The Bulgarian Communist Party was the ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 1990 when it ceased to be a Communist state. The Bulgarian Communist Party had dominated the Fatherland Frontcoalition that took power in in 1944, late in World War II, after it led a coup against Bulgaria's fascist government in conjunction with the Red Army's crossing the border. The party's origins lay in the Social Democratic and Labour Party of Bulgaria, known as the Tesnyaki, which was founded in 1903 after a split in the Social-Democratic Party. The party's founding leader was Dimitâr Blagoev and its subsequent leaders included Georgi Dimitrov. The party opposed World War I, was sympathetic to the October Revolution in Russia and applied to join the Communist International upon its founding in 1919. Upon joining the Comintern the party was reorganised as the Communist Party of Bulgaria. Dimitrov was a member of the party's Central Committee from its inception until his death in 1949 also serving as Bulgaria's leader from 1946.
In 1938 the party merged with the Workers' Party to become the Bulgarian Workers Party. In 1948 the BWP merged with the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party to become the Bulgarian Communist Party once again.
Following Dimitrov's sudden death, the party was led by Vulko Chervenkov a hard-line Stalinist who oversaw a number of party purges under Moscow's guidance. The party joined the Cominform at its inception in 1948 and conducted purges against suspected Titoites following the expulsion of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the alliance. Hundreds of thousands of suspect party members and suspected counterrevolutionaries outside of the party were imprisoned. In March 1954, one year after Stalin's death, Chervenkov was deposed.
Albania's communistparty, in early 1992, was in a state of transition, and its future remained uncertain.
Known from 1941 to 1948 as the Albanian CommunistParty, from November 1948 as the Albanian Party of Labor (APL), and from June 1991 as the Socialist Party of Albania (SPA), the communistparty was organized along lines similar to the CommunistParty of the Soviet Union.
The Ninth Party Congress of the APL was convened in November 1986, with 1,628 delegates in attendance.
Party politics, of course, are a staple of political science, but, as the authors note, it has only been studied in a schematic way in the third-wave democracies, that is those that have arisen since the mid-1970s.
Given the importance of parties to democracy—despite the claims of some Eastern European theorists of anti-politics—such an analysis is essential to understanding not just the durability of these democracies (the focus of most analyses to date), but also a frequently ignored factor: their quality.
The main problem appears to be the continued appeal of the unreformed Communistparty and the unwillingness of centrist parties to cooperate with the democratic left.
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