With Tito's appointment as general secretary in 1937, the KPJ at last took notice
of deficient conditions in its Macedonian branch. But as in Croatia,
Tito insisted on the abandonment of separatist agitation in the face of the worldwide
fascist threat. The secretary chosen to revitalize the Regional Committee for Macedonia
was a veteran Communist functionary but hardly the sort of wax enthusiastic over the defense
of Yugoslavia's territorial integrity. Metodi Shatorov (Sharlo), born in Prilep in Vardar Macedonia,
spent much of the inter-war period in Bulgaria, where he joined the BRP and from 1927
served as a member of its Central Committee. An old Comintern hand and a Spanish veteran,
Shatorov was not in awe of Tito and would not shed his Bulgarian loyalties: one of his
noms de conspiration was "Old Bulgarian".
Shatorov first ran afoul of Tito in October 1940, at the KPJ's Fifth Land Conference,
clandestinely convened in Zagreb. He rejected the conference theses (drafted by Milovan Djilas)
which spoke of a popular front in the narrowest of terms, restricting it to the
worker-peasant constituency. Citing the colonial character of Macedonia, Shatorov insisted
on a Communist-led national revolutionary front of all Macedonian strata and groups
(including the bourgeoisie), which, in the words of the resolution of the KPJ's regional
conference for Macedonia (Skopje, September 8, 1940), had to struggle against
"Serbian imperialists and oppressors". Shatorov also insisted that the party could not win
the Macedonians' confidence unless it came out in favor of expelling the post-1918 Serb
settlers from Macedonia. He accused Djilas of a Serb chauvinist stand because Djilas's use
of historical analogies to defend the settlers, the Bolsheviks supposedly having protected the
Russian colonists in the Caucasus. Shatorov said
"We cannot go to the Macedonian peasant, and tell him that the colonists are
the brothers of Macedonian peasants. Generals, gendarmes, and spies are not brothers.
If we opted for an alliance with the colonists, the peasants would give us the shovel.
There are some 10,000 settler families with some 70,000 hectares of land. All of them are
the oppressors of the Macedonian people and we cannot have good relations with them.
In Belorussia all the colonists were arrested and their land was taken. We must do the same.
Those who know the psychology of the Macedonian peasant know that he is fighting
for blood revenge against the colonists."
Shatorov's defiant stand was overlooked for the sake of maintaining a semblance of leadership
authority in Macedonia. Newly elected to the KPJ CC at the Fifth Conference, Shatorov
in fact succeeded in keeping up the KPJ's pre--Tito line in Macedonia, the line predicated
on the breakup of Yugoslavia.