Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO; Bulgarian: Вътрешна македонска революционна организация (ВМРО), romanized: Vatreshna Makedonska Revolyutsionna Organizatsiya (VMRO); Macedonian: Внатрешна македонска револуционерна организација (ВМРО), romanized: Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija (VMRO)) was a secret revolutionary society founded in the Ottoman territories in Europe that operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was founded in 1893 in Salonica and initially aimed to secure autonomy for Macedonia and Adrianople regions in the Ottoman Empire. However, it later became an agent serving Bulgarian interests in Balkan politics. IMRO modeled itself after the earlier Bulgarian Internal Revolutionary Organization of Vasil Levski and accepted its motto "Freedom or Death" (Свобода или смърть). According to the Organization's earliest statute from 1894, the membership was reserved exclusively for Bulgarians. This was later changed on the initiative of Gotse Delchev, who wanted IMRO to depart from its exclusively Bulgarian nature, so he opened the membership for all inhabitants of European Turkey, and the organization began to acquire a more separatist stance. Delchev sought autonomy for Macedonia under the slogan Macedonia for the Macedonians. However, these new formulas as a whole failed to attract other ethnic groups, as they generally perceived it as "the Bulgarian Committee"; eventually, IMRO's base remained only among Bulgarian millet-affiliated Slavic speakers in Ottoman Macedonia and in Adrianople vilayet. It used the Bulgarian language in all its documents and in its correspondence. The Organisation established its Foreign Representation in 1896 in Sofia. Starting in the same year, it fought the Ottomans using guerrilla tactics, and in this, they were successful, even establishing a state within a state in some regions, including their tax collectors. This struggle escalated in 1903 with the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising. The fighting involved about 15,000 IMRO irregulars and 40,000 Ottoman soldiers, lasting for over seven weeks. After the uprising failed, and the Ottomans destroyed some 100 villages, the IMRO resorted to more systematic forms of terrorism targeting civilians. More importantly, the Ilinden disaster splintered IMRO and signalled the beginning of a fratricidal conflict between the left-wing faction ("federalists") who continued to favor autonomy as a step towards independent Macedonia and its inclusion into a future Balkan Federation, and the right-wing faction ("centralists") which favored unification with Bulgaria. In fact, the division was a culmination of a conflict which existed within IMRO since its formation. It was based partially on ideology, and partly in terms of personality and locality, and it would plague the Macedonian revolutionary movement over the next decades.

During the Balkan Wars and the First World War, the organization supported the Bulgarian army and joined Bulgarian wartime authorities when they temporarily took control over parts of Thrace and Macedonia. IMRO's adherents regarded the division of the area among the Balkan states in the Balkan Wars not as "liberation", but as entailing the partition of Macedonia. Retaining the unity of Macedonia seemed crucial for IMRO in this period; autonomism as a political tactic was abandoned, and annexationist positions were supported, aiming eventual incorporation of occupied areas into Bulgaria. The desire to incorporate most of Macedonia and Thrace within a Bulgarian state lay behind the Bulgarian decision to enter each of these three wars. The Bulgarian government first attached the IMRO chetas as auxiliaries of its army in the Balkan wars and then drafted the former paramilitaries directly into it, as Bulgarian military personnel during the First World War. Under the right-wing leadership, IMRO arose then from a clandestine organization into an important factor of the Greater Bulgarian policy, supporting the Bulgarisation of the area. Additionally, some guerrilla companies formed by IMRO-irregulars participated in several massacres of accused Serbomans in the areas of Azot, Skopska Crna Gora and Poreče. Regular Bulgarian troops took control of the region while komitadjis were appointed mayors or prefects and served as gendarmerie corps. IMRO detachments participated in the suppression of the Serbian Toplica uprising. Nevertheless, the division within IMRO during this period continued to exist, and the wars reinforced the rival federalist and unionist tendencies in the IMRO factions. These two tendencies were consequently adopted in the interwar period, the first one by the "federalist" wing and the latter by the "centralist" wing.

After World War I, the combined Macedonian-Thracian revolutionary movement separated into two detached organizations, IMRO and ITRO. Simultaneously, the "federalists" split up and formed the Macedonian Federative Organization and later IMRO (United). After this, the IMRO earned a reputation as an ultimate terror network, seeking to change state frontiers in the Macedonian regions of Greece and Serbia (later Yugoslavia). They contested the partitioning of Macedonia and launched raids from their Petrich stronghold into Greek and Yugoslav territory. Their base of operation in Bulgaria was jeopardized by the Treaty of Niš, and the IMRO reacted by assassinating Bulgarian prime minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski in 1923, with cooperation of other Bulgarian elements who organised a coup d'état. In 1925, the Greek army launched a cross-border operation to reduce the IMRO base area, but it was ultimately stopped by the League of Nations, and IMRO attacks resumed. A conflict over the leadership arose and Ivan Mihailov ordered the assassination of Aleksandar Protogerov, which sparked a fratricidal war between the so called "Mihailovists" and "Protogerovists". By 1928, after the assassination of Protogerov, Mihailov proposed a new plan calling for unification of a pre-1913 Macedonia region into a single state, that would be independent from Bulgaria. In the interwar period the IMRO also cooperated with the Croatian Ustaše, and their ultimate victim was Alexander I of Yugoslavia, assassinated in France in 1934. After the 1934 Bulgarian coup d'état, their Petrich stronghold was subjected to a military crackdown by the Bulgarian army, and the IMRO was reduced to a marginal phenomenon. According to Ivan Katardžiev, practically, neither the left nor the right wing of the IMRO questioned their Bulgarian provenance and Dimitar Vlahov would do so only in 1948 at a Politburo's session of the Macedonian Communist Party.

The organization changed its name on several occasions, but the name VMRO (IMRO) remained most noted. After the fall of communism in the region, numerous parties claimed the IMRO name and lineage to legitimize themselves. Among them, the right-wing parties established in the 1990s, "VMRO-BND" in Bulgaria and "VMRO-DPMNE" in then Republic of Macedonia.