Fifty years since the fall of the Greek junta

the day of the generals

by our Balkan affairs correspondent

On 24 July 1974 the military dictatorship that had ruled Greece collapsed. Seven years before, on 21 April 1967, a group of far-right army officers led by Brigadier-General Pattakos and Colonels Papadopoulos and Makarezos seized power after a coup d'etat. In the early morning of that day, tanks marched onto the central streets of Athens while small mobile units of the army were arresting politicians, government officials and prominent figures who were regarded as having left-wing sympathies.The coup was  supported by the American imperialists, the Greek oligarchs and some of the   bourgeoisie. 
The same junta, made up of right wing generals that acted on the behalf of President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the CIA took power claiming that an “imminent communist plot” was about to take place. In reality scheduled elections were due in May of that year that would have seen George Papandreou’s moderate Centre Union Party come to power. But unfounded fear, spread by the Western powers, that a Papandreou government would undermine the country’s role in NATO allowed the Generals to ‘save Greece’ with the acquiescence of the then king, Constantine II, and the powerful Orthodox Church. 
“The Revolution of 21st April” was the slogan of the military dictatorship. Their symbol was a soldier standing in front of a phoenix rising from the flames. But resistance began from day one. Outside Greece communists and other democratic forces built solidarity movements to demand the release of political prisoners and the end of military rule. Inside Greece the fight-back was led mainly by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).The Junta was finally brought down by the actions of communists, left wing students, unions and ordinary working class people. 
This year the conservative New Democracy party government wanted to make a big show of the ‘Restoration of Democracy’, but in reality, after 50 years, the same bourgeois system is still in power along with its hallmark corruption, nepotism and populism.
In the 50 years since the fall of the Junta the country has seen many changes. The formation of a Hellenic Republic and the abolition of the monarchy by a nationwide referendum.The creation of a welfare state, a national health service, state schools and the like. However a small, wealthy landowning elite made up of powerful dynasties and oligarchs, still control the country through their old mechanisms. While the other “left wing” social democrat and liberal parties joined in the “celebrations”, to their credit , the leaders of KKE did not take part in the festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the "Restoration of Democracy".
Instead a speech was read out in Parliament and a letter published decrying the restoration of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. A senior KKE MP, Nikos Karathanasopoulos, stated that Greece had forgotten that the KKE was the only party that actively fought against the Junta , and that after "democracy was restored " it only lead to the stabilisation of capitalist power, further anti-communist persecution and greater integration into  NATO and the US Alliance.
He added that for all the achievements of the post dictatorship governments, a small minority still dominates the working classes. The struggles and sacrifices of the KKE may have brought the collapse of the dictatorship but the mechanisms that created it were still hard at work exploiting the masses. And that slogans such as "Greece Out Of NATO" must be heard even louder and the strikes against privatisation and labour exploitation must be expanded. As well as the popular struggles that still need resolving such as the Cyprus issue and anti union laws.
The invasion of Cyprus 50 years ago was a direct result of the Junta taking power and gave Washington the green light to allow Turkey to invade a weakened Cyprus under a puppet dictatorship, similar to the one in Greece. Fifty years on and the island is still divided, to the shame of the so called “guarantors”, namely, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom with its military bases at Akrotiri and Dhekleia from where it launches its air-strikes against the Arabs in the Middle East.
The fall of the military dictatorship in Greece owes everything to the brave working class people of Greece who stood up to seven years of crackdowns , to the banning of political parties and newspapers. to the arrests of prominent communists and union leaders and to the complete militarisation of justice and law. The people and their leaders freed Greece from a tyranny that could have lasted decades. Thankfully the people remember the communist resistance ,the siege of the students at the Athens Central University, the general strikes and other acts of bravery, even if the current regime chooses to whitewash them from history.

Nikos Zachariadis: a great communist leader

 August 1^st marked the 47th anniversary of the death of Nikos Zachariadis, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956, one of the most significant figures of the European and international communist movement in the 20th century.

         

   Nikos Zachariadis was born to ethnic Greek parents in the Turkish Ottoman Empire's Edirne (Adrianopolis) in 1903. At the age of 16, Nikos moved to Istanbul (Constantinople) where he worked as a docker and a seaman in the port. It was there that he started having his first organised relationship with the working-class movement. 

            In 1919-1922 he travelled extensively to the new Soviet Union. In 1923 he became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey. He studied in the newly-founded "KUTV" (Communist University of the Toilers of the East), also known as the "Stalin School", in the Soviet Union. After the Greco-Turkish War and the exchange of populations in 1922 the Zachariadis family moved permanently to Greece, during a period of severe political and economic crisis.

 During his stay in the Soviet Union Zachariadis had become a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and in the summer 1924, after finishing his studies in the Soviet Union, Nikos travelled secretly to Greece where he undertook duties for the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE). In 1926, during the dictatorship of General Pangalos, he was arrested and imprisoned in Thessaloniki. He managed to escape and worked secretly in various party positions. He was re-arrested and re-imprisoned in 1929, but once again he escaped and fled to the Soviet Union.

Nikos Zachariadis moved back to Greece in 1931 following a decision by the Communist International and became Secretary of the Central Committee of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). He led the Party during extremely difficult times, especially in a period of harsh anti-communist laws and violent persecutions by the bourgeois governments. He was captured and imprisoned in August 1936 by the State Security of Metaxas' fascist regime. From 1936 to 1941 he remained in prison. After the Nazi German invasion of Greece in 1941, he was transferred to the notorious Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. Zachariadis was released in May 1945. Returning to Greece he re-assumed the KKE leadership, thus becoming the Party's General Secretary. During the peak of class struggle in the country following the restoration of the monarchy by Anglo-American imperialism he organised the heroic Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) which fought against the bourgeois army and it’s British and American imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War. After the defeat of DSE in 1949, the KKE leadership, including Zachariadis, fled into exile in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. Zachariadis spent a few years in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, which has become the exile home of a large number of Greek communist exiles. 

The death of Joseph Stalin and the right, opportunist turn of the CPSU that followed had a serious impact in the Greek communist movement. In May 1956, the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee of KKE – significantly influenced by Khrushchev's revisionist leadership – wrongfully denounced Zachariadis for "serious mistakes" and "sectarianism”. On February 1957 he was expelled from the Party. Nikos Zachariadis passed the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, particularly in Yahuta and Surgut. On 1^st August 1973, at the age of 70, he was found dead in his home in Surgut. According to the official account of his death, Zachariadis had committed suicide.

In December 1991, his remains were repatriated in Greece where he was given a funeral at Athens' First Cemetery.In July 2011, taking a historically and politically significant decision, the National Conference of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) fully rehabilitated Nikos Zachariadis as General Secretary and Party member, reversing the unjust decisions of the 6th Plenum.

 

Nobody can take away your honour. You can only lose it by yourself - Nikos Zachariadis.

 

Creeping fascism in the European Union

on the platform

By New Worker correspondent

NCP comrades joined communists from all over Europe at a conference in Brussels on Monday, to denounce the outrageous anti-communist resolution of the European Parliament and the escalation of anti-communism planned by the European Union (EU). NCP leader Andy Brooks and Peter Hendy from the Central Committee took part in the regional communist conference in the European parliament centre, called by the Communist Party of Greece and supported by 37 other communist and workers’ parties throughout Europe.

The bourgeois lie that equates communism with fascism to blame the Soviet Union for the outbreak of the Second World War is being promoted all over Europe. The pseudo-academic slander that the Soviet Union, which lost over 20 million people – soldiers and civilians – in the battle to defeat the Third Reich, was actually an ally of Nazi Germany is being used in eastern Europe to justify the banning of communist parties and the suppression of any opinions that challenge the bourgeois consensus.

The one-day conference denounced all the distortions of History by the EU and its governments, as well as the well-paid EU anti-communist propaganda campaign that they misleadingly call the ‘Europe for Citizens’ programme, which claims to promote “understanding of the EU, its history and diversity and to encourage the democratic participation of citizens at EU level”.

On Tuesday the NCP delegation attended the annual meeting of the European Communist Initiative (ECI) that met in central Brussels to review the work of the anti-EU communist committee and plan joint communist campaigning in the New Year.