Ilinden Pension Plan – Buying the Memories

The Yugoslav Communists implemented many measures to foster a “Macedonian” consciousness amongst the local populace in a historical context and in a region where such an ethno/national identity hardly existed.

The Communists manufactured a version of history that lent a historical legitimacy to the new “Macedonian” nation. One measure that they implemented in order to sanitize and reconstruct history for the purpose of giving the “Macedonian” nation a historical credibility was their employment of a pension plan for those who were involved in the Ilinden uprising.

In order to get the pension individuals had to fulfill conditions that basically bound them to espouse the notion that the Ilinden uprising was an “ethnic Macedonian” uprising. In reality a vast number of contemporary observers and documenters of the uprising at Krushevo did not record the uprising as an “ethnic Macedonian” rebellion. In essence the Yugoslav government offered financial incentives and advantages to those who reinterpreted the events at Kruschevo in such a manner that facilitated that agreed with new “Macedonian” historiography the government was manufacturing.

Keith Brown, in his book “The Past in Question“, goes into great detail about the events that took place at Kruschevo along with the subsequent measures taken by the communists to reconstruct the events to make the uprising appear as an “ethnic Macedonian” one. Brown spent time in FYROM studying government archives. These are some excerpts from Brown’s book regarding the “Ilinden Pension Plan”.

This is a description of the pension plan and the conditions that individuals had to fulfill in order to obtain the pension:

By Xiotis

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