Елизабет Баркер:МАКЕДОНИЈА. Нејзиното место во Балканската политика на моќта

3. THE GREEK COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION, 1941-9

The Greek Communist Party, which had partly freed itself from the Macedonian burden in 1935, managed to avoid resuming it until the summer of 1943. Nevertheless, memories of the Party’s earlier support of Macedonian autonomy seriously hampered its work in the first two years of the Axis occupation. When the Party, through E.A.M.-E.L.A.S., tried to organize resistance in Greek Macedonia, it met with prolonged resistance from nationalist-minded Greeks. Its chief opponent was Y.V.E., or the ‘Protectors of Northern Greece’, a nationalist organization which sought to protect the integrity of Greece, and which later re-christened itself P.A.O., the ‘Panhellenic Liberation Organization’. However, E.A.M. accused this potentially dangerous rival of collaboration with the Germans, attacked its armed bands, and by the end of October 1943, had eliminated it. E.A.M. also speedily eliminated lesser rivals in Greek Macedonia, whom it accused with more justice of collaboration.

In the early summer of 1943, however, the Greek Communists had to face a more serious problem: their attitude towards the Slavo-Macedonian minority of Greek Macedonia. Hitherto the only activity of these Slavo-Macedonians had been to let themselves be organized, under Bulgarian sponsorship, in home defence units, mainly to protect their villages against the Greek Communist-led partisans, E.L.A.S. These units had, however, caused E.L.A.S. relatively little trouble.

Then Tempo, Tito’s special emissary, having reorganized the partisan movement in Yugoslav Macedonia and made contact with Enver Hoxha’s Albanian partisans, crossed the frontier and made contact with the Greek Communists. His object was to get the Greeks to recognize the potentialities of the Slavo- Macedonians and to organize them in partisan units under Communist leadership. The Greek Communists, probably reluctantly, agreed, and S.N.O.F., the Slav National Liberation Front, was formed, although its name was not publicly heard until many months afterwards. Either then or later, a Macedonian called Gochev or Gotsi became military leader of the S.N.O.F. units; and a Greek Communist of Macedonian origin, Andreas Tsimas, seems to have acted as chief liaison officer between S.N.O.F. and the Yugoslav partisan movement. It is not yet clear what part, if any, the Bulgarian Communists played in the formation of S.N.O.F.

From the first, the exact degree of subordination of S.N.O.F. to the E.L.A.S. command seems to have been questionable. The Yugoslav Communists, with a weather eye on the possible eventual southerly extension of Yugoslav Macedonia, obviously took a keen interest in S.N.O.F. It is said that as early as November 1943 Tito’s radio, Free Yugoslavia, broadcast a message of adherence from a south Macedonian leader. When, however, Marshal Tito himself addressed the second session of the Anti- Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia at Jajce on 29 November 1943, he used terms which could not give offence to the Greek Communists. After speaking of partisan successes in Yugoslav Macedonia, Tito said: ‘The partisan movement in Macedonia is closely linked with the partisan movement in Albania and Greece and at the same time is giving considerable support to the development of the partisan movement in Bulgaria itself.’

The existence of S.N.O.F., together with wider differences over the strategy of resistance, presumably explain why war-time relations between the Yugoslav and Greek Communist leaders were difficult. When Greek Communist emissaries arrived at Tito’s headquarters, they were treated without any great respect; Yugoslav partisan representatives, when speaking in confidence, were apt to be critical of the methods by which the Greek partisans conducted resistance. The Greek Communists, on their side, must always have been suspicious of Tito’s presumed aspirations to Greek Macedonia and Salonika.

By the spring of 1944, when Greece was approaching liberation, relations between S.N.O.F. and the Greek Communist Party had become severely strained. Emissaries from Yugoslav Macedonia had by this time become active in the work of both political and military organization among the Slavo-Macedonians of Greece. The leaders of S.N.O.F. looked over the frontier to the Macedonian Communist Party in Yugoslavia, rather than to the Greek Communist Party, for leadership. In fact, in the summer of 1944 the S.N.O.F. formations commanded by Gochev clashed with E.L.A.S. on at least three occasions.

The proclamation of the Macedonian People’s Republic on 2 August 1944 made the Yugoslav power of attraction doubly strong. On the other hand the Greek Communist Party, which by then was participating in the internationally recognized Greek Government and had hopes of winning power in a liberated Greece, was obviously unwilling to ruin its chances by ceding Macedonian territory to Yugoslavia or even by sponsoring Macedonian autonomy inside Greece. Tito at this time seems to have decided that it was more important that the Greek Communists should win the whole of Greece than that he himself should win Greek Macedonia. When the liberation of Greece began in September 1944, Tito must have restrained his enthusiasts in the Macedonian Communist Party, just as he restrained them over Pirin Macedonia. Gochev and his S.N.O.F. battalions broke with the Greek Communist Party and crossed into Yugoslav Macedonia. Gochev himself went to Skoplje; his units were disbanded and later enrolled in the Yugoslav army.

Little of these difficulties between the Yugoslav and Greek Communist leaders came into the open until the break between Tito and the Cominform had led to a break between Tito and the Greek Communists. Speaking just after the break with the Cominform, but a year before the open break with the Greek Communists, Tempo still gave a rosy if somewhat one-sided view of war-time relations between Yugoslavs and Greeks. Addressing the Yugoslav Communist Party’s Fifth Congress in July 1948, Tempo said:

The Yugoslav Central Committee pursued a policy of brotherly co-operation with the heroic Communist Party of Greece throughout the liberation war. . . Macedonian partisan detachments very often crossed to the territory of Aegean Macedonia and developed lively political work among the local population. Thanks to the correct political work of our partisan detachments, the Macedonian masses in Aegean Macedonia realized that the liberation struggle of the Greek people was at the same time their own struggle, that not only the freedom of the Greek people, but also the freedom of the Macedonian people depended on the success of that struggle. . . Our Party activists during the liberation war acquainted their Greek comrades with the experiences of our Party in organizing a regular army. . . They acquainted their Greek comrades with their experience in organizing the people’s revolutionary authority on the ruins of the old State apparatus. . . Our Party activists conveyed to their Greek comrades their experience in the struggle against the imperialist tendencies of the western allies. . . Military and political co-operation between our national liberation army and units of the Greek Army was exemplary throughout the national liberation war. Macedonian units always met with great hospitality whenever they had to withdraw to Greek territory before enemy offensives. . .

Tempo’s account does of course unwittingly betray two inevitable causes of war-time irritation to the Greek Communists. The first was the somewhat superior and patronizing attitude of the Yugoslavs, which must have been nearly unbearable to Greeks, even if they were Communists. The second was that the Yugoslav Macedonians considered themselves entitled to conduct ‘political work’ on the Greek side of the frontier. Although there is no evidence that this implied a definite pledge by the Greek Communist Party to cede Aegean Macedonia to the Macedonian People’s Republic, it was a fact which, if widely known, would inevitably cause serious damage to the Greek Party’s prestige inside Greece.

Greek Communist resentment was, however, not allowed to find an open vent until Tito had decided to close the Yugoslav- Greek frontier in July 1949. Then Nikos Zahariades, Secretary General of the Greek Communist Party, wrote an article in the issue of 1 August of the Cominform journal, For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy, in which he bitterly attacked the Yugoslav Communists’ war-time policy. Zahariades had himself not been in Greece during the occupation, since he was in a German concentration camp. Much of his article consisted of fantastically exaggerated charges against Tito designed to fit in with the general Cominform campaign against him; nevertheless it probably expressed a good deal of the long-suppressed war-time fears and antagonisms of the Greek Communists. He said:

The people’s democratic movement of our country has never, since the times of the first occupation, known such a cunning and foul enemy as the Tito clique. The Great Serbian chauvinism of the Tito-ites in relation to the resistance movement in Greece was evident as far back as 1943, when the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party declared that the people of Aegean Macedonia could only win their liberation with the framework of Yugoslavia. The corollary of this was that it was the prime duty of all Macedonian patriots to fight against the Communist Party of Greece and E.A.M. and instead to collaborate with the Tito agents.

This [Zahariades continued] was the directive followed by Tito’s man in Aegean Macedonia, Tempo (Vukmanović). This was the directive applied in practice by their chief agent, Gochev. . . During all these years the Tito clique sent thousands of its agents into the Communist Party of Greece and into E.A.M. with the job of undermining the Communist Party of Greece and splitting the unity of the people’s liberation movement.

 Zahariades then told the following startling story to illustrate the alleged ‘alliance’ between Anglo-American imperialism and the Tito clique:

In October 1944, when the British landed in Greece, Tempo, at the head of the provocative movement directed against the Communist Party of Greece, informed the Communists of Aegean Macedonia that he had asked Tito for two divisions to occupy Salonika. This was before the December events; the British were not sure that they could hold Greece. Preferring to see Salonika occupied by Tito than in the hands of E.L.A.S. the British parachuted weapons on to the aerodrome at Grupitsa. These were sent on to Vapsori by Tito’s agents—Tempo, Gochev, and Pios—to be used against E.L.A.S. . . In December 1944 Tito, who dreamed of snatching Salonika from the people’s democratic Greece, did nothing to help us to fight the British, in spite of all his earlier pompous statements. . .

 Zahariades declared that ‘the Tito clique and its executive organ, the Gochev-Keramidjiev gang’ had, ‘and still has’, hundreds of Yugoslav intelligence men in Aegean Macedonia. Time and again, he said, the Greek Central Committee had drawn the attention of the Yugoslav Central Committee to the counter-revolutionary actions of these agents, ‘proved by irrefutable documentary evidence’, and had demanded that their activities should be stopped. The Yugoslav Central Committee, however, ‘did not do a thing about these provocative actions.’ 

The point which Zahariades did not disclose was, of course, the extent to which the Greek Communist leaders had ever pledged their consent to these Yugoslav activities in Aegean Macedonia. There is in fact no evidence available about any formal war-time agreement between the two Communist Parties on the Macedonian question, although there was quite obviously a working agreement on war-time collaboration.

On war-time relations between the Greek and Bulgarian Communist Parties there is very little reliable evidence. A document was produced towards the end of the war, known as the Tetrich Agreement’. This purported to be an agreement signed by Greek and Bulgarian Communists in July 1943, pledging the Greek Communist Party to co-operate in the establishment of an autonomous Macedonia. The authenticity of this document was accepted by most non-Communist Greeks but denied by the Communists. On grounds of general probability, it seems unlikely that the Greek Communists would have ceded such a vital point to the Bulgarians at a period of the war when the Bulgarians had very little to offer in exchange, and when Moscow was presumably known to be backing the Yugoslavs, rather than the Bulgarians, in Macedonia.

Nationalist Greeks also accepted the authenticity of the supposed Mount Kaimaxillar Agreement, by which the Greek Communists were alleged to have agreed to Macedonian autonomy within a Slav federation.

Finally, there is the curious character known as Rhodopoulos or Radev who, at the beginning of 1944, presented himself to the Allied Military Mission in Greece as liaison officer between the Mission and the Greek and Bulgarian Communists. In September 1944 he reappeared as a Colonel in the Bulgarian Army, and engineered the Bulgarian army’s sudden change of front in Greek Macedonia.

It seems a reasonable guess that although there were undoubtedly war-time contacts between the Greek and Bulgarian Communist Parties, in the course of which the Macedonian question must inevitably have been raised, these contacts were of far less importance than Greek-Yugoslav Communist relations. It seems in fact probable that during the war the Greek Communist Party managed to avoid committing itself on the ultimate settlement of the Macedonian question. At the time of the liberation Professor Svolos, a non-Communist member of E.A.M., denied that E.A.M.-E.L.A.S. has any interest in Macedonian autonomy. No statement was, however, officially made by the Greek Communist Party, as such.

The Greek civil war of December 1944 led to the flight of a number of Slavo-Macedonians, and also Greek Communists, to Yugoslav Macedonia. This gave the newspapers of Skoplje and Belgrade the occasion for repeated outbursts, from 1945 onwards, about Greek ‘monarcho-Fascist’ persecution of the Slavo-Macedonians. A Soviet spokesman gave 30,000 as the total of Slavs who had fled from Greece at this period.

Zahariades, in his article of August 1949, gave a strange interpretation of this flight: ‘Tito organized the mass emigration of Macedonians to Yugoslavia, thus depriving Aegean Macedonia of its Macedonian population.’ ‘Incidentally’, he added, ‘the Greek monarcho-Fascists have been trying to do the same thing for many years, hoping to change the ethnical composition of Aegean Macedonia.’ Zahariades added that the ‘Tito-ites’ tried to recruit agents from the refugees who, after the necessary training, were sent to Greece to operate against the Greek Communist Party.

In March 1949, when relations between the Greek and Yugoslav Parties were nearing an open break, a delegation from ‘free Greece’ asked permission to visit these refugees and help them to return home. This, according to the Greek account, was refused; probably the Yugoslavs declared that the refugees did not wish to return.

The Greek Communist Party, for the first four years after the liberation, did its best to keep silent on Macedonia. In the early spring of 1946, Zahariades visited Prague and Belgrade, and must almost inevitably have discussed Macedonia with the Yugoslav Communist leaders. A few months earlier, on 11 October 1945, Tito had made an uncompromising statement in Skoplje: ‘We have not denied the right of the Macedonian people to unite. We shall never deny that right. That is our principle. We do not lay down principles for some passing sympathy. We shall stand on this aim, that all Macedonians shall be united in their country.’ Nevertheless, it seems likely that Tito informed Zahariades that the first priority was that the Greek Communists should win Greece, and that only after that had been achieved need the Macedonian question be settled.

At all events Zahariades, when he returned to Athens, said in an interview to a British correspondent in May 1946: ‘Territorial questions between Greece and Yugoslavia do not arise.’ He added that the population of Greek Macedonia was 90 per cent Greek and only 10 per cent Slav, and that E.A.M. stood for the territorial integrity of Greece. At that time there was at least no open change in the Greek Party’s Macedonian policy.

However, the Greek Communist Party must then already have laid its plans for the new Greek civil war: these in fact may have been the main subject of Zahariades’s talks in Belgrade. On 8 June 1946 the Greek Ministry of Public Order announced that ‘roaming Communist bands had created a desperate situation in Macedonia’. By the end of the year the new guerrilla movement had started operations, led by the Moscow-trained Greek Communist and former Communist organizer in Macedonia, Markos Vafiades. (Markos was born in Asia Minor and came to Salonika in 1922; his natural sympathies would therefore be with the Greek ‘patriotic’ wing, rather than the Macedonian autonomist wing, of the Greek Communist Party.) On 24 December 1947 the formation of the ‘Provisional Democratic Government’, headed by Markos, was proclaimed. The Greek Government in Athens replied by outlawing the Greek Communist Party.