Mara Maleeva-Zhivkova

Later, Mara Maleeva left her medical career and worked in the party apparatus, for some time she was a municipal councilor. Although she did not hold official positions, according to Todor Zhivkov, she was one of his closest associates since his election as secretary of the Central Committee in 1950.

From June 1943, Todor Zhivkov was a member of the staff of the First Revolutionary Working Zone and a prosecutor of the "Chavdar" partisan detachment. Mara Maleeva helped him, treated sick and wounded partisans, and illegally provided medicines and bandages. On September 9, 1944, Todor Zhivkov began working for the People's Militia in Sofia and moved his family there. Mara Maleeva became an employee of the first internal clinic of the Higher Medical Institute, where she laid the foundations of free medical care in Bulgaria.

At the end of the year, Maleev was assigned to the village of Lesichovo in Pazardzhik, where the family spent several months. In February 1940, Zhivkova and Maleeva left Lesichovo and, after a short stay in Pravets and the Chirpan village of Orizovo, settled in August in Govedarka near Samokov. In the following years Maleeva was a district physician there.

In 1938, Mara Maleeva got a job as a district doctor in the Pavlytsia village of Daskot, Veliko Tarnovo Province, where her friend and peer Todor Zhivkov later came. In the following months, he lived there without a job but supported Maleev by participating in amateur theatrical productions. As their cohabitation by civil marriage caused dissatisfaction in the village, in April 1939 they married in Pavlikeni. Mara was more intellectually and culturally developed compared to the village boy T. Zhivkov and he had to try to keep up with her in the area of education.

In 1928, the whole family moved to Sofia, where Maleeva graduated from the First Sofia Women's Gymnasium in 1930 and entered Sofia University (she studied with the medical faculty until 1938). As a student, she became a member of the Communist Organizations of the Workers' Youth Union and the Bulgarian National Student Union, and joined the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1933, working as a technical assistant on its Central Committee. In 1936, she met the communist activist Todor Zhivkov (1911-1998). After graduating from university she worked as a village doctor.

Mara Hristova Maleeva-Zhivkova (born July 12, 1911, Plovdiv; died October 23, 1971, Sofia, People's Republic of Bulgaria) was a Bulgarian physician, and the First Lady of Bulgaria (1954-1971) as the wife of Todor Zhivkov, who was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1954-1989).

Mara Maleeva was born in 1911 into a family of primary school teachers Hristo Maleev and Nedelya Altunova.