One could argue that the Cold War began in Greece and China. Their civil wars served as the first frontlines of a new global conflict, where communist guerrillas who had cut their teeth fighting the Axis occupiers were now pitted against ‘nationalist’ armies. Each received virtually no support from Moscow, and both wars ended in 1949. But the Chinese communists won their war, and so their insurrection became the Chinese ‘Revolution’. In Greece the communists were defeated, and the victors insisted on describing the struggle as a mere ‘anti-gang operation’ (symmoritopolemos). Korea, which became the next frontline, was famously described by the Truman administration as the ‘Greece of the Far East’. Here, the US and its allies, including Greece, set out to stop the domino effect in East Asia.

The international setting is crucial for an understanding of the origins and the course of the Greek Civil War. The country’s future was determined partly by the changing global strategies of Britain and the United States during the 1940s. Britain was able to keep the Left out of power, but it was unable to stabilise the country, halt the recrudescence of paramilitary violence and reverse the slide to civil war. Right-wing movements were ideally positioned to exploit Britain’s weaknesses. In contrast to what happened elsewhere in post-war Europe, the far Right was able to infiltrate the Greek state and the armed forces, and to eventually claim power. The looming Cold War gave it leverage with the British and the US and licence to operate in broad daylight. The Right also used its leverage to ignore British and US disapproval of its violent excesses and its drive to create a reactionary political order. The story of Greece during the second half of the 1940s was therefore about how a tail managed to wag a dog.

This chapter discusses the horrific ordeals of Greek society and how the Right came to dominate the Greek state. It also considers why persecuted leftists were able to regroup and conduct a well-orchestrated insurgency. Yet it was also a war that was intimately tied to a global crisis. The following pages therefore emphasise the extent to which Greece’s civil war was a chapter of the Cold War.