Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party

(Broad Socialists) or BWSDP(BS), founded in 1903 at the Tenth Congress of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party by an opportunist tendency that arose in this party in the 1890’s and united around the magazine Obshcho delo (Common Cause), which began publication in 1900 under the editorship of la. Sakyzov. Ia. Sakyzov and his supporters accused the members of the revolutionary wing, which wanted to transform the party into a vanguard of the working class, of a narrow interpretation of Marxism and advocated a so-called broad interpretation of Marxism and collaboration with the bourgeoisie. In 1908 and 1909 the BWSDP(BS) admitted groups of anarcho-liberals and progressives who had split off from the revolutionary wing of social democracy; after that the party was sometimes called BWSDP(United). During World War I the party pursued a social-chauvinistic policy. At the time of the revolutionary waves in Bulgaria in 1918–23, the leaders of this party joined bourgeois governments (1918–19) and A. Tsankov’s fascist government (1923–24). In 1934 the BWSDP(BS) was officially disbanded, along with the other Bulgarian political parties, by the government of K. Georgiev. During World War II some social democrats established contacts with the Communist Party and joined the Fatherland Front (FF). After the victory of the antifascist uprising of Sept. 9, 1944, the BWSDP(BS) was reconstituted, and social democratic representatives participated in the FF government. With the deepening of the people’s democratic revolution in Bulgaria, the right wing of the social democrats fought more and more vigorously against the people’s democratic system and found itself isolated from the majority of party members. From May to August 1948 the Social Democratic Party purged its ranks of alien elements and joined the Communist Party on the basis of full acceptance of the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the organizational principles of the Bulgarian Communist Party.