Dimitar Blagoev

Dimitar Blagoev (1856 to 1924) was a Bulgarian Marxist thinker and political organiser, born in a Macedonian village of the Ottoman Empire and educated in Constantinople, Odessa and Saint Petersburg. While a student in Russia in the early 1880s he turned to socialism after reading Ferdinand Lassalle and the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital, and in 1884 he formed one of the first Marxist groups to operate inside Russia. Returning to Bulgaria, he helped found the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party at the Buzludzha Congress of 1891 and for decades edited the journal Novo vreme. He led the Narrow Socialists after the party split of 1903 and later founded and led the Bulgarian Communist Party. For the atlas he matters as a theorist who carried classical Marxism and the ideas of the Second International into the Balkans, and as a figure whose strict class-party doctrine split the early Bulgarian labour movement.