Born 1904 - Kilifarevo, Bulgaria, died May 28th 1925 - Belovo, Bulgaria.

Born in Kilifarevo, Bulgaria on 14th August 1904, the student-actress Mariola Sirakova belonged to a well-off family. She revolted from an early age against her social background and became an anarchist communist when she went to the Girls High School at Tarnovo in 1919.

She regularly took part in secret anarchist meetings.

She began a relationship with another Bulgarian anarchist, Gueorgui Cheitanov. She associated with other important anarchists like Petar Maznev, Georgi Simeonov Popov, and others. In her frre time, she acted in the Orpheus Theatre Company in Kilifarevo. In 1922-23 she studied in Pleven. She often hid wanted anarchists like Vassil Popov and Valko Shankov

In 1923 a military coup led to the butchery of 35,000 workers and peasants. The armed resistance that followed ended with the bomb attack by the Communist Party on Sofia cathedral which was aimed at the country's elite. A massive campaign of repression was then unleashed by the fascists and military against the revolutionary movement.

Mariola was arrested by the police, and brutally beaten. In June 1924 she returned to Kilifarevo. She was arrested again, but soon released. She gave support to the Kilifarevo cheta (armed guerilla unit), bringing them food, medicine and clothes and caring for the wounded.

Special police detachments were set up to hunt Cheitanov down. All the guerrillas united into a single detachment, being forced to disperse towards the end of May. Cheitanov and Mariola Sirakova, were caught in an ambush and arrested. They were taken to Belovo railway station and shot with 12 other prisoners on May 28th June 1925.

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  • President_Obama [they/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    On this site, people often suggest Dimitrov's work from 1935 as Marxist theory to learn about fascism. People shouldn't do that, as there are many, many flaws with Dimitrov's analysis of fascism. It's better to suggest historians who analyse fascist ideology and clarify the various positions historians have, like Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism (2005), and Roger Griffin The Nature of Fascism (1993). Or, if you're Dutch, Te Slaa's Fascisme from last year. No historian, not even the Marxist ones, thinks fascism was simply "a result" of capitalist crisis, or a "terrorist dictatorship" without mass support. This is in part thanks to the numerous empirical studies and historical research done in the past 50 years. I'll close this comment with an excerpt from Kitchen's Fascism (1976).

    The Comintern failed to see the importance of the mass base of fascism and thus underestimated both its offensive strength and its staying power. Greater emphasis on the mass base of fascism would also have prevented the Comintern from thinking of fascist movements as being little more than the paid agents of monopoly capitalism with virtually no autonomy. It was a strikingly crude example of vulgar Marxist determinist economism, which denied Marx's insistence on the dialectical relationship between basis and superstructure and which reduced dialectical materialism to a mono-causal determinism. Dimitroff's speech to the Seventh Congress remains the basis of the present-day Marxist-Leninist heteronomic theory of fascism. Fascism is seen as an essentially dependent movement, for fascists are the agents of monopoly capitalism with little autonomous will. The problem with this theory is to provide adequate empirical data on the ways in which big capital supposedly dominated the fascist movement. [Hexbear note: empirical data showed the inverse was true, and fascism had great support from the masses.]

    Note: I don't recommend Kitchen's book, I recommend the two I mentioned above, but his overview of the development of the Comintern's view of fascism in the intro is great.

    tl;dr: want to learn about fascism? Read books by historians, not politicians!