By Matthew Quest
October 2nd, 2026
Yavor Tarinski. Balkan Federation and Communes: Revolutionary Projects in Bulgaria of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Foreword by A. Schismenos. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2026.
This concise history, a reclamation project, bursts and overflows with future possibilities. Examining revolutionary projects in Bulgaria in the 19th and 20th centuries, this book reminds us that there is a different way to look at the Balkans, the arena of Southeastern Europe often considered marked by nationalism, bloodshed, and xenophobia first stirred by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and later the demise of the Soviet Union. Can only great imperial powers hold together these territories of Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, the present countries of the former Yugoslavia, assorted Greeks, Turks, and Macedonians? Is Stalinism, fascism, aristocracy, and elite representative government their only prospects?
Bulgaria and the Balkans: An Unsung Radical Tradition?
There is a radical tradition of left libertarian thought deeply rooted in Bulgaria that searched for a federation and commune forms of government that would unite the diverse region around socialism from below and anarchist ideas. If the very idea of ‘Balkanization’ in contemporary politics imply separatism distinguished by hostilities, there is a hidden history of the region that has been stretching forth its hands toward popular self-management. For many years unsung community organizers have wished to coordinate an autonomy informed by self-limitation, that doesn’t wish to pick anyone’s pocket, break anyone’s legs, or constitute themselves as threats to their neighbors.
Yavor Tarinski, a theorist of direct democracy and an independent researcher of the region’s history, documents revolutionary projects centered in Bulgaria in the 19th and 20th centuries. Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, Tarinski currently resides among Athens, Greece and works with activist circles informed by Cornelius Castoriadis, Murray Bookchin, and the Rojava and Zapatista experiments in Northern Syria and Southern Mexico respectively.
With Bakunin and Tolstoy in Mind
Tarinski’s book, marked by a trilingual bibliography, highlights linkages between Bulgarian activists (in their homeland and in diasporic communities) with the Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Leo Tolstoy. The author shows how past activists engaged with the meaning of the Paris Commune, which some see as a workers’ republic (a contradiction in terms) but it foreshadowed desires for popular self-directed emancipation. But also the Russian Revolution (and the challenges that Ukraine exposed) beyond their immediate region.
The Challenges for Freedom Movements Today
One of the greatest challenges for freedom movements today is not to aspire to grab for power in the already existing commanding heights. Rather, to make the global archive of aspirations to design a new society, and the alternative forms of freedom and popular self-government previously known and theorized, commonplace on ordinary people’s minds again. This heritage must be shared in workplaces and neighborhoods, not counter-cultures who make a virtue of shabby living, so those with cosmopolitan intent can fire up an enlarged concept of citizenship.
What is a Commune and a Federation? Tools for Designing A New Society
A commune is a cooperative form of government whose lifestyle seeks to prefigure the new society. Through mutual aid as producers in fields, modest factories, and workshops (not pursuing profit), it can be a deliberative body around a specific community in relatively peaceful circumstances living by mutual aid. It can also be a provisional government informed by magnanimity in times of war where these ideals are disciplined to more troubled arenas but are not jettisoned but preserved in practice.
A federation is a form of government that seeks unity across today’s national and ethnic borders in an attempt to discard them. While this historically has expressed itself as a cooperation between nation-states and a network of activists and community organizers, a model of federation below society is discussed here. The aspiring historical Balkan federation desired to discard professionals as the embodiment of culture and government. It was envisioned to be coordinated below official society. In both instances those who organize themselves in this fashion do not wish to seize state power but abolish it. They do not wish to be overlords over everyday people but forge friendship and new forms of association embracing cultural pluralism and learning from each other.
Tarinski illustrates a long desire for solidarity in struggle between Bulgarians and Greeks, Turks, and Serbs. We are made aware of a heritage of guilds and communal agrarian units among workers, farmers, and pastoralists. There is a vast archive of working documents, charters, and constitutions for social revolutions and new societies that the author refers and peaks our interest.
Soviet Russia or Russian Soviets? Non-Aligned and ‘the Bandung Spirit’?
Many believe they are familiar with the intricacies of the former Soviet Union (1917–1991), an empire built around modernizing Russia, exactly because it was the nemesis of the imperial United States during much of the Cold War which surfaced in 1947, as the Third World national liberation epoch was beginning. Yet how many know that a ‘soviet’ is not a Russian, but a workers, peasants, or soldiers council for direct self-government?
Beyond the color curtain, the former Yugoslavia (part of southeastern Europe) was for a time considered part of the Third World ‘non-aligned’ countries. Marshal Tito, while not African or Asian, embraced the ‘Bandung Spirit’ (he did not attend the famous conference in Indonesia in 1955) that African Americans from Richard Wright to Malcolm X popularized. Yet for many in the US, the Ottoman Empire is obscure today.
What was the Ottoman Empire again?
The Ottoman Empire existed from c. 1299 to 1922. Founded in northwest Antatolia (modern day Turkey), its capital came to be Istanbul. The previous name for this famous city is Constantinople. This Turkish empire was officially led by an Islamic state that overlorded a culturally plural domain. It conquered Northern Africa, Western Asia, and Southeastern Europe. It was central to politics in what has come to be called the Middle East for many years. The Ottomans were the overlords of Palestine, before Britain and later the United States and Israel, took on this role.
In the 19th and in the start of 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire began to be contained and became smaller. Persecution of Muslims followed as the Ottomans’ power was declining, and the Russian Empire (before and after the Russian Revolution in 1917) was expanding. This resulted in great loss of life, and mass migration. Within empires and conquering there is always great ethnic and religious resentments and clashes, though they may appear half-hidden for a time to history. When these acrimonious brawls come out in the open over religion, race, and ethnicity, it is tragic when ordinary people attack each other for their heritage, because their identities are (rightly or wrongly) associated with past menacing regimes that incited great alienation and dispossession.
One insightful and militant Black public school principal in Baton Rouge Louisiana I’m familiar, taught his daughter in her early teen years how to read in the newspapers about the break up of former Yugoslavia. These events marked by ‘ethnic cleansing’, could not be easily grasped after using the reference books she had available. Her father reminded that this is, including lynching (he had a book with pictures of these horrors), what happened to many African Americans during the Jim Crow era (1896–1965) in the US. It was conveyed to this sweet Black child not familiar yet with the alienation of the world, after made to confront sadistic brutality, we should have empathy to all world societies who have felt these burdens, not simply our own.
These are among the comparative world contexts that should help us be attentive to the stories of these perhaps obscure revolutionaries’ dreams for alternative ways of living in what for us may be a half-hidden part of the globe.
Talented Individuals Who Contribute to Clarifying Revolutionary Projects
Yavor Tarinski introduces us to an assortment of courageous and sagacious legacies of radical historians, thinkers, and activists. They seem to exist in a historical and material environment that compelled many to oscillate between romantic utopian impulses and existential ones full of dread with a sensibility that we must be ready to die for what we believe. In between these prescient poles we actually find many examples of qualitative and insightful political thought and communal aspirations. We must be cautious in evaluating those who clearly were organizing on what seems unmerciful terrain. Then and now, necessities of direct action anti-fascism are not a game or a cool t-shirt.
Vasil Levski was one of the main figures of struggle against the Ottoman Empire. He was a strong believer in the potential of the local populations to liberate themselves from Ottoman rule, rather than being liberated (and soon subordinated again) by the foreign Great Powers. He was an advocate for a unified Balkan republic, beyond narrow nationalism and ethnicity, at a time when in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a republic (peculiarly even for some anarchist leaning) could be a type of imaginary for a liberated society from feudalism and empire. Yet we must be alert, whatever Levski’s dynamic tensions, how some anarchists (not all) in this period pose an aspiring ideal republic, and draw back from aspirations to a direct democracy. Of course, this reminds that a federation can be a network of republics, with its revolt against overlords shape shifting and ambiguous in certain moments in history. In any event, it cannot be ignored that the monarchy in Bulgaria was not abolished until 1946.
Levski to Botev
Hristo Botev was one of the main figures in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire. A vocal supporter of a stateless Balkan federation, he is the founding father of Bulgarian anarchism. Botev is fascinating, with anti-colonialism in mind today, for he recognized that as empires decline, smaller or peripheral states and rulers see this as their opportunity to expand at ordinary people’s expense. Circa 1869–1871 the Bulgarian Botev, like many Russian Radicals, fled to Romania.
Botev had a rich intellectual life as a language instructor and published newspapers that translates as: Flag and The World of Bulgarian Emigrants. A conoisseur of literature and philosophy, Botev enjoyed Turgenev’s, Chernyshevsky’s, and Pushkin’s creative writing among others, and the libertarian political writings of PJ Proudhon and Charles Fourier, which influenced many utopian communes in the US. In Romania, Botev met the controversial Russian radical Sergey Nechaev, who wrote Catechism of a Revolutionist, and they became friends.
Every Government Plots Against Humanity’s Freedom
Many (not all) of the anarchists and left-libertarians featured in this book are guerillas who lived a harsh life (and a significant number were killed in battle) in an unforgiving social environment. And the reviewer must wonder if these historical radicals share with the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno, a search to balance an anarchist liberty with disciplined organization sustaining a platform of unwavering values (perhaps with necessary centralization for a time) in arenas where they were always outnumbered and always outgunned.
Botev had a contempt for class based organizations and unlike Nechaev, who could be a morose inspirer of underground cadre (from Bakunin to Lenin to the Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver) who questioned whether friendship and joy were possible, could wield grand visions of freedom, fraternity and happiness. Still Botev asserted that every government, that he was familiar, was a plot against the freedom of humanity. Botev’s face is the official logo of the contemporary Federation of Bulgarian Anarchists.
Botev to Gerdzhikov
Mikhail Gerdzhikov played a central role in the establishment of the Strandzha Commune and Illinden Uprising. He was a visionary of a Balkan stateless federation and co-founder of the Bulgarian anarcho-communist federation. He spread his ideas through newspapers with profound names, such as Free Society and Antipower. One aspect of the book that is fascinating is where Tarinski compared the disposition of Gerdzhikov to Nestor Makhno’s movement in the Ukraine.
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It seems a political strategy can be pursued where armed guerillas enter a city or village and declare, quite publicly, that they are no type of overseeing authority that anyone is obligated to obey. They wish for a world where there is cooperation and mutual aid beyond ethnicity and national interests.And they have merely arrived to be allies and neighbors of the working people.
Projections of Anti-Authoritarian Guerillas
Freedom and self-government of toilers cannot be advanced or taken away by anyone but the commoners. Such guerilla rebels can humbly share that they can dialogue about the world of ideas and contribute to civil defense, but such a group cannot prescribe or compel anyone to arrange society against their will. Nevertheless, there are moments when aspiring rulers are hoarding food and other necessities, and those with arms can break down the doors to storage facilities and allow everyday people to take what they need that they are held back from producing with their own creative and self-directed abilities.
Georgi Benkovsky, one of the leading radicals of the April Uprising of 1876, witnessed the creation of a short-lived commune in the city of Panagyurishte, a historic town located in the Sredna Gora mountains of Pazardzhik Province in southern Bulgaria less than sixty miles east of Sofia. Historical research has uncovered a large meeting of guerrilla groups that with nuance proposed a federation government of communes and popular committees for mutual defense that would share all property and the necessities of life in common, and which desired to abolish money relations.
Benkovsky to Delchev
Gotse Delchev, born in 1872 in Kilkush (today Kilkis) is an interesting radical personality in more ways than one. He was a major activist within the IMARO (the Internal Macedonian Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organization). They fought for regional political autonomy. Delchev formed his own circle of armed rebel guerillas. Delchev was heralded for a rootedness and great solidarity toward rural people, whether Christian or Muslim.
Unfortunately the movement around IMARO collapsed as a result of conflicting tendencies, and nationalist factions gaining the upper hand. Now top-down authoritarians of North Macedonia and Bulgaria have hijacked this history wielding it toward narrower ends. It is a real dilemma of revolutionary politics, to commit one’s life toward a liberating future, and have associates (or descendants) reverse themselves, or discard precepts that are essential to the substance previously hoped for.
Anarcho-Christians
Hristo Dosev, was one of the founders of a Tolstoyan commune in Bulgaria (in Burgas on the Black Sea coast). He eventually moved to Russia, married a close friend of Leo Tolstoy, whom he encountered, and founded another commune there. Dosev did not simply wish to live a lifestyle anarchism that would informally and subtly permeate the other terms of order around. He wished to evangelize and disseminate his political faith. They propagated their ideas in a self-organized journal whose title translates to Revival. Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, saluted them as the only magazine in the world that fully committed to his ideas. Evidence shows that this commune disturbed official authorities and conservatives nearby greatly. In trying to bring forth ‘the kingdom of God’ (the new beginning) from within themselves, their example disturbed the Kingdom of Bulgaria greatly.
The book also discusses at least three more communes that shaped radical culture in Bulgaria: Ruse’s Commune (on the Danube River that serves as a defacto border between Bulgarian and Romania), Ruzhintsi’s Commune (in Northwestern Bulgaria near the city of Vidin, and the Kilafarevo Commune, a short lived republic that was overthrown by a military putsch, but somehow unleashed the creation of popular councils of anarchists and communists in protest.
Other personalities we can learn of in this fine volume include: Lachezar Krastev, Regas Feraios, Svetozar Markovic, Theofil Raynov, Nikolai Sudzilovsky, Raycho Grablev, G.S. Rachovsky, Lyuben Karavelov, Georgi Hadzhiev, Georgi Sheytanov, Hristo Silianov, Gotsi Delchiv, and Georgi Shopov.
It is striking, beyond lingering recent stereotypes, it really vindicates their humanity, that many Bulgarians and broader Balkan neighbors had an open aspiration to make alliances with those who were found to be peaceful, honest, and just, regardless of ethnicity or nationality. This would mean nothing if it wasn’t pursued under arduous circumstances.
Overcoming A Cynical World of Prejudices and Blind Spots
We live in a cynical world (these are often so-called activists and progressives) where a narrow historical materialism and identity politics is constantly wielded to suggest that prejudices and blind spots are permanent among some, and others are somehow humanizing agents or redeemers because of the historical oppression they have known, regardless of how they politically behave.
While Bulgaria and the Balkans are marked today by elements of racism and fascism in certain sectors of the grassroots, we must remember that they cannot, at a distance, be simply dismissed as ‘white’ people. For much of the twentieth century, after occupation by the Ottomans, the Balkans were invaded, occupied, divided by Nazi Germany. Then Bulgaria, and much (but not all) of the Balkans, became colonies of the former Soviet Union. These were not myths stirred by American propaganda; though the US never misses an opportunity to make absurd projections for their empire of liberty.
Those who live among Southeastern or Eastern European immigrants in the United States, or in other parts of the world, must keep in mind the conflicting tendencies within these communities. They may express white racism, or a profound anti-racism and desire to fight fascism. An openness to learning their heritage of struggles might stir new pathways to solidarity. If it requires grace under adversity, what community organizer doesn’t learn to overcome hindrances in their path?
There are no ‘People’s Republics’; Some ‘Whites’ are Conquered Peoples
Those who hoped Russia would win the Cold War, and received aid from this top-down regime for their own struggles at a distance, tragically or maliciously saw these societies as ‘people’s republics’. No such things have ever existed in the world. A republic, in the classical and contemporary sense, is minority rule of the few (elites and experts) through periodic elections.
Where Bulgarians and the Balkans experienced these violent contradictions (just as the Chinese, Iranians, and Cubans have) it can push them toward callous conservative anti-communist stances, or make them some of the most insightful left libertarians in the world. It is the latter archive that this book helps us to strengthen.
Autonomous movements, qualitatively, are self-organized and self-emancipating, not excuses for equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy, and management of subordinate lives. Today, we hear a lot of talk about self-determination. But those who don’t live by self-help psychobabble books understand that what aspiring rulers really want, who appropriate our image and likeness, is not for the multitudes of the historically oppressed to determine their own destiny. Instead, recognition under dominion status for their smaller states that will perennially sit on the backs of the local people, and treat those beyond their borders as cheap labor to degrade further. If this seems to be informed by observing aspiring Multi-Cultural America, or Africa and the Caribbean, perhaps this mirrors aspects of Southeastern Europe as well?
Placing Balkan Federations and Communes in Comparative World History
It is remarkable how the voices that reverberate in this volume were aware of some if not most of these global and contemporary problems. While anti-authoritarians at their best are against nations and states, increasingly their ideas are penetrating national liberation struggles, which are mass democratic struggles of those who have been denied their popular and direct self-government. We tend to forget this when we think nations are simply geographic locations which we happen to live, a gathering of people with a shared culture, or that a nation is simply a hierarchy of social classes. Popular democratic movements, like the search for communes and federations, can be forms of freedom. But we have to fight within them to guard their ethical and self-directed content. Otherwise they can also be gateways to state formation and capital accumulation.
Tarinski notes that this Balkan and Bulgarian heritage of radical autonomy has been captured by nationalists and aspiring imperialists in their region today. Equally disturbing the search for a Black autonomous movement in the US, today in many places the desire for ‘autonomy’ is being funded and derailed by the white imperial super-rich patricians. There is a desire to undermine growing anarchist impulses among African American militant youth, as ‘popular assemblies’ are invented to get out the vote for half the conquerors of the world under the premise of being ‘unapologetically black’ and ‘queer’. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Though many are aware of these historical forms of freedom and self-government, Tarinski warns that left libertarian ideas of federation and communes in Bulgaria and among the Balkans are unpopular today. This is a result that its anti-imperialist, radical internationalist, and left libertarian spirit are often smeared or covered up by those preoccupied with power struggles among nation-states in the region.
Conquered Peoples Not Unique to Any Ethnicity, Gender, or Color
As a reviewer in the United States, and as someone familiar with politics in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Global South, while we are aware of the imperial social construction of Ancient Greece and Western civilization, and the belligerence of psychopathic racial personalities found in the US and elsewhere, we must be alert that conquered peoples are not unique to any ethnicity, gender, or color. Just as CLR James was able to convince African Diaspora activists what they might learn for their own struggles from modern Hungary and ancient Greece, and the UK based reggae dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson of Jamaican descent placed the struggles of Bulgaria and Romania in conversation with Africa, it is in this spirit that global activists should receive Balkan Federation and Communes. If the oppressive systems we live under have to go, we must combine the risks of faith with methods for how to arrange society differently.
There is a historical tendency (it appears, disappears and reappears) to suggest that we should prioritize only the empowerment of foundational but neglected citizens within our own borders than to prioritize communing and federating with those of a different heritage or geographic origin. Yet this is always a masked desire to partner with those who patrol, and club us upside our heads, to contain us everyday.
Not Begging the People in Charge and Defending the Minorities Among Us
“Look at me! Our lives matter, too”, it is often said. But we should not be begging the people in charge. And Balkan Federations and Communes reminds of a politics that doesn’t kneel and scrape while supposedly condemning respectability. Autonomous movements cannot be confused with those sponsored by imperialists. Such alliances are a strange way to condemn privilege and speak of self-government. Yet when in the midst of war, with bombs bursting overhead and rubble crumbling all around us, and where borders no longer contain anything but freedom and self-government is not yet secured, it is difficult not to take assistance from where ever we might find it for one moment in time. It is what we do with that assistance which is key. Are we strengthening states and rulers or placing them in greater jeopardy?
Solidarity and mutual aid among toilers and commoners cannot be sustained if we condemn racial and ethnic insecurity but maintain elite brokerage above society. All world societies are populated by humans that have made historical mistakes; this cannot be permitted to justify ethnic eating and the violent race to the bottom it implies.
The spirit of Balkan Federation and Communes is that in every neighborhood we should prioritize and defend the minority among us. This is crucial because many historically oppressed actually find themselves the majority in many places. What we must secure is an end to contemporary fears, exploitation, and brutality. Learning from the degraded past, while acknowledging scars, we cannot carry the enemies’ worldview forward shouting we are independent and desiring recognition by them.
Beyond Affirmative Action Empires: Bringing the New Society Closer
We must search for and fan the flame of a pluralism that respects the autonomy (self-organization and self-direction) of every sector of the world while discarding it as a veil of social identity politics that reconstitutes and legitimates domination. Certainly, in Bulgaria and the Balkans in recent times, those animated by secession have not enhanced autonomy but beat back the popular democratic traditions of these societies that desire the grassroots to be self-directed and self-emancipating.
In this spirit we should consider the radical tradition of Bulgaria and the Balkans that each global sector can learn from. How to pronounce the names of key historical actors, and the places of epic events may be as yet unfamiliar to some of us. Still as we make friends and alliances with this remarkable book, Yavor Tarinski’s Balkan Federation and Communes, there will be opportunities for multi-directional flows of teaching and learning.
