Greek-Soviet Relations, 1917-1941 (review)

Reviews 113 justify his perception of a communist threat is based on the comparison of results of the national election in 1981 in selected cities with those ofthe municipal elections in 1982. This effort is methodologically unsound. It should also be stated that while Macridis makes an issue of the electoral alliances in some municipalities between the KKE and PASOK, in the second round he neglects to mention that there were also electoral alliances between the New Democracy and the KKE. Macridis' conclusion that the Greek socialist government is moving in the direction of the statism and authoritarianism of Third World socialism rather than toward Western democratic socialism is erroneous in the assumptions upon which this conclusion is contingent , and it is analytically unsound. Categorizing Greece as a Third World country, subject to Third World style authoritarianism, is invalid : Greece does not share the level of underdevelopment, the historical legacy or the sociocultural patterns of either Africa or Asia. Moreover, the Third World socialist regimes Macridis alludes to are countries such as Mozambique and Ethiopia, which are ruled by Marxist-Leninists, an ideology which PASOK repudiates. All in all, Macridis' study of Greek socialism is superficial, highly biased, lacking in analytic depth or meaningful insights, and theoretically weak. It contributes little to one's understanding of Greek socialism. Adamantia Pollis New School for Social Research Andrew L. Zapantis. Greek-Soviet Relations, 1917-1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Pp. 615. Western and Soviet scholarships on Greek-Russian relations during the tsarist period made appreciable strides during the last two decades. Published scholarship and ongoing research in the field touches on various aspects of this relationship—diplomatic, political, cultural and economic. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Soviet period, and the appearance of the volume under review, Greek-Soviet Relations, 1917-1941, by Andrew L. Zapantis, is of necessity a welcome study about a poorly researched topic. One would have expected that despite understandable obstacles, especially inaccessibility of diplomatic and related documents, some attempts 114 Reviews would have been made earlier by either Soviet, Greek or Western scholars to rescue some of the fast vanishing details that touch on Greek-Soviet relations. Nothing ofthe sort happened, and Zapantis' work stands in a category by itself. As the author points out in his preface, Greek-Soviet Relations is an expanded version of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Philipps -Universität Marburg in 1978. As such, it is characterized by the virtues and shortcomings usually associated with dissertations— and expanded ones at that. Its main virtue or contribution is that it directs attention to the nature of diplomatic relations and the conditions which affected those relations between Greece and the Soviet Union. Indeed, this is the first time that so many published sources and related studies in Eastern and Western European languages, including modern Greek, have been utilized to prepare a narrative, parts of which until now remained buried in textbooks, monographs and memoirs and some of which were entirely unknown or presumed not to have existed. It is sometimes forgotten that despite the inevitable strain between Greece and the young Soviet regime resulting from ideological, political and economic considerations, the two countries established "full diplomatic and consular relations" as early as 1924 and that these relations survived remarkably well until the fall of Crete in 1941. It was a turbulent relationship, to be sure, made more so by European political developments during the interwar years, the political fortunes of Greece itself oscillating between democratic and dictatorial regimes, the existence and fate of the Communist Party of Greece, the Greek refugees who fled Russia after the failure ofthe Allies to "extinguish" the Bolsheviks, the question of mutual claims especially as it affected Greek properties in Russia, and the arrest and deportation of Greeks in the Soviet Union during the Great Purges ofthe 1930s. It is worth noting that among the individuals who had helped initiate and sustain relations between the two countries during this period were Greeks who had fled from Southern Russia after the Civil War and Intervention. This story and much more is told responsibly, chronologically but rather unimaginatively, by the author. Maybe the story in its...