The First Proxy War of the Cold War: The Greek Civil War
History had broken the way of Communism after the Soviet victory in the Second World War: one State after another in Eastern and Central Europe fell under Soviet domination and soon China would go the same way. As the Western Alliance struggled to contain the Revolution it found a foothold in Greece. With both sides eager to avoid the contest turning into a nuclear showdown, the Greek war would be fought by proxy, setting down a template and many of the unwritten rules of the long Cold War.
GREECE UNDER AXIS OCCUPATION
In October 1940, Fascist Italy launched a war against Greece from Albania, which the Italians had annexed eighteen months before; it was a shambles. With the Italians forced back so far that the Greeks were occupying half of Albania and the British Empire having deployed troops in support of Greece, the Germans stepped in to rescue their ally. The Nazis invaded Greece on 6 April 1941 simultaneous with an invasion of Jugoslavija. Athens fell on 27 April 1941. The conquest of Crete a month later inflicted a terrible defeat on the Allies and brought the whole of Greece under Axis control. The Nazis’ view was that Germans had more right to the country than its inhabitants because the Ancient Greeks had been “Aryans”, descended from an “Indo-Germanic” Nordic race that had spread south to what is now Germany and Greece, but where the Germans had kept their lineage “pure”, the Greeks had allowed their blood to be “polluted” by miscegenation with Turks and others.1
Two weeks after the Nazis entered Greece, Bulgaria initiated an unopposed invasion, occupying a zone around Western Thrace. The tripartite Axis occupation of Greece was gruesome: over 100,000 people died from starvation alone, and 60,000 of Greece’s 72,000 Jews (80%) perished, though the Germans had some trouble getting the Italians to cooperate in the Holocaust.2 Resistance activity against this horrendous dispensation had begun in Greece in 1942. Even at this early stage, the two strands of the Resistance—the monarchist and other constitutionalists on one side, and the Soviet-run Communists on the other—were clashing because of the Soviet effort, through the brutal National Liberation Front (EAM), to monopolise the insurgency. (EAM was a “Popular Front”, nominally a coalition of Leftist and republican elements, which was really controlled by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), one of the “fraternal” Soviet Parties that operated under the command structure of Moscow Centre.)
In late 1943, Nazi fortunes took a terminal downturn, with the defeat in North Africa, the halting of the advance into the Soviet Union, and the Allied landing in Italy that collapsed the Fascist government. In the short-term, however, the situation got worse for the Italians, half of whom were soon under Nazi occupation, and for the Greeks. Whatever morale boost the Greek insurgents gained from the Nazi setbacks, this was offset by an intensified effort from the Communists to eradicate other Resistance forces and the fact that all Greeks were now exposed to direct Nazi rule.
STRUGGLING FOR THE POST-AXIS GREECE
October 1944 was the key turning point for Greece. The catastrophic naiveté of Britain and America in treating Stalin’s Soviet Union—Hitler’s partner in starting the war—as a good-faith ally, was beginning to dawn on Prime Minister Winston Churchill (it never would dawn on President Franklin Roosevelt). After breaking the siege of Saint Petersburg (“Leningrad”) in February 1944, the Red Army had attacked Finland and occupied the Baltics—again, having done so the first time in 1939-40 as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Poland, the first victim of the Pact, was by now under total Soviet domination. It was standard practice in the areas where the Soviets displaced their former Nazi allies for the NKVD to slaughter the non-Communist anti-Nazi Resistance as its first order of business, since those who had resisted totalitarianism of one kind were dangerously likely to resist another.3 In Poland, the Nazis did most of the job for Moscow: the Red Army held back in August 1944 to allow the Nazis to finish with the Warsaw Uprising before Communist troops occupied the Polish capital. Ukraine and Belarus had been re-imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and the Red Army had conquered Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Hungary was clearly next, and to prevent Greece being next after that a British detachment landed near Athens on 12 October, the advanced guard of Operation MANNA, which sought to restore the legitimate Greek government—and succeeded in doing so by the first week of November 1944.
Churchill accompanied the military moves to secure Greece against Communism with a political initiative, going to Moscow on 9 October 1944 to try to secure Stalin’s acquiescence in Greece remaining outside the Soviet Empire. The Anglo-Soviet Percentages Agreement delineated spheres of influence in post-war Europe: 90% Soviet influence in Romania, with 10% for the West; 90-10 for the West in Greece; 50-50 in Yugoslavia and Hungary; and 75-25 for the Soviets in Bulgaria. Churchill is sometimes criticised for his insouciance in making this deal—there was no enforcement mechanism, and it was written on a napkin, a most extraordinary means of determining the fates of nations. Such criticism misses the point.
The Percentages Deal was indeed a desperate play, but at this moment it was about the limit of what Churchill could do to rescue something from a situation where Red Army had rolled over virtually the entirety of eastern Europe. The problem went back at least to the Tehran Conference (November-December 1943), when Roosevelt sold out Poland and sided with Stalin against Churchill’s proposal for a Mediterranean and Balkan operation that would have prevented significant territory passing from Nazi to Communist hands. Stalin wanted—and received—an Allied second front through the thickest Nazi defences in France, an enterprise that gave the Red Army the maximum time to advance into Germany from the East and bloodied the Anglo-American troops sufficiently that there was no political will left after the Nazi defeat for follow-on operations to push the Soviets out of Central Europe.4 There is, of course, an argument that the root of the problem goes back to 1941, when the decision was made to save Stalin from the consequences of his alliance with Hitler.
Inevitably, the Soviets violated every item on the Percentages Agreement, seizing four of the States by direct military conquest and tried to seize Greece through subversion. The Soviet-run EAM and its armed division, the National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), took control of large areas of Greece as the Nazis fell back, but for six weeks or so sought to avoid a direct confrontation with the British, who were trying to occupy the major cities and restore order by bringing an end to the intra-insurgent violence and demobilising the militias. It did not work. In the first week of December 1944, EAM/ELAS tried to take over Athens in a savage uprising: policemen were tortured to death in the streets and the categories of people—the wealthy, the intelligentsia, monarchists, democrats—marked for extermination by the Communists as “class enemies” were rounded up, imprisoned in camps where they were beaten, starved, and subjected to forced marches and other forms of mistreatment; the death toll was very high. EAM claimed those it murdered, such as the actress Eleni Papadaki, were “fascist collaborators”. By mid-December 1944, British troops were directly fighting the Greek Communists, which was something of a political and public relations problem, since these groups could claim to be “anti-Nazi resistance groups”.
In early January 1945, Nikolaos Plastiras, the leader of the largest Resistance group during the war, the National Republican Greek League (EDES), was appointed as Greece’s Prime Minister, and all sides in Greece signed the Treaty of Varkiza with the allies in February 1945, committing to dismantling their paramilitary squads. Stalin did not want the Allies coming their senses about the Soviet Union before he had put the finishing touches to his victory at Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), so KKE/EAM simmered down for a bit, playing along with the idea it was demobilising ELAS, though the violence never came close to ending in Greece. Among other things, the Trotskyists—whom the KKE Stalinists had massacred under the cover of the “December Events” (Dekemvriana)—continued to be terribly persecuted wherever the KKE/EAM had influence. The British Labour government that came to power under Clement Attlee in July 1945 was much less willing to try to compose Greek politics, or even to have troops leave the city, which created a mirage of greater stability, since the Communists were content to leave the British unmolested on their urban barracks as the Communists quietly terrorised their way into control of vast swathes of the countryside.
Plastiras was replaced in April 1945 and for the next year Greece struggled to consolidate a government at the centre, cycling through four more Prime Ministers, including (interestingly) at one point a Greek Orthodox Archbishop, Damaskinos Papandreou, for a month. These governments generally tried to crack down hard on the Communists; while there was a certain amount of clumsiness to this, allowing a lot of propaganda about “White Terror”, the State’s actions were notable mostly for their inefficacy. The premiership of the liberal Themistoklis Sofoulis, from November 1945 to April 1946, was probably the last chance to avoid a full-blown civil war, had the Communists wanted to, but they did not. The KKE spurned Sofoulis’ offer to find a compact for a national unity government and the Communists ever-more-overtly agitated for Greece to be pushed into the abyss of civil war, out of which they believed Revolution would come, as it had for Lenin. The KKE made no secret of its desire to murder its political opponents and exterminate the Church.
COLLAPSE INTO CIVIL WAR
In early 1946, the Greek government began to find its footing. The Greek elections of 31 March 1946 were won by the nationalist alliance headed by Konstantinos Tsaldaris. The power that the legitimacy of a democratic mandate provides was seriously underestimated by the Communists. Likewise, the importance for the Greeks of having their King back: in September 1946, a referendum formally restored the monarchy. Tsaldaris would remain in power up to January 1947, when he was replaced by Dimitrios Maximos at the head of a coalition government. Sofoulis returned in the summer of 1947 and guided Greece through most of the civil war, dying in office in June 1949 and being replaced by Alexandros Diomidis. Simultaneous with Greek politics beginning to function, however, the Communists made their bid for power and collapsed the country into all-out civil war. On 30 March 1946, the night before the elections, the Communists attacked a police station in Litochoro, which is usually considered the beginning of the civil war.
The Communist insurgents, led militarily by Markos Vafeiadis, who was also head of the nominal “Provisional Democratic Government” from December 1947, were primarily supported by Jugoslavija (which, despite Marshal Tito’s supporters in the British government, remained fully in the Soviet camp until 1948), Albania (another lock-step Soviet dependency at the time, only breaking away from Moscow formally in 1961 and taking the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split because of Enver Hoxha’s hostility to Nikita Khrushchev’s “revisionism”), and Bulgaria, one of the Captive Nations—the nominally independent extensions of the Soviet Empire “proper”. Even those who thought the Greek King had an excessive “phobia about Communism” acknowledge the “incontrovertible evidence” by the end of 1946 that the insurgency was being fed from outside.5
The Soviet role was wilfully ambiguous. Stalin’s habit was to politically give hope to Western officials who saw him as reasonable and engageable by giving something, even as he took more than had been agreed to. To that end, Stalin took an ostentatiously hands-off approach to Greece, claiming he was sticking to the Percentages Agreement that left Greece to Britain. The reality was the States supporting the Greek Communists were not independent entities: they acted at Stalin’s behest and certainly would not have been supporting an insurgency if Stalin opposed it. The strategy of “deniably” supporting terrorists and insurgents by deputising others—East Germany, Asad’s Syria, Qaddafi’s Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—to directly interface with them was standard Soviet practice. At least some of the material sent to the Greek Communists through Jugoslavija came from the Soviets,6 and obviously anything Bulgaria possessed came from Moscow. According to Jugoslav officials, they received a telegram from Stalin in March 1947 praising them for the assistance they were giving to the insurgency.7
GREECE BECOMES A CENTRAL FRONT IN THE COLD WAR
The British informed the U.S. on 21 February 1947 that Britain was no longer able to bear the burden of Empire: the financial and military upkeep of the governments of Greece and Turkey was beyond Britain’s capabilities. Even the British token force in Greece was withdrawn by the Labour government after a sudden announcement on 30 July 1947.8
U.S. President Harry Truman was warned on 7 March 1947 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Greece was on the verge of falling to the Communists and if it went down it would have grave consequences for Turkey, Italy, France, and all of Western Europe. This line of thinking has been called the “domino theory” and is now often derided, but it had already proven true in Eastern Europe, it would soon prove true in Asia where China’s fall spread into Korea, and it would be demonstrated elsewhere later—in the 1970s in Indochina (where Vietnam’s fall took Cambodia and Laos with it) and in the 1980s in Latin America (where the Cuban Revolution spread to Nicaragua in 1979 and from there destabilised El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, and many other states).
Greece came before the world as a theatre of the Cold War on 12 March 1947, in a speech by President Truman, to a joint session of Congress, laying out the “Doctrine of Containment” or “Truman Doctrine”. The first half of Truman’s speech to Congress focused on Greece and Turkey, specifically, saying that—with the British too exhausted to handle their responsibilities—the Americans would have to take over. Truman asked Congress for $400 million (equivalent to $5.5 billion now). The second half of Truman’s speech was on the “broad implications” of his policy—on the “disastrous [consequences] not only for them but for the world” if Greece went under, and the extent of the duties the U.S. was now taking on to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”.
The Americans overtly engaging meant there was no longer a purpose to Stalin hiding his hand in Greece. To the contrary, the Soviets’ bluff had been called; honour was now at stake—not only for Stalin personally and the Soviet Union “nationally”: if the Communists prevailed in Greece, it was vital for the course of History that it be understood the Soviet system had proven superior and beaten the Main Adversary of the capitalist world on the battlefield. In June 1947, the Soviets dispensed with their obfuscation and extended direct, public support to the Greek Communist insurgents.
Beyond a small number of military advisers, the U.S. did not deploy troops in Greece; the U.S. did not control Athens’ command structure; and the U.S. did not directly finance the Greek national army, either. What the Americans provided was training and equipment, including perhaps most importantly surplus Curtiss Helldivers. The entire Communist insurgency was bankrolled and armed by the Soviets, and while the question of Soviet “advisers” within Greece was less relevant, since the KKE leaders were NKVD agents to a man, the issue of Soviet “advisers” placed in Jugoslavija—the main State from which the Soviets were running the Greek insurgency—was very large and quite intrusive and ended up playing a role in destabilising Moscow’s relations with its subordinates in Belgrade. The Jugoslav Communists had never doubted who was master, but they had become accustomed to a bit more finesse in how this servitude was presented.
The American support to the Greek government kicked in quickly, especially the airpower advantage, and by early 1948 the State was making significant advances against the insurgency. However, the biggest single factor in the Greek Communists’ defeat was that Marshal Tito ceased supporting them in June 1948 after breaking from the Soviet Line, and the removal of the Soviet apparatus in Jugoslavija that was feeding the Greek insurgency.9
Stalin had been unhappy for some time with the direction Tito’s government was moving in: there were various abstruse Marxist theological aspects to this, with differences over what “socialist development” meant, but the fundamental objection Stalin had was that Tito retained too much independence. Stalin had proposed even before Tito came to power that Jugoslavija be made into a federation with Bulgaria—essentially a “Popular Front” for States, rather than Parties, seen quite correctly by Tito as a Trojan Horse for total Soviet domination to be pursued with the “salami tactics” that had taken the rest of Eastern Europe into the Soviet Empire. Tito’s final, flat rejection of the Bulgarian scheme on 1 March 1948 angered Stalin, and this was made worse by Tito’s designs to bring Albania under effective Jugoslav rule, presenting it as a security necessity to protect Albania from “capitalist aggression” emanating from Greece. Soviet military “advisors” were withdrawn from Jugoslavija in mid-March 1948 and matters deteriorated thereafter, symbolised in a series of aggressive letters Stalin sent to Tito.10
A series of increasingly aggressive letters from Moscow to Tito were sent from March to May 1948. The Jugoslav-Soviet Schism was “formalised” on 28 June 1948 when the COMINFORM published a notice making public that Tito had refused to send delegates to the meeting in Bucharest that began a week earlier. Jugoslavija and the Soviet Union thereafter entered the so-called “Informbiro Period”, where each purged the alleged sympathisers of the other side from their systems. Stalin also tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Tito several times. It is said—the original cable has proven difficult to locate—that during this period in the summer of 1948, Tito sent a message to Stalin saying: “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them … If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”
The Tito-Stalin split was terribly demoralising for the Greek Communists—this was not how the program of universal brotherhood was supposed to go. It also presented the KKE with the question of whether it would side with the Soviet Union (to which it was ideologically devoted, but which was now at some distance) or Jugoslavija (the KKE’s most important practical supporter). After half-a-year of hesitation—the KKE was the only Party in the world that did not immediately issue a statement of loyalty to the Soviet-controlled COMINFORM—the KKE did what Communists always did: chose ideology, declaring themselves for Stalin, beginning a purging of those accused of “Titoist” deviancy. The removal of Vafeiadis, a close ally of Tito’s, as head of the KKE shadow government in February 1949 was the clear sign of which side the KKE had chosen. This was the beginning of the end of Jugoslav support to the KKE, and the internal witch hunt against “Titoite” heretics further damaged the KKE’s military capacity right as the Greek government was gaining proficiency and momentum.11 In July 1949, with Belgrade having turned firmly to the West and asked for American economic aid, Marshal Tito pulled the plug on the Greek Communists, sealing the border with Jugoslavija.
In early August 1949, two weeks after Tito definitively dropped the Greek Communists, the Greek government began Operation PYRSOS (TORCH) against the final KKE stronghold in Gramos, in the north-west, on the Albanian border. The Communists were unable to resist, particularly when the Greek State began pulverising the insurgents with the Helldivers. The Greek Communists were shattered by the end of the month and most fled into Albania, though Albania made clear it was no longer supporting the insurgency or allowing the insurgents to use its territory for aggressive activities. The constitutional government had prevailed in Greece with Western, mostly American, support, and Stalin understood he was beaten. Stalin ordered the KKE to issue a statement on 16 October 1946 announcing a “temporary ceasefire”, which was in reality the end of the war, proof that as so often there is nothing more permanent than the temporary.
AFTERMATH
The 1,000 or so remaining Greek Communist troops had been allowed to evacuate to Albania in September 1949, joining the KKE cadres already there. The Greek Communists and their families were moved to the Soviet Union—and deposited in camps in Uzbekistan, where they remained until just before Stalin died, at which point they were allowed to move to other States in the “Socialist Commonwealth”.12
The death toll from the Greek Civil War—defined as March 1946 to October 1949—is estimated at 158,000, split roughly into thirds between government troops, Communists, and civilians. Atrocities against civilians were serious during the war, particularly by the Communists, and the elements—cold, disease, starvation—took a terrible toll. The injuries from the war surely ran into the hundreds of thousands and some estimates are that a million people were displaced. Houses, factories, bridges, railways, and the electricity grid were all devastated, leaving a shattered economy. Greece was one of the States very much at the forefront of mind when the Marshall Aid program was passed through Congress in April 1948.
NOTES
Johann Chapoutot (2016), Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past, pp. 92-3, 396.
German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on 13 December 1942: “The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of the Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and will not permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals but is very superficial regarding problems of vital importance. The Jewish Question is causing us a lot of trouble. Everywhere, even among our allies, the Jews have friends to help them.” Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler wrote to the German Foreign Minister on 29 January 1943 that there were “grave security problems” being caused in the occupied areas by Italian resistance to collaborating in the Final Solution, and it was also creating political problems by allowing it to be “argued that not even our Axis partner Italy sees eye to eye with us on the Jewish issue”. See: Martin Gilbert (1978), The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, pp. 433-35.
Anne Applebaum (2012), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, p. 8.
Sean McMeekin (2021), Stalin’s War, pp. 499-512.
C. L. Sulzberger (1969), A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs & Diaries, 1934-1954, pp. 324, 335.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager (2013), Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, p. 181.
Howard Jones (1997), “A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece, p. 284.
Athanasios Sfikas (1994), The British Labour Government and the Greek Civil War 1945-1949: The Imperialism of “Non-Intervention”, p. 175.
An interesting question is whether the post-war leader of Jugoslavija was Josep Broz Tito. A man of that name fought in the First World War for Austria-Hungary and disappeared into Russia; someone calling himself Tito returned to Croatia in 1920 from what was by then a Bolshevik Revolutionary State. What happened in the interim is simply unknown; decades of Tito’s life are unaccounted for, and—which is to make the same point in a different way—the official biography of Tito does not stand up to basic scrutiny. Linguistic analysts concluded Tito spoke Serbo-Croat with a foreign accent, possibly Russian. Who knows?
Ivo Banac (1988), With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism, pp. 32-44.
Charles R. Shrader (1999), The Withered Vine: Logistics and the Communist Insurgency in Greece, 1945-1949, pp. 184-85.
The KKE was not exactly a factor in History after this, though Nikos Zachariadis, the KKE General-Secretary since 1931, the man who had replaced Vafeiadis as head of the nominal “Provisional Democratic Government” in February 1949 and issued the “ceasefire” statement that October, would have a role in Soviet domestic politics after Stalin died—and provide a sad lesson in the cruelty of the Soviet system. Zachariadis, firmly against Khrushchev’s reforms, was deposed as KKE leader in 1956 and sent to Siberia. Zachariadis managed to make to Moscow in 1962 and begged the Greek officials at the Embassy to take him home, even if it was only to imprison him for his various crimes—treason, mass-murder, terrorism, etc. Zachariadis had no sooner left the Embassy than the KGB arrested him and sent him back to Siberia, where he killed himself in 1973.