Greek Civil War, The

David H. Close

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317898511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Greek Civil War (1943--50) was a major conflict in its own right, developing out of the rivalry between communist and conservative partisans for control of Greece as the Axis forces retreated at the end of the Second World War. Spanning the transition from World War to Cold War, it also had major international consequences in keeping Greece (alone of all the Balkan nations) out of the Communist bloc and stopping the Soviets reaching the Mediterranean. Yet it has received less attention than it deserves from historians. In this striking and original study, David Close does justice to both the domestic context of the conflict and also to its international significance.

CHAPTER ONE

Greece after the First World War

DEPENDENCY AND SCHISM

‘The encounter between the West and the great non-Western majority of mankind,’ wrote the historian Leften S. Stavrianos, ‘seems likely to be viewed in retrospect as the central feature of modem history.’ In Greece the encounter led from the fifteenth century onwards to increasing acceptance of Western influence, a process which eventually brought the country into what Nikos Mouzelis described as ‘the parliamentary semi-periphery’ of the advanced capitalist countries. Greece by the 1930s qualified for this description because for nearly all the time since 1844 it had experienced parliamentary rule; it had made substantial progress towards industrialization; yet it remained dependent on advanced capitalist countries in many spheres – economic, military, and cultural.¹

Dependency stemmed from economic backwardness; and by conventional criteria – low income per capita, low rate of literacy, high rural unemployment, malnutrition among the majority of the rural population, and a low average life expectancy – Greece rated as backward by northern European standards. However it shared at least the first three of these characteristics with the other four Balkan countries, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. By another criterion, however – the relatively high proportion of the population engaged in non-agricultural occupations and living in large towns – Greece obviously diverged from the rest of the Balkans. By 1940 48 per cent of the population of 7,330,000 lived by non-agricultural occupations, and 23 per cent lived in the four connurbations with over 50,000 people: the metropolis (i.e. Athens and its port Piraeus), Salonika, Patras, and Volos. The metropolis alone contained 15 per cent and was far larger than any other Balkan city. The urban population was relatively receptive to Western technology, clothes, and culture: Athens and Salonika, for example, were on the electricity grid after 1930. Here, the wealthy and educated lived in a way far removed from that of the villages. These, if defined as having under 1,000 people, still included 48 per cent of the population, and many were remote and primitive, like one in the Pindus mountains, described by an American officer attached in 1944 to the base of the main resistance movement against the Germans: here all the inhabitants slept on the floors of their single-roomed huts; the nearest shop was fifteen hours’ walk away; and an old woman, seeing an illuminated light bulb for the first time, tried to blow it out.²

Political dependency had been continuous since 1832 when the boundaries and the monarch of the new state were determined over the heads of the Greek people by Britain, France, and Russia. ‘A Greece truly independent is an absurdity,’ declared the British minister to Athens in 1841; ‘Greece is Russian or she is English; and since she must not be Russian, it is necessary that she be English.’³ From the 1830s onwards, successive monarchs represented the interests of one or more of the great powers, who reciprocated by taking a protective interest in them. The political institutions of the new state – monarchy, legislature, civil service, police, armed forces, law courts, legal code, educational system, and later the trade unions also – were modelled on those of various states of northern and western Europe. Many leading members of these institutions acquired a higher education abroad, including the majority of leading politicians between the First and Second World Wars. The prime minister Elevtherios Venizelos, when modernizing the state in the second decade of the twentieth century, entrusted the organization and training of the army to a French mission, of the gendarmerie to an Italian one, and of the navy and city police to British missions. Governments after the Second World War repeated this practice. This is not to deny that these institutions soon acquired some Greek characteristics – notably their subversion by clientelistic practices – as the foreign missions found to their frustration.

The compulsion, inherited by Greeks from Ottoman rule, to seek powerful patrons was projected beyond national frontiers; and so in the early years of the new state there was a ‘British’, a ‘French’, and a ‘Russian’ party. Dependency was reinforced by geographical position. Greece was small and situated at an international crossroads. It was vulnerable to pressure from the sea, because in the 1930s the five largest cities were ports; it had a large merchant fleet; and imported, mainly or entirely by sea, many of its vital requirements including about a third of its wheat. On ten occasions between 1850 and 1944 the country was blockaded or menaced by warships of Britain, France, or Italy. Of special importance for the 1940s was the traditional interest of Britain in ensuring that Greece was ruled by a friendly regime. Britain’s strategic goals were to maintain freedom of communication through the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal; ensure that the Straits of Constantinople were not closed by a hostile power, as indeed they were during the First World War; and protect her interests in the Middle East, which grew after the First World War with the acquisition of protectorates there and her increasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Given Greece’s vulnerability to foreign intervention, the international instability which prevailed between 1914 and 1949 was intensely disruptive. Each of the two world wars caused a civil war, and the international tension of the inter-war period shaped domestic politics in various ways. The First World War quickly precipitated what became known as the National Schism, which started as a dispute between the prime minister Elevtherios Venizelos and King Constantine over Greece’s alignment. The Cretan politician Venizelos was to modern Greece what Bismarck was to modem Germany. Like a previous prime minister in 1907 he wanted ‘both from inclination and from policy to gravitate … [towards] the Western powers …’,⁴ a choice justified by Greece’s maritime position. Being responsive moreover to the wishes of businessmen in Greece and the diaspora, Venizelos wanted to continue his programme of modernizing the state on the model of Britain and France, and to bring within its frontiers the large Greek population of western Asia Minor. Constantine rejected this policy as too risky to the political and social structure of the old lands, that is the original kingdom comprising chiefly the Peloponnese and Sterea Ellada. In addition, as the Kaiser’s brother-in-law, Constantine admired Germany’s military efficiency and political institutions. Either choice was risky yet critical to the country’s future. Each leader was idolized by his camp. Venizelos had been head of government, and Constantine actively head of the army, during the Balkan wars of 1912–3 which added Macedonia, Epirus, and Crete to the state.⁵

Venizelos with Entente backing established a revolutionary government with its own army in Salonika the capital of the Greek province of Macedonia in 1916. In 1917 the rebels took over the king’s government and army in the south, forcing Constantine to abdicate in favour of his son. Thereupon Venizelos’s government purged the army and civil administration of monarchists. These events were accompanied by fierce, small-scale fighting in many parts of the country, as those active on each side persecuted the supporters of the other.⁶ For the next eighteen years, the Venizelist and anti-Venizelist camps alternated in power as a result of military coups or general elections, and each transfer of power was followed by a purge of the army and public administration. The Venizelist camp, of which the core was the Liberal Party, became predominantly republican, while the anti-Venizelist camp, of which the core was the Populist Party, tended towards monarchism.

The Schism destroyed consensus about the political system, and politicized the machinery of state. Henceforth each of the camps had a military wing on which it depended for political power. For their part many of the officers were keen for political patronage because of recent changes in the social composition of the officer corps. To enable the country to participate in the Balkan Wars of 1912–3 and in the First World War, governments rapidly expanded the army officer corps, and to this end abolished fees in the training school for officers and enabled many conscripts to become professional officers. Thus many of the officers were without private means, and depended entirely on their salaries for a livelihood. In attempting to defend and further their positions they sought political patrons. The practice, anyway traditional and accepted among officers, of forming political organizations and engaging in political conspiracies became more widespread.⁷

Having brought Greece into the First World War on the winning side, Venizelos secured as a reward Thrace, the west of which Bulgaria had occupied since its seizure from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, and Smyrna with much of western Anatolia, which lie in present-day Turkey. In the face of subsequent Turkish revival led by Kemal Ataturk, only western Thrace proved defensible. Eastern Thrace and western Anatolia did not; and in the so-called Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the Greek army was forced to withdraw from them with masses of civilian refugees.

The Treaty of Lausanne which followed between the Greek and Turkish governments ratified an extraordinarily drastic process of population exchange, as a result of which Greece expelled 380,000 Turkish-speaking Muslims to Turkey, while Turkey expelled to Greece about 200,000 subjects who were Greek Orthodox in religion. In addition, about 1,100,000–1,200,000 Greek Orthodox refugees arrived in Greece of their own accord from 1913 to 1922. The great majority came after the Catastrophe from present-day Turkey, and of these perhaps 50,000 promptly re-emigrated and perhaps 70,000 died soon after arrival.

During and soon after the First World War there had been other migrations. Some 58,500 Greek Orthodox migrants arrived in Greece from the Caucasus region and Russia, and another 46,000 from Bulgaria. During or soon after the First World War, 92,000 Bulgarian-speaking Christians left Greece for Bulgaria; and some of the Koutsovlachs, who were Romanian-speaking, emigrated to Romania. Greece emerged from these upheavals as probably the most homogeneous country in the Balkans, with the overwhelming majority of the population in most provinces being Greek-speaking and Greek Orthodox, and the rest fragmented into many mutually unsympathetic groups. A large percentage of those whose mother tongue was not Greek – such as Albanian-speakers in southern regions or Koutsovlachs in the Pindus ranges – regarded themselves nevertheless as ethnically Greek.

The ethnic groups of significance for the civil war period lived near the northern frontiers: the slavophones who lived mainly in western Macedonia, and the Albanian-speaking Muslims, or Chams, of western Epirus. The slavophones are usually thought to have numbered 100,000, but may in fact have numbered up to 200,000. Possibly a majority had no distinct national consciousness, but, of those who had, most in the interwar period identified with Bulgaria, which aspired openly to extend its territory at Greece’s expense, and sheltered the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) which periodically raided Greece and encouraged the Slavs’ separatism. Western Macedonia remained a powder-keg: to the north lay the Yugoslav and Bulgarian sections of the ancient province of Macedonia, inhabited largely by peoples speaking the same language as the slavophones of Greece; within it were tens of thousands of Turkish-speaking, but in religion Greek Orthodox, refugees who were fearful for their newly acquired lands and so suspicious of Slav expansionism.

The Chams numbered only 19,000, but derived some significance from patronage by neighbouring Albania, which encouraged their separatist feelings. The Romanian-speaking Koutsovlachs, who dwelt in the Pindus ranges and Macedonia, may have been nearly as numerous as the Slav-speakers, but very few had any separatist inclinations as Romania was remote. The Muslim, and mainly Turkish-speaking, population of 86,000 in Greek Thrace played little role in the civil strife of the 1940s because its religion was tolerated under the Treaty of Lausanne and it lacked interest in Greek quarrels. The Sephardic Jewish population of 62,000 was found mainly in Salonika and provoked quite strong anti-Semitism from Greeks. Most were deported to death camps during the German occupation. This group likewise played no significant role in the strife of the 1940s.

The exchange of populations gave added force to the National Schism. After 1923, refugees formed a fifth of the total population. They had lost their property in the Catastrophe, and many suffered a severe drop in status, for example from well-to-do merchants and professionals to poor peasants and workers. As many were distinguished from natives by speech, manners, or poverty, they were targets of resentment and scorn. The overwhelming majority of refugees saw Venizelos as their protector and blamed the Catastrophe on his opponents. Over half settled in the newly acquired territories of Macedonia and Thrace, including probably over 600,000 newly established smallholders, so accentuating the difference between the new and old regions of the country. The non-Greek minorities in rural Macedonia were jealous of the territorial claims of the refugees, and so gave their support to Venizelos’s opponents. Further south the refugees tended to form distinct communities both in villages and towns. Of special significance for the future were the extensive and generally poor quarters of the metropolis which they inhabited.⁸

The Catastrophe left an ideological vacuum which before 1922 had been occupied by the Great Idea: the ambition of most politicians to see the state expand so as to include all the ancient Greek diaspora of the Balkans and Asia Minor. In pursuing this aim for many decades, successive governments incurred a financial burden which starved the state and the economic infrastructure of resources. Now there were groups who argued that governments should make good this neglect and turn their backs on irredentism. These groups included Ioannes Metaxas, the right-wing dictator of 1936–41, and, at the opposite pole, the Greek Communist Party.

Economic dependency was reflected in a massive and mounting foreign debt. This burden was suffered also by the other Balkan states after the First World War; but the Greek debt was the heaviest per capita and was of long standing. Since 1897 an International Financial Commission (IFC), representing the creditor countries of which the chief was Britain, had supervised repayments, which in 1932 consumed 35–40 per cent of revenue and 9 per cent of national income. Both the IFC and the League of Nations Finance Committee possessed statutory powers over government finances. Naturally this foreign intervention provoked much resentment, especially during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Another cause of dependency was the reliance of the rapid industrialization in the inter-war period on foreign investment. Much of the industry and communications systems were financed by the Western powers, including for example the tramways, underground railways, water company, and electricity company in the metropolitan area.⁹

The majority of Greece’s ...