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Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War And The Origins Of The Soviet-american Rivalry,1943-1949

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The author has done a good research in writing the book about the turmoil years 1943 to 1949 in Greece.
A good description of the bloody events,that took place in Athens & the interferance of the communists, before And after the withdraw of the German forces from Greece. A book to be read by those who lived in Greece during these events and by those who were young then.

Red Acropolis, Black Terror looks at The Greek Civil War following World War II and how that fit into the overall context of the Cold War. From the British collaborators to the German sympathizers and the eventual rise of the communist this book carefully assesses the major players and how they fit into the larger picture. The various forces and the political terror they achieved (through violence much of the time) is still felt today in Greece and there are many parallels that can be seen. Two complaints are that it is written in a dry manner and can be a struggle to get through at times. Secondly it is missing a list of primary people which makes learning names that very few people would be familiar with difficult. Overall though it is still a valuable addition to the scholarship on both Greece and the Cold War.

The Greek Civil war that began after the Second World War is still being felt today. This book explores it, beggining with the OSS intervention in Greece and the resistance to Nazism in Greece and follows the conflict up to modern times through interviews with normal people and history of the various governments and the coup.

This is an important contribution to cold war studies and regional history and squarely places the Greek Civil war in the context of the Cold War, the realm of 'small wars', great power politics and the Balkan region. This leads to one of the great drawbacks of the book: its over-emphasis on the role of the U.S and Russia, when we know that both played a far smaller role than credited. Stalin didnt support the Greek rebels and the U.S maintained mainly an economic support as well as using the Mediteranean fleet and a CIA office to support the Greek government. THe second major flaw is the emphasis on the "Black terror" which is mostly a canard. The Communist Greeke rebels murdered ten times the number of civilians as the government ever did. But somehow in this book that is called 'political terror'. One wonders if it had been the other way around if the murder of villagers by the 'Black terror' would have been called 'political' and not murder.

Seth J. Frantzman