The Macedonian Question ? 
During a period of some 10-15 years (1913-1925), the enormous movements of population which took place in Greek Macedonia changed the ethnological composition of the area. In the period of sustained warfare (1912-1919) tens of thousands of Bulgarians left, and this shift was completed with the departure of a further 53,000 Bulgarians by virtue of the voluntary exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria. This left only the Slav-speakers principally in Western Macedonia, most of whom had a Greek national consciousness. League of Nations figures dated 1926 give the following picture of the population of Greek Macedonia (at a time when the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey had been completed):
| Greeks | 1,341,000 | 88.8% |
| Muslims | 2,000 | 0.1% |
| Bulgarians | 77,000 | 5.1% |
| Others (mainly Jews) | 91,000 | 6.0% |
| Total | 1,511,000 |
The liberation of Macedonia and the widespread movements of population which followed led to the three sections of Macedonia, as incorporated into the three Balkan states, becoming part of the life of the respective countries. This process was neither uniform nor rapid.
In Greek Macedonia, the revolutionary ethnological developments led to the emergence of homogeneously Greek population, with only sparse alien elements mainly in border districts. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) put an end to the traditional Greek policy of the "Great Idea". This allowed the Greek governments of the inter-war years to turn their attention to the country's domestic affairs and to the building of the modern Greek state. The "new lands", including Macedonia, experienced difficulties at first in absording the influx of refugees but were later to play a leading part in the economic and social upsurge of modern Greece and her people.
As for the problem of the other ethnic and linguistic groups left within Greek borders, the Greek government attempted, after the signing of the peace treaties ending the First World War, to keep in line with the atmosphere current in Europe at the time, complying to the letter with all the provisions of the League of Nations minority treaties. Overlooking the fact that the Slav-speakers who had chosen to remain in Greece thought of themselves largely as Greeks, the Greek government of the day agreed, in 1924, to sign with Bulgaria an agreement known as the Kalfov-Politis protocol, by which the Slav- speaking populations left within Greek territory were acknowledged to be Bulgarian. However, this raised such an outcry in the country -not to mention the fact that Serbia reacted by repudiating the Greco-Serbian treaty of alliance of 1913- that the Greek Parliament refused to ratify the protocol and the League of Nations relieved Greece of the obligations she had undertaken by it. After that Greece regarded the remaining Slav-speakers -of whom there were in any case not more than 100,000- as Slav-speaking Greeks, an attitude which was greeted with relief by the vast majority of those concerned since their national consciousness was Greek regardless of what language they might speak.
A few years later (1927), a new Greco-Bulgarian agreement settled all the economic issues which had manifested themselves during the mass exchange of populations and remained pending since.
In Bulgarian Macedonia, the influx of large numbers of refugees from the Serbian and Greek zones caused widespread social and political conflict. These populations had not been reconciled to the idea of being uprooted from their homes. They were sharply irridentist and their feelings fed the political revanchism of successive governments in Sofia throughout the inter-war period.
The attempts of pre-war Serbian (Yugoslav) governments to "Serbianise" the Slav populations of Yugoslavian Macedonia met with less success. These populations, largely imbued since the period of Turkish rule with the Bulgarian national ideology, continued to be orientated towards Sofia.
After the ethnological restoration of Greek Macedonia, it was only natural that disputes over 'the Macedonian question' in the inter-war period should shift principally to the fate of the population of Yugoslavian Macedonia. The designs of the Bulgarians -and only secondarily of the Yugoslavs- on Greek Macedonia and Thrace no longer involved the liberation of ethnically kin populations but was a matter of geopolitical calculation and the search for an outlet to the Aegean.
In the meantime, a new factor had burst dynamically on to the scene. After the end of the war, the leaders of the infant Soviet Union attempted to exploit any instance of smouldering socio-political unrest in Eastern Europe, in the hope that the revolution could be spread to the area. In the early 1920s, Bulgaria appeared to be the ripest of all the Balkan states for a successful attempt to repeat the Soviet experiment. For that reason, the Comintern adopted the view of the Bulgarian communists on the Macedonian question, hoping thus to win over to the cause of communist revolution the aggrieved masses of the Bulgarian Macedonian refugees. The armed rising attempted in Bulgaria in 1923 failed, but the Comintern continued for a number of years to suppont Bulgarian nationalist positions as expressed by Bulgarian leaders such as Vasili Kolarov and Georgi Dimitrov (General Secretary of the Comintern).
The line taken by the Comintern and the Balkan Communist Federation (BCF) -in which all the Balkan communist parties were represented - was expressed in a series of party texts in the period 1922-24 and provided for the foundation of an "independent and united Macedonia (and Thrace)" which would have consisted of the corresponding geographical departments of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece. The putative state would in effect have been a second Bulgaria. This, at any rate, is what emerges from the initial texts of the Comintern and the BCF which use the te-rm "Macedonians" to denote not any particular ethnic group but, in general, all the inhabitants of Macedonia and more specifically the Bulgarians of Macedonia.
Even the Yugoslav Communist Party, as can be seen from the decisions of its Third Conference of 1923, when referring to the oppressed masses in Yugoslavian Macedonia, spoke only of "Turks, Albanians, Bulgarians and Vlachs".
Despite their initial reservations, the Communist Parties of Greece and Yugoslavia in the end came into line with the Comintern. Some cadres, inluding the historian Yannis Kordatos, editor of the party newspaper Rizospastis, resigned from the Party, claiming that the conditions -at least in Greek Macedonia after the major exchanges of populations- made the line taken by their Bulgarian comrades entirely groundless.
The Comintern persisted in its pro-Bulgarian line until 1935, when international conditions in view of the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe led to the popular front policy, which did not favour the advancing of nationalist or separatist slogans capable of alienating the broad masses of the people. The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) decided at its Sixth Congress in December 1935 to adopt a new line on the Macedonian question, replacing the "independent and united Macedonia" line with one of complete equality for all minorities.
