Beyond the Ballot box: Rethinking Greek Communism Between the Wars

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 electoral gains of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the 1930s gave legitimacy to the communist 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 identification 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 radicalization 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’.