In mid-1973 political affairs and the administration of the country remained completely in the hands of the ruling circle of the Bulgarian Communist Party (Bulgarska Komunisticheska Partiya--BKP, see Glossary), headed by First Secretary Todor Zhivkov. Political power was exercised by him and by the few select officials in the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, particularly those who were members of the Politburo and the Secretariat. The extent of such power was best described by Vulko Chervenkov, onetime premier and Politburo member, who declared that "no institution, organization, or person can be above the Politburo and the Central Committee." This statement, made in the early 1950s, continues to be the cardinal rule of communist power in Bulgaria.
Retention of power by the party was ensured through its absolute control of governmental machinery and of all organized activities. Virtually every important government post was held by a high-ranking party member. First Secretary Zhivkov, for example, was also president of the State Council, the leading government body, which made him the top man in both party and government. In addition to the interlocking of government and party posts at all levels, it was also customary for the top officers of mass organizations to be members of the party hierarchy. The continued existence of a second political party, the Bulgarian Agrarian Union (Bulgarski Zemedelski Suyuz--BZS), did not encroach on the monopolization of political power by the BKP because the prerogatives of the union had been curtailed to the point where it had become an auxiliary of the BKP rather than a competitor. Any opposition to the ruling elite had come from within the party rather than from outside organizations. As recently as 1965 an abortive attempt to overthrow Zhivkov was made, but this was the result of intraparty factionalism rather than antiparty opposition. Zhivkov managed to avert the attempted coup d'etat and afterward strengthened his power base within the party.
At the helm of the party for nineteen years, Zhivkov, despite occasional intraparty struggle and friction, remained the undisputed leader and, as such, he maintained very close relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and with the Soviet government. On the one hand the close Bulgarian-Soviet relationship has been interpreted by Marxist theoreticians as the application of "proletarian internationalism"--a theory that contends that proletarian unity is "historically the higher right than that of national self-determination." On the other hand, many observers of Bulgarian-Soviet relations maintain that the nature of the unequal alliance stems not only from historical and cultural affiliations as well as political and ideological identification but, more important, from Zhivkov's need for strong Soviet support.