Balkan Decisions

This chapter assesses how the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) leadership tried to navigate the uncertain postwar terrain of international politics, and reevaluates the transnational origins of the Greek Civil War. In May of 1945, when the KKE's secretary-general, Nikos Zachariadis, returned to Athens from imprisonment at the Dachau concentration camp, a new era began for the Greek party. Having had no involvement in the Communist-led uprising of December 1944, Zachariadis, together with Communist leaders in Belgrade and Sofia, began to draw up revolutionary strategies under Moscow's careful supervision. The civil war that began again in 1946 basically as a KKE initiative was possible only because of this international Communist alignment and the prospect of decisive foreign support. The party leadership moved its headquarters to Belgrade and throughout the civil conflict worked closely with its sister parties in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe.