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

Monthly Review, April, 1999 by John Newsinger

To counter this uncertainty and to quiet complaints at home, the British launched a propaganda campaign to blacken the Communists. Without any doubt, the fighting had provided an opportunity for the settling of scores with

collaborators, something that happened in every liberated country, but here it was presented as an atrocity, a war crime, that the British had to prevent. The British use of former members of the Security Battalions in the fighting was ignored.(15)

In the New Year, British troop strength increased to seventy-five thousand men while the ELAS forces in the city were left to fight alone. Heavily outnumbered and outgunned, on January 5, 1945 the Communists began to withdraw. The battle had been lost and ten days later a truce was concluded. British losses were heavy: 267 dead, 987 wounded and 1,170 captured, but as far as Churchill was concerned, the prize was worth the cost. The Communists had been defeated and Greece had been saved for the Empire.

The British themselves were puzzled by the ELAS failure to press home their advantage in the early days of the fighting, putting it down variously to military incompetence or a defect in the Greek national character. In fact, the Communists were still operating within the parameters of Popular Front politics that required a compromise with the British rather than their defeat. Moreover, it was clear that Stalin was backing Churchill in the struggle. Throughout the fighting, Soviet representative Colonel Popov remained in the British Embassy and on friendly terms with Macmillan, Alexander, and company, even appearing in public with them. He was also present in Churchill's party when he met the EAM representatives who, according to one British diplomat, could not look him in the face. KKE attempts to explain the situation to the Russians were decisively rebuffed when Politburo member Petros Rousos was ignominiously expelled from Bulgaria without even a hearing. But the decisive blow came on December 30 when Stalin appointed an ambassador to the Greek Government, while ELAS was fighting for its life in the streets of Athens. While there were protests against British conduct in both Britain and America, the Russians remained silent. Stalin, for the moment, honored his deal with Churchill, sacrificing the Greek Communists and the Greek Left in a breathtaking display of realpolitik.(16)

Aftermath

On February 12, 1945 the EAM leadership concluded the humiliating Varkiza Agreement with the British, agreeing to disband ELAS in return for what proved to be empty promises of amnesty, civil liberties, and democracy. The outcome was a "White Terror" with some twenty thousand EAM members arrested and another five hundred killed by right-wing death squads between February and July 1945. The election of a Labour Government in Britain in July was welcomed by the Greek Left as offering the prospect of some relief from the repression. This was not to be. As far as foreign policy was concerned, the Labour Government continued Churchill's policy with at best a change of rhetoric.(17) This repression was to provoke the Communists into armed resistance in 1946, but under considerably less favorable circumstances than had existed in the closing months of 1944. The bitter civil war that continued until 1949 saw the Greek Left decisively crushed, with the price paid in the blood and suffering of the Greek working class and rural poor.