Petar Chaulev
Petar Chaulev was a Bulgarian revolutionary in Ottoman Macedonia. He was a local leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.
Biography
He was born into an Orthodox Albanian family in Ohrid. His father was a Tosk Albanian fisherman from southern Albania. Chaulev was fluent in Albanian, and spent several years living in Albania where he was nicknamed 'Petrush'. He graduated from the Bulgarian High School in Bitola. He taught in Ohrid and the village of Popolzhani in the Lerin region. Chaulev was an organizer of the revolutionary committees in the Ohrid, Prespa and Lerin regions in the 1890s. In the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, he was a voivode and head of the Ohrid revolutionary committee.After the uprising, he was the district commander and a member of the Bitola District Committee. He participated as a delegate in IMRO's Kyustendil Congress in 1908. He declared himself against the disarmament of IMRO after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. Chaulev was elected as a member of IMRO's Central Committee in 1911. He participated in the Balkan Wars, Tikveš uprising and Ohrid–Debar uprising in 1913. During the First Balkan War, as the commander of a volunteer detachment, he supported the offensive of the allied Serbian troops in Vardar Macedonia. During the Bulgarian occupation in World War I, he was the district chief of Ohrid. Chaulev was included in the administrative section of the 11th Macedonian Infantry Division. After the war, he participated with Todor Aleksandrov and Aleksandar Protogerov in the re-creation of IMRO. He became part of IMRO's new central committee in 1919. As a member of the Central Committee, he was responsible for organizing armed actions from Italy and Albania, but was unable to cope with this task.
Chaulev published the book Skipia in 1924 in Istanbul. He established contacts with representatives of the Soviet embassy in Rome and with Communist International figures. In 1924, IMRO forged connections with the Comintern. As a result, Chaulev signed the so-called "May Manifesto" in Vienna along with Protogerov and Aleksandrov concerning the formation of a Balkan Communist Federation and cooperation with the Soviet Union. Under pressure by the Bulgarian government, Aleksandrov and Protogerov denied that they had ever signed any agreement, claiming that the May Manifesto was a communist forgery. Shortly after, Aleksandrov was assassinated by IMRO voivodes. IMRO sentenced Chaulev to death. Chaulev, who did not abandon the Manifesto and was suspected as involved in Aleksandrov's murder, was assassinated in Milan on December 23, 1924, by IMRO revolutionary, on the orders of Ivan Mihaylov.