Georgi Dimitrov

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Georgi Dimitrov Mihaylov (

Born in western Bulgaria, Dimitrov worked as a printer and trade unionist during his youth. He was elected to the Bulgarian parliament as a socialist during the First World War and campaigned against his country's involvement in the conflict, which led to his brief imprisonment for sedition. In 1919, he helped found the Bulgarian Communist Party. Two years later, he moved to the Soviet Union and was elected to the executive committee of Profintern. In 1923, Dimitrov led a failed communist uprising against the government of Aleksandar Tsankov and was subsequently forced into exile. He lived in the Soviet Union until 1929, at which time he relocated to Germany and became head of the Comintern operations in central Europe.

Dimitrov rose to international prominence in the aftermath of the 1933 Reichstag fire trial. Accused of plotting the arson, he refused counsel and mounted an eloquent defence against his Nazi accusers, in particular Hermann Göring, ultimately winning acquittal. After the trial he relocated to Moscow and was elected head of Comintern.

In 1946, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years in exile and was elected prime minister of the newly founded People's Republic of Bulgaria. He negotiated with

The first of eight children, Dimitrov was born in Kovachevtsi, in present-day Pernik Province, to refugee parents from Ottoman Macedonia (a mother from Bansko and a father from Razlog). His father was a rural craftsman, forced by industrialisation to become a factory worker. His mother, Parashkeva Doseva, was a Protestant Christian, and his family is sometimes described as Protestant.^[2] The family moved to Radomir and then to Sofia.^[3] Several of Georgi's siblings engaged in leftist political activities. His brother Nikola moved to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in Odessa. In 1908, Nikola was arrested and exiled to Siberia where he died in 1916.^[4] Georgi's brother Konstantin became a trade union leader but was killed in the First Balkan War in 1912. One of his sisters, Lena, married a future communist leader, Valko Chervenkov.

Dimitrov was sent to Sunday school by his mother, who wanted him to be a pastor, but he was expelled at age 12. He then trained as a

Dimitrov joined the

In 1911, he spent a month in prison for libeling an official of the rival Free Federation of Trade Unions, whom he accused of strike-breaking. In 1913, he was elected to the Bulgarian Parliament. He opposed government policies in the Balkan Wars and World War I. In 1915, he voted against awarding new war credits and denounced Bulgarian nationalism, for which he received short prison sentences.^[5] In summer 1917, after he intervened in defense of wounded soldiers who were being ordered by an officer to clear out of a first-class railway carriage, Dimitrov was charged with incitement to mutiny, stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and imprisoned on 29 August 1918.^[6] Released in 1919, he went underground and made two failed attempts to visit Russia, finally reaching Moscow in February 1921. He returned to Bulgaria later in 1921, but then travelled again to Moscow and was elected in December 1922 to the Executive Bureau of Profintern, the communist trade union international.^[5]

In June 1923, when Bulgarian Prime Minister

The Reichstag fire trial lasted from September to December 1933. Because it occurred at the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, it is often referred to as the Leipzig Trial. Dimitrov decided to refuse counsel and defend himself against his Nazi accusers, most famously Hermann Göring. Dimitrov used the trial as an opportunity to defend the Communist ideology. Explaining why he chose to speak in his own defense, Dimitrov said:

I admit that my tone is hard and grim. The struggle of my life has always been hard and grim. My tone is frank and open. I am used to calling a spade a spade. I am no lawyer appearing before this court in the mere way of his profession. I am defending myself, an accused Communist. I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals. I am defending the content and significance of my whole life. For these reasons every word which I say in this court is a part of me, each phrase is the expression of my deep indignation against the unjust accusation, against the putting of this anti-Communist crime, the burning of the Reichstag, to the account of the Communists.^[11]

Dimitrov's calm conduct of his defence, and the accusations he directed at his prosecutors, won him world renown.^[12] In Europe, a popular saying spread across the Continent: "There is only one brave man in Germany, and he is a Bulgarian."^[13] Among those impressed with Dimitrov was the noted U.S. attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Hays attended the Leipzig Trial and devoted a chapter to it in his 1942 autobiography. In an oft-quoted passage, Hays wrote of Dimitrov:

I have never seen such a magnificent exhibition of moral courage. The man was not only brave but reckless, and selflessly so. Whenever he got to his feet, he would by force of his personality place the court, the prosecutors, the German audience, and the Nazis on the defensive.^[14]

This striking characterization was cited in multiple American newspaper reviews of Hays' book and helped introduce Dimitrov's name throughout the U.S.^[15]

On 23 December 1933, the verdicts were read. While Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death, the judge acquitted Dimitrov, Tanev, and Popov because of insufficient evidence to connect them to what the judge was convinced was a conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag.^[16] The three Bulgarians were expelled from Germany and sent to the USSR.

When Dimitrov arrived in Moscow on 28 February 1934, he was encouraged by

During the

In 1946, Dimitrov returned to Bulgaria after 22 years in exile. After a referendum abolished the monarchy in September, Bulgaria was declared a people's republic. Later that year, he succeeded Kimon Georgiev as Prime Minister, though Dimitrov had already been the most powerful man in the country since the monarchy was abolished two months earlier. He retained his Soviet citizenship.

One of Dimitrov's first acts as Prime Minister was to negotiate with

By January 1948, Tito's plans to annex Bulgaria and Albania had become an obstacle to policy of the Cominform and the other Eastern Bloc countries.^[20] In December 1947, Enver Hoxha and an Albanian delegation were invited to a high-level meeting in Bulgaria. Dimitrov was aware of the subversive activity of Koçi Xoxe and other pro-Yugoslav Albanian officials. He told Enver Hoxha during the meeting: "Look here, Comrade Enver, keep the Party pure! Let it be revolutionary, proletarian and everything will go well with you!"^[25]

After the initial rupture, Stalin invited Dimitrov and Tito to Moscow regarding the recent incident. Dimitrov accepted the invitation, but Tito refused, and sent his close associate

In 1906, Dimitrov married his first wife, Serbian emigrant milliner, writer and socialist Ljubica Ivošević, with whom he lived until her death in 1933.^[3] While in the Soviet Union, Dimitrov married his second wife, the Czech-born Roza Yulievna Fleishmann (1896–1958), who gave birth to his only son, Mitya, in 1936. The boy died at age seven of diphtheria. While Mitya was alive, Dimitrov adopted Fani, a daughter of Wang Ming, the acting General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 1931.^[3][27] He and his wife adopted another child, Boiko Dimitrov, born 1941.

Dimitrov died on 2 July 1949 in the Barvikha sanatorium near Moscow. The speculation^[20][28] that he had been poisoned has never been confirmed, although his health seemed to deteriorate quite abruptly. The supporters of the poisoning theory claim that Stalin did not like the "Balkan Federation" idea of Dimitrov and his closeness with Tito.^[20][28]

After the funeral, Dimitrov's body was

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• A statue in the village of Dimitrov, named in his honour in 1949.

• A large painted statue of Dimitrov survives in the centre of Place Bulgarie in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, decades after the country abandoned Marxism–Leninism and the colossal statue of Vladimir Lenin was removed from Place Lenine.

• Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
• Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum 1949–1999

• There is also an avenue (#114) named for him in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

• A main avenue in the Nuevo Holguin neighborhood, which was built during the 1970s and 1980s in the city of Holguín is named after him.
• Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias Jorge Dimitrov in Bayamo is named after him.
• IPUEC Jorge Dimitrov (Ceiba 7) school in Caimito
• Primary School Escuela Primaria Jorge Dimitrov in Havana

• In then-East Berlin's Pankow district, a street that since 1874 had been named Danziger Straße — after the formerly German city Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) — was in 1950 renamed Dimitroffstraße (Dimitrov Street) by the Communist East German regime. It also lent its name to an U-Bahn station. After German unification, the Berlin Senate in 1995 restored the street's name to Danziger Straße, and the U-Bahn station was renamed Eberswalder Straße.

• In July 1982, there was a centennial celebration of Dimitrov's birth held at Mahatma Gandhi Hall in London. A lecture from the event was printed in the pamphlet, Georgi Dimitrov: Fighter Against Fascism.^[29]

• In 1974, the song Mavra Korakia along with 20 songs of album "Antartika" (The Guerilla [Songs]) were published by
  KKE in Greece during the Metapolitefsi. The song is a glorification of the Leipzig Trial of Dimitrov, Tanev and Popov, emphasising Dimitrov's ability to avoid hanging. It is widely sung in the left-wing circles of Greek society.^[30]

• The square Fővám tér and the street Máriaremetei út in Budapest, Hungary were named after Dimitrov between 1949 and 1991. In the square, a bust of him was erected in 1954, replaced by a full-length statue in 1983, which was then relocated to the eponymous street a year later. Both sculptures are exhibited since 1992 in the Memento Park.

• There is a Georgi Dimitrov street in the city of
  Emilia Romagna
  administrative region.

The

• In Bucharest, a boulevard was named after him (Bulevardul Dimitrov). In 1990, following the
  fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, this boulevard was renamed in honor of the former Romanian King Ferdinand I
  (Bulevardul Ferdinand).

• Dimitrovgrad, Russia
• In
  Ob River
  are both named after him. The bridge was opened in 1978.

• Dimitrovgrad, Serbia (see below)

• During the times of the communist rule, an important chemical factory in Bratislava was called "Chemické závody Juraja Dimitrova" (colloquially Dimitrovka) in his honour. After the Velvet Revolution, it was renamed Istrochem.

• Dymytrov, now Myrnohrad in Ukraine was named Dymytrov between 1972 and 2016.

• After the 1963 Skopje earthquake, Bulgaria joined the international reconstruction effort by donating funds for the construction of a high school, which opened in 1964. In order to honor the donor country's first post-World War II president, the high school was named after Georgi Dimitrov, a name it still bears today.
• The town of
  Tito-Stalin split. The name has been kept since, although in recent years the local city council has tried to restore the old name (most recently in 2019), and some people prefer the older name to avoid confusion with the Dimitrovgrad
  in Bulgaria.

Sources

• Banac, Ivo, ed. (2003). The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  ISBN 0300097948
  .

Further reading

• Dallin, Alexander; Firsov, Fridrikh Igorevich, eds. (2000). Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  ISBN 0300080212
  .
• Stankova, Marietta (2010). Georgi Dimitrov: A Life (Communist Lives). London: I. B. Tauris.
  ISBN 978-1845117283
  .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Georgi Dimitrov.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Georgi Dimitrov.

• Georgi Dimitrov Internet Archive at Marxists Internet Archive.
• Selected Works in English (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) in PDF format, published in Bulgaria in 1972.
• Stella Blagoeva, George Dimitroff, International Publishers, 1943.
• Georgi Dimitrov: 90th Birth Anniversary, containing biographical information.
• Video A Better Tomorrow: The Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum from
  UCTV (University of California)
• Newspaper clippings about Georgi Dimitrov in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Political offices
Preceded by Kimon Georgiev	Prime Minister of Bulgaria 1946–1949	Succeeded by Vasil Kolarov
Party political offices
Preceded by office established	General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party 1948–1949	Succeeded by Valko Chervenkov