Vasil Kolarov, long a top figure of the Comintern. Kolarov served as chairman of a new governing body for the organization known as the Executive Committee of the Krestintern. Activities The Krestintern initially sought to build common cause with the Bulgarian Peasants Union, an organization established in exile in Yugoslavia by two former ministers of the government of Aleksandar Stamboliyski following his government's overthrow by a military coup in June 1923. One of these ministers, K. Todorov, travelled to Moscow early in January 1924 where he conducted negotiations with Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Kolarov regarding joint action between their organization and the Communist Party of Bulgaria for the overthrow of the newly imposed Aleksandar Tsankov regime. The Bulgarian communists sought without success for Todorov to align his organization with the newly established Krestintern; for his part Todorov sought money and arms for use against the Tsankov government. Some Comintern money changed hands, but no alignment of the Peasants Union with the Peasant International or change of regime in Bulgaria was forthcoming. The Krestintern was largely unsuccessful in its task of gathering and mobilizing non-Communist peasants' political parties to advance Communist ends and was only able to attract a small number of factional grouplets, these frequently being artificial creations of the various national communist parties themselves. The sole exception to this rule was the nominal affiliation was the brief and nominal adherence of the Croatian People's Peasant Party (Hrvatska Pučka Seljačka Stranka) headed by Stjepan Radić in 1924 during a visit to Moscow. This affiliation is judged by historian E. H. Carr to have had less to do with Communism than with the national aspirations of non-Serbian ethnicities inside Yugoslavia. The close relations between Radić's organization and the Soviets led to a banning of the Croatian Republican Peasant Party and its official publication, the magazine Radnik (The Worker), were officially banned on 12 July 1924. The journal continued to be issued illegally for a short time before being terminated at the end of September. Radić was imprisoned within months of his return to Yugoslavia and the Central Committee of the now-banned Peasant Party was quick to renounce his seemingly rash decision to affiliate with Moscow. Rather than bolstering the political position of his organization, Radić's dalliance with the Red Peasant International seemed to have gone far to bringing about its demise. Four months after his release from prison in July 1925,