Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944

by E.P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the preeminent British historians of the second half of the twentieth century; his The Making of the English Working Class (1964) is arguably the most influential work of British history published during that period. In the present work, originally presented as a set of lectures at Stanford University, Thompson returned to a question that had been on his mind since the war years, the circumstances surrounding the death of his older brother Frank as a British Liaison Officer with the Bulgarian partisans in 1944. Though these events, Thompson admitted, constituted only a historical footnote, they afforded him an opportunity to engage larger intellectual and political matters that we now associate with the early beginnings of the Cold War and to illustrate certain elements of historical method. Thompson was here concerned not so much with what is fact and what is interpretation as with "the activities of anti-historians, how sensitive evidence is destroyed or screened, how myths originate, how historical anecdote may simply be a code for ideology, how the reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge." Early in 1944, a British Special Operations mission was parachuted into Serbia to make contact with a group of Bulgarian partisans operating in the area. Their aim was to arrange air drops of supplies for the partisans and to assist them in extending guerrilla warfare across the frontier into Bulgaria itself. Frank Thompson was head of the British mission when it entered Bulgaria with the partisan forces. By the end of May, the entire group had been killed or captured. After a show trial, Frank (though a British officer in uniform) was executed by a firing squad together with the remaining leaders of the partisans and the villagers who had aided them. The book shows how the status of the actors in this drama―and the respect accorded to them in the decades that followed―varied with changes in the political climate of Europe and the world. It does not simply examine the events themselves, although these are clarified, but also analyzes the politics that lay behind the events, notably the conflicting interests of the "western" and "eastern" allies in supporting the partisans and the British liaison mission.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, marxist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition," calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read for Thompson fans that turns him into a reflective writer, not just one of the most scholastically sophisticated Marxist historians of English and labor history. Emotionally stirring, it shows the decision that many Western European communists had to make during World War II. Facing the threat of fascism, communists like Frank Thompson had no choice but to enlist in the military of his home country and to go fight the fascists on the front for liberation, democracy, and the salvation of Europe from destruction. Perhaps those interested in Bulgarian history of in the history of communists in WWII would find this book useful.