Review: “Greece, 1941-49: From Resistance to Civil War: The Strategy of the Greek Communist Party” – Haris Vlavianos

Haris Vlavianos’s “Greece, 1941-49: From Resistance to Civil War: The Strategy of the Greek Communist Party” offers what I think is probably the most comprehensive and least biased historical analysis of the KKE during the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Greek Civil War (1943-49). Did the KKE deliberately start the civil war to seize power, as several right-wing historians claim? If they didn’t, why did the boycott the elections in March 1946? The KKE was the most successful and strongest party in Greece during the occupation. What explains its defeat in the civil war? What were Stalin’s and Tito’s role in Greece? These are the questions the author seeks the answers to. Besides Vlavianos’s obsessive anti-Stalin bias, he is extremely thorough and objective in his analysis, criticizing sharply the views of right-wing historians but also those of former KKE leaders.