ary and
in its place created the post of first secretary, again following the
lead of the Soviet party, which had done the same thing after Stalin's
death a year earlier. Party leader Chervenkov, who was premier and a
Politburo member, kept those posts and allowed the election of Zhivkov
as first secretary. Zhivkov was then an unknown functionary who had
risen from the ranks of the Sofia party structure. Aside from the usual
exhortation for party unity and the changes in six Politburo positions
as well as an increase in Central Committee membership, the Sixth Party
Congress was uneventful. Zhivkov's rise to power did not take place
immediately, and a period of intraparty struggle ensued as he gradually
consolidated his authority as first secretary.

The Seventh Party Congress, held in June 1958, proved even more
uneventful. It passed the Third Five-Year Plan for the development of
the economy, the fulfillment of which was drastically reduced to three
years even before the ink was dry on the document. With Central
Committee approval, new plans for economic targets were prepared;
meanwhile, Zhivkov prepared an elaborate propaganda campaign to push
this program through. Zhivkov's Theses, as the collection of
instructions have come to be known, advocated increased cultivation and
production in agriculture and industry to obtain yields that were double
those of previous plans. An unprecedented flurry of activity followed on
the heels of extensive media coverage. Aided by the press, the Agitation
and Propaganda Department under the Central Committee's direct
supervision launched a vast campaign that surpassed even those efforts
in neighboring countries.

This period is characteristically known as Bulgaria's Great Leap
Forward, patterned after the Chinese experience, and historians put
forth political and economic motives for such an economic experiment.
Politically, after Nikita Khrushchev started his de-Stalinization policy
in the Soviet Union, the Bulgarian repercussion was evident in
Chervenkov's disenchantment with the Soviet trauma and his looking
favorably instead toward the Chinese example. The Great Leap Forward was
neither a spectacular success nor a dismal failure and achieved no more
than the expected progress in three year's time. The ensuing period
marked a return to earlier patterns and heralded the end of Chervenkov's
political career and the concurrent elevation of Zhivkov. The election
of Zhivkov's friends-