Nachmani, Anikam. 1990. International Intervention in the Greek Civil War: The United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans, 1947–1952. New York: Praeger.
- Chapter 6. 1950–1967: Post–Civil War
- » Fucking Fifties
Chapter 6. 1950–1967: Post–Civil War
Fucking Fifties
Western European governments saw the end of the Greek Civil War as a victory in the fight against world Communism, so much so that President Lyndon B. Johnson later considered Greece the Vietnam of the 1940s. The greatest irony about both the British involvement and the Truman Doctrine was that the Soviets neither actively nor implicitly supported the Communist Party's efforts to assert its size and become by force part of political power in Greece. Quite the contrary, they repeatedly advised the leadership of the KKE not to undertake a military campaign and made it quite clear that there would be no possibility of material or other support from the Soviet Union. Nikos Zachariadis, a favorite of Stalin, was repeatedly humiliated at meetings with Zhdanov, Molotov, and Dimitrov when he insisted on requesting help and was repeatedly denied it. The contemporary evidence for this is overwhelming. (See Nachmani 1990, Close 1995, Gitlin 1967, Iatrides 2005, and Farakos 2000.) In other words, there never existed an actual Communist threat in Greece, and it certainly did not come from the outside, as the Truman Doctrine claimed .
But this is exactly how Greek historiography of the 1950s, all written by the Right, treated the emphýlios, as an attempt by the KKE, supported by the Soviet Union, to take over the country. Not until 1963 did books coming from the Left suggest a different reading of the events of the preceding three decades. And only since the mid 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, have memoirs of those years and of the years spent on the islands started to appear.
The Right-wing position was reiterated in 2000 by Stathis Kalyvas (in Mazower 2000). Kalyvas redeveloped the thesis that “red terror” in Greece had been more intense than and just as calculated as “white” and “black” terror, especially during the last years of the occupation, and he accused “recent historical research” on the issue of systematically and programmatically tending to “overlook, minimize, or whitewash leftist terror.” He further chastised “even serious scholarship” for having minimized Leftist violence by employing a “skewed vocabulary,” such as that used by anthropologist Riki van Boeschoten, who characterized “the violence of EAM 'revolutionary violence' and the violence of the Right 'terrorism' ” (in Mazower 2000: 142). The only historians whom Kalyvas cites as developing an argument about Left violence during the occupation comparable to his own are Mark Mazower (1993) and David Close (1995), and even they only partially so (in Mazower 2000: 178n4).
When historians from the Left criticized this position, calling it ahistorical and deeply ideological, Kalyvas accused them of “histrionics, witch-hunts, and conspiratology,” since, he claimed, “it is widely accepted that on the level of public discourse the dominant theories about the Occupation and the emphýlios come from the blatantly partisan myths that were created in the context of the emphýlios struggle” (2003: 31). Kalyvas recognized that the narrative of the emphýlios was originally produced by the winners, while after the junta it was appropriated and changed by the “descendants of the defeated” (ibid.). He and Nikos Marantzidis, calling themselves “revisionists of history,” laid down what have come to be called (with derision) “the Ten Commandments” of the proper study of the emphýlios (2004).
The first such injunction is to relocate the beginnings of the emphýlios from 1944 (as had been announced by the Greek state and published in the Government Gazette on September 18, 1989) to 1943, claiming that it has “finally been grafted onto consciousness” that, when referring to the emphýlios, “we mean the entire period of 1943–1949” (2004, point 1), although such consciousness seems to exist only within the group of the “revisionists,” since not even the old Right-wing historiography made such a claim. Another one of the ten points is that “recent research has shown that violence was not the prerogative of only one party” (point 4). With a suspicious wink at postmodern discourses, they accuse the research produced thus far of looking for “one truth,” for which should now be substituted partial, collaborative, and conjoined research that would “avoid attempts at large scale interpretive schemes if they are not supported by detailed and complete documentation” (point 5). Of course, the positivism of their entire project, with its reliance on numbers, mathematical models (especially by Kalyvas), and the need “to set the record straight” (in Mazower 2000: 142) reveals not a commitment to postmodernism but a deep commitment to finding not “one truth” but “the truth.” It is a project as far removed from postmodernism as could be.
Kalyvas and Marantzidis have reverted to the earlier, Right-wing model of narrating the emphýlios even more than moderate historians and political scientists such as John Iatrides, who came to the conclusion, after decades of studying the phenomenon, that the KKE “as a genuinely revolutionary party was determined to seize power at the first opportunity, preferably by political means but by armed force if necessary” (2005: 9). This possibility of seizing power, “preferably by political means” has been lost in Kalyvas and Marantzidis (as Iatrides has overlooked that the Greek Communist Party was not a “genuinely” revolutionary party, since it did not attempt to create the conditions for revolution).
To study the emphýlios in its entirety, Kalyvas and Marantzidis have sought to form a revisionist school of thought that would prove the emphýlios to be not only a power struggle initiated by the KKE but one that necessarily and as a matter of tactics used violence. In the first article that he wrote to set the project in motion (in Mazower 2000), Kalyvas set out to prove: (1) that the Left had not been the main “(or even the only) victim of violence” in the civil war Mazower 2000: 142), and (2) that the “seemingly straightforward instances of German terror and rightist 'white' terror prove misleading when not connected to the red terror and placed into the full sequence of events to which they belong” (ibid.: 143–44). He thus seeded the argument that German reprisals and German and collaborationist terror resulted from violence enacted by the partisans against the occupying forces. Because this argument needs documentation with examples from across the country, a number of younger scholars have been drafted into the endeavor. This movement has caused a furor in historical and political circles in Greece, since it has reanimated many of the original political positions and debates of the emphýlios itself. Because the Left is not a uniform and monolithic entity in Greece, this debate has drawn criticism from many angles, many different ones from the Left itself.
A great many graduate students, in both Greek and European universities, are participating in this project, engaging in local-history research and trying to produce a complete picture of the political landscape of Greece in the decade of the forties and fifties. Apart from the methodological problems of this entire project, however (see Panourgiá 2008c), there are other, more serious epistemological ones, as the project is ultimately both an enumerative one, and an attempt at balancing atrocities.
After the end of the civil war, military tribunals started to prosecute not only the captured DSE military but also the political branch of the Party and Leftists in general. The paramilitaries continued their terror, which set the tone of the political climate of the country as one of conflict and tension. This resulted in the murder of a number of Left and Left-leaning civilians and politicians, such as the pacifist Gregorios Lambrakis in Thessaloniki in 1963. (The Lambrakis affair, as it has come to be known, is the subject of the film Z, by Costa-Gavras.) The places of exile were not closed down. Quite the contrary, exile was intensified as a measure of both discipline and punishment, as we have seen. The state, through complete control of education, engaged in an even tighter production of patriotism and nationalism. In 1953, the government headed by Marshall Papagos founded the Kentrike Yperesia Plerophorion (KYP), the Greek equivalent of the CIA. According to James Becket (1970: 13), the KYP “was a subsidiary of the Langley, Virginia, parent corporation… and was directly financed by it.” Although initially the KYP was not permitted to interfere in Greek domestic affairs but was to engage in “counter espionage activities outside of Greece” (ibid.), both the KYP and the CIA became heavily involved in Greek matters.
As Becket rightly observes, the “heavy involvement of KYP and the C.I.A. in domestic Greek affairs can be explained by their concept of the enemy. The enemy was not simply expansionist Russia but communism” (ibid.). It was back to square one of the Idiônymon. KYP and the CIA, even if they did not organize the paramilitaries, certainly abetted them. The parakrátos (para-state) and the paramilitaries were allowed to utilize every known method of organized terror, abducting citizens in the middle of the street or in the middle of the night, or fabricating crimes and evidence. One such instance, a pretext for the coup of 1967, was the case of ASPIDA (literally meaning “shield,” the acronym abbreviates Axiōmatikoi Sôsate Patrida Idaniká Dēmoratia Axiokratia, “Officers Save Fatherland Ideals Democracy Meritocracy”). A group of Centrist army officers was accused of having formed a Left-wing, antiroyalist organization of that name, which was planning to take power through a coup. The attempt never took place and, according to the officers themselves, never had been planned. Nevertheless, the officers were tried for “treason against the Greek state” and for “following a known communist,” namely, Andreas Papandreou, the son of ex-prime minister Georgios.
In the crevices between the terror of the Right and the abject existence of the Left people, went on trying to live a life worth living, falling in love, dancing, going out, throwing parties, decorating Christmas trees, studying, working, swimming.
Close, David. 1995. The Origins of the Greek Civil War. London: Longman.
Gitlin, Todd. 1967. “Counter-Insurgency: Myth and Reality in Greece.” In Containment and Revolution: Western Policy Towards Social Revolution, 1917 to Vietnam, ed. David Horowitz, 140-82. preface by Bertrand Russell. London: Anthony Blond.
Iatrides, John. 2005. “Revolution or Self-Defense? Communist Goals, Strategy, and Tactics in the Greek Civil War.” 7, no. Journal of Cold War Studies, 7, no. 3 (Summer): 3-33.
2000. Dekemvres tou '44: Neotere erevna—Nees Proseggiseis (December of 1944: Latest Research—New Approaches)., ed. Gregores Farakos Athens: Philistor.
2000. After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960., ed. Mark Mazower Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Mazower, Mark. 1993. Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
2000. After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960., ed. Mark Mazower Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Panourgiá, Neni. 2008c. “Review of Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.” Historein, 192-97.
Becket, James. 1970. Barbarism in Greece: A Young American Lawyer's Inquiry into the Use of Torture in Contemporary Greece, with Case Histories and Documents. Foreword by Senator Claiborne Pell.. New York: Walker and Company.
This is a reference to the song by Loukianos Kelaidones that I wrote about earlier (Panourgiá 1995), but now I want to look at the fifties not as they produced the middle-class generation of youth that came of age in the fifties and sixties (and thus produced the political and cultural landscape of modernity in Greece) but as they produced abject political spaces in the context of the Truman Doctrine and with the aid of the Marshall Plan. On a certain level, the doctrine and the plan secured the survival of the new middle class while giving it a certain power and authority. The term post–civil war, of course, can be taken as only a temporal marker, referring to the date when the actual fighting was over. In other words, there is nothing “post” regarding the civil war in Greece, perhaps even now.
See Gitlin 1967. In 1967, when the junta arrested all the Leftists that it could find and transported them to various camps and prisons, Tzavalás Karousos, an actor who had been persecuted since the civil war and was being arrested again at the age of sixty-two, during his transport to the camp, thinking about U.S. involvement in the junta, called Vietnam “the hope and the anguish of the whole world” (Karousos 1974: 85).
In the report that Mark Ethridge, the U.S. delegate to UNSCOB, submitted in May 1947 with his findings about outside involvement in the civil war and Communist Party actions, he mentioned that he found very little evidence to support the Greek government's claims. See US/NA 501, BC-Greece/ 4-847. This is also shown by Nachmani (1990), who has researched exhaustively all the sources of the period. The views that Ethridge presented in the report, however, are complicated by the private accounts that appear in the book that his wife, Willie Snow, wrote about her impressions of Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia when she visited her husband in 1947 (Snow 1948). She unwittingly shows how Paul Porter (the head of the U.S. economic mission to Greece), her husband, members of the various foreign postwar and reconstruction delegations to Greece, members of the Greek government and the Greek aristocracy, and members of the various relief organizations informally and in social settings reinforced each other's convictions about a Communist plot and the role of international Communism in shaping the landscape of Greece immediately after the war.
In an interview that Ethridge gave in 1974 to Richard McKinzie, he mentions how, on the basis of intuition, he urged President Truman to make a declaration on account of Greece (which later became the Truman Doctrine). McKinzie mentions how, by February of 1947 (about a month before the British announced their intention of pulling out of Greece), Ethridge had sent a dispatch to the United States in which he said that it appeared to him that there was going to be an all-out Communist push to take over the government. McKinzie asked Ethridge whether he had any evidence of this or it was his own personal assessment. Ethridge seemed to flounder: “Yes, yes. Well, they were having demonstrations in Athens the whole time, and they broke up a couple of meetings of the Commission with their demonstrations outside. And I walked out of a Commission meeting, saying, 'If you people can't keep order there's no use in us going on.'… Yes, you could sense it, you could sense it. They were going to try an all-out push and the Truman Doctrine prevented it” (my emphasis). Ethridge visited the Balkans to study the postwar situation for the U.S. Department of State in 1945; he was U.S. delegate to the UN commission of investigation to study the Greek border disputes in 1947; he was U.S. representative on the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1949; and he was the chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information from 1948 to 1950. His oral history interview with McKinzie took place in Moncure, North Carolina, on June 4, 1974, for the Harry S Truman Presidential Library.
To be fair, I should add that it is not only Right-wing historiography from the 1950s and 1960s that has adopted this position. Tony Judt, writing about the postwar period in Europe, without giving his sources, rehearses the same argument, while acknowledging that “despite a significant level of wartime collaboration among the bureaucratic and business elites, post-war purges were directed not at the Right but the Left. This was a unique case but a revealing one. The civil war of 1944–45 had convinced the British that only the firm re-establishment of a conservative regime in Athens would stabilize this small but strategically vital country” (2005: 48). But, looking at the transition period between the postwar and reconstruction, Judt announces that “in the post–World War Two years, the Communist ΚΚΕ terrorized villages under its control, leaving a legacy of fear and associating the radical Left in many Greek memories with repression and atrocity” (ibid.: 505). These years, of course, would be the years of the White Terror, when even U.S. observers testified to the persecution of the Left.
Kalyvas accuses the following researchers of engaging in an ideological representation of the Left and its violence (or lack thereof): (1) overlooked violence, in Tsoucalas 1969, Svoronos 1982, Collard 1989, Hondros 1983, Hart 1996; (2) minimized violence, in Smith 1984 and Fleischer 1995, who is also accused of dismissing Leftist violence as an aberration (In Mazower 2000: 142); (3) whitewashed violence, in Elephantis 2008 and Broussalis 1997.
Even if Kalyvas and Marantzidis would like to raise our consciousness on this matter, as Peter Berger told us in 1974, “it is, in principle, impossible to 'raise the consciousness' of anyone, because all of us are stumbling around on the same level of consciousness—a pretty dim level” (13).
Photograph of Kostas Papaioannou and other exiles on the island of Ai-Stratis, in the northern Aegean, taken in October 1950. In the center is General Stefanos Sarafis, commander in chief of ELAS during the Resistance. Sarafis was exiled in 1945 to the island of Ikaria and then transferred to Makrónisos, from which he was transferred again to Ai-Stratis in 1950. Next to him, with glasses and an open jacket, is Konstantinos Despotopoulos. They are surrounded by other political exiles, both civilians and captured military. What is remarkable about the photograph is that the exiles appear (after the tortures of Makrónisos and—possibly—Yáros) with the imprimatur of the social class to which they belonged before the war and the civil war started: suits, military attire, and peasant and lower-middle-class aesthetics mingle in this photograph. Kostas Papaioannou Archive, General State Archives of Kavala. Reproduced with permission.
The reaction to the Kalyvas-Marantzidis project has been forceful. In addition to the special issue of Vivliodromio (where the entire debate is published), see also Eleftherotypia's “Ios,” especially “Oi Tagmatsphalites dikaionontai” (“The Tagmatasphalites are being exonerated)” October 26, 2003 (in two parts); “He Nea 'Sovietologia' gia ten Katoche kai ten Antistase” (“The New 'Sovietology' about the Occupation and the Resistance”) May 12, 2004 (in two parts); and Kalyvas's letter to “Ios” and “Ios's” response, November 3, 2003. See also Panourgiá 2004b.
Photograph of salute to the flag at the opening ceremony of the (“performances of gymnastics”) at the High School of Naousa, Western Macedonia, May 1956. At the front, to the left of the flag-bearing group, is the physical education teacher in charge of the performance. Private collection.
March of the High School of Naousa in March 1956 to celebrate the 1821 War of Independence. Leading the march is the physical education teacher. Immediately following her are high-school students dressed in traditional costumes. Behind them follows the entire high school, dressed in the formal high-school uniform. Girls precede boys. Note how demeanor in this photograph differs from : a fascistic appearance gives way to the softness of the flowing silk costumes and the smartness of the teacher's suit. Private collection.
Parakrátos denotes the machinery of the underground, unacknowledged, and (thus) lethal structure of persecution, character assassination, and extermination of political dissidents that allowed the official state to maintain its modicum of legality. The parakrátos (translated as “deep state” in the case of Turkey) should not be confused with the paramilitary organizations and the militias, which existed in Greece (and have elsewhere in the world, such as the death squads in Latin America). The agents of the parakrátos certainly existed at the margins of the state. They were individuals who worked closely with the police and the gendarmerie but were not armed (as the militia and the paramilitaries were). They used crude objects (axes, axe handles, large stones, lead pipes, etc.) to carry out their operations, which were not only aimed at exterminating Leftists but also at creating and maintaining a climate of fear. As Veena Das and Deborah Poole note, paramilitaries “represent both highly personalized forms of private power and the supposedly impersonal and neutral authority of the state (2004: 14). The complete locution was to parakrátos tes Dexias (“the parastate of the Right”), indicating the deep commitment of the Right to maintaining power and its identification with the state (and vice versa). The existence of the parakrátos, like the paramilitaries, further underlines not only the fragmentation at the margins of the state but also the investment of the state in maintaining these margins. Importantly, the margin allows the elasticity of being (temporarily) both inside and outside of the law, and it is therefore as fiercely contested as the center. Das and Poole have also noted this, but not the temporality of interiority and exteriority in terms of the law (see Das and Poole 2004: 15).
In trials of Leftists in the fifties and sixties, it turned out that policemen charged with shadowing suspects could not produce documentation because they had simply fabricated it. It is easy to dismiss this as simply one of the excesses of political power, but it reveals the state's need for an affect of legality to legitimate its actions. I am indebted to Vassilis Karydis for bringing these trial transcripts to my attention.
The laughable notion that Papandreou was a Communist can be explained only by the intense antidemocratic climate in Greece in the years preceding the junta, such that any and all democratic, antiroyalist and anti–Right-wing tendencies in the body politic were relegated to Communism. See the excellent account of this process in Deane [Gigantes] 1976.