 However, per Kuzman Shapkarev, as a result of "Macedonists"' activity, in the 1870s the ancient ethnonym "Macedonians" was imposed on the local Slavs, and began to replace the traditional one "Bulgarians".During the 1880s, after recommendation by Stojan Novaković, the Serbian government also began to support those ideas to counteract the Bulgarian influence in Macedonia, claiming the Macedonian Slavs were in fact "pure Slavs" (i.e.Serbian Macedonians), while the Bulgarians, unlike them, were partially a mixture of Slavs and Bulgars (i.e.