The origins of the Greek Civil War lay in the character of the anti-Nazi resistance in the country during the Second World War. In the autumn of 1944, when the German army retreated fTom Greece, most of the country was controlled by partisans of the National People’s Liberation Army (Ellinikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos, ELAS), the military wing of the National Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo, EAM), established in September 1941 by the Greek Communist Party (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, KKE). Some areas, however, were controlled by smaller resistance movements of pro-Western and anti-Communist orientation. From the outset of the anti-Nazi struggle, fratricidal in-fighting had been taking place between the left - and right-wing resistance movements.
During the summer of 1944, alarmed by the prospect of a Communist takeover after the war, Churchill successfully lobbied Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin and obtained support to sideline the EAM.278 In September, the EAM was forced to accept an agreement recognising the authority of Georgios Papandreou’s royal government in exile. Furthermore, ELAS units were placed under the command of the British general Ronald Scobie. Developments in Greece certainly played a role in prompting Churchill to initiate the 'percentage agreement’ on spheres of influence in the Balkans when he met Stalin in October 1944. During the same month, a British contingent landed in Athens, followed a few days later by the royal Greek government. An uneasy stand-off ensued between the Communist-led forces controlling the countryside and the government, backed by British troops in and around Athens. Shots fired by police during an EAM rally in Athens on 3 December triggered an open civil war. The British government urgently deployed reinforcements from bases in Italy. Within a month, a combination of British military muscle and Churchill’s political cunning had forced ELAS out of Athens and its immediate surroundings.
The EAM’s failure to take control of the country in late 1944 can be attributed to Stalin’s refusal to authorise it to do so. When the British contingent landed in Athens, Stalin ordered the withdrawal of Bulgarian troops from northern Greece, thus honouring, as he saw it, the inter-alliance agreement on Balkan spheres of influence.279 At the climax of the fighting in Athens, in mid-December 1944, Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist leader and head of the recently disbanded Comintern, communicated a stark message to the KKE leadership that the 'current international situation’ did not permit other Communist states to support any offensive by the Greek Communists.280 On 10 January 1945, in front of Dimitrov, Stalin accused the KKE leadership of acting against his advice 'not to start this struggle’, cynically adding that they probably 'expected the Red Army to descend to the Aegean’.281
Deprived of Moscow’s support, the EAM ceased fighting over Athens and signed an agreement with the Greek government on 12 February 1945. This agreement effectively signalled the EAM’s military defeat in the first round of the Greek Civil War. Under the terms of the agreement, ELAS and other paramilitary forces were disarmed and disbanded in return for a promise of a referendum on the fate of the monarchy and general elections. ELAS’s demobilization allowed the Right, now in full control of the Greek army and the police, to unleash a 'white terror’ campaign of persecution and murder against the Communists and their sympathisers. Many on the Right saw this as a retribution for Communist excesses perpetrated during the December fighting in Athens.
The KKE’s decision to boycott the 31 March 1946 general elections, because of the widespread intimidation of its sympathisers, led to an overwhelming victory by the anti-Communist parties. The momentum created by this victory would, six months later, help the government and anti-Communist parties secure majority backing for King Georgios’s return to Greece in a national referendum on the future of the Greek monarchy. The outcome of the elections and continued persecution of the Left provoked a series of spontaneous actions of ELAS veterans against government forces. Without Moscow’s clear authorisation, the KKE leadership, in particular its general secretary, Nikos Zachariadis, escalated sporadic clashes into another round of civil war by the end of 1946.282 In December, the left-wing forces were unified into the Greek Democratic Army (Dimokratikos Stratos Elladas, DSE).
Organised into small guerrilla units, the DSE attacked government forces and outposts and then retreated into mountains or bases in Yugoslavia and Albania.
By the autumn of 1946, a consensus had been reached in Washington that the escalation of the Communist insurrection in Greece, coupled with Soviet pressure on Turkey, was proof of Moscow’s expansionism and a threat to vital Western interests in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the British government, preoccupied with problems in Palestine and India and its dire economic situation at home, was increasingly unable to fulfil its role as regional gendarme. Washington thus began preparations to step in and provide necessary military and economic assistance to the Greek and Turkish govern-ments.283 This explains how on 12 March 1947, barely three weeks after the British had informed him of their inability to continue supplying arms to Greece, President Harry S. Truman was able not only to request from the US Congress a substantial military and economic assistance package to Greece and Turkey but also, more importantly, to promulgate a comprehensive doctrine of containment of the Soviet and Communist global threat - the Truman Doctrine.
By mid-1948, decisive US military and economic assistance to the Athens government, in the absence of Moscow’s commitment to the DSE, tipped the scales of war against the Communists. Besides arms, Washington provided crucial assistance in military training, air support, and command co-ordination. In addition, substantial US economic aid helped turn the peasant population, exhausted after seven years of war, away fTom the Communists. The change in the DSE’s military tactics to large-scale operations fTom the autumn of 1947, in particular the DSE’s disastrous attack on Thessaloniki on 10 February 1948, haemorrhaged its human and material resources without any military gains in return. In addition, divisions and purges within the KKE caused by the Tito-Stalin split further diminished its effectiveness and its ability to wage war. In the summer of 1949, the Greek government army, under the newly appointed commander-in-chief, General Alexander Papagos, launched a series of successful offensives. The retreat of the last DSE units into Albania in October 1949 signalled the end of the civil war in Greece.
15. Communists shot by the government during the Greek Civil War, 1949.
Some historians have mistakenly attributed the end of the Communist insurgency in Greece to Yugoslavia’s decision to close its border in July 1949. Between 1945 and July 1948, the Yugoslavs had supported the Greek Communists and often acted to promote their cause with Stalin. The closing of the border with Greece was a desperate concession to the West, at a time when Belgrade had become convinced of an imminent Soviet attack on Yugoslavia. By the summer of 1949, however, the outcome of the Greek Civil War had already been decided. The final offensive of the government’s army had inflicted a fatal blow on the remaining Communist units, by then at a fraction of their strength in 1947.
Arguably, it was Stalin himself who decisively contributed to the Communists’ defeat in the Greek Civil War. The Soviet leader repeatedly denied assistance to the Greek Communists and often deliberately undermined their policies. Available evidence suggests that Stalin never seriously contemplated a pro-Soviet regime in Greece because he was fearful that it would encroach on what he understood to be an area of vital British and American interests.284 At the Yalta Conference, he never raised the question of Greece. The only time Stalin offered military assistance to the Greek Communists was during his May 1947 meeting with Zachariadis in Moscow. But even then he recommended that Zachariadis seek arms from Tito,
Knowing full well that Yugoslavia’s stockpiles were at the time depleted and that it would not be able to deliver anything like the requested quantities. A few months later, Stalin excluded the KKE from the formative meeting of the Cominform, citing as justification the danger of provoking the Americans.285 On 10 February 1948, Stalin angrily reprimanded Dimitrov and Tito’s deputy, Edvard Kardelj, for aiding the Greek Communists, insisting that he had never believed in their victory.286
Turkey, although it was the only Balkan state that had remained neutral during the Second World War, emerged as an overwhelmingly underdeveloped country, with deep social divisions, and governed by an authoritarian regime based on a monopoly of power held by the Republican People’s Party (RPP), which saw itself as custodian of Ataturk’s political legacy. Building on what he thought was the Turkish state’s internal weakness, Stalin in the summer of 1946 demanded shared control of the Bosphorus straits. Encouraged by the United States, Turkey resisted Moscow’s demands and, together with Greece, provoked the Truman Doctrine and the West’s emerging containment strategy.
Improved relations with the United States prompted a slow democrat-isation of Turkey’s political life. The first postwar elections in July 1946 instigated a process of transition from twenty years of dictatorship to multiparty democracy. Elections in 1950 and 1954 and the victories of the former opposition Democratic Party under Adnan Menderes represented the culmination of this process. As a beneficiary of Marshall Plan aid, between 1949 and 1954 the Turkish economy also underwent substantial modernisation, which strengthened the central state further.
During the 1950s, Ankara received more than $2 billion of Western, mostly US, military assistance that helped transform Turkey into a major regional military power. In February 1952, after participating in the Korean War on the side of the United Nations with a 25,000-strong contingent, Turkey was rewarded with full membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).287 By the mid-1950s, Turkey had become the linchpin of US-backed regional military alliances. A treaty of military co-operation with Pakistan was concluded in August 1954. A similar treaty with Iraq, signed in February 1955, was a precursor to the Baghdad Pact, a regional alliance also joined by Iran and the United Kingdom, with the United States as an 'observer’. In the years that followed, Arab states in the Middle East increasingly perceived Turkey as an American Trojan horse and a regional policeman. After a radical coup in Baghdad in 1958 led to Iraq’s withdrawal fTom the Baghdad Pact, a new Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) was formed, with the United States as a full member. In August 1954, Turkey, encouraged by Washington, created a military alliance with Greece and Yugoslavia - the Balkan Pact - the only formal Cold War military alliance with ideologically antagonistic members. Ankara thus played a very important role in the US strategy of encircling the USSR with pro-Western regional military alliances. In turn, it was rewarded with continuous access to Western economic aid and financial assistance.
With the Communists defeated in the Greek Civil War and Greece and Turkey firmly ensconced in NATO, the Americans and the British preserved a foothold in the Balkans, securing the vitally important rim of the eastern Mediterranean from Soviet penetration. As Europe began to split into antagonistic blocs, Stalin recognised the need for deeper cohesion inside the Soviet 'camp’.
World History
