Open dictatorship of the monarch and some of the pro-fascist bourgeoisie. King Boris III and the extreme political reactionary wing prevailed, erecting a barrier to any democratic leanings. The palace and its puppet governments leaned on a bureaucratic apparatus, the army, the police and the statecontrolled trade unions. Parliamentarism became a farce, and the National Assembly degenerated into a rubberstamp body.

Under the Craiova agreement of 1940 Romania ceded Southern Dobroudja back to Bulgaria. In March 1941 Bulgaria joined the Axis. The king and the obedient fascist government turned Bulgaria into a satellite of fascist Germany. In December, the government declared an allegedly 'symbolic' war on Britain and the US.

In these conditions, some of the bourgeois and pettybourgeois parties and factions ceased to exist. Three political wings became manifest during the war, albeit not always as well-organized bodies; these were the wing of the monarcho-fascist dictatorship, of the legal bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opposition, and of the underground or partially legal anti-fascist opposition. The Communist Party, the left-wing factions of the BZNS and the Social Democratic Party, together with the Zveno Political Circle, headed by Kimon Georgiev, which had shifted left-wards after 1935, formed the Fatherland Front which was to play an important role in the anti-fascist struggle. The experienced and tested subjective factor played a leading role in that struggle. In the wake of the October Revolution, many Bulgarian communists became activists of the international workers' and communist movement. There were Bulgarians in the leadership of the Third Communist International. Bulgaria's communists did not stand aside from any international campaign of support for the Soviet Union, of resistance to fascism and for democratic fredoms either before or during the war. The professional revolutionary and Comintern activist Georgi Dimitrov set a personal example of communist courage and adherence to principles in moments of hardship, when at the framed up Reichstag Fire Trial (1933) from a defendant he became an accuser. Having survived the duel with fascism he became known as the General Secretary of the Third Communist International in 1935-43, guiding the powerful united - and popular-front movement which would have an overwhelming effect on all subsequent major international developments.

Bulgarian communists fought fascism in Spain; during World War II, there were Bulgarians in practically every resistance movement in Europe.

The subjective factor did what was best for bringing together all national anti-fascist forces in Bulgaria. Going deep underground, the Bulgarian Communist Party did not suspend its activities for a single moment, applying legal forms of action and combining them skilfully with conspiratorial forms, thus proving as indestructible as life itself. During the inter-war period, it exercised a dominating presence, its ideas permeating deep among the workers and the other labouring people. No special legislation and no censorship proved capable of suppressing its numerous publications in various fields of social science, in art and literature, which facilitated the shaping of an entire generation of anti-fascists.

In 1942, the radio station Hristo Botev, broadcasting from outside Bulgaria, announced the Programme of the Fatherland Front, which envisaged the most necessary steps: getting out of the Axis which had proved fatal to Bulgaria, the liquidation of the monarchy, and the restoration of democratic rights and freedoms in the country.

Having started immediately after the nazi invasion of the USSR, the underground armed struggle against the nazi troops quartered in Bulgaria and their Bulgarian servants assumed a particularly broad scale in 1943 and 1944. In April 1943, the Communist Party headed the setting up of the People's Liberation Insurgent Army (NOVA). Bulgaria was divided into 12 insurgents' operative zones, each one with its own headquarters. By the summer of 1944, the insurgents' active forces included one division, 13 partisan brigades and over 40 detachments, several chetas and hundreds of subversion groups, bringing NOVA membership to 30,000 fighters. These were chiefly members of the Communist Party and its Youth League. The partisans' regular aides alone numbered 200,000. These NOVA units carried out over 3,000 combat and subversion operations.

This was a battle front in the nazi rear. The partisans' operations engaged not only the gendarmerie that had been set up especially to deal with them, but a regular army of several hundred thousand as well, which would otherwise have been placed by the fascist authorities at the service of the nazi high command.

The moment long awaited for came at last. Tne Soviet Army entered the Balkans. Following the Yash - Kishinev Operation, the troops of the Soviet Army reached Bugaria's frontier in late August, 1944. A government of representatives of the non-fascist bourgeois opposition with a pro- Western orientation was formed as a last attempt to save the bourgeois system in the country. However, the Communist Party's Central Committee issued a timely directive for establishing people's democratic rule. The country was swept by strikes and anti-fascist demonstrations, which grew into an armed uprising.

Bulgaria had ripened for a turnabout in her development. The external factor proved favourable this time, too: through its foreign policy moves, the Soviet Union helped bring about a relatively painless and practically bloodless liquidation of fascist rule in the country, and a solution to the main contradiction, that between labour and capital, after which the vanguard of the Bulgarian working class could rely on a support of the overwhelming majority of the nation.

The anti-fascist forces dealt the main blow on the capital on the night of September 9th, 1944. The bourgeois government of K. Mouraviev was overthrown. On the ninth of September, 1944.