By Michel Pablo
I knew A. Stinas when he was still a member of the Communist Party and I was a member of the organisation KEO (Unitary Communist Group). That was at the beginning of the 1930s.
In the Memoirs of A. Stinas – of which a large part constitutes a history of the political evolution of Greece during this century, and particularly its workers’ movement – the history of the Trotskyist opposition in Greece is sketched out in some detail but very much from his own point of view. A. Stinas never considered himself to be really a Trotskyist, for reasons which, in my view, come from his long career in the ranks of the Greek CP leadership and also from personal reasons.
Stinas was a sort of “Red Monk”, not very sociable and preferring to walk the solitary path of the revolutionary who constantly comes up against the immaturity of a society little disposed to accelerate its rhythm. This frail man, who lived on coffee and toast and kept his material needs to a minimum, from necessity but also by temperament, lived a revolutionary faith and an uncommon courage in the face of “class enemies”.
Uncomfortable in all the organisations which he has associated with and sometimes created, he has in reality been withdrawn into reflection since the end of the Second World War, keeping his distance from the action which he excelled in during a long period of his life.
Much younger than him, it was I who encouraged him to join the ranks of the Trotskyist organisation. First of all he was associated with the KEO, that I had formed with an important fraction or worker cadres from the archeiomarxists[1] in 1930. Afterwards, we formed the LAKKE together, which he talks about in his Memoirs. The KEO united the most important archeiomarxist worker cadres of that organisation – such as Mitsos Soulas, Sakkos, Sklavounos and others - and the most brilliant and militant students who dominated the student movement in the University of Athens at that time. We left that organisation, seeing that its ideology, its internal regime and its way of acting towards the Greek Communist Party did not fit with the idea that we had, at that time, of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky.
If A. Stinas quite rightly emphasises the exemplary militantism of the LAKKE that we formed together after the KEO, I have to say that the latter amply deserves the same appreciation. And I hope that some worker militants still surviving from this era and this organisation, such as Mitsos Soulas, will soon publish the memoirs which they have written on this subject.
And while A. Stinas returns to the Trotskyist movement by way of the KEO, he remains above all linked to me. This lasted perhaps three years, during which we became, in action, comrades and friends. I thus had the occasion of observing him from close up, of frequenting his house and knowing his companion as well. During the whole of that period our partnership seemed to have an exemplary solidity, but for grave personal reasons and also for political ones we were imperceptibly separated. I don’t want to insist on the personal reasons nor to judge them. A. Stinas is no longer with us. On the other hand, independently of any judgement on him and his politics, I’d now rather see in him one the many faces of the man of revolution, who is distinguished above all by his faith, his monastic frugality, his courage in the face of the Praetorians of the bourgeois order and the fanatical devotees of Stalinism.
As for the political reasons which have played a certain role in our separation, it is necessary above all to look for them in his instinctive and tenacious aversion towards the person of Pantelis Pouliopoulos. For my part, on the contrary, I was irresistibly drawn to that man, whose very high political level and incomparable human qualities I had begun to appreciate. Pantelis Pouliopoulos remains for me one of the most cultivated, fine and heroic figures that I have had the chance to know in the course of the revolutionary saga of my long life. An old General Secretary of the Greek Communist Party, he was one of the first people in the world to take a position in favour of the ideas of Leon Trotsky and the Left opposition in the USSR. Helped by his great marxist culture and having stayed in Moscow during the Fifth Congress of the Communist International as a representative of the Greek Communist Party, he had been able to familiarise himself with the divergences which existed within the Bolshevik Party and the Third International, and declared himself at the time favourable to the ideas of the Left opposition.
He represents the other branch of Greek Trotskyism, coming directly from the Greek Communist Party in the years 1927-1928, known under the name Spartacus Opposition, from the title of the review that that opposition then began to publish. It is in that review that the principal texts of the Left opposition and Leon Trotsky could be found at that time, along with the best analyses of Greek political life and the line of the Greek Communist Party, already passed over to “Stalinism”.
It was therefore very natural that from the moment when I had a better idea of the realities concerning Greek Trotskyism, I began to move away from archeiomarxism and from those who had left it, so as to move closer to the group formed around Pantelis Pouliopoulos. The Trotskyist organisations coming from archeiomarxism mentioned in the Memoirs distinguished themselves by the importance of their worker base relative to that which followed P. Pouliopoulos, but the political quality of the latter and the few worker cadres grouped around him seems to me markedly superior.
Separating from A. Stinas, I formed, with P. Pouliopoulos in 1934, the Organisation of Internationalist Communists of Greece (OKDE), which I represented at the founding congress of the Fourth International in Paris, in September 1938.
On the evolution of the relationship between Stinas and Pouliopolous, both arrested by the Metaxas dictatorship and then detained in the same prisons, I have nothing important to say since I have been in France since 1938. But I want to cite the heroic attitude of P. Pouliopoulos during his long imprisonment and up to his execution by the Italians in June 1943, with two other cadres of our organisation, the worker Xypolytos and the teacher Yannakos. All the testimonies agree, including those of Stalinist militants.
A central figure among the numerous Greek Trotskyist political prisoners, P. Pouliopoulos was chosen to pay with his life for the first important action of the Greek Resistance, the destruction by partisans of the Gorgopotamos bridge. Addressing himself in Italian to the squad of soldiers given the job of executing him, he exhorted them not to commit such a crime against the anti-fascist resisters and their adversaries in the war. When the soldiers refused to be executioners, it was the Carabinieri who were given the task. The ideological evolution of A. Stinas, clearly set out in his Memoirs, explains why during the war he adopted a downright hostile attitude to the formidable popular movement of the Resistance, in reality led by the Communist Party, considering it to be a reactionary nationalist movement in the service of imperialism. His uncompromising condemnation of Leon Trotsky’s line concerning the “defence of the USSR” and the line that the Fourth International adopted during the war, is also a consequence of that position.
To refute his arguments on these questions would involve a return to a discussion that we have had with a number of people and currents which came out of the Trotskyist movement. But this preface is not the place to do that. I will however insist on a few points, intended for a public little informed about the realities of Greece in that time.
The Greek resistance involved up to 90% of the population of that little country, occupied at the same time by the Germans and the Italians. It was a question of the biggest popular movement that that country had ever known, the bearer of a truly revolutionary dynamic. For sure, with that sort of percentage, it wasn’t only workers. In the mountains it was dominated by elements specifically of the poor peasantry of that time and by petty bourgeois intellectuals, mostly members of the Greek Communist Party. In the towns there was a majority of workers and other sectors from the proletarianised or poor petty bourgeoisie of that time.
With a non-Stalinist leadership, such a movement, effectively national, could easily take power by “revolution”. By all the evidence – all the evidence known to me – the adequate transitional slogan had to be “All Power to the EAM and the ELAS”. The Greek Trotskyists had to orient their line to this real possibility, even if it was difficult for them, if not impossible in some places, to individually participate in these movements. Because it is true that once recognised by the Praetorians of the Stalinist leadership they would be risking their lives.
The argument that it was simply a question of a nationalist movement in the service of imperialism is refuted by two major facts. In December 1944, this movement was attacked jointly by the arms of British imperialism and Greek reaction, which considered the physical destruction of the Resistance to be the precondition for the restoration of bourgeois order in Greece.
Despite the serious defeat of December 1944, the result of betrayal by the Stalinist leadership, this movement was reborn two years later with an unbelievable force and took the form of a veritable civil war which turned the country upside down. The Stalinist leadership then betrayed for the second time a movement which to a large extent appeared spontaneously, and which had had to channel itself towards other forms of struggle. It was a question of a major class conflict that you can’t just shrug off by qualifying it as a “Stalinist” movement. This amounts to an abandonment of marxism in favour of simplification, whose motives, even if unconscious, are subjective.
That said, I hope that the publication of the Memoirs of Stinas in French, thanks to the work of Olivier Houdart, will mark the beginning of the realisation of a project much more ambitious: to make better known, by other works and translations, the true history of Greek Trotskyism. It was intimately mixed with the more general history of the class struggle in Greece, which offers a richness and a dramatic texture capable of inevitably arousing, in some of its features, the memory of an ancient tragedy.
20/10/89
Michel Pablo
Agis Stinas came from the generation of the early communist leaders who went over to the opposition when it seemed to them that the Communist International had turned its back on the world revolution. He was born with the twentieth century, in Spartilla, a village on the Isle of Corfu, in a well-off family (his father was a dealer in olive oil). His real name was Spyros Priftis.
His memoirs, written in 1976, in the evening of a life of struggle, essentially cover the events of the years 1912-1950 in a Greece marked by war: from the Balkan wars, which announced the war of 1914-18, to the civil war, a Greek prolongation of the 1939-45 war.
Stinas lived these events as a spectator and then quickly as an actor, an actor who tried with his friends to change their course. It is that which gives flesh and depth to his story. Placing itself in a non-orthodox perspective, it puts paid to some golden myths, in particular that of the Second World War with its “democratic crusade” and its “Red Partisans”.
The working class of Piraeus and Thessaloniki is the central character here, tobacco workers, dockers, rail workers and sailors; with its militants, from the most obscure, like the socialist humanists of Corfu at the beginning of the century, to the best known, like Siantos, chief of the Communist Resistance or Zachariadis, leader of the Greek CP during the civil war; from the most charming, like the anarchist Speras or the blind “archeiomarxist” Verouchis, both assassinated by the Stalinists, or the Trotskyist leader Pouliopoulos, shot in 1943, to the most sinister, like Ioannidis, the Greek Beria.
But this account is also the story of a professional militant which this epoch gave rise to, who espoused the revolution at the age of 18 and remained faithful to it until the end, testifying by his life itself to the depth of the hopes raised by October 1917 and the Berlin Commune.
Running through this book is an “invigorating spirit”, to take up the terms used by the author, of revolt against the established order, against blind obedience, oppression and nationalism. A revolt which never targets individuals but systems, neither internalised nor deflected, but completely turned towards the subversion of society. More precisely towards the application of this principle: the role of revolutionaries is not to absorb social struggles but to help them go right to the limit of their emancipatory possibilities.
After his break from Trotskyism in 1947, Stinas became the principal representative in Greece of the “Socialisme ou barbarie” current. At the end of his life he moved closer to the anarchists[2]. The last time I met him, in April 1987, in his little ground floor flat in Pangrati, he was delighted that a demonstration was being held in protest against the anti-Turkish campaign and the bellicose bragging of the Papandreou government.
He died in 1987 following a cataract operation whose risks he had accepted. His obituary in one of the main Athens dailies, Eleftherotypia, appeared under the title “Stinas the inflexible”. The press also reported this anecdote: contacted by a minister of Papandreou who offered him a pension (Stinas, at the end of a life spent in prison, in camps, in clandestinity or in exile, had neither resources nor a retirement pension), he declined his offer and replied to him, after having thanked him for his concern: “Revolt is a duty, not a profession”.
The press also reported that there were numerous young people at his burial: the ultimate revenge on his old comrades from the CP leadership who had all chosen to adapt themselves to Stalinism and to make a career there. What is now the political or human heritage of a Zachariadis, the Stalinist chief who succeeded to power and glory at the end of the war, and was then reviled and dragged through the mud by his own party, dying miserably in exile in the USSR?
* * *
A. Stinas did not limit his political horizon only to Greece, he always considered himself as a militant of an international cause. You can’t reduce him to the dimension of “Greek revolutionary”. But it is a Greek public which he addresses himself to, with which he shares historical references little known in France.
In 1820, the region which stretched from the Balkans to the Middle East formed a vast political entity under the authority of the “Sublime Porte”. But the centuries-old Turkish empire was on its last legs, undermined by revolts and attempts at secession by local potentates.
A political void appeared in the East, from which emerged over a century, thanks above all to the intrigues and wars launched by the big European powers or on their behalf, fifteen or so states and protectorates, of which the first was Greece.
The little political entities, not economically viable, cutting into the flesh of peoples, guaranteed dependence and instability.
When Germany and Italy unified themselves and removed their internal borders, the borders only multiplied in this part of the world, while the apparatuses of rival states created two zones of tension. One was in the Balkans, which the First World War was to start out from. The other was in the Middle East, opening a cycle of wars, terrorism, pogroms and population displacements which we still haven’t seen the end of. After a relative stabilisation at the end of the Second World War, the Balkans experienced a revival of nationalist tensions which seemed to be straight out of the nineteenth century.
Not the least of the paradoxes is that the Turkish empire, vestige of the Middle Ages, symbol of immobilisation and of Oriental Despotism, had succeeded to do on a large scale what apparently no Balkan state, the majority of which had socialist pretensions, had managed to do even on a small scale. This was to make people who were destined to become “hereditary” enemies live in harmony. There were however some men, such as the Greek Righas Feraios, from the end of the eighteenth century who defended the idea of a state encompassing all the European possessions of the empire on the basis of equality of all the peoples including the Turks. This idea did not take shape, but it didn’t cease to reappear, even if fleetingly, like during the Young Turk revolution in 1908, which proclaimed in the central square of Thessaloniki in fourteen languages the political equality of all the nations of the empire, to the enthusiasm of the population.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the creation of a “pure” Greek state made no sense because over the centuries the Greeks had spread out around the perimeter of the Eastern Mediterranean. They were present everywhere but were only a majority in old Greece, that is to say barely more than the Peloponnese.
With the Jews and the Armenians they formed the merchant wing of the Turkish empire, the bulk of its bourgeoisie and its intellectuals, and it is notably through the channel of the Greek merchants that liberal and republican ideas began to spread. They were in a position to play a role of revolutionary ferment against absolutism and as federator of the Balkan peoples. Yet this bourgeoisie only played a secondary role in the Greek national insurrection which was proclaimed in the Peloponnese in 1821 by the Archbishop of Patras.
The insurrection, carried out by the notables and the clan chiefs, wanted to be specifically Greek and Christian Orthodox, which limited its scope from the outset, and the imbalance between its forces and those of the Turks made it seek out the support of the great powers and put its fate in their hands. Despite some initial military successes it would have been defeated like all the previous insurrections without a joint Franco-Anglo-Russian military intervention which forced the empire to accept first autonomy and then independence for Greece.
Thus a mini-state came into being, peopled by a few hundred thousand inhabitants, without a city worthy of the name (Athens was only a small town), without roads, in one of the poorest and most backward regions of Europe, ravaged by almost ten years of war, and above all cut off from large numbers of Greeks, who found themselves in Constantinople (Istanbul), in Odessa or in Smyrna (Izmir).
The “Revolution” had given birth to a mouse and accepted without any resistance the installation of a Bavarian monarch (Otto, the son of Louis I of Bavaria).
The monarchy built up the concept of the “Great Idea” which aimed at the reconstitution of the old Byzantine Empire, Greek and Orthodox, around Constantinople, and on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, an idea which above all would appeal to Russia. The Great Idea became the official doctrine of the Hellenic state, and allowed it to avoid all its internal problems.
When Otto sought to ally himself more closely with Russia, the British, ready to prevent any modification to the balance of forces in Europe and any progress of Russia towards the south at the expense of the Turkish empire, deposed him and installed a Danish monarch in his place in 1863. From that date Greece definitively entered the British sphere of influence.
On this occasion the British gave him the Ionian Islands and Corfu which were dependant on them. Later they forced the Turks to give him Thessaly.
But it is during the Balkan wars (1912-1913) that Greek achieved its present size. In 1912, a coalition of Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks chased the Turks out of almost all their European possessions. The following year the winners fought amongst themselves over the division of the spoils. Greece got out while the going was good and got hold of Aegean Macedonia, with a majority of Muslims, and Thessaloniki.
Thessaloniki, the natural capital of the Balkans, rebellious against the central power, a mostly Jewish town, became “Greek” and was stripped of its hinterland.
After this Serbia and above all Bulgaria ceaselessly demanded “their” part of Macedonia, and the Macedonian question, with the terrorism of the Bulgarian komitadjis, was made into a permanently open wound.
Put in power in 1917 by the French army, Venizelos thought that only the support of the Great Powers would allow him to realise the Great Idea. He enrolled his country in the war on the side of the Entente powers and the Treaty of Sèvres rewarded him, at the expense of Bulgaria and Turkey, who had made a bad choice of camps. With eastern Thrace, Greece was at the gates of Constantinople, and with Izmir and its region it had a foothold in Asia Minor.
Venizelos then sent troops to the Ukraine against the Soviet revolution and, above all, he sent them to Turkey to bring the nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal to heel and to be better placed for the carving up of the empire that everyone thought was imminent.
But nobody foresaw the strength of the wave of Turkish nationalism, and that what was supposed to be a simple policing operation against Ankara, Kemal’s capital, in 1921, would be transformed into a crushing defeat. Greece was abandoned by its French and British protectors, who reconciled themselves with Kemal on its back, its army was torn to pieces, and the Greek population of Asia Minor was threatened with massacre, having to leave as quickly as possible a land which it had lived on since time immemorial. In its turn the whole Muslim population of Greek Macedonia was expelled to Turkey.
The Asia Minor littoral and Constantinople were thus “islamicised” by default, and Macedonia was “christianised” by the massive settlement of Greek refugees.
This trauma has remained in memory as “The Catastrophe”. It sounded the death knell of the Great Idea and put an end to the territorial expansion of Greece, which reverted to its frontiers of 1913.
Greece, already incapable of feeding its five million inhabitants, had to receive an extra million in a few weeks, the majority of whom had lost everything. Impoverished neighbourhoods and shanty towns were created on the edges of big towns. It is thus that Athens and Piraeus, linked together by these neighbourhoods, in the evocative names of New Smyrna or New Ionia, came to form a single agglomeration.
Inter-war Greece presented all the aspects of under-development. You could list them forever: malnutrition (the tourist guides of the time spoke of “frugality”) ; malaria in the inshore undrained areas (the country held the European record for consumption of quinine per inhabitant) ; child labour (the Ministry of Labour officially listed the active population starting from ten years old) ; emigration (above all to the English-speaking countries, since the wars had prevented emigration to the previously more hospitable shores of the eastern Mediterranean) ; illiteracy (particularly amongst women) ; the split between the “purist” Greek used by the authorities and the press and the “vulgar” Greek used by the ordinary mortals made access to culture and information even more difficult.
Some villages and whole islands only lived on the money sent by expatriates. The country had to import most of the wheat which it consumed – the Second World War immediately reduced the population of the towns to famine by cutting the trade routes.
The indigenous bourgeoisie, particularly the ship owners, did not invest their profits in Greece. Modern equipment in the ports or the railways was the work of foreign capital, and more suited to their needs than those of the country – the first railway constructed in Greece was built by the French company which ran the mines at Laurion, to transport ore to the port which it was exported from. The road network was only really developed along the coast and the mountainous majority of the country remained landlocked and isolated.
In fact the only sector touched by modernity was the army and the navy, the first formed by France, the second by Britain. The army regulated political life. There were countless coups aimed at “modernising”, “Europeanising” or “stabilising” Greece. A task which always had to start again. Each party had its fraction in the army and the navy, but the malicious gossip was that each party was only an outgrowth of a fraction of the army.
But there had existed for a short while another modern formation, modern in its objectives, its mode of organisation and its base in the workers. This was the young communist movement – the Communist Party and the archeiomarxist party – young in all senses of the word, at a time when you could lead the Communist Party at the age of twenty five!
Paris, August 1989
Olivier Houdart
* * *
The book was published in two volumes in Athens in February and December 1977, under the title Memoirs – sixty years under the flag of socialist revolution by Vergos editions.
It was reissued in facsimile in 1985, by Ypsilon editions, in one volume. The French edition differs slightly from the Greek edition in the following points: the repetition between the two volumes has been removed and texts have been moved to appendices. The “Debates of Achronafplia” and the “Reply” to P. Pouliopoulos have been placed at the end of the book whereas in the original they appear inside Chapter 5, so the appendices of the French edition do not appear in the Greek edition.
I am particularly grateful for the help of my friends Phedon Metalinos and Michel Volkovitch.
To those who in the hellish nightmare
of the second world imperialist war
when the socialist ideal had sunk in an ocean of nationalist hate
found the strength to struggle against the current,
to boldly reveal the fraud of the antifascist war,
that war of bandits
the stuffed against the starving
for the sharing out of the world,
to fight without hesitation
for the peoples to cease their fratricidal combat
and turn against their exploiters
and who, isolated, and only here, in Greece
in terrible conditions
when death struck at each step
have continued the heroic tradition of Luxemburg
and of Liebknecht, with the most profound emotion I dedicate these Memoirs
Very young, from the age of fourteen or fifteen, I was influenced by socialist ideas and at eighteen I dedicated myself to the movement for the liberation of the working class.
I took my party card in May 1920, the day of my twentieth birthday. According to the statutes you had to have reached twenty to join, but for a long time I had fought actively for the principles of the October revolution and to purify the Corfu socialist group of its elements which were foreign to socialism.
I fought in the ranks of the Communist Party, and in more responsible positions, until the end of 1931. Then I passed over to Trotskyism. Like many others I had the illusion that it represented the revolutionary wing of the movement. Officially I was a member of the Fourth International until the middle of 1947. But in reality perhaps I never was. There was not much of a relation between what the groups I belonged to defended and what the Fourth International defended. This appeared clearly during the war, when the International crumbled to dust.
In March 1935, after intense ideological struggles, instead of the so called “Left Opposition” a political group was created which distinguished itself from other tendencies, groups, organisations and parties by its programmatic principles, its means and forms of struggle, its combativity and the devotion and moral courage of its members. I take complete responsibility for the theses and action of this group, particularly during the war and the Occupation. It has maintained itself and conserved its autonomy up to the present day. And, amongst the few old revolutionary groups, it remains the one (with the precious help of Castoriadis) which most pushes back that which, in the old theoretical arsenal of the movement, prevents the separation of the revolution from the Stalinist counter-revolution, and which puts into practice, without internal conflicts or splits, that which is generally called “the spirit of the French May ’68”.
Studies and articles of mine have been published in the following journals and periodicals: Rizospastis[4], Voice of the Worker, Jeunesse ouvrière, The Revolutionary Exile (Isle of Anafi, 1926), The Tobacco Worker, The Struggle Against Tuberculosis, Avanti, Banner of Communism, Permanent Revolution, Bolshevik, New Epoch, Workers’ Front, Bulletin of Achronafplia, Workers’ Fight, Internal Bulletin of the KDKE (International Communist Party of Greece), New Beginning, Pavement, Socialism or Barbarism.
I’ve written some pamphlets: Critique of the Resolutions of the Fourth Plenum of the CPG (1932), Chronical of the Group (1950), “Workers’” Parties, “Workers’” States and the Movement for the Liberation of the Working Class (1965), and I wrote the prefaces for: Socialists and War, Lenin, The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg, and Modern Capitalism and Revolution[5] by Castoriadis[6].
Until 1926, I signed with my real name: Spyros Priftis. Starting from 1926 I was under the pseudonym A. Stinas. Other pseudonyms: Agis, Diros, Korphiatis, Philippou.
Memoirs cannot replace history. The history of the workers’ movement in Greece and the struggles of the working class up until today, still hasn’t been written by anybody. Kordatos, in his History of the Workers’ Movement, gives a good glimpse of Greece before the First World War. All those who are interested in the workers’ movement must read his book. But it stops in 1918, the epoch of the founding of the Communist Party and of the General Confederation of Workers. The histories which the Greek CP produces from time to time, to celebrate itself and to exhibit its titles of ownership over the working class, made up of falsification and counterfeiting, are only fables and calumnies. The historians “of the left” preoccupy themselves with the trials of Karaïskakis or Androutsos[7] and the “failed” bourgeois-democratic revolution. To read them you would think that the workers’ movement did not exist in Greece.
These Memoirs can’t therefore fill the current void. I do believe however that they will serve the movement and those who struggle. The young workers and the students will come to know about events, situations and personalities which are unknown to them. And perhaps it will cause them to reflect, will incite them to compare yesterday with today, the socialism for which the masses have struggled with that promised by the two CPs[8], PASOK[9] or Mavros[10].
They cover the period going from the First World War until today. They are memories of the historic epoch of the movement, when the social terrain was overturned by the revolutionary assaults of the working class following the First world War.
Memories of the reflux and decline of that movement, a decline inevitably accompanied by the degeneration and decay of its “official representatives”, the political and trade union organisations. Memories of the second imperialist carnage, of the Occupation and of the actions, under those conditions, of individuals, groups and parties.
Memories of the camps and prisons.
Memories, finally, of that brief period when everything in the movement was pure, real, limpid, clear and crystalline, then from that historic epoch when blood, tears, mud and poison seeped from every hour and every minute.
Preface by Michel Pablo
Forward
A Brief Autobiographical Note
Chapter I – The First World war and the Founding of the Workers’ Movement
Chapter II – The Awakening of the Popular Masses
Chapter III - The Reflux of the Revolutionary Movement and the Degeneration of the Communist Parties
Chapter IV – The Open Road to Fascism and War
Chapter V – In the Fascist Galley
Chapter VI – In the Struggle for Socialist Revolution
Appendices
The Debates in Akronafplia:
Our Divergences with the Unified OCI
The USSR and the struggle for world revolution.
A response imposed on us despite us.
Those who gave their lives for the socialist revolution during the Second World War
Acronyms and Organisations
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
[1] Translator’s Note - The archeiomarxists were a fraction expelled from the Communist Party in 1924. They were named after their journal Archives of Marxism which originally set out to make the “classics of marxism” available in Greek.
[2] Translator’s Note - This is perhaps misleading. According to Yannis Tamtakos, long-term friend of Stinas and member of his tendency during the war, Stinas always called himself a marxist. He “moved closer to the anarchists” in the sense that he became a popular figure with many young anarchos who knew that he hated Stalinism and Greek nationalism but, often, didn’t really understand what his politics were about.
[3] Where there are references to titles of publications here in English it should be assumed that they were published in Greek. – Translator’s Note
[4] The Radical, a daily created in 1916 whose editor belonged to the Greek CP from its foundation. It became the party’s official organ and remains so to this day.
[5] This is its English title, as published by Solidarity in the UK in 1974. - Translator’s Note
[6] Stinas has certainly written numerous other texts since, including a book about the Greek resistance called EAM-ELAS-OPLA and published in Athens in 1984. Translator’s Note – according to Greek comrades, this details, amongst other things, the horrific atrocities committed by the anti-fascist forces against the working class.
[7] An allusion to some episodes of the Greek war of independence.
[8] A split took place in 1968 at the beginning of the dictatorship of the colonels, giving birth took a second Greek CP which took the name of “internal” CP, that is to say it was led from inside the country (the leadership of the Greek CP had been in exile in Eastern Europe since 1949).
[9] Panhellenic Socialist Movement, the party of Andreas Papandreou.
[10] A politician of the centre left.