📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 24 September
Bulgaria spent the First World War fighting alongside Germany and Austria. One Bulgarian general spent it commanding a Russian army against them, and was shot by the Bolsheviks for his trouble. Radko Dimitriev was born on this date in 1859.
What happened on this day
He was born in the village of Gradets in what is now Sliven province, brought up by his grandmother in Kotel, and schooled at the Aprilov Gymnasium in Gabrovo, where as a teenager he had a hand in organising the April Uprising of 1876. During the Russo-Turkish war that followed he served as a translator with a Russian guards division, which set the pattern for everything after.
He finished the Military School in Sofia in 1879 and the Saint Petersburg Academy in 1884. Two years later, still only a captain, he joined the pro-Russian officers who kidnapped Prince Alexander of Battenberg and forced his abdication. Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov exiled him for it, and he spent the next decade in the Russian army, coming home only after Stambolov fell.
Then the respectable years. Colonel in 1900, head of the Bulgarian General Staff from 1904 to 1907, lieutenant general in 1912. In the First Balkan War he commanded the 3rd Army and beat the Ottomans decisively at Lozengrad and Lule Burgas. In 1913 he was sent to Saint Petersburg as minister plenipotentiary, and when the world war came he stayed, taking a Russian command while his own country lined up on the other side.
It ended badly. In spring 1915 he held the line at Gorlice in Galicia with five and a half divisions of poorly trained conscripts and 140 light guns, facing ten German divisions and seven hundred guns. The bombardment opened on 2 May, the Russian high command refused to believe it was the main attack, and by the time he was permitted to retreat on 10 May only about 40,000 men reached the river San. He said his army had been bled white, which was true, and was removed from command anyway. He was dismissed again in 1917, fled to Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus, and was executed there by the Bolsheviks in October 1918.
Why this matters for British expats
There is a British witness to all this. Sir Bernard Pares, the historian who covered the Eastern Front and later founded the study of Russia in British universities, met Dimitriev repeatedly and left this: "General Radko Dimitriev is a short and sturdily built man with quick brown eyes and a profile reminiscent of Napoleon. He talks quickly and shortly, sometimes drums on the table with his fingers, and now and then makes a rapid dash for the matches."
That is worth more than a paragraph of analysis, because it is the only way most of us will ever meet the man. It is also a reminder of how tangled Bulgaria's relationship with Russia has always been. The version you meet in a Bulgarian kitchen today, warm about the culture and cold about the politics, or the reverse, is not a recent development and it is not simple. Understanding that is most of what it takes to follow a Bulgarian conversation about Russia without putting your foot in it, and it is part of why we take the history seriously on this site.
There's more on this kind of thing over at the Shumen.UK residency guide.
Sources and further reading
The Kotel childhood, the Battenberg plot, the Balkan War commands and the Gorlice catastrophe are set out in the English Wikipedia entry on Radko Dimitriev, which also carries the Pares description, with the Bulgarian entry covering the Bulgarian service in more detail.