Despite recent losses, Greece’s communists remain the most hardline in Europe. Their perseverance may only be quelled by an investigation into KGB activities in Greece recently ordered by a senior District Attorney. The large and relatively influential orthodox Stalinist Party (KKE) has publicly reaffirmed its faith in the ultimate worldwide triumph of Communism, and its members have embarked on a tour from China to the US to encourage efforts for a new International and lately hosted a meeting of 14 communist parties and organizations of the Near and Middle East and the Mediterranean.
At a time when the rest of the world was celebrating the end of communism, Harilaos Florakis, President of the KKE, last year predicted: “The 21st century will bring the total victory of socialism in the world… If some socialist countries have been lost, others remain and more will surely come.”
While the rest of the world moves on, Greece has been witness to several other oddities: Along with that of China and Portugal, the KKE party, also extensively financed by the KGB, in the company of Saddam Hussein and Khadafi, openly supported the August 1991 abortive Stalinist coup in Moscow designed to re-establish totalitarian dictatorship. At its 14th Congress in December 1991, the KKE reversed the previous Congress’s decision to abandon Marxism-Leninism, and pledged faith in it anew. And while almost all statues and outward symbols of communism were being demolished, Greek communists and the opposition socialists raised a statue to Aris Velouchiotis, the guerrilla leader during the Civil War who sought to estabish a dictatorship on the Soviet model.
KGB financing stopped with the collapse of the former regime, but the conservative government has approved the inclusion of the communists in state financing of the political parties, amounting this year to 3.5 million dol-lars of Greek taxpayers’ money.
Paradoxically, outdated Communism persists despite a torrent of official revelations in Moscow and Athens showing that the KKE, along with its widespread network of front organizations, was the fifth largest recipient worldwide of KGB financing. Along with Portugal, it was in fact the highest recipient in NATO relative to its population, indicative of the importance Moscow gave to wrenching Greece away from the West.
It also indicates that the wealth built up by the KKE, and its parallel network of front commercial companies and real estate assets, are perhaps the key explanation for its ability to persevere. Greece may yet provide the most documented evidence in the West of how secret KGB funding was used to mold a pro-Soviet and anti-American mindset, one that fuelled campaigns ranging from the fierce campaigns to expel US bases to Greece’s anti-Western foreign policies in general.
Recent exposure of KGB activity in Greece runs parallel to the Communist Party’s drive to support and reorganize the remnants of international Communism. The most important development has been the investigation into KGB activities ordered last May by Thessaloniki Chief District Attorney Argyrios Tsichlas, an investigation that may culminate in a major trial.
The sum total of its revelations lead to the conclusion that large-scale Soviet financing was largely responsible for molding Greece into the most anti-Western country within NATO and the EC. The published documents and confessions of former Soviet officials show that KGB money went to the Greek Communist Party, the Greek Communist Youth Organization (KNE), specific left-wing publications, EEDYE, Greece’s main peace organization, which is a branch of the World Peace Council and has set up a number of front organizations in most walks of life including trade unions, the feminist movement, religious fronts, the organizations which campaigned for the explusion of the US bases, etc. and publications, such as the 57-volume works of Lenin.
Published documents show that there was a ‘fixed’ annual figure for communist parties which, however, doubled with the addition of ‘extraordinary* payments on specific projects. For example, the annual grant for the KKE was 700,000 dollars per year between 1971-82, a figure which rose to 900,000 dollars between 1984-90. But, with the additional projects approved for financing, over the 15 years between 1968-71 and 1978-90 payments for the KKE’s activities totalled 30 million dollars – in other words, an average of 2 million dollars a year.
This financing does not include revenues for the party generated through privileged commercial transactions granted by the Soviets, through joint enterprises, through free newsprint, and through the bloating of dollar payments by speculating with foreign currency values.
The persistence of the Greek communists in orthodox Stalinism, and their attempts to reestablish a Communist International, does not mean that they have not suffered enormous losses as a result of such revelations and the international discrediting of Communism. Since 1974 the KKE and its affiliates has averaged between 9 to 13 percent of the popular vote, and held far greater influence through their ideological ties and cooperation with the Socialist party and government. But at the Party’s 13th Congress in 1990, it was disclosed that over the preceding four years it lost 19 percent of its members, 31 percent of the party daily’s circulation, and 50 percent of the readership of its Sunday paper.
Worse, the Greek communist movement in 1991 split into two, apparently irreconcilable and feuding parties. One of their feuds is over the division of communist party funds and assets. The KKE, with KGB funding now ended, says it is selling a few of the reported 73 real estates assets it owns.
The latest revelations of covert financing of the Greek communist movement has come from neighboring Bulgaria. In the first such move since the liberalization of the Zhivkov regime, authorities have released documents revealing clandestine ties between the former communist government and KKE.
According to a report by the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) and back-up documents, Bulgarian communists authorized the transfer of funds to the KKE as well as “the illegal transfer across the border of special Greek poli-tical emigrant groups, the organizing of one-way radio transmissions from Bulgarian territory which could not be located by Greek security services, the transfer to Greece of Greek Communist Party propaganda materials, etc.”
The same report and documents cited cases of Bulgarian support for Turkish terrorists, as well as the training of security agents and the provision of military and economic aid to Third World countries, including Nicaragua and Cuba.
The Bulgarian News Agency’s dispatch said the documents authorizing such activity were signed by Zhivkov, as well as by other high-ranking government officials such as Dimiter Stoyanov. It is said the documents would be used against them in Zhivkov’s upcoming trial.
As the torrent of revelations continues, the District Attorney’s investigation might be the coup de grace for the Greek communist movement.
