'Little Moscow'and the Greek Civil War: Memories of Violence, Local Identities and Cultural Practices In a Greek Mountain Community (original) (raw)

The experience of the civil war (1946-49) in a Greek village

Thetis, 2002

This paper examines the experience of the civil war (1946-49) in the village of Agia Triada in central Greece. The civil war in this area, and generally in the countryside, is only now beginning to attract the attention it deserves. Yet a study of the war on a local and rural level would be interesting for three basic reasons. Firstly, because during the occupation Evrytania, the province to which Agia Triada belongs, was the main stronghold of the Left resistance organisation National Liberation Front (EAM), and its powerful military wing ELAS (National People's Liberation Army). However, after the battle for Athens in December 1944, in which EAM/ELAS units fought against the government and British troops, and were defeated, the tide turned suddenly and decisively against the Left and Evrytania became for five years the target of a powerful conglomeration of anticommunist state and paramilitary forces. Secondly, because the consequences of the civil war in Evrytania were disastrous; estimates indicate that more than 10% of the population were killed either in action or after arrest and execution. Hundreds of people were prosecuted, imprisoned, exiled, and left homeless and unemployed. Many families were split and children were forced to live in an atmosphere of fear, anticipated arrest, and forced separation. Beyond the human losses and suffering, the material and economic devastation was no less appalling. Private houses and public buildings were destroyed, villages were evacuated, and fields and flocks were abandoned. Karpenisi, the administrative capital, became early in 1949 a battlefield between government and guerrilla forces. The third reason for the study of a specific community relates to new methodological approaches to the history of the 1940s. With the ending of the Cold War the entire debate on the Greek civil war has come to seem a little dated. While in the previous decades the conception was basically political, the mode diplomatic history (the war simply as a question of political strategies and policy-making), the perspective national and international (policy-making taking place in Athens, London and Washington) and the scope apologetic (who was responsible, the communists or the Greek rightists and the British), the 1990s signalled the opening up of the possibility of quite different avenues of enquiry: gender relations, village life, themes of crisis, trauma and violence, and the ethnic dimension, for example. A generation of younger historians has been exploring new interesting and exciting ways of doing history, using local studies, oral history and anthropological methods in conjunction with more conventional forms of social and political history to get at the kind of questions ignored by earlier scholars. As Mark Mazower points out, emphasis on ‘local perspectives serve to underscore the decisive importance of local politics and show how national political loyalties and struggles were filtered through a dense layer of village and regional concerns and interests’.

Old Interpretations and New Approaches in the Historiography of the Greek Civil War

Thetis, 2013

The Greek civil war was one of the most important “small wars” of the twentieth century. It was the result of the bitter divisions and violence that engulfed Greece in the interwar years and in the first half of the 1940s. It was also determined by external geopolitical factors, for this civil war was the first crucial episode of the Cold War and a critical turning point in the shaping of America’s containment policy.

The Deafening Silence of the Unburied Dead: The Greek Civil War and Historical Trauma

2020

While World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, the onset of the Greek Civil War in December 1944 marked the beginning of the Cold War. For the people of Greece, the civil war would continue the devastation that the Italian, German, and Bulgarian occupations had initiated. The civil war's catastrophic cleavages in Greek society are still part of contemporary social and political life. For my family, the civil war's barbarity is manifest in the brutal execution of my great-uncle Yiorgos (George) Kasidakos, a partisan of ELAS who was imprisoned in Gytheio following the Treaty of Varkiza. On March 21st, 1947, George and 31 other political prisoners were brutally executed by a monarcho-fascist gang comprised of members of EAOK, X, and local paramilitaries under the leadership of Kostas Bathrelos. Following the formal ending of hostilities, my family experienced repression, harassment, and for some, exile. Most of the family would emigrate in the 1950s and 1960s to...

The Legasy of Civil War in Greek Society

AUTH, 2019

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the consequences of the war related to the civilians and which constituted the legacy of the civil war in Greek society. An initial presentation of the casualties-victims, of the "civilians", as it has been established to be characterized as those who do not participate in war as well as those who do not belong to the armed forces of a country. The casualties will be reported for the period of the Greek Civil War 1946-1949. We will try through the events and you went to highlight the other face of this conflict. The face of these civilians who did not fight actively in 1946-49 but participated n without their will in the hostilities. They were young, strong, children, mothers, sick and wounded. They are the ones who were not respected by the bullet of the "brother’s gun, the shell of the "friend's" gun, and the mine in the fields of the "relative". They were the children who left the arms of the mother for foreigners, they were the immigrants who took their “eye" for new opportunities, the if they were executed ( on both fronts), the political and mountain refugees, all those who were affected by the hostilities as a whole, those whom we will henceforth call "civilians".

Birth of the Cold War: irregular warfare first blood in Greece

Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2019

While often held up as a model of successful American counterinsurgency, the Greek Civil War presents a unique case. Peculiar local conditions and geopolitics contributed to the defeat of communist forces in Greece. A firm British and later American commitment to combating communism stood in contrast to ambiguous support from the Soviet Union in an area they considered outside of their sphere of influence. Strong nationalist feeling among the Greek population buttressed support for the government and undermined the 'internationalist' concessions of communist forces. These characteristics make the extrapolation of broader lessons focused on victory through the application of overwhelming American resources and the financing of local forces problematic. If lessons are to be gleaned from this case, they should focus on the critical roles played by internal political dynamics and geopolitics in undermining the strength of the insurgent forces and how these provided a stable platform from which the counterinsurgents could operate.

The Defeated of the Greek Civil War: From Fighters to Political Refugees in the Cold War

Journal of Cold War Studies 16.3 (Summer 2014)

In the fall of 1949, after the end of the Greek Civil War, the bulk of the defeated Greek Communist (KKE) fighters were covertly transported from Albania to Soviet Uzbekistan. This article addresses the covert relocation project, organized by the Soviet Communist Party, and the social engineering program intended to create a prototype Greek People’s Democracy in Tashkent. Drawing on Soviet and Greek Communist Party records, the article raises three major issues: first, the contingencies of postwar transition in the Balkans and the precarious status of the Albanian regime; second, the international Communist response to the military defeat of the KKE in 1949 and the competing visions of the Greek, Soviet, and Albanian parties regarding the future of the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG); third, the intentions of the KKE to establish military bases in Albania and the party’s ensuing effort to transform the agrarian fighters of the DAG into revolutionary cadres for a future victorious repatriation in Greece. Drawing these elements together, the article elucidates the relocation operation of 1949, positions the Greek political refugee experience within the postwar “battle of refugees,” and challenges the widespread historiographical assumption that the KKE immediately abandoned the prospect of a renewed armed confrontation.