Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War (review)

The political prisoner is a construct of the twentieth century. In earlier centuries there were small groups of dissidents identified as "enemies of the King" who were jailed for political reasons, and here and there later political antagonists were occasionally imprisoned, but it was not until the calamities of the Great War in the last century and the subsequent wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, that large groups of opponents were charged with crimes against the state and incarcerated as a punishment for those crimes.

By the early nineteenth century the history of punishment had progressed from retribution, primarily in the form of corporal punishment, towards rehabilitation. That is, punishment was increasingly directed towards the psyche of the malefactor and viewed as corrective as well as punitive. This liberalization of attitudes toward wrongdoers underwent a radical revision and refinement, however, as jails, camps, and isolated islands began, in the decades after World War I, to be filled with those whose political ideas were considered to be inimical to the state's welfare. Rather than emphasizing rehabilitation, the punishment of political prisoners came to be characterized by terror and violence. In Finland in the 1920s, in the Russian "Great Terror," in Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania, as well as Nazi Germany (where the camps evolved into installations for the carrying out of the Final Solution) large numbers of dissenters were incarcerated. These overcrowded prison environments often entailed hard labor, inadequate food and few amenities, and the executions of dissidents came to be a routine part of the state's management of its political enemies. The political opponent, an enemy of the established order, had become the enemy of the state, and it was not enough simply to keep him or her incarcerated for the period of time deemed necessary for rehabilitation. Instead, such prisoners were candidates for unrelenting psychological intimidation and rehabilitation, even torture and death.

In Becoming a Subject, Polymeris Voglis clearly traces the exponential growth of the twentieth century phenomenon of the political prisoner, with its generative thrust largely fueled by the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent counterrevolutions. He also describes the introduction of special laws relating to political crimes, purges, the special law courts and the special police forces that specifically targeted political dissidence. Following this historical overview, Voglis turns to his main subject, the treatment of military personnel from the vanquished Left by the rightist governments of Greece after the end of the Greek Civil War (1943-49). He briefly traces the travails of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), never an element of significant political importance in pre-war Greece, which was nonetheless singled out by the dictator Ioannis Metaxas upon his assumption of power in 1936 at the invitation of King George II. The KKE was virtually eradicated by the Metaxas regime with a very small core of survivors going underground, where they would learn important lessons of secrecy and party loyalty which were to revivify the party during the Axis Occupation.

Metaxas' Police Chief, Konstantinos Maniadakes, instituted the Declaration of Repentance (dilosi metanias) for political prisoners, most of whom were in internal exile on arid islands with a long history as sites for this form of banishment. If a prisoner demonstrated sincere application to the assigned heavy labor, conscientious attention to the "disciplined life" enforced by his jailers, and— most critically—supplied an unequivocal and public recantation of his political beliefs, he would be released after serving one fourth of his sentence. It was this recantation, publicly announced and published in the press, which was the essential element for his freedom. After the occupation of Greece by German, Italian and Bulgarian forces following the defeat of 1941, many of the unrepentant prisoners still held over from the Metaxas years, most of them members of the Communist Party, were turned over to the Germans, and some were later executed. That is to...