The Bulgarian Socialist movement should prove interesting to the student of modern socialism for two reasons: the striking ideological parallel of the left and right wings of the Bulgarian party to their Russian and Western counterparts, and the manner in which the Bulgarian schism of 1903 anticipated both the Menshevik-Bolshevik split later that same year as well as the permanent rift between the Bolshevik and Western socialist parties on the outbreak of World War I.
The Bulgarian Socialist party was founded in 1891 by left-wing intellectuals who had studied abroad, most of them in Geneva, Russia, or England. Although the party split up within a year's time over the issue of political activity by the proletariat, it was revived in 1894 as a reaction to the repressive policies of the Bulgarian premier, Stefan Stambulov. Throughout the ensuing decade of its existence the party, like its Western counterparts, was plagued by the perennial issue of collaboration or non-collaboration with bourgeois groups.