The Uncompleted Greek Revolution
rab
The Uncompleted Greek Revolution
by Nick Axarlis
Recently a two-volume history of
the Greek Civil War (1946-49)
was published in Greece and it
became a best-seller.
Last month, two films about the
Greek Civil War drew hundreds of
thousands of spectators at cinemas
throughout Greece, the vast majority
of them young people in their 20s.
Television programmes on events of
the Civil War are widely watched.
Sociologists and academic historians
have offered a number of valid explanations
as to why the Civil War attracts
the deep interest of young people
today, 60 years since the last battles
were fought on the Greek-Yugoslav
border in the summer of 1949.
These bourgeois scholars have pointed
out that a civil war is a most profound
event in any society and that at
least half of Greece’s families had one
or more of their members directly
involved.
Such views and concepts have camouflaged
and hidden the essence, that
the Greek Civil War was a remarkable
Socialist Revolution which vindicated
Trotsky’s brilliant Marxist theory of
Permanent Revolution. But it was a
revolution betrayed by Stalinism.
In the 1950s several Greek poets produced
poetry and prose of the highest
quality dealing with the colossal
events of the 1940s – World War II, the
Resistance to the Nazis and Mussolini’s
fascist armies and the 1946-49
Civil War between the guerrillas of the
Democratic Army, led by the Greek
Communist Party (KKE), and the
Greek National Army, led first by the
British generals and then by the American
ones.
The Civil War literature produced
was branded “literature of the defeat”;
deeply political and personal, it
expressed itself through laconic verses
and in a Modernist form.
As expected, most of this literature
wails of the horrific defeat and the barbaric
annihilation of tens of thousands
of fighters and of the mass murders of
many thousands of men, women and
children considered by the National
Army and the United States-controlled
Greek capitalist state as the enemy
within.
Some Greek poets of the 1950s,
despite executions, prison sentences
and exile, found the strength to examine
the causes of the defeat.
One of them was Michalis Katsaros,
who wrote a powerful allegorical
poem entitled I Speak modelled on The
Twelve, the famous work by the Russian
poet Alexander Blok, which is
extremely popular in Greece and has
been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.
This is an extract of Katsaros’ poem.
‘. . . But I speak mostly about the
fishermen
who abandoned their nets and followed
his steps
and when he got tired
they did not stop to rest
and when he betrayed them
they did not denounce
Soldiers of the Democratic Army
prepare for battle with a dance
and when he was glorified
they turned their faces . . .’
In subsequent interviews Katsaros
verified that this poem refers to the
horrendous betrayal by the leaders of
the KKE of the Resistance movement
and of the Democratic Army armed
struggles in the 1940s.
By the summer of 1944, when the
Nazi armies started their withdrawal
from Greece and the Balkans, a huge
Resistance army (ELAS) and movement
(EAM) was operating under the
leadership of the KKE and dominated
the whole of Greece, except the main
cities and an area in the west of the
country which was under the control of
the British-supported rival guerrilla
army of EDES.
By October of the same year the
Nazis were gone and ELAS defeated
the EDES and entered all the Greek
cities including the capital Athens.
The KKE had formed ELAS-EAM as
a Popular Front and had invited several
bourgeois politicians and academics
on the movement’s Central Committee.
The Stalinist leaders of the KKE in
line with orders from Moscow aimed
for a post-war ‘democratic’ bourgeois
Greece, envisaging for themselves an
important role in political life as the
‘Left’.
They had not the slightest intention
of establishing a socialist democracy,
despite the fact that they controlled the
whole of Greece with a large experienced
army and with the vast majority
of the population supporting EAM.
Indeed, they were so hostile to the
demands for socialism that the ELAS EAM’s
‘security’ organisation OPLA
carried out assassinations of militant
workers and trade unionists, Trotskyists
and anarchists, branding them as
‘provocateurs’.
In the autumn of 1944, a National
bourgeois government was formed,
which the KKE entered holding five
ministries.
As far as the Greek Stalinist leaders
were concerned, they had achieved
their aim for a ‘democratic’ post-war
Greece.
But Churchill and British imperialism
had other plans discussed and
accepted by Stalin at the Yalta conference;
to re-install the hated monarchy
and a puppet state and government and
to disband and defeat the all powerful
Resistance ELAS-EAM movement.
The National government confused
the masses and gave time to the British
forces to prepare their attack.
Churchill sent the British Army to
Greece to carry out this task.
Incredibly the Stalinist leaders organised
mass demonstrations welcoming
the butchers into the port of Piraeus
and in Athens.
The KKE leaders even assisted the
British Army in taking over the very
centre of Athens.
In early December 1944, the Greek
puppet government orchestrated a crisis
and police fired on unarmed EAM
demonstrators in front of the Vouli
(Greek parliament) killing dozens.
Next day another huge EAM demonstration
was again fired upon
by police again killing many.
Only then the Stalinist leaders
decided to act. But instead of
mobilising the experienced
guerrilla Resistance ELAS
army, they fought the British
Army with the badly armed and
trained youth and workers’
militias.
ELAS was sent far away from
Athens to fight EDES.
The December Athens-
Piraeus battles, engraved in
workers’ memory as well as in
art and literature as simply ‘the
December’, led to the defeat of
the EAM forces as the British
RAF did not hesitate in the
slightest to carpet bomb whole
working class areas of Athens
and Piraeus and fire down from the
Acropolis.
Instead of calling the ELAS army
into Athens, the Stalinist KKE leaders
ordered the EAM fighters and their
families out of Athens in a catastrophic
retreat to the countryside while the
Stalinist executors of OPLA exterminated
dozens of Trotskyists and nonaligned
socialists.
Far worse was to follow. The KKE
leaders agreed to the infamous Varkiza
truce in early 1945, which included the
total disarming of both ELAS and
EAM and their dissolution. It was the
biggest betrayal of the KKE leaders –
so far.
In February 1945, 'Fourth International'
printed a long article on the history
of Greece and the Stalinists’
treachery calling the various disorientated
groups who supported the Fourth
International to the task: ‘The revolutionary
vanguard must plunge into the
struggle, work unceasingly to show up
these “leaders” [of KKE-EAM] for the
counter-revolutionary rascals that they
are and burn out their influence in the
labour movement.
‘A large-scale and vigorous agitation
must be started to expose the fatal role
and purpose of the perfidious People’s
Fronts.
‘The Trotskyists will call upon the
working masses to break the bloc with
the bourgeoisie both inside and outside
the present government.
‘They will counterpose to these People’s
Front blocs the necessity of setting
up, on the broadest possible basis,
workers’, farm labourers’, poor peasants’
and soldiers’ Soviets.’
The disarming of the Resistance
army was the last straw for Aris Velouchiotis,
the heroic and military gifted
virtual leader of ELAS, who disagreed
with the KKE’s leaders’ momentous
betrayal and took his regiment to the
mountains hoping to start a new resistance
movement against the British army.
But Velouchiotis was unable to see
through Stalinism and he sought a way
to contact the Soviet Union, or Tito.
His political weakness cost him and
the Resistance movement dear.
He was publicly denounced by the
KKE in their newspaper Rizospastis,
which called Velouchiotis an ‘agent
provocateur’ and ordered KKE members
and the Greek people not to offer
any support or assistance to him.
In June 1945, Velouchiotis was encircled
by Greek Army forces and he
committed suicide. His and his leading
comrades’ heads were cut off and
paraded in Greek cities.
A terrible wave of terror followed.
Literally tens of thousands of workers
and youth were rounded up and, after
torture, were exiled to the isolated and
Greek islands without food or shelter.
Thousands died off.
In the countryside, gangs made up of
fascist collaborators raided villages
killing and pillaging and setting fire to
houses.
Many workers and small farmers
unearthed their hidden weapons and
took to the mountains forming isolated
small guerrilla groups reviving the
Resistance. In these circumstances all
the KKE leaders could do was to
appeal for ‘democracy’.
The few Trotskyists that had survived
the Nazi executions and the Stalinist
murders had remained isolated from
the international movement since
1936, including through the imposition
of a British backed dictatorship in
Greece.
During the war supporters of
the Fourth International had
taken up a sectarian position
which regarded the ELAS-EAM
as a Stalinist organ of counterrevolution.
This was criticised by the
European Secretariat of the
Fourth International, which in
1945-46 attempted to unite
three different political groups
into a party with a revolutionary
perspective which would call on
EAM to take the power.
Following butcher Winston
Churchill’s electoral defeat, the
Labour government of Clement
Attlee carried on his policies.
The stooge Athens government
called a general election
for the end of March 1946 amid
the widespread white terror, executions
by firing squads and exile sentences
carried out by kangaroo military
courts.
The KKE leaders rightly refused to
take part in the election farce and
called for a boycott but refused to offer
leadership to the millions of workers
and small farmers at the mercy of the
fascist gangs and of the Greek Army.
Then on orders from the KKE’s general
secretary Nikos Zachariades, a
group of guerrillas attacked a gendarmerie
station in northern Greece on
the eve of the general election.
But this was designed cynically by
Zachariades as a ‘tactical move’ to put
pressure on the Greek government and
their masters, to force them into a
compromise and go back to the
National Government terms.
But for the Greek government’s new
masters, the US imperialists, the country
was a pawn in an entirely different
game to that of 1944.
The US President Harry Truman had
declared the ‘Cold War’ against the
Soviet Union and that meant the annihilation
of Communism in Greece.
Following the sham elections, a
plebiscite was held for the re-establishment
of the monarchy in Greece.
The KKE’s and EAM’s offices were
destroyed and the KKE outlawed. A
dictatorial state of emergency was
declared. All-out civil war followed.
In November 1946, the Fourth International
published an article titled
‘The Plebiscite in Greece’, which stated:
‘The plebiscite which sanctioned
the return of King George II to the
throne of Greece at the end of August
marked a new stage in the efforts of
Greek reaction, backed by the British
and American imperialists, to set up a
“strong regime” capable of stemming
the still fast-running tide of revolution
which set in with the “liberation” in
1944.
‘Because of the state of civil war in
the country, the refusal of the broad
masses to tolerate the old oppressive
order of things, the ruling class cannot
organise a regime of parliamentary
democracy.
‘It must rely on a police-military dictatorship
to preserve its rule.
‘The Tsaldaris government came to
power last March through rigged elections
which were boycotted by all the
parties of the Left.
‘Lacking any semblance of a popular
base, it requires a central “authoritative”
figure around which all the reactionary
riffraff can be rallied.
‘That is why the restoration of the
hated Glucksberg monarch was a life
and death question for the Greek capitalists
and landlords, as well as for
their imperialist patrons.’
In late December 1946 the KKE
formed the Democratic Army (DA) to
fight the British and American offensive.
Through the so-called ‘Marshall
Plan’, US President Truman poured
vast amounts of money, resources and
weapons into Greece and American
military advisers directed operations.
For the first time napalm bombs were
used extensively against the guerrillas
of the Democratic Army as well as
against the villagers.
In the three-year period 1946 to
1949, over 1.5 million people were
forcibly removed from small towns
and villages in northern Greece so as
to isolate the Democratic Army.
The guerrillas stood their ground
until the KKE leader Zachariades, in
early 1948, decided ‘from now on, our
forces must leave behind the guerrilla
and infiltration tactics and fight the
monarchists-fascists in regular army
tactics’. (KKE Central Committee
Resolution). The Democratic Army’s
leader Markos Vaphiades disagreed
with these disastrous ‘tactics’ and was
withdrawn from the front.
As a result of Zachariades’ ‘tactics’
several thousand DA fighters died in
all-out attacks to capture Greek cities.
On top of this, the Tito-Stalin clash
left the Democratic Army without regular
and proper supplies from
Yugoslavia, while the Soviet Union
refused to assist the guerrillas through
Bulgaria.
Both Stalinist wings stabbed the
Democratic Army in the back.
There is ample evidence that by the
summer of 1948 a very large proportion
of the Democratic Army’s men
and women fighters, possibly the
majority, consisted of Slav Macedonians,
recruited from the Greek part of
Macedonia, who hoped that a victory
would mean social and national liberation.
Successive Greek governments had
outlawed the Slav Macedonian language
and had forced Slav Macedonians
to change their names.
The KKE leaders promised national
autonomy to the Slav Macedonians,
but even before the end of the Civil
War, several Slav Macedonian guerrilla
leaders had sensed the opportunist
character of the KKE’s promise and
had left the Democratic Army, going
into Yugoslavia.
In the summer of 1949, the Greek
National Army through its monopoly
of US heavy guns and fighter aircraft,
forced the remnants of the Democratic
Army into Albania, Yugoslavia and
Bulgaria.
An estimated 10,000 fighters were
forced into exile in several eastern
European countries, along with some
30,000 children and women, who fled
the Civil War.
Most of them ended up in Tashkent,
the capital city of Uzbekistan.
Those who survived exile and further
Stalinist persecution in the degenerated
and deformed workers’ states were
able to return to Greece only in the
1980s.
The KKE leader Nikos Zachariades
was expelled from the party in 1956
and exiled in Siberia, where he committed
suicide in 1973.
Since 1949, the KKE leaders have
condemned Tito as responsible for the
defeat of the Democratic Army.
In the last decades, under pressure
from fighters and historical research,
the KKE have acknowledged ‘tragic
mistakes’ that were made by party
leaders in the 1940s.
But even to this day the Stalinists of
the KKE refuse to recognise the events
of the 1940s as a Revolution.
They are still true to the treacherous
Popular Front policies that the KKE’s
aim was the establishment of a ‘democratic
Greece’.
In his book 'Conversations with Stalin',
the Yugoslav Resistance leader
Milovan Djilas stated that Stalin was
very much against the Democratic
Army’s struggle in Greece.
Djilas wrote that, in a meeting on 10
February 1948, Stalin said that ‘this
uprising [in Greece] must be terminated
as soon as possible’.
To someone’s question that the Chinese
Liberation Army led by the Chinese
Communist Party is winning, Djilas
wrote that Stalin’s response was
simply ‘well, it’s different there’!
In 1989, the KKE once again entered
a National Government with the
Social-Democrats and the conservative
New Democracy, once again
betraying the struggles of workers and
youth.
To this day the KKE have not
denounced that reactionary government
which opened the way for the
election victory in 1990 of the
counterrevolutionary
New Democracy government,
that unleashed class war
against workers, youth and trade
unionists.
As we enter the second decade of the
21st century, 60 years since the defeat
of the Democratic Army, the lessons of
Greece’s uncompleted revolution of
the 1940s are vital.
First. the sequence of events and
their dialectical development must be
firmly grasped.
In 1942-43, a revolutionary Resistance
army was created in the Greek
mountains, mainly consisting of small
farmers who had lived in extreme
poverty and backward conditions, the
vast majority of them illiterate.
The Resistance transformed
them into a revolutionary army.
But the treacherous Popular
Front policies of the Stalinists
destroyed that army.
Yet the volatile social and political
situation gave rise to another
resistance movement, the Democratic
Army that fought heroically
in 1946-49, only to be defeated
once again by the treachery of
the Greek Stalinist leaders and
by Stalin whose policy of peaceful
co-existence with imperialism
sent the Greek fighters to
their tragic deaths.
The Greek Revolution of the
1940s started with the formation
and operations of ELAS in 1942
and was defeated in 1949
through a series of betrayals by
the KKE Stalinist leaders.
These events should be analysed and
understood through the Marxist theories
of combined and uneven development
which start off from examining
Greece in an international context.
Leon Trotsky wrote in ‘What is the
Permanent Revolution?’: ‘With regard
to countries with a belated bourgeois
development, specially the colonial
and semi-colonial countries, the theory
of the permanent revolution signifies
that the complete and genuine solution
of their tasks in achieving democracy
and national emancipation is conceivable
only through the dictatorship
of the proletariat as the leader of the
subjugated nation, above all of its
peasant masses.’ (The Permanent Revolution,
by Leon Trotsky, New Park,
p152)
The KKE’s degeneration into a
nationalist counter-revolutionary party
through the Stalinist Popular Front
policy meant that their ‘natural’ allies
were indeed the national bourgeoisie.
Spurred on by Stalin, through the
Yalta Agreements, the KKE in 1944-
46 sought to play bourgeois politics
like the Italian and French Communist
Parties, which entered bourgeois government
just after WWII, only to be
thrown out once the capitalist state and
army was consolidated and the working
class disarmed.
In 1946, Greece became the testing
ground of the ‘Cold War’, that communism
had to be eradicated by civil war.
Still the Stalinist KKE sought a compromise
instead of declaring a revolutionary
war.
They fought the Civil War as a
Democratic Army and refused to call
for a workers’ and small farmers’ revolutionary
socialist government.
The reason why the Greek Civil War
of the 1940s is still a paramount issue
in today’s class struggle in Greece is
because it remains an uncompleted
Revolution, despite the catastrophic
defeat of 1949.
The bitterness of the Revolution’s
betrayal has been passed on from one
generation of workers and small farmers
to the next, seeking class revenge
and fulfilment.
Today the unprecedented world economic
crisis of capitalism creates revolutionary
conditions in every country.
In Greece it revives the Civil War
history and thus poses the issue of the
completion of that Revolution.
This is what attracts, even unconsciously,
today’s youth and militant
workers to the study of the Greek Civil
War. They will have to complete the
heroic struggles of their forefathers by
making their own revolution.
As history demonstrated, this task
requires the building of a Marxist revolutionary
party, a section of the
Fourth International, to fight for the
overthrow of capitalism and the establishment
of a workers’ and small farmers
government through councils of
action.
The Revolutionary Marxist League,
the Greek section of the International
Committee of the Fourth International,
is engaged in this fight today.
jh
This is a useful historical piece, which provides some background for
the discussions about the Greek Civil War here on APST lately. It
sounds pretty sound, if there are historical errors in it, well,
Vangelis has the floor.
The most important thing in the whole piece is on the Macedonian
question. The article states that a vital, perhaps even majority,
section of the ELAS liberation fighters in the late '40s were Slav
Macedonians from the Macedonian area of Greece, motivated partially,
it seems, by the ELAS program for self-determination for Macedonia.
These heroic if misguided ELAS guerilla fighters were stabbed in the
back by Stalin, and murdered by the Greek reactionaries.
Now they are being stabbed in the back by counterrevolutionary Greek
national chauvinists Vangelis, Dusty and Forrest, who are also
justifying dubious and murky Greek chauvinist deeds in Pantaleimon
Square.
-jh-
dusty
> This is a useful historical piece, which provides some background for
> the discussions about the Greek Civil War here on APST lately. It
> sounds pretty sound, if there are historical errors in it, well,
> Vangelis has the floor.
>
> The most important thing in the whole piece is on the Macedonian
> question. The article states that a vital, perhaps even majority,
> section of the ELAS liberation fighters in the late '40s were Slav
> Macedonians from the Macedonian area of Greece, motivated partially,
> it seems, by the ELAS program for self-determination for Macedonia.
>
> These heroic if misguided ELAS guerilla fighters were stabbed in the
> back by Stalin, and murdered by the Greek reactionaries.
>
> Now they are being stabbed in the back by counterrevolutionary Greek
> national chauvinists Vangelis, Dusty and Forrest, who are also
> justifying dubious and murky Greek chauvinist deeds in Pantaleimon
> Square.
>
> -jh-
>
> On Jan 6, 7:29 am, rab <rogeralanblackw...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> > MARXIST REVIEW: DECEMBER 2009 Vol 24,No. 11
>
> > The Uncompleted Greek Revolution
>
> > by Nick Axarlis
A few comments in seriatum, (not up to the Macedonian section):
Begin quote:
“One of them was Michalis Katsaros, who wrote a powerful allegorical
poem entitled I Speak modelled on The Twelve, the famous work by the
Russian poet Alexander Blok, which is extremely popular in Greece and
has been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis. This is an extract of
Katsaros’ poem.
‘. . . But I speak mostly about the
fishermen
who abandoned their nets and followed
his steps
and when he got tired
they did not stop to rest
and when he betrayed them
they did not denounce
Soldiers of the Democratic Army prepare for battle with a dance and
when he was glorified they turned their faces . . .’
In subsequent interviews Katsaros verified that this poem refers to
the horrendous betrayal by the leaders of the KKE of the Resistance
movement and of the Democratic Army armed struggles in the 1940s.”
End quote
Diamond the hysterical anti-Christian can rub his face in this one.
Begin quotes:
By the summer of 1944, when the Nazi armies started their withdrawal
from Greece and the Balkans, a huge Resistance army (ELAS) and
movement (EAM) was operating under the leadership of the KKE and
dominated the whole of Greece, except the main cities and an area in
the west of the country which was under the control of the British-
supported rival guerrilla army of EDES.
By October of the same year the Nazis were gone and ELAS defeated the
EDES and entered all the Greek cities including the capital Athens.”
“...the fact that they controlled the whole of Greece with a large
experienced army and with the vast majority of the population
supporting EAM.”
End quotes
All the apst Globalist experts on the Politically Correct Politics of
Occupied countries can rub your faces in this. As has been constantly
pointed out by supporters of the Patriotic Left: the correct
revolutionary socialist politics were to build on the resistance to
the German occupation laid by the masses of the Greek people - and in
the process of that, to gain the authority of the masses against the
Quisling bourgeoisie and to build the necessary armed forces for the
conquest of power.
Your alternatives to waging armed struggle:
1) fraternisation with the Nazi troops (workers in uniform” - at that
stage of the German ascendancy - indeed!). But "in season and out"
that's the main one... Make sure your "unarmed persuaders" can duck
the bullets.
2) appealing to ELAS rank and file (presumably ONLY by being a PART of
it!) to take the power in the occupied parts of Greece - as though
this task could be carried out separated from the tasks of National
Resistance and as though deep going reforms had not been, were being,
instituted by ELAS-EAM.
3) Not accepting guns from the British as these came "with strings
attached"!! A resistance without guns...indeed!
Begin quotes:
“The Stalinist leaders of the KKE in line with orders from Moscow
aimed for a post-war ‘democratic’ bourgeois Greece, envisaging for
themselves an important role in political life as the ‘Left’.
They had not the slightest intention of establishing a socialist
democracy...”
… Indeed, they were so hostile to the demands for socialism that the
ELAS EAM’s ‘security’ organisation OPLA carried out assassinations of
militant workers and trade unionists, Trotskyists and anarchists,
branding them as ‘provocateurs’.
In the autumn of 1944, a National bourgeois government was formed,
which the KKE entered holding five ministries.
As far as the Greek Stalinist leaders were concerned, they had
achieved their aim for a ‘democratic’ post-war Greece.
But Churchill and British imperialism had other plans discussed and
accepted by Stalin at the Yalta conference; to re-install the hated
monarchy and a puppet state and government and to disband and defeat
the all powerful Resistance ELAS-EAM movement. The National
government confused the masses and gave time to the British forces to
prepare their attack. Churchill sent the British Army to Greece to
carry out this task.
Incredibly the Stalinist leaders organised mass demonstrations
welcoming the butchers into the port of Piraeus and in Athens.
The KKE leaders even assisted the British Army in taking over the very
centre of Athens.
In early December 1944, the Greek puppet government orchestrated a
crisis and police fired on unarmed EAM demonstrators in front of the
Vouli (Greek parliament) killing dozens. Next day another huge EAM
demonstration was again fired upon by police again killing many.
“…The December Athens-Piraeus battles, engraved in workers’ memory as
well as in art and literature as simply ‘the December’, led to the
defeat of the EAM forces as the British RAF did not hesitate in the
slightest to carpet bomb whole working class areas of Athens and
Piraeus and fire down from the Acropolis.”
End quotes
Tell us something we haven’t said already!
And on the politics of British Imperialism, the great fosterers of
Reformist illusions, the WRP and Diamond should take note that it was
these British Labour Party rats who continued the policies of
Churchill. Their perfidy then, as now, knows no limits.
Begin quotes:
“Only then the Stalinist leaders decided to act. But instead of
mobilising the experienced
guerrilla Resistance ELAS army, they fought the British Army with the
badly armed and trained youth and workers’ militias.”
End quote
In order to have an “experienced guerrilla Resistance ELAS army”…one
had to be…er...built, a task you all reject.
Begin quote:
“In February 1945, ‘Fourth International’ printed a long article on
the history of Greece and the Stalinists’ treachery calling the
various disorientated groups who supported the Fourth International to
the task”
End quote
Disoriented in what way and why?
Begin quote:
“The disarming of the Resistance army was the last straw for Aris
Velouchiotis, the heroic and military gifted virtual leader of ELAS,
who disagreed with the KKE’s leaders’ momentous betrayal and took his
regiment to the mountains hoping to start a new resistance movement
against the British army. But Velouchiotis was unable to see through
Stalinism and he sought a way to contact the Soviet Union, or Tito.
His political weakness cost him and the Resistance movement dear. He
was publicly denounced by the KKE in their newspaper Rizospastis,
which called Velouchiotis an ‘agent provocateur’ and ordered KKE
members and the Greek people not to offer any support or assistance to
him. In June 1945, Velouchiotis was encircled by Greek Army forces
and he committed suicide. His and his leading comrades’ heads were cut
off and paraded in Greek cities.”
End quote
There is a tragedy in the appeal to Stalin. Reminds one (in the sense
of a sad farce, rather than the grand historical tragedy that was the
fate of Velouchiotis) of some Healyites who, when their national
“sections” started going bad, considered that "Healy" would straighten
them out…
From this, in spite of Velouchiotis’ revolutionism, it appears the
author holds the view that his residual illusions in Stalinism, even
the KKE leadership, led to his encirclement and fate… Vngelis is best
placed to criticise/elaborate on this.
dusty
Diamond, the pathological hater...and under-estimator...of the
Christian peasantry...