Mihail Gerdzhikov

Mihail Gerdzhikov was born in Plovdiv, then in the Ottoman Empire, in 1877. He studied at the French College, where he received the nickname Michelle. As a student in 1893 he started his revolutionary activities as the leader of a Macedonian Secret Revolutionary Committee (MSRC).^[1] Then he studied in Switzerland (Lozana and Geneva), where he made close connections with the revolutionary immigration and founded the so called Geneve group, an extension of MSRC. Gerdzhikov was under strong anarchist influence and rejected the nationalisms of the ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire, favouring alliances with ordinary Muslim people against the Sultanate and the idea about a Balkan Federation. In 1899 he comes back to the Balkans and worked as a teacher in Bitola. He becomes a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and a close friend of Gotse Delchev. He was the great mind that organized and led the Preobrazhenie Uprising in July 1903, a revolt against the Ottoman authorities in Thrace, based itself amongst the Bulgarian peasants. 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.

Sources

1. ^ Black flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism, Lucien van der Walt, Michael Schmidt, AK Press, 2009, ISBN 190485916X, p. 317.