The Bulgarian Communist Party was the founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 1990, when the country ceased to be a socialist puppet regime of the Soviet Union. The party had dominated the Fatherland Front, a coalition that took power in 1944, late in World War II, after it led a coup against Bulgaria's tsarist regime in conjunction with the Red Army's crossing of the border. It controlled its armed forces, the Bulgarian People's Army.