The Bulgarian History Podcast · Eric Halsey

245 To Reign and Govern

·32 min·2 clips

Boris moved from reigning to governing after the military league backed Andrei Toshev.

Boris remains the main thread. The episode picks up after the previous setup by returning to the regional shift around Bulgaria, where Alexander of Yugoslavia had made a state visit that improved relations and helped keep anti-monarchists in Sofia contained before his assassination by the VMRO and its allies, the Ustasha and Italy, in France reset the board. Yugoslavia now runs on a regency. Alexander's cousin Paul takes over as regent, and the show notes that he leans more toward the Soviet Union than toward Britain. The communist story is moving too. A left-sectarian wing inside the Bulgarian Communist Party is described as effectively liquidated within a few years, with only a few exceptions surviving. The episode does not treat that as a clean break. It points out that Dmitrov would later, in 1948, call the whole faction Trotskyites and spies and then describe them as the best allies of the Bulgarian fascist dictatorship. That contradiction matters. It shows how unstable political labeling could be inside the Bulgarian communist world. The larger Comintern context matters just as much. At the Seventh Congress, the Comintern shifts its nationality policy and moves away from the earlier line favoring Macedonian independence. The new approach is more conservative. It is presented as a practical attempt to win friends and allies in places like Greece and Yugoslavia and to build broader popular fronts against fascism. The narration stays with that change because it captures a larger tension. Ideological purity gives way to political usefulness, and the episode is interested in what that tradeoff looks like in practice. Once the communist thread is back on the table, the story returns to Bulgaria itself. The new government installed by Tsar Boris in the early weeks of 1935 had expelled Zveno members and some military league figures who were hostile to the monarchy, but it was not yet secure. Boris uses the government's failure to push his own agenda further and finish his triumph over Zveno and the military league. The episode ends by looking ahead to 1935 and 1936, where the storm around Bulgaria keeps building and Boris still has to steer the ship of state through it.

As heard by us

A steady account of 1935, where Tsar Boris's consolidation and Communist Party realignment shape the same political turn.

The episode keeps Tsar Boris's push in Bulgaria and the aftermath of Alexander of Yugoslavia's assassination in the same frame, then ties both to the Comintern's effort to pull Bulgarian communists away from hard-line left-sectarian politics and toward broader anti-fascist…

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Why you'd press play

You watch Boris push his agenda further as Balkan alliances and communist factions shift.

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