Skopje, 20 June 1944 – Four Macedonian fighters, imprisoned as political convicts, escape from the Skopje prison “Idrizovo.” One of them is the then 37-year-old Vasil Ivanovski, the man who, a few months later, would become the first editor-in-chief of the first Macedonian daily newspaper, Nova Makedonija. Despite this, his brilliant revolutionary career ultimately ends tragically. Silenced by the very ideologies he fought against, Ivanovski was erased from the collective memory of the people whose freedom he had championed. Today, his Golgotha stands as a powerful metaphor for relations between Macedonia and Bulgaria—relations burdened by the old propagandas of Serbian and Bulgarian nationalism and further inflamed by Russian geopolitical influence.
The Golgotha of Vasil Ivanovski
Screenshot from the article by Vasil Ivanovski entitled “Why We Macedonians Are a Distinct Nation,” published in 1934 | Source: Archive of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) on Wikipedia
Vasil Ivanovski was the first editor-in-chief of the newspaper Nova Makedonija, a position he assumed at the end of October 1944, immediately after the liberation, as part of the efforts to build Macedonian statehood. Yet today this prominent publicist and revolutionary is almost unknown to the broader public. Notably, Ivanovski is also the author of the important text “Why We, the Macedonians, Are a Separate Nation,” published in 1935, one year after he joined the United (Obedineta) VMRO in Sofia. This early, explicitly declared Macedonian national activism would mark his entire turbulent life.
In 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Ivanovski was arrested by the Bulgarian authorities and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was initially imprisoned in Bulgaria, but was later transferred to Idrizovo near Skopje in 1943. On 20 June 1944, together with Pero Ivanovski, Dimitrija Aleksovski–Pekar, and Nikola Dimitrovski–Grcheto, he managed to escape from prison and immediately joined the partisans. As a delegate, he took part in the First Session of ASNOM, and he also became actively involved in the movement’s journalistic activities, working for the partisan newspaper Ilindenski Pat. When the first issue of Nova Makedonija—the first daily newspaper in the Macedonian language—was published on 29 October 1944, Vasil Ivanovski was appointed its first editor-in-chief. Shortly thereafter, he also became Deputy Minister of Social Policy in the first people’s government.
Ivanovski remained in his editorial post only for the first issue of Nova Makedonija. Archival sources reveal that the party leadership at the time was dissatisfied with the language and script used in that first issue, which was printed in the Macedonian language according to the then-existing orthographic norm, rather than in the strictly Serbian alphabet of Vuk Karadžić. Ivanovski was removed from his position and quietly reassigned as a deputy minister. The reason for this dismissal was never publicly announced.
After a few months, Ivanovski requested permission to return to Bulgaria. In November 1945 he moved to Sofia, where he continued working in the cultural association “Macedonian Brotherhood.” In 1949 he became a victim of the staged trial against Traicho Kostov, a Bulgarian official who had supported Macedonian national distinctiveness. Kostov was hanged, while Ivanovski was arrested and sentenced to 12 years of hard imprisonment as a “Macedonist.” He served seven years in prison and was rehabilitated only in 1956. Thereafter, although he lived in Sofia until the end of his life in 1991, his name disappeared from the Macedonian public sphere—as if it had been deliberately erased because of his opposition to the pro-Serbian policy in Macedonia after the Second World War.
Old Nationalisms in the Service of Moscow
Historians and analysts today often point out that Macedonian–Bulgarian relations are hostages to a deep conflict that has persisted since the beginning of the 20th century, when Serbian and Bulgarian nationalism clashed over Macedonia. After the Second World War, this clash intensified under the leadership of the party commissars Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo and Dobrivoje Radosavljević Boba, who, through Lazar Koliševski, enforced a harsh ideological line against anyone who did not accept the pro-Serbian discourse.
“Bulgarians–Tatars” is a well-known and still current slogan that is regularly used pejoratively in colloquial speech as well as in many texts of a propagandistic nature. Many of those who use this slogan in order to demean an entire people are unaware that it was created as early as the time of the Second Balkan War as part of official Serbian propaganda, and as such was incorporated into the educational system. Of course, today it is an anachronism in Serbia—but not here.
Former President Stevo Pendarovski | Photo: screenshot from a video by Antidisinfo.net
“A significant part of today’s Macedonian intellectual elite still operates within the ideological framework imposed after the Second World War by Svetozar Vukmanović–Tempo and Dobrivoje Radosavljević–Boba, the political commissars of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia who were tasked with ensuring the ideological orthodoxy of Macedonian communists at the time,” says former President Stevo Pendarovski. We spoke with him about the crisis in Macedonian–Bulgarian relations, a crisis that has effectively stalled Macedonia’s European integration process.
The Bulgarian intellectual elite, meanwhile, is no less burdened by ideological contamination—often reinforced by Russian propaganda, given the enduring pro-Russian sentiment within Bulgarian society. Professor Dimitar Atanasov explains that anti-Macedonian narratives in Bulgaria began to intensify in the 1960s, when the communist system abandoned its internationalist foundations and increasingly embraced nationalism.
“At that point, propaganda began circulating in everyday life through the figure of Momchil the Hero, a narrative designed to promote the mobilization of the population around a national cause,” historian Atanasov notes.
By 1971, the Bulgarian linguistic atlas had expanded beyond Bulgaria’s borders, and the Macedonian language was reclassified by Sofia as a ‘western’ Bulgarian dialect.
“In the 1970s, Todor Zhivkov and the entire political leadership opened a national front toward neighboring countries,” Atanasov adds.
Communist propaganda and Bulgaria’s political isolation during that period went on to shape an entire intellectual class educated within that ideological framework.
“As a consequence of this legacy, we now encounter absurd situations—such as the one in which the vice-president of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences told the Albanian ambassador here in Sofia that Bulgaria has no interest in studying the Albanian language because a large portion of Albanians supposedly speak a Bulgarian dialect,” Atanasov says, illustrating the deep intellectual distortion produced by a propaganda matrix that shaped generations of influential public figures.
Professor Dimitar Atanasov | Photo: personal archive, used with permission
Secret Informants in Politics
According to Professor Atanasov, Lyudmila Zhivkova, daughter of Todor Zhivkov, took things even further. He notes that she claimed Bulgarian culture was the foundation of world civilization and envisioned a future in which everyone would speak Bulgarian. During that period, she reportedly granted academic titles to ideologically loyal “scholars” who acted as her mouthpieces. Atanasov recounts that several of these individuals were given professorships specifically to advance Greater Bulgarian narratives.
Later, the opportunistic handling of the “Macedonian question” also drew in alleged collaborators of the Bulgarian secret police, who, following Bulgaria’s democratization, entered the political arena. One notable figure, according to Atanasov, was Krasimir Karakachanov, leader of Bulgaria’s VMRO, known by the codename “Doncho.” He reportedly worked with security services against Macedonian organizations in Bulgaria and later became a staunch opponent of Macedonia’s Euro-Atlantic integration.
It is also worth noting the historical loyalty of the Bulgarian elite to the USSR—sentiments that remain influential in certain circles today. These networks, directly or indirectly, became channels for Russian propaganda, which has been particularly active in opposing Macedonia’s integration into NATO and the EU.
A senior source from the office of former Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov confirmed that, during critical negotiations to find a compromise to end Bulgaria’s blockade of Macedonia, Russian intelligence was actively working to undermine the process. This aligns with broader Russian messaging; for example, in 2023, the Russian ambassador to Montenegro publicly described EU enlargement in the Western Balkans as a security threat to Russia.
The story of Vasil Ivanovski is not just about injustice against one individual—it reflects the broader fate of a people struggling to define themselves on their own terms, free from the narratives imposed by others.
Each new generation in Macedonia is confronted with the same question Ivanovski posed almost a century ago: “Why are we, the Macedonians, a distinct nation?”
Today, this question is no longer asked in the prisons of Idrizovo or the courts of Sofia. Instead, it emerges in European institutions, educational curricula, and public discourse, where old ideological frameworks persist, merely adopting new language. Until these historical distortions are acknowledged and the silence that allowed them to endure is confronted, North Macedonia and Bulgaria will remain trapped in a cycle of mutual distrust.
