The Political Committee of National Liberation in Greece

On 10 March 1944, in Viniani, a mountain village in the Greek region of Evrytania, the founding act of the Political Committee of National Liberation (Greek: Πολιτική Επιτροπή Εθνικής Απελευθέρωσης, Politiki Epitropi Ethnikis Apeleftherosis, PEEA for short) was proclaimed. It was created by the communist-dominated National Liberation Front (EAM), which together with its partisan army ELAS then controlled most of the country’s mountainous interior. The Committee, popularly known as the “mountain government” (Kyvernisi tou Vounou), was to exercise authority in the areas freed from occupation – so-called Free Greece – and from the first day it was a rival both of the collaborationist government in Athens and of the government-in-exile in Cairo recognised by the Allies.

Two Greeces and three governments

At the beginning of 1944 Greece in practice had three centres of power. In Athens sat the collaborationist government of the Hellenic State, headed since April 1943 by Ioannis Rallis, who under German supervision was raising the Security Battalions to fight the partisans. In Cairo there was the government-in-exile of Emmanouil Tsouderos, linked to King George II, whose return to the country was opposed by most Greeks who remembered the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. The third force was the resistance – above all EAM and ELAS, and alongside them Colonel Napoleon Zervas’s republican EDES in Epirus and the small EKKA in Central Greece.

Since the autumn of 1943 ELAS, which after the Italian capitulation had taken over much of the weaponry of the Italian garrisons, had been fighting EDES. These clashes, which historians call the first round of the Greek Civil War, were ended only by an agreement reached through British mediation on 29 February 1944 at the Plaka bridge over the Arachthos river, which drew demarcation lines between the two organisations. At the same time the Germans were carrying out brutal anti-partisan operations in the mountains, combined with mass reprisals against the population – in December 1943 the inhabitants of Kalavryta fell victim to them. Villages burnt by the occupiers, and their people, depended more and more on the structures of EAM, which stood in for a non-existent state.

For in the areas held by ELAS the institutions of a new authority had been emerging since 1943: elected village councils, people’s courts, schools, health posts and a food distribution system. According to various estimates, Free Greece covered most of the mountainous interior, from Thessaly and Western Macedonia to the mountains of Roumeli and the Peloponnese. What it lacked, however, was a common political centre that could speak for these territories to the Allies and the government in Cairo.

From a proposal of unity to the “mountain government”

On 14 December 1943 the Central Committee of EAM called on all parties fighting the occupier, and on the Tsouderos government, to form a “government of national unity” in Greece itself, which would direct the liberation struggle and prepare for the dispute over the monarchy to be settled by a vote. The condition was to be a declaration by the King that he would not return to the country before a plebiscite. The pre-war politicians in Athens and the government in Cairo rejected the proposal; Tsouderos argued that the government had to remain abroad to keep in contact with the Allies, and that there was no permanently liberated territory in Greece. The appeal did, however, draw some non-communist republicans closer to EAM, above all the professor of constitutional law Alexandros Svolos. After meetings of the leaderships of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and of EAM in January 1944, the decision was taken to set up a governing body of their own, even without the participation of other political forces.

The founding act of the PEEA is dated 10 March 1944. According to Greek studies, the five members of the Committee were sworn in two days later, on 12 March, in the primary school building in Viniani, in the presence of the local priest, a representative of the church authorities, the village headman and the commander of ELAS, General Stefanos Sarafis. The provisional president was Colonel Evripidis Bakirtzis – an officer of republican convictions known as the “Red Colonel”, a co-founder of EKKA who later went over to ELAS and commanded its units in Macedonia. The other members were Georgios Siantos, acting general secretary of the KKE, who took charge of internal affairs; Ilias Tsirimokos of the left-wing republican Union of People’s Democracy (ELD), responsible for justice; General Manolis Mandakas, a Cretan officer linked to ELAS, who dealt with military affairs; and Kostas Gavriilidis of the Agrarian Party, who took over agriculture.

The founding declaration listed the Committee’s aims: to coordinate the struggle “against the conquerors” alongside the Allies, to drive the Germans and Bulgarians out of the country, to achieve full national liberation and secure Greece’s independence and integrity, and to “exterminate domestic fascism and the armed formations of traitors”. The Committee was to assume command of the partisan units that recognised it and merge them into a single national army, to exercise supreme authority in the liberated areas while respecting local self-government, to guarantee civil liberties, private property and freedom of religion, and to prepare the country for a return to normal political life after liberation – with the proviso that “putschist or dictatorial solutions” would have to be resisted. The text invoked the principle of national self-determination set out in the Atlantic Charter and the decisions of the Tehran Conference.

The Committee at work

The PEEA was not formally a government – it avoided the name so as not to close the door to an agreement with the cabinet in Cairo – but it acted like one. Its members bore the title of secretaries, the equivalent of ministers. On 18 April 1944 (some Greek studies give 10 April, when the decision to enlarge the Committee was taken) the presidency was assumed by Alexandros Svolos, who also took over foreign affairs and education; Bakirtzis became vice-president and secretary for supply. Among those who then joined the Committee were the economist Angelos Angelopoulos, Stamatis Chatzibeis, Nikolaos Askoutsis and the physician Petros Kokkalis. The presence of people from outside the KKE was meant to convince Greeks and the Allies that the PEEA was not merely an offshoot of the Communist Party, although in practice the direction of its activities was decided by the KKE leadership and the ELAS command.

The Committee’s best-known undertaking was the elections to the National Council, held by secret ballot in the second half of April 1944 – both in the liberated areas and clandestinely in the occupied cities, above all Athens. According to Greek sources, between 1.5 and 1.8 million people took part, and women voted for the first time in Greek history. The results must be treated with caution: the elections took place under occupation and under the control of a single organisation that did not allow its opponents to take part. The National Council met in the mountain village of Koryschades in Evrytania on 14–27 May 1944 and approved the PEEA’s founding act of 10 March. Its resolution laid down that all power derives from the people, that women and men have equal political and civil rights, and that the language of public life and of schools is the popular language – demotic Greek.

In the mountains the PEEA organised schools and courses for teachers, issued its own textbooks, and ran people’s courts and a local militia; it tried to protect harvests from requisitioning by the occupier and to provide food for people driven from villages burnt in German reprisal operations. At the same time ELAS rule in the provinces had a harsh face: political opponents accused of collaboration were often tried summarily, and rival resistance organisations were treated as enemies.

Place in the war

The creation of the PEEA shook the Greek camp in exile. At the turn of March and April 1944 a mutiny broke out in the Greek units in Egypt – in the 1st Brigade and then aboard the ships of the fleet at Alexandria – among soldiers and sailors who demanded a government of national unity based on the Committee. Tsouderos resigned, and Sophoklis Venizelos briefly held office. The British, angered by the turmoil behind the front, suppressed the mutiny at the end of April; thousands of soldiers were sent to internment camps, and the loyal units were later formed into the Greek Mountain Brigade. On 26 April Georgios Papandreou, who had been brought out of occupied Greece and was a determined opponent of the communists, became prime minister. In the same month ELAS units crushed EKKA, and its commander, Colonel Dimitrios Psarros, was murdered – a crime that undermined trust in EAM’s assurances of unity.

At the Lebanon Conference (17–20 May 1944) the PEEA delegation – Svolos, Angelopoulos and Askoutsis – signed a joint declaration that condemned the mutiny as a national crime and announced a government of unity under Papandreou. The EAM leadership in the mountains at first rejected the terms of the agreement and only in August, after long bargaining, agreed to join the government. At the beginning of September 1944 the PEEA dissolved itself, and six of its representatives took portfolios in Papandreou’s cabinet. On 26 September the Caserta Agreement placed ELAS and EDES under the British General Ronald Scobie. Soon afterwards the Germans left Greece, and in October the government returned to Athens.

The “mountain government” thus proved to be an episode lasting half a year, but a very important one. It showed that EAM was ready to build its own state in the territories it controlled – while Britain, for its part, showed that it would not let Greece slip out of its sphere of influence, which Winston Churchill secured in October 1944 in a conversation with Joseph Stalin. The mistrust on both sides led in December 1944 to fighting in Athens between ELAS and British and government troops, and, after a short-lived peace, to the civil war of 1946–1949. The experience of the PEEA, with its elections in which women voted and its village self-government, was later remembered by the Greek left as a foretaste of a different, democratic Greece; by its opponents, as an attempt by the communists to seize power under cover of the struggle against the occupier.