Dimitrov, Stanke

(also Stefan Dimitrov; pseudonym, Marek). Born Feb. 5, 1889, in Dupnitsa, now the city of Stanke-Dimitrov; died Aug. 26, 1944, in Briansk. Figure in the Bulgarian workers’ movement. Son of a shoemaker.

In 1904, Dimitrov joined the workers’ educational society Class Consciousness, which later became a party group of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party (Narrow Socialists). Dimitrov graduated from the pedagogical school in Shumen in 1908 and from the department of law of the University of Sofia in 1919. He was one of the leaders of the woodworkers’ trade union in 1914-15. Dimitrov took part in the Vladaia uprising of 1918. From 1919 to 1923 he was a member and in 1922 became secretary of the district committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party (Narrow Socialists), or BCP (NS), in the city of Dupnitsa, and he was a deputy of the BCP (NS) to the National Assembly during the same period. Dimitrov participated in the preparation of the September antifascist uprising of 1923. He was repeatedly arrested and was sentenced to imprisonment and death for his revolutionary activity. He was a delegate of the BCP (NS) to the fifth enlarged plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow in 1925. In the same year, Dimitrov emigrated to the USSR where he joined the ACP (Bolshevik). He was an instructor at the Communist University and the International Lenin School. In 1932 he began work in the Bulgarian sector of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Dimitrov engaged in underground political activity in Bulgaria from 1935 to 1937 and was secretary of the Central Committee of the BCP (NS) in 1936-37. During World War II (1939-45), Dimitrov was one of the organizers of the armed struggle of the Bulgarian people against monarchofascism. He worked on the editorial staff of Khristo Botev, the radio station of the national liberation movement in Bulgaria, and beginning in September 1941 he directed the broadcasts of the radio transmitter Naroden Glas. Dimitrov was tragically killed in an airplane crash. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1945.