914, but was arrested and tortured, but escaped again, 
travelling to Moscow where he witnessed the 1917 revolution first-hand, and 
returning to Bulgaria in 1918 after having escaped a White firing squad in the 
Ukraine. In Bulgaria, Sheytanov became involved with the anarchist movement 
again and issued a famous Appeal to the Anarchists, and a Manifesto to 
Revolutionaries, an anarchist critique of Bolshevism.

In 1920, the social-democratic Bulgarian Agrarian Union (BZS) under Aleksandar 
Stamboliyski became Bulgaria’s first socialist government, within the framework 
of the constitutional monarchy of Tsar Boris III, creating conditions for 
widespread popular self-activity. But as with the Social Democratic Party’s 
“Noske Guards” in Germany, the BZS also established an “Orange Guard” as a 
strikebreaking force. The pro-Bulgarian right wing of the nationalist Internal 
Revolutionary Organisation of Macedonia (VMRO) rebuilt itself in 1920, and 
started agitating for the return of Macedonia to Bulgaria. The Bulgarian 
Communist Party (BKP), which had developed out of the Tesni social-democrat 
faction which approximated the Bolsheviks, rose swiftly to become one of the 
largest in Europe, but still adhered to reformist tactics and had seats in the 
Bulgarian parliament. After Produda was banned in 1920, it was replaced as the 
FAKB’s mouthpiece by The Anarchist, of Kyustendil, a large town to the 
south-west of Sofia. Meanwhile, Sheytanov published The Revolt clandestinely and 
Rabotnicheska Misl reappeared first as a magazine, but then took the name of 
Gerdzhikov’s old paper Svobodno Obshtestvo (Free Society). In 1921 at the age of 
15, another key militant, Georgi Grigoriev (1906-1996) 4 joined the FAKB. He 
would later write the definitive anarchist history of what he called “the 
Macedonian Revolution” 5 under the pseudonym Georges Balkanski while in exile in 
Paris.
The 1923 Fascist Coup & its Aftermath
In January 1923, the FAKB held its fifth annual congress – its first public, 
though still illegal, congress – in the city square at Yambol, attended by 104 
delegates and 350 observers from 89 organisations, according to Grancharoff at 
page 5. The agenda included the internal and external situation, and the 
questions of organisation, the peasantry, internationalism, the transition 
period, the dictatorship of the proletariat, propaganda, co-operatives and 
syndicalism. Delegates reported that the working class of Yambol itself, of 
Kyustendil and Radomir to the west of Sofia, of the central village of Nova 
Zagora and the southern city of Khaskovo, and of Kilifarevo and Delebets were 
almost wholly affiliated to the anarchist movement and that great progress was 
being made in Sofia, the southern city of Plovdiv, the Black Sea port of Burgas, 
Russe and other centres. The Yambol public congress was so impressive that the 
circulation of anarchist journals surged upwards. But this popularity had not 
escaped the eyes of the reaction who were plotting a coup and persuaded the BZS 
to pass an “anti-bandit” law that targeted the anarchists. In March 1923, 
Stamboliyski signed a pact with Yugoslavia recognising the new border and 
agreeing to suppress the VMRO. On March 26, an anarchist protest in Yambol 
against the disarming of the people under the anti-bandit law provided the 
right-wing with the excuse for a massacre.

According to Grancharoff, the military governor of the city forbade the 
anarchist meeting and stationed troops in the public square, but an anarchist 
orator stood on a bench and began speaking. The troops opened fire, injuring him 
and several other anarchists. A fierce battle lasting two hours between the 
anarchist forces and the two regiments stationed in the city was only ended when 
the military commander brought in an artillery regiment from a nearby town. 
Soldiers captured 26 anarchists who were machine-gunned at the barracks that 
night. Some 30 to 40 anarchists, including the key organiser and activist Todor 
Darzev, were killed that day, but one of the 26, the student Obretenov, had only 
been wounded, and creeping away, managed to raise the alarm. The following 
morning, troops raided the anarchist centre in Sofia and arrested all present. 
On June 9, in a nationalist backlash to the Bulgarian-Yugoslav pact, fascist 
army officers belonging to the Military League, and backed by the tsar and the 
VMRO, staged a coup against the BZS government and killed Stamboliyski. At 
Kilifarevo, the anarchists united the communists and agrarians behind them and 
withstood assaults by the army for several days, and also briefly occupied the 
city of Drenovo and several towns at the foothills of the mountains.

The new government was a coalition of right-wing forces supported by the 
Narodrisak, the party of big capital and lead by the notorious fascist Professor 
Aleksandr Tsankov, which gave the VMRO right wing de facto control of the 
Bulgarian portion of Macedonia (the left wing of the party, dissolved during 
World War I, was re-established in 1926 in Vienna as the VMRO United, but no 
longer had any anarchist content, being oriented towards the Bulgarian and Greek 
communist parties). Grancharoff writes that “the country turned into a 
slaughter-house,” with perhaps 30,000 to 35,000 workers and peasants killed by 
right-wing forces between 1923 and 1931 – on a par with the Argentine 
dictatorship under Galtieri. The anarchist, communist and agrarian movements 
were forced underground and key anarchist militants like Nicola Dragnev were 
arrested and summarily executed. Some anarchists went into exile, producing 
Rabotnicheska Misl in Chicago. Others formed combat detachments known as cheti 
and were involved in an important attempt at a co-ordinated rising with the BKP 
in 1923 and in subsequent guerrilla activities. Grancharoff says that the BKP 
had initially not taken part in the struggle against fascism, taking the line 
that it was a struggle “between two bourgeoisies” – the people and the state! 
Scolded by Moscow, the party initiated the insurrection, but because the party 
tried to substitute itself for mass action, it was an adventurist failure. In 
1923, Sheytanov published the underground newspaper Protest, and was later, in 
1924, able to publish the legal weekly Zov (The Call), which became popular in 
academic circles, while also clandestinely publishing the paper Acratia 
(Anti-Authority).
The United Front & Guerrilla Warfare
Believing it was time to unite rank-and-file workers against fascism, Sheytanov 
established contacts with communists, left agrarians and Macedonian federalists 
such as Todor Panitsa, founding the “literary” journal Plamlak (The Flame) to 
push this idea. But when the United Front was founded, it was a Comintern 
initiative and the FAKB-led anarchist movement rejected it as authoritarian. 
Grancharoff cites a Stalinist work, The Rise, Development and the Setting of 
Opportunism in the Bulgarian Workers’ Movement (1986) as his source for the 
quote in his comment that:

     With a few exceptions, anarchists had not accepted the Soviet Union as 
being a socialist country. And their argument was cogent: “In Russia as 
everywhere else, there is capitalism. It is stupid to think that the latter can 
exist without being defended by a government [even if in] Russia, this 
government is referred to as proletarian.”

The existence of a large, organised anarchist-communist ideological and 
anarcho-syndicalist workers’ movement with deep penetration into both the 
working class and intelligentsia must also explain why, unlike in Hungary and 
Czechoslovakia where many anarchists helped found communist parties in this 
period, few Bulgarian anarchists were attracted to the Bolshevik concept of 
revolution. The 1925 bombing of the St. Nedelya Cathedral in Sofia by a joint 
team of a radical BKP faction and BZS members – in response to the jailing and 
execution of many BKP leaders – killed 11 generals, the chief of police and the 
mayor of the city, and 140 other people. However, it brought down a reign of 
terror against the left, with 3,000 communists arrested and three executed. The 
FAKB, BKP and BZS united their guerrilla forces into a single detachment, but it 
was soon forced to disperse into smaller combat groups. Special police units 
were sent after Sheytanov and he and his comrade-in-arms, the young anarchist 
actress Mariola Sirakova,6 were caught and executed along with 12 other 
prisoners at the Belovo railway station on June 2, 1925. The repression saw a 
large number of Bulgarian anarchists such as Grigoriev flee into exile in 
Yugoslavia, then France, where groups were established in the anarchist 
strongholds of Toulouse and Paris as well as Beziers. These groups set up an aid 
committee to support anarchist prisoners in Bulgaria and drafted a revolutionary 
programme for the FAKB. Influenced by the debate in France over the Makhnovist 
Platform from 1926 onwards – where a Bulgarian delegate known only as “Pavel” 
(perhaps Grigoriev) was among those who established the short-lived platformist 
International Anarchist Communist Federation (IACF) in 1927 – the FAKB adopted 
the Platform as its constitution.

“Vlassovden Syndicalism” & Anarchist Expansion
Meanwhile, the anarcho-syndicalist Manol Vassev Nicolov and a group of 
anarchist-communists from Khaskovo had been organising among the peasant tobacco 
farmers in the district, making use of traditional old rural mutual aid 
co-operatives called Vlassovden (after the feast-day of Vlas, an old pagan god). 
In 1930, they achieved success, with 600 delegates from across the country 
founding the Vlassovden Confederation – sometimes called the Vlassovden Union – 
at Khaskovo. The demands of the Vlassovden Confederation were radical, not 
revolutionary: the reduction of direct and indirect taxation, the breaking-up of 
agrarian cartels, free medical care for peasants, insurance and pensions for 
agricultural workers, and community autonomy. But “Vlassovden syndicalism” 
spread like wildfire and by 1931, the Vlassovden Confederation boasted 130 
sections. Meanwhile the political situation was changing: in 1930, Grigoriev 
returned to Bulgaria to take advantage of an amnesty, and organised an 
underground FAKB cell in Sofia; in the same year, a fascist military 
organisation called Link (Zveno) was founded by army officers who were inspired 
by Mussolini and closely associated with the Military League.

In 1931, faced with rising anarchist-led demands for free speech and an amnesty 
for political “crimes”, the right-wing regime was ousted by a “People’s Bloc” 
coalition of BZS agrarians, liberals and radicals. Before the election, in 
Bulgaria’s first May Day celebration, the police attacked an anarchist student 
BOSF meeting and arrested eleven students. The BOSF demanded an end to clerical 
control of education and military recruitment on campus, demanding that “the 
priests and sergeants major be expelled from schools and universities and taxes 
abolished.” The end of the regime saw a huge upsurge of anarchist organising and 
publishing so that the anarchist movement could be counted as the third largest 
force on the left, after the BZS then the BKP. In that year, according to one 
study, there were some 40 anarcho-syndicalist groups under the 
Anarcho-Syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (ASNCL), while the 
Bulgarian Federation of Autonomous Unions (BFAU) became the Bulgarian IWA 
section.7 In 1932, the FAKB held a clandestine national congress in the forest 
near Lovech which was chaired by Grigoriev which aimed at re-uniting the 
movement: Rabotnicheska Misl was re-established as the mouthpiece of the 
federation. Despite the leftist nature of the “People’s Bloc”, the anarchist 
movement was still persecuted: shootings, arrests and imprisonment were common.
The 1934 Fascist Coup & its Aftermath
In 1934, fascist Zveno leaders Colonel Kimon Georgiev and Colonel Damyan Velchev 
staged a coup and established an authoritarian regime with Georgiev as prime 
minister, outlawing all political parties, corporatising the trade unions like 
the ANSCL, BFAU and Vlassovden Confederation – from which the latter never 
recovered – and waging war on the FAKB and BKP. Also in 1934, the rightist VMRO 
assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis 
Bartou in Marseilles in collaboration with the Croatian fascist Ustaše. The 
international outrage the assassination provoked forced the Zveno regime to 
suppress the VMRO. The regime also banned anarchist papers such as Svobodno 
Obshtestvo – but it reappeared as a monthly entitled New World edited by Petar 
Lozanov, while the paper Compass managed to remain in circulation. A 
counter-coup in 1935 backed by the tsar saw Georgiev ousted and monarchist Zveno 
leader General Zlato Panchev installed, soon to be replaced by a civilian 
monarchist dictatorship. But the anarchist, communist and agrarian movements 
still had to operate underground – with the remnants of its press banned – while 
the pro-communist VMRO United collapsed in 1936.

An example of a typical Bulgarian anarchist of this period is found in the 
police file (compiled later under Soviet occupation) of the miner, farmhand and 
locomotive fitter Alexander Metodiev Nakov (1919-1962),8 who came from a poor 
family in the village of Kosatcha in the department of Pernik. Becoming an 
anarchist in 1937, Nakov launched an anarcho-syndicalist group in the 
Machinostroitel factory in Pernik and was later to serve time in both a fascist 
prison and a Soviet concentration camp. The Stalinist police described him 
despairingly as “a fanatical anarchist” – but also a “fine worker”, with “a good 
overall political grounding” who was well-read and an Esperantist. At the 
outbreak of the Spanish Revolution in 1936, some 30 Bulgarian anarchists 
including Grigoriev went to fight in the militia. Grigoriev represented the FAKB 
at the CNT-FAI congress in free Spain in November that year. The revolutionary 
challenge to fascism finally forced the dispersed anarchist movement to rally 
again at the FAKB’s final pre-war congress, held at Vitosha in August 1936. 
Despite their many jailings in concentration camps, the anarchists also managed 
to circulate the mimeographed Khleb i Svoboda (Bread and Freedom) during 
1936-1939. In 1938, the BKP attempted to appeal to a broader audience, renaming 
itself the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (BRP), until reverting to its Stalinist 
colours in 1948. Returning to Bulgaria in 1939, Grigoriev was arrested and spent 
the war years in prison then a concentration camp.
War & Red-Orange-Brown Collaboration
n 1940, a manifesto by the FAKB railed against the intrigues of the Comintern in 
first allying with the Nazis, then opposing them, accusing the communist BRP, by 
supporting the Allied war effort, according to Grancharoff, of having:

     …committed a historical crime by restoring the credit of the bankrupt 
bourgeois slogans, gonfalons [medieval military and ecclesiastical flags] and 
institutions for constitution, democracy, love of peace… patriotism and 
nationalism…

Bulgaria aligned with the Nazis in 1941 and the anarchist movement fought a 
guerrilla war against Nazi forces stationed in Bulgaria as well as the Bulgarian 
fascists: as Grancharoff puts it, “situated between hammer and anvil, they 
courageously fought against fascism and paid dearly for it.” Popular resistance, 
in fact, saved all of Bulgaria’s Jews from deportation to the Nazi extermination 
camps. In Macedonia itself, a Communist Party of Macedonia (MCP) was only 
founded in 1943. The anarchist movement operated a powerful guerrilla force by 
the closing phases of the war in what was still mostly an agrarian society. The 
anarchist movement, which had fought a long guerrilla campaign against the 
fascists, grew rapidly and helped the Fatherland Front stage the successful 
insurrection of the 9th of September 1944 against the Nazi forces stationed in 
Bulgaria. Indeed, they were arguably strong enough to pose a serious 
alternative, but the strength of the Fatherland Front – consisting of the 
communist BRP, a faction of the socialist BZS and the military fascist Zveno 
movement – which had also fought as partisans against the Nazis, proved 
formidable. In late 1944, the BRP had only 15,000 members, but when the Red Army 
replaced the Germans as an occupying force, the Bulgarian communists took 
advantage of the situation, forming a Fatherland Front government headed by 
Zveno leader Kimon Georgiev, the army colonel who had staged the fascist coup a 
mere decade earlier in 1934. This Red/Orange/Brown alliance – what Grancharoff 
calls “the unity between National Socialism and communism” – immediately went to 
work to repress the anarchists, other political tendencies and the working 
class. Workers were forced to join a single state “trade union” – as before 
under Georgiev’s rule, which was modelled on Mussolini’s Italy – and piecework 
was introduced. Nevertheless, organisations such as the Southwest Bulgarian 
Anarchist Union and the Élisée Reclus Group in Pernik were formed by militants 
such as Nakov.
The Stalinist Regime 9
The FAKB called a congress at Knegevo, in the capital Sofia, in 1945 to discuss 
the repression, but communist militia arrested all 90 delegates and put them 
into forced labour camps. This did not stop the organisation from producing an 
important anarchist-communist Platform. Anarchist locals were forcibly shut down 
and the revived FAKB organ Rabotnicheska Misal (Workers’ Thought) was forced to 
suspend publication after only eight issues. It reappeared briefly during 
communist-rigged elections held in 1945 under American and British pressure, 
surging from a circulation of 7,000 to 60,000 before being banned again. The 
next annual congress of the FAKB in 1946 had to take place clandestinely. In 
1946, the Zveno leader Georgiev was replaced by the communist Georgi Dimitrov, 
the Zveno and BZS factions within the Fatherland Front were dissolved, the 
monarchy was abolished and Bulgaria became a supposed “People’s Republic”. The 
agrarians of the BZS refused to co-operate and in 1947 (the year of the 
anarchist veteran Gerdzhikov’s death), the BZS leader Nikola Petkov was executed 
by the communists. In 1948, the last mass round-up of anarchists netted 600 
militants who were sent to concentration camps such as Cuciyan (near Pernik, 
called by its inmates the “Caresses of Death”), Bogdanovol (called the “Camp of 
Shadows”), Nojarevo, Tadorovo and Bosna – and the BRP was merged with the 
Fatherland Front to transform it into an ersatz mass “communist” party claiming 
460,000 members.

By that date, hundreds had been executed and about 1,000 FAKB members sent to 
concentration camps where the torture, ill treatment and starvation of veteran 
(but non-communist) anti-fascists – some of whom had fought fascism for almost 
30 years – was almost routine. Anarchist prisoners were singled out and worked 
to death, being forced to work 36-hour shifts compared to the 12-16-hour shifts 
of other inmates. A partial list of 33 detained anarchists released that year by 
those working underground in Bulgaria is revealing in terms of its class 
composition: eleven school and university students; four urban 
anarcho-syndicalist workers including a technician; four teachers including a 
schools inspector; four rural workers (remnants of the Vlassovden syndicalist 
movement); three print-workers; two journalists including Georgi Dimitroff 
Kurtov (Karamikaylov), the often-detained editor of Rabotnicheska Misal; a 
librarian; and several others whose occupations are not given. The youngest 
whose age was given was 21, presumably politicised under fascism, and the oldest 
49, the tobacco worker Manol Vassev Nicolov, who had initiated Vlassovden 
syndicalism in 1930. Most had been imprisoned or even sentenced to death by the 
fascists, three were former guerrilla fighters, and one had been involved in a 
military conspiracy against the fascists. As Grancharoff says:

     The dark veil of communism used to entomb anarchism was also the same that 
buried … genuine communism and all revolutionary hopes for the emancipation and 
liberation of the downtrodden.

While a dedicated anarchist underground run by militants like Nakov kept 
operating well into the 1980s, many Bulgarian anarchists such as the key 
militant Georgi Grigoriev fled into exile in France – where exile formations of 
the FAKB were established, as well as an umbrella Bulgarian Libertarian Union 
(BLU) which embraced all anarchist tendencies from that country. Grigoriev, who 
wrote a history of the Bulgarian anarchist movement and a study of the interplay 
between national liberation and social revolution in the Balkans, would play a 
key role in re-establishing the BLU as the synthesist Federation of Bulgarian 
Anarchists (FAB) after the collapse of communist rule in 1989 and in ensuring 
its adherence to the International of Anarchist Federations. In 2008, the FAB 
still publishes its newspaper Svobodna Misl (Free Thought) as a monthly. Today, 
other anarchist organisations in Bulgaria include the Anarchist Front (AF), the 
Autonomous Anarchist Group “Anarchoresistance” (ABDA) with its paper 
Anarkhosprotiva (Anarchoresistance), the anarcho-syndicalist Bulgarian 
Confederation of Labour (BKT) which is an IWA section, founded in 1991 by 
militants such as Nikola Mladenov Totorov, and the revived Federation of 
Anarchist Youth (FAM).10
The Legacy of Bulgarian Platformism
On the plane of theory, I would argue that a long-neglected Bulgarian document 
should be regarded as another cornerstone of the platformist tradition after the 
Platform itself: the 1945 Platform of the Federation of Anarchist Communists of 
Bulgaria.11 Only recently translated into English, this Platform repudiated 
fascism, democracy, the state and capital, and reaffirmed an anarchist communist 
mass line of the total eradication of private property and the full 
socialisation of the means of production under working class control. The FAKB 
Platform went on to deal with the crucial issues of tactics and organisation, 
rejecting the form of the political party as “sterile and ineffective, unable to 
respond to the goals and the immediate tasks and to the interests of the 
workers,” but speaking in favour of “the true strength of the workers”, “the 
economy and their economic organisations. Only there lies the terrain where 
capitalism can be undermined. Only there lies the true class struggle.” On 
organisation, the FAKB stated that several types of working class organisation 
were indispensable and intertwined without subordination: anarchist communist 
ideological organisations; worker syndicates; agricultural worker syndicates; 
co-operatives; and cultural and special-interest organisations, for instance for 
youth and women. Of these, the FAKB Platform noted that:

     It is above all necessary for the partisans of anarchist communism to be 
organised in an anarchist communist ideological organisation. The tasks of these 
organisations are: to develop, realise and spread anarchist communist ideas; to 
study the vital present-day questions affecting the daily lives of the working 
masses and the problems of the social reconstruction; the multifaceted struggle 
for the defence of our social ideal and the cause of working people; to 
participate in the creation of groups of workers on the level of production, 
profession, exchange and consumption, culture and education, and all other 
organisations that can be useful in the preparation for the social 
reconstruction; armed participation in every revolutionary insurrection; the 
preparation for and organisation of these events; the use of every means which 
can bring on the social revolution. Anarchist communist ideological 
organisations are absolutely indispensable in the full realisation of anarchist 
communism both before the revolution and after.

Such anarchist communist organisations were to be federated across a given 
territory, “co-ordinated by the federal secretariat” – but the “local 
organisation” remained the basic policy-making unit and both local and federal 
secretariats were “merely liaison and executive bodies with no power” beyond 
executing the decisions of the locals or federation of locals. The FAKB Platform 
emphasised the ideological unity of such organisations, stating that only 
convinced anarchist communists could be members, and that decision-making must 
be by consensus achieved by both persuasion and practical demonstration – not by 
majority vote (the latter being the method applicable to syndicalist and other 
forms of organisation, with allowances made for dissenting minorities). 
Anarchist communist militants, so organised, participated directly in both 
syndicalist unions and mainstream unions, arguing their positions, defending the 
immediate interests of the class and learning how to control production in 
preparation for the social revolution. Militants also participated directly in 
co-operatives, “bringing to them the spirit of solidarity and of mutual aid 
against the spirit of the party and bureaucracy” – and in cultural and 
special-interest organisations which support the anarchist communist idea and 
the syndicalist organisations. All such organisations related to each other on 
the basis of “reciprocal dependence” and “ideological communality”.
Lessons from the Bulgarian Experience
I would argue that here we have a movement that started out looking quite 
similar to many of its contemporaries, particularly in colonised territories: 
small propaganda cells of anarchist militants establishing underground presses 
and raising the temperature of the class struggle. The parallels with the early 
movements of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary are of course there, but the 
Bulgarians in particular parted ways quite early on from those trajectories by 
throwing themselves directly into the Macedonian liberation war of 1903. For all 
the criticisms levelled at these anarchist guerrillas – and the strategy of 
launching a largely rural war without a peasant organisational base, relying 
instead on the vagaries of peasant sympathies, is one of the strongest – this 
baptism of fire not only hardened the Bulgarians for the struggles to come, but 
in real terms precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In less than 
ideal conditions of almost continual war from 1911-1918, followed by the 
hammer-blows of two successful fascist coups in 1923 and 1934, the Bulgarian 
anarchist movement built itself into a formidable force, the third-largest on 
the left, using worker disenchantment with agrarian and communist reformism to 
build a plethora of urban syndicalist unions, then penetrating all layers of 
society with a phalanx of interlinked professional, worker, student and even 
guerrilla organs. It even managed to bridge the urban-rural divide by organising 
the peasantry along syndicalist lines that were uniquely their own. This was 
above all a social movement – but one that had significant ideological clarity 
to fend off the lure of Bolshevism, and one that was organised, and able to 
defend itself by force of arms.

That clarity came, I suggest, by the FAKB’s adherence to the platformist concept 
of the specific organisation working – as the Makhnovist’s had – within a broad 
front of revolutionary libertarian socialist social forces. By doing so, the 
FAKB was not merely orienting itself geographically eastwards towards 
neighbouring insurgent Ukraine with its flexible, plural approach towards the 
revolution, rather than westwards towards the Bolshevik-compromised anarchist 
movements of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but politically towards the task of 
grabbing the bull by the horns and taking up the necessary tools to build 
tomorrow’s society today. It seems the Platform served the FAKB specifically, 
but the movement in general, very well given the challenges of fascist 
corporatism, guerrilla war, fascist-Stalinist rule, and some 40 years of 
productive exile. And despite the slander of sectarianism often thrown at 
platformist organisations by synthesists, the FAKB, as shown by its 1945 
Platform was a staunch supporter of the anarcho-syndicalist International 
Workers’ Association (IWA) – founded in Berlin in 1922 representing some 2 
million workers – and so was its descendant, the FAB, so the anarch 
ist-communists clearly never relinquished the mass line, regardless of either 
repression or their own adoption of defensive guerrilla war.

Other than the Makhnovist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RIAU) 
itself, which peaked at 500,000 members, the closest corresponding mass 
anarchist-communist organisation to my mind that combined such a range of 
worker, peasant, student, intellectual and social formations including guerrilla 
forces were those of the pre-war/wartime Korean Anarchist Communist Federation 
(KACF) of 1929-1945 and the post-war Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) of 
1956-1976. But key KACF militants joined the Korean provisional government in 
1940, and the FAU fell into insurgency, flirting with Guevarist adventurism in 
the early 1970s, before finally clearing its head of the Marxist fog and 
embracing especifismo (the Latin American form of specific organisation which is 
often close to platformism) in 1985. So it seems fair to say that the FAKB takes 
the honours as one of the best-organised and enduring of all anarchist-communist 
organisations, even if its current incarnation as the FAB is (of necessity, 
perhaps, for a rebuilding movement) synthesist. What role did the FAKB and its 
sister organisations play in laying the social groundwork for the remarkable 
historical feat of the refusal of Bulgaria’s people to allow the deportation of 
their Jewish neighbours, resulting in the rescue of every single one of 
Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jews during the war? These facets have yet to be explored: the 
Bulgarian movement clearly needs further intensive study, but it would appear 
that few movements have had such a tough history. And that few have met the 
challenge so brilliantly.
Notes:

1. The Bulgarian Anarchist Movement, Jack Grancharoff, unpublished manuscript 
kindly written especially for the ZACF, Quamaa, Australia, 2006. This document 
provides the connecting tissue for what was otherwise an intriguing, yet obscure 
movement.
2. The Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), 
Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett and others of the Workers’ Cause exile group in Paris, 
France, 1926. This key anarchist-communist text reaffirms the historical 
majority tendency – of the mass-organisational line, which includes “political” 
(ideological), “social” (community) and syndicalist (union) organising – against 
both the adventurism of the minority insurgent line, and anti-anarchist 
individualist posturing. It can be found among the documents in the extensive 
Nestor Makhno Archive online at: www.nestormakhno.info/. It is also downloadable 
from the Zabalaza Books website as a fully laid out pamphlet.
3. Gueorgui Cheitanov, 1896-1925, Nick Heath, Anarchist Federation, UK, undated, 
online at: www.libcom.org/articles/history/1896-1925-gueorgui-Sheytanov/index.php
4. Georgi Grigoriev, 1906-1996, (aka Georges Balkanski), Nick Heath, Anarchist 
Federation, UK, undated, online at 
www.libcom.org/history/articles/1906-1996-georgi-grigoriev/index.php
5. Liberation Nationale et Liberation Sociale: l’Example de la Revolution 
Macedonienne, Georges Balkanski (Georgi Grigoriev), Collection Anarchiste, 
Federation Anarchiste, Paris, France, undated. This book is the primary 
French-language anarchist analysis of the Macedonian national question.
6. Mariola Sirakova, 1904-1925, Nick Heath, Anarchist Federation, UK, undated, 
online at: www.libcom.org/history/articles/1904-1925-mariola-sirakova/index.php
7. Bulgaria: The New Spain (available for download from the ZB site)
8. Alexander Metodiev Nakov, 1919-1962+, anonymous, Bulgarian Libertarian Union 
in exile, Paris, France, undated, online 
at:www.libcom.org/history/articles/1919-1962-alexander-metodiev-nakov/index.php
9. Bulgaria: The New Spain
10. References to these organisations can be found under their relevant country 
entry at the reasonably accurate Broadleft web-portal: www.broadleft.org/
11. Platform of the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria, Federatsia 
na Anarkho Komunistite ot Balgaria, 1945, English translation by Nestor McNab, 
FdCA, Italy, 2006. This excellent mass-organisational position statement 
deserves, in the author’s view, to take pride of place in the platformist 
theoretical pantheon.

Related Link: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/2526
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