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Taken from
The Black Book Of Communism.
It
must be mentioned that at the presentation of the book in Greece a few
hundred communists and left wing activists gathered and using violence forbade
the presentation. This is the kind of free press the communists want.
[Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to
death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now! ...
Slaughter them, Red Army Fighters, Stamp harder on the rising lids of their
rancid coffins!" (Isaac Babel, described by Cynthia Ozick
in her book From Kafka to Babel as "an acutely conscious Jew"
propagandizing for the Bolshevik Revolution, and cited by K. MacDonald in his
book The Culture of Critique ... (2002, xxxvii).
"We didn't kill enough people."
Communist guerrilla leader, Ares Velouchiotes, when
queried as to why his EAM-ELLAS forces had been
defeated.]
What follows has been
excerpted from The Black Book Of Communism
and has to do with the Greek Civil War
When the [second world] war
ended, the Greek Communists were in a situation roughly similar to that of the
Yugoslavs. On 2 November 1940, a few days after the Italian invasion of Greece,
Nikos Zachariadis, the
secretary of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), who had been in prison since
1936, sent out a call to arms: "The Greek nation is now engaged in
a war for its national liberation from the fascism of Mussolini ... Everyone
must take his place, and everyone must fight." But on 7 December a
manifesto from the underground Central Committee called into question this
decision, and the KKE returned to the official line recommended by the
Comintern, that of revolutionary defeatism. On 22 June 1941 came the
spectacular U-turn: the KKE ordered its militants to organize "the
struggle to defend the Soviet Union and the
overthrow of the foreign fascist yoke."
The experience with
clandestine activity had been crucial for the Communists. On 16 July 1941, like
their counterparts in other countries, the Greek Communists formed a National
Workers' Front for Liberation (Ergatiko Ethniko Apelevtherotiko Metopo, EEAM), an umbrella organization for three unions. On
27 September they established the EAM (Ethniko Apelevtherotiko Metopo), the
Party's political arm. On 10 February 1942 they announced the creation of the
People's Army for National Liberation (Ellinikos Laikos Apelevtherotikos [Stratos]), or ELAS. By May 1942
the first ELAS partisans were operating under the
leadership of Ares Velouchiotes (Thanassis
Klaras), an experienced militant who had signed a
recantation in exchange for his freedom. From this point on, ELAS numbers continued to grow.
The ELAS
was not the only military resistance movement. The National Greek Democratic
Union (Ethnikos Demokratikos
Syndesmos), or EDES, had
been created by soldiers and republican civilians in September 1941. Another
group of resistance fighters was formed by a retired colonel, Napoleon Zervas. A third organization, the National Social
Liberation Movement (Ethniki Kai Koinoniki
Apelevtherosis), or EKKA, came into being in October
1942 under Colonel Dimitri Psarros.
All these organizations were constantly trying to recruit from one another.
But the success and
strength of the ELAS made the Communists hopeful of
imposing their leadership on all the armed resistance groups. They attacked the
EDES partisans several times, as well as the EKKA,
who were forced to suspend operations to regroup. In late 1942 Major G. Kostopoulos (a renegade from the EAM) and Colonel Stefanos Sáráfis formed a
resistance unit in the heart of a zone that had been captured by the EAM in
western Thessaly, at the foot of the Pindus
Mountains. The ELAS surrounded them and
massacred all those who did not escape or refused to enroll
in their ranks. Taken prisoner, Sáráfis finally
agreed to assume leadership of the ELAS units.
The presence of British
officers who had come to help the Greek resistance was a cause of concern to
the ELAS chiefs, who feared that the British would
attempt to reinstate the monarchy. But there was a difference in viewpoint
between the military branch, directed by Ares Velouchiotes,
and the KKE itself. The latter, led by Giorgis Siantos, wished to follow the official line as laid down by
Moscow,
advocating a general antifascist coalition. The actions of the British were
momentarily beneficial because in July 1943 their military mission convinced
the three main protagonists to sign a pact. At that time the ELAS had some 18,000 men, the EDES
5,000, and the EKKA about 1000.
The Italian surrender on 8
September 1943 immediately modified the situation. A fratricidal war began when
the Germans launched a violent offensive against the EDES.
The guerrillas, forced to retreat, confronted several large ELAS
battalions, which threatened to annihilate the EDES. The
KKE leadership decided to abandon the EDES, hoping
thus to check British policy. After four days of fighting, the partisans led by
Zervas escaped encirclement.
This civil war within the
main war was of great advantage to the Germans as they swept down upon the
resistance units one by one. The Allies thus took the initiative to end the
civil war. Fighting between the ELAS and the EDES stopped in February 1944, and an agreement was signed
in Plaka. The agreement was short-lived; a few weeks
later the ELAS attacked Colonel Psarros'
EKKA troops. He was defeated after five days and taken prisoner. His officers
were massacred; Psarros himself was beheaded.
The Communists' actions
demoralized the resistance and discredited the EAM. In several regions, hatred
for the EAM was so strong that a number of resistance fighters joined the
security battalions set up by the Germans. The civil war did not end until the ELAS agreed to collaborate with the Greek
government-in-exile in Cairo.
In September 1944 six members of the EAM-ELAS became
members of the government of national unity presided over by Georges
Papandreou. On 2 September, as the Germans began to evacuate Greece, the ELAS sent
its troops to conquer the Peloponnese,
which had always eluded its control thanks to the security battalions. All
captured towns and villages were "punished." In Meligala,
1,400 men, women, and children were massacred along with some 50 officers and noncommissioned officers from the security battalions.
Nothing now seemed to stand
in the way of EAM-ELAS hegemony. But when Athens was liberated on 12 October it escaped the
guerrillas' control because of the presence of British troops in Piraeus. The KKE
leadership hesitated to undertake a trial of strength, unsure of whether it
wanted a place in a coalition government. When the ELAS
refused a government demand to demobilize, Iannis Zegvos, the Communist agriculture minister, demanded that all
government units be disbanded too. On 4 December, ELAS
patrols entered Athens,
where they clashed with government forces. By the following day, almost the
entire capital had fallen under the control of the 20,000-strong ELAS forces; but the British stood firm, awaiting
reinforcements. On 18 December the ELAS again
attacked EDES in Epirus and at the same time
launched a bloody antiroyalist operation.
The offensive was
contained, and in talks held in Varkiza the
Communists resigned themselves to a peace accord under which they agreed to
disarm. The accord was something of a sham, however, since large numbers of
weapons and munitions remained carefully hidden. Ares Velouchiotes,
one of the principal warlords, rejected the Varkiza
conditions, rejoined the partisans with about one hundred men, and then crossed
into Albania
in the hope of continuing the armed struggle from there. Later, asked about the
reasons for the defeat of the EAM-ELAS, Velouchiotes replied frankly: "We didn't kill
enough people. The English were taking a major interest in that crossroads
called Greece.
If we had killed all their friends, they wouldn't have been able to land. Everyone
described me as a killer -- that's the way we were. Revolutions succeed only
when rivers run red with blood, and blood has to be spilled if what you are
aiming for is the perfectibility of the human race." Velouchiotes
died in combat in June 1945 in Thessaly, a few
days after he was thrown out of the KKE. The defeat of the EAM-ELAS unleashed a wave of hatred against the Communists and
their allies. Groups of militants were assassinated by paramilitary groups, and
many others were imprisoned. Most of the leaders were deported to the islands.
Nikos Zachariadis,
the secretary general of the KKE, had returned in May 1945 from Germany, where he had been deported to Dachau.
His first declarations clearly announced KKE policy: "Either the
EAM struggle for national liberation is finally rewarded with the establishment
of a people's democracy in Greece,
or we return to a similar but even more severe regime than the last fascist
monarchist dictatorship." Greece,
exhausted by the war, seemed to have little chance of enjoying peace at last. In
October the Seventh Party Congress ratified Zachariadis'
proposal. The first stage was to obtain the departure of the British troops. In
January 1946 the U.S.S.R. demonstrated its interest
in Greece
by claiming at a United Nations Security Council meeting that the British
presence constituted a danger to the country. On 12 February 1946, when defeat
for the Communists in the coming elections seemed inevitable -- they were
calling on their voters to abstain -- the KKE organized an uprising, with the
help of the Yugoslav Communists.
In December 1945 the
members of the KKE Central Committee had met with various Bulgarian and
Yugoslav officers. The Greek Communists were assured that they could use Albania, Bulgaria,
and Yugoslavia
as bases. Fore more than three years their troops did so, retreating with their
wounded into these countries and using them to regroup and build up supplies
and munitions. These preparations took place a few months after the creation of
the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), the
Moscow-dominated grouping of world Communist parties. It seems that the Greek
Communist uprising was perfectly coordinated with the Soviet
Union's new policies. On 30 March 1946 the KKE declared that a
third civil war was under way. The first attacks by the Democratic Army (AD),
which had been established on 28 October 1946 and was led by General Markos Vafiadis, followed the
usual pattern: police stations were attacked, their occupants killed,
and leading local figures executed. The KKE openly continued such actions
throughout 1946.
In the first months of 1947
general Vafiades intensified his campaign, attacking
dozens of villages and executing hundreds of peasants. The ranks of the AD were
swollen by enforced recruitment. Villages that refused to cooperate
suffered severe reprisals. One village in Macedonia was hit particularly hard:
forty-eight houses were burned down, and twelve men, six women, and two
babies were killed. After March 1947 municipal leaders were systematically
eliminated, as were priests. By March the number of refugees reached 400,000.
The policy of terror was met with counterterror, and militant left-wing Communists were killed in turn by
right-wing extremists.
In June 1947, after a tour
of Belgrade, Prague,
and Moscow, Zachariadis announced the imminent formation of a
"free" government. The Greek Communists seemed to believe that they
could follow the same path taken by Tito a few years earlier. The government
was officially created in December. The Yugoslavs provided nearly 10,000
volunteers recruited from their own army. Numerous reports from the UN Special
Commission on the Balkans have established the great importance of this
assistance to the Democratic Army. The break between Tito and Stalin in 1948
had direct consequences for the Greek Communists. Although Tito continued his
aid until the autumn, he also began a retreat that ended with closure of the
border. In the summer of 1948, while the Greek government forces were engaged
in a massive offensive, the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha also closed his country's border. The Greek
Communists became increasingly isolated, and dissent within the Party grew. The
fighting continued until August 1949. Many of the combatants fled to Bulgaria and thence to other parts of Eastern
Europe, settling particularly in Romania
and the U.S.S.R. Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan,
received thousands of refugees, including 7,500 Communists. After this defeat,
the KKE in exile suffered a number of purges, and as late as 1955 the conflicts
between the pro-and anti- Zachariadis factions [were]
still extremely fierce, so much so that at one point the Soviet army was forced
to intervene, resulting in hundreds of casualties.
During the civil war of
1946-1948, Greek Communists kept records on all the children aged three to
fourteen in all the areas they controlled. In March 1948 these children were
gathered together in the border regions, and several thousand were taken into Albania, Bulgaria,
and Yugoslavia.
The villagers tried to protect their children by hiding them in the woods. The
Red Cross, despite the enormous obstacles placed in [its] path, managed to
count 28,296. In the summer of 1948, when the Tito-Cominform
rupture became apparent, 11,600 of the children in Yugoslavia
were moved to Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania, and Poland, despite many protests from
the Greek government. On 17 November 1948, the Third UN General assembly passed
a resolution roundly condemning the removal of the Greek children. In November
1949 the General Assembly again demanded their return. These and all subsequent
UN resolutions remained unanswered. The neighboring
Communist regimes claimed that the children were being kept under conditions
superior to those they would be experiencing at home, and that the deportation
had been an humanitarian act.
In reality the enforced
deportation of the children was carried out in appalling conditions. Starvation
and epidemics were extremely common, and many of the children simply died. Kept
together in "children's villages," they were subjected to courses in
politics in addition to their normal education. At age thirteen they were
forced into manual labor, carrying out arduous tasks
such as land reclamation in the marshy Hartchag
region of Hungary.
The intention of the Communist leaders was to form a new generation of devoted
militants, but their efforts ended in failure. One Greek called Constantinides died on the Hungarian side fighting the Soviet Union in 1956. Others managed to flee to West Germany.
From 1950 to 1952 only 684
children were permitted to return to Greece. By 1963, around 4000
children (some of them born in Communist countries) had been repatriated. In Poland, the
Greek community numbered several thousand in the early 1980s. Some of them were
members of Solidarity, and were imprisoned after the introduction of martial
law in December 1981. In 1989, when democratization was well under way, several
thousand Greeks still living in Poland
began to return home.
The warm welcome extended
to the defeated Greek Communists in the U.S.S.R.
contrasted strangely with Stalin's annihilation of the Greek community that had
lived in Russia
for centuries. In 1917 the number of Greeks in the Soviet state was between
500,000 and 700,000, concentrated for the most part around the Caucasus and the
Black Sea. By 1939 the number had fallen to
410,000, mainly because of "unnatural" deaths, not emigration; and
there were a mere 177,000 remaining by 1960. After December 1937 the 285,000
Greeks living in the major towns were deported to the regions of Arkhangelsk, the Komi republic, and northeastern Siberia. Others were allowed to return to Greece. During
this period A. Haďtas, a former secretary of the KKE,
and the educator J. Jordanis died in [Stalinist]
purges. In 1944, 10,000 Greeks from the Crimea, the remnants of what had been a flourishing Greek community there, were deported to
Kirgizstan
and Uzbekistan,
on the pretext that they had adopted a pro-German stance during the war. On 30
June 1949, in a single night, 30,000 Greeks from Georgia
were deported to Kazakhstan.
In April 1950 the entire Greek population of Batumi suffered a
similar fate.
Source. The Black Book Of Communism. by Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth,
Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin.
trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. H.U.P., Cambridge, MA. 1999. pp. 326 - 331.