About the author

About the author

Pavle Rakovski was born on May 23, 1913 in the village Dolna Kleshtina, Lerin Region. He graduated from the Pedagogical High School in Solun and worked as an educated worker, but was mostly known as one of the most prominent Macedonian champions and NOF leaders in Aegean Macedonia. After Greece’s occupation in April 1941, he joined the anti-fascist struggle. He soon became regional head of the ELAS reserve force in Ostrovo Region. In the summer of 1944, on his own initiative, and in accordance with the Voden CPG District Committee, he helped create the ELAS Voden Macedonian Battalion, composed exclusively of Macedonian fighters. Rakovski (together with his companions Petre Sarakinov and Dinko Delev) created a 24 letter Macedonian alphabet and presented it to the Macedonian people in Voden Region along with songs and marches for the Voden battalion. The alphabet was used to teach subjects in the Macedonian language during the national liberation war.

After the Voden battalion was pursued by the CPG and ELAS, due to the fact that it was a “Macedonian battalion” and after it crossed over into Vardar Macedonia, led by Pavle Rakovski, the First Aegean Shock Brigade was formed on November 18, 1944.

Under orders from the Political Commission of Macedonia under Greece, in early 1945, Rakovski was sent to Meglen Region to do field work among the Macedonian population. He was one of the founders of TOMO, a Macedonian organization. NOF, for the Macedonians in Greece, was constituted on May 21, 1945 by the CPM leadership due to the new situation in Greece that included English intervention. As a member of NOF’s Main Board, Rakovski, together with Dzhodzho Urdov, was sent to Voden Region to, among other things, carry out propaganda and publishing activities. In that sense, Rakovski was responsible for looking after NOF’s publishing needs until the end of the Greek Civil War.

In November 1946, after NOF and the CPG made their unification agreement to join the Macedonian and Greek partisan groups, Rakovski took charge of the agitation and propaganda department and its activities. He organized the publishing of the NOF

newspaper “Nepokoren”. Rakovski took part in the Second International Peace Conference in Prague, held in April 1949, where he, as a delegate of the Conference and a NOF representative, greeted Conference delegates in the Macedonian language.

During the CPG arrests in 1949, following DAG’s defeat and the Informburo Resolution, Rakovski was charged with being one of the main culprits for DAG’s defeat. He was accused of being a “Tito Agent” and was arrested on October 7, 1949 by DAG’s security organs and interned at the central prison in Tirana. After a lengthy investigation, conducted in Moscow, and after the USSR Ministry of State Defense reached a verdict in 1952, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and sent to a concentration camp in Siberia.

After relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR normalized in 1960, Pavle Rakovski and his family moved to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia and settled in Skopje. He was awarded several times by the Yugoslav government for his revolutionary work.

During the period when Macedonian war refugees were leaving the Eastern European countries and moving to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, UDBA opened files on them and many were sent to the Idrizovo Prison to be interrogated, especially by their former comrades and leaders in the National Liberation Movement in Aegean Macedonia. Their loyalties to the Yugoslav regime were questioned and their political differences went as far as affecting historiography. History itself was abused – biased, non-objective, tendentious and disqualifying articles and books were written on the one hand, and quiet censorship on the “other side of the story” (on the truth) was imposed on the other.

Due to the division and disagreement between the people in the Macedonian National Liberation Movement in Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia, shortly after Rakovski arrived in Skopje from the USSR, he was ignored and politically and professionally marginalized. But, to the end of his life, he made it his mission to study and analyze Macedonian history, especially during the periods around the national liberation war and the Greek Civil war. He left behind thousands of documents, reports, analyses and reviews, of

which only a small fraction were published during his lifetime. In addition to the fact that his works were not published by the historical institutions, the press also refused to publish them. Of the many articles offered only one was published by “History” in 1977. Later, the Institute of National History purchased one of his manuscripts as study material. Thus, his revolutionary biography and records were kept at home “in a drawer”, for decades, even after his death.

Among the works Rakovski published included are: “The CPG and the Macedonians - Views, Reflections and Findings” (Makedonska kniga, Skopje, 1990), “Autobiography, or: my sufferings” (AEA, Misla, Skopje, 2000); “Macedonians and the Civil War in Greece -Volume 1: ‘In the deep night the dawn is born’ (Makedonika, Skopje, 2011), Volume 2: ‘Truths and untruths’ and volume 3: ‘I protest and blame’ (Makedonika, Skopje, 2013)”.

Pavle Rakovski died in Skopje on February 10, 1990.