How Stalinism betrayed Greece

'HE HISTORY of modern Greece is very much an international question. It cannot be understood apart from the role first of British, a cradle. CINEMA ONE OF the cults of RIlE PAGE

then of American imperialism.

The full tragedy of that history cannot be appreciated either without reference to the crimes of Since Toucalas is unable to cover up for either of these interested parties, much of his book provides a useful and ennentens record When it comes to interprelalion alla alternative policy he betrays weakness of his own position.

Accordi ing to him Greec "political and social modernization' the colonels put a stop to it.

His own sympathy seems to go to the rapanareous, par acularly to Anarea.

mainly This lowed through the Period' then the Popular Front the 1930s.

in way for reaction than in munist Party a key position.

During and after downfall it was able to control country EAM Front)

Mr one ridence concords that All the EAM was liberalone. As Tsoucalas uts it: Endership, bad not tied Thus, of the the EAM for years, to pre-war Churchill's aim was to reBritish Greece after the and recover the huge endy to make Greece.

True face

Anyone who wants to see the true face of the British ruling class and its greatest political hero of this century should study the events in Greece in 1944 described in this book. When British troops commanded by General Scobie landed in Greece they did so according to a design which Churchill had prepared well in advance and cleared with Stalin. His aim was to break the will of the Greek people by force and restore the discredited Greek bourgeoisie, the exiled government and the monarchy. As a preliminary the left-wing rebellion in the Greek forces in Egypt was smashed and 20,000 dissident soldiers and sailors were imprisoned in the desert.

In return for a free hand in the Balkans the Soviet bureaucracy was ready to sell-out its faithful followers in the EAMELAS organization.

When Churchill visited Stalin in October 1944, the deal was sealed on half a sheet of paper.

The wily Tory wardog pretended to be shocked: "Might it not be thought rather cynical, he suggested, 'if it seemed we had disposed of come to power because of the long record of betrayals by the leadership of the Greek Communist Party. Conpublished in a paperback edition (Penguin Special, 6s), highlights some of the background to the coup.

Stalin's deal with Churchill in October 1941, concluded at a meeting in the Kremlin, fixed Greece firmly in the sphere of British and US imperialism. All that followed in Greece was the result of that treacherous deal, right up to the present friendly relations that obtain between the Soviet bureaucracy and the leaders of the military regime in Athens. The tragedy of Greece will be the tragedy and defeat of the international working class unless Stalinism is politically defeated. That these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner. Let us burn the paper.' 'No, you keep it', Stalin replied. Churchill's instructions were . that EAM was to be destroyed.

He told Scobie in Athens: *Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.' Atrocity stories and all sorts of distortions were put out to discredit ELAS. Nevertheless the partisans fought bravely, evidently against the wishes of the Russians.

In the Commons Churchill did not hesitate to call ELAS "Trotskyist', for Stalin's benefit. In his war memoirs he tribute to Stalin, who 'strictly and faithfully adhered to our agreement of October and in all the long weeks of fighting the communists in the streets of Athens not one word of reproach came from "Pravda"

or "Izvestia" ' Yalta, Churc carve Europ Many points about the situation in 1944 and the policy of EAM-ELAS remain obscure. Tsoucalas seems to suggest that it was wrong to continue the struggle against the British.

In any case an armistice was signed in February 1945, and a white terror unleashed under under the benign gaze of the British army.

What mattered was that the big British investments were restored. Otherwise the Greek economy was shattered; the masses were hungry and in rags and tens of thousands mourned their dead.

Much partisan resistance continued to the new occupiers and their Quislings. Meanwhile relations between Stalin and his erstwhile allies had deteriorated. The Greek Communist Party swung over to a policy of insurrection which was launched under the worst possible conditions and did not end until 1949.

it guerrilla struggle was used by the confirmed Stalinist, Zachariades, as a bargaining counter, not as a bid for power.

Combat

The. failure to build a real political movement in the countryside was fatal to the success of the guerrilla struggle.

When, in the final stages of the civil war, the partisan armies moved over to open combat, they lost what advantages remained to them.

Forced back to the border, the communist forces had finally to abandon the struggle. The balance sheet of Stalinism in those years was a terrible series of useless sacrifices and defeats which decimated and demoralized the vanguard of the Greek working class. Reaction was triumphant all along the line. "The left had been beaten and blown to bits,' writes Tsoucalas. "Thousands of people who had constituted the nation's progressive elite had been killed, imprisoned or exiled. The hecatomb can only be compared with the sombre fate of the Spanish intelligentsia.' The week .communist Party, arning nothing from its de feats, became all the more obedient to Moscow and moved from guerrilla warfare to the purest reformism which has characterized its policy ever since.

The debility of British imperialism made it impossible for the aims which Churchill had set to be realized. From 1949 the State Department took over. The aim was to crush 'communism', , keep Greece in the 'Free World' and ensure a paramount position for US capital in the country.

Some democratic appearances were best preserved, but even those could be dispensed with, despite murmurs of disapproval in European capitals, where the lesson of American ruthlessness was not lost. In this set-up there was no real basis for a return to parliamentary democracy with all the liberal guarantees which would have permitted the formation of a left-wing government. Even the Centre Union government of Papandreou, Britain's stooge, elected in 1963, causd American displeasure. Greek politics, behind a facade of parliamentary government, became even more than normally a hotbed of plots and intrigues in which the King, the CIA, the army and various right-wing cliques backed by big business played their murky parts.

It was out of this background, with the working class held prisoner by the Stalinists' policy of left alliances, that the colonels' coup was hatched. The present regime rests on the reactionary state apparatus built up on the ruins of EAMELAS for which Stalinism was It interest between American im perialism and the wealthy merchants, bankers and shipowners who dominate Greek capitalism.

Iscoucalas shies away from a full analysis of the colonels' regime on the grounds that there is not enough serious information to make this possible.

Unable to draw the real lessons of the history he writes, he simply points to the dictatorship as a bad thing. His only prognosis is : 'Even at the risk of seeming pessimistic, it must at present be said that the forces which will shape the future of Greece are still unknown.' In fact the future is in the hands of the Greek working class, Greece, made still more im which is the decisive class portant by the economic changes of the past decade. The need is to build in Greece a section . of the Fourth International and to smash the Stalinist leadership whose past betrayals have permitted the temporary victory of the most reactionary regime that Greece has ever known. ness about his adventures; he pursued death, sex and shopping with the same, flat imperturbability.