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Civil War
In October 1944 the German army withdrew from Greece, and the new government entered Athens on October 18. Georgios Papandreou, the prime minister, ordered the ELAS to disband and disarm, but its leaders refused to do so. Tension increased, and the British brought in reinforcements for their own troops in Athens. Civil war between the ELAS and the government forces began in Athens in December, following an ELAS demonstration in which the Athenian police fired on the demonstrators. The ELAS controlled all of Greece except for a British-patrolled sector of Athens. The British aided the government forces, which gained military superiority, and in December 1944 Archbishop Damaskinos was installed as regent of Greece pending a plebiscite to determine the state of the monarchy.
In February 1945 the ELAS finally agreed to a truce. In return for the dissolution of its army, the EAM was promised freedom to engage in political activity, and a nonpolitical Greek army was guaranteed. In October 1945 Greece became a charter member of the United Nations.
The first Greek postwar general elections were held in March 1946. The result of the elections, a victory for the royalist Populist party, was bitterly contested by the EAM, which claimed that the election proceedings had been irregular. The plebiscite, held on September 1, 1946, again returned George II to the throne. A few months later George died and was succeeded by his brother, Paul I.
The increasing strength of the insurgent Communist forces in northern Greece became a source of concern to the Greek government, which claimed that the guerrillas were receiving aid from Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, three countries within the sphere of influence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The disputes between these three countries and Greece were aggravated by their respective claims to territory lying along their common borders. By the terms of the peace treaties drafted at the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, Greece received the Dodecanese Islands from Italy and reparations of $45 million from Bulgaria.
In February 1947, Great Britain, unable due to economic difficulties to extend further aid to Greece, asked the United States to assume British obligations to the beleaguered Greek regime. U.S. President Harry S. Truman subsequently initiated the policy known as the Truman Doctrine, sending military supplies and advisers to support government forces and relief supplies for civilians.
Despite a strong government offensive in the spring and summer of 1948, the rebels succeeded in retaining their principal strongholds, especially those in the mountainous area along the northern frontier. Several of the major defense bastions of the rebels in the Grammos Mountains were captured by government troops in the summer of 1949; on October 16, the rebel leadership proclaimed that military operations against the government had been halted "to avoid the total destruction of Greece."
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It is estimated that more than 50,000 combatants died in the conflict, and more than 500,000 Greeks were temporarily displaced from their homes by the fighting. The internecine strife and fierce brutality that characterized the civil war left a lasting legacy of bitterness between segments of the Greek population.
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The gory details (from the perspective of the right wing)
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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. Haïtas, 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.
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The gory details (from the perspective of the left wing - note that the left wing had a different understanding of what Greece is,
especially when it comes to the status of the area of Macedonia)
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The Greek Civil War
"From the period prior to the Metaxas dictatorship until after the Civil
War, the Greek Communist Party recognized the large ethnic Macedonian minority
in Greece. Click here to read articles from the newspaper Rizospastis.
""Toward the end of World War II, Aegean Macedonians formed the Slav National Liberation Front (SNOF) in alliance with the Greek Communist forces in order to resist the fascist occupation of Macedonia by the Germans and Bulgarians. During this period in the liberated areas of Greece under Communist control, Macedonians were free to publish newspapers, establish schools, and hold church services, all in the Macedonian language."
"During the Civil War that followed, Aegean Macedonians continued their struggle for the creation of an autonomous Aegean Macedonia, which would ultimately become part of a united and independent Macedonia. But in 1949, with the defeat of the 'democratic forces of Greece' by the 'promonarchist bourgeois forces' of the Greek government, these hopes were dashed. Over the course of the Civil War thousands of Aegean Macedonians were killed, imprisoned, or had their land confiscated, and many Macedonian villages were completely destroyed. Fifty thousand Aegean Macedonians were forced to flee their homes and escape to Yugoslavia in order to avoid persecution. In one of the most tragic episodes of this period 28,000 Aegean Macedonian children, known as 'child refugees' (Deca Begalci), were separated from their families and settled in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in an attempt to save them from the terror, slaughter, and bombing inflicted on Aegean Macedonians by the Greek government." 2
A Macedonian living in Melbourne, Australia, Vangel Rozakis, recalls his experiences of the Greek Civil War:
"We've been fighting for our freedom for two thousand years. With the referendum we finally broke our chains. The more you suppress a people, the more they assert their identity. People are like tobacco seeds; there can be a drought for thirty or forty years, but when the moisture comes, the seeds will begin to grow."
"The hell we've seen, especially from the Greek side. We'll have nightmares till we die. The Macedonian people went through a mincing machine and came out a people who fight for freedom."
"My grandfather was arrested because he was a Macedonian. He was sixty years old, and he didn't speak Greek. He didn't know anything about politics either. He went to jail for four years because he wouldn't sign a paper saying he was Greek. I'll never forgive the Greeks for that. Every family here has dropped a tear from the Greek government. My wife saw a Greek soldier cut open a woman who was eight months pregnant and put her baby on the end of his bayonet. That's what makes the nightmares come. Where was the UN? Where was Europe?"
"I remember sitting with my friends for three days in a dirt hole with no food and no water. The Greek soldiers had machine guns; they were just waiting for orders from Athens to kill us. They dropped a bomb on my godfather's house and killed eleven members of his family. It wasn't their nation; it wasn't their people. We were Macedonians. They did it so they could bring Greeks from Asia Minor to take our land."3
"After the Varkisa agreement (12-2-1945), the use of the Macedonian name and the Macedonian language were once again prohibited in the Aegean part of Macedonia and the Greek authorities started applying medieval terror against the Macedonians. In the period of 1945-46 alone, according to statistics: 400 murders were registered; 440 women and girls were raped; 13,529 interned on the Greek islands; 8,145 imprisoned in the Greek prisons; 4,209 indicted; 3,215 sentenced to prison; 13 driven mad by the torture in the prisons; 45 villages abandoned; 80 villages pillaged; 1,605 families plundered; and 1,943 families evicted."
"In order to protect themselves from this attempt at ethnic extermination, the Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia began to organize and provide armed resistance against the nationalistic policy of the Greek government. Macedonian organizations (NOF, AFZ, NOMS) played invaluable historical roles in the organization of the Macedonian resistance."
"At the beginning of the Greek Civil War (1946-49), the Macedonian people were drawn into the conflict not because of Communist aspirations, but by the promise of granting them full national and human rights. These included the rights to use the Macedonian language publicly, be educated in the Macedonian language, and to be able to establish and worship in Macedonian churches. It also included the promise of the right to self-determination through the establishment of of autonomous Macedonia. Because of these factors, the Macedonian people took massive participation in the Greek Civil War with over 20,000 Macedonians who actively participated in the armed resistance, and hundreds of thousands more who supported them."
"For a short time during the conflict, certain rights were granted to the Macedonians in Greece. The Macedonian language flourished in the schools and churches. Eighty seven Macedonian language schools with over 10,000 pupils were opened, and cultural theatrical performances in Macedonian were an everyday occurrence."
"Unfortunately, this period ended with the systematic bombing and destruction of the cities and villages in the Aegean part of Macedonia. The genocide and terror perpetuated against the innocent civilian population raged on without any restraints from any local or international authorities." 4