Manolov, Christo (1896-1965)

Christo Manolov Kastarov was born into a family of middle intelligentsia in Dupnitsa, south west Bulgaria, in 1896. At an early age he participated in the movement to liberate Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire.

He was a strong advocate of a structured anarchist organisation, and believed that a revolutionary must be totally committed, “devoted to the revolution.”

During an incident with the police in 1923, he was arrested but managed to throw himself from a window of the National Security building and made his escape.

After the fascist coup of 1923 and the murder of many anarchist militants, he fled to Yugoslavia and belonged to the important anarchist group of Velicki-Beckerek (now Zrenjanin in Serbia), most of whose members worked at the station or the port. Manolov worked at the station and then as a longshoreman at the port.

In 1926 he returned secretly to Bulgaria to set up a relief committee for imprisoned anarchists and their families and to provide financial assistance for the publication of the weekly Svoboden Rabotnik -Free Worker (Sofia 1926-1928) which had replaced the banned Rabotnicheska Missal (Workers’ Thought) and was the undeclared organ of the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (FAKB). Mission accomplished, he returned to Yugoslavia. He participated in the secret anarchist conference at Kazanlak in August 1927 which he had helped prepare and then in 1927 emigrated to France, together with fellow anarchist Alexander Sapundjiev.
He lived in Paris, and then Toulouse. In 1927 he was a member of the Bien-être et Liberté group in Béziers and Cannes under various identities including Dobri Banov and Vladimir Vodenicharov.

In Beziers he worked in the woven shoe cooperative of Béziers at 40 avenue du Maréchal Foch and then a similar one founded in Cannes. These two companies employed many Bulgarian anarchist refugees, but also Communists, members of the Agrarian Party, and non-party refugees.

On a holiday in Bulgaria in summer 1929, he was arrested in the town of Sliven, along with thirty other anarchists from various towns, all accused of preparing a regional anarchist conference. He, like the other comrades, underwent beatings and torture.

In 1937, while living in Cannes under the name Vladimir Vodenitcharov , he was denounced to the police as the organiser of a network smuggling Bulgarian volunteers to fight in Spain and he was expelled.
Returning to Bulgaria, he resumed his activism and played an important role in organising young people in Dupnitsa.

After the Communists took power, he was arrested and interned several times in camps despite his advanced age. He was prosecuted in 1949 with a group of comrades, including Manol Vassev. Released from prison in 1950, he was arrested again in April 1951 in Rila and interned in a camp in Cuciyan.

Hristo Manolov died on August 9, 1965 in Dupnitsa.

Nick Heath

Sources:
Balkanski. G. Histoire du Mouvement Libertaire en Bulgarie (esquisse).