The Bulgarian National Liberation Movement in Macedonia (1893–1912) – Ideology, Politics, Revolution

The Kresna-Razlog Uprising 1878–1879 and the Unification of the “Two Bulgarias” in 1885 were the two highlights along the journey on which embarked the all-Bulgarian revolutionary movement from the epoch of National Revival towards its “Modernity”. 

The first event continued the “Bulgarian uprisings” for political independency (statesmanship) from before 1878. The second one provided – again with respect to continuity – an Eastern Rumelian autonomy model and the example of the Unification to those parts of the ethnical territories remaining “under the yoke” of the Ottoman empire. The organized (conspiracy) mass national liberation struggle of the Bulgarian population in Macedonia and Adrianople region, led by IMARO, was a result of the same processes that determined the emergence, although under different circumstances, of the legal Macedonian/Macedonian- Adrianople organization in the Principality of Bulgaria. 

The earlier origin of the Internal Organization is only but a chronological detail owing to a single factor: the rule of Stefan Stambolov and his attitude to revolution and revolutionary conspiracies as a means of settling the Bulgarian national issue after the Congress of Berlin. The governmental concept of the former, in his young age, revolutionary apostle, considered by his admirers a Balkan copy of the “iron chancellor” Bismarck, convincingly relied on a sensible and firm, as much as possible and required, “real policy” towards the Ottoman Empire. 

Namely: the obtaining of greater concessions in favor of the Bulgarian element in the “vilayets” through the Exarchate – the legitimate institution that represented legally the interests of the Bulgarian Christian ethnic community – “millet”, under the rule of the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople. To that “foreign” peculiarity of the Bulgarian policy regarding the Macedonian Issue until the mid-90s of the 19th century must be added also one important “interior” reason: the engagement of the Macedonian (Macedonian-Adrianople) circles with the illegal Russophile opposition and their incessant plots against Knyaz [Prince] Ferdinand and his Prime Minister Stambolov. 

The spiral of internal Bulgarian political violence entangled the Prime Minister and the Macedonian activists in a true vendetta, which led to the public stabbing of 22 Sen. Asst. Prof. Georgi N. Georgiev, PhD the disgraced politician in Sofia in the summer of 1895. It was only then, after the “dictator” Stambolov had fallen from power, that the Macedonian movement in Bulgaria shifted all of a sudden from its quiet cultural-educational and charity trajectory to the liberalized sphere of political life, where it consolidated its organization, cleared up its ideology and… only began looking for its place – below, among or beyond parties’ headquarters.