THE ILINDEN UPRISING IN BULGARIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS (1944 – 1989)
Naum Kaytchev
(Summary)
The text analyzes how the 1903-uprising was presented in Bulgarian
history textbooks under the communist regime. It invariably occupied
half or a whole lesson in the textbooks dedicated to the History
of Bulgaria throughout the entire period, most often in all three
educational levels: in primary, intermediate and high school. From the
very beginning, since 1946, the Bulgarian Communist Party, often by
means of specially appointed textbook authors such as Tushe Vlahov,
imposed a distorted Macedonianist view of the uprising, presenting it
as the outcome achieved by a putative Macedonian nation, and not by
the Bulgarian nation. In a more moderate form, this version persisted
in the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s.
The Bulgarian character
of IMARO and the Uprising began to stand out more clearly after the
second half of the 1960s, especially in the high school. During the
entire period up to the beginning of the 1980s, textbooks followed the
regime’s ideological patterns and the so-called ‘class-party approach’,
according to which some malicious conquering role of the Bulgarian
bourgeoisie, Prince Ferdinand and the Bulgarian governments was to
be highlighted, which was opposed to the democratic and republican
spirit of the Macedonian revolutionary movement, strongly influenced
by socialism.
Only at the beginning of the 1980s, a new high-school
textbook was introduced, which was freed from these ideological patterns and was largely in line with scientific discoveries and theses of
Bulgarian history science, which adopted part of the achievements of
pre-war Bulgarian historiography on Macedonian topics. In the 1950s
and 1960s, textbooks presented two separate uprisings with different
names: the Ilinden Uprising in Macedonia and the Preobrazhenie
Uprising in Eastern Thrace, and in 1969 – 1981 they coalesced in one
single uprising styled ‘Ilinden-Preobrazhenie’. After 1981 – 1982,
textbooks adopted the traditional name of this uprising, used before the
Second World War and especially before 1934: the Ilinden Uprising.
Keywords: Ilinden Uprising, Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, Macedonianism,
history textbooks, Bulgarian historiography
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