NIKOLAOS ZACHARIADIS

'Nikolaos Zachariadis' (27 April, 1903, Edirne, Ottoman Empire -8 August, 1973, Surgut, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956.

Contents

Early life

Political activity in Greece

Civil War

Post-war

Early life

Born in Adrianopole in 1903, the son of an employee of the Ottoman tobacco monopoly. He worked as a seaman on the Black Sea, where he came under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. He studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow.

Political activity in Greece

In 1923, he was sent back to Greece to organise the Federation of Communist Youths of Greece (OKNE). Imprisoned, he subsequently fled to the Soviet Union. In 1931, he was sent back to Greece to restore order in the highly factionalised KKE and in the same year (other accounts claim 1935), he was appointed, by order of Stalin and the Comintern, General Secretary of KKE.
In August 1936, he was arrested by the State Security of the Metaxas regime and imprisoned. From prison, he issued a letter urging all Greeks to resist the Italian invasion of October 1940and transform the war into an anti-fascist war. This was given great publicity and provided a guiding light for the subsequent leading role of the CPG in the Resistance movement.
After the German invasion of Greece, in 1941 the Germans transferred him to the Dachau concentration camp, from where he was released in May 1945. Returning to Greece, he re-assumed the leadership of the KKE from Georgios Siantos, acting general secretary of the KKE since January 1942.

Civil War

Zachariadis conducted with remarkable tenacity the operations of the Democratic Army of Greece which was formed as reaction to the White Terror that had been unleashed by Greek reactionaries and their British and American allies. After the defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece in 1949, Zachariadis charted the difficult path of CPG in working under totally new conditions and accounting for the reasons of the defeat.

Post-war

In 1949, the KKE leadership and the remnants of the Democratic Army fled into exile in the socialist states. Zachariadis' consistent and revolutionary leadership of the KKE and his refusal to accept the conciliatory policies of part of the Party cadre during the Resistance fight and similar moods following the 1949 defeat,proved essential in preserving the integrity of KKE in the 1949-1955 period. However, following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, reformist and revisionist forces within the leadership of the KKE, aided in a variety of ways by the new Soviet leadership, tried to form anti-leadeship centers, primarily in the Greek exile communities in the socialist countries. However, the large majority of party members and cadre rallied behind Zachariadis.
It was only by an open intervention of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other communist parties in the internal affairs of the KKE that, in May 1956, the 6th General Assembly of the Central Committee of KKE removed Zachariadis from the post of general secretary, and in February 1957 he was expelled from the party. There followed thousands of expulsions of ardent revolutionary party members that did not wish to accept the KKE leader's expulsion and the opportunist line of the new leadership.
He spent the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, initially in Yakutia and later in Surgut, where, as KGB claims he committed suicide in 1973, while the vast majority of the Greek communists refugees had the opinion that he was murdered. As today, the Russian state archives for his death conditions remain secret.^[1]
1. Interview of Natalia Tomilina, Director of the Russian State Archive of Most Recent History at 2000 in Thessaloniki. (From the book: Lefteris Apostolou "Nikos Zachariadis", Filistor, Athens, 2000)