Lambi Stanchev Kandev

Born 1879 in Svishtov; died Apr. 19, 1925, in Sofia. Figure of the Bulgarian youth and workers’ movements. Became a member of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party in 1900.

Kandev graduated from the Lorn Teachers’ College in 1895 and was a teacher until 1911. He began to contribute to various periodical publications in 1902 and was editor of the newspaper Uchitelska iskra from 1911 to 1919. Kandev was the secretary-treasurer of the Teachers’ Social Democratic Organization from 1912 to 1919 and then was active in the Bulgarian Teachers’ Communist Organization and in the Union of Workers in Education. He was elected secretary of the Young Social Democratic Workers’ League in 1912, which became the Bulgarian Communist League of Youth in 1928. Kandev was killed in Sofia during the April uprising of 1925.

In his articles, most of which were devoted to questions of education, Kandev criticized the idealistic basis and the religious and chauvinist tendency of the bourgeois system of education. Considerable discussion was devoted to the organization and leadership of educational work, the conditions of teachers, the problems of professional and polytechnical education, and the education of working youth. Kandev translated the book Popular Education and Democracy, by N. K. Krupskaia (1922), from Russian into Bulgarian.