Pro-Serbians vs. Pro-Bulgarians: Revisionism in Post-Socialist Macedonian Historiography

Abstract

After 1990, historians in the Republic of Macedonia soon settled in accepting communist-time scholarship as the base on which to build further research. The reluctance for a thorough re-evaluation of communist historiography was mainly caused by the fact that the very nation of Macedonia was a result of communist Yugoslav policies, and this historiography had played a major role in the nation-building process. Historians therefore feared that substantial critique of communist historiography and of the Yugoslav period would jeopardize Macedonian national identity. There was also no official effort for a re-evaluation of the communist past. Cracks in this consensus occurred after 1998, when the anti-communist opposition came to power. Revisionist tendencies appeared which portrayed Yugoslavia as a peoples' prison and tried to rehabilitate personalities from Macedonian history, previously kept out of the national pantheon. The main dividing line was the one between historians who kept to the radical dissociation of Macedonian from Bulgarian history, and those who accepted the cultural proximity between these two peoples. Both tendencies, however, shared their basically nationalistic conceptualization of the past.