General Markos (review)

Reviews 281 D. Kljakic. General Markos. Zagreb: Globus. 1979. Pp. 254. 350 dinars . Dragan Kljakic has presented an impressive and moving biography of Markos Vafiades, the military leader of the leftist forces in the Greek Civil War. Though his work, written in Serbo-Croatian, is of the scholarly/popular genre, it still has much of value to scholars. First it is based on long interviews with Markos himself; secondly Kljakic makes use of various Yugoslav and Bulgarian memoirs and scholarly works usually ignored by Western scholars who deal with Greece between 1941 and 1949. It also is of value as an antedote to the generally accepted—though highly biased—interpretations of events found in the West. The Western interpretation has grown out of English and to a lesser degree American justifications of Anglo-American foreign policy. The English interpretation, to a great extent laid out by the English agent on the ground, Christopher Woodhouse, who subsequently became an academic, must be treated with every bit as much scepticism as we Westerners show toward works emerging from Communist and other leftist writers. The most interesting points brought out by Kljakic, in my opinion , are Markos' summary of a letter from the Greek Communist Party Central Committee to Churchill, which was basically a statement of surrender, written prior to the Lebanon meeting (p. 219). Secondly Kljakic provides some further details on the alleged meeting of 7 October 1943 between the English officer Donald Stott (whom Kljakic erroneously calls Scott) and the Germans to co-operate against ELAS, and subsequent meetings for the same purpose with Greek collaborationist groups in November. Supposedly he signed an agreement with these parties on anti-communist joint action. Though still no concrete source is given for the story, we come a little closer as Kljakic attributes it to a Greek from Rumania who was translator for Vaso Vamvakari (secretary for this coalition); this translator, according to Kljakic, later publicly confirmed all the stated details (p. 65). English histories of the war in Greece tend to ignore Stott's alleged actions and leftist works present them as facts. It would be interesting to have either a more solidly documented accusation or some sort of English rebuttal. Passing his activities off as unauthorized (as Woodhouse, also without documentation, does) hardly puts one's doubts to rest. Therefore, until a documented refutation appears, open-minded historians must consider the possibility that England in fact in 1943 was willing to collaborate with the Nazis against the Greek resistance. Considering the Greeks with whom the 282 Reviews English were willing to collaborate a year or so later, such a possibility is not hard to accept. Kljakic then provides detailed lists of names and deeds of various of these Greek collaborators and war-criminals, released by the English and/or Greek right who rose to high posts in post-war Greece (e.g., pp. 102-03). Kljakic presents a thorough and persuasive account of the persecution of the left after Varkiza; he gives various citations from the press—including some from such respected journalists as Vlachos—which egged on the rightist vigilantes. This persecution forced the left to take defensive measures and eventually to go into revolt. Kljakic's account of the Civil War is moving. He describes the heroism of the outmanned and outsupplied guerillas and the brilliance of Markos as a general. He also shows in detail how KKE Secretary General Zahariades did everything humanly possible to guarantee his own cause's defeat; in the end he purged Markos and concentrated the guerilla forces to defend a single fixed position against the far superior US-supported Greek government forces. To the usual debate of whether Zahariades was simply incompetent to an extreme or whether he was losing the war on Stalin's orders (with Stalin still holding faithful to the percentages agreement), Kljakic suggests a third interpretation that Zahariades was a Greek police agent (pp. 223-27). His case is circumstantial only, but the number of times in the 1930s Zahariades was captured by police and then escaped boggles the imagination; moreover, as the Civil War was breaking out and most communists had fled or were in hiding, Zahariades was openly...