This political act nullified the harmful clauses of the Treaty of Berlin under which the greater part of the railway lines in Southern Bulgaria were under the regimen of capitulations (as Turkey's property) which entailed the payment of an annual tax to Turkey.

Parallel to this, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbian bourgeoisie for its part pushed south to Macedonia.

According to its ideologists, the population of Macedonia had to be treated as a separate community different from the Bulgarians and even opposed to them.

There were certain objective prerequisites at the end of the 19th century favouring the existence of ths essentially absurd theory which was further favoured by the events that took place during the first two decades of the present century.

After the Treaty of Berlin (1878) Macedonia remained under Ottoman rule, while after the wars and the peace treaties (Bucharest, 1913, and Neuilly, 1919) the greater part of it was incorporated into Serbia and Greece. The idea of the national unification of the Bulgarians was fatally doomed, mostly by the policy of the imperialist diktat, but for those affected it was impossible to abandon it. An armed struggle began which in its content, organizational methods and purposes was a continuation ot' the Bulgarian national-liberation movement of the 170s of the 19th century: the Kresna-Razlog uprising with the short-lived 'temporary Bulgarian rule' in Macedonia (October-November 1878) was followed by the establishment in 1893 of well-knit revolutionary committees which developed into the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization under the leadership of Gotse Delchev, Dame Grouev and Yane Sandanski. The SMARO carried out preparations for the Ilynden Uprising (August 2, 1903), which assumed mass proportions in the Bitola revolutionary district where a republic headed by the teacher Nikola Karev was proclaimed in the small town of Kroushevo. Some 5 000 people were killed in the uprising which lasted for more than three months and 30 000 Bulgarians took refuge within the borders of the Bulgarian state. The new revolutionary wave - the Preobrazhenie Uprising which broke out in Adrianople Thrace on August 19, 1903 - resulted in the establishment of the Strandja republic which put up resistance to the regular Ottoman army. After this liberation attempt was put down, a further 20 000 emigrants set off for the Bulgarian border.

The Ottoman rulers were pushed out of Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace not by means of a democratic revolution but through Bulgaria's, Serbia's, Greece's and Montenegro's military might in 1912. In the division of the liberatedterritories, however, Bulgaria found herself all alone against her neighbours. The Second Balkan War of 1913 reduced to a minimum Bulgaria's territorial gains. This is known as the first national disaster in Bulgarian history. With even more catastrophic consequences for Bulgaria was her involvement in the First World War (September 1, 1915 - end of September, 1918). After having fought on the side of the Central Powers (Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary) she was stripped of more territories and was forced to pay reparations to the tune of thousands of millions of gold francs. Tens of thousands of Bulgarian soldiers died in the war and 40 per cent of the country's transport was worn out. Famine and diseases also took a heavy toll in the war and post-war period.

Increasing numbers of refugees streamed into Bulgaria, just like after any armed conflict on the Balkans. Their accommodation in the country became a chronic problem. This failure of the Bulgarian national cause can rightfully be blamed on the court and its subservient bourgeois rulers, especially the parties from the government coalition of Vassil Radoslavov - the Liberals, the Popular Liberals and the Young Liberals.

Yet, the role of the court and the qualities of the ruling psychical traumas suffered by individual people and society as a whole have no quantitative dimension. Thus the Balkans became known as 'the smoking peninsula', which at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century frequently shook with armed conflicts and hostilities and in the second decade of the 20th century became a theatre of war. The loss in material resources and human life would have sufficed, in its money costs, to gild the disputed territories.

In this situation the workers and people's masses refused to be the ones who always suffered. In the four decades after the liberation from Ottoman domination Bulgaria attained no more than a mean level of capitalist development. There were no large-scale industrial enterprises. In the 1920s, however, the bourgeois state engaged the active part of the Bulgarians in its biggest enterprise - the war. This offered good opportunities for contacts between the working people and for the growth of disillusionment with capitalist society. Sections of the Bulgarian society which had formerly been sceptical to revolutionary and Marxist propaganda became susceptible to socialist ideas. These were major objective prerequisites for the revolutionizing of the majority of Bulgarians. Left-wing forces gained in influence and role, particularly the party of the left-wing Socialists, which after the war named itself the Communist Party and joioed the Third International. This party, to quote the . independent newspaper 'Champion', published in Rousse (April 4, 1919) was the 'only remaining reserve of democracy'.

The founder of the socialist movement in Bulgaria, Dimiter Blagoev (1856 - 1924 in his teens was influenced by the atmosphere of the National Revival period, and by the great Bulgarian poet, educator and enlightener Petko Slaveikov and painter Nikolai Pavlovich. He became involved in public activities in the early 1880s, while a student at St Petersburg University in Russia. In the Russian capital he matured with Marx's Das Kapital and while still under the influence of populist ideas and those of Proudhon and Lassale, he created the first social democratic group in Russia, called a party, with its press organ, the Rabochii (Worker) newspaper. Extradited in 1885 by the Russian Czarist government, Blagoev returned to his homeland, settled in Sofia and began to propagate socialist ideas. These activities coincided with the first labour strikes in Bulgaria. Under his guidance and leadership the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party was formed in 1891 and the foundations of the class trade-union movemet were laid in 1904. Under the leadership of the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party /left-wing Socialists/ and the revolutionary trade union organization related to it - the General Workers Trade Union, 557 industrial actions by 32,000 workers took place over the period 1904-1911.

Georgi Dimitrov, talented trade union leader and Party activist (1882-1949) and ex-printing worker, was greatly instrumental in the expansion of the class struggle. The leadership of the party of the working class included specialists who had degrees from universities in Western Europe and Russia and had sound political experience. This was the most highly public-spirited section of the nation in the postwar period which kept in pace with the times and took upon themselves the task of combining scientific socialism with the practice of the Bulgarian workers' movement.

The cooperative movement came into existence in the 1890s in agriculture, commerce and among the urban workers and craftsmen.

The Bulgarian Agrarian Party (BZNS), founded in 1899, also earned its place on the political scene. This was the only agrarian party in Europe at the time not to duplicate the programmes of other bourgeois parties Moreover, its underlying principle was to safeguard the interests of small and middle peasants from the exploiting designs of big business and the state.

The anti-capitalist leanings of the majority of the Bulgarians already during the first two decades of the century was contingent on the development of Bulgaria itself and that of the Balkans, as well as on the deepening conflicts within the capitalist system, which made social revolution inevitable. The Party of the left-wing Socialists and the Bulgarian Agrarian Party soon won the confidence and trust of the majority of the workers and peasants in city and country, which can be seen in the election results. The revolutionary Marxist party of the working class carried with landslide victories the elections for municipal councils, after which municipal communes were set up in many towns and villages. The first two communes were proclaimed in the towns of Dryanovo (1894) and Samokov (1910). In the ensuing period until 1934 the left-wing Socialists carried the municipal elections and formed communes in dozens of towns and villages. For instance, 37 city and 232 village communes and 152 communist boards of school trustees came into existence over the period 1919- 1923. The ruling circles naturally were hostile to the communes and dismantled them by force. It was precisely under the influence of the Party of left-wing Socialists that the soldiers' mutinies of 1913, during the Second Balkan War, flared up. V.I.Lenin expressed special interest in these mutinies when he expounded the theory of the possibility of turning the imperialist war into a civil war, into a revolution.

If the Leninist stage of the development of Marxism was the stage of the direct binding of theory with revolutionary practice, then we must say that the Bulgarian revolutionary Marxists passed successfully the austere test of history. They realized already in their day the significance for the whole of humanity of the breakthrough in the system of imperialism achieved by the Russian proletariat and gave their unqualified support to the Great October Socialist Revolution. Their affinity for the changes taking place in the world derived not only from their collaboration with the Russian'revolutionary movement since the university years of Dimiter Blagoev in St Petersburg, and the personal contacts of the Bulgarian Socialists with the Russian revolutionary Marxists, the Bolsheviks, and their leader V.I.Lenin, but above all from the purposeful course of their work in accordance with the conditions prevailing in their own country and their firm belief that this was the right course to lead them to victory.

By the end of the First World War no one and nothing was able to prevent the surge of revolution. In September, 1918 the soldiers who had left the south-western front stood up in revolt to call to account the rulers who were to blame for the defeat. This was the so-called Valdaya uprising.