Nikos Zachariadis

Nikos Zachariadis (Νίκος Ζαχαριάδης; 27 April 1903 – 1 August 1973) was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956.

Nikos Zachariadis was born in Edirne, Adrianople Vilayet, Ottoman Empire, in 1903, to an ethnic Greek family.

His father, Panagiotis Zachariadis, was of petty-bourgeois origin and worked as an expert in the Regie Company, a French firm possessing the tobacco monopoly in Turkey.

In 1919, Nikos Zachariadis moved to Constantinople, where he worked in various jobs, including as a soldier.

It was there that he carried out his first organized work in the working-class movement.

After the defeat of Greece during the Greco-Turkish War and the population exchange between the two countries, the Zachariadis family was forcibly relocated to Greece and fell into poverty.

In 1922 to 1923, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he became a member of the Komsomol.

He studied at various political and military institutions of the Soviet government and of the Communist International, including the International Lenin School.

In 1923, he was sent back to Greece to organize the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE).

Imprisoned, he subsequently fled to the Soviet Union.

In 1931, he was sent back to Greece to restore order in the highly-factionalised KKE.

The same year, he was elected general secretary of KKE.

He was appointed, by order of Stalin and the Comintern, General Secretary of KKE in 1935.

He was arrested by the right-wing Metaxas dictatorship the following year.

In 1935, during the 7th Congress of the Communist International, he was elected to its executive committee.

In the years until 1936, Zachariadis was a successful leader of the KKE by tripling the number of its members, gaining seats in the Greek Parliament and even acquiring control of some labour unions.

In August 1936, he was arrested by the State Security of Ioannis Metaxas's regime and was imprisoned.

From prison, he lent his political influence to a united antifascist front following Italy's invasion of Greece on October 28, 1940.

From prison, he issued a letter urging all Greeks to resist the Italian invasion of October 1940 and to transform the war into an antifascist war.

Some KKE cadre members, who did not believe that the ongoing war between the big imperialist powers differed from the First World War because of the existence of the Soviet Union on the world scene, considered that the letter had been fabricated by the Metaxas regime.

Zachariadis was even accused of releasing it to win the favour of Konstantinos Maniadakis and to be released from prison.

Despite his efforts to encourage unity and resistance in the face of fascist aggression, Zachariadis remained imprisoned and when the Nazis ultimately invaded and occupied Greece in 1941, Zachariadis was transferred to Dachau concentration camp, where he remained until the camp was liberated by the US Army in May 1945.

Zachariadis's letter remains a cornerstone of the KKE's vital contribution to the National Resistance movement against the Fascist occupiers (1941-1944).

After the German invasion of Greece in 1941, Nazi Germany transferred him to the Dachau concentration camp from where he was released in May 1945.

Returning to Greece, he reassumed the leadership of the KKE from Georgios Siantos, the acting general secretary of the KKE since January 1942.

The bloody Dekemvriana had just ended with the communists' defeat.

Zachariadis now declared his political intention for the KKE to fight for people's democracy by elections.

Zachariadis conducted the military operations of the communist Democratic Army of Greece, which was formed to install a socialist people's democracy in Greece.

He ordered the ELAS commander Markos Vafiadis to abandon guerrilla warfare tactics and adopt a strategy of conventional warfare.

According to Vafiadis, that had a strongly negative effect on ELAS.

Vafiadis was expelled from the KKE for challenging Zachariadis and kept under house arrest in Albania, accused of being a British agent.

However, Joseph Stalin had made a deal with the Western Allies that Greece would be considered part of the western sphere of influence after the war and was opposed officially to any communist seizure of power.

He ordered the KKE leadership to co-operate with the British military when it landed in Greece in 1944 and refused to supply any assistance to the KKE when they took up arms against the royalist government imposed by the British.

Along with Markos Vafiadis, Zachariadis was an integral figure in the formation and operations of the KKE-led Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949.

Following the collapse of the military effort in 1949, Zachariadis and other leaders of the DSE retreated to Tashkent, capital city of Uzbekestan SSR.

He continued to receive support as the General Secretary of the "exterior" branch of KKE until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.

Zachariadis fell out of favor with the Tashkent branch of KKE in 1955 and, following some infighting, he was removed from his post — ostensibly with the support and approval of Nikita Khrushchev — by May of 1956.

Zachariadis was expelled from KKE the following year.

Zachariadis spent the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, initially in Yakutia and later in Surgut, where — according to official KGB records — he committed suicide in 1973.

His body was returned to Greece in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union.