mpletely absorbed by the much more numerous Slavs, leaving
only their name to mark the land they had conquered. From the ninth
century A.D. on, Bulgarian history is the story of this amalgamated
nation of Bulgar-Slavs who enjoyed two different epochs of independent
glory under medieval Bulgarian kingdoms but who also suffered invasion
and defeat and, eventually, 500 years of domination by Ottoman Turks. In
1878 Turkish rule was finally ended, and a truncated Bulgaria reappeared
on the map of Europe. After five centuries of foreign domination,
Bulgaria was backward, underdeveloped, and poor.

The descendants of the Bulgar-Slavs made up the majority of the
approximately 8.7 million people living in Bulgaria in 1973. The largest
minority group, which numbered about 0.7 million people, was Turkish.
The few Greeks, Romanians, Armenians, and Jews in the population
collectively accounted for only about 1 percent of the total. These
modern Bulgarians live in a country that is almost rectangular in shape
and covers roughly 42,800 square miles of the lower Balkan Peninsula.
Their country is bounded on the east by the Black Sea, on the south by
Greece and the part of Turkey that is in Europe, on the west by
Yugoslavia, and on the north by Romania.

The most prominent communist leader of Bulgaria was Georgi Dimitrov, a
native-born Bulgarian who had lived in exile during most of the period
between the two world wars and had become a Soviet citizen in 1935.
Dimitrov was prominent in the international communist movement and,
while resident in Moscow, had served as secretary general of the
Comintern (Communist International), founded under Lenin's guidance in
1919. Dimitrov returned to his homeland in late 1945, resumed his
Bulgarian citizenship, and took over the leadership of the BKP and the
government. He was instrumental in developing the 1947 Constitution
(usually referred to as the Dimitrov Constitution) and set about
remaking his country's economic, political, and social structures in the
Soviet image. Nationalization of all means of production,
collectivization of agriculture, and an ambitious program of
industrialization all commenced under Dimitrov.

Dimitrov died in 1949 but, before he died, his programs were well under
way, the Moscow-oriented BKP was in complete control, and the country
was firmly in the Soviet orbit. Several years later, even though the
term _satellite_ was no longer used to describe the Eastern Europea