Vasil Glavinov

Vasil Glavinov

Vasil Kostov Glavinov (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Васил Костов Главинов) (Veles, 1872 – Sofia, 1929) was a Bulgarian socialist from Ottoman Macedonia, a member of the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party.^[1] He is considered a Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia.

Glavinov worked in his native Veles before moving to Sofia in 1887. There he went bankrupt, owing to the financial support which he gave to the first Bulgarian theatre troupe. In July 1891 on the initiative of Dimitar Blagoev, several social democratic circles united to form the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party (BSDP). In 1892 Glavinov became acquainted with Dimitar Blagoev's exposition of the Marxist view of history and in 1894 he entered the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party. In the same year, under Vasil Glavinov's leadership and in order of Blagoev, the first Social-Democratic group in Ottoman Macedonia was formed. In 1896 Glavinov founded a Macedonian Revolutionary Social-Democratic Union, as part of the Bulgarian Workers' Social-Democrat Party.^[2] The last idea was probably influenced by the League for the Balkan Confederation, created in 1894 by Balkan socialists, which supported Macedonian autonomy inside a general federation of Southeast Europe. In Sofia Glavinov met the future leader of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO) Gotse Delchev and both became a friends. Glavinov also edited several Socialist papers here.

The first Conference of Macedonian Socialists was held on June 3, 1900, near Krushevo, where the activities of Vasil Glavinov's political group defined the basic aspects of the creation of a Macedonian Republic as a part of a Balkan Socialist Federation, with equal rights to all its citizens.^[3] After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he moved to the Ottoman Empire and initially gravitated around the People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section). The newspaper "Rabotnicheska Iskra" (Worker's Spark), edited by him, described the two rivaling Bulgarian parties at the time, the PFP (Bulgarian Section) and the Union of the Bulgarian Constitutional Clubs. According to the newspaper, both of the parties, the former a defender of the poorer Bourgeois, the latter - of the richer, were nationalist and were led by desires of unification with Bulgaria. Because of that, Glavinov was disappointed and entered the Ottoman Socialist Party in Salonica in 1910. It was actually not a real political party, but rather a group of intellectuals. In the same year he participated also in the First Balkan Socialist Conference held in Belgrade, which important aspect was the call for a solution to the Macedonian Question.

After the Young Turks had taken stringent measures against it, difficult times began for the Ottoman Socialist Party. As a consequence, on the eve of the Balkan Wars in 1911 Glavinov moved back to Sofia, where he rejoined the Bulgarian Narrow Socialists. Here he opposed the Balkan Wars and World War I and was sympathetic to the October Revolution in Russia. In 1919 his Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Narrow Socialists) joined the Comintern and was reorganised as the Communist Party of Bulgaria. In 1920 Glavinov was elected as a member of the Central Emigrant's Commission to the Central Committee of the Party. After the St Nedelya Church assault on 16 April 1925 he was arrested and afterwards Glavinov withdrеw from political life. He died in Sofia in 1929.

References

1. Freedom or death, the life of Gotsé Delchev, Mercia MacDermott, Journeyman Press, 1978, ISBN 0-904526-32-1, p. 87.
2. The politics of terror: the Macedonian liberation movements, 1893–1903, Duncan M. Perry, Duke University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-8223-0813-4, p. 172.
3. We, the people: politics of national peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, Central European University Press, 2009, ISBN 963-9776-28-9, p. 122.