Churchill, Stalin, and the Greek revolution - British Prime Minister William Churchill; Joseph Stalin

Monthly Review, April, 1999 by John Newsinger

Even before the end of the Second World War, the British intervened militarily in Greece, with over seventy thousand troops, to crush the Left and prepare the way for the restoration of a discredited and reactionary monarchy. Prime Minister Winston Churchill took a close personal interest in the episode, famously ordering his military commander, General Scobie, to behave in Athens as if he were in "a conquered city." Churchill, with the full support of his Labour coalition partners, made absolutely clear that, as far as he was concerned, those Greeks who had collaborated with the Nazis were infinitely preferable to those who had resisted. What is particularly remarkable is that the bloody assault on the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) took place with the agreement of Joseph Stalin. It honored the secret "Churchill-Stalin Pact," concluded in Moscow in October 1944, which partitioned the Balkans. The Greek Left, after enduring the long years of Nazi occupation, was brutally sacrificed on the altar of great power politics.

The Resistance

Parliamentary democracy had been extinguished in Greece in August 1936, when General Metaxas established a military dictatorship with the endorsement of King George II and the support of the British. Metaxas established a police state modeled on corporatist lines borrowed from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Left was successfully broken and Greece was kept safe for the rich and for foreign investors, particularly the British. However, the regime's fascist trappings did not save it from the attentions, first of Mussolini, and later of Hitler. In April 1941 the Nazis invaded and occupied the country, driving out a British expeditionary force in the process. George II fled to London, while the Greek Communist Party (KKE) proceeded to put itself at the head of a growing resistance movement.

In September 1941, the Communists established the National Liberation Front, a broad based alliance with Popular Front politics. It was committed to social reform, women's liberation, democratization, and national freedom, but relegated the struggle for socialism to the future, once the Germans had been driven out and a democratic republic put in place. EAM proclaimed its respect for property rights and was determined to conciliate the middle class, hoping to unite the Greek people against the Nazi Occupation and the Greek conservatives who chose to collaborate with it.(1)

The movement was tremendously successful, and by the end of 1943 had achieved mass support in both the towns and the countryside. By mid-1944, it claimed two million members, nearly a third of the population and, with its fifty-thousand-strong National Liberation Army (ELAS), had successfully liberated much of the countryside. It had overwhelming support in the working-class districts of Athens. The Communists had established an underground resistance state in the face of the most savage repression: Nazi reprisals, executions, and massacres were to cost the lives of some seventy thousand men, women and children, and resulted in the destruction of around nine hundred villages.(2) How did the British respond to the rise of a mass armed Left in what they regarded as one of their "satellites?"(3)

While the British hoped to use ELAS against the Germans, they also attempted to build up a right-wing counterbalance to the Left. Rex Leeper, the British ambassador to George II, sent a memorandum in July 1943, arguing that Greece could be saved for the British Empire and that Britain's "postwar influence in the Eastern Mediterranean may depend very much on our success in doing so." To achieve this he insisted that "we must pursue a somewhat reactionary policy."(4) This was, of course, not something with which British Governments have ever had a problem! On this occasion, however, British difficulties were increased by Churchill's personal commitment to George II, who was deeply unpopular in Greece for his association with Metaxas. Churchill insisted on a royalist restoration, even though this drove much of the Greek middle class (republican in sympathy) into the arms of EAM and the Communists. Indeed, British support for the monarchy eventually provoked a mutiny in the Greek army and navy units serving with the British in the Middle East. This provided an excuse for a purge of unreliable left and liberal elements (thousands of Greek servicemen were interned for the duration of the war), leaving only one loyal reactionary unit, the Mountain Brigade.

In Greece itself, the British tried to encourage rival resistance organizations, even turning a blind eye to their cooperation with the Germans and their locally recruited collaborationist forces, the Security Battalions. Support for EAM and its military arm, ELAS, remained overwhelming, however.

Given the extent of their popular support and their military superiority on the Greek mainland, it has often seemed incomprehensible that the Communists did not defy the British, depose the King, and proclaim a republic in 1944. The British could not have done much about it. Instead, the EAM leadership was browbeaten by the British into acknowledging George II's government-in-exile and, in August 1944, actually appointed a number of ministers to it. This was despite the fact that the government-in-exile had no significant support in Greece and was wholly dependent upon the British. Indeed it was, in every sense of the word, their creature.