Ivan Mihailov
Ivan Mihaylov Gavrilov, also known as Vancho Mihaylov, was a Macedonian Bulgarian revolutionary in interwar Macedonia and the last leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.
Under Mihaylov, IMRO became notoriously anti-communist and identified itself closely with Bulgarian nationalism, thus eliminating not only the enemies of the
Bulgarian national idea in Macedonia but also its left-wing opponents within the Macedonian liberation movement. Mihaylov changed the organization's tactics from guerrilla campaigns to individual terrorist acts. Numerous attacks were carried out by IMRO against Yugoslav officials under his leadership, the most spectacular of which was the assassination of Alexander I of Yugoslavia, in collaboration with Croatian Ustaše. He actively cooperated with
revanchist powers, such as Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Admiral Horthy's Hungary and Hitler's Nazi Germany. During the last stage of the war, he tried to realize IMRO's plan to create an Independent Macedonia but ultimately refused to move forward due to the lack of German military support and his reluctance to take a course that would lead to civil war.
During the Cold War, Mihaylov lived in Italy while the emigrant Macedonian Patriotic Organization in the US and Canada worked under his guidance on the old IMRO's goal of an independent Macedonia. This was acknowledged by a CIA report from 1953, which dubbed the MPO as "the US branch of the IMRO" and asserted that it acted as a money-raising organ to support Mihaylov's activity. At the beginning of the fall of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia, only a month before his death in 1990, he kept insisting: "I am a Bulgarian from Macedonia" and "I would recommend to the young people in Macedonia to hold on to the fact that we have been Bulgarians for a thousand years." Mihaylov was considered a Bulgarophile traitor and fascist in Communist Yugoslavia. He is still regarded as such in what is today North Macedonia, while the organization he led is seen as a controversial Bulgarian organization because its ideas clash with the Yugoslav Macedonian nation-building narrative. According to Bulgarian historian Chavdar Marinov, Mihaylov was regarded as a Nazi collaborator in Communist Bulgaria. He was later partially rehabilitated there, supporting the Bulgarian narrative that negates the existence of a widespread Macedonian national identity before the end of World War II and he has been fully rehabilitated today.
Mihaylov is the author of four volumes of memoirs and a number of articles and pamphlets, such as "Macedonia: Switzerland of the Balkans", "Stalin and the Macedonian Question", as well as other materials describing the Macedonian struggle for freedom.
Biography
Early years
Ivan Mihaylov was born on 26 August 1896 in the village of Novo Selo, in the Kosovo vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. Mihaylov studied at the Bulgarian Men's High School in Thessaloniki up until the Second Balkan War, when the school was closed by the new Greek administration. He later continued his schooling at a Serbian school in Skopje, then in the Kingdom of Serbia. A scholarship was offered to him by the Serbian Ministry of Education to pursue a degree at a European university, but he declined. During the First World War, he enlisted in the Bulgarian Army, which occupied the region at the time. After the end of the war, Mihaylov emigrated to Bulgaria, settling in Sofia. Here he began studying law at the Sofia University. It was at this time that he was offered to work as personal secretary to the then IMRO leader Todor Aleksandrov.Leader of the IMRO
On 31 August 1924, Todor Aleksandrov was assassinated under unclear circumstances and IMRO soon came under the control of Mihaylov, who by then had become a prominent figure in Bulgarian politics.IMRO's leadership was quick to blame Aleksandrov's death on the communists, while they claimed that Mihaylov may have actually been responsible for the murder. These events created friction between factions within the organization and led to several high-profile murders, including that of Petar Chaulev in Milan.
During the interwar period, IMRO took action against several former members of IMRO's Sandanist faction. Gjorche Petrov was killed in Sofia in 1922. Todor Panitsa, who had killed the right-wing Boris Sarafov and Ivan Garvanov, was assassinated in Vienna in 1924 by Mihaylov's future wife, Mencha Karnichiu." Dimo Hadjidimov, Georgi Skrizhovski, Aleksandar Bujnov, Chudomir Kantardjiev, and many others were killed in a series of murders, all taking place in 1925.
Mihaylov's group of young IMRO cadres soon fell into conflict with the older members of the organization. The latter were in favour of the old tactics of incursions by armed bands into Yugoslavia and Greece, whereas the former favoured more flexible tactics, with smaller terrorist cells carrying selective assassinations of public figures.
The conflict grew into a leadership struggle, which led Mihaylov to order the assassination in 1928 of a rival leader of the older faction, General Aleksandar Protogerov, sparking a fratricidal war between the "Mihaylovists" and the "Protogerovists". The less numerous and ill-equipped Protogerovists allied themselves with Yugoslavia and certain Bulgarian military circles as Zveno, who favoured rapprochement with Yugoslavia.
That period led to the intensification of the armed struggle of the organization in Aegean and Vardar Macedonia. A total of 63 terrorist acts and attacks on bridges, warehouses, Serbian police stations, and military targets were carried out between 1922 and 1930, with the number of assassinated Serbian officials and collaborators numbering in the thousands.
File:Ivan Mihaylov Mencha Karnicheva and Marko Doshen.jpg|right|thumb|230px|Ivan Mihaylov, his wife Mencha Karnicheva, and Marko Doshen at the grave of Todor Alexandrov in 1933
IMRO had de facto control of Pirin Macedonia and acted as a "state within a state", which it used as a base for hit-and-run attacks against Yugoslavia with the unofficial support of Bulgaria and later Fascist Italy, while also establishing close links with the Croatian Ustaše movement. Numerous assassinations were carried out by IMRO activists in several countries, the majority of which occurred in Yugoslavia. The most spectacular of these was the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseille in 1934, in collaboration with Ante Pavelić.
IMRO's constant fratricidal killings and assassinations abroad prompted some within the Bulgarian military to attempt to crush the organization after the Bulgarian coup d'état of 1934. In 1934, Mihaylov fled to Turkey and ordered his supporters not to resist the Bulgarian army and to accept the disarmament peacefully, potentially avoiding a civil war or foreign invasion. Many inhabitants of Pirin Macedonia met this disbandment with satisfaction because it was perceived as relief from an unlawful and quite often brutal parallel authority. Mihaylov had nine life sentences and three death sentences in Bulgaria.
Even though IMRO's main goal had always been the creation of an independent Macedonian state, some Bulgarian governments had tolerated it since their goal had been the liberation of Macedonia, which they considered Bulgarian land, from Greek and Yugoslav occupation. As a result of this, IMRO had built an extensive network in Pirin Macedonia and in the other parts of Bulgaria, which was used to provide financing for the organization and an operational base from which the incursions into Yugoslavia and Greece were conducted.
While in exile, IMRO was kept alive by members in various countries worldwide but ceased to be an active force in Macedonia except for brief periods during the Second World War.