6

who were actually in prison appear to have been excepted this time also.1 On the 3rd April the Court of Cassation, which had been requested by the Government in March to examine the relations between the Labour and Communist Parties, ordered the dissolution of both Parties and also of the Osvobojdenie Co-operative Society, on the ground that the activities of these organizations were directed against the security of the state. On the 30th April two letters, dated the 7th and 25th March and purporting to have been written from Berlin to the Bulgarian Communist Party by M. Kolarov, the Secretary of the Third International in Moscow, who was himself a Bulgarian by origin, were made public in Sofia.3 In August the smuggling of arms and munitions into the country led to the proclamation of a state of siege in Eastern Bulgaria, and when a vessel laden with munitions was captured near Mesembria on the 14th August 5 107 persons were arrested on the charge of complicity. While it is difficult to estimate the amount of truth in these allegations of Communist activities inside Bulgaria, the difficulty is still greater in the case of the alleged negotiations between the Third International and the Macedonians. That the Third International had a strong motive for attempting to drive in a wedge between the Macedonian leaders and M. Tsankov's Government has been explained already; and the Macedonians, on their part, had every reason to be disillusioned. As early as February, Colonel Vulkov, M. Tsankov's Minister for War, had declared in the Sobranje that the Government does not support or encourage the Macedonian Movement; 8 and, under diplomatic pressure from Jugoslavia, M. Tsankov had been forced so far to tread in M. Stamboliski's footsteps as to arrest several hundred Macedonian émigrés on Bulgarian soil who were suspected of active participation in irredentist activities. Thus it was not inherently improbable that a section, at any rate, of the Macedonians should turn in despair towards Moscow, as the Croat leader M. Radić admittedly did in the summer of this year; 10 and it was, in fact, reported that Todor Alexandrov, the head of the Macedonian Revolutionaries, paid a three days'

6

9

1 Le Temps, 5th April, 1924.

3 Ibid., 2nd May, 1924.

5 Ibid., 16th and 18th August, 1924.

2 The Times, 5th April, 1924.

4 Ibid., 15th and 16th August, 1924.

Le Temps, 19th August; The Times, 6th September, 1924.

7 The difficulty may be gauged by comparing two articles on the subject published respectively in The Times of the 8th July and The Manchester Guardian of the 18th August, 1924.

8 The Times, 28th February, 1924. 9 Ibid., 9th July, 1924.

visit to London, from the 30th May to the 1st June, in order to discuss possibilities of co-operation with M. Rakovski.1 It was afterwards denied by the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization that this meeting had taken place; 2 but on the 15th July La Féderation Balkanique of Vienna published the text of a manifesto, dated the 6th May, 1924, and purporting to have been signed by Todor Alexandrov, A. Protogerov, and Peter Chaülev in the name of the Organization, in which it was declared that the Macedonians could now only rely on the progressive and extreme revolutionary movements of Europe'; that they must rally for the formation of a 'revolutionary front'; and that this would be the foundation of a united revolutionary front' which, in close collaboration with the progressive and revolutionary movements in Europe and the Balkans', would win independence for Macedonia' and 'impose the formation of a Balkan Federation'.3 If this text was genuine, it indicated that already, by the beginning of May, the Macedonians had accepted the Moscow plan of campaign. Its authenticity was officially denied by the Macedonian Revolutionary Head-quarters in a communiqué published in Sofia on the 5th August; but it was perhaps significant that this communiqué was signed by Alexandrov and Protogerov but not by Chaülev, and also that, while it was declared that the Macedonians were engaged in a nationalist movement and would not tolerate interference from any quarter, it was also put on record that the Organization would not take part in any internal conflicts in Bulgaria. The most likely explanation is that negotiations with the Bolsheviks had already taken place and that Chaülev had been in favour of accepting their terms while Todor Alexandrov had been against it. At any rate, it is certain that, about this time, the Macedonian Organization was split, through some cause or other, by an internal division, so violent that it ended in mutual assassination-Alexandrov being murdered by a dissident faction amongst his followers on the 31st August, while Chaülev suffered the same fate, in reprisal, on the 23rd December.

This alienation of the Macedonians was a serious thing for M. Tsankov and his colleagues, who had shown little restraint in taking revengeful and repressive measures against their defeated political opponents, and who now found themselves exposed to the danger of a counter-stroke, without any organized force on which they could rely. During the summer they had asked permission 1 The Times, 19th July, 1924.

3 Ibid., 5th August, 1924.

2 Ibid., 1st August, 1924. 4 Ibid., 6th August, 1924.

to recruit 3,000 volunteers for a period of three months, but the Conference of Ambassadors, in its reply of the 25th August, had reserved this request for further consideration, while instructing the Government to disband militia already illicitly enrolled. In these circumstances, M. Tsankov visited Belgrade on the 26th December and Bucarest on the 29th in order to advocate a common front against those revolutionary forces which were already attempting to form a common front on the other side. In both capitals the Communist danger was discussed on this occasion; but M. Tsankov's reception at Belgrade seems to have been cool, and, although he received a better welcome at Bucarest, it was officially denied on all hands that any formal agreement had been concluded between the three countries.1

Meanwhile, the Macedonians were not the only recalcitrant nationalists in Jugoslavia who had turned their eyes towards Moscow. A more powerful factor of instability than the Macedonian revolutionaries was the Croat Peasant Party led by M. Stephen Radić; and while the relations of this Croat leader and his followers with the Jugoslav Government and the other parties in the state were an internal affair of Jugoslavia and therefore do not fall within the province of this survey, his journey, in the summer of 1924, from Vienna, where he was living as an émigré, to Moscow was an international event of some importance. On this visit M. Radić, acting upon authority which had been conferred on him by his party on the 1st May, negotiated the adhesion of the Croat Peasant Party to the Moscow Peasant International (one of the subsidiary organizations affiliated to the Third International), and on the 3rd August— at a moment when it was expected that one wing, at least, of the Croats might support M. Davidović's Government at Belgrade and might even enter the Cabinet-the party, in a plenary session at Zagreb, passed a resolution unanimously approving and endorsing what M. Radić had done. Since, however, they resolved simultaneously to support the Government upon conditions, though without entering its ranks, and since M. Davidović depended on this support for his majority, M. Radić was permitted to return to Jugoslavia. At the end of October, however, M. Radić, on being challenged by the Government to declare whether he maintained his

1 See statements by M. Ninčić (Le Temps, 1st January, 1925) and by M. Tsankov (The Times, 2nd and 5th January, 1925; Le Temps and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 7th January, 1925).

2 The Times, 6th August, 1924.

republican programme or accepted the framework of the Jugoslav Kingdom, and also to clear up his relations with Moscow and the Macedonians,1 returned a defiant answer and once more fled the country. At the end of December the Government decided to dissolve the Croat Peasant Party 3 as a subversive organization adhering to the Third International and to arrest its leaders under the Defence of the Realm Act. The Communist Organization in Jugoslavia (at that time entitled the Independent Labour Party') was also dissolved on the 13th December, after the publication of a report from Vienna that a combined Macedonian-Croat-Communist rising had been timed to break out at the end of January 1925.5

In Rumania the Communist Party had been officially dissolved nearly six months earlier, on the 28th July. Rumania was in a more exposed position than Jugoslavia, and the Bessarabian question? was a standing obstacle to the re-establishment of good relations with Russia, whatever might be the complexion of the Russian Government of the day. Thus Rumania was more inclined than either Jugoslavia or Greece to show complacence towards Bulgaria under the Tsankov régime; but this tendency could make little head against the rooted tradition of national feuds, and so long as that tradition maintained itself in South-Eastern Europe M. Zinoviev had no reason to despair of ultimately attaining his ends.

(f) COMMUNISM IN GERMANY (1923-4)

A new opening in Germany was presented to the Third International by the struggle between Germany and France which began with the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr on the 11th January, 1923; and in the summer of that year, when the struggle was

8

1 The Vice-President of the Croat Peasant Party, Dr. Predaveć, had previously denied that M. Radić had come to terms with Todor Alexandrov (The Times, 13th August, 1924).

2 The Corriere della Sera and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26th October, 1924.

3 At about the same time a group within the party decided to break away from M. Radić and attempt an understanding with the Serbs (the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 18th November and 30th December, 1924).

Le Temps, 26th December; the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 28th Decem

ber, 1924.

5 Le Temps and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. 2nd December; The Times, 15th December, 1924. Wholesale arrests of supposed Communist leaders had begun as early as the previous 15th July (The Times, 17th July, 1924).

6 The Times, 30th July, 1924.

7 See Section (vii) below.

8 For the history of this struggle see II. A. (ii) below.

unmistakably approaching its climax, the Executive of the Third International sent M. Karl Radek to Germany to hold a watching brief, to act as a liaison with the German Communist Party, and to assist the latter to bring about a revolution.1

6

At this time the German Communist Party seems to have been divided into a right and a left wing, and in July 1923 the Central · Committee, under the inspiration of the left, issued an appeal to the workers against the German Fascisti' and fixed a date for an anti-Fascist day'. This move, which promised to precipitate the 'class-war' in Germany, was approved in Moscow; but M. Radek, who had identified himself with the right or moderate wing of the German Communists and regarded any attempt at direct action' in Germany at this moment as foredoomed to failure, overruled their judgement, and at his instance they apparently telegraphed to the German Central Committee on the 26th July, advising it to refrain from street demonstrations on the 29th. MM. Kamenev and Zinoviev evidently came to the conclusion that M. Radek's advice had been wrong, and regarded him as personally responsible for the non-achievement of revolution in Germany in 1923. The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party afterwards censured him for disobedience to orders and the Political Bureau passed a resolution informing the Executive of the International that, on the German question, M. Radek did not represent the views of the Party, while M. Zinoviev declared that it was he who pulled back the German Party by the coat-tails, when it should have been urged to fight'. Detailed plans for an armed rising in the autumn of 1923 had, indeed, been worked out by the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, according to the findings of a committee which was appointed next year by the Reichstag to inquire into the cases of three Communists who had been arrested on the 28th January in Würtemberg. On the 4th June, 1924, Herr Löbe, in presenting the Committee's report to the Reichstag, gave the following details:

Armed companies had been organized and large quantities of arms had been secured. In Berlin alone 44 depots for arms had been hired 1 All statements made in this section regarding the part played in Germany during 1923 by M. Radek, by the Executive of the Third International, and by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party are taken from the reports of a speech delivered on the 10th January, 1924, at a conference of the Communist Party of Moscow Province, by M. Kamenev (The Times, 19th January) and a speech delivered in February 1924, at a conference of the Russian Communist Party, by M. Zinoviev (ibid., 6th February, 1924).