Ivo Banac (ed), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-49, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). pp495. ISBN 0-300-09794-8, £27.50 hbk..

Georgi Dimitrov is one of the communist movement’s most significant figures and the publication of his diary, covering the years 1933-49, in an English translation is a welcome addition to historical sources in this country. Dimitrov wrote his diary in nineteen separate notebooks that are now in the former Communist Party archive in Sofia, with a copy held in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History in Moscow. The diary was first published in Bulgarian in 1997. The Yale University Press was given access to the diary in 1993 and decided to publish an English translation. Because parts of the diary were written in different languages – Bulgarian, German and Russian – it was necessary to assemble a team of translators under the editorship of Ivo Banac. Professor Banac writes in his Preface that if he had known how long and arduous the assignment was going to prove he would have hesitated before taking it on. We must be grateful that he stuck to his task, for Professor Banac and his team have done a superb job in translating and editing the diary.

Georgi Dimitrov was born in Bulgaria in 1882, the son of a fur-hat maker, and he became a printer, an active trade unionist, a marxist, and an early member of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party. His trade union and political activities led to Dimitrov spending several spells in King Ferdinand’s prisons before he was elected a member of the Bulgarian parliament. Dimitrov followed Lenin’s lead and opposed the First World War on the grounds that it was an imperialist war, and his opposition led to his arrest in 1918. After his release he became a founder member of the Bulgarian communist party. He then made his way to Moscow, where he met Lenin and was elected to the executive committee of the Profintern. He returned to Bulgaria to take part in an abortive communist uprising, after which he moved to Vienna, working for the Profintern and Comintern. In 1929 he was transferred to Berlin and was in the city when Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933.

In the wake of the Reichstag fire Dimitrov, together with his fellow Bulgarians Popov and Tanev, Reichstag deputy Ernst Torgler and the deranged Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, were arrested and charged with participation in a plot to set fire to the Reichstag. The Nazis although in power were still feeling their way towards the establishment of a totalitarian state in Germany and they decided to put Dimitrov and the others on trial. The ‘Reichstag Fire Trial’, as it came to be called, was held in Leipzig, between September and December 1933, and it transformed Dimitrov from a shadowy Comintern agent into an international celebrity. The Nazis had caught a tiger by the tail. Dimitrov to his immense credit showed exemplary courage and considerable ability in conducting his defence. Speaking in German he exposed the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case and used the trial to expound his faith in communism. The eyes of the world were on Leipzig and Dimitrov, Popov, Tanev and Torgler were acquitted, Van der Lubbe was found guilty and executed. The Bulgarians were offered asylum in the Soviet Union and moved there, Torgler was rearrested on release from the court and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Against the odds, he survived this ordeal and became an official of the Social Democratic Party in post-war Germany.

Back in Moscow Dimitrov resumed his work for the Comintern and in 1935 was appointed its Secretary-General, the perfect person to lead the new line of ‘popular front’ opposition to fascism. He served in this post until the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. Two years later he became the first communist prime minister of Bulgaria, and held this post until his death in 1949.

To many surviving communist party veterans Georgi Dimitrov is still the ‘Lion of Leipzig’, the man who turned the tables on the Nazis during a period when everything seemed to be going their way. However, according to the ex-communist Ruth Fischer in her book Stalin and German Communism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1949) Dimitrov knew before the trial that Stalin had done a deal with the Nazis to secure his release. Her source is émigré gossip and I for one find her evidence too thin to be taken seriously and the idea of a deal unconvincing. Why should the Nazis have been interested in such a deal? Goering and Goebbels were not people who liked to be shown up in an open court, as they were at Leipzig. Furthermore, no documentary evidence has been found among the extensive collection of Nazi papers captured by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Nor has anything emerged from recently opened Soviet archives.

Whatever the flaws in his character – and Dimitrov was no plaster saint – the course of his life shows him to have been a brave and able man, as well as a ‘steel hardened’ communist. Perhaps it is for the latter that he can be criticised, for he always deferred to Stalin even on occasions when he must have known that Stalin was wrong. This was probably due not so much to fear of Stalin as to Dimitrov’s conviction that it was his communist duty to obey Stalin’s orders. As the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas put it, communists believed that ‘Stalin was not only the undisputed leader of genius, he was the incarnation of the very idea and dream of the new society’ (Conversations with Stalin, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, p14). By the mid-1930s Stalin, like the Caesars of Ancient Rome, had been elevated to the status of a god – and it is difficult to argue with a god. Indeed, Stalin dominates the pages of Dimitrov’s diary in the same way that Stalin dominated the Comintern.

Dimitrov’s entries in the diary for 1939 become more guarded as Stalin, a master of realpolitik, skilfully manoeuvred his way towards an understanding with Hitler. As a good communist Dimitrov loyally applied the new line of August 1939, but the entries suggest that he did so without the same enthusiasm he had shown during the ‘popular front’ period.

The diary confirms that the decision to wind up the Comintern was taken as early as April 1941, when the Soviet Union was still honouring the Nazi-Soviet pact, although the timing of the announcement was left open. There was little life left in the Comintern when it was formally dissolved in June 1943 and, as recorded in the diary, most of the Comintern’s communications network was handed over to the Soviet intelligence services.

There is an intriguing entry on 25 May 1942, when a report from Gaik Ovakimian the NKVD specialist on ‘Anglo-Saxon countries’ [sic] comments on:

Pol[litt’s] strange behaviour. English intelligence is using him to plant its people in the party and also in the apparatus of Sov[iet] organs. So far it has been impossible to determine whether Pol[litt] is carrying out this work deliberately or whether English intelligence is taking advantage of his lack of vigilance.

Dimitrov noted in his diary: ‘Arrange to undertake the most scrupulous study of Pol[litt] and what is generally taking place in the leadership of the English CP’. Clearly Harry Pollitt was far from being above suspicion.

The diary establishes beyond all doubt that Dimitrov was the prime mover in the execution of Nikola Petkov, the leader of the Bulgarian Peasants’ Party, who opposed the communist takeover of Bulgaria. Dimitrov was very sensitive to criticism that that the Nazis had dealt with him more fairly at Leipzig in 1933 than he had treated Petkov in 1947. He recorded in his diary that it should be made clear that the circumstances surrounding the two trials were entirely different. Dimitrov was no ‘liberal’: he fully supported the ruthless measures needed to establish communist power in post-war Bulgaria. Nor was he a narrow Bulgarian nationalist, and over the years he toyed with various schemes for the creation of a ‘Balkan Federation of Communist states’.

The diaries record that in the last decade of his life Dimitrov was a very sick man suffering from diabetes, chronic gastritis, a diseased gall bladder and several other ailments. Severe illness prevented him from playing any significant role in the Cominform’s break with Yugoslavia in 1948. Although he had some sympathy for Tito’s position, Dimitrov followed Stalin’s lead. The last entry in the diary is for 24 January 1949 when Dimitrov attended a meeting of Bulgaria’s Council of Ministers, where among other things ministers discussed the proposed trial of evangelical pastors on charges of espionage and the affairs of Soviet-Bulgarian friendship societies. Georgi Dimitrov died in Moscow on 2 July 1949, and his embalmed body was installed with due pomp and ceremony in a marble mausoleum in the centre of Sofia.

The last words of Dimitrov in his closing speech to the court at Leipzig were: ‘The wheel of history moves slowly on towards the ultimate, inevitable, irrepressible goal of Communism’. Stirring words that echoed around the world in 1933. However, at the time of writing Dimitrov’s forecast appears to be well off course as global capitalism holds the field and little of what Dimitrov worked for survives. His body was removed from its mausoleum in 1990 and cremated, his ashes being transferred to a family plot in the city cemetery. In the 1990s the empty mausoleum suffered the indignity of being occupied by squatters. After much consideration of possible alternative uses it was finally blown up in 1999. Meanwhile Bulgaria abandoned its command economy and struggled to prepare itself for membership of the European Union. Nevertheless, although the wheel of history has not turned as he expected Dimitrov remains one of the most interesting of his generation of communist leaders. He was in Stalin’s phrase, one of the ‘men of a special mould’. Yet in spite of his loyalty to the party line laid down by Stalin, Dimitrov was never a one-dimensional figure: he was a strong personality with his own views on important matters, although he had to move with extreme caution in expressing and implementing his own ideas. No one was safe from Stalin’s anger and suspicion. Dimitrov’s diary, although written with some discretion under the circumstances of the time, provides us with additional information concerning his thoughts and actions.

Archie Potts