The Origins of the Greek Civil War, and: Children in Turmoil during the Greek Civil War, 1946-49: Today's Adults, and: Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy, and: Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Origins of the Greek Civil War, and: Children in Turmoil during the Greek Civil War, 1946–49: Today’s Adults, and: Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy, and: Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End Mark Mazower David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War. London and New York: Longman. 1995. Pp. xiv + 248. $11.99. A. Mando Dalianis-Karambatzakis. Children in Turmoil during the Greek Civil War, 1946–49: Today’s Adults. Stockholm: Karolinska Institutet. 1994. Pp. 324. John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley, editors, Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1995. Pp. xii + 340. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. R. Licklider, editor, Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End. New York and London: New York University Press. 1993. Pp. ix + 354. $50.00. The four books under consideration show in different ways how much the study of the Greek civil war still has to offer historians, and how far historians’ interpretations are shaped and re-shaped by current events. The end of the Cold War and now the civil war in the former Yugoslavia have each in turn encouraged scholars to explore the Greek conflict from new angles, and have led them to point out new areas of interest and contemporary significance. John Iatrides is in many ways the doyen of historians of the Greek civil war; his study of the Dekemvrianá inaugurated several decades of (ongoing) debate in the United States and offered a model of impartial professionalism that remains hard to match. The volume of essays he has now edited with Linda Wrigley represents the third, and perhaps final, stage in a series of important conferences on Greece in the 1940s. Two other collections of essays have already appeared. Now we are offered a further volume of papers originally presented in 1987. Iatrides opens this volume by asking why Liberation led to civil war in Greece given that it failed to do so in other countries with strong wartime communist movements—Italy and France, for instance. His answer focuses, though not exclusively, on the role of the Greek Communist party. Both the Soviet Union and the Greek Right played a secondary role, in his estimation, in this outcome. While we will see that most historians today would concur with the first point, there is considerably less unanimity on the second. For Iatrides, though, “in the final analysis, the Greek crisis of 1946–49 has to be viewed as the result of a communist-inspired revolution domestically inspired” (5). I shall return to Iatrides’s arguments below. But let me first offer some remarks about the other contributions to his volume. The lengthy gestation period between conference and publication has left its mark. Several of the contributions have appeared elsewhere in substantially similar form as articles or parts of books; this applies in particular to the pieces by Stavrakis, Banac, Close, [End Page 177] and Kofos. In addition, a number of contributions now look a little out of date. This, I think, is true of George Mavrogordatos’s study of ethnic and class conflicts in Greek society. Based upon the arguments he originally put forward for the interwar years in the pioneering Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), this article makes a number of assertions that now look crude or misleading. The question of wartime political allegiances of the Chams, Slavo-Macedonians and Vlachs is a good deal more complicated than Mavrogordatos allows here. He should be given credit for raising such subjects in the first place, but research in this area has moved a long way since the early 1980s. The same is true today of the question of the fate of Greek Jewry: anti-Semitism alone cannot seriously be offered as the explanation for the very different outcomes of the Final Solution in Thessaloniki and in Old Greece. Perhaps more intriguingly, from the point of view of historical debate, Mavrogordatos describes the Metaxas period as one in which Greece’s internal divisions were “frozen.” Here, too, recent research has opened up alternative points of...