Author's Note

Since her liberation in 1878 Bulgaria has been a land of conspiracies and in most of them the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) has played a conspicuous part; but that Organisation's story cannot be told apart from the story of Bulgaria, nor understood without some knowledge of the Macedonian Question which is outlined in my Introduction (written mainly for students).

This book is the result of my observations while living in Bulgaria (as the representative of Reuter’s Agency, The New York Times, and other newspapers) from October 1932 to December 1935 (when I was expelled from the country) and of much supplementary research. My completed manuscript was more than double this book’s length, and in reduction to reasonable dimensions many details have had to go—though details are often needed to refute the tissue of contradictory falsehoods spread by the Bulgarian propagandists. The bulk of my information was gathered in Bulgaria (most of it from Bulgarians who have parts in my story), and very little beyond Bulgaria’s frontiers. However, I dare not, for obvious reasons, mention the names of my chief informants, nor will the Bulgarian police discover them by pushing pins beneath the finger-nails of my known Bulgarian friends because I never disclosed their names to anybody. But I apologise to those friends if my findings offend their patriotism, though adding that it is my profound sympathy for the Bulgarian people as a whole which has inspired me most to expose their rulers’ outrages. Above all I apologise to my secretary, Marie Popilieva, while recording my heartfelt gratitude for her loyal service within the limits of her stout nationalism.

Since anyone who dares criticise the Bulgarian chauvinists policy is dubbed Communist, spy, or “paid agent of Serbia”, I shall probably receive those designations—honours I must decline. This book will certainly be banned in Bulgaria: if not officially, then by that Hidden

Power which has for years stifled free opinions, deluded the Bulgarian public, and prevented the circulation of any books (those by Londres, Perrigault and Doolaard, for example) which might cause embarrassment to the governing clique. Since representatives of the present order in Bulgaria, guiltily convinced before its publication that this book will expose their methods and subterfuges, have already declared their intention to publish attacks upon it, expressing confidence that a leading British newspaper will afford them every opportunity to do so, I feel it wise to declare that I shall treat anonymous criticism with silent contempt (though I shall welcome impartial criticism and correction of errors which I may have made while unravelling a very tangled skein).

A book upon Bulgarian conspiracies seems long overdue, for the facts are little understood; moreover coming events often cast their shadows before them in the Balkans. John Gunther’s few pages upon Bulgaria in his Inside Europe are extremely inaccurate; while Stoyan Christowe’s (Christov’s) account of the Revolutionary Organisation in Heroes and Assassins is written in the Mihailovist interest, whole paragraphs very closely corresponding with paragraphs in books published under the auspices of the terrorist leader Mihailov. Only George Logio, in his Bulgaria Past and Present, has made any real attempt to throw light upon Bulgarian affairs since the World War, though the true character of the Revolutionary Organisation seems to have eluded him, but I am indebted to his book for much background material in my chapters upon the War and pre-War periods.

Some words used in the text require definition. They are:—

Bashi Bazouks: Turkish irregulars.
Comitadji: Member of a revolutionary committee but not necessarily a revolutionary in arms (who was known as a tchetnik); but in deference to popular usage I have used the word comitadji instead of tchetnik.
Communist: Any opponent of the Bulgarian Government or individual with views as pink or pinker than Lord Baldwin's.
Grand Vizir: Turkish Prime Minister.
Haiduk: A Balkan Robin Hood, a political outlaw.
Horo: Bulgarian national dance.
Shkupstina: Yugoslav (or Serbian) Parliament.
Sobranié: Bulgarian Parliament.
Supremist: Originally a member or supporter ot the Vrhoven Komitet — the Supreme Committee; but now any Bulgarian or Bulgarophile Macedonian working for Bulgarian hegemony of the Balkans. The Porte; Turkish Imperial Government.
Ukase: Royal decree.
Vilayet: Turkish province.
Voivode: Macedonian local duel.

Royal Societies' Club

Introduction

A stranger to the Balkan Peninsula might he surprised to find the Blue Danube is a delusion, for it is a muddy river unredeemed by its banks. If he is observant the stranger will find too, as he lingers upon those banks, that the delicate shades which lured him here were but the reflections of harsh colours—red blood and black mourning and the blue of cold fear.

Along the Danube's right bank extend the Kingdoms of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The people of both are of Slavonic stock, speaking dialects of a common language, using the Cyrillic script (except in northern Yugoslavia) and worshipping (save 5,000,000 Catholics in the north and a Moslem minority) in National Orthodox Churches which use the old Slavonic language (except for sermons in dialect) and have neither spiritual nor dogmatic differences between them. Among these people there grows a will for understanding and ultimate federation, but they have been held apart by early Serbian follies and the conspiracies of Bulgarians with imperial ambitions.

By the World War Serbia won from Austria-Hungary the Slav provinces of Bosnia, Hertzegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, and The Banat and, united with Montenegro too, became Yugoslavia, with 15,000,000 inhabitants. By war with Turkey and Bulgaria in 1912 and 1913 Serbia had gained a common frontier with Greece, well defined by a mountain range bisecting a vague region called Macedonia; and her share of Macedonia she called South Serbia, In 1912 Bulgaria won a quarter of Macedonia too, calling it the Petritch Department; and although losing by the World War her outlet upon the Aegean Sea and certain strategic districts along her Western Frontier, she has to-day a population of 6,081,000. But the Bulgarians claim that all Christian Slav Macedonians are Bulgars, not Serbs—hence the quarrel between the two Slav nations; it is as if Austria should quarrel with Germany over the racial affinities of the Bavarians.

Macedonia's bare hills and arid plains are bounded by Old Serbia, Albania’s mountains, Greek Thessaly, and the rugged Rila and Pirin ranges of Bulgaria. The Bulgarian share holds romance among its tobacco and opium poppy fields beside the Struma River and in the pine forests and lonely tarns upon old El Teppe’s flanks; and there is Melnik, a rich survival of Byzantine times with 10,000 inhabitants until the Bulgarians destroyed it in 1913. Founded in the twelfth century between Dantesque cliffs of sandstone, it became the home of disgraced Byzantine nobles; they came with all their treasures, each family building its chapel till there were seventy-two: and a Byzantine Emperor’s crown was preserved there until presented to King Constantine of Greece in 1912. The exiles brought here the art of making wine, rich wine of several grades which the 400 souls who dwell among its tragic ruins still make, storing it in immense vats in cool caves deep in the cliffs. There is no road to the place, its main street becomes a surging torrent in a storm, and if you ask a Bulgarian who brought it to this ruin he never knows, It is the strangest place in all Macedonia.

Until 1912 Macedonia’s sad villages and market towns, groaning under Turkish misgovernment, sheltered (according to the Bulgarian Vassil Kantchev) 1,179,000 Slavs (147,000 of them Moslems, known as Pomaks), 498,000 Turks, 225,000 Greeks, 125,000 Albanians, 78,000 Vlachs, 70,000 Jews, 55,000 Gipsies and 22,000 miscellaneous, a veritable macédoine totalling 2,252,000 of whom 1,339,500 were Christians. Of the Greeks—who dwelt in the towns and southern Macedonia, many were Hellenised Slavs or Vlachs. The Vlachs (or Wallachs) shared with the inhabitants of Wallachia (now Roumania) descent from Latinised native stocks which had not been absorbed by the fringes of the Slavonic immigration in the sixth century. The Jews and Gipsies were townsmen. But precise statistics never bothered the Turks, and when they did compile any they classed the population simply as Turks (meaning the Moslem ruling caste) or Greeks (meaning all Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church).

On March 3, 1878, Russia dictated to Turkey the Treaty of San Stefano which revived the early Bulgarian Empire, its bounds extending to Albania’s mountains and Salonika’s gates; but Great Britain, Germany and Austria-Hungary declined this Russian arrangement which was superseded on July 13 by the Treaty of Berlin. Russia’s Great Bulgaria was carved into three parts—Bulgaria proper (between the Balkan mountains and the Danube) with the Sofia district of “Turkish Serbia”, Eastern Roumelia (the Maritza basin), and Macedonia. Bulgaria, inhabited by 2,500,000 peasants (a third Moslems), became an autonomous principality under Turkish suzerainty: while Eastern Roumelia (with barely 1,000,000 inhabitants similarly divided) was placed under a Turkish Christian Governor-General assisted by a European Commission; but Macedonia remained under direct Turkish rule, though reforms were promised.

But the “San Stefano Bulgaria” has remained “holy ideal” no Bulgarian leader has dared renounce. Bulgaria proper united with Roumelia in 1885: thereafter the Bulgarian nationalists strove unremittingly to acquire Macedonia, hegemony of the Southern Slavs, and outlets upon “the three seas”. Serbia—and later, Yugoslavia—was their enemy.

The Serbs, who became completely independent in 1878 when they acquired Nish, Pirot and Vrania, were farther from Macedonia and cut off by a wedge of Moslem Albanians whom the Turks had purposely encouraged to flow into the vacuum left by the Serb emigration in 1690, a wedge extending through Old Serbia to Vrania. Moreover the Serbs, by revolting first among Turkey’s Christian subjects, had earned Turkish hatred, so their cultural activities in Macedonia were suspected and thwarted; and they were torn by dynastic squabbles and preoccupied with their kinsmen in Bosnia, Hertzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, provinces the Austro-Hungarians occupied in 1878.

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Macedonian Slavs immigrated to free Serbia, being welcomed as co-nationals and rising, many of them, to her highest places; but after 1878 advantages of proximity and size and greater prosperity, and her victory over Serbia in 1885 raised her prestige. Encouraged by the Exarchate (the Bulgarian National Church) thousands of Macedonians came over her border for education and professional opportunities their own country under the Turks did not offer: and having their roots upon both sides of the border, many embraced the Great Bulgaria ideal with the fanaticism of converts. Sharper than their Bulgarian cousins, the most ambitious rose to dominate Bulgarian affairs, forming the nucleus of

a clique, known as Supremists, who worked fanatically for Bulgaro-Macedonian supremacy in the Balkans. By 1930 Macedonian immigrants and their children had given to Bulgaria eight Cabinet Ministers, twenty diplomatic representatives, 1,568 school-teachers, and numerous deputies, bishops, judges, officers and journalists; but many of them are the Supremists’ bitterest antagonists, preferring a democratic Federation within Yugoslavia to Bulgarian hegemony.

The Supremists’ hatred of Serbia is political and dynastic. They stand for The Cause of Sofia and the Coburg dynasty against Belgrade and the Karageorgevitches. Yet among them are men whose brothers or cousins were enthusiastic Serbophiles, a notable example being Professor Miletitch whose uncle led the Serbian minority in Hungary; while Macedonian Slav brothers often called themselves respectively Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek and Vlach as advantage dictated! And the Serbian statesman Nikola Pasitch was an engineer in Bulgarian official service once while in exile—which shows the fundamental kinship between the two peoples.

In 1878 the Macedonian Slav masses had no national feelings whatever; but being wearied of Turkish misrule and the Greek Patriarchate’s corruption, most of them fell readily under the Bulgarian Exarchate’s influence, The Exarchate, founded in 1870 at Constantinople and favoured by the Turks as a counterblast to the rebellious Serbs, rallied the unliberated Slavs of Bulgaria, Roumelia, and Macedonia, being the first Slav organisation able to stand between them and their Turkish overlords or Greek clergy. In 1880 the Exarchate opened a Schools Department, financed by the Bulgarian Government, to maintain schools in Macedonia and Eastern Thrace; it trained Macedonian teachers and poured them back into Macedonia to set the stamp of Bulgarian nationality upon the receptive and discontented peasants. This activity coincided with a growing demand for education, the Sultan Abdul Hamid’s increasing tyranny, and the completion of the Salonika-Skoplje Railway which flooded the little tradesmen's markets with cheap goods while opening to Moslem landlords trading opportunities which encouraged their greed at their downtrodden tenants’ expense. The Exarchist representatives told these tenants that Moslem landlords had been driven from free Bulgaria and their lands distributed and that prosperous Bulgaria would ultimately liberate the Macedonians too, while giving them now free modern education and the free services of Slav priests; so the impoverished Macedonians let the Exarchate take over such Slav schools and churches as they had themselves established.

Thus Exarchist propaganda flourished upon sympathetic soil and Macedonia east of the River Vardar (where dialect and customs were closest to the Bulgarians') became a stronghold of Bulgarised Slavs; but the Slavs beyond preserved an independent spirit. Supremists claim that by 1912 the Exarchate had in Macedonia and Eastern Thrace 1,360 schools with 77,000 scholars and 1,329 churches with 1,371 priests; whereas the Greeks claimed 998 Patriarchist schools (in Macedonia only) with 59,600 scholars. Actually it seems there were in Macedonia only 561 Exarchist schools (395 in South Serbia) with 18,300 scholars, though High Schools at Salonika and Bitolje and Normal Schools at Seres and Skoplje sent many students to Sofia University.

In 1913 Serbia and Greece, having driven out the Turks, partitioned most of Macedonia between them and defeated Bulgaria’s effort to wrest it from them. Many Patriarchist Slavs welcomed the Greeks; but in South Serbia two-thirds of the Christian Slavs were Exarchists, of whom those under thirty years of age—taught to believe themselves Bulgars— were puzzled or irritated to find they must now call themselves Serbs. Even Supremists admit the Serbs behaved well until provoked, and 20,000 refugees to Bulgaria from the Turks immediately returned to Serbian Macedonia. The Serbs fraternised easily with the people, appointing as officials and teachers and priests local men who accepted the authority of Belgrade and the Serbian Patriarchate; but when Bulgaria attacked Serbia these had to sign declarations of Serbian nationality, using the Serbian termination (ič) to their names, while Bulgarophile fanatics were deported, children forbidden to sing Bulgarian songs learnt in Exarchist schools, priests praying for the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand thrashed, and in many cases the people made to Serbise their shop signs and even the inscriptions upon gravestones. However, such crude methods were the outcome of Bulgaria's treacherous attack and Serbian determination to crush agitators and accomplices of raiding bands from Bulgaria.

The Serbisation of Macedonian names was no great hardship. The termination itch had prevailed in Serbia as the Serbian dialect was developed; but until 1912 not a few Bulgarian high officials had this itch too, as had Macedonian leaders (though their names have been Bulgarised by Bulgarian historians). It was only after the Serbo-Bulgarian War in 1913 that it became indiscreet to itch in Bulgaria. Originally a Balkan Slav was known by his Christian name. He was, say, Ivan. He became a priest—or Pop: so his name would be Pop-ivan. His son called himself Pop- ivan-ov—Pop-ivan-son: and so the name would stay if he was Bulgarian; but if he became a Serb he would be Popivanovitch.

The Bulgarians, though pretending tolerance towards minorities, made even the Albanians add -ov to their names when they occupied Macedonia in 1916—often with incongruous results. How often in Bulgaria, where there are over half a million Moslems of Turkish blood, does one find an official or deputy with a name that does not end in -ov or -ev? And what liberties have the 75,000 (by Bulgarian statistics) Roumanian villagers in northern Bulgaria? Placards tell them it is unpatriotic to speak Roumanian, reading Roumanian books brings persecution, and they must Bulgarise their names if they wish to prosper. There is, too, an official list of patriotic Bulgarian Christian names and children may be baptised with no others.

Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 to wrest Macedonia from Serbia and for a short while succeeded. She appointed Supremist officials, teachers, priests and bishops whose appalling cruelties caused an Inter-Allied Commission of Enquiry to report afterwards that “it is really impossible to believe that they considered for one moment that [Macedonian] population was an integral part of their nation". These “liberators” were driven out in 1918.

The Bulgarians, though a kindly and industrious people often breeding truly remarkable men, are in general gross and parsimonious and envious, servile and untruthful and suspicious, almost insensible to pain, and indifferent to the interests of others outside their families. So the unscrupulous among them rise, the rare altruists go under. There is no aristocracy, no traditions. Almost 80% of them are peaceful peasants who care nothing for territorial gains and think the town-dwelling minority unproductive parasites; but they have been muzzled by a system (inaugurated by Tsar Ferdinand) which has presented a façade of democratic government to naive observers. Dr. Seton-Watson wrote truly that Tsar Ferdinand was “one of the chief corrupters of his age... From Hungary Ferdinand imported with him the specifically Magyar quality of self-advertisement in the foreign Press, of throwing dust in the dazzled eyes of strangers... Foreign observers have always exaggerated the importance of the parties and underestimated the power of the Crown.” Those words might equally have been written of Ferdinand’s Bulgarian-educated soldier son Boris in whose favour he abdicated in 1918, for propaganda has exaggerated Boris' popularity, his democratic manner, amiability and passion for driving railway engines, while ignoring the subtle role he plays, his intolerance of criticism, his consistent support of the Supremists' aims, and his absolute powers.

The Bulgarian Constitution promulgated at Trnovo in 1879 laid down that the Tsar is Commander-in-Chief of Bulgaria’s armed forces in peace and war, confers military ranks, may commute sentences and pardon criminals: the executive power is his and his decrees become law when countersigned by the respective Ministers who assume all responsibility. If the State is in danger and the Sobranié cannot he convoked, the Tsar may, at his Ministers’ instigation and responsibility, issue decree-laws which must, however, be approved by the next Sobranié. The Cabinet is composed of all the Ministers, of whom one, chosen by the Tsar, becomes Prime Minister; moreover the Ministers are appointed and dismissed by the Tsar who may appoint to any official post. In 1911 Article XVII was amended to read: “The Tsar is the State’s representative in all its relations with foreign countries. It is in His name that the Government negotiates and concludes with foreign countries all treaties, which must be sanctioned by Him. The Ministers inform the Sobranié of them Directly the Welfare and Safety of the State Permit." These provisions still stand.

In 1879 the Constituent Assembly rejected proposals for a Council of State or Senate, a proportion of nominated deputies, and even for an electoral qualification, most representatives being resolved there should be no privileged class and only one Chamber elected by universal male suffrage. In theory this was very liberal; but in practice all power remained the Tsar's, for though responsible to nobody he might appoint, promote, and dismiss Ministers, officers, and functionaries at will. To supplement this power Tsar Ferdinand evolved a clever technique. To create a governing class he encouraged corruption among politicians and military chiefs while compiling detailed dossiers of their misdeeds so that he might threaten them with exposure if ever they dared oppose him. The tale of a well-known General’s meteoric rise shows how Ferdinand wielded his powers. One night this General, then a Captain of the Guard, hearing his beautiful wife was closeted with Ferdinand, angrily broke into the royal private apartments. Ferdinand, unabashed, met him at the door.

"What do you want, Colonel?" he asked.

The Colonel retired, content with this promotion.

By exploiting individualism, encouraging rapacity and rewarding servility, Ferdinand skilfully played against each other those bickering office-seekers who sprang from a legion of impecunious intelligentsia deliberately created by an elaborate educational machine against anticipated territorial expansion. Anyone with strong enough lungs might proclaim himself a party, rally a following by wild promises, then curry favour by professions of loyalty to the Sovereign and Supremist ambitions; and the party’s strength mattered not at all if the Palace called it to power, for once in control of the administrative machine it was simple to frame elections and secure a make-belief majority. No Cabinet ever fell until the Sovereign willed. Each individual politician played for his own hand or pocket, caring little or nothing for national welfare and collaborating with his colleagues in office only for his own advantage. If a politician was condemned for embezzlement he was soon amnestied because his Sovereign needed a new pawn; and so, among ninety-six Ministers who governed Bulgaria between 1879 and 1926, forty-eight were condemned, while over thirty general amnesties were proclaimed!

So there were never many principles but many parties in Bulgaria: and the names of the parties meant as little as their programmes; though no party (after Stoilov) called itself Conservative (a name unattractive to the masses), the most extreme Right styling themselves National, Popular, or even Liberal of various brands. Almost alone the Radicals defied Ferdinand, declining office without a genuine majority; but since they would not buy supporters by promising wholesale appointments to Government offices they remained in the wilderness, being joined by Socialists and Agrarians and other opponents of Ferdinand’s powers and methods.

Thus there was formed a powerful but corrupt governing class numbering in 1934 perhaps 300,000. Men of skin- deep culture crowded mostly in Sofia, they clamoured for official posts while waiting and praying and scheming for the day when Bulgaria’s expansion would open influential "black-coat" jobs to them all; and any leanings towards moderation among the more thoughtful of them was called Communism. Agriculture they thought degrading and scorned to succour the poverty-stricken villages from which most of them hailed, villages filthy as farmyards, sloughs of ignorance.

Indeed sophistication has many backslidings in Bulgaria’s valleys and forests and wide plains. In addition to numerous religious and official holidays there are many of pagan origin which the peasants observe—so many that when allowance is made for bad weather there are barely a hundred working days in the year. There is Wolf’s Day, Bear’s Day, Mice Day, Horse’s Day, Midwife’s Day, Black Wednesday, Dry Tuesday, each bringing its particular misfortune if not suitably observed. Against persistent drought a small girl is dressed in sack-cloth, draped with greenery, and led around by a chain about her neck, hopping and chanting an incantation while each housewife in turn empties a jug of water over her. Then there are fanatics near the Turkish border who dance upon red-hot embers as if possessed, yet come to no harm.

Bulgaria’s Supremists were not discouraged by defeat in 1918.Though they had fanned Tsar Ferdinand’s bellicosity and driven the masses to war, they heaped blame upon their abdicated ruler for Bulgaria’s misfortunes and shrieked about an unjust peace; and while protesting innocence they drummed into their children through Bulgaria’s militaristic educational system fanatical ideas of revenge, fiercely opposed reconciliation with their brother Yugoslavs and murdered those who counselled sanity. Holding the reins in Sofia they were indifferent to the squalor and poverty of the provinces (hardly good arguments for Bulgarian expansion). Common sense dictated that Bulgaria should cut her losses, forget territorial ambitions and develop herself— as Turkey has done though Turkey’s losses were far greater. Two men tried to set Bulgaria on that course. One was Alexander Stamboliski—he was chopped to pieces. The other was Damian Veltchev—he lies in gaol.

Stamboliski’s Agrarians were overthrown in 1923, then massacred by Supremist Army Chiefs who began immediately and secretly to rearm Bulgaria while collaborating with Hungary, with Italy (who feared the new Yugoslavia might threaten her supremacy of the Adriatic Sea) and ultimately with the German Nazis. The Exarchate maintained its headquarters at Constantinople and fiercely refused to move to Sofia, arguing that this would signify "abdication of the National Church’s right" to jurisdiction over the "oppressed Bulgarians" now under Yugoslav "usurpers". Supremist diplomats clamoured for "Minority Rights" for the "Bulgarians of Macedonia".

 

Typical Bulgarian Supremist propaganda—a diagram reproduced from a slip to be found in cigarette-boxes during 1933. The black areas represent territories "stolen" from Bulgaria (according to the propagandists) by Serbia, Greece and Roumania; the hand is grabbing "reparations"; while the Lettering beneath, referring to the Treaty of Neuilly, proclaims: "Down with Neuilly! Neuilly must be torn up."

But most Macedonians did not want to be Bulgarians. Before the War they had rallied to Bulgaria in despair at Turkish oppression; but now they were ruled by Slavs like themselves. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), founded in 1893 to win autonomy from the Turks, had violently resisted Bulgaria’s annexionist aims, but had fallen ultimately under the influence of the Supremist Committee in Sofia. In 1924, however, most Macedonians in Bulgaria were immigrants from Greek Macedonia who urged understanding with the Yugoslavs against the Greeks; while the peasants of South Serbia were content provided they obtained civil right. So IMRO leaders tried to reassert their independence; whereupon they were massacred by terrorists led by Ivan Mihailov in the service of the Italophile Bulgarian War Minister Volkov. These terrorists, masquerading as leaders of IMRO to bemuse the public, were used by Italophile Army Chiefs to prevent (by terror and outrages) Bulgarian reconciliation with Yugoslavia. Behind these Army Chiefs stood Tsar Boris and behind him his exiled father. These Coburgs, an alien dynasty, feared South Slav friendship would lead to South Slav Federation; and Federation implies a dual Bulgaro- Yugoslav monarchy in which the native Karageorgevitch dynasty, reigning already over the greater kingdom, would be preferred. So the Coburgs strove for Bulgarian hegemony, valuing their Throne above national welfare or morality. Fear of South Slav Federation undoubtedly influenced Tsar Ferdinand to attack Serbia in 1915—for had the two countries emerged from the World War as friends or allies the movement for Federation might well have been irresistible.

The prevalent desire in both countries for understanding was never more clearly proved than between July 12 and 14, 1935. when 6,000 Yugoslav Sokols—among them 900 Macedonians from South Serbia—came to Sofia in their red shirts and plumed caps to join in a great Rally of Younaks (as the Bulgarian Sokols call themselves). Arriving with their banners and bands they were welcomed with wild joy by the generally undemonstrative Bulgarians. Sofia was never so gay. That artificial hatred of Yugoslavia so fierce two years before was obliterated by a miraculous wave of enthusiasm. There were men from Yugoslav Bled to Bulgarian Bourgas—and women too, in their gorgeous national dresses—fraternising and flirting and dancing between Sofia’s flower-beds and café tables to the music of Yugoslav bands, while knots of Bulgarians and Yugoslavs sat together over drinks, talking deeply, each understanding the others’ dialect: Bulgarian girls wore Sokol caps: Bulgarian officers strolled arm in arm with Yugoslav Sokols. In a public garden a Bulgarian schoolgirls’ band played while Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, colourful as parrots, danced wildly into the small hours of the morning beneath the glare of a military searchlight. In the great Cathedral’s square thousands of Younaks and Sokols knelt in prayer together, then marched through the streets bearing flaming torches. Together they delighted vast audiences by their gymnastic displays in the Younak stadium; and at the end Younaks from all Bulgaria danced their wild local dances as the sun went down, the Yugoslav Sokols' leaders catching the general enthusiasm and rushing out to join the men from Nova Zagora. Then the Sokols’ and Younaks’ standards were crossed and Yugoslavia’s Chief Sokol was embraced by General Rachko Athanassov, Minister of Interior and President of the Younaks and organiser of these stirring scenes of South Slav fraternity.

But it was this sense of brotherhood the Supremists had striven to thwart, knowing it doomed their dreams of hegemony. The Supremists’ Committee in Sofia of earlier days had yielded place to a "Macedonian National Committee" (elected by delegates from the numerous Macedonian immigrants' "brotherhoods" in Bulgaria) which controlled the Macedonian Co-operative Bank, Students’ Association, Women’s Union, Ilinden Organisation—of survivors of the Ilinden Revolt, Scientific Institute, and other Macedonian institutions. This Committee, though working legally by propaganda, always collaborated with IMRO which, though illegal, did as it pleased in Bulgaria; but when in 1928 Mihailov finally usurped control of IMRO and turned it into a purely terrorist organisation he purged the Committee of all moderates and shot with impunity in Sofia’s streets all opponents of Supremism until May 19, 1934, when disgusted military subordinates swept the Italophile Army Chiefs from power. Then the Mihailovist terrorists collapsed.

The National Committee, under Mihailov the terrorists’ chancellery and Supremists’ loud-speaker, claimed to represent "700,000 refugees from Yugoslav oppression" and to speak for "700,000 unliberated Bulgarians" in Yugoslavia —whereas Yugoslav statistics in 1931 put the Orthodox Slav population (of whatever political allegiance) at only 321,000 in that part of Macedonia now Yugoslav which had been allotted to Bulgaria by her abortive treaty with Serbia in 1912. Curiously the Bulgarian Foreign Office always alleged that in Roumania there are 700,000 Bulgarians too—while the Roumanians admit that 38% of the population in South Dobrudja is Bulgarian; yet Supremist animosity was directed almost exclusively against Yugoslavia, for the Macedonian Slavs were ruled by Yugoslavs and ready to become good Yugoslavs if Bulgarian agitation relaxed, whereas the Slavs in Roumania or Greece were racial minorities who will preserve their Slavonic characteristics.

But the National Committee’s statistics do not tally with those of the Bulgarian Statistical Department (where few visiting foreigners go). These official statistics show that in 1926 those inhabitants of Bulgaria who had been born beyond her present frontiers originated as follows:—

From territory now Greek:	Macedonia	69,449
	Thrace	38,572
From territory now Turkish:	In Europe	69,734
	In Asia	15,924
	Total	276,463

 

Of all these, 234,768 are described as Bulgarians; and of the remainder 23,986 came from Turkey, 8,228 from Roumania, 6,169 from Yugoslavia and 3,312 from Greece. Of them all, 221,191 immigrated between 1912 and 1923, but only 10,244 came from Yugoslav territory after the defeat of Turkey in 1912. Foreign nationals in Bulgaria other than Greeks, Roumanians, Russians and Turks, numbered 13,003. The above statistics show only 101,144 Macedonian immigrants in Bulgaria, of whom two-thirds came from Greek territory. Odd then, that Bulgaria’s relations with Greece were more or less normal, while with Turkey she concluded in 1925 a treaty of "inviolable peace and perpetual friendship", renouncing her claims to Eastern Thrace. If children born in Bulgaria of Macedonian or mixed parentage be counted, the number of Macedonians is, of course, much greater; but most of those Macedonians who settled in Bulgaria before 1912 (as distinct from temporary refugees from the Turks, who generally returned to their homes) immigrated voluntarily to seek employment, so were refugees from nobody. Moreover a Convention signed in Sofia on November 26, 1923, provided that all Macedonians (except active revolutionaries) might return to South Serbia with free railway tickets; but the Supremists, who did not wish to lose good soldiers or "arguments", repeatedly demanded the abrogation of this Convention and easily prevented immigrants from returning (for nobody can leave Bulgaria without a police exit visa), murdering those who tried while drumming into the others that terror reigned in South Serbia. Thus the harrowing tale that thousands of Macedonians in Bulgaria were yearning to return if only the Yugoslavs would let them has another side to it!

In 1917, when the Central Powers seemed to be winning, the Supremists proclaimed that the Macedonian Slavs were enthusiastic allies against the Serbs and pined for union with Bulgaria. After the Armistice they begged that at least Macedonia east of the Vardar should be annexed to defeated Bulgaria. Rebuffed, they changed their tactics. They claimed Minority Rights for the Macedonian Slavs—in other words, that the Yugoslav Government should recognise those Slavs as Bulgarians whose education, worship, and political conduct Bulgaria was entitled to control. Had this been granted the Supremists would have continued to Bulgarise the Macedonians by open propaganda and secret terror, inciting them to demand autonomy which would be a prelude to union with Bulgaria when the opportunity arose—as in the case of Roumelia in 1885.

Acting upon a parallel line, IMRO (under Supremist influence), while exasperating the Yugoslavs by outrages which were attributed to "discontented inhabitants" and trying to rally the Macedonians themselves by the slogan: "Macedonia for the Macedonians", declared its readiness to suspend revolutionary activities if Minority Rights were granted, though reserving the right to work by peaceful means for Macedonian autonomy. But IMRO’s demand for Minority Rights (which ultimately became merely a pretext for agitation against Yugoslavia) did not necessarily mean that the Macedonians wished for recognition as a Bulgarian Minority; on the contrary Todor Alexandrov, leader of IMRO, and many of his lieutenants too, while collaborating with the Supremists as a means to their end, wanted rights for the Macedonians as such: nor was ultimate union with Bulgaria attractive to these ambitious revolutionary leaders. Though the authenticity of an interview granted by Alexandrov to a "special correspondent’’ of The Times (January 4, 1924) may be open to question, his alleged wild boast that he could mobilise 150,000 Macedonians fitted the policy of the Supremists who, thinking him their tool and unaware that he planned to rally all Macedonians by alliance with the Communists and other Left elements, wished the world to believe him mighty; but if indeed he added that he would welcome any independent enquiry into the state of Macedonia or the protection of any great Power, preferably Great Britain, it was a show of that independent spirit for which he forfeited his life at Supremists’ hands eight months later.

Immediately after the World War the demand for autonomy (as distinct from union with Bulgaria) was popular in South Serbia because the Yugoslav administration was excessively corrupt, officials even selling the passes which (to check revolutionaries and agitators) were necessary for travelling from place to place. While Yugoslavia was being organised, many unscrupulous Serbian chauvinist officials were appointed who reacted ruthlessly and often unjustly to the revolutionaries’ dastardly outrages and made Bulgarophile agitation an excuse for partisan maladministration—though the tale that since 1912 the Yugoslav authorities have arrested 50,000 Macedonians is clearly a "printer’s error" of a "o"! But in 1923 a purge was inaugurated, notably by Dobritza Matkovitch (now Governor of Nish) who discharged officials by the score to check abuses while tightening up military control to check terrorism; whereupon the Supremists, realising good government would soon eliminate surviving Bulgarophile sentiments, redoubled their efforts to provoke the Yugoslav authorities by sending raiding bands and terrorists from Bulgaria.

Only fanatical Bulgarophiles and undisciplined men disgruntled for personal reasons supported these raiders; though there were enough of them to whisper tales of woe into naive foreigners’ ears. But the vast majority wanted only peace, caring not at all whether they worshipped under the auspices of the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate or the Yugoslav Orthodox Church provided they might have ordinary civil rights as Yugoslav citizens, rights Belgrade was chary of granting while Bulgarian propaganda persisted. Naturally Bulgarophile agitators had no liberties, nor might Bulgarian books and papers circulate while Bulgarians fulminated against everything Yugoslav and pretended the Macedonians were enslaved Bulgars; nevertheless (contrary to Bulgarian propaganda) most priests, teachers, mayors and deputies in South Serbia were local men. There were, in 1924, thirty-five Macedonian deputies in the Shkupstina (mostly Radical or Democrat sympathisers with the Croat leader Stepan Raditch), who hotly criticised administrative deficiences though they had no sympathy with the Bulgarian raiders; but when in 1924 the Supremists formed a Macedonian group in the Sobranié these deputies were forbidden to follow this precedent in the Shkupstina which (as intended) would have placed the Macedonians upon a separate and artificial racial basis.

The Supremists’ clamour for Minority Rights, based only upon the Bulgarisation effected by Exarchist propaganda while Macedonia groaned under the Turks but fervently pressed to forestall the Macedonians’ absorption in Yugoslavia, received curiously strong support from so-called "Bulgarophiles" entrenched at the head of the (unofficial) British Balkan Committee—of which Lord Noel-Buxton is President, Sir Edward Boyle Chairman, and the Bulgarian- born Lady Muir (née Stanchov) a member. A tireless worker for Bulgarian claims, Lady Muir’s appointment in 1922 by Stamboliski as First Secretary of Legation in Washington brought her the distinction of being Europe’s first woman diplomat. Writing in July 1933 to the National Committee these "Bulgarophiles", having reiterated their recognition of the "Macedonian Bulgars" as a Minority and affirmed their conviction that the National Committee had nothing whatever to do with the terrorists (whereas everybody in Sofia knew the contrary), recalled the failure of the National Committee’s appeals on behalf of Macedonia to the League of Nations—in ten years the League had ignored forty-three—and attributed this partly to the abuse of Yugoslavia they generally contained and partly to the Yugoslavs' refusal to acknowledge the Macedonians as a Minority. They proposed the preparation (by an international lawyer of standing quite unconnected with the "Macedonian Bulgar case") of a petition claiming to argue before the League Council "the right of the Macedonian Bulgars to be deemed a Minority". This petition, they concluded, would be "a new line of approach" to the Macedonian problem and they hoped the National Committee would adopt it in view of "the strength of their case on grounds of history, ethnography, language and customs".

The Yugoslavs held that in conformity with the treaty relating to Minorities the existence within a State of inhabitants differing by race, religion or language from the majority of the population (and so entitled to Minority Rights) must be established; but it was precisely because this could not be established in the case of the Macedonian Slavs that it was never attempted—indeed the terrorists deliberately thwarted any legal examination of the Macedonian Question. The "British Bulgarophiles" supported an unproven case; but when they suggested at last that it should be proved the idea evoked no enthusiasm in Sofia.

These "British Bulgarophiles’" attitude encouraged the Supremists’ arrogant claims (which threatened Europe’s peace) and thus contributed to the horrors of which this book tells. Their efforts are gratefully acknowledged in Sofia—there is a Buxton Brothers Boulevard—but not by the Bulgarian peasants. The Balkan Committee, numbering in its ranks many distinguished men without original knowledge of Bulgarian problems and meeting in committee rooms of the House of Commons, gains in Balkan eyes spurious authority for its "Bulgarophiles'" opinions which were re-echoed (during the past fifteen years) by ignorantly prejudiced pronouncements in The Near East and India. These "Bulgarophile" busybodies, whose opinions were often based upon the briefest of visits to Bulgaria under Bulgarian official or semi-official auspices, should be warned by the words of that celebrated Bulgarian writer Stoyan Mihailovski who, addressing his compatriots, wrote: "Thou shalt remain to the end an ass. Such is the decree of Providence... Do not ask me to flatter thee, for if I were to say in an apologue that thou art a deft, clever, sweet-voiced animal, common folk would begin to make fun of me and say that I too am an ass."

No problem has been more obscured by propaganda than the Macedonian Slavs’ racial affinities, nor is it easy to draw a line between peoples of similar origins, language, customs and religion: but an impartial tribunal weighing claims and counter-claims would probably tip the balance in favour of the Serbs, except possibly in regard to districts adjoining Bulgaria. In mediæval times the Bulgars held Macedonia intermittently for 129 years, of which 108 preceded the dilution of Bulgaro-Slav by Kuman and Petcheneg blood; but the Serbs held it afterwards, and continuously, for the same length of time and their rule was long survived by their cultural and religious sway. The Exarchate partially Bulgarised the receptive Slav peasants’ dialect and customs, but their folk-songs tell mostly of Serb heroes. Even in Sofia to-day the most Bulgarophile Macedonian is invariably referred to as "Macedonian"; nor will foreign merchants deny the difference between the slick but bellicose Macedonian and the stolid but often unprepossessing Bulgarian—hence the Macedonians’ stranglehold of business and professions. The Macedonian readily adopts a veneer of culture and will speak honeyed words to the man he is blackmailing, then murder him with artistic cruelty; whereas the downright Bulgarian will kill with a bludgeon.

In 1919 South Serbia (22,776 square kilometres in area, yet only 5,030 productive) was an almost roadless land of malaria-scourged peasants who scarcely knew to sleep in a bed or wash their hands. Until 1912 ground by the Turks, wars had stricken them since. In 1921 the population was 818,377, of whom a third were Moslems, Catholics or Jews, and many more were Orthodox Vlachs; but south-east of a line from Prilip to Kratovo the waterless steppe, treeless and desolate, yellow and dusty in summer, muddy and dismal in winter, had in general less than twenty-five inhabitants to the square kilometre. Yet this area is equally if not more fertile than western Macedonia. So the Yugoslavs began to settle colonists from more populous western Macedonia or rocky Montenegro and Dalmatia upon Turkish landowners’ expropriated estates, upon properties abandoned by Turks or Bulgarophiles in 1918, and upon waste pasture lands.

Since Yugoslavia was new-born there was incompetence and abuses and to the end of 1922 only 750 colonist families had been settled in all South Serbia. Colonisation was then suspended while bridges and roads were built and a great Institute of Hygiene at Skoplje which took in hand child welfare, sanitation and social development, bringing untold relief to this suffering land and reducing malaria by 90%.

To the end of 1929, 39,632 colonists had been settled in South Serbia (9,533 Christian and 375 Moslem families), of whom 26,104 were landless Macedonians; while 1,129 families were Serbian and 517 families Slavs from Greece. So it is untrue that South Serbia was flooded with Serbian colonists, and equally that these colonists alone opposed raiders from Bulgaria. Opposition to raiders, directed by former voivodi of IMRO, was already very determined in 1923, the authorities distributing 30,000 rifles in the Bregalnitza Department alone where only 895 colonists’ families had arrived in 1929.

In Greek Macedonia, where in 1922 over 40% of the population were infected with malaria, the position was radically changed by the Greco-Turkish Convention for the Exchange of Populations of January 30, 1923. As its consequence 329,000 Moslems left Greek Macedonia while 638,253 Greeks came in—among 1,221,849 Christian immigrants from Turkey to all Greece. Between 1912 and 1924, 653,824 Moslems, Bulgarophile Slavs and Vlachs left Greek Macedonia while over 40,000 Greeks immigrated from Bulgaria; so the population of Greek Macedonia rose from 1,090,432 in 1920 to 1,412,477 in 1928, just half of them being Greeks from Anatolia. How Greece settled these newcomers is no part of my story; but they turned Greek Macedonia into a Hellenic province and silenced Bulgarian claims, for though the Slavs were not legally obliged to leave many did so voluntarily and others under illegitimate local pressure, so their numbers dropped from 119,000 in 1912 to 77,000 in 1928. Stamboliski’s expropriations drove many Greeks from Bulgaria to rich Thracian lands, while more fled from IMRO retaliation for the hardships suffered in Greece by Bulgarised Slavs—whom the Greeks declined to recognise as a Bulgarian Minority (being willing to let them have their own but not Exarchist-controlled schools). Of the Macedonian Vlachs about 30,000 emigrated to the Roumanian Dobrudja—most of them from Greece.

In November 1919 a Bulgaro-Greek Convention had provided for the voluntary emigration of Bulgarophile Slavs from Greece and of Greeks from Bulgaria and the liquidation of their properties by a Mixed League of Nations Commission. On December 9, 1927, the Bulgarian and Greek Finance Ministers signed the Mollov-Kaphandaris Agreement to regulate this liquidation; but Greece tried to tie it with reparations due to her and her claim to compensation for victims of the anti-Greek riots in Bulgaria in 1906, there being a considerable balance in Bulgaria’s favour when the Mixed Commission concluded its difficult task in 1930. Hence a cause of friction between Bulgaria and Greece, Bulgaria’s truculent rejection of arbitration leading to an undignified squabble in 1931. Yet this friction remained diplomatic and outrages in Greece were few.

By Bulgarian statistics there were in 1926 in Petritch Department (Bulgarian Macedonia) 186,040 inhabitants, of whom 8,121 were Turks or Gipsies, 25,578 were Pomaks, and 37,277 were poverty-stricken Slav peasant immigrants (most of them from Greece). The Bulgarian Government blocked League of Nations intervention on behalf of the immigrants until 1926, when a Refugee Settlement Loan

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CHAPTER I

THE TERRORISTS

 It is October 9, 1934. Marseilles is welcoming a King. The French and Yugoslav tricolours, hanging from windows and balconies, brighten the route from the docks to the railway station. An open car drives slowly between the packed spectators upon the pavements. Suddenly a man bursts from the crowd, dodging the sparse police lining the route. He leaps upon the car’s running-board. Revolver shots ring out. A mounted officer s glittering sabre cuts the man down. There are cries, pandemonium, the crowd surges forward to lynch the assassin. Then newspaper offices the world over buzz with excitement, startling their public with glaring posters and alarmingly recalling the Sarajevo crime in 1914. King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou are dead, killed by the wild bullets of one Kalemen, member of the Croatian Revolutionary Organisation Ustacha which has its headquarters in Hungary. Accomplices had waited in Paris to kill the King if Kalemen did not succeed in Marseilles; others had gone to London, ready to assassinate King Alexander there if the others failed and he should go to visit his son Peter, at school in Surrey: so many Londoners must have rubbed shoulders with these murderous agents of revisionist Italy and Hungary.

But the assassin's name was not Kalemen. A skull and crossbones, tattooed upon his arm, were a clue: and his finger-prints, sent to the Sofia police, proved his identity. He was Velichko Dimitrov, alias Vlado "Tchernozemski" (meaning "Black Earth")—nicknamed Vlado the Chauffeur, for whom the Bulgarian police had been hunting. So the world eventually learned that Tchernozemski belonged to the redoubtable IMRO which had ruled the Petritch Department of Bulgaria and dominated Bulgarian Governments until the coup d'état of May 19, 1934, had placed its enemy Kimon Georghiev in power. For fifteen years this terrible Organisation had waged unofficial warfare against Yugoslavia while assassinating its enemies in Sofia with impunity; but in June Georghiev had announced that the Bulgarian military authorities in Petritch Department had already confiscated from it 10,938 rifles, 701,388 rounds of ammunition, 7,767 hand grenades, forty-seven machine guns and other military supplies.

Actually Tchernozemski belonged to a band of professional assassins euphemistically called the "punitive division of IMRO". These terrorists, most of them criminals from South Serbia, were commanded by Ivan Mihailov and a group of young Macedonian associates serving Italophile chiefs of the Bulgarian Army and receiving a substantial subsidy from Italy. They had distinguished themselves, not by revolutionary exploits, but by murdering peasants and moderate politicians and old leaders of IMRO in Bulgaria. With them Mihailov had, at General Ivan Volkov’s instigation, usurped control of IMRO by assassinating in turn Todor Alexandrov and General Alexander Protogerov, then reigned supreme in Petritch Department under protection of martial law until May 1934. Previously, Bulgarian Governments had pretended IMRO was an uncontrollable organisation of which there was no trace upon Bulgarian soil—it was "beyond the law", which simply meant the law might not interfere with it; yet Mihailov and his lieutenants never left Bulgaria (except comfortably, upon missions to Rome) and came to Sofia whenever they chose. In this police-ridden land which nobody may leave without an exit visa, where nobody may dwell without an identity card, and where a "Black Cabinet" at the G.P.O. (under Democratic Mouchanov’s government) blatantly examined private correspondence, these terrorists "could not be found"; yet they carried police passes, though discreetly withholding their photographs from the Press.

The Organisation, as this secret Mafia was called by scared and whispering Bulgarians, cast over the land a black shadow of terror, muzzling free speech more effectively than any censorship. It had several functions. First, it worked against understanding between Bulgaria and Italy’s rival Yugoslavia, committing outrages in Yugoslavia to exasperate the Yugoslavs and murdering or terrorising in Bulgaria all who spoke of such understanding, taking a heavy toll of Macedonian immigrants—Federalists who, having roots upon both sides of the frontier, were advocates of South Slav Federation. Next, it worked by similar methods against "Communists" who dared challenge the supremacy of Bulgaria’s governing class—a class inspired by fanatical ideas of territorial aggrandisement and leaning always towards Europe’s bellicose Dictatorships. Finally, its chiefs performed the functions of "Fascist Commissars" among the immigrants in Bulgaria, mainly among those in Petritch Department who were conscripted into a militia ready— when Italy and Hungary were prepared for war—to invade South Serbia and cut Yugoslavia’s vital communications with the free sea at Salonika. Moreover these "Volunteers", or "IMRO Reserve", as the militia were called, must he ready always to crush revolt by Bulgarian moderates, so the terrorists drummed into them that talk of friendship with Yugoslavia was treachery to The Cause of "Macedonian Liberation". Petritch Department, annexed by Bulgaria in 1912, had remained under the control of IMRO which had fallen under Supremist influence. A State within a State, it was a base for attacks upon Serbia before Bulgaria declared war in 1915 and a base for the "Macedonia-Adrianople Volunteer Division" which helped to drive the Bulgarian peasants into war. In 1923 General Volkov resolved that it should be so again and issued arms to IMRO for the militia.

The Mihailovists sometimes varied their political tune, but it was always the Italophile Supremists who called it; they preached hatred of Yugoslavia and taxed the immigrants for The Cause, those who espoused it ardently being rewarded with lands and official appointments. Mihailov’s "illegal" Central Committee controlled and collaborated with the "legal" National Committee and the deputies they nominated to represent Petritch Department, and there were no differences between them except that Mihailov’s Committtee carried out and accepted responsibility for all illegal acts. From the National Committee radiated a vast network of Supremist agents to every chain of responsibility, every State department, every newspaper or business office café or street-corner; so it mattered nothing that (for example) the Minister of Education was an Agrarian opponent of Supremism if Philip Manolov of the National Committee was Secretary-General with Mihailov’s assassins behind him!

The carefully-built myth of Mihailov’s power was obliterated by Damian Veltchev’s coup d’etat in 1934 which overthrew the Italophiles. That power had been derived from Volkov and his associates among the Supremist Generals, diplomats, and high officials of Bulgaria; and behind them had stood Tsar Boris, wedded to an Italian Queen and Italian policy, son of a German father of Hungarian extraction. Mihailov, "irresponsible" agent of the War Office, obeyed their secret instructions. So "Mihailovist" became synonymous with "Supremist"; and a Supremist might be a Mihailovist assassin or Minister- Plenipotentiary or Director of the Public Debt. But most Supremists were of Macedonian origin, for the pacific Bulgarians cared little for Supremist aims.

King Alexander was Yugoslavia’s unifier; yet his popularity in South Serbia was growing for it was believed he planned a liberal regime—attractive to the Federalists. In Rome in 1922 Macedonian revolutionary chiefs had been urged to contrive his death. In 1934 he died at the hand of a fanatic who went to certain death in the belief that he served The Cause; but in fact Tchernozemski sacrificed himself for Hungarian revisionism, Italian imperialism, and the aspirations of Bulgarian Supremists who had convinced him the Slavs of South Serbia groaned under King Alexander’s oppression.

Tchernozemski, by his friends’ account a gentle vegetarian because he held it cruel to kill animals, was born at Shtip in 1897. Having served the Bulgarians too well during the World War, he fled with them when they were driven from South Serbia and eventually joined a comitadji band raiding into Yugoslavia. But he fell under Mihailov’s influence and first distinguished himself on September 24, 1924, by shooting in Sofia that altruistic veteran revolutionary Hadji Dimov (intimate friend of IMRO’s founder, Deltchev) who had become a Communist deputy. Tchernozemski was caught by Bulgarians who disliked murderers, so he was formally condemned to fifteen years' imprisonment: but soon he was walking the streets with police agents! As a chauffeur who took victims "for a ride" he had become an expert murderer before he killed the Macedonian leader Naoum Tomalevski on December 2, 1930.

Tomalevski, who had threatened to expose the Government’s connection with Mihailov’s terrorists, was celebrating at home in Sofia the fortieth day after his son’s birth. He went into his garden to plant a memorial tree as the custom is. The window curtain in an overlooking house moved. He noticed—and told his elder boy to run for his revolver. But it was too late. Two shots rang out. Tomalevski fell into his mother’s arms, dead. His bodyguard rushed into the street, firing at the assassins who were making off. They fired back, mortally wounding the plucky lad; but as he dropped one of them fell too. This assassin's funeral was conducted by a Bulgarian bishop, for Tomalevski was the hero’s eighteenth victim! The other assassin, Tchernozemski, was waylaid by an officer. He drew a revolver: but the officer was quicker, and gave him in charge. For such interference with the law this officer was soon transferred to the retired list! Tchernozemski said he was a wood merchant in Sofia but boasted of his connection with IMRO; he had waited with his companions for three days in a room rented by a police agent and had shot Tomalevski with police carbines! While he awaited trial a fellow-prisoner tattooed upon Tchernozemski’s arm the skull and crossbones of IMRO. He was sentenced to life imprisonment; but late in 1931 he was amnestied and attached to Kyril Drangov, Mihailov’s director of terror in the Bulgarian capital!

Tchernozemski soon won fresh laurels, showing (writes Christowe) "rare tact and bravery in the execution of individual assignments"; but the Ustacha asked Mihailov for an expert to instruct Croat terrorists in Hungary, whereupon Drangov took Tchernozemski in July 1932 to the Croat leader Pertchetz at Budapest. So Veltchev’s coup d'etat undoubtedly averted a European war because (so the Yugoslav Premier Yevtitch afterwards told me), if Georghiev’s Government had not suppressed the terrorists in Bulgaria before King Alexander was killed, nothing would have restrained the infuriated Yugoslav Army from marching upon Sofia to exterminate those criminal Supremists who had long premeditated and bear responsibility for the King’s death. Yet Veltchev lies in Sofia gaol for this contribution to the peace of Europe.

The terrorists labelled their Bulgarian victims Protogerovists, Federalists, or Communists. The Protogerovists were friends of the murdered Protogerov. The Communists were any opponents of Supremism who could not be charged in Courts of Law.

Communism was a conveniently elastic term justifying persecution or massacre, a bogy used to frighten Europe into granting loans to Bulgaria or ignoring her surreptitious rearmament. It was the Communism of a soldier who, being reproached for kissing a sacred icon in church with his cap on, replied simply: "But I am a Communist." There were not more than 12,000 true Communists in Bulgaria (so Premier Mouchanov told me in 1931); but there were hundreds of thousands of discontented people who rallied to their banner for want of a better against the aggressive Supremism of the corrupt governing class. Yet these "Communists" were persecuted under Mouchanov’s supposedly democratic government with a ferocity hardly surpassed by his predecessors', and this Government, which could never trace Mihailov’s assassins, were for ever discovering Communist conspiracies, finding printing presses in cellars or mountain caves, and dragging to mass trials poor wretches whose only offence was their possession of literature held seditious by their rulers.

A fortnight before the coup in 1934 which laid Mouchanov low I chanced to attend at Sevlievo (to the authorities’ vast irritation) the trial of ninety-three "Communists", half of them boys and girls under twenty years, some laden with clanking chains of mediæval immensity attached to great weights; and these children, ringed about in court by police with fixed bayonets at the ready, were condemned to ten or fifteen years imprisonment for calling or thinking themselves Communists. Yet the Bulgarian Supremists would have roused the world had there been a like trial of Macedonian Slavs in Yugoslavia!

It was in August 1931 that I went first to Bulgaria. Coming through Greece from Albania, Bulgaria seemed well ordered by comparison and Sofia (of 300,000 inhabitants) a fair city with its tall blocks of flats and trim public gardens, its wild café music and smart officers in their white summer tunics, its trams and yellow-paved streets. Stuffed with propaganda by the Foreign Office Press Bureau, Agence Télégraphique Bulgare (Bulagence), National Committee, and Bulgarian-British Review, I was pushed far towards Bulgarophilism during my month’s stay and was disposed to believe the Bulgarians complaint that they had been robbed of Macedonia, the Dobrudja and Thrace. I had read of the feud between Mihailovists and Protogerovists. I was told the Protogerovists were a handful of assassins in Yugoslav pay who wantonly murdered heroes of IMRO while they rested in Sofia from revolutionary activities beyond the border, even Mouchanov assuring me IMRO was so elusive and so powerfully supported by all Bulgarians that none could gainsay it! A halo of romance surrounded young Mihailov who lived and fought in Yugoslavia but retired sometimes for rest to the lofty Pirin mountains of the (Macedonian) Petritch Department, safe there among devoted adherents—for nobody told me Mihailov never dared go to Yugoslavia, ruled the Department by ruthless terror, and once even ordered the murder of a man who had told these truths to a British Minister in the hearing of a German correspondent who was Mihailov’s friend.

I was eager to meet Mihailov. Early one morning a man to whom I could speak no word rapped at my hotel bedroom door and beckoned. I followed him into a car which drove us all round Sofia and stopped at a street corner not far (as I afterwards found) from our starting point. My guide led furtively to the door of a flat and I was welcomed in fluent English by a dapper little man, sallow and pockmarked. It was Yordan Tchkatrov, Mihailov’s ambassador in Sofia. Tchkatrov bewailed the cruel fate of the poor Macedonians in South Serbia; but as for Mihailov, he was "somewhere beyond the frontier" and I could not see him.

A doorway close to the National Bank in one of Sofia's main streets bore a brass plate with the words Comité National des Refugiées Macédoniennes en Bulgaria. This National Committee, I was assured, had no connection with the revolutionaries—though naturally it sympathised with them! Venerable Dr. Alexander Stanichev, the president, received me, speaking with suitable emotion of "Macedonia’s tragedy, then urged me to see "the Black Frontier" the Yugoslavs had built to separate "700,000 refugees in Bulgaria" from their native hearths and mothers’ arms. So a representative of the Committee whisked me from Sofia one day, our car engulfing in its clouds of dust, slow ox-carts and chickens and peasants with linked hands dancing the Horo to wild music, passing rocky hills and patches of gigantic sun-flowers and golden cornfields till we reached Kustendil with its giant water-melons and its statue of Todor Alexandrov in the market square.

Beyond Kustendil we came to the frontier, picking up the Bulgarian sector commander on our way. And here was a battle front, built by the Yugoslavs at immense cost to guard themselves against surprise. So far as I could see there stretched over hill and valley upon the Yugoslav side of the white pyramids marking the frontier a stout thorn fence with barbed wire entanglements behind. In the hollows were trip wires and pits with spiked stakes in them, upon the hill-tops tall observation platforms. Every half mile or so stood a concrete blockhouse with steel shutters, one of them precariously sharing the crown of a little hill with a modest Bulgarian post only three yards from it, though they seemed to be restrained from flying at one another like angry dogs by a tangle of barbed wire between them. There were observation pits too, every hundred yards or so, to conceal Yugoslav night patrols who fired at sight upon anyone trying to force a passage—so shots in the darkness and a corpse upon the wire in the morning were commonplace.

This Black Frontier stretched from the Greek border at Strumitza to the Dragoman Pass upon the Orient Express route and no travellers might cross it. The sector commander told that the Yugoslavs, who outnumbered the Bulgarian troops upon the border by about twenty to one, had four lines of defence against revolutionaries from Bulgaria—so the revolutionaries could not cross and the outrages of which the Yugoslavs complained were the work of oppressed local people. If some did cross it was not Bulgaria’s fault for she was too disarmed to man her frontiers adequately. But two things he did not explain. For fifty yards beyond the frontier all brushwood was cut to the ground, whereas it grew as it chose on the Bulgarian side, splendid cover for any bent upon an illegal passage (yet Bulgaria had a Compulsory Labour Corps which might have cleared it). In the Bulgarian posts, little whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs, quarters for frontier detachments but not for defence, there hung above the men’s cots the scowling portrait of Todor Alexandrov, side by side with a picture of Tsar Boris—and sometimes Queen Giovanna too! So Alexandrov, revolutionary leader in whose footsteps his murderer Mihailov claimed to follow, whose portrait hung beside a map of Great Bulgaria in many a Government office and every Sofia café (to mark its patriotism), presided over the dreams of soldiers who, in wakeful hours, were under (nominal) orders to prevent Mihailov’s men from raiding Yugoslavia! In practice these Bulgarian posts were advanced bases for Mihailov’s men, whose outrages obliged the Yugoslavs to guard all railways till passengers thought Yugoslavia an armed camp, to search all railway coaches for hidden bombs, to examine all luggage deposited at railway stations—even at Belgrade.

(Above) Upon the "Black Frontier"—Bulgarian (left) and Yugoslav Frontier Posts: see p. 40. (Below) Troops and police searching Sofia for arms on June 24, 1933.

This was an unjust frontier, my companions complained, for it separated Bulgarians from their properties, villagers from their wells: and a woman was called to touch my heart with crocodile tears while telling how she owned a field beyond the line. The other side of this tale was that owners of such "divided properties" might go to them freely with passes, though the Bulgarian terrorists’ activities imposed caution upon the Yugoslavs who sometimes made mistakes; but since there was no racial boundary the frontier had been determined mainly by strategic advantages and sometimes caused hardships to local folk.

Sixteen months later I was standing at a street corner in Sofia with the Macedonian reporter (Sprostranov) I employed. Rapiers of wind pierced our clothes and caught the litter in its dusty eddies. Heavy grey clouds were gathering to cast a white mantle over Mount Vitosha's purple mass and muffle the streets till the only sound after nightfall would be the jangling of sleigh-bells and the sharp cries of the drivers peering from beneath their frosted eyebrows and fur caps. Soon the dry snow would sing under foot and there would be tales of wolves in the suburbs.

But those wolves were lambs beside the human wolves prowling the streets in fours and fives, hats over eyes, collars turned up, both hands thrust into overcoat pockets where they clutched revolvers. Beneath an ordered exterior, Sofia was a furtive city of whispers and terror and shots in the night, spies and listeners, anonymous letters or telephone calls, blackmail and threats. The struggle between attacking Supremists and defending moderates was at its height, waged by uncouth gunmen who lurked in cafés, awaiting orders to kill—orders sometimes casually scribbled upon a menu card and often accompanied by a photograph whereby the gunman should identify his victim. Going to a restaurant, one sought a corner far from windows. Bodyguards waited for deputies before the Sobranié, no man of free opinions stirred without them nor went out after dark unless he must. Even the Foreign Legations were guarded. Yet the new Palace of Justice was the largest building in all Bulgaria! In cafés, even in crowded tramcars, victims of all ranks and professions fell, while in the streets there were veritable battles, five or six aside blazing off two revolvers apiece regardless of passing pedestrians who were often wounded. £4 was a fair price for a murder, often earned by former police agents. If legs or waiting cars could not carry the assassins beyond reach of unsympathetic policemen, they always pleaded they had written orders from IMRO and must obey or be killed themselves; so they were sent to rest in gaol, content in the knowledge that their employers would soon have them amnestied. Every department of State was split into two camps waging civil war by proxy and both sides had friends in the police, so shooting affrays were part of the Capital's daily life but investigations seldom went beyond preliminaries.

But outrages in Yugoslavia were commonplace too. The Bulgarian Government always denied they were the work of terrorists from Bulgaria, saying IMRO was internal and revolutionary and existed only in "unliberated Macedonia"; but unofficially everybody knew the contrary. Tchkatrov had declared at a public meeting in Sofia during March that "IMRO will continue to struggle by the same methods which it has employed in the past, while repudiating all responsibility for ensuing international complications".

I asked Sprostranov why should I not cross the border with a raiding band, then write from experience of revolutionary heroism. He went to a telephone, then came again to say I should straightway meet a man who could arrange the matter. Our rendezvous was one of Sofia’s most fashionable cafés.

We sat to sip coffee with a rubicund man in a khaki jacket and cap. Sprostranov introduced him—Ivan Gioshev, organiser of outrages beyond the frontier in the Kustendil- Dragoman sector! The Yugoslav authorities offered a big price for his head. Courteously he explained that he could not send me upon a raid now—but in spring perhaps, when the snows were gone and there were leaves upon the trees. Then he asked a question. Had the official Yugoslav news agency (Avala) reported any bomb outrages?—Because, he explained, one of his bands was in Yugoslavia and he was eager to know how it had fared, adding that of course Bulagence could not report its doings until Avala did. We had no news for him.

But next day Bulagence issued the following, from Avala, dated Belgrade, December 20, 1932: —

"Last night, towards 23 hours, upon the outskirts of Zaitchar and near the barracks which are situated outside the town, unknown persons threw fourteen grenades of which twelve burst without causing any damage. The grenades thrown were of the ‘Odrin’ type used by the Bulgarian comitadjis. An enquiry was opened immediately to discover the aggressors. It has revealed traces leading to the Bulgarian frontier."

To this message Bulagence added:

"According to information obtained by the Bulgarian Telegraphic Agency upon this subject, the Bulgarian frontier authorities have not observed the passage over the frontier of any single individual."

In a further message Avala reported the explosion of a time bomb near Zaitchar station (causing slight damage) and discovery of another, unexploded. It was supposed these had been laid by the same individuals who threw grenades near Zaitchar barracks. The Director of Bulagence told me that of course all this was the work of "oppressed Macedonians" in South Serbia. I refrained from contradiction.

On December 24, The Times, referring to the closing of the frontier by Yugoslavia because Bulgaria declined joint investigation of an earlier incident, wrote (editorially) that "the internal condition of Yugoslavia is most unsatisfactory... this may explain why the Dictatorship has attached such importance to a trivial affair". Perhaps it was the lingering influence of its notoriously Bulgarophile Balkans Correspondent of pre-War days, J. D. Bourchier, that warped The Times's outlook upon Bulgarian affairs sometimes—or was it misled? There had been hundreds of "trivial affairs" since the War, and Yugoslavia’s restraint was commendable. Between 1919 and 1934, raiders from Bulgaria committed 467 outrages in South Serbia, killing 706 Yugoslav officials or civilians, the years of greatest activity being 1923 (51 outrages), 1924 (74), 1925 (55), 1927 (61), and 1933 (34). Bulgarian frontier posts sometimes fired at Yugoslav patrols to cover the raiders’ passage; and whenever a terrorist fell, his biography and photograph were published by "illegal" papers circulating freely in Sofia.

Any Bulgarian who dared befriend a Yugoslav was "a spy for Serbia"; and I fell under suspicion because seen sometimes with the Yugoslav First Secretary, an old friend of my Albanian days. Returning in March 1933 to Sofia’s terror-heavy atmosphere from a brief holiday with Reuter’s representative in Belgrade I was shunned on all sides, my telephone audibly tapped, Bulgarian friends were warned by Foreign Office officials that I was a spy, Sprostranov left me, and the curtains of a window facing my door moved whenever I had a caller.

In January 1933 the terrorists shot in Sofia a Labour deputy (Traikov), by Bulgarian measure a very Red Communist who had dared preach an eight-hour day. His funeral was riotous, attended by police in force. Sprostranov and I were talking to police officers when three men in plain clothes passed in single file, their hands in pockets.

"Who are those?" asked one of the officers sharply.

"IMRO"—answered another with a shrug.

So Mihailov's terrorists, calling themselves IMRO, collaborated with the police to prevent a demonstration at their victim’s funeral!

In 1933 there were few streets in Sofia without bullet- marked walls, and foreigners were sometimes nearly bullet- marked too. One evening in April, while Sofia’s main boulevard was crowded, five Mihailovists opened fire at the Protogerovist leaders Anastas Naoumov, Lef Glavinchev, and their bodyguards. Strolling Sofiots lied in panic, or threw themselves to the ground and blazed away too with their privy arsenals. The Director of the Italian Bank was shopping with his wife. They drove in their car at top speed from this hail of bullets; but several police, displaying unusually impartial zeal and thinking the car held the aggressors, fired at it and wounded the chauffeur, while the aggressors slipped quietly away, their leader innocently strolling into the police station "on business" and hiding there till all was over. Italy made no protest, for the Italians did not conceal their sympathy with the Mihailovists, and Italian journalists reported only affrays in which Mihailovists were attacked!

Though local newspapers were full of political murders, they reported only incidents already known to everybody. On New Year’s Eve the American director of an oil company dodged behind a tree as bullets whistled out of the fog, and one of the British Consulate staff had a like experience in the Boris Gardens soon afterwards. An Englishman saw a man knifed to death in a main street one night while the police watched. An Italian journalist had barely reached home one evening when stray Mihailovist bullets splintered his door. At Easter a girl from the American College was kidnapped in Sofia, gagged and blindfolded, carried to Petritch Department, and interrogated for three days about her father’s visitors. The newspapers mentioned none of these incidents, so one wondered how many more there were of which nothing was heard.

Another unwritten story was the kidnapping of Major Yanko Vapzarov, an old revolutionary who had repudiated Mihailov. In April he came from Bansko to Sofia. One day a car carrying terrorists in police uniforms drew up beside him in the street. Tsar Boris, he was told, wished to see him—for the Tsar knew him well. He vanished— and his luggage was collected from his hotel by "police". His three bodyguards in Bansko were murdered: and his son, coming to look for him, disappeared too.

"Be careful you don’t soon stink" was the terrorists’ admonition to their critics. So everyone presumed that Vapzarov stank—like so many others. But he had been taken to a building behind a high wall near Kustendil, a house of inquisition standing in a vineyard where victims were buried. He was charged with giving a grenade to somebody who had thrown it into a house in Bansko where Mihailov was being entertained. Tortured, Vapzarov and the bomb-thrower admitted the charge: then the bomb- thrower was hanged. But Vapzarov, having friends in high places, was held captive under the eyes of the Bulgarian authorities until the coup d'etat in 1934 released him.

One day in May 1933 great posters, signed by the Minister Interior, proclaimed that though firearms might no longer be carried by unlicensed persons, licences would be issued to all who feared for their lives: and anybody might employ armed bodyguards, though these must be of good character and registered at the Town Hall.

Some days later I was travelling in a charabanc with other journalists, and representatives of the National Committee, to visit Alexandrov’s grave near Melnik—for the Mihailovists idealised the leader they had murdered. I sat with the president’s (Dr. Kondov’s) three bodyguards. Not far from Sofia a heavy cart blocked the road and a policeman jumped upon the running-board. Had we any firearms and where were our licences? An Italian correspondent and the Hungarian Press Attaché among us angrily abused the police for stopping foreign correspondents, whereupon the police proposed to search us. Then Kondov produced his revolver, saying he had no licence but everybody knew he might carry arms. The police led him away into the village, telling him he must telephone to police headquarters for permission to proceed. As he disappeared his guards became restless. Suddenly I felt a cold barrel in my hand—would I look after my neighbour’s gun? No sooner had I taken it than the other guards thrust their guns behind me for concealment too, in case the police should return. Their example was followed by all our "legal Macedonian" companions till all we correspondents were sitting upon arsenals. But Kondov got his permission.

The National Committee often conducted excursions to Petrich Department, though one’s hosts’ malign expressions chilled and there was a strain behind the local people’s greetings. Yet the myth of contentment and orderliness and high morality here was built up by a certain type of journalist, one whom wrote that Mihailov’s Organisation "had made of this corner of Macedonia a kind of camp or picnic grounds for the Macedonian emigrants in Bulgaria, as well as a haven for itself... an example of what it hoped to make all Macedonia".

Sometimes a particularly naive journalist was taken to Mihailov, but this was inconvenient because though Mihailov frequented Sofia, the fable that he dwelt "far away in Yugoslavia" had to be maintained. A celebrated American journalist was once led for two days round Petritch Department (blindfolded, lest he should betray the secret trail "over the frontier") till he found himself before the "great leader"—at Banderitza hut in the Pirin Mountains (inside Bulgaria)! Yet he wrote: "Mihailov and I began to walk outside the hut, but not very far and returned again, because about a hundred yards from the hut in all directions there were pickets watching for Serbian patrols." Stoyan Christowe opened his book with an interview almost identical in every detail except that he did not set the scene inside Yugoslavia, where Mihailov never went.

Everyone knew Mihailov and his lieutenants (who often wore comitadji uniforms) were lords of Petritch Department under martial law, that no State official might be appointed there (or if appointed, could not remain) unless they agreed, that the Bulgarian civil authorities had no jurisdiction there whatsoever, that the Mihailovists examined all correspondence stopped all hostile newspapers, levied regular taxes, forbade marriages of which they disapproved, and turned back Bulgarian visitors who came without their permission or a pass from the National Committee. If foreigners went they were treated with extraordinary solicitude by watchful agents. But few realised the horrors of terrorist rule until newspapers supporting Georghiev’s Government lifted a corner of the veil in 1934.

The Bulgarian Press photograph opposite shows nine skeletons exhumed near Gorna Djoumaia in August 1934. The peasant who dug their grave in 1931 at the local terrorist chief’s order told how they died. His digging was done when they came through the darkness with their escort. They were tied neck to neck, staggering and groaning with pain, for they had been "interrogated" at a house in Krupnik village. Six of them were peasants, one a teacher, and two unknown to the grave-digger—but those he knew were popular men. They were bayoneted, then pushed into the grave—one of them alive. The grave-digger shovelled the earth over them while the executioners wiped their bayonets.

Kustendil, though not in Macedonia, was the terrorists’ favourite haunt. They walked about freely. The townsfolk paid "taxes" to them and kept their mouths shut.

In Gorna Djoumaia, capital of "Bulgarian Macedonia", a fine stone monument to the "unknown comitadji" was raised in August 1933 before the Military Club to inspire the townsfolk, the terrorists’ impotent accomplices. A prosperous town, the terrorist chiefs found it agreeable. Only they and theirs might buy tobacco crops, which they sold at 100% profit. Objectors were invited to "drink coffee" with Tsrn Kiro and other celebrities at an old mill, a damp place where Kiro had an assortment of instruments for his guests’ entertainment; and he admitted in 1934 that in one year he had killed over fifty people. Often his guests were driven from here by a gentle old cabman with two black horses, known as "the Coachman of Death", who served the Organisation like everyone else lest "the crows should eat his body". He drove Dimiter Markov for his last ride early in 1932. Markov had been too popular—he had built a library and protested against the terror. Warned, he fled to Sofia; but he was lured back by a friend. One dark night he was invited to an interview with Mihailov. There was no escape. Beyond the town he was strangled, then hanged from a bridge. Peasants found his body the next day—another warning to them all. No newspapers reported the affair; but in 1934 a former Director-General of Bulgarian Elementary Education was condemned to death for it—but still lives.

And so on—one or two cases among hundreds. Truculent villagers who offended terrorist chiefs were simply charged with immorality, espionage, or Communism, then robbed or raped and murdered. An official communiqué in 1934 told how one girl was raped in a wood by a dozen terrorists and then buried alive, while twenty boys were once hanged together for refusing to join the pre-military Association of Macedonian Youths. If a Mihailovist wanted a house he tortured the owner till the poor wretch either died or made the house over; and of what use then was complaint to the authorities once a deed transferring the property was signed? Money was extorted likewise—only the local chief’s favour could protect a man. In July 1933 a student was kidnapped in the mountains; but when his father had paid a ransom the lad was murdered lest he told that one of his kidnappers was Dinko, brother of the deputy Vassilev, Mihailovist "Governor of Bansko" who in 1934 admitted a dozen murders. The Sofia police issued a communiqué when the boy disappeared, which was all they did.

Nor might opium be sold until its owner had a receipt for dues to the Organisation. But in November 1933 a Gorna Djoumaia merchant sold opium without paying dues. Before Mihailov he was so tortured at the mill that he died of blood poisoning. A bold Bulgarian police chief made enquiries, a military doctor who disliked terrorists having certified the real cause of the merchant’s death; so Mihailov warned the widow that if she spoke the truth she and her child would be killed, whereas she would be paid a pittance till the matter was forgotten if she lied that her husband had fallen from a tree. Upon her evidence the authorities dropped this awkward matter. In such rare cases brought against terrorists, money—to the police or the prosecutor— did its work.

After the coup in 1934 many who had fled from this terror to other parts of Bulgaria returned to their homes; and villagers who had buried their friends readily dug up their remains for official identification. Yet in the Military Club at Gorna Djoumaia one day in 1933 Tchkatrov had complained sorrowfully to me because The New York Times had reported the murder of several peasants by Mihailov’s men. "You know it is untrue. Everyone in the Department is with us, so why should we kill them?" So well were the facts hidden that I had almost believed Tchkatrov!

The expenses of this great Mihailovist-Supremist mafia were considerable, for the National Committee, Central Committee, their agents in European capitals, and their assassins all had to be paid, officials and journalists bribed, arms for the militia maintained, extensive propaganda made and the papers Makedonia (the National Committee's organ) and Freedom or Death (Svoboda Ili Smrt—the "illegal" Organisation’s "illegal" organ) heavily subsidised. Mihailov, his lieutenants, and members of the National Committee drew salaries immense by Bulgarian standards, apart from their perquisites and incomes from enterprises (often illicit) under their control; while their regular assassins pay was about 2,500 leva a month (the salary of a junior State official) in addition to fees for successful murders and free board and lodging and clothing from immigrant tradesmen who dared not refuse such "contributions to The Cause".

The Government's secret funds were insufficient to cover these expenses, so immigrants, Jews, rich merchants and the peasants of Petritch Department paid the greater part, the Foreign Office financed propaganda and contributed to general expenses, and there was an annual subsidy through a Sofia Bank of no less than 44,000,000 leva from Italy. The annual budget was estimated at 200,000,000 leva (about £500,000), though 634,319,550 leva were collected from tobacco dues alone between 1926 and 1932. Every collector of State taxes in the Department took an additional 10% "for the Cause". Then every household was required to subscribe to Makedonia and every tradesman or farmer was taxed upon his profits or property, head of stock or corn, the terrorists giving receipts. Those who did not pay were fined, and if they still did not pay they had armed guests. No peasant might cut wood nor labourer work without a permit (for which he paid) from the terrorists. Even junior State officials paid for the privilege of working in the Department, while seniors often profited by collaboration with the terrorists who did as they pleased with the funds of state institutions and made handsome private profits upon the sale of timber from state forests, murdering any zealous foresters who dare ask them to show permits from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Elsewhere in Bulgaria the immigrants’ Brotherhoods scribed to the National Committee. Then 16,000 immigrant-owned businesses paid 10% of profits to The Cause, while well-to-do Bulgarians and Jews were asked (politely and legally enough) for their contributions; but strange things befell those who hesitated to subscribe, or State collectors discovered arrears of taxes which must be paid forthwith, while the police found reasons for refusing exit visas to any "debtors" to the Organisation who attempted to leave the country. Indeed Supremist tax collectors held a powerful weapon, so merchants of all nationalities became loud partisans of Bulgarian Revisionism and often found enthusiasm for Mihailov smoothed away business difficulties or turned State tax collectors from their doors. Even banks found advantage, too, in employing notorious Supremists or assassins who were technically "resting". But opponents of The Cause might seek work in vain; and one girl, who was reduced to destitution because the National Committee constantly prevented anybody from employing her, begged me to tell nobody when at last she found work.

In 1932 the Mihailovists discovered the drug traffic’s possibilities. Even if they had not had partisans among the police, drugs yielded profit enough for bribes to ill-paid officials; and so, when discoveries in Egypt exposed the drug traffickers and other countries drove them out, many came to Bulgaria where they found eager collaborators. The cultivation of opium poppies (which thrive in Petritch Department) to supply controlled drugs for medical purposes was perfectly legitimate: and it was easy to increase the crops, supplement them by smuggling raw products from Turkey and even from South Serbia, open secret factories, sell the drugs to international traffickers, then smuggle them away. I knew one notorious woman smuggler well. Soon (reported the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee) there were ten factories (in Sofia and Petritch Department) producing annually, under the noses of corrupt officials, enough acetic anhydride to make five tons of heroin. When representations were made to Bulgaria, measures against the traffickers were ordered, but Mihailov's gangsters knew how to evade them. In December 1933 Mihailov wrote to collaborators that he had bought 2,326 kilograms of "the special product", adding: "If the dollar had not been de-valued we could undoubtedly have made a further 5-6,000,000 leva."

In July 1934, while fishing the tumbling streams and trout-filled tarns of the Pirin Mountains, I had many talks with peasants who had never seen a fly rod. But they had seen Mihailovist guns and their hatred of Mihailov was fanatical. "We don’t believe the Serbs were ever so cruel as the Mihailovist bandits to us," they said. "We were desperately preparing to revolt. Thank God the new Government has ended their terror. Under Turkish rule things were never so bad. Now all we want is peace." It was the same tale in Nevrokop; and there was great satisfaction when, while I slept at Bansko one night, troops caught Dinko Vassilev. The people talked with pride of Sandanski, Alexandrov, and Protogerov; but for Mihailov they had no good word.

A year later, with two Bulgarians and a German colleague. I motored through Greek Macedonia and South Serbia, having many talks with peasants as we mended punctures, wandered through the markets, or watched villagers in their fantastic costumes dancing wildly as African tribesmen at celebrations. Greek Macedonia was dreary, its roads fearful; and at a village near Banitza (a Bulgarophile stronghold under the Turks and Bulgarophile still rather than alien Greek) a man told us he was a Bulgar (meaning Slav) and that the Greeks beat children who spoke " Bulgarian " for these Exarchist-educated Slavs would say: " We are Macedonians, but by the Church we are Bulgarians." Strange then, I thought, that the Bulgarian frontier sector commander at Strumitza had told me two years earlier how excellent were his relations with the Greek frontier officers, whereas with the Yugoslavs, to whom he could speak in his own tongue, he was demonstratively not upon speaking terms.

Yet in South Serbia the good roads led to developing towns, there were fewer police than in the Bulgarian provinces and no sense of fear, students sang Macedonian songs in the streets and people spoke freely—saying how hard life had been while terrorists from Sofia provoked the authorities but now conditions were vastly improving. Some owned to warm friendship with Mihailov’s revolutionary opponents: but for Mihailov there was nothing but contempt.

In progressive Skoplje the Macedonian mayor, speaking his own dialect, showed us his splendid town and was welcomed with genuine affection by the people of villages we visited together.

At St. Jovan Bigorski Monastery we sat with the Macedonian Abbot, a Serbian high official from the Ministry of Agriculture, and an Inspector of Taxes from Dubrovnik, clinking glasses and gulping potent spirit, watching the Yugoslav patrols upon the high ridge before us, the Albanian border.

"This is a great day," said the Abbot; "for here we are, a Dalmatian, a Serb, a Macedonian, and Bulgarians—all friends together, all speaking the same language. But we Macedonians have lived through hard times, for you Serbs were very harsh."

We were harsh because the revolutionaries had friends among you, said the Serb. "Yet we respected Todor Alexandrov; but that Mihailov... bah!"

"But why did we fight among ourselves?" asked the Abbot.

"We built a Great Yugoslavia," answered the Serb.

"No you did not," retorted the Abbot hotly. "How can you speak of a Great Yugoslavia while millions of brother Slavs remain beyond the Bulgarian border? There will be no Great Yugoslavia till all are united as equal partners; and I curse the great King Alexander’s murderers—the King talked here several times with me and he knew the two nations must get together. He worked for that and for that he was killed!"