Article

European History Quarterly

2022, Vol. 52(1) 43–64
Beyond the Ballot box: © The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
Rethinking Greek Communism sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02656914211066800
Between the Wars journals.sagepub.com/home/ehq

Margarite Poulos
Western Sydney University, Australia

Abstract
The assimilation of more than one million Anatolian Greek refugees into the social,
economic and political life of Greece following its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War
(1919–1922) accounts for much of the conflict that defined the period of the Second
Hellenic Republic (1924–1935). The impact of the refugees on the traditional balance
of mass politics at the electoral level, is well documented; their contribution to the elect-
oral gains of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the 1930s gave legitimacy to the com-
munist threat and ultimately served as a pretext for the suppression of competitive
politics and the end of republican governance. The nature and extent of refugee identi-
fication with communism is not well understood in the historiography, however, and
remains largely based on the male refugee vote, even though the adult male refugee
population accounted for a minority of the refugee population. The census of 1928
reported an ‘abnormally high’ number of widows and girls, especially among the refugees
of Asia Minor, as all the males of military age (18–50) had been retained by the Turks as
hostages during the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922, and many of them had perished
before their release. This paper begins an overdue examination of generational radica-
lization outside the ballot box, among the ranks of refugee youth, and young women in
particular, the group regarded by contemporaries as most vulnerable to the excesses of
liberal cosmopolitanism in the new ‘motherland’.

Keywords
communism, gender, identity, interwar Greece, radicalization, refugees, youth

Corresponding author:
Margarite Poulos, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith South,
NSW 2751, Australia.
Email: m.poulos@westernsydney.edu.au
44 European History Quarterly 52(1)

The ‘state of peace’ re-established between Turkey and the West, embodied in the Treaty
of Lausanne (1923), saw the first internationally ratified compulsory exchange of popula-
tions under the auspices of the League of Nations.1 It proved a watershed in the eastern
Mediterranean, with far-reaching ramifications both for the new Turkish Republic, which
absorbed hundreds of thousands of Muslim peoples from their Greek homelands, and for
Greece, which had to absorb more than one million Greek orthodox natives and thou-
sands of Armenians from the shores of Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace and the Black
Sea.2 Known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greece,3 it was, to borrow Benjamin
Nathan’s term, one of Greek history’s ‘plastic hours’, with far-reaching consequences
for society and the economy, the labour movement, and the development of Greek
communism.4
The limited resources available to the Greek state to undertake the relief and resettle-
ment of the refugees prompted the intervention of the League of Nations. The outcome
was the establishment of the Refugee Settlement Committee (RSC) in 1923, whose
mandate was to help settle the bulk of the refugees into agricultural work so that they
might become self-supporting; the location of the settlements was determined by the
availability of suitable land for cultivation, a key factor in the country’s capacity to
absorb the new population. Accordingly, the core of the refugee population was resettled
in Macedonia (52 per cent) and Attica (25 per cent), although historical accounts indicate
that many refugees coming from Ottoman urban centres were not accustomed to agricul-
tural labour, and abandoned the land they had been allocated to move to cities.5
The impact of the sudden and dramatic increase of the national population upon an
ill-prepared nation – an increase of more than 20 per cent in a few months – has been
well-documented in the historiography, with particular emphasis on the unprecedented
expansion of Greek industry, on the one hand, and deepening institutionalized workplace
exploitation of a vulnerable and inadequately protected urban labour force, on the other.6

1
The Treaty of Lausanne or the Treaty of Peace with Turkey was signed on 24 July 1923 by the British Empire,
France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Serb-Croat-Slovene state, on the one side, and Turkey, on the
other.
2
The Greek Orthodox natives of Asia Minor, Thrace and the Black Sea areas who were forcibly expelled from
their homes, or ‘exchanged’ for their Turkish counterparts in Greece after Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish
War (1919–1922).
3
In Turkey it is known as the Western Front of the Turkish War of Independence.
4
I have adapted this term used by Nathans but coined by Gershom Scholem, to refer to moments in history when
inherited institutions melt away, clearing a path for possibility. See Benjamin Nathans, ‘Bolshevism’s New
Believers. Review of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine’,
New York Review of Books, 23 November 2017.
5
Elie Murard and Seyhun Arcan Sakalli, ‘Mass Refugee Inflow and Long-Running Prosperity: Lessons from
the Greek Population Resettlement’, IZA-Institute of Labor Economics, Germany, June 2018 (Discussion
paper 11613).
6
See, for instance, Leda Papastefanaki, Ergasia, Technologia kai Fylo stin Elliniki Biotechnia [Labour,
Technology and Gender in the Greek Cottage Industry] (Heraklion 2009); Eleni Kyramargiou, Drapetsona
1922–1967: At the Edge of the World (Athens 2019).
Poulos 45

This new lumpenproletariat in Greece’s rapidly expanding urban industrial centres, to

quote historian Constantinos Tsoucalas, was largely comprised of the Greek Anatolian
bourgeoisie, members of the middle classes of Asia Minor and Bulgaria, who, despite
their reduced circumstances, did not abandon their bourgeois mentality and remained
staunch liberal supporters (Venizelist) throughout the 1920s. Only later, after becoming
absorbed as workers in Greek industry did they abandon the dream of returning to their
previous social position, and begin to act and behave as members of the working class.7
The Treaty of Ankara of 1930, which decisively ended refugee hopes for repatriation and
compensation, further destabilized their traditional alignment with Venizelos and bour-
geois politics.8 These factors are widely accepted as the basis for the electoral gains of
the Greek Communist Party (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas/KKE) in the various elec-
tion cycles of the 1930s, and, ultimately, for the suspension of parliamentary democracy
in 1936 and the installation of the Metaxas dictatorship.
The Greek Communist Party’s membership increased almost ninefold in the span of
13 years, from less than 2000 in 1923, to 6000 in 1934, to more than 17,500 in 1936.
The Party’s electoral share increased from 4.38 per cent in 1926 to 9.59 per cent in
1935,9 and it gained 15 parliamentary seats in the elections of January 1936.10 In 1926
eight of the 10 communist deputies introduced to the Greek Parliament were from
refugee-dominated provinces, while the parliamentary elections of 1933 showed that
the KKE gained 12.4 per cent in Nea Ionia, 12 per cent in Kaisariani, 11.2 per cent in
Kokkinia and 10.5 per cent in Vironas, all refugee neighbourhoods (prosfygopoleis).
Whether the refugee vote was, as Kritikos puts it, ‘an act of revenge and disappoint-
ment with the old political order, or a ‘conscious identification with an ideology that pro-
mised a brave new world’,11 is far from understood. Indeed the connection between the
refugees and the growth of communism, while broadly accepted, has never been the
subject of a focused study. In this paper I explore the extent to which the traditional his-
toriographical focus on (male) refugee voting patterns has obscured vital and distinctive
generational and gender(ed) aspects of communism’s expanding social base between the
Wars. It is my contention that the refugee crisis not only marked a critical phase in the
development of the Greek Communist Party between the Wars but also began to redefine
the relationship of women to it. Between the worsening plight of an expanding and unpro-
tected female industrial labour force on the one hand, and the efforts made by a

7
See Constantine Tsoucalas, The Greek Tragedy (London 1969), 23.
8
This pertains to the refugee ‘proletariat’ toiling in the urban centres who had a far higher hope of compensation
than those who became owners and cultivators of land redistributed to refugees by the state.
9
The All People Front [Pallaiko Metopo] was an electoral coalition formed between the Communist Party of
Greece, the Common Front of Workers, Farmers and Professionals, and the United Front of Workers and
Peasants. It participated in the elections of 1935 as ‘Communists and Allies’ and took 9.59 per cent without
electing any MPs. These figures are given by Angelos G. Elefandis, The Promise of the Weak Revolution:
The Greek Communist Party and Bourgeois Ideology in the Interwar Period (Athens 1999), 424.
10
Ibid.
11
Giorgos Kritikos, ‘From Labour to National Ideals: Ending the War in Asia Minor – Controlling Communism
in Greece’, Societies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2013), 27.
46 European History Quarterly 52(1)

Bolshevizing party to ‘double its forces’,12 the ‘meagre’ numbers of Party women, and
what Psarra calls the sporadic ‘fluid’ nature of their activism and membership, gave
way to a larger and more embedded female constituency, many of whom were young
female refugees.13 To use the anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of ‘liminality’, in
relation to identity construction, Anatolian refugees were ‘neither here nor there;
betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention
and ceremonial’.14 Social-movement theory has long identified complex but clear links
between displacement, deprivation and a resulting spiritual and emotional ‘vacuum’
that may create a space for new behaviours, relationships and subjectivities to form – a
social movement.15 Displaced youth forced to adapt to a new way of life while also
undergoing important developmental changes represent a particularly vulnerable popula-
tion.16 It is reasonable to assume that Anatolian youth, and young women in particular,
who constituted the largest urban refugee demographic and occupied the lowest rungs of
the social ladder, were doubly displaced, susceptible to breaking with past loyalties and
identities, and becoming receptive to the messages of radical politics.
To explores these links, I draw on autobiographical data contained in the personal files
of young Greek communists, predominantly refugees from Asia Minor, held in the
Comintern archives at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii/ RGASPI). I juxtapose these auto-
biographical data with the energetic efforts of dominant voices in the refugee press to
raise community awareness of the dangers of ‘untethered’ youth, efforts which betrayed
a strong sense that the world of the refugees was indeed shifting in unknown and danger-
ous directions.17 I draw primarily on the journalism of Prosfygikos Kosmos, one of the
largest and the most socially engaged of the refugee newspapers, which ran a ‘special
series’ of articles in the latter half of the 1920s, urging greater community commitment
to religious and moral education of refugee youth, as crucial to the preservation of refugee
identity, and as a bulwark against the spread of communism.18

12
‘Instructions from the Executive Committee: On the Doubling of the Forces of the Party May–June’,
Rizospastis, 24 April 1925.
13
This is Psarra’s characterization. See Aggelika Psarra, ‘The Different Faces of a Celebration’, Aspasia, Vol. 6
(2012), 43–59.
14
Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL 1969), 93.
15
The literature is vast. See for example: Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ 1970); Mario Diani,
‘The Concept of Social Movement’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 40, No.1 (1992), 1–25; Doug McAdam,
John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, eds, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political
Opportunities, Mobilising Structures and Cultural Framings (Cambridge 1996).
16
Alba Lucy Guerrero and Tessa Tinkler, ‘Refugee and Displaced Youth Negotiating Imagined and Lived
Identities in a Photography-Based Educational Project in the United States and Colombia’, Anthropology and
Education Quarterly, Vol. 41, No.1 (2010), 55–74.
17
I define ‘youth’ as young people between the ages of 13 of 25 years in accordance with the age parameters
adhered to by KKE’s youth organization Omospondia Kommounistikon Neolaion Elladas/OKNE [Federation of
Greek Communist Youth].
18
‘Identity vulnerability’ is a term I have adapted from Christie Grace Provine’s work on Islamist extremism in
which she argues that vulnerability of personal identity is the core driver of attachment to radical ideology and
terrorist network recruitment. See Christie Grace Provine, ‘Understanding Radicalisation through the Lens of
Identity Vulnerability’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 29 (2017).
Poulos 47

Identity Vulnerability
While Greece had never been as ethnically homogenous as it was after the population
exchange, a multitude of factors, including the particularities of Anatolian Greek identity,
worked to reinforce the refugees’ sense of separation from their native Greek neigh-
bours.19 Scholars have variously characterized the refugees as Greek, but not ‘hemmed
in by a national/ist perspective’,20 while others have asserted that ‘most Anatolian
Greeks did not consider themselves to be Greeks at all, seeing themselves instead as
Anatolian Christians or Christians from the East’.21 In her landmark study of the refugees
who settled in the Piraeus, Renée Hirschon notes that religious affiliation was the official
criterion of identity for refugees; Orthodox Christianity had a conscious, preeminent
place in their self-image and social organization, and provided the foundation and under-
pinning of their culture, but also served as a point of difference with native Greek com-
munities who were far less observant.22 Anatolian ‘otherness’ extended to language and
dialect (especially in relation to Turkophone refugees), food, dress, music, manners,
domestic routines, and even gender norms. The newly impoverished refugee girls who
‘pranced’ through the streets of Athens, perfumed and made up according to the
customs and habits they brought from multicultural and cosmopolitan Smyrna, were
soon characterized as ‘pastrikia’, a term that referred to women who used their beauty
to ‘lure’ wealthy native Greek men with the ultimate aim of escaping the squalor of
the refugee settlements.23 Commonly used epithets such as ‘Turkish spawn’ (tourkos-
poroi), ‘yoghurt-baptized’ (yiaourtobaptismenoi), ‘Orientals’ (Anatolites), in conjunc-
tion with protracted debates about the conditions and extent to which refugees could
be allowed to participate in national elections,24 betrayed native scepticism about
refugee identity and loyalty to the Greek nation, and a resentment of their destabilizing
effects on the Venizelist/anti-Venizelist political balance and on the social and cultural
givens of the capital.
Yet, refugee rebuttals to these ‘otherizing’ practices often hinged on their self-
presentation as ‘true’ Hellenes, an identity that distinguished them from the locals,
whom they considered, in turn, to be uncultured, rough and boorish, commonly calling
them ‘Vlachs’ (Vlachoi) shepherds (tsopanoi) or country bumpkins (horiates), a

19
Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford
1998), 13. For the Pontian perspective, see Maria Vergeti, Apo ton Ponto stin Ellada: Diadikasies Diamorphosis
mias Ethnotopikis Taftotitas [From the Pontus to Greece: Processes in the Formation of Ethnic Identity]
(Thessaloniki 1994, 2000), 188.
20
See Philip Mansel’s study of the Greek Smyrniots, Levant: Splendor and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean
(New Haven, CT 2012) 14.
21
Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts (New York 2006), 336.
22
Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe, 192.
23
Menelaos Haralambidis, ‘Aspects of the Political Behaviour of the Refugees in Interwar Athens’, O Dromos
tis Aristeras, 21 February 2011.
24
The voting rights of refugees was widely covered in the refugee press. For example: ‘To eklogiko dikaioma
ton prosfygon’, Pamprosfygiki, 19 November 1925.
48 European History Quarterly 52(1)

sentiment that grew alongside their disillusionment with resettlement in the ‘mother-
land’.25 As true Hellenes, refugees resented their depiction by locals as foreigners.
After all, they had proven their resilience in the successful preservation of their
Hellenic (Rum) identity after centuries of Ottoman subjugation. The refugees offered
Greece the power of rebirth precisely because their Hellenic attributes had been so rigor-
ously tested.

In the Greek dictionary, refugee refers to someone who flees to a foreign land … no, those
unfortunate shipwrecked persons are not refugees, they are bonafide Hellenes (Ellines). They
are not foreigners … They do not descend from the races that live on the banks of the Volga
or the Siam. They are not refugees; they are returnees by the fault of our bad governors.26

In the assessment of the refugee daily Pamprosfygiki, the reason the ‘entire Hellenic
universe’ had not collapsed into anarchism after the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and the
arrival of more than one million destitute refugees, was the refugees themselves who
arrived with the will to work and to reconstitute themselves. ‘It is we who maintained
national cohesion, it is we who forged national unity’.27
The politicization of Anatolian difference was compounded by the limits of the reset-
tlement programme, the refugees’ political allegiances, and stiffening economic compe-
tition in an already depressed labour market. In spite of its significant accomplishments,
the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission’s (GRSC) task was not to relieve the distress
of the refugees; theirs was a longer-term goal of the successful settlement and assimila-
tion of the refugees. That is, the long-term goal was not a philanthropic or humanitarian
one, but a political one. The major concern of the GRSC was the economic integration of
the refugees, the boosting of national economic activity, and the promotion of a ‘national
brotherhood of race’ over other less desirable possibilities: the likelihood of the Greek
state’s mishandling of the situation; the radicalization of the refugees; the possible desta-
bilization of the Greek state; the influence of the newly established Soviet Union.28
Besieged by worsening global economic conditions, a crisis in public health and
welfare, and intensifying worker militancy and strike action,29 the Greek state revealed
its own ambivalence about refugee identity and loyalty, specifically in relation to the refu-
gees from the Pontus. In 1929, enabled by the Special Crimes Act (Idionymo), the
Venizelist government imposed special conditions of entry on the ethnic Greeks from

25
Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe, 33.
26
‘Oxi prosfyges, alla pallinostoundes’ [Not Refugees but Returnees/Repatriated Immigrants], Prosfygikos
Kosmos, 6 February 1928. See also ‘Oi prosgfyges os oikonomikoi kai fyletikoi anadimiourgitai tis Ellados’
[The Refugees as Economic and Racial Renewal in Greece], Pamprosfigiki 9 November 1925.
27
‘Hethniki enotis kai oi prosfyges: O kindynos tou kommounismou’, Pamprosfygiki, 14 November 1925
28
See, for example, G.R.S.C. Chairman and Charles Eddy, Greece and the Greek Refugees (London 1931). See
also Mary Layoun, Wedded to the Land: Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (Durham, NC 2001),
18–19.
29
For the successes and failures of health policy between the Wars, see Vasiliki Theodorou and Despina
Karakatsani, ‘Health policy in interwar Greece: The intervention by the League of Nations Health
Organisation’, Dynamis, Vol. 28 (2008), 53–75.
Poulos 49

the Pontus.30 The Minister of Foreign Affairs justified the measure as a ‘public security
issue since it had been observed many times that those who lived under the Bolshevik
yoke drift toward communism when they arrive in Greece’.31
On 26 July 1929, the day after the Idionymo was passed, the first arrest made was
indeed of a refugee, but from Pergamo in Asia Minor, not the Pontus.32 Denezakis’ ana-
lysis of judicial records finds that of the approximately 3000 people convicted under Law
4229 most were young unmarried working-class men and 3 per cent were women, while
most had received only primary-level education and lived in the industrialized areas of
Athens, Piraeus, Salonica, Larissa and Kavala, where most of the urban refugees of
Asia Minor were settled.33
I am not attempting to argue here that ethnic difference per se, or native ‘otherizing’
practices, predisposed refugees to communism as a form of ‘anti-national’ behaviour.
Rather my purpose is to explore the convergences between the predicament of refugee
youth, and the increasing grassroots presence of the Greek Communist Party as it
embarked upon the process of its own transformation into an activist, socially embedded
‘mass party’, a process known as Bolshevization.

Bolshevization of the KKE and the ‘Woman Question’

The decision to enter the Comintern fold, taken at the Third Extraordinary Congress of
December 1924, saw the Socialist Workers Party (SEKE) rename itself the Communist
Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas/KKE) and begin the process of its
transformation into a revolutionary party of the proletariat, a process known as
Bolshevization. This entailed the reorganization of the Party on the basis of cells
(pyrines) and fractions (fraxia), the beginning of a multi-platform campaign to ‘double
its forces’, and the development of an educational infrastructure to tackle the task of pro-
ducing cadres well versed in the principles of Marxism-Leninism. The simple objective
on the ground was to mobilize the masses, to establish Party cells in every factory, street
and village club and association, that were ‘controlled by local committees’. Thus ended
the KKE’s initial ambivalence towards the refugees and the beginning of rigorous efforts
to bring the refugees into the fold and to ‘lead their struggle’.34

30
The Idionymo (Law 4229) aimed to penalize ‘insurrectional’ ideas and to establish the legal basis for the pro-
secution of communists and anarchists, and the suppression of trade union mobilizations. It was never replaced
or softened, and indeed served as the basis of the much harsher anti-communist laws instituted during the sub-
sequent Metaxas dictatorship (1936–39). See Mark Mazower, ‘The Messiah and the Bourgeoisie: Venizelos and
Politics in Greece’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 35, No. 5 (1992), 885–904.
31
In Vlassis Agtsidis, ‘Pontian Refugees in the “Motherland”’, Istoria tou Ethnous, Vol. 17 (2010), 23.
32
Paraschos Marmarelis, a student at Athens university, spent eight months in prison for reading OKNE litera-
ture and identifying himself as a communist in court. See Andreas Denezakis, “‘Idionymo” Venizelou: Otan
thesmothetithike i poinikopoiisi tis skepsis’ [Venizelos’s ‘Special Crimes Law’: When the Criminalization of
Thought was Institutionalized]. https://www.imerodromos.gr/idionymo-venizeloy-otan-thesmothetithike-i-
poinikopoiisi-tis-skepsis/. The original notice was printed in the communist daily Rizospastis, 28 July 1929.
33
Ibid.
34
‘The refugee question’, KKE Episima Keimena, 1925–1928 [KKE – Official Documents] Vol. 2 (Athens
1974), 77.
50 European History Quarterly 52(1)

At first, like the rest of Greek society, the SEKE/KKE treated the destitute refugees
who arrived on Greek shores as a foreign body.35 The Party saw the refugees as a
mere electoral tool of Venizelism, a negative force in the labour market, a threat to
wages and working conditions, the cause of rising unemployment. Throughout the inter-
war period, the refugee labour force, largely women and children, was often used as a
reserve labour force, to counteract trade union campaigns. The period witnessed many
cases of un-unionized refugee workers being used as strike-breakers. As the director of
the International Labour Office, A. Thomas, stated in March 1927, ‘the working class
is unable to defend against employers who respond to every organized worker campaign
with mass sackings, replacing the unionized workers with unprotected refugee labour’.36
The segregation of the poorer segments of the refugee population on the city’s out-
skirts served to stigmatize the refugees in native society. It also highlighted existing
and new class or political divisions within the refugee population as upper-class refugees
became involved in establishment politics and began to distance themselves from their
poorer counterparts.37 The Party began to recognize that, like the native population,
refugee communities were characterized by class division and exploitation, and thus
began the narrative that the ‘native Greek plutocracy was in cahoots with the upper
refugee classes against the great majority of the refugee populations’.38 By the end of
the decade it made no distinction between native and refugee labour, appealing to one
working class, and a united class-consciousness:

Greece is not divided between natives and refugees but by rich and poor, by people who do
not have to work to live, and people who work but cannot live … Each of us has to choose
between the rich refugee who aligns himself [sic] with the rich native, and the poor refugee
whose comrade is the poor native worker.39

Notably, refugee representation in the Party leadership witnessed a sharp increase with
the advent of Bolshevization. Eleftherios Stavridis, born near Constantinople, assumed
the leadership of the Party from 1925 to 1926; Pastias Giatsopoulos, born in Bulgaria
became General Secretary in 1926; Andronikos Haitas, a Pontian communist from
Sokhoum, Georgia, took the helm in 1927. Nikos Zachariades, from Eastern Thrace
(Ottoman Empire) became General Secretary in 1931 and remained there till 1956.
Chrysa Hatzivasiliou, a refugee from Aydin (Aidinio in Greek), a Greek-dominated pro-
vince of Western Anatolia, would be elected to the Central Committee in 1935 and to the

35
Vlassis Agtsidis, ‘Memory, Identity and Ideology Amongst Pontian Greeks’, in Yiorgos Kokkinos, Vlassis
Agtsidis and Elli Lemonidou, eds, To Trauma kai oi politikes tis Mnimis. Endeiktikes opseis ton symvolikon
polemon gia thn istoria kai ti Mnimi [Trauma and the Politics of Memory. Indicative Aspects of the
Symbolic Wars for History and Memory] (Athens 2010).
36
Ibid.
37
See Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis, ‘A Mediterranean City in Transition: Thessaloniki between the Two
World Wars’, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1997), 502. See also Hirschon, Heirs of the
Greek Catastrophe, 45.
38
Rizospastis, 7 September 1929.
39
Ibid.
Poulos 51

Politburo in 1942. Indeed, the majority of the Central Committee of the KKE and almost
all members of the Politburo after 1931, the year in which KKE and Comintern interests
became inextricably intertwined, were not ‘domestic cadres’40 but refugees from Asia
Minor and the greater diaspora, including the Pontus, Balkans, and the Greeks of
Russia. A significant percentage of this group had also been trained at one of the
Comintern schools. The growing refugee representation in the leadership,
Moscow-trained or otherwise, gave substance to the argument that after 1924, the
Party became disconnected from and could not respond to Greek political realities.41
This, of course, discounts the reality of the toiling refugee masses, for whom refugee
representation at the leadership levels of the KKE, would have been enormously sym-
bolic, in conjunction with the Party’s undiluted articulation of the particular and multiple
challenges they faced. Between 1928 and 1938 labour productivity increased by 43 per
cent and wages increased by 24 per cent; consumer prices between 1922 and 1935
increased by 207 per cent whereas wages rose by only 83 per cent. The rate of both indus-
trialization and the proletarianization of the refugee population occurred under the pincer
of the debt burden which created an explosive radical mix, challenging the traditional
political cleavage between Venizelists and royalist populist factions.42
The KKE’s increased attention to the ‘woman question’ witnessed at this time has
been interpreted as a response to the intensification of feminist campaigns for the
women’s vote in Greece.43 It would be more accurate to argue that the SEKE/KKE’s
views on women’s emancipation developed ‘in dialogue’ with and at the same time as
feminist views on the subject,44 in conjunction with the ‘synergies’ between the
radical expansion of unrepresented female industrial labour, and the momentum of
Bolshevization.
From 1925, Party directives, announcements and declarations began to refer more sys-
tematically to both female and male workers, to male and female youth, and to refugee
women. The use of katharevousa tapered off and the demotic form was used more con-
sistently, in line with the ethos of the mass party. This was highly symbolic in a nation
where education was free but katharevousa remained the language of state, of upper-level

40
This is a term used by Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall (London 1983), 128.
41
For example, see Angelos Elefands, H Epaggelia tis Adinatis Epanastasis: KKE kai Astismos ston
Mesopolemo [The Promise of the Impossible Revolution: The Greek Communist Party and the Bourgeoisie
in the Interwar Period] (Athens 1999).
42
See Vasilis Fouskas and C. Dimoulas, Greece, Financialisation, and the EU: The Political Economy of Debt
and Destruction (Basingstoke 2013), 77.
43
See Yianna Katsiamboura, ‘Proto Socialist Feminism: Women Communists and Socialists of the Interwar
Period’. Paper presented at the workshop ‘Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece? 80 Years after
Pouliopoulos and his Era’, Institute of Political and Social Research Pandelis Pouliopoulos, 12–13
December 2014, Athens. http://ipsr-pouliopoulos.org/sites/ipsr-pouliopoulos.org/files/1412-katsiampoura-
pouliopoulos.pdf
44
Aggelika Psarra, ‘Women in Pursuit of Pleasure and the Vote’, in Christina Vlachoutsikou and Laurie Kain
Hart, eds, When Women Have Differences: Contradictions and Conflicts between Women in Contemporary
Greece (Athens 2003), 187.
52 European History Quarterly 52(1)

primary and secondary education, until the 1960s.45 The 1929 education reforms made
the use of demotic Greek compulsory for primary-level education but not for secondary
and higher education. The refugees thus were required to reconcile their own dialects with
both the vernacular and katharevousa. The 1929 reforms also made entry to classical sec-
ondary education highly selective to stem the flow of school leavers aspiring to positions
in the already bloated public sector; average students were to be redirected into vocational
and technical training. These reforms, in sum, functioned to limit upward mobility and
integration.46
Party reports claimed that the membership numbers of the Greek Communist Youth
(OKNE) had begun to see a ‘serious increase’ despite the rigours of illegality imposed
by the Pangalos dictatorship in 1926. OKNE members recruited refugee workers from
the factory floor as well as students in high schools and institutions of higher learning.
There were also refugees who maintained large families through long hours of hard
work, and simultaneously pursued university studies.47 According to Party historian,
Christos Tzitzilionis, the first communist youth cells were formed within Greek institu-
tions of learning in 1925. ‘Male and female students were recruited from high schools
and universities for the first time, paving the way for multiple ongoing student strikes.48
Eleftheria Ktena, a refugee from Constantinople, was born in 1914 to a self-described
progressive middle-class family, the daughter of an agronomist/agriculturalist (geopo-
nos). She attended school and university in Salonica and Athens from 1928 to 1932,
where she ‘joined the left faction of the university almost immediately through associ-
ation with her sister and brothers’ circle’, and thereafter took part in all the student
demonstrations. Ktena joined OKNE in December 1932, and in March 1942 during
the occupation, joined the Party with her husband and ‘gave everything we had to the
organization’.49
Venizelists were quick to recognize and sound the alarm about the KKE’s accelerated
mobilizational activity, contrasting the activism of ‘cells’ working factory floors and
schools, with the complacency of government and educators. In 1925 Achilleas
Kalevras, the Constantinople-born Minister and Senator in the second Venizelos admin-
istration, published an article in the Athens daily, Eleftheros Logos, accusing the then
Minister of Education under the Pangalos dictatorship, Ricardos Livathinopoulos, of
underestimating the problem of communist students. He advocated for community-based

45
Katharevousa, or ‘pure language’, was an artificial language based on ancient Greek, created by the intelli-
gentsia during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. It was not replaced by demotic Greek as the language of state
till 1976.
46
Giorgos Kritikos, ‘Primary Education in a Non-Standard Language as a Tool of Social and National
Integration: The Case of Vernacular Greek 1923–1930’, in Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk,
eds, Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present (Farnham 2009), 62–3.
47
Anonymous, ‘Refugee Youth’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 6 May 1928.
48
Students demonstrated against rising fees, lack of resources, and for a general overhaul of educational stan-
dards and conditions.
49
This is a reference to the National Liberation Front (EAM), the communist-led Resistance organization that
was formed during the Axis occupation. File of Eleftheria Ktena, RGASPI Fond 495 op 207 File 694.
Poulos 53

education initiatives and the necessity of a coordinated effort between family, school and
state:

The problem of national citizenship (agogi) in the post-war order cannot be solved with gov-
ernment circulars. State decay and racial decline have had a direct and intense impact on the
psychic development of Greek youth … Unfortunately, the work of Greek educators is
lacking in faith and inspiration …This youth need to be saved. Not by sermons, not by scho-
lastic means, not by dry and sterile teaching, not by violence and ill-conceived psychological
measures, but by coordinating the energies of family, school and state. Today in many high
schools the dominant students are communists. Because they abide by some kind of faith …
The youth of the bourgeoisie have no faith. Tired, anaemic, weakened, they feel nothing for
the Greek flag. Youth has a need for intense and exceptional psychic motives to rise to the
bullet of an ideal …50

Many students who would become prominent figures in OKNE and the KKE were
also recruited during this phase of expansion. Well-known communist militants Avra
Vlassi-Partsalidou, Electra Apostolou and ‘Raika’ (1926) joined OKNE at this time.51
An extract from the autobiographical entry of an OKNE cadre, and a rare example of
a female communist icon, Electra Apostolou (née Sidiriou, pseudonym Koula Drakou),
offers insights into the era of Bolshevization from a young woman’s point of view.52
Born in Athens, in 1911, to a prosperous lower middle-class family, her father a trades-
man and employee of a joint-stock company, her mother a housewife, Apostolou became
a member of OKNE in 1927, aged 16, when she was still a high school student in Athens.

I was recommended by my older brother who had been a member since 1921. I have never
been a member of any other parties or organizations. Until the spring of 1929 I had been
working as a rank and file member of the cell. And then I was elected as a member of the
regional leadership … In 1930 I was co-opted by the county leadership of Athens. In
1931 I started working as the editor of our Central mass newspaper which I did till 1933
… Currently [1935] I am working as an organizer of a factory cell. During my Party life I
have recruited 14 members to the Komsomol and two to the Party. There were six
women among them.53

50
Achilleas Kalevras, ‘Communism in the High-Schools’, Eleftheros Logos, 11 December 1925.
51
Avra Vlassi Partsalidou became a reserve member of the Central Committee of the KKE in 1945, and a full
member in 1953. She was married to trade union leader and KKE Politburo member, Dimitris Partsalides. See
Avra Partsalidou, Anamniseis apo tin Zoi stin OKNE [Memories of Life in OKNE] (Athens 1983), 20. Very little
information survives on ‘Raika’, whose true name is said to have been Eirini Komioti (nee Koundouri). Christos
Tzitzilionis, OKNE 1922–1943: Leninistiki Machitiki Scholi Neon [OKNE 1922–1943: Leninist Militant School
for Youth] (Athens 1989), 75.
52
Apostolou was very active in the Greek Resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The myth that has
developed around Apostolou seems to be based on a combination of her youth, gender, her commitment to the
cause, and the particularly gruesome circumstances of her execution at the hands of Greek security forces in
1944.
53
File of Agnia Apostolou and Electra Apostolou (Koula Drakou), RGASPI, Fond 495 op. 207, del 128, 17–21.
54 European History Quarterly 52(1)

Like Apostolou, all aspiring members of OKNE or the Party had to be recommended
by two existing members, which was then brought to a vote at the next Party meeting.54
The recommendation was usually made by a male – brother, father, husband, colleague –
hardly surprising given that politics was a highly masculine domain. On the other hand, it
was a very radical road to follow and Apostolou, like many communists, was eventually
disowned by the rest of her ‘royalist’ family ‘for her political views’.55 Many women
were married to or involved in romantic partnerships with organized communist men,
intimate bonds formed within the movement. Chrysa Hatzivasiliou and Avra
Partsalidou met their future spouses, communists Petros Roussos and Dimitris
Partsalides, as members of OKNE.
Stella Kerasidou (Olga Ivanovna), a close collaborator and friend of Chrysa
Hatzivasiliou, a Soviet Greek from Batumi (originally from Kerasund, Turkey) and
future cadre of the KKE, met her future husband, one-time communist chief,
Andronikos Haitas (Sifnaios) in Moscow where he was on an official visit to Moscow
as the KKE representative at the Fifth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the
Communist International (ECCI) (1925). Haitas encountered Kerasidou on his tour of
the Greek sector of the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV)
where she was enrolled as a student.56 Klio Dimitrievna Stai (née Nisiriou), born in
Constantinople in 1905, completed high school and began work as a teacher there,
until the family departed for Athens in 1925. In 1927, Stai became a member of the
KKE on the recommendation of a colleague at an Athenian private school where she
found employment.57

Gender, Tobacco Labour and Communism

The class location, occupation and educational background of the refugees consulted in
this study were variable – what they shared was their refugee status, youth, gender and a
trajectory that often began with trade union membership, followed by membership in the
OKNE and finally Party membership. The most highly represented group in this sample
worked in tobacco and cigarette production, an industry dominated by young, female,
refugee labour. Most of these girls and women were of working-class origins, and
most had received little formal education. Some came from ‘tobacco families’ who
had worked in tobacco for generations in Anatolia and gravitated naturally to it upon
arrival in Greece. They were absorbed as cheap factory labour on arrival by an expanding
tobacco industry, most destined for the tobacco towns of Kavala, Volos and Thessaloniki
although tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories proliferated across the country in
response to technological advances and mechanization. Mechanization itself, as Betas

54
‘The Organisation of the Socialist Workers Party (SEKE)’ in KKE Episima Keimena vol. 1 1918–1924
(Athens 1974), 21.
55
File of Agnia Apostolou and Electra Apostolou (Koula Drakou), RGASPI, Fond 495 op. 207, del 128, 17.
56
‘Letter to the Human Resources Department of the Comintern’, File of Olga Nikolaevna Ivanova RGASPI
Fond 495 Op. 207 Del 169, 48.
57
‘Autobiography of Klio D. Stai’, RGASPI Fond 495, Op 207, Del 636, 18, 32.
Poulos 55

has argued, was driven by the availability of large volumes of cheap(er) and very talented
female refugee workers, mostly from Asia Minor, who were known to work ‘faster than
the machines themselves’.58
Elena Anemelou was born in December 1911 in Panormou (Asia) Minor to a
‘workers’ family, she had completed two years of high school.

My father was a worker-sailor, my mother was a tobacco worker. My father died in 1912. In
1922 we became refugees and went to Kavala in Greece. In 1923 I started to work in a
tobacco factory and worked there until 1928. In 1924 I joined the Red Union of
Tobacconists. In 1925 I joined the Greek Komsomol and in October 1928 the Party sent
me to study in KUNMZ.59

Tobacco had always been among the biggest employers of working women, along
with textiles, dressmaking and paper production.60 The arrival of the refugees, especially
the women, transformed these industries and created new ones such as the carpet indus-
try. The tobacco/cigarette factory plant owned by the Matsagos Brothers in Nea Ionia,
Volos, for example, was founded in 1890, a small enterprise with modest production
and few workers until 1919. After 1922, and the absorption of female refugee labour,
its production and exports doubled, as did the size of the factory building site. By
1930, it employed 500 workers.61 Betas notes that the most important component of
the firm’s workforce during the interwar period were women, mainly refugees from
Asia Minor. In the 1928 census, 57 per cent of the tobacco workforce in Volos were refu-
gees, of which 77 per cent were women.62 The predominance of a female refugee work-
force in tobacco was seen not only in the cigarette factories of Volos but in tobacco
warehouses and factories across the country.
After 1923, one third of the women’s labour force consisted of refugees, many of them
orphans. From 1913 to 1935, women workers’ wages generally amounted to 22.3 to 58.6
per cent of the average male wages, even in the tobacco industry where the number of
women employees nearly outnumbered men. The working day for women far exceeded
the eight-hour limit stipulated by the law, and sanitary conditions in the factories were
reportedly appalling. The conditions in tobacco and textile industries, for example,
were especially unhygienic, which in combination with very long work hours, resulted
in serious illness, particularly tuberculosis, for many female workers.63 The Greek

58
Thanasis Betas, ‘From the Tobacco Shop to the Cigarette Factory: Technological Changes, Gender and
Surveillance in a Greek Cigarette Firm in the Early 20th Century’, Advances in Historical Studies, Vol. 5
(2016), 61.
59
KUNMZ was The Communist University for the National Minorities of the West, based in Moscow.
‘Autobiography of Elena Anemelou (Dimitrievna)’, RGASPI Fond 495 op 207 file 199, 14–16.
60
Anna Karamanou, ‘The Changing Role of Women in Greece’, in T. Couloumbis et al., eds, Greece in the
Twentieth Century (London 2003), 284.
61
Nitsa Koliou, Typo-Photographic Panorama of Volos, Vol. 1 (Athens 1991).
62
Ibid., 54.
63
Anastasia Kondaxi, ‘A Bourgeois Refugee Settlement: Nea Ionia Volou’ (Masters thesis, Aristotle
University, 1993), 35.
56 European History Quarterly 52(1)

tobacco workers’ movement is widely acknowledged in the scholarship as exceptional in

the history of the Greek working class. The Greek Tobacco Workers’ Federation64 was
the oldest, most militant and well organized union in Greece, and was the only ‘autono-
mous’ union, which according to Koumandaraki, accounted for its militancy in contrast
to the traditional subservience of the Greek trade union movement to the state.65 In turn,
the autonomy and militancy of the tobacco union is attributed to the deep influence of
the Communist Party in the tobacco regions of Macedonia and particularly Thessaloniki,
tobacco being the most underpaid sector. According to Ghikas, working in particular indus-
tries, such as the tobacco industry, was considered by many as the first step before joining
the Party.66 The status of women in the Greek tobacco union was precarious, however. As
Avdela has shown, from the late 1920s, the steady trend within the international tobacco
market towards cheaper leaves promoted gender conflict; new technologies and the
mechanization of production, combined with fluctuations in the crop’s market prices and
overproduction, led gradually to an extensive restructuring or ‘feminization’ of the entire
tobacco labour market and thus a destabilizing effect on the situation of male workers.
One of the most important developments related to this restructuring was the introduction
of cheap processing methods employing mainly women, so that ‘skilled’ male unemploy-
ment increased significantly. In the 1930s, despite the fact that women were by then
accepted as union members, the unions tried repeatedly to restrict their employment and
to secure male predominance in numbers and wages, culminating in what Avdela refers
to as the masculinization of the dominant trade union representation alongside the femin-
ization of the actual labour force.67 In what appears to be tension between the union and the
Party, now following Comintern directives, the communist daily Rizospastis stepped up the
call for women’s full trade union rights from 1928, including their right to vote and to be
elected, especially in the tobacco union given their very high numbers in that industry.68
In the municipal elections of February 1934, the first and only elections in which
Greek women were able to vote (conditionally), the Athens newspaper, Akropolis,
reported a link between female labour and the communist vote.69 Specifically, it

64
The communist-led Greek Tobacco Workers’ Federation (Kapnergatiki Omospondia Elladas/KOE) was also
referred to as the Red Trade Union of Tobacco Workers.
65
Anna Koumandaraki, ‘The Greek Trade Union Movement in Controversy: Against a State-Centred Approach
to Labour Movement Theory,’ Workers of the World: International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts, Vol.
1, No. 1 (2012), 130.
66
Anastasis Ghikas, ‘The Politics of Working-Class Communism in Greece 1918–1936’ (PhD thesis,
University of York 2004), 175.
67
Efi Avdela, ‘Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Post-Ottoman Thessaloniki: The Great Tobacco Strike of 1914’,
in Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace 1870–1930 (London 1997).
68
Rizospastis, 24 February 1928. According to official data there were 21,426 women employed in Greek
tobacco compared with 29,175 men in 1927; by 1932 the number of women and men had reached parity
(19,500:20,000) although the number of employees dropped due to increasing mechanization of the industry.
See ‘Presentation on Female Unemployment in Greece 1927–1935’, Archive of Maria Desypri Svolou,
GR-ASKI-0153b, Contemporary Social History Archive (ASKI), Athens.
69
The Venizelos government extended this right only to women who had completed elementary school and
were over thirty years of age, although it is estimated that only 10 per cent of those eligible actually voted.
Greek women gained full political rights in 1952 and exercised them for the first time in the elections of 1956.
Poulos 57

noted that ‘the communist ballot (kendro) in Athens was surrounded mostly by fanat-
ical women, factory workers and office workers, including women of a very young
age’,70 while in Xanthi, it was a matter of fact that the communist candidate could
expect at least one thousand votes from female tobacco workers.71
The autobiography of tobacco worker Stella Vamniatzidou (Elena Arnova) offers rare
insights into the background and trajectory of a female militant during the period.
Vamniatzidou also belonged to a tobacco family – her father, two sisters and husband
were employed in the sector although it remains unclear if this tradition had its origins
in Anatolia. Her husband, and at least one sister, were also members of the KKE and
OKNE respectively.

I was born in 1910, in Fragia, in Raedestos. My nationality is Greek. My father was a peasant
of modest means, later a refugee, we lived very poorly. I started working at the tobacco
factory at the age of 12. For ten years I worked at various factories in the city of Kavala.
I am married to a tobacco worker, a party member since 1929. I have been a member of
the red trade union of tobacco workers since 1924, a member of MOPR [International
Red Aid] since 1929 where I held various elected positions, the most senior of them as a
member of the regional committee of the MOPR. I did not go to school at all, I eliminated
my illiteracy later after I joined the party. I have practically no party-political education with
the exception of attending the propaganda classes in the cell. Before I joined the party, I had
not been a member of any other parties. I joined the Communist Party in 1931 in the city of
Kavala. I was a member of the cell bureau almost since the very start after I joined the party.
In 1932 at the party conference of the city of Kavalla I was elected a member of the regional
party committee. As a party member I carried out work in the masses of the tobacco workers,
organized strikes, meetings, rallies, I was appointed by the regional committee as the leader
of one of the cells … I was arrested in May 1932 during one of the meetings of the under-
ground trade union. I was sentenced to one month in prison.72

Alexandra Gromova (Chrisoula Vagia) also born in Raedestos, Anatolia, in 1914,

received six years of primary school education before moving to Kavala, Greece,
where she became a tobacco worker at 16 years of age. Her father had been a tobacco
worker in Anatolia, her older sister also worked in tobacco. Her husband was a metalwor-
ker and member of OKNE. Gromova joined the Greek tobacco workers union in 1930,
became a member of the Union board and OKNE in 1931, at age 17.73
Chrysanthi Kantzidou (Kaiti Vasiliou) was born in 1912 in Ottoman-held Drama,
Thrace, to a peasant family. She attended elementary school for one year and started
work in a tobacco factory in 1923, at 11 years of age, working there until 1934. She

70
‘How Did Athenians Vote Yesterday?’ Acropolis, 12 February 1934
71
‘The Threat of the “Red” Mayors in Various Towns of Northern Greece’, Acropolis, 26 January 1934.
72
Note: the autobiography is handwritten, but probably not by Vamniatzidou. The writing is very sophisticated
but her signature shows that she is barely able to write. ‘Autobiography of Stella Vamniatzidou (Elena Agneva)’,
RGASPI Fond 495 Op. 207 file 109, 41.
73
File of Alexandra Gromova (Chrysoula Vagia), RGASPI Fond 495 op 207 file 183, 9–11.
58 European History Quarterly 52(1)

joined the tobacco workers’ union in 1923, the OKNE in 1932, and the KKE in 1934.
Kantzidou was a member of the illegal Board of Workers in Drama and Kavala, as
elected by the Party Congress. She took part in the ‘unemployed movement’ as a
protest organizer, and in all the strikes of tobacco workers as a trade union activist and
communist. Kantzidou was the only member of the communist party in her family, she
never married.

I joined the Komsomol in 1928 in Drama, but soon lost contacts with the organization
because I was the only Komsomol member there. Later in Kavala, in 1932, I resumed my
Komsomol membership and joined the Communist Party in 1934. As a party worker, I
am the secretary of the district Komsomol committee. At present I am a member of the
Kavala district Party committee. I took part in the workers’ movement, first as a worker,
then as a party member and member of the district committee. I was a member of the
trade union executive committee in Serres, Kavala. I was arrested 9 times and on one occa-
sion beaten unconscious. I always maintained my revolutionary opinion before the
authorities.74

The trajectory of these young women as outlined in their autobiographical narratives

strongly suggests that the context of displacement and resettlement represented a social
and political turning point for many refugees, with clear generational and gendered
dimensions. Generational vulnerability became a matter of increasing concern for promi-
nent voices within the refugee community who attributed it not only to the struggles of
resettlement, but to the liberal state itself for failing to furnish youth with the ‘higher
ideals’ they craved.

Liberal Cosmopolitanism and the Corruption of Youth

Concerns for ‘straying youth’ grew out of an initial discourse around the declining
domestic habitus of the refugees, which had preoccupied intellectuals as early as 1924.
Echoing antimodernist discourses of the interwar period, Prosfygikos Kosmos located
the decline of Anatolian civilization in the diminishing importance of religious culture
for the newly anointed members of the dominant ethno-religious group, and in
Venizelos’s liberal utopia. The ‘narcosis of relativism’, symptomatic of post-war
liberal democracies, was especially ‘ill-suited to Greek realities’, as it undermined the
integrity of Hellenism and the Christian values and practices which defined it. Pavlos
Floros, the chief culture writer for the newspaper at this time, defined the malaise of
the modern nation-state and its core principles in terms of the threat it posed to an essen-
tialized conception of Hellenic culture and identity. Democracy based on religious toler-
ance, relativism and excessive freedoms would bring nothing but evil to the Greek nation
whose ‘idiosyncrasies and psychology’ required ‘moderation through religion’.
Venizelos ‘was getting ahead of himself’ in the belief that Greek society could

74
Autobiography of Chrisanthi Kantzidou (Kaiti Vasiliou) Fund 495 Op 207 Del 98, 22.
Poulos 59

‘emulate England’. ‘Greece cannot become England so quickly. The character of the
Englishman is absent. We don’t even have a tenth of it’.75
The critique targeted the psychological assumptions of Venizelos’ moral cosmopolit-
anism which attempted to disperse attachments to fellow-citizens in order to honour a
moral community of human beings, such that the nation’s psychological functioning
would be undermined.76 The notion of an ‘inherent’ Greekness was of a piece with
European anti-modernist and reactionary modernist discourses of the interwar period
that have been linked by scholars to the rise of fascism,77 and whose primary impulse
was to produce a new alternative spirituality, which had been compromised by the dimin-
ishing influence of traditional religions and institutions, by the Great War, and in Greece,
by the violent end to the Megale Idea,78 all of which ‘shook society and washed up every
detritus, and unclean vile element to the surface’.79
This, Floros advanced, was a ‘crisis of cosmopolitanism’, led by the young, the group
most vulnerable to the impacts of cultural fragmentation in the transition from ‘cocooned’
minority subjects to Greek nationals in ‘free-fall’, and the group most neglected by state
and community.80

What great ideal will replace [territorial attainment]? The worship of the idea of humanity?
Cosmopolitanism? The various corrupters of the people, the apostles of communism, can
then take the floor, the destroyers of faith, the family, patriotism … Youth has a tendency
towards higher ideals than materialism can offer, they require faith, great words about the
nation, not relativisms – great words that come alive. Nations cannot be held together
with tolerant relativist principles …81

75
Pavlos Floros, ‘Venizelos, Democracy, the Party, and the Recovery’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 29 September
1929.
76
The term ‘moral cosmopolitanism’ refers here to the duty to respect and promote basic human rights and
justice, synonymous with liberal democracies. It demands that social institutions be designed so that they
include all human beings as equals and prescribes a unified legal organization of the whole human world.
See, for example, C. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ 1997); T. Pogge,
‘Cosmopolitanism’ in R. Goodin and P. Pettit, eds, A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy
(Oxford 2007); P. Kleingeld and E. Brown, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA 2006).
77
See, for example, Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (Basingstoke 2007). Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf (1984) to describe
the mixture of ‘great enthusiasm for modern technology, with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the
values and institutions of liberal democracy characteristic of Nazism’. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary
Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge 1984).
78
The Megáli Idéa or ‘Great Idea’ was an irredentist concept that expressed the goal of reviving the Byzantine
Empire by establishing a Greek state which would include the large Greek populations that were still under
Ottoman rule after the end of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1828) and all the regions that traditionally
belonged to Greeks since ancient times (parts of the Southern Balkans, Asia Minor and Cyprus).
79
Arethas Argaios, ‘The Recommendation for Educational Associations’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 4 March 1928.
80
A term coined by Pavlos Floros (1897–1981), a Smyrna-born and German-educated Greek writer and poet,
who ‘returned’ to Greece in 1929. See ‘Toward Moral and National Invigoration – Territorial Moral Duties and
Exotic Cosmopolitanism’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 17 March 1929 (Instalment 1).
81
Pavlos Floros, ‘Toward Moral and National Invigoration – Territorial Moral Duties and Exotic
Cosmopolitanism’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 7 April 1929 (Instalment 2).
60 European History Quarterly 52(1)

The notion of a unique heroic ‘Greek spirit’ or ‘Greek identity’ in the rhetoric of
Prosfygikos Kosmos, was a defining feature of Greek anti-modernist discourse. As
Lekkas has argued, Greek conservative intellectual elites articulated a narrative or ‘doc-
trine of Greekness’ which equated anything ‘national’ with conservative values, in oppo-
sition to the interpretations of Greekness, Hellenism and Greek modernity proposed by a
‘vicious’ anti-national, immoral historical materialism.82 As Apostolakou has argued, the
doctrine of Greekness countered not just the excesses of liberalism but also the interna-
tionalistic and egalitarian rhetoric of communism, in an effort to ‘otherize’ communists at
a critical juncture in the movement’s development.83 In thinly veiled references to the
social agenda of communism and the feminist campaign for suffrage which raged
during the interwar period, Prosfygikos Kosmos invoked the patriarchal bias of national-
isms, whereby women were charged with maintaining the nation’s (and men’s) honour
and integrity. Modern democracy was likened to a ‘woman of bad morals’, bereft of
stable ‘organic foundations’, the corrupting effects of which would find no redress in
Venizelos’ economic and agricultural reforms. Once again, invoking the familiar trope
in which women, as the symbolic bearers of the nation, are denied any direct relation
to political, historical or individual agency, Prosfygikos Kosmos called for the reinstate-
ment of motherhood as the nation’s greatest defence against the disorder of modernity:

Today, only the Woman-Mother is a valuable asset for a country. Even in Europe, the issue
has faded. Paris, the most ancient European civilization, does not intend to give women the
vote. Just like the vote has faded, so too has the ‘science’ of Marx … But Greece wears these
hand-me-downs gratefully. In Greece the works of Marx are bound in gold, yet we have no
sewers!!84

Floros’ basic prerequisites for national recovery, enumerated in characteristically gen-

dered terms, would be forcefully championed by the Metaxas dictatorship some years later:

Compulsory education for illiterate citizens up to fifty years of age; compulsory education
for children (which had been announced in the new legislation); reinforcement of a form
of national social enthusiasm to collectively harness the best sentiments of each citizen,
the most refined aspect of his life and world view. These cells (pyrines) needed to be of a
cultural, social, patriotic, moral and religious nature; the broad promotion of sports, athleti-
cism and gymnastic training, to encourage the formation of a ‘masculine-mindedness’
(andrikou fronymatos); elevation of the clergy to confront the moral corruption afflicting

82
Pandelis Lekkas, Ethniki Ideologia: Pente Ypotheses Ergasias stin Istoriki Koinoniologia [Nationalist
Ideology: Five Working Hypotheses in Historical Sociology] (Athens 2006), 209.
83
Lito Apostolakou, “‘Greek” Workers or Communist “Others”: The Contending Identities of Organised
Labour in Greece 1914–1936’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1997), 417.
84
Pavlos Floros, ‘Teenagers Kidnapped, and the Women’s Vote’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 24 February 1929.
Poulos 61

democratic societies, the materialist civilization of the urban metropolises, and the flawed
conception of the term freedom.85

Spiritual Rehabilitation and the Education Offensive

In 1928, Giorgos Askitopoulos (alias Arethas Argaios), a prominent educator and jour-
nalist for Prosfygikos Kosmos, and vocal activist for cultural preservation, led a campaign
for the establishment of ‘educational associations (ekpaideftikos omilos/etaireia)’ by
spiritual leaders of the refugee community. The purpose was to rescue youth in the set-
tlements, who, ‘for the most part spend their time in houses of corruption and cafés,
entirely futile and without purpose, like money scattered to the wind’, abandoned to
the spiritual void by ‘sluggish Anatolian teachers’. In 1928, the establishment of better
and more hygienic schools, and special ‘educational associations’, was seen as more
important than the erection of churches, which continued, despite meagre resources
and widespread economic hardship, to proliferate in the refugee neighbourhoods of
Athens and Piraeus. This enviable zeal, was better directed, it was argued, to the estab-
lishment of schools in the refugee settlements, ‘if [refugee families] don’t want their
schools to shift from being centres of enlightenment to houses of illness and spiritual
disability’.86
Educational associations would be far more effective than churches in restoring the
‘laws of nature, the spirit, and morality’.87 Arethas Argaios lamented the loss of the edu-
cational infrastructures and cultural networks of the past that formed the bedrock of com-
munity identity and stability in Asia Minor. He recalled the ‘great philanthropic and
educational organizations for youth’ which he visited as Inspector of community
schools in Smyrna and the inland regions; these organizations were very successful in
‘covering all the bases’ of young life from educational requirements to spiritual and
recreational needs; their reconstitution in Greece was of the utmost importance.88 The
return of refugee youth to the ‘true path of Christianity’, once integral to Rum identity
and community stability, was a vital defence against the influence of communist and
atheist ideas. Refugee clergy and teachers in the nation’s capital were urged to gather
their energies to remove ‘the thorns from the vineyard of the Lord’.89
These concerns extended beyond the nation’s urban centres, to other regions which
hosted large concentrations of refugee youth. Loukos’ study of prominent youth-based
volunteer associations on the Cycladic island of Syros, offers insights into the systema-
tization of community efforts to guide youth away from communist influence. The full

85
Pavlos Floros, ‘Venizelos, Democracy, the Party, and the Recovery’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 29 September
1929.
86
Arethas Argaios, ‘Refugee Schools’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 22 April 1928; ‘Refugee Schools’, Prosfygikos
Kosmos, 30 June 1929
87
Arethas Argaios, ‘A Recommendation for Educational Associations’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 4 March 1928.
88
Arethas Argaios, ‘Our Educational Networks in Asia Minor – Must Be Reconstituted’, Prosfygikos Kosmos,
22 January 1928.
89
Arethas Argaios, ‘Religious Education/Training’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 25 March 1928.
62 European History Quarterly 52(1)

range of actors from the Church to educational institutions, cultural associations and indi-
viduals were mobilized in an effort to reinforce traditional Christian /Hellenic values by
implementing educational programmes designed for the ‘national and moral guidance’ of
youth.90 Syros (Syra) was known as the Island Orphanage, after taking up to 7000 dis-
placed Anatolian Greek and Armenian orphans between 1923 and 1930. It was one of
the largest orphanages in the American ‘Near East Relief ‘system (NER), offering
more vocational training programmes than any other facility in Greece at that time.
The NER, an American philanthropic organization, was renamed the Near East
Foundation in 1929 and rebadged as an educational organization, whose ultimate goal
was to facilitate the ‘self-sufficiency’ of young people in conjunction with their ‘assimi-
lation … into Greek society by providing them with jobs and a wholesome environ-
ment’.91 The ‘Progressive Youth Group of Hermoupolis’ (Proodeftiki Omas Neon
Ermoupoleos), founded in Syros in 1928, was unambiguous in its definition of the whole-
some environment in its mission statement: to create a movement in Hermoupolis that
would raise the intellectual and moral level of society and its members in the appropriate
way (italics my own). ‘Appropriate’ as defined in article 5 of the organization’s mission
statement referred to ‘impeccable social conduct and appearance of all members, an
ongoing special commitment to spiritual study, resistance to revolutionary or subversive
tendencies, and the absolute disavowal of any communist affiliation or activity.92
The success of Prosfygikos Kosmos’ youth-education campaign is difficult to ascer-
tain. The founding of a periodical titled Kaini Ktisis (New Creation), described as ‘the
best and most instructive religious family publication’, was regarded as a milestone
in the path to the much desired ‘national renaissance’. In October 1929, Prosfygikos
Kosmos boasted that ‘New Creation’ printed 35,000 copies annually and circulated as
far as the most remote villages of Hellenism; 30 educational associations operated
across various refugee settlements.93 Led by theologians from Asia Minor, Angelos
Nissiotis and Prokopios Kalliontzis, the periodical was filled with articles written by
the most esteemed theologians of the day ‘who wrote on the history of the church, trans-
lated from the collected works of [Archbishop] Chrisostomos, advised newlyweds, and
offered practical studies on the many evils and catastrophic consequences of commun-
ism’.94 New Creation’s announcement of the opening of new branches of the Union of
Girls (Enoseos Korasion) in several refugee suburbs of Piraeus and Athens, and the pur-
chasing of a ‘large plot of land to build a space for lectures and workshops for destitute
girls’95 was particularly well received given that disadvantaged girls were more

90
Christos Loukos, ‘Voluntary Associations by and for Young People in Syros during the First Half of the
Twentieth Century’, in Efi Avdela, Haris Exertzoglou and Christos Lyrintzis, eds, Forms of Public Sociality
in Twentieth-Century Greece (Rethimno 2015).
91
Louis P. Cassimatis, American Influence in Greece 1917–1929 (Kent, OH 1988), 124. See also James Barton,
Near East Relief 1925–1930: An Interpretation (New York 1930).
92
Loukos, ‘Voluntary Associations’, 68.
93
Ibid., 9.
94
Arethas Argaios, ‘The Recommendation for Educational Associations’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 15 April 1929.
95
Arethas Argaios, ‘Young Refugees Found Educational Associations’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 13 October 1929.
Poulos 63

vulnerable to moral corruption in the form of prostitution, an attraction to ‘Parisian

imports’ like the women’s vote, and, of course, communism.96 In classic fashion, all
three deadly sins were presented as symptomatic of the liberalization of morals and idi-
patheia (hedonism) characteristic of cosmopolitan Greece.

Conclusion
Reading the files of communist refugees collected in this research, against the upheavals
of the interwar period, one is struck by a far more vibrant and complex social history of
interwar communism than is acknowledged, one not captured in the conventional his-
toriographical focus on the increasing electoral share of the Greek Communist Party in
the 1930s. As Ghikas states, the collective and militant manner in which the
Bolshevizing KKE – the new outsider par excellence of bourgeois politics – mobilized
factory floors, neighbourhoods, schools, men, women and youth, panicked political
elites more than the election results themselves.97
The combined experience of violent expulsion and displacement, of family fragmen-
tation and the brutal conditions of resettlement for many refugees, called into question
many of the social and political givens of refugee culture and identity. I have argued
that this was doubly so for refugee youth – who were caught between old and new,
between childhood and adulthood, treated ambivalently by both their own and native
societies – and for the vast numbers of young girls and women in particular, who consti-
tuted the majority of the refugee industrial workforce and who were among its most valu-
able members, yet its least protected and least represented at the industrial level and in
terms of citizenship rights. The passage of refugee youth into the Communist Youth
and the Party suggests that the shocks of the post-1922 interwar environment presented
a juncture for generating novel forms of thought and behaviour, one capable of transform-
ing identities. The predominance of young refugee women in the tobacco industry, the
highly organized nature of the tobacco workers’ unions, coupled with an ambivalence
towards its women workers, and the union’s close links with a Party in the throes of
Bolshevization, are critical components of this emerging picture of shifting female sub-
jectivities between the Wars.
Generational vulnerability to radicalization did not escape the fine-tuned attentions of
the intellectual elite and self-appointed custodians of Anatolian culture, who, perceiving
the threat to Anatolian civilization in the new liberal cosmopolitan context, called for a
fierce reassertion of traditional authority and culture.
Generational and gender difference may begin to address Hirschon’s ‘paradox’, in
which widespread support among refugees for left-wing political groups co-existed

96
Arethas Argaios, ‘Religious Education – “New Creation”’ (Kaini Ktisis), Prosfygikos Kosmos, 6 January
1929; Pavlos Floros, ‘Teenagers Kidnapped, and the Women’s Vote’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 24 February
1929; S. M. Papadopoulos, ‘In the Tent City of the Humbled and the Despised: The Settlement of Tabouria
that has Nothing’, Prosfygikos Kosmos, 11 August 1929.
97
Anastasis Ghikas, Rupture and Integration: A Contribution to the History of the Labour-Communist
Movement of the Interwar period 1918–1936 (Athens 2010).
64 European History Quarterly 52(1)

with adherence to religious practices.98 It is clear that growing numbers of ‘untethered’

refugee youth, and women in particular, found more solid ground in a political movement
that bypassed the methods, and class and gender prejudices of bourgeois political culture,
than in the churches their elders continued to build.

Acknowledgements
This paper was written during my fellowship at Princeton University in the Summer of 2019. A
sincere thanks to Dimitris Gondicas and the team at the Seeger Center, and my esteemed colleagues
and comrades Violetta Hionidou, Katja Arfara, Dimitris Sotiropoulos and Panagiotis Thanassas for
their fine company and support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author received funding support from the Hellenic Studies Program, Princeton University, for
the authorship of this article.

ORCID iD
Margarite Poulos https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7091-1609

Author Biography
Margarite Poulos teaches modern European history at Western Sydney University, Australia. She
is the author of Arms and the Woman: Just Warrriors and Greek Feminist Identity (Columbia
University Press 2010). Her forthcoming book on the Greek Cominternians will be published by
Vanderbilt in 2022.

98
Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe, 192.