Metodija Andonov-Čento was a Macedonian statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the People's Republic of Macedonia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War. In the Bulgarian historiography he is often considered a Bulgarian. The name of Čento was a taboo in Yugoslav Macedonia, but he was rehabilitated during the 1990s, after the country gained its independence.

The Socialist Republic of Macedonia, or SR Macedonia, commonly referred to as Socialist Macedonia, Yugoslav Macedonia or simply Macedonia, was one of the six constituent republics of the post-World War II Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and a nation state of the Macedonians. After the transition of the political system to parliamentary democracy in 1990, the Republic changed its official name to Republic of Macedonia in 1991, and with the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, it declared itself an independent country and held a referendum on 8 September 1991 on which a sovereign and independent state of Macedonia, with a right to enter into any alliance with sovereign states of Yugoslavia was approved.