Translation:Why we Macedonians are a separate nation

by Vasil Ivanovski

Why we Macedonians are a separate nation

In the last issue (31) of the banned, by the Sofia military-fascist dictatorship, organ of the Macedonian progressive emigration "Macedonian Flag" the article entitled "What is a nation" was published. Due to the draconian censorship, the article gives a general answer to the question and speaks about the Croatian nation, without giving a specific explanation for the Macedonian nation. Here we further develop that article, focusing specifically on Macedonia and answering the question: Why are we Macedonians a separate nation?

The answer to that question is, above all, of great political importance. It is well known that both Bulgarian and Serbian and Greek imperialism deny the existence of the Macedonian nation. According to the first, Macedonians are "the best part of the Bulgarian nation". According to the second, Macedonians are "pure Serbs" and according to the third, Macedonians are "Slavic-speaking Greeks." So all three of our new "masters" justify the enslavement of a part of our homeland and at the same time justify the claims for domination over the entire Macedonia.

To expose those maneuvers of the occupiers and demonstrate that they have no right over Macedonia, to hinder their assimilation policy and to fight consistently for the right of the Macedonian people to self-determination until its separation from the Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek imperialist states, and its unification into an independent republic of the working Macedonian people, we Macedonians should state resolutely that we are neither Serbs, nor Greeks, nor Bulgarians, but a separate Macedonian nation fighting for our national liberation and the separation of our Macedonian state. Of course, we should not do this for political reasons alone. If Macedonian nation did not exist, we could not talk about such. However, she is evident and her existence should be pointed out to everyone. In this way, it will greatly facilitate our national liberation struggle.

In Macedonia there are obvious all the elements of an independent Macedonian nation, with its own territory and economic integrity, with its own language and general national character and with its own Macedonian history.

1. The territory of the Macedonians is separate from the territory of the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian nations. It has established geographical and ethnographic boundaries between the Mesta River, the Rhodope Mountains, Rila and Shar, the Drim River, the Gramos Mountain, the Bistra River and the Aegean Sea with an area of 65,000 square kilometers. The fact that today Macedonia is fragmented is a result of the imperialist peace agreements. The break-up of the Macedonian territory into parts and their annexation to the territories of the Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek states was committed through violence.

2. Economically Macedonia is one whole, and it is completely separate from the states that govern it. Even under the rule of the Turkish Empire, Macedonia followed the path of its independent development, although later, still independently of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. None of the latter had close economic ties and general trade routes with Macedonia, although they were together with it, within one and the same country - Turkey. And with the emergence of the capitalist economy in Macedonia, internal trade routes and markets were created here with one general and main center – Solun (Thessaloniki), and not Belgrade, Sofia or Athens.

The forcible disintegration of Macedonia's economy as a whole into three parts and their accession to three foreign economic units - Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece - has had a devastating effect on Macedonia's economy. A catastrophic example of this is the current situation in Solun (Thessaloniki), which, after being cut off from its natural economic background in eastern and central Macedonia, has completely collapsed and turned from a first-class port on the Aegean into a mournful memory of a recently rich shopping center. Today, Solun (Thessaloniki) is in third place compared to Athens and Piraeus. The same fate befell Bitola, Ohrid and all other cities in central and southwestern Macedonia, which, torn apart from the natural Solun (Thessaloniki) market, have been forced to use the unnatural trade route to Belgrade. Macedonia is in the same position under Bulgarian slavery, the economic prosperity of which is closely linked to the trade routes to Serres, Drama, Kavala, Solun (Thessaloniki) and Strumica, and not to Sofia-Vidin and Plovdiv-Burgas.

3. The language of the people who make up the Macedonian nation is Slavic, with a special dialect - Macedonian. That language is common to them. The different provincial (i.e. dialectal) nuances in the Macedonian language are a result of the remnants of the former tribal and feudal dispersal of Macedonia. However, the provincialism of this language is covered by a general Macedonian Slavic dialect in which everyone distinguishes the Macedonian from the Serb, the Bulgarian, the Russian and every person from any other Slavic nation. Provincial nuances in the language have not yet been liquidated even in the most developed nations, yet alon in the Macedonian nation which is nationally enslaved, not organized in its own nation-state and has not yet built a literary language.

Except for the dialect (i.e. by its peculiarities) the Macedonian language differs from the Serbian and Bulgarian languages in that the Old Slavic element is much more preserved and contains more words that are not present in the languages of neighboring and other Slavic nations.

Bulgarian and Serbian expansionist chauvinists use the closeness of the Macedonian language to the languages of their nations to claim that Macedonians are "part of the Bulgarian nation" or "pure Serbs". But we Macedonians are neither one nor the other. We are not a "dough from which anything can be baked," as Cvijich, one of Serbia's warring policy historians, said. We are a separate nation. The similarity of our language with Bulgarian and Serbian is a simple resemblance between the languages of close, but independently developed nations. Such a similarity of languages exists between Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as well as between Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs, but in contrast they are separate nations.

The Greater Bulgaria chauvinists are particularly speculating about the fact that the Macedonian language is closer to Bulgarian than to Serbian, and this serves as an argument in their claims that Macedonians are part of the Bulgarian nation. Their argument is extremely unfounded, because Croats are much closer to Serbian in language than to the Czech nation.

At the same time, it is known that it is not only the language that determines the nation. Even if the language of the Macedonians is equal to that of the Bulgarians, it does not mean that we Macedonians are "part of the Bulgarian nation", when we live with generations on another territory, we represent a separate economic entity, we have our own history, specific narratives, customs and so on. The British, Irish, and Americans of North America speak the same language but are separate nations.

4. The fourth common feature for people who make up a separate nation is the national character. This applies to the Macedonian nation too. Equal are their narratives, customs, games, songs, dances, and other folklore that are more or less different from those of the Serbian, Bulgarian, and other Slavic nations. The elements of the independent national character of the Macedonians are so strong that despite the national oppression in Macedonia, they have never stopped appearing. After dinners, weddings, appointments, etc. they are constantly appearing among the emigrant-refugee masses in Bulgaria, America and wherever there are such.

All these elements, taken together, make up the Macedonian nation. They are irrefutable proof that we, the Macedonians, do not belong to either the Serbian or the Bulgarian or the Greek nation, but we are a separate nation.

5. Nations are not tribes. Like other nations, the Macedonian nation was not created by one tribe, but by several different tribes or, more precisely, by parts of several different tribes: Illyrians, Slavs, Bulgarians, Serbs and others. The basic element is Slavic. The ancient Illyrians merged with the later Slavs who came to Macedonia. The Bulgarian and Serbian elements in the Macedonian nation are the result of the fact that even before the Turkish slavery, Macedonia fell under either Bulgarian or under Serbian rule. The insignificant Bulgarian and even more insignificant Serbian element in the Macedonian nation is a remnant of the former military invaders, mostly of boyars and fugitives, who over time also merged with the Macedonian Slavs.

According to Bulgarian bourgeois historians, the Bulgarian nation dates back to the time of Tsar Asparuh, after the Bulgarian Tatar tribe subjugated the Slavs who inhabited the northeastern part of the Balkan Peninsula, merged with the Slavs, but ordered them to call themselves Bulgarians within their kingdom. According to these historians, the Macedonian Slavs in the same way infiltrated the "exclusively Bulgarian national whole" subordinate to the Bulgarian tribe.

Of course, historically this is not true. At that time, the conditions for the formation of a Bulgarian nation were lacking, which is why the nation itself was lacking. Therefore, it cannot be thought that since then the Macedonian Slavs have been part of "a single Bulgarian national whole". The then Bulgarian state was divided into separate lords, severely imprisoned with small sub-kingdoms, with its own borders and customs, without economic, cultural and other common heritage. The populations of those boyars came in contact with each other only on the battlefield, in the wars between the various boyars or in the wars with Byzantium and other countries, and some boyars in Bulgaria united (not all and not always) around the strongest of them - the emperor. In such conditions the Bulgarian nation could not be formed and even less to include the Macedonian Slavs, because the populations of the various fiefdoms in feudal Bulgaria were not united in a single common territory, nor in a single economic whole, which was an obstacle to building a general language and a general national character of the populations of the various boyars.

In addition, it is a historical fact that the Macedonian Slavs were not always subjugated by what was then Bulgaria and Serbia. The state of the Bogomil emperor Samuel was not the second Bulgarian state as represented by Bulgarian bourgeois historians, but it was a state of the Macedonian Slavs that existed in parallel with the Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Kingdom. That Macedonian Slavic state was later conquered by Bulgaria and Serbia.

Greater Bulgarian chauvinists are keen to talk about a "single Bulgarian tribe" identifying it with the Bulgarian nation. They hide the historical fact that the latter was created without the small number of Bulgarians left in Macedonia and without the Macedonian Slavs. Today's central and northern Bulgaria, eastern Rumelia and Dobruja. The main reason for this lies in the economy. As we have already said, in Macedonia capitalism appeared and developed later independently of capitalism in Bulgaria without having solid economic ties between the two countries. The national revolutionary movement, which fought for the liberation of the Bulgarian people from the bondage of absolutist and feudal Turkey, did not include Macedonia as an object of its revolutionary activity.

We have a similar situation with the Serbian nation, which was also created without the Macedonian Slavs and without the insignificant part of the Serbs who remained in Macedonia before it fell under Turkish slavery.

But even the Greek state chauvinists, in order to justify the domination of Greek imperialism over the part of Macedonia that was taken over by it, demand a tribal connection between the Greek nation and the Macedonians. Those cunning chauvinists falsify history by declaring the tribe of the ancient Macedonians, as well as the leaders of that tribe - Macedon, Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great - as an integral part of the ancient Greeks. At the same time, they consciously keep silent about such an event as the settlement of Macedonia with a huge mass of Slavs, for whom it is quite inconvenient to claim to be Greeks.

6. The Macedonian nation has its own history of cultural and political manifestation. The Miladinov brothers are the first Macedonian educators. They were the first to dedicate their forces to awakening the independent national feeling of the Macedonian slave. They sang Ohrid and Macedonia as their homeland in a purely Macedonian-Slavic dialect. They did not teach the Macedonian people either Serbian or Bulgarian, but taught them in their native Macedonian language. Although, on the contrary, those Macedonian educators spoke of Bulgarian in Macedonia, it was influenced by the old past when Macedonia had been under feudal Bulgaria for centuries. As a result, the struggle for independent schools and churches against the assimilationist tyranny of the Greek patriarchate was waged in the form of Bulgaria. At that time, the Macedonian nation was still in its infancy, it had not been formed and, most importantly, its economic and political interests had not yet clashed with the warring aspirations of the later created state of the Bulgarian nation. Today, the term Bulgaria in Macedonia, as well as Serbism and Hellenism, is synonymous with national and economic slavery applied to the Macedonian people's masses by the imperialist captors.

The Miladinov brothers are followed by many other folk teachers and spiritual awakeners, such as the Ohrid Bishop Theodosius and the group around the Loza newspaper, under the editorship of Petar Arsov, who fought equally against the Greek Patriarchate, the Bulgarian Exarchate and the Serbian Patriarchate churches. Those so-called Macedonian separatists pointed to the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and pleaded for an independent state life of that state.

The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization emerged from the same environments. Petar Arsov joined the first Central Committee of that Organization, and Gjorce Petrov, who also comes from those areas, became an ideologue of the Organization. He wrote the book "Geography of Macedonia" at the time in the spirit of the separatist idea.

However, the pressure of the Greater Bulgaria propaganda - the Exarchate and the Supreme Leaders - proved so strong that it stifled the question of an independent nation and brought to the consciousness of many Macedonians the conviction that they were Bulgarians. This was done by stopping the newspaper "Loza", which was published in Sofia, with the persecution of Bishop Theodosius of Macedonia and the teachers who did not submit to the Exarchate, with the ban on the book by Gjorche Petrov, which is still in manuscript in the archives of the Bulgarian Ministry of War.

But on the contrary, the Macedonian people with their long and persistent struggles for economic liberation and independent state life have created their own history. Those struggles in the past have flared up under the leadership of the old Goce Delchev’s VMRO against the slavery of Turkish sultans and beys, as well as against the aspirations of the Balkan states.

The Macedonian people with their own blood in their history recorded the first Macedonian revolution - the Ilinden Uprising, whose wreath is the first Macedonian national-revolutionary republic in Krushevo.

After VMRO was manipulated and turned into a machine of the Bulgarian imperialism, the liberation struggle of the Macedonian people did not stop but was subjugated by the following centralist-separatist followers, the VMRO left, led by Gorche Petrov, Petar Arsov, Sandanski, Dimo H. Dimov and Chernopeev. Today, in the new conditions, the struggle of the Macedonian people against the new captors - Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek imperialism for national, political and economic liberation is being led with even greater perseverance and consistency under the leadership of VMRO (United).

All that Macedonian history is not only a manifestation of the Macedonian nation, it is not only its aspiration to its national state, but it, the Macedonian history, at the same time is an element that completes and determines the independent character of the Macedonian nation.

Of course, in addition to the Macedonian nation, in Macedonia we have other indigenous nationalities: Vlachs, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Roma. Although they are on the same territory with the Macedonian nation, although their economic life is directly related to the last one, those nationalities do not comprise the Macedonian nation because each of them has a specific character.

Indigenous nationalities in Macedonia are actively participating in the Macedonian liberation movement because they are also interested in creating an independent Macedonian republic of workers, to gain national equality and economic liberation, to live in peace and together with the Macedonian nation to raise their own and general cultural and the economic life of the Macedonian working people.

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