TO THE INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL HISTORY IN SKOPJE

TO THE INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL HISTORY IN SKOPJE

As a Macedonian, citizen of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, that is, of SFR Yugoslavia, I am providing you with the attached material with the intention of helping you to see and to overcome an unwelcome situation in Macedonian affairs...

The same material was submitted to: The SKM Central Committee Presidency The Republic’s SVR The editorial board of “Communist” (the Macedonian edition) The editorial Board of “Nova Makedonija”...

Skopje, May 6, 1980.

With much respect, Pavle Rakovski (Resenska 6 / 1-4, Skopje)

And here’s something from that material:

TO THE INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL HISTORY - SKOPJE (To the Science Council or competent authority)

Subject: Writing the history of the turbulent events in neighbouring Greece, i.e. Greek occupied Macedonia, in the periods from 1940 to 1945 and from 1945 to 1949, was entrusted to persons who, judging by their work, are not always up to the job.

A.

The book “The Communist Party of Greece in the War and in the Resistance, 1940-1945”, published by “KAZANTZA”, Athens 1974, is the work of Alekos Papa-Panaiotou, in other words, Theodoros Papa-Panaiotou.

Alekos Papa-Panaiotou, or Theodoros Papa-Panaiotou during the struggle was a DAG commissar working at General Headquarters at Mount Kaimakchalan.

That is exactly his “topic” here in INI on which he has been working and which is going to be published by INI as a separate book in Macedonian. In this work, which is briefly but beautifully and clearly presented, the author talks about the CPG’s policies in that period, discusses the EAM, ELAS and PEEA programs, talks about the agreements made with representatives of the British General Staff in the Middle East (Mediterranean), talks about the agreements made with the domestic bourgeoisie and, in the end, talks about ELAS’s dissolution.

However, Comrade Aleksos is silent on the topic of CPG policies and Party politics in general, with regards to our people. Comrade Aleksos has said nothing about how horribly our people have been treated by the CPG in Aegean Macedonia. It is as if our people did not exist at all… It is as if such policies were never enacted in the Greek state… This is something common to all Greek authors, who wrote on this subject. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter if they were former generals of ELAS, former generals of DAG, commissars, commanders, members of the Politburo or members of the CPG Central Committee; they all treat the Macedonians as if they do not exist. And this specific case is no exception. Comrade Alekos is following a Greek line that all disciplines follow...

Therefore being familiar with the events and having supporting documents in my possession I am willing to try and help in this matter. I feel I need and should show “what happened and why”.

(It is my intention to continue to present events that led the CPG leadership to enact anti-Macedonian policies during the Macedonian

national liberation movement but for now I need to continue with this specific topic.)

As I mentioned earlier, all Greek authors are silent when it comes to the Macedonians and Greek policies enacted against them.

Comrade Alekos with his Greek edition is trying to do exactly that, even here at the Macedonian Institute of National History (INI). Like all Greek authors Comrade Alekos has ignored some events and is silent on them while thoroughly examining others. There is not a single word in his works about the Party politics enacted against the Macedonians, or about the history of the Macedonian national liberation struggle which existed in that period. He acts like a man who has not heard anything and does not know anything about the existence of any Macedonian national liberation movement. He acts like he knows nothing about the kind of Party policies the CPG enacted against the Macedonian movement. And not just that: Being in charge of the “Theme Project”, of the work being done at INI, he vigorously opposes anyone who tries to bring anything outside of what he has written himself. He insists that “it is not true”. He insists that by “slandering the CPG the CPY is also slandered… because the CPY co-operated with the CPG…!” If I remember correctly he reacted in this way when I brought one of my texts to INI and gave it to him to review it (in fact his review exists and can be examined)...

But Comrade Alekos is wrong! He is wrong for hiding those who promised “full equality of minorities” as per the official CPG Party line, and instead delivered a chauvinistic policy against the Macedonian people. He is also wrong in demanding that we not slander the Party and its Marxist principles, after what the CPG did to us...

As one of the founders and as a member of the top NOF leadership I had the opportunity to witness how our Comrade Alekos treated the Macedonians at General Headquarters at Kaimakchalan. In April-May 1947, about 5 to 6 months after “unity” was established on November 21, 1946, I had the opportunity to see Comrade Alekos register the Macedonian fighters. He recorded them as Greeks by nationality and wrote down their Greek names. He then addressed

them as “Greek people…!” and “Greek brothers…!” without mentioning a single word that they were Macedonians. He ignored the fact that the units in that part of the region were composed mainly of Macedonians (about 70-85%).

I then personally went to see Comrade Alekos and vigorously protested his actions demanding that he immediately correct them...

But, the only thing I achieved in doing was to have them label me an “active nationalist”. A little later, Petris, then CPG Bureau Organizing Secretary for Macedonia and Thrace, reprimanded me with the words: “…and after all this you tell me that you had a Greek education and Greek manners…!”

In the Greek edition of his INI project, Comrade Alekos played the role of implementer of the idea that: “There are no Macedonians in the Seaside part (Greek occupied) of Macedonia and that there is no ‘Macedonian Question’ in Greece...” It is truly strange that Comrade Alekos was invited and allowed to write “our history”, i.e. the history of the Macedonian national liberation movement in that part of Macedonia in the period from 1940 to 1945...

B.

As an INI project, Theodoros Papa-Panaiotou and Risto Kiriazovski took on the leading roles to write the works: “The Worker Movement, the CPG and the national liberation movement of the Macedonians in Aegean Macedonia.”

Theodoros Papa-Panaiotou took on the work of processing the historical material from the period 1940 to 1945. How well he did with this material can be beautifully seen in his Greek edition of “The CPG in the War and in the Resistance 1940-1945” which can be found in the INI library.

Risto Kiriazovski took on the work of processing the historical materials from the period 1945 to 1949, which included “NOF and other Macedonian organizations in Aegean Macedonia from 1945 to 1949”. The work was entitled: “CPG leadership attitude and position towards the Macedonian national question in Aegean Macedonia

from 1945 to 1949. Kiriazovski offered to publish a shortened version of this theme, about 50 pages, in the magazine “Istoria”. The editors of “Istoria” sent me this text, with a cover letter, and asked me to review it and give them my written assessment. And so I did… but Kiriazovski was not happy with it. He said to me: “This is my theme which I have produced and I will not change anything in it. I am prepared to rate it, defend it and reach my own conclusions…”

And here is how he rated the situation and the conclusions he offered:

On page 1 of his text, Kiriazovski evaluated that our Greek comrades, i.e. the CPG leadership, “officially never contested that the Macedonians were a separate nation…”

This categorical assertion that accentuates the Greek principles of our Greek comrades towards the Macedonians, as opposed to emphasizing facts, is completely unfounded and random. Here is a brief reminder of the facts:

1) During the first six years since the CPG’s founding in November 1918, its program (an official document) contained not a word about any Macedonian or any non-Greek people. All the people in Greece have been referred to as... Greek people.

(After that I wrote about events pointing out the CPG’s deep anti-Macedonian policy, and ended with:)

10) After DAG’s inevitable defeat, after our struggle had failed, after we left the Greek territory, NOF, the material force of the Macedonian national idea and the Organization of the Macedonians fighters and people, was openly attacked and disbanded. In its place the CPG formed a new organization, especially for the “Slavophones” which in fact was designed to struggle against the Macedonian national idea… and not for it. For this purpose, they (the CPG leaders) carefully selected “Janissary” of Macedonian origin to staff the new organization. They called it “Ilinden” primarily to hide their real intentions behind it and to cling to the Macedonian resistance. In fact they were planning to kill the spirit

of Ilinden with the help of an organization named Ilinden. Here are some facts about that:

The Greek leaders and self-styled tailors of the Macedonian people’s fate decided to take away the Macedonian alphabet from the Macedonian people and imposed on them something alien that suited their Greek taste. They also took away their Macedonian literary language and their Macedonian grammar by prohibiting them from using them in the schools, by the press and generally by the Macedonian public. What was already Macedonian was replaced with a new Macedonian grammar and a new Macedonian literary language both concocted by Kotsopoulos and the other “opouloses”. After that it was left to the “Ilinden” publishing department to promote this concoction and to publish the new textbooks and its new literary values... And did the Macedonian people know that this was actually a “Greek concoction” and not a Macedonian one…? No they did not! The Greeks promoted themselves as a principled, civilized and cultured people but in practice showed themselves to be neither “principled”, “cultured”, nor “civilized”… especially when it came to delivering on their promises such as the “self-determination of the Macedonian people” and “full equality” for the Macedonian people.

In other words the Greek communists were no better than the Greek bourgeois and all other Greeks before them who promoted the well-known anti-Macedonian thesis of non-recognition and carrying out their infamous policy of denying the existence of a Macedonian nation, language, culture… in the entire ethnic, geographic and historic Macedonia… including in Greek occupied Macedonia!

This was yet another attempt to break down the Macedonian nation, culture and language. In addition to breaking down the Macedonian territory through its invasion, occupation, division and annexation by the neighbouring monarchies through the Balkan wars, the CPG’s aim here was to break down the Macedonian people’s language and culture in order to prove to the world that the vocabulary used inside the Greek state is really only an internal Greek phenomenon, only an eloquent part of the Greek people, the bilingual Greeks, who have nothing to do with the Macedonians in the Republic of Macedonia in Federal Yugoslavia... According to

the logic of this crude anti-Macedonian act, the Macedonians who survived the Greek-bourgeois genocide, that is, the Greek denationalization and assimilation policy, cannot and must not exist except as a complimentary addition to the Greek people, and as a people’s sacrifice… In time they are destined to disappear… As for the rest, because they work against Greek national interests, they must be viewed as actors working for foreign interests…! Of course, it was not an easy job to destroy a people like us Macedonians. Our primordial forces that keep us going are well hidden, like they are in every healthy and strong nation, and with every chance we get we replace the lost and heal the wounds of the injured. But, like all others before them, this time too our Greek comrades, the CPG leaders, tried everything in their power to destroy us but they proved to be unable. They failed to change the character and nature of the Macedonian phenomenon. They tried this inside our homeland and they tried it outside but it did not work. They called us “Slavophone Greeks” meaning Greeks who spoke a Slavic language but we did not buy it… They formed an organization called “Ilinden”, something near and dear to our hearts, but that too we did not buy… But not only did we not buy it…, it backfired on the Greeks…

As the number of “Slavophone Greeks” grew under heavy Greek influence, so did their anti-Macedonian sentiments to which the Macedonian people caught on and began to openly rebel against. In this way, “Ilinden” the organization began to increasingly receive its colour as the national Macedonian organization in the spirit of Ilinden, and became more and more the material force of the Macedonian national ideal. Because of this, it did not take long for our Greek comrades to dissolve it. The “Ilinden” organization and its Macedonian pages in the Greek newspapers were abolished in almost every centre among the Macedonians including among the Macedonian émigrés. By doing so, the Greeks, yet again, robbed the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia of all their rights. They robbed them of their opportunity to organize, develop and continue their struggle for elementary human rights. They robbed them of their struggle to survive as Macedonians and, on top of that, ended their chances of creating a decent life in the Greek state as Macedonians, or as a non-Greek nation...

But of course, one is not going to find any of this in the Greek books, and outside of some “nice and meaningless words” spoken, the many Greek authors are silent on the subject of the real Greek policies and attitudes exercised against the Macedonian people. But they do more than that. They use many empty words to blur and cover up the fact that minorities were recognized and that the Macedonian people were promised “equality” during the critical period of the Greek Civil War. But later the official response to this was: “The correctness of the line for a given question did not exclude individual irregularities in handling that question... (And if I understand this correctly, the official line is that the CPG ‘simply made a mistake…’) This also happened when the CPG was dealing with the ‘Slavo-Macedonian Question’ during the first phase of the armed struggle (referring to the national liberation war, 1941- 1944) and later (during the Greek Civil War, 1945-1949).” This was a Party editorial published in the Party magazine “Neos Cosmos” No. 2/1957, p. 8, in an attempt to explain the CPG policy applied on the Macedonian Question.

So, according to the “official” explanation “nothing serious took place”, and whatever small things did take place… they were “irregularities”. In other words, even though the official CPG line was in favour of “full equality for minorities”, Macedonia was still proclaimed to be as Greek as Attica… and the Macedonian people were only “Slavophone Greeks”. This, naturally, was done to suppress the Macedonian anti-fascist liberation movement… with the use of weapons… and to remove all traces of the bearers of the Macedonian national liberation movement. On top of that, in order to negate the fact that a real Macedonian liberation movement existed and to cover it up, they claimed it was a “Grkoman” (Macedonians loyal to Greece) movement. And to further confuse the Macedonian issue, the Greeks took steps to not only rob the Macedonian people of their culture and language, but imposed a “Greek created” alphabet, grammar and language… especially created for their “Slavophone Greeks”. This is reality… these are steps the Greek communists took to negate the Macedonian movement… which, obviously, today cannot be considered or qualified as APPLICATIONS of the official line, nor as random misstatements in the implementation of the official line. These are

things, however, that cannot be accepted as simple mistakes and understood as simple “irregularities”…!

Even though there are plenty of illusions and self-deceptions, we must distinguish fact from fiction and seek to understand the truth. The Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia were victims of a dangerous dual policy with a single purpose in mind – to officially negate the existence of the Macedonian people in Greece. One part of the policy is the pro-minority declaration principle, and the second, the one practiced, is the anti-Macedonian course of action. The first is there to hide the second…

In an attempt to launch his own assessment in our historiography, historian Risto Kiriazovski has made claims that the Greek leaders never officially objected to the fact that the Macedonian people were a separate nation. In doing so he has joined the Greek leaders in their endeavours to apply their chauvinistic policies against the Macedonian people and keep the truth veiled and blocked from the public and from the CPG membership.

This is not the only one. There are many similar such assessments in Kiriazovski’s texts that have entered our historiography, which objectively do not have and cannot have another function other than:

Twisting the historical truth, and together with the beautiful words written by the Greek side, blur, overshadow and cover up the Greek leadership’s chauvinistic policies against the Macedonian people...

It is well-known that Kiriazovski never belonged in the ranks of the Macedonian national liberation movement and has always sat on the opposite side of the barricade. He also negated and was an active opponent of NOF... So, it is truly strange that, judging by his writing, such an incurable “Grkoman” (loyal to the Greek cause) can be given the responsibility to write the history of the Macedonian national liberation movement in that part of (Greek occupied) Macedonia for the period from 1945 to 1949... ___________________

We know that Theodoros Papa-Panaiotou (Alekos) made a request to the INI authorities to allow him to conduct an audit of the archive

material with the intent of “purging” from INI and from other archives all memorials and written testimonies that “slandered the CPG”. He asked that this material be excluded from our history and be destroyed. By using his position as a former and current CPG official and head of the INI project “The worker movement, the CPG and the Macedonian national liberation movement in Aegean Macedonia”, Comrade Alekos tried to protect the CPG leaders from being found out for what they did to the Macedonian people and from being condemned and denounced. Ignoring its Marxist principles… breaking its own official line on “self-determination to secession”… breaking its own official line on “full equality for minorities”… the CPG leadership, in the name of the CPG itself, committed chauvinistic acts against the Macedonian national liberation movement and against the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia… In other words, the CPG became an extended arm of the Greek reactionaries and took on their role to destroy the Macedonian nation in Greece. This above-mentioned request to eliminate the defamatory information against the CPG, made by our comrade Alekos, was supported by another “historian” of the Macedonian national liberation movement in Aegean Macedonia, and that historian was Kiriazovski, who carried special weight and importance and was recognized as an expert in the subject.

I must confess that, as a Macedonian and a citizen of this Yugoslav community, I look at the INI situation with much bitterness and resentment.

But, at the same time I am confident that when a “special commission” (if one is established sooner than later) is formed it will be able to save and preserve this valuable documentation of our past. We need to be able to preserve everything we have on the Macedonian national liberation movement, not only to safeguard our past but to also be able to defend ourselves in the future… so that one day we can expose the truth about the CPG...

Skopje, March 23, 1980 _______________

Here is another turn of events: