Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower Read Free Book Online Page B

under surveillance and imprisoned or sent into internal exile, just as they would be during the civil war too. Armenian activists were deported to Soviet Armenia “since they scandalously propagandize among their co-nationals for communism and give significant backing to Greek and Jewish communists.” The refugees too were widely accused of being responsive to the communist “virus,” much to the annoyance of their leaders. 6
    As old anxieties about the activities of Kemalist and Italian fascist agents subsided international communist policy itself gave ample new grounds for police fears. In Moscow in 1924, the Comintern, hoping to promote revolution in Bulgaria, adopted the Bulgarian Communist Party’s slogan of “a united and independent Macedonia” (one which would unite the lands taken by Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria in 1912–13 in a larger communist Balkan federation). The Greek Communist Party publicly declared its adherence to the new line and although many party members resigned in protest, the party itself stuck to this deeply unpopular position for a decade. As a result, in the following year high-ranking party cadres were put on trial for treason as “autonomists.” In the minds of the authorities, they had become pro-Bulgarian and anti-Greek protagonists in a new round of the Macedonian Struggle. Far-fetched claims circulated in police headquarters that leading international Bolsheviks had descended from Vienna to make the Macedonian capital their base as they prepared to overthrow Greek rule. Under the shadow of the Russian revolution, the old Slav peril thus resurfaced in a new guise. “With … the development of industry, especially tobacco, the tram-drivers, docks and the railways,” noted the police in 1927, “Thessaloniki brings together a great mass of workers upon whom communist propaganda finds fertile soil, given the lack of any kind of countervailing anti-communism to forestall its attacks, and given the absence of preventative measures able to hinder the impact of the nation-destroying activity of certain rootless blind organs of the Third International and the Russian Communist Party.” 7
    Inside the movement, however, the tensions, disagreements and limitations were unmistakable. The KKE split almost immediately after its formation into several factions who detested each other as much if not more than they detested the representatives of “the bourgeois state.” Benaroya, one of the founders of the Greek labour movement, was expelled, while rival groupings such as theTrotskyite “Archive Marxists,” who gave priority to worker education over revolutionary activism, rejected the Comintern line over Macedonia: their fights with party members were every bit as frequent and violent as those with the police.
    The party’s Macedonia policy damaged it deeply. It disturbed relations between the Salonica branch and the central committee in Athens, and led to many defections. In 1926 the party lost control of the trades union federation, and marginalized itself further by recruiting primarily factory workers and ignoring the villages. Although it did fairly well in the general elections of November 1926, winning 4 per cent of the vote nationally, and nearly 11 per cent in the city itself—which returned three of the ten communist deputies to parliament—it was a false dawn. By 1927 the Salonica branch had run out of funds. A decade later, in the critical elections of 1936, when the communist vote rose substantially over its 1926 levels in most of the country, it slipped in Salonica, the centre of labour activism. In fact, what is surprising is how limited the party’s appeal remained within the Greek working population for most of the interwar period.
    Worker militancy was fed far more by heavy-handed official repression—and by the poverty of the city’s refugee masses—than it was by communist tactics. In the early 1920s, when the authorities had little manpower to spare, they