An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas

Abstract

Reviewed by: An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas Spyros Tsoutsoumpis (bio) Andre Gerolymatos, An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxii, 399. Paper $25.00. Spyridon Plakoudas, The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xi + 256. Cloth $99.00. In the midst of the Greek Civil War, Iraklis (Heraclis) Petimezas wrote to a fellow-veteran of the resistance struggle that it is "nearly not enough to present the current predicament as the fault of the British or the Russians" or as a by-product of political circumstances "outside our control." Petimezas reminded [End Page 431] his correspondent that that several western European nations had powerful left-wing movements, yet these countries "were spared the ravages of civil war" and concluded the letter by noting that "If we truly want to understand the root of these events we should carefully look at our recent history and try to understand what led us to where we are now" (Genika Arheia tou Kratous/Petimezas Archive/163/19/1/1947). Seven decades after the parting shorts of the civil war were fired, Petimezas's appeal has not lost its resonance. Andre Gerolymatos's An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 and Spiros Plakoudas's The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy attempt to address this question by locating the civil war in a broader comparative and theoretical framework. The authors are not unique in this respect. The study of the resistance and the civil war has witnessed an unprecedented renaissance in the preceding decade. These two books exemplify the progress made but also demonstrate the numerous problems and challenges faced by civil war scholars. This review of the two books is divided into three parts. The first part provides a brief overview of past scholarship and locates the two studies in relation to ongoing debates in the history of the 1940s. The second part provides a critical analysis of the two accounts while the third and final part delineates paths for future research. In the aftermath of the war, the study of this turbulent period was relegated to the margins of historical enquiry. The bulk of the studies was produced by conservative pundits, politicos, right-wing veterans, and amateur scholars. While these actors had widely different agendas, backgrounds, and political lineages, most of them agreed on one single point: the civil war was the act of a baleful, un-Greek minority with no roots or genuine support within the country. The real culprit behind the civil war was the nation's eternal enemies, the Slavs, who used the Greek left to realize their age-old ambition of partitioning northern Greece and gaining a foothold in the Aegean. The civil war years were therefore presented as a struggle between a unified nation and communism (Mazower 2000, 216–224). The advent and fall of the Junta dictatorship (1967–74) and the consequent discrediting of right-wing conservatism paved the way for a new generation of scholars who challenged the representation of EAM as a Soviet pawn. They re-examined the role of the British and American factor in Greek foreign policy and have provided new insights on foreign relations. The bulk of these studies was based on foreign archives and adopted a top-down perspective that stressed the actions and activities of political elites and top-level activists. At the same time, alongside the revisionist historiography, there emerged a popular historiography fueled mostly by memoirists—the majority of them ELAS veterans—who offered their own vision of resistance events. The book [End Page 432] that set the tone for this historiographical trend was Dominique Eudes's The Kapetanios. Influenced by the radical leftism of the 1960s, Eudes refashioned the resistance as an earlier version of Latin American liberation movements. The guerrillas were recast as peasant rebels fighting for grass-roots democracy and the enfranchisement of the people. In common with other contemporary radical leftists, Eudes criticized the conservative stance of the Communist Party, and accused it of stalling the revolutionary potential of the...