Kabakchiev, Khristo Stefanov

Born Jan. 2, 1878, in Galaţi, Rumania; died Oct. 6, 1940, in Moscow. A Bulgarian and international labor leader, a publicist. The son of a teacher.

Kabakchiev participated in student demonstrations against the government while he was at the Gymnasium in Varna in 1894 and helped organize student socialist circles in Gabrovo in 1896. He joined the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (BWSDP) in 1897. He studied in the medical department of the University of Montepellier in France in 1897 and in the law department of the University of Geneva in 1898–99 and 1901, graduating from the law department of the University of Sofia in 1904. From 1905 to 1928 he was a member first of the Central Committee of the BWSDP(Narrow Socialists) and then, from 1919, of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). Editor in chief from 1910 to 1923 of the newspaper Rabotnicheski vestnik, the central organ of the party, Kabakchiev was a delegate of the BWSDP(NS) to congresses of the Second International in Stuttgart (1907), Copenhagen (1910), and Basel (1912). He was a deputy to the National Assembly from 1914 to 1923 and attended the Second (1920), Third (1921), Fourth (1922), and Sixth (1928) Congresses of the Comintern.

Kabakchiev translated several works of V. I. Lenin into Bulgarian and became acquainted with Lenin personally in 1920. After becoming political secretary of the BCP in 1923, Kabakchiev helped prepare the September Antifascist Uprising of 1923 and was in prison from September 1923 to February 1926. He emigrated to Vienna in late 1926 and to the USSR in May 1927. Kabakchiev worked in the Bulgarian section of the Comintern and in the Internation Control Commission, to which he was elected in absentia at the Fifth Congress (1924), and taught at the International Lenin School and at the Communist University.

Joining the ACP(Bolshevik) in 1928, Kabakchiev was a research associate of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. He became a member of the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1935. Kabakchiev studied and wrote on the history of the BCP, of Bulgaria and other Balkan countries, and of the international labor movement. He became a doctor of historical sciences in 1935.