Movement for the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-1955

50 years since the massive rebellion of the Greek communists in

Tashkent against the Khrushchevite revisionism

The open intervention of the Khrushchevite revisionists in KKE and the

rebellion of the Greek communists against Khrushchevite revisionism

The “Tashkent events” and the pogrom against the communists

September of this year marked the 50th year since the open, barbarous intervention by
the treacherous Khrushchevite clique in the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and
the massive rebellion of the Greek communists, political refuges in Tashkent against
Khrushchevite revisionism. These events - the so called “Tashkent events” - are
virtually unknown to the communists, the working class and the people of our country
and mark the beginning of the liquidation of the revolutionary KKE 1918-1955, the
heroic party of the proletariat.

At the end of August 1949, after a three-and-a-half-year armed struggle against the
indigenous monarchist-fascist reaction and the Anglo-American imperialism, when
there were no any prospects of victory because of the titoist treason (Tito’s joining
the imperialist camp) that disrupted the balance of power at the expense of our
struggle, following a decision by the Central Committee of the KKE headed by Nikos
Zachariades, the partisans of the Democratic Army of Greece (DA) left behind the
glorified and legendary heights of Grammos, Vitsi and the other mountains of our
country to pass to Albania and from there, in their majority, to the faraway Tashkent,
the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan, then part of Stalin’s
socialist Soviet Union.

The Greek communists spent their first years in exile trying to adjust to the new life
conditions with all the expected problems, but they were living in peace and were
also, with great enthusiasm, actively participating in the socialist construction and
party life supporting the revolutionary line of KKE, headed by Nikos Zacahriades,
and the line of the international communist movement, guided by the great communist
leader and Marxist [classic], Joseph Stalin.

In October (10-14.10) 1950, the 3rd Conference of KKE took place. This body almost
completely purged the opportunists from the party. For the first time in the decade of
1940-1950, a heavy blow was dealt to the right opportunism, to all opportunists who
had betrayed the popular movement during the time of the Nazi occupation by
signining the agreements in Lebanon (20.5.1944), Gazerta (26.9.1944) and Varkiza
(12.2.1945) and who, moreover, had sabotaged the development and enlargement of
the DA during the Civil War.

The DA partisans had, on one hand, the luck to witness for a few years the
construction of socialism in the Soviet Union in Stalin’s time but, on the other hand,
for many decades following his murder in March 1953, they had also the great
misfortune to experience the abolition of socialism and the gradual restoration of
capitalism. The latter process started in the Hruchev-Brezhnev period in the mid
1950’s after the prevalence of the Khrushchevite revisionist counter-revolution, and
finished with the collapse of the restored capitalism, and finally, with the break-up of
the capitalist Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, in Gorbachev’s time.
The socialist society in the Soviet Union was a class society – consisting of workers,
farmers and intellectuals – but without exploitation. Nevertheless, the construction of
socialism was advancing in the midst of fierce class struggle since the counter-
revolutionary forces never ceased to exist and act against the Soviet power. Despite
the establishment of proletarian dictatorship these forces attempted from early on,
through various means to undermine the unity of the Greek communist political
refugees. However, after the death/murder of Stalin and the prevalence of the
revisionist group of Hruchev-Mikoyan-Brezhnev et al. when the latter found out that
the KKE leadership headed by Nikos Zachariades is not going to abandon the
revolutionary marxist-leninist-stalinist course and to follow the anti-stalinist
revisionist course, it sought to form a right opportunist faction in the largest KKE
Party Organisation abroad, the Tashkent Party Organisation (KOT), and to push this
faction right up to the Organisation’s leadership. However, the revolutionary KKE
leadership headed by Nikos Zachariades immediately took measures removing
fraction’s cadres from the leadership of KOT.

After the removal of the faction from the KOT leadership, high-ranking members of
the Khrushchevite group in the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, following Hruchev’s
orders, organised and guided an assault on the Organisation’s offices. They assembled
around 200 opportunists headed by Ypsilantis, Himaros, Barbalias and others who,
under the guidance of Saakof, attacked the offices with the intention to capture them:
“at 4 pm, on the 9th of September, around 200 people gathered in the courtyard
of 7th Politeia together with the faction leaders who were bracing their followers
with vodka, beer and wine” (K.D. Karanikola: “Mia lefki selida tou KKE”, p. 53).
The assault on the KOT offices was preceded by faction’s provocations in various
Politeies: “In those Politeies where the factionists had some support, like in the
2nd, 3rd, 7th, 9th and 11th, they started looting the local libraries and burning
books, especially those written by Zachariades, Bartziotas and those about the
struggle of the DA” (ibid, p. 46). Now the social-democratic leadership of Aleka
Papariga pretends to support the struggle of the DA.
The assault on the KOT offices did not have the expected result - the opportunists did
not manage to capture them. Vagelis Zoulis, former DA partisan, made the following
ironic comment on their failure: “Now I realised why we didn’t seize Konitsa with
at least a thousand houses since our leaders with 200 men didn’t manage to seize
a single house!!” (Ibid, p. 54).

When the assault on the KOT offices was made known, thousands of enraged
communists rushed into their defence. Clashes and beatings followed with the
factionists until police and cadet detachments came to their rescue. Many of the
injured had to be transported to the hospital while hundreds of Greek communists
were arrested, mainly high-ranking DA officers, thrown in jail and tried for
“hooliganism”(!).

Despite this open provocation by the Khrushchevite clique against KKE, Saakof and
Safayef, the principal perpetrators of the pogrom, circulated the rumour that “the
KKE leadership and Nikos Zachariades unleashed a bloody terror without a
precedent”!!! (Ibid, p. 55).

All the political refuges in Tashkent knew that the instigators of the provocative
“Tashkent events” were the Khrushchevite revisionists who aimed at the liquidation
of KKE. Everybody knew that the handful of Greek opportunists were in permanent
contact with and under the direct guidance of the treacherous Khrushchevite
revisionist group. One of the noted opportunists, Kostas Gritzonas, confesses: “One
evening, during the time when the Tashkent events reached their climax, as I was
on my way from the 7th to the 9th Politeia together with the secretary of KOT,
Aristotelis Hatouras, he confided to me that the anti-zachariadist movemement
enjoyed the support from the Soviets. He left me with the understanding that
they were having private talks with the Khrushchevites from the CC of the CP of
Uzbekistan” (K.Gritzonas: “Meta to Grammo”, p.18-19).

The overwhelming majority of the Greek communists, 95% of the KOT members,
condemned the Khrushchevite revisionists’ intervention in KKE and they rallied
around their Party headed by Nikos Zachariades. This attitude was most clearly
expressed in the historic 5th Plenum of the CC of KKE convened at the end of
December 1955. In the Plenum’s decision, among other things, it is mentioned that:
“the faction would have achieved nothing at all had it not received the support
by certain soviet comrades, who were convinced that the faction is the strongest
and the most pro-soviet part of KOT which they must support and help”.
The “Tashkent events”, the open and anti-communist intervention of Khrushchevites
in KKE, has been concealed by every right opportunist leadership of the social-
democratic “K”KE since 1956 and they are still concealed by the A. Papariga
leadership. The decision of the 5th Plenum (December 1955) concerning the situation
in KOT was published for the first time in 1995, after 40 years.
In February of 1956, during the counter-revolutionary 20th Congress of CPSU, the
show trials of the Greek communists, political refugees, started. In these trials they
were sentenced under “hooligan” laws and exiled to prison camps (Giorgos
Kalianesis, general of DA, Dimitris Vyssios, lieutenant-kernel, commissar of the
103rd Brigade, Nikos Fragos, major of DAG, Giorgos Makris captain of DA and
others).
In the 20th Congress of CPSU, the Khrushchevites formed the infamous
“International Committee” consisting of cadres from the Soviet, Romanian,
Hungarian, Polish, Czechoslovak and Bulgarian parties. The president of the
International Committee was, formally, Georgiu Dez – Khrushchev’s puppet – but
essentially Otto Kuusinen, well-known social democrat, and member of the Politburo
of CPSU. The International Committee openly and without pretexts intervened in
KKE by arbitrarily summoning the infamous 6th Plenum (March 1956). In this illicit
meeting the report was read not by a Greek, but by the Romanian opportunist Dez.
Former cadres and expelled members participated, but not the lawfully elected
General Secretary of the Party Nikos Zachariades.

The 6th Plenum illegally and forcibly removed the elected revolutionary leadership
of KKE, including the Party’s General Secretary Nikos Zachariades, who was arrested
and isolated, and appointed a right opportunistic puppet leadership. The 6th Plenum
adopted the counter-revolutionary social-democratic line promulgated in the 20th
Congress of CPSU (peaceful transition to socialism, etc).
The great majority of the Greek communists (85-95%) rejected and vehemently
opposed the treacherous social-democratic anti-Stalinist line of the 20th Congress/6th
Plenum and defended marxism-leninism-stalinism as well as Stalin-Zachariades.
In the following years, thousands of communists were expelled by the appointed right
opportunist Kolligianis-Partsalidis-Vafiades leadership, while others broke away from
the new opportunist bourgeois party that shamelessly usurped the title-name “K”KE –
a title that bears until nowadays - while it is guided by the counter-revolutionary trend
of Khrushchevite revisionism. The decades after 1956 was a time of fascist
persecutions of all the Greek communists, who remained faithful to Stalin and
Zachariades by the Soviet and Greek Khrushchevite revisionists. These persecutions
took various forms: surveillance, spying, arrests, imprisonments, exiles to Siberia, etc.
Many party cadres were exiled to Siberia and among them the Party’s General
Secretary, Nikos Zachariades, who, after 17 years of exile, was murdered in Sorgut
by the treacherous Brezhnev-Florakis clique so that he wouldn’t return alive to Greece
and upset their plans.

Every single right opportunist leadership of the social democratic “K”KE, including
the Florakis-Tsolakis and the contemporary Papariga leadership, have passed over the
fascist persecutions against the Greek communists in silence. Moreover, they have
made no reference to the intervention in the KKE internal affairs carried out by the
infamous “International Committee” for 40 years. They published the relevant
documents just in 1997.
TASHKENT September `55 – the beginning of the struggle of all the
world communists against Krushchevian revisionism
Movement for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-1955

Nobody could have ever imagined that in the middle of the `50s of the previous
century, a small and unknown city was destined to go down in history of the world
communist movement as the birthplace of resistance against the Krushchevian
revisionism and the beginning of international struggle against this treacherous
counter-revolutionary trend; this small city is Tashkent, the capital of the Soviet
Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan, “lost” in the depths of Asia, alien for the Greek and
world proletariat.

Nobody could have ever imagined that a handful of revolutionaries - members of a

Communist Party of a small country - would be the first ones to stand up against
Krushchevian revisionism. The party of this small country is the revolutionary KKE
and the handful of revolutionaries were the heroic, battle-hardened partisans of the
Democratic Army of Greece (DA), members of the Tashkent Party Organisation
(KOT) living then in the faraway Asian city as guests of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Their
struggle against Krushchevian revisionism passed into the history of the Greek and
world communist movement as the “Tashkent events” (September 1955).

Earlier - shortly after the prevalence and strengthening of his treacherous faction in
CPSU – as the renegade and agent of imperialism, Nikita Hruchev, was making
approaches to the secretaries of the Communist Parties, he found out that the
Secretary of KKE, Nikos Zachariades was not willing to abandon the revolutionary
Stalinist line. He requested that he revise his attitude in three fundamental questions
of the world communist movement: 1) to consider the capitalist Yugoslavia a
“socialist” country, 2) to turn against Stalin by writing articles in Pravda on the “cult
of personality” - the infamous, Krushchevian myth of idealist origin, and 3) to assent
to the liquidation of Comniform. The reply given by the great and unwavering
communist leader on all the above requests was negative.

When later the Krushchevian revisionist clique became sure that this kind of pressure
will not have any effect, it proceeded with the formation of a faction in the Tashkent
Party Organisation, but there a was a lack of support for it save for a few opportunists.
The Party leadership unmasked the faction and removed the factionists.

Nikos Zachariades, delivering a speech in a Party cadres meeting in the theatre Mu Ki

Mi in Tashkent, said the following among other things: “comrades, several speakers
launched an attack on Demetriou and more or less they consider him the head of
the revisionists. Demetriou, comrades, is only the end of the tail of a very
clumsily camouflaged elephant. The serious and historic duty allotted to all of us
is to pull this tail so that the whole world will see the elephant, that is, Hruchev”
(K. Karanikola, Mia lefki selida tou KKE, p. 59).
When even the formation of a sizeable faction failed, the Krushchevian revisionist
group, employing a few Greek opportunists, organised on the 9th of September 1955
“the open provocation against the delegation of the CC of KKE: the violent and
gangster assault on the offices where the delegation was based and injury of
three of its members” (5th Plenum, December 1955). On the 9th of September, about
200 opportunists, under the direct guidance of the soviet revisionists, headed by
Ipsilantis, Demetriou, Barbalias and others, carried out an assault on the offices of the
Tashkent Party Organisation, but they failed to capture them. This act raised an outcry
among the thousands of party members who rushed immediately to defend the KOT
offices. What followed were violent clashes with the factionists, the police and the
army. Many hundreds of Greek communists were arrested and thrown into jail.

At the end of December of `55 (26-28.12 1955) the 5th historic Plenum of the CC of
the KKE was convened. It was historic because: 1) it condemned the anti-communist
Krushchevian revisionist intervention in KKE and 2) it was the last convened body of
our heroic party before its final liquidation.

Next year, in the middle of February 1956, during the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the
show trials of the Greek communists began in Tashkent. In this travesty of justice,
battle-hardened DA veterans, like Giorgos Kalianesis (general), Demetres Vyssios
(lieutenant-kernel) and others, were tried for hooliganism and vagrancy. Following
their convictions, they were exiled to Siberia and, in fact, into concentration camps
“that were intentionally adjacent to concentration camps of German war
criminals sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, the maximum period according
to the Soviet criminal law. The Germans didn’t work because of their ‘prisoner
of war’ status, and, apart from having the meals of a Soviet soldier, they received
parcels of medicine and foodstuffs by the West German Red Cross every ten
days. The sentenced refugees were fed with rotten potatoes and mouldy crushed
grain. This “diet” was followed under conditions of heavy and exhausting
labour” (D. Vyssios: “Open letter to M. N. Panomariof, former Head of the
Department of International Relations of the CC of CPSU, January 1991).

The opposition of the Greek communists to Krushchevian revisionism was expressed

en masse. The overwhelming majority (95%) of the members of the Tashkent Party
Organisation came out against the Krushchevian intervention in KKE and defended
the revolutionary party line and the CC headed by Nikos Zachariades showing a
stunning decisiveness and unparallel courage. The opposition of the captive
communists in jails and concentration camps was similar.

It was exactly this overwhelming opposition by the Greek communists (ranging from
85% to 95% in Tashkent and in the People’s Republics) that prevented KKE from
being transformed into a bourgeois party of social democratic type.

When, a few months later, the renegade Hruchev set up the infamous “International
Committee”, Nikos Zachariades, addressing its “president” Georgiu Dez, said the
following regarding his interference in KKE internal affairs: “who granted the right
to examine the problems of heroic KKE to you, who slept in August of 1944
under fascism and woke up next day under People’s Republic, brought by the
Red tankists from Stalingrad when they crashed the fascist Romanian Division
and offered it to you as a present. What experience do you have to judge the
struggle of Greek communists who, to their credit, through their struggle, did
not allow not even a single Greek citizen to fight in the Eastern Front against
USSR” (K.Karanikola, p. 70-71).

The revolutionary KKE is the only communist party of a capitalist country that was
never transformed into a counter-revolutionary, bourgeois, social democratic
party. This fact compelled the Krushchevian revisionists to create a completely new
party that replaced the old liquidated one. They summoned an illicit party body, the
so-called “6th Plenum”, that decreed the arbitrary removal of the lawfully elected
Party’s leadership, the arrest of Nikos Zachariades and massive expulsions of
dissident members. In ideological-political level, the 6th Plenum adopted the counter
revolutionary, social democratic line of the 20th Congress (“peaceful” transition to
socialism, etc). The new party took the false name of “K”KE (shamelessly usurping
the name of the revolutionary KKE) and it has been, from the very beginning, a
bourgeois social democratic party that bears no relation whatsoever with the
revolutionary KKE because the latter was guided by the revolutionary Marxism, i.e.
Leninism-Stalinism, while the former - by the counter-revolutionary trend of
Krushchevian revisionism, a variant of bourgeois ideology.

The overwhelming and militant opposition of the Greek communist political refugees,
headed by Nikos Zachariades against the Krushchevian clique in September 1955 in
Tashkent, was chronologically the first in the history of the international communist
movement’s struggle against Krushchevian revisionism, and, also, a culmination of
the revolutionary KKE (1918-1955) heroic struggle. If one takes into account the
unheard-of disaster that inevitably followed the enforcement of Krushchevian
revisionism to the communist parties (destruction of socialism and restoration of
capitalism in the Soviet Union, breaking-up of the capitalist Soviet Union, liquidation
of the communist parties), it can be said that it was not just a culmination of the long
struggle of the stalinist-zachariadist KKE, but was at the same time a great and
unique moment in the struggle of the international communist movement
(Komintern-Komniform) against the new counter-revolutionary treacherous trend of
Krushchevian revisionism which emerged in its lines in the mid-1950s: it was
precisely this moment that marked the beginning of the most fierce ideological-
political struggle against Krushchevian revisionism in international level, a
struggle that has been going on for half a century now, is still going on and it will
be going on in the future until its final victory.

From the above, it becomes obvious that the “Tashkent events” of 1955 assume a
triple historical importance:

First, they constituted the first open and brutal intervention of the Krushchevian
revisionists in KKE internal affairs aiming at its liquidation.

Second, they marked the beginning of the resistance and struggle of the Greek
communists against Krushchevian revisionism before its emergence as a complete
ideological-political trend in the 20th Congress of CPSU (February 1956).

Third, they raised the banner of struggle of the communists of all countries against
this counter-revolutionary trend. The rising and battle of the Greek communists in
Tashkent, in September of 1955, ushers in the period of struggle against
Krushchevian revisionism on international level.

But what is the reason for the resolute opposition of the Greek communist political
refugees (95% in Tashkent and 85-90% in the other People’s Republics) against
Krushchevian revisionism, of people who had been brought up in a spirit of deep trust
and devotion to the Socialist Soviet Union?

First of all, it is the guiding and decisive role played, in this extremely difficult
struggle, by the courageous, unyielding and uncompromising revolutionary Nikos
Zachariades, in order KKE not to abandon its revolutionary line. Besides his
opposition to the Krushchevian group, in the beginning of 1956, he replied thus to
some Greek revisionists, members of the CC of KKE, when they asked him to resign:
“I won’t grant you this favour now, I won’t allow you to convert KKE into a
bourgeois party” (D. Votsika: Portreta koryfeon stelexon tou KKE”, Athens 1999,
p.21)

Secondly, it is the fact that the members of KKE were battle-hardened partisans who
had given everything to the armed revolutionary struggle against the indigenous
monarchist-fascist reactionary forces and the imperialism, having almost a decade
(1940-1950) of armed struggle to their credit. This long revolutionary experience
helped them to show the necessary political-ideological maturity, firmness,
consistency and decisiveness in this critical moment.

Comrade Nikos Zachariades had predicted the disaster that would come in case
Krushchevian revisionism dominated, and it is this prediction that allows for his
historical eminence as a great communist revolutionary leader to be assessed: “watch
out comrades, these are international provocateurs, they are going to cause a
great damage to the world’s communist movement and their Greek collaborators
will cause great damage to our country” (Tashkent, September 1955).

Not only did he predict the disaster, but he was the first in the world’s communist
movement who stood up and fought against the counter-revolutionary trend of
Krushchevian revisionism, a fight for which he paid with 17 years of exile and finally
with his own life: he was murdered by the treacherous social-democratic clique of
Brezhnev-Florakis in August of 1973 in Sorgut, Siberia, the place of his exile.

Thus, without a doubt, Nikos Zachariades, through his revolutionary struggle, rises to
eminence as a giant revolutionary, Bolshevik and great communist leader, as “one of
the most important figures of the world’s communist movement” (Niyazof,
Tashkent 1955) and remains until the end of his life a devoted disciple of Joseph
Stalin who, during the proceedings of the 19th Congress of CPSU (1952), had said
about him: “Do you see this one? He is a great leader. He will start the revolution
not only in Greece but also in Europe” (P. Demetriou, “Ek vatheon”, Athens 1997,
p. 202-203).

The revisionist group of Hruchev-Brezhnev quite naturally saw him as a serious,

capable, powerful and very dangerous ideological-political opponent whom therefore
they had to forcefully remove from the leadership of KKE at all costs, and to
destroy politically and physically; so dangerous was he considered, that one of
Hruchev’s fervent supporters, the French poet Louis Aragon, saw fit to mention him
in his two-volume “History of the Soviet Union”: “The charge for personality cult
resulted in the removal of Nikos Zachariades from his post as General Secretary
of KKE” (L. Aragon, “History of the Soviet Union”, v. 2, p. 268, Athens 1963).

This article was first published in Newspaper “Anasintaxi” issue 214, 15-31 October, 2005 in Greek
on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the “Tashkent events”.