site.btaWhy Ivan Mihailov's Memory Still Disturbs Present-day Balkan Politics

More than 30 years after the death of Ivan "Vanche" Mihaylov (1896-1990), Bulgaria and North Macedonia are locked in a heated debate over the man who led the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) from the 1920s.

In mid-April 2022, a cultural centre named after Mihailov opened in Bitola, North Macedonia, in the presence of an official top-level Bulgarian delegation. The event inflamed the local community, and they staged a protest. On Facebook, North Macedonia's President Stevo Pendarovski called Mihailov a "proven collaborator of the fascist regime during WW II" and argued that he definitely "cannot contribute to building bridges between the two countries". 

Inescapable Factor

Mihailov emerged as a factor which all powers with interests in Macedonia had to reckon with. 

Under his leadership, IMRO held de facto control over Pirin Macedonia and acted as a state within a state in the late 1920s. He changed the IMRO tactics from guerrilla warfare to individual terrorist acts. Mihailov cooperatred with some Bulgarian governments but rejected some of their policies. In Bulgaria, he was under several life sentences and three death sentences.

In Yugoslavia, Mihailov was vilified by the authorities for his life-long struggle against their official policy targeting the assimilation of Bulgarians in the part of Macedonia under Yugoslav control. Tito's regime took up that assessment, and it was deeply entrenched in the minds of generations of Macedonians in that country.

Mihailov's efforts to deter foreign influences in Macedonia and in IMRO itself earned him even more enemies. His organization was plunged into a fierce fratricidal war with rival/partner IMRO-United as "Vanche" focused on blocking leftist Bolshevik encroachments.

His wife, Melpomena "Mencha" Karnicheva, is best known for assassinating IMRO left-wing activist Todor Panitsa in Vienna's Burgtheater in 1925.

Bulgarian Nationalist, Not Fascist

Mihailov was set on liberating Macedonia (a Bulgarian land, as far as the IMRO was concerned) from Greek and Yugoslav occupation. This made him the acknowledged ideologue of the Bulgarian national liberation movement in Macedonia. Until the end of his life, he insisted that he was "a Bulgarian from Macedonia" (he was born in a village near Shtip) and is quoted as urging young people in Macedonia "to hold on to the fact that we have been Bulgarians for a thousand years."

He established cooperation with Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Admiral Horthy's Hungary and Hitler's Nazi Germany, but in 1944 he declined a German offer to head an independent puppet state in Macedonia, apparently anticipating Germany's defeat.

After the end of WW II, Mihailov lived in exile in Rome. His perception as Nazi is disproved by recently discovered documents, according to which his stay in the Italian capital was financed by Angel "Angelo" Kouyoumdjisky, a Bulgarian diplomat, tobacco trader, banker and, subsequently, colonel of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the CIA's predecessor). "The OSS were very sensitive about any collaborators, fascists and Nazis. Therefore, claiming that Ivan Mihailov can be listed as such seems quite incredible," researcher Lachezar Toshev said on bTV.

Another proof is that the Italian law enforcement authorities protected Mihailov despite the purges against fascists in Italy at that time. The only condition they set was that he stood away from politics, which he did until the end of his life.

To the Bulgarian communist regime, Mihailov was a fascist, a nationalist and "an enemy of the people". After the communist takeover in 1944, IMRO was suppressed in Bulgaria.

The advent of democratic changes in Bulgaria in 1989 ushered in a major revaluation of many preconceived notions of ideas, events and figures in recent history. "Vanche" was no exception.

Mihailov's life and political activities rank him alongside equally controversial figures like Marshal Pilsudski, Che Guevara, Yasser Arafat and Stepan Bandera.