He was elected to the Bulgarian parliament as a socialist during the First World War and campaigned against his country's involvement in the conflict, which led to his brief imprisonment for sedition.

The plan ultimately fell apart over differences regarding the future of the joint country as well as the Macedonian question, and was completely abandoned following the fallout between Stalin and Tito.

The first of eight children, Dimitrov was born in Kovachevtsi, in present-day Pernik Province, to refugee parents from Ottoman Macedonia (a mother from Bansko and a father from Razlog).

In 1911, he spent a month in prison for libeling an official of the rival Free Federation of Trade Unions, whom he accused of strike-breaking.

[5] In summer 1917, after he intervened in defense of wounded soldiers who were being ordered by an officer to clear out of a first-class railway carriage, Dimitrov was charged with incitement to mutiny, stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and imprisoned on 29 August 1918.

He returned to Bulgaria later in 1921, but then travelled again to Moscow and was elected in December 1922 to the Executive Bureau of Profintern, the communist trade union international.

[5] In June 1923, when Bulgarian Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski was deposed through a coup d'état, Dimitrov and Khristo Kabakchiev, the leading communists in Bulgaria at the time, resolved not to take sides,[7] a decision condemned by the Comintern as a "political capitulation" brought on by the party's "dogmatic-doctrinaire approach".

[8] After Vasil Kolarov had been sent from Moscow to impose a change in the Bulgarian party line, Dimitrov accepted the Comintern's authority.

In September 1923, he and Kolarov led the failed uprising against the regime of Aleksandar Tsankov, which cost the lives of possibly five thousand communist supporters during the fighting and the reprisals which followed.

Despite its failure, the attempt was approved by the Comintern, and secured the positions of Kolarov and Dimitrov – who escaped via Yugoslavia to Vienna – as the joint leaders of the Bulgarian CP.

Living under pseudonyms, he remained in the Soviet Union until 1929, when he was ousted from his Bulgarian CP leadership role by a faction of younger, more left-wing activists.

His diary entries during this period tended to be "dry and elliptical, and occasionally obscure" since he knew they would be subject to examination by his captors.

For these reasons every word which I say in this court is a part of me, each phrase is the expression of my deep indignation against the unjust accusation, against the putting of this anti-Communist crime, the burning of the Reichstag, to the account of the Communists.

"[13] Among those impressed with Dimitrov was the noted U.S. attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

[14] This striking characterization was cited in multiple American newspaper reviews of Hays' book and helped introduce Dimitrov's name throughout the U.S.[15] On 23 December 1933, the verdicts were read.

In April, as Dimitrov's fame grew in the wake of the Leipzig Trial, he was appointed a member of the Executive of Comintern and of its political secretariat, in charge of the Anglo-American and Central European sections.

His impassioned anti-fascist speeches at the Congress were transcribed and published in a September 1935 pamphlet, The United Front Against Fascism, which went through numerous editions over the ensuing years.

Later that year, he succeeded Kimon Georgiev as Prime Minister, though Dimitrov had already been the most powerful man in the country since the monarchy was abolished two months earlier.

One of Dimitrov's first acts as Prime Minister was to negotiate with Josip Broz Tito on the creation of a Federation of the Southern Slavs.

[20] The idea was based on the fact that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were the only two homelands of the Southern Slavs, and were separated from the rest of the Slavic world.

The idea eventually resulted in the 1947 Bled accord, signed by Dimitrov and Tito, which called for abandoning frontier travel barriers, arranging for a future customs union, and having Yugoslavia unilaterally forgive Bulgarian war reparations.

By January 1948, Tito's plans to annex Bulgaria and Albania had become an obstacle to policy of the Cominform and the other Eastern Bloc countries.

In 1906, Dimitrov married his first wife, Serbian emigrant milliner, writer and socialist Ljubica Ivošević, with whom he lived until her death in 1933.

[3] While in the Soviet Union, Dimitrov married his second wife, the Czech-born Roza Yulievna Fleishmann (1896–1958), who gave birth to his only son, Mitya, in 1936.

While Mitya was alive, Dimitrov adopted Fani, a daughter of Wang Ming, the acting General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 1931.

The Sandinista government of Nicaragua renamed one of Managua's central neighbourhoods "Barrio Jorge Dimitrov" to commemorate him during that country's revolution in the 1980s.