EDITORIAL

Most of the items in this issue of our magazine have never before appeared in the English language, and, indeed, have never been widely disseminated in any language. Until comparatively recently the revolutionary movement in Greece has been subject to continuous illegality, and to a double, or even a triple, oppression – of foreign occupation, of military dictatorship, and of Stalinist witchhunting and murder. Our aim here is to place before a wider public the distinctive characteristics of the history of the revolutionary movement in Greece from the earliest days of the Greek Communist opposition to the end of the civil war. We are convinced that any reader who picks his way through this material will join with us in expressing our gratitude to comrade V.N. Gelis, and his collaborators, who have translated all that appears here except in one or two instances where it is otherwise indicated.

The intention of this collection is to uncover a dark period in the history of the Greek labour movement, in which the Trotskyists provided the greatest tally of victims of Stalinist murder and repression outside the borders of the Soviet Union itself. The various articles provide only a glimpse of the KKE’s (Greek Communist Party) rotten history of class compromise and outright betrayal of the working class, which continues unabated to the present day. The recent Popular Front policy of the KKE, whereby it entered into a coalition government with Nea Demokratia (Greek Tories) in June 1989, and subsequently into a coalition government with both Nea Demokratia and PASOK (Papandreou’s Socialists) in November 1989, has brought it into a terminal crisis. For this reason we can only express the hope that the wider dissemination of these articles will make some contribution to the recognition that an alternative historical tradition to Stalinism has always existed. We can end these remarks in no more fitting a manner than to dedicate this number of our journal to the memory of those Greek revolutionary internationalists murdered by the bourgeoisie, Fascism, and Stalinism.

Editorial Board
Revolutionary History