SEVERAL dozen anti-fascists rallied in Sofia on Saturday in protest against a far-right commemoration of pro-Nazi World War II general Hristo Lukov.

Neonazis have held rallies in honour of Lukov, the head of the fascist and anti-semitic Union of Bulgarian National Legions from 1932-43, since 2003 on February 13, the anniversary of his 1943 assassination by communist partisans Ivan Burudzhiev and Violeta Yakova, the latter of whom was hunted down and executed aged just 21 the following year.

This year’s rally was prohibited but far-right militants gathered in Sofia to lay flowers at Lukov’s former house, with police facilitating their doing so in small groups because of Covid restrictions. Many bore flaming torches as carried at Nazi rallies, and now at marches organised by Ukrainian fascists honouring Nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera.

David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists’ Group told the Morning Star: “As Jewish socialists we are proud to remember the Sephardi-Jewish, communist anti-fascist partisan Violeta Yakova who assassinated General Lukov in 1943.

“We are very concerned about the continued presence of far-right forces in several central and eastern European states and give our solidarity to anti-racists and anti-fascists there who are combatting rising anti-semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Roma racism in these countries.”

The rehabilitation of second world war fascists has accompanied rising anti-communism in much of eastern Europe, most dramatically in Ukraine, where Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles in the 1940s, is now feted as a national hero.

Last week a Polish court ordered two historians to apologise for research exposing the Polish complicity in the Nazi Holocaust.