Nikos Marantzidis - Under Stalins Shadow: A Global History of Greek Communism

A VOLUME IN THE NIU SERIES IN

Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Edited by Christine D. Worobec

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Copyright 2023 by Cornell University

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First published 2023 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marantzides, Nikos A., author.

Title: Under Stalin's shadow : a global history of Greek communism / Nikos Marantzidis.

Description: Ithaca : Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023. | Series: NIU series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016861 (print) | LCCN 2022016862 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501767661 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501768347 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501767685 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501767678 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Kommounistikon Komma tes HelladosHistory20th century. | CommunismGreeceHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC HX375.5.A6 M347 2023 (print) | LCC HX375.5.A6 (ebook) | DDC 949.507/6dc23/eng/20220819

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016861

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016862

Cover photo: Fighters of the Democratic Army of Greece. The State Archives of the Republic of Macedonia (DARM).

To Charis and Alexandros

This book is the product of efforts over many years, and I wish to acknowledge and express my gratitude to those who have assisted me. Among them, I owe a particular debt to John O. Iatrides, who has been a teacher and a friend, and provided the moral support and encouragement I sometimes needed to keep going. He also offered advice on the manuscript and helped prepare it for its publication. Stathis Kalyvas has been a friend and colleague for more than twenty years and has supported me in many ways. I doubt that without him I would have dared to tackle a subject of this magnitude and complexity.

The adventure of this book began in 2005 in Paris, when I began collecting international documents concerning Greek Communism and the Greek civil war. I was then fortunate to meet Professor Andrzej Paczkowski, who kindly provided me with crucially important Polish documents on the Greek civil war, which led me to the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance. I would not have been able to accomplish this work in Poland without my research assistant, Angelica Wudalas.

Collecting documents from different countries is a complicated and laborious affair. Several fellow scholars and friends helped me to get access to archival material. I am particularly indebted to Kostas Tsivos, Elias Skoulidas, Nikosz Fokasz, Kostis Karpozilos, Nikos Papadatos, Evangelos Kofos, Katerina Tsekou, Apostolos Patelakis, Charis Marantzidou, Marios Markovitis, Stratos Dordanas, and Paris Aslanidis. I also owe special thanks to my research assistants, Victoria Ouroumidou and Irma Papadopoulou, who worked for several years at the RGASPI and RGANI archives, where they collected many documents from the Soviet period.

I owe Karolina Partyga a huge debt of gratitude for her corrections and comments, which made the manuscript eminently more readable than it would have been otherwise. Thanks to our discussions, I gained a much clearer insight into the books issues. Vladimir Tismneanu and Stathis Kalyvas read the manuscript and made valuable comments. Kostis Karpozilos and Charis Marantzidou were also kind enough to read the manuscript, or parts of it, and offer critical comments.

Work on this book was supported by a number of institutions. In 2008, thanks to the financial support of Yale Universitys Program in Hellenic Studies, I was able to consult and translate several documents from the Czech Archives. In addition, the collection and translation of an extensive assortment of documents from different countries became possible during 201014, when I assumed the scientific coordination of a five-year research program entitled Greece from the Second World War to the Cold War: International Relations and Domestic Developments (Operational Program Education and Lifelong Learning). The program was cofinanced by the European Union (European Social Fund) and Greek national funds. With the contribution of almost thirty scholars and research assistants, we located, collected, and translated, when necessary, a large number of archival materials coming from the Balkans, Central and Western Europe, Russia, and the United States. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies and the University of Macedonia for granting me, during these years, two sabbatical leaves, which permitted me to complete this book under very favorable conditions.

An earlier version of chapter 4 was presented at the workshop Soviet Foreign Policy during the Second World War, organized in collaboration with the University of Udine and Harvard Universitys Cold War Studies/Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. I would like to thank Mark Kramer and Tommaso Piffer for the invitation and the participants of the workshop for their comments. Part of chapter 5 is based on an article titled The Greek Civil War (19441949) and the International Communist System, published in the Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 4 (2013): 2554. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the journals editor.

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the support and love of Maria Kyriakidou. It is needless to say that she has put up with Greek Communism for far too long.