Todor Mitev

Tocho Mitev's parents were teachers. His father, a communist and resister of the Bulgarian fascist regime, became hostile to the USSR when the Red Army occupied Bulgaria. Tocho, a medical student, approached the Bulgarian Communist Anarchist Federation (FACB) around 1944.

On 5 December 1948, 600 well-known FACB activists were arrested. Unactive, Tocho was not worried but, on his way to college, and finding a street barred by the militia, he learned that someone had managed to hang on the top floor of a hotel a banner “Down with the dictatorship.” This event decided him to commit himself more resolutely. He stuck leaflets on the doors of the Faculty of Medicine. He was arrested some time later, several times, to obtain his collaboration with the regime. As the pressure is getting stronger, he decided to go into exile. In March 1950, he left the country with a comrade, Mirtcho, hiding under a train.

A refugee in Yugoslavia, he spent several months in that country before being deported to Italy. Arrested in Trieste, he was held in a U.S. Army camp where refugees were sheltered and sorted before being shipped to countries in demand of manpower. Thanks to the complicity of Italian anarchists, he managed to escape to France. Helped by the French comrades, he won Paris where he declared himself at the prefecture on 3 November 1952, and obtained refugee status.

He then did various odd jobs, in several factories in the Paris region. Twice the CGT made him lose his job, because of his refugee status in a socialist country. In October 1953 he finally obtained a scholarship to resume his medical studies.

He then frequented the Bulgarian anarchist milieu in exile, and participated in the edition of his monthly magazine, Notre Route, which was roneoted in the cellar of a comrade of the French Anarchist Federation (FA), Jean-Max Claris, in the Vesinet. He was nevertheless wary of the middle of the exile, which he thought was infiltrated by Sofia’s secret services. He also opposed the collaboration with the Americans, who sought to infeorate the Bulgarian opponents. Tocho himself received a job offer from the International University, located near Strasbourg, but he quickly left when he was actually offered to work for American radio broadcasts Free Europe. He and three other overly critical comrades of the “Exile” were finally removed from Our Road.

Tocho Mitev sympathized more with the French FA. He also participated in an international choir headed by his comrade Mirtcho and composed of Spanish, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, and some French libertarian refugees. This choir repeated rue Sainte-Marthe, in the premises of the CNT in exile. It was through this that he met Claude Leconte, also a medical student, whom he was to marry in November 1955 (see Claude Mitev).

In 1955, Tocho Mitev joined the Kronstadt Group, which was excluded from the Communist Libertarian Federation (FCL), and at the end of the year would co-found the Anarchist Revolutionary Action Groups (GAAR) with other groups out of the FCL. He then actively collaborated in the review of the GAAR, Black and Red for which he wrote articles on self-management in Yugoslavia and criticism of Marxism.

That year he married Claude Leconte, of whom he had to have three children.

From 1957 to 1960, he and Claude practised medicine in Morocco. On their return to France, they re-imposed Black and Red, who was beating from the wing. The editorial meetings of Noir and Rouge are now held in the cellar of the house of the Mitev, in Vauhallan (Essonne). In May 1961, Tocho refused to follow the majority of GAARs who entered the FA to constitute the Union tendency of communist anarchist groups (UGAC). He was one of those who kept Black and Red as an independent magazine. When, after May 68, the militant crowd overflowed the magazine, the editorial meetings were moved to Paris.

Tocho and Claude then divested somewhat from Noir and Rouge, to engage more in the Syndicat de la médecine générale (SMG), whose orientations corresponded quite to their vision of a more humane medicine, less focused on profit, freed from pharmaceutical laboratories and hierarchies, seeking group work. Supported by the SMG, they participated in a class action to refuse to pay the compulsory contribution to the order of doctors, giving rise to a somewhat publicized trial.

After the stop of Black and Red in 1970, Tocho Mitev remained in connection with the former comrades of the GAAR.

In 1975, he co-founded the magazine Iztok with a few other Bulgarian exiles such as Nikola Tengerkov.

In 1978, Tocho participated in a three-day symposium on dissent at the Maison de l’architecture in Paris, then in a larger meeting with Russian dissidents in Marseille. He then tried unsuccessfully to reconnect with the Bulgarian libertarians in exile.

In 1979, the magazine Iztok was overwhelmed with an edition in French (see Nicolas Trifon) which had a great success in the French libertarian movement, because of the lighting it brought on the decay of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s.

Around 1980, Tocho and Claude Mitev translated from Bulgarian and published by Acratie the short stories of Georgui Markov under the title The Odyssey of a Passport. In 1989 after the fall of the wall, new contact with the Bulgarians was not very conclusive. Tocho then organized financial assistance in Bulgaria with Iztok to the newspaper La Pensée libre. He went to Bulgaria in 1992, but there was not much left of what he had known before.

Having retired in 1991, he edited in Bulgarian in 1993, Xristo Botev i negovoto vreme ("Khristo Botev and his time").

A few years later he died of brain cancer.