Bulgaria emerged from World War II under the control of a coalition government dominated by the BKP, which by 1947 had arrogated unto itself complete power in the country. In the immediate postwar years policy and direction concerning how the BKP should run the country was dictated from Moscow, as was the case throughout most of the countries of Eastern Europe. Between 1944 and 1948 eight countries had been taken over by communist parties and had aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, which exerted varying degrees of influence in the internal and international affairs of all of them. Over the next twenty years Yugoslavia and Albania broke out of the Soviet orbit completely; the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia experienced uprisings or civil disorders--in most cases suppressed by Soviet force--and Romania asserted its right to national self-determination on numerous occasions. Bulgaria alone remained unwavering in its absolute allegiance to the Soviet Union. Bulgaria chose not to follow the examples of other Eastern European countries in seeking some degree of autonomy during the 1950s and 1960s for many reasons. Not least among these were the historic traditions of friendship between Bulgarians and Russians dating back to the Russo-Turkish war that freed Bulgaria from Turkish rule in 1878. Bulgarians are also close to the Russians in language, religion, and cultural traditions. Additionally, having assumed power, the Bulgarian Communists quite naturally looked toward Moscow--then the center of world communism--for guidance and support. Many of the early postwar leaders had spent several years as residents of the Soviet Union, where they had been closely associated with the country's party. Another reason for the close ties to the Soviet Union was pure pragmatism on the part of the Bulgarian communist leaders. They were, in effect, a minority leadership group faced with the task of imposing an alien ideology on a reluctant majority at the same time that they were trying to reorient the country's economy from an agricultural base to an industrial base. The Bulgarian leaders needed the support of the Soviet Union. Beset by intraparty strife and lack of success in running the country after the death of Georgi Dimitrov--the leading Bulgarian communist hero and strong man of the early postwar years--the party leadership again clung to Soviet support and totalitarian rigidity to perpetuate itself in power. Even after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the later de-Stalinization program under Nikita Khrushchev, Bulgaria's leaders retained Stalinism as a modus operandi until the early 1960s.