- Dimitris Troaditis
- English
During the 5th Extraordinary Electoral Congress of the Sosialist Workers’ Party of Greece (SEKE – which became Communist Party of Greece – KKE – in 1924) in October 1920, the Branch of Kavala (a town in northern Greece) and lots of members of the Branches of Athens, Piraeus and Patras, with as their main representatives Stelios Arvanitakis and Evangelos Papanastasiou, strongly opposed the participation of the Party in the elections, maintaining that the abstention from the elections should be also accompanied by revolutionary propaganda. However, the proposal of the leadership predominated and those who disagreed with this since then constituted the left wing of the Party and published separately the magazine “Kommounismos” ("Communism").
On 9 April 1924, members of KKE from the Branches of Piraeus, Patras, Athens, Thessalonica, Syros (an island), Karditsa and Volos (both towns in central Greece), who had left been expelled for mainly ideological reasons by the Party constituted the Kommounistiki Enosis Ellados (KEE - Communist Union of Greece) which published the magazine “Kommounistiko Vema” ("Communist Tribunal”). The most active Branch of this organisation was this of Piraeus. "Leaders” of the KEE were Stelios Arvanitakis and the lawyer Evangelos Papanastasiou, who were came out against the sosial-democrat elements tended to dominate KKE. It is historically documented that Stelios Arvanitakis was an anarchist communist and Evangelos Papanastasiou believed in a wide spectrum of anarchist and libertarian ideas. Because of these they became the first target by the KKE which characterised them simply as "adventurers".
However, it appears that KEE didn’t do a lot of things, mainly because of two reasons: a) the very polarised political climate with the arrival of the Pangkalos dictatorship and b) the slanderous war that SEKE (shorthly later KKE) started against the organisation. After one year of existence, the organisation was not working well and in February-March 1925 dissolved by the continous attacks by the dictatorship. The majority of their members returned to KKE, something that Stelios Arvanitakis, Evangelos Papanastasiou and a few others denied to do, while there was a small number of members withdrawn from the political life and action. But, after a year, in 1926, KEE. re-founded and published the magazine “Mpolsevikiki Epitheorisi” ("Bolshevik Review"), adopting this time a more bolshevik rather an anarchist or libertarian orientation.
Stelios Arvanitakis, Evangelos Papanastasiou and a few others opposed this orientation but accused by the new leadership of the organisation as anarho-extremists and they were expelled.
KEE, despite that it had roughly 250 members in country scale, it maintained its offices in Piraeus where an educative department was established and courses of Political Economy and Marxism delivered.
Apart Stelios Arvanitakis and Evangelos Papanastasiou, there were other known active militants in the organisation such as Kostas Vafeiadis, who was originated and educated in Russia and published many articles, Nikos Marakis, from Piraeus, linguist and intellectual, and Chrysanthos Karamouzis, from Chalcis, a Law student and later journalist and theatrical writer.
Lawyer Evangelos Papanastasiou was also from Chalcis but he was living in Piraeus. Initially, while he was...
- Dimitris Troaditis
- English
A brief presentation of the first anarchist communist publication in Greece “Epi ta Proso”.
In 1893, Socialistiki Adelfotis (Socialist Brotherhood) founded in Patras, an organisation with a mutual aid character, a loose grouping of some socialist and progressive elements, followers of the moderate socialist Plato Drakoulis. In Socialist Brotherhood found also accomodation followers and friends of the socialist Stavros Kallergis as well as some anarchists. Socialist Brotherhood interested primarily for the trade-union movement and with its own initiative the first working associations were founded in Patras, aiming also in educating the population and the workers in the ideals the...