Pirinsky, George

PIRINSKY, GEORGE (1901-1992). Leader of the small but politically active Macedonian community in the United States, Pirinsky successfully urged an anti-fascist “Popular Front” approach to immigrant politics and culture along with the other general aims of the 1930s-40s Left. After rising to prominence at the creation of the United Nations, Pirinsky was besieged by Cold War repression and spent his later decades in exile.

Born George Nikolov Zajkov in the Pirin region of Macedonia (present day Bulgaria) in 1901, he was the son of a wealthy figure who remained neutral, for business reasons, during the Macedonian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1903 and the Balkan Wars of the 1910s. The young man became dismayed after Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia occupied and divided Macedonia. He also disdained his family’s bourgeois lifestyle and at the age of sixteen he discovered Marxism. He began organizing socialist groups throughout Macedonia until fascism took root in Bulgaria and right-wing revolutionaries captured control of Pirin Macedonia.

Fearing for his life, Pirinsky fled the Balkans and arrived in the United States in 1923. He began writing political poetry about Macedonian issues, but in order to protect his family from persecution by the Bulgarian government and right-wing Macedonians immigrants, he signed his poems “George Pirinsky,” in honor of his homeland.

Pirinsky moved around the Midwest, settling in Michigan in 1926. At an assembly line in Pontiac, German American Communists discovered his gift for oratory. They encouraged him to convince Macedonian immigrants working in the factory to join the labor movement. Pirinsky grasped this opportunity to spread progressive ideals amongst his countrymen and to build a solid base of Macedonians who would support the liberation of the homeland.

Pirinsky soon extended his efforts outside the workplace, hosting his first organizational meeting in Toledo, Ohio in 1927, gathering several dozen Macedonians to discuss the labor movement and broader progressive ideas including the liberation and unification of Macedonia. This sparked the informal creation of the Macedonian-American People’s League (MPL). The next year, Pirinsky started a socialist newspaper called The Macedonian Bulletin. While the paper touted socialist ideology, its overarching objective was to oppose the right-wing ideology and activity of the Macedonian Political Organization (MPO), an organization of Macedonian-Americans created by agents of the Bulgarian government.

Soon, the MPL became a formal organization with two primary aims: to educate Macedonian-Americans in the spirit of American democracy and to work toward the liberation and unification of Macedonia in an independent people’s republic. Pirinsky was elected secretary and Smile Voydanoff, a veteran of the Macedonian revolution, the group’s president. The name of the newspaper changed to Consciousness and Cross Mischeff became editor. If the three leaders were unified in their stance on Macedonian independence, Pirinsky often found himself at odds with Mischeff, who thought the MPL should be an outright communist organization. Pirinsky, on the other hand, believed it should serve as a united front organization to attract as many progressives, socialists and radicals as possible. The disagreement became so contentious that Communist Party leaders arbitrated the dispute. Ultimately, Mischeff was expelled from the MPL, which found new editors and changed the newspaper’s name to People’s Will.

Organizing throughout the 1930s, Pirinsky opened MPL branches across the Midwest, Pennsylvania, and New York. The three strongest local branches were in Detroit, Akron, Ohio, and Granite City, Illinois, targeting Macedonian communities where the MPO had already established a stronghold.

The MPL relied heavily on activism to accomplish its aims. American newspapers often reported on their militant protests in streets and parks. Members and supporters pushed for five-day workweeks and six-hour workdays; opposing cost of living increases, war relief cuts, home and farm foreclosures, and fascism; and supporting unemployment insurance and other bills that would require the government to pay rent, fuel and electricity for the unemployed. In Wisconsin, the MPL chapter joined other progressive groups in proposing a bill to prevent officers from using gas to quell riots. In Minnesota, the MPL urged Macedonians to join the Farmer Labor Clubs. The Minnesota MPL chapter even provided most of the manpower in the early organizing days of the local Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.

Pirinsky and the MPL persistently confronted the MPO and right-wing Macedonian Americans, in one instance bringing African Americans comrades to disrupt an MPO meeting, knowing that the presence of Blacks would infuriate the racist MPO members. In another instance, at a Macedonian café in Hammond, Indiana, a brawl ended in a shootout. Outside an MPO convention in 1934, MPL members were arrested and charged with communistic activities for handing out leaflets criticizing Mayor William Hosey for giving the welcome address at a gathering of fascists. At the next year’s MPO convention, Pirinsky circulated a signed statement claiming that Macedonians Americans were being misled by MPO’s leaders, labeling them as fascist agents of Bulgarian imperialism.

Pirinsky became one of the de-facto leaders of the American Slav Congress (ASC) during the 1940s. He helped lead and organize many of their rallies and eventually became secretary of the United Committee of the South-Slavic Americans, which aimed to unite South-Slavic Americas against the Axis powers. As part of his role with the ASC, Pirinsky participated in the United Nations Conference in San Francisco.

As assorted official bodies intensified the witch-hunt of progressives, communists and radicals, right-wing Slavic-Americans attacked Pirinsky, calling him a tool of Soviet Russia. Pirinsky faced arrest in 1948, under the charge of being an immigrant belonging to an organization advocating the overthrow of the government. Presidential candidate Henry Wallace insisted Pirinsky was not a communist and had been slandered. The House Committee on UnAmerican Activities continued pursuing Pirinsky, who testified that he was working for progressive movements and the peaceful liberation and reunification of Macedonia. Still, congressmen branded him as the leader of a Russian group spreading poisonous propaganda in America.

The FBI had begun investigating Pirinsky in the 1930s, eventually establishing a dossier on him over 1,000 pages long. J. Edgar Hoover directed staff to investigate Pirinsky until they had a basis to detain him, as “one of the highest figures in the Communist Party” and “chief organizer” of Macedonians in America. As the persecution of progressives continued, Pirinsky was arrested several times on false pretenses. All but forced out of the United States in 1951 and resettled in Bulgaria, he appreciated Macedonia’s acceptance as a republic within Yugoslavia. The persecution of progressives in America caused the MPL to disband, leaving the right-wing MPO as the only national organization of Macedonian Americans. Long honored and greatly admired by Macedonian Americans, Pirinsky died in Sofia in 1992.

Sinadinoski, Victor. George Pirinsky: The Voice of Macedonian Progressives in America. Burlington, Vermont: 2018.

Sinadinoski, Victor. Macedonians in America: Their Lives and Struggles during the 20th Century. Burlington, Vermont: 2017.

Sinadinoski, Victor. The Uncomfortable Truth of the Macedonian Political Organization. Burlington, Vermont: 2018.