Per Bulgarian sources, the new authorities in the
Socialist Republic of Macedonia, were involved in retribution against people who did not support the formation of the new
ethnic Macedonian identity. To wipe out the
Bulgarophile sentiments of parts of the local population, the
Yugoslav communists started a process of
nation-building. Bulgarian sources put the number of dead "traitors" and "collaborationists" due to organized killings of Bulgarians during Bloody Christmas and afterwards at around 1,200. Per Croatian researcher
Vladimir Žerjavić, the number of the massacred collaborationists in Yugoslav Macedonia after WWII reached 1,000. According to Bulgarian historian Dobrin Michev the idea was to weaken the Bulgarian intelligentsia in Macedonia, to eradicate the Bulgarian self-identification of parts of the population, and to speed-up the process of
Macedonisation. At the end of 1944, a law was passed
for the protection of the Macedonian national honour, which persecuted people with a Bulgarian identity, pro-Bulgarian views, collaborationists or those who wanted more independence from Yugoslavia. A special court was also set up between April and August 1945 to implement the law. According to Bulgarian authors during the terror of January 1945, on the road between
Lake Ohrid and
Lake Prespa, and on the hills of
Galičica mountain near the village of
Oteševo and other villages, more Bulgarians were executed. Most of the bodies were disposed of in Lake Prespa. Nearly all inhabited places in
Vardar Macedonia provided victims for the campaign. In several cities in Vardar Macedonia, where people's courts were set up, death sentences over citizens charged with "great-Bulgarian chauvinism" were issued. In
Skopje, in 1945 alone, 18 trials were held with 226 defendants, 22 of whom were sentenced to death. In
Štip in the same period, seven Bulgarians were sentenced to death. Ten Bulgarians were sentenced to death in
Prilep and in
Veles. In
Bitola, nine were sentenced to death. The central
Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) expressed discontent with these actions of the
Communist Party of Macedonia (CPM), with an exchange of letters showing that the latter misunderstood the repressions to be greenlit by the former. The CPY struggled in these earlier years to assert itself over the affairs of the CPM, which was subject to considerable factionalism at the time. To make matters worse, the CPY's former representative in Macedonia with considerable understanding of the regional situation,
Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, had been recalled earlier in November 1944 and replaced with the less knowledgeable
Miha Marinko. According to Bulgarian sources, between 1945 and 1946 over 4,700
Bulgarians were
massacred or went missing. As a result of the purge, up to 100,000 people were deported, displaced, imprisoned, persecuted or sent to concentration camps in
Yugoslavia. The bodies of 50 executed victims were exhumed near the village of Letevci on June and July 1996. In 2005, a scholarly conference was organized in Veles to commemorate the murder of more than fifty locals but they were portrayed as patriotic Macedonians wrongly accused of pro-Bulgarian sentiments. Some Bulgarian researchers have questioned the high figures, noting that the assertion that these individuals were persecuted and killed solely on account of their Bulgarian national consciousness is deceptive. Bulgarian historian Stefan Detchev writes that "23,000 killed in Ohrid region and 150,000 sent to prisons are fantasies that don't even deserve a comment". He adds that "Many people from the elite who were convinced Bulgarians were brutally murdered. But there were others killed as well". ==See also==