Aris Velouchiotis

Aris Velouchiotis, whose real name was Athanasios Klaras, was the most famous commander of the Greek resistance and one of the most controversial figures in modern Greek history. A communist activist with many years of prison behind him, in June 1942 he led the first unit of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) into the mountains, and within two years he had made it the largest partisan army in the country’s history. He was joint commander of the destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct, one of the most celebrated acts of sabotage in occupied Europe. To his supporters he was a hero of the struggle against the occupiers and a symbol of popular resistance; to his opponents, a cruel fanatic responsible for violence against political rivals. He died in June 1945, hunted by government troops and expelled from the party he had served all his adult life.

Youth in Lamia and the road to communism

He was born on 27 August 1905 in Lamia in central Greece, into a prosperous and respected family. His father, Dimitrios, was a lawyer and for a time president of the local bar association; his mother, Aglaia, was the daughter of a notary. He was expelled from grammar school for bad behaviour. In 1919 he entered the secondary agricultural school in Larissa, from which he graduated in 1922. For a short time he worked as a clerk in the agricultural service in Drama and Trikala, before leaving for Athens.

There he came into contact with communists, and in 1924 he joined the communist youth organisation. During his military service, which he did as an artillery corporal, his political activity came to light. He was demoted and punished with a spell in a penal unit. On returning to Athens he became a full-time activist of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He was responsible for protecting demonstrations and meetings, organised escapes for imprisoned comrades, among them the future party leader Nikos Zachariadis, and worked on the editorial staff of the party daily Rizospastis. From the late 1920s he wrote reports from the workplace for it, and in 1931 one of his articles became the pretext for closing the paper. In these years he was known in the party by the pseudonym “Mizerias”. He read not only the Marxist classics but also Clausewitz.

He was arrested many times for subversive activity. He was imprisoned on Crete, served ten months of internal exile on the island of Gyaros, and the party sent him to do organisational work on Lesbos and in Thrace. By the mid-1930s he was regarded as one of the KKE’s best organisers and was known as a hard man with a propensity for violence.

Prisoner of the dictatorship

After the establishment in August 1936 of the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, known as the 4th of August Regime, communists were ruthlessly persecuted. Klaras was arrested at the end of 1936 and imprisoned on Aegina. He was tortured by the police. In 1937 he escaped while being taken to trial, but was soon recaptured and sentenced to four years in prison. In 1939 he was transferred to solitary confinement in the prison on Corfu. According to Greek biographers, in July 1939 he signed there a “declaration of repentance” – a public renunciation of communism and the party – and regained his freedom. Such declarations, extracted by the Minister of Public Security, Konstantinos Maniadakis, were published in the signatories’ home towns and meant disgrace in the eyes of communists. It is still not known whether torture broke him or whether he decided that he could do more as a free man. Some authors maintain that he acted on the party’s instructions. The declaration weighed on him for the rest of his life: the KKE leadership never fully trusted him.

After leaving prison he found himself on the margins of the party and, according to his biographers, went through a breakdown and took to drink. He nevertheless organised an illegal printing press.

War and first steps in the underground

After Italy attacked Greece in October 1940 he was called up and fought as a private in the artillery. Greek biographers write of an anti-aircraft battery on the Macedonian front. In April 1941, during the German invasion, he returned with his unit to Athens and urged demobilised soldiers not to hand in their weapons. On 15 May 1941, at a meeting of communists in a grove on the outskirts of Athens, he argued that “the war goes on”.

When, after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the communists founded the National Liberation Front (EAM), Klaras pressed for permission to start a guerrilla war in the mountains. The Central Committee at first rejected his plan. In November 1941, however, Andreas Tzimas, secretary of the KKE’s Athens organisation, sent him to Roumeli to assess the prospects for armed struggle. At the beginning of 1942, after the KKE’s January plenum and the creation of ELAS in February, the party’s new leader, Georgios Siantos, approved his plan. At the end of May 1942 Klaras assembled the first unit, a dozen or so strong, near Sperchiada.

Kapetanios of ELAS

It was then that he adopted the nom de guerre Aris Velouchiotis, from Ares, the Greek god of war, and from Mount Velouchi (Tymfristos) in Evrytania, and presented himself as a major of artillery. On 7 June 1942 his unit marched into the village of Domnista under the Greek flag and announced to the inhabitants the start of the struggle against the occupiers. Velouchiotis created the style that became the hallmark of ELAS: entering villages openly, invoking the tradition of the uprising of 1821, seizing grain from state warehouses, breaking up bands of brigands, and an iron discipline under which a partisan could be shot for petty theft. It was he who introduced the triple command of units (the kapetanios, a military commander and a political commissar) and the form of address “comrade-in-arms” in place of the party’s “comrade”.

His methods alarmed the party leadership. When in July 1942 he killed Nikos Maratheas, a landowner accused of collaboration, and abducted his son, who later died, the KKE considered recalling him to Athens. On 9 September 1942 his men fought the first ELAS battle with the Italians in the Reka gorge in the Giona mountains. On the night of 25–26 November 1942 Velouchiotis, together with Napoleon Zervas of EDES and Edmund Myers’s British sappers, carried out Operation Harling – the demolition of the railway viaduct over the Gorgopotamos river, which for several weeks cut the only railway line from Salonika to Athens. What Velouchiotis wanted from the British above all was not the gold sovereigns he was handed, but weapons and boots for his barefoot partisans.

At the beginning of 1943, after further complaints about his cruelty and wilfulness, the party summoned him to Athens. He went back to the mountains, however, and in May 1943, when the ELAS General Headquarters was set up, he took the post of kapetanios in it alongside the military commander, General Stefanos Sarafis, and the EAM representative, Andreas Tzimas. The partisans called him the “first kapetanios”. He was surrounded by a personal guard of “Black Berets”. In July 1943 ELAS signed an agreement placing itself under the Allied command in the Middle East of General Henry Maitland Wilson, but distrust of the British and of the other organisations only grew.

War with rivals and liberation

In the autumn of 1943 ELAS attacked EDES, in what historians call the first round of the Greek Civil War. Velouchiotis was among those in favour of settling accounts with rivals. In April 1944 he led the assault on the 5/42 Evzone Regiment of the EKKA organisation. After the regiment was destroyed, one of the ELAS officers shot its captured commander, Colonel Dimitrios Psarros, and many of his men were executed. In a report to the EAM committee Velouchiotis claimed that the regiment had collaborated with the Germans, which historians do not confirm. The circumstances of Psarros’s death and responsibility for it remain disputed.

In the spring of 1944 the party sent him to the Peloponnese, where ELAS was losing to the Security Battalions, Greek units armed by the Germans. There he rebuilt the partisan forces. In September 1944, as the Germans withdrew, ELAS captured the Battalions’ garrisons at Kalamata, Pylos and Meligalas. After the capture of Meligalas hundreds of prisoners and civilians were shot; estimates range from several hundred to more than a thousand victims. Velouchiotis’s role in these executions is a matter of dispute. In October 1944 he returned to Roumeli and in his native Lamia gave a widely noted programmatic speech on the power of the people after liberation.

In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens between ELAS on one side and British troops and the forces of the government of Georgios Papandreou on the other, the latter backed by Winston Churchill, Velouchiotis took no part in the battle for the capital. The party sent him to Epirus against EDES, whose units evacuated to Corfu.

Rebellion and death

After the defeat in Athens, EAM signed the Varkiza Agreement on 12 February 1945, which provided for the disarmament of ELAS. Velouchiotis signed the demobilisation order together with Sarafis, but soon came to regard the agreement as a betrayal of the partisans, who had been left at the mercy of persecution. With a group of loyal men he stayed in the mountains and announced that ELAS would be rebuilt against the British. According to some accounts, in the spring of 1945 he tried to cross into Albania, but the communists there would not allow him to stay. The KKE leadership under Zachariadis, who had returned from a German concentration camp, condemned him as an “adventurer” and expelled him from the party, reminding him of his declaration of 1939.

In mid-June 1945 his unit, pursued by the National Guard, was surrounded near the village of Mesounta in the Arta region, on the Achelous river. Sources give the date as 15 or 16 June. Velouchiotis and his deputy, Giannis Angeletos (nom de guerre Leon Tzavelas), took their own lives. Government communiqués claimed that he had been killed by gunfire. Their bodies were found and beheaded, and the heads were displayed on a lamp post in the main square of Trikala. In those same days Rizospastis announced his expulsion from the party.

Significance

Velouchiotis was the creator of the largest partisan movement in Greek history. He led a dozen or so men into the mountains, and at the height of its strength ELAS had several tens of thousands of regular partisans, tied down considerable occupation forces and controlled most of the country. His combination of appeals to patriotism and to the tradition of the klephts with ruthless discipline enabled him to draw into the movement peasants who knew little of communism. That same ruthlessness, turned against rivals from other resistance organisations, contributed to the bloodshed that preceded the Civil War of 1946–1949.

His memory in Greece remains divided. For decades the state portrayed him as a bandit and the KKE as a traitor. In 1962 the party restored his good name, in 2011 it acknowledged that he had been right in his assessment of the Varkiza Agreement, and in 2018 it posthumously restored his membership. Monuments to him stand in Lamia and other towns. Scholars point out that the story of Velouchiotis encapsulates the tragedy of the Greek left: courage and self-sacrifice in the fight against the occupiers, but also the violence, distrust and subordination to the party that led to its defeat.