upies the topmost position of
power in the party and is therefore first among equals in the Politburo.
Such is the concentration of political authority in the top bodies that
multiplicity of membership by party officials in any or all of the
central party organs is more the rule than the exception.

Membership

After the successful coup d'etat in September 1944, communist party
membership grew with unprecedented speed. From prisons and internment
camps and from self-exile abroad, party leaders began to converge in
Sofia to restructure the party and to form a new government. Party
members assisted by sympathizers helped fill the necessary manpower
requirements as functionaries and working groups in the new coalition
government. A period of intensive recruitment and propaganda followed
that swelled the number of members from 15,000 to 250,000 in just four
months. By the time the Fifth Party Congress convened in December 1948,
party membership reached 500,000. This was in part due to the merger of
the Social Democrats with the BKP in August 1948. In large part,
however, Bulgaria's egalitarian peasant society--coupled with
indiscriminate recruitment using hardly any criteria for
qualification--produced a predominantly peasant membership. Workers
accounted for slightly over one-fourth of the total membership as
compared to one-half made up of peasants.

Ironically, the intense campaign for new members was accompanied by
wide-scale purges within the party during a power struggle between the
Stalin faction and the home faction of the BKP. Led by Chervenkov, the
Moscow-oriented leaders succeeded in getting rid of their political
opponents and soon after established a Stalinist kind of government in
the country. Observers noted that this was aimed not only at weeding out
undesirable party elements but, more important, at increasing the number
of workers and consequently achieving a numerical balance with the
peasant members.

Once in full control of the party and government, the BKP hierarchy
turned its attention to more systematic methods of recruitment. By the
time the Eighth Party Congress convened in November 1962, the BKP had
528,674 members plus 22,413 candidates. It was also at about this time
that the Zhivkov government relaxed the open police terror and pardoned
6,000 political prisoners, most of them Communists.

The Ninth Party Congress, held in November 1966, provided new
regulations concerning party composit