Mihail Gerdzhikov

In memoriam

Mihail Gerdzhikov was a Bulgarian revolutionary and anarchist. He was born in Plovdiv, then in the Ottoman Empire, in 1877. He studied at the French College in Plovdiv, where he received the nickname Michel. As a student in 1893 he started his revolutionary activities as the leader of a Macedonian Secret Revolutionary Committee (MSRC). Later Gerdzhikov studied in Switzerland (Lausanne and Geneva), where he made close connections with the revolutionary immigration and established the so-called Geneva group, an extension of MSRC. Gerdzhikov was under strong anarchist influence and rejected the nationalism of the ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire, favouring alliances with ordinary Muslim people against the Sultanate and the idea about a Balkan Federation. In 1899 he came back to the Balkans and worked as a teacher in Bitola. Gerdzhikov became a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and a close friend of Gotse Delchev. He was the mastermind and leader of the peasant Preobrazhenie Uprising in July 1903, a revolt against the Ottoman authorities in Thrace. Gerdzhikov's forces, about 2,000 strong and poorly armed, managed to establish a “Strandzha commune”. In 1919 the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) was founded at a congress opened by Gerdzhikov. In 1925 he was among the founders of IMRO (United) in Vienna. Gerdzhikov had invested high hopes in the new Socialist system after 1944, but was soon disappointed by the newly established regime. He died in 1947 in Sofia.

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