Sotiris Walldén, Senior Policy Advisor of ELIAMEP, recently published a new book, The Greek Dictatorship, Resistance, and the Left (Themelio Publishers, Athens 2025, 207 pages). It brings together texts by the author covering the last decade. Most of them concern the dictatorship of April 21, 1967 as well as the Left during that period.
The 50th anniversary of the fall of the April dictatorship, together with other anniversaries celebrated during the same period (50 years since the coup d’état [1967] and the scission of the Communist Party of Greece [1968], 30 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall [1989], 50 years since the Polytechnic School uprising [1973]), triggered a revival of the interest of historians and the general public in these events. The generation that lived through them – and to which the author belongs – naturally focuses on them and feels the need to remember and (re)evaluate its experiences.
The volume contains sixteen articles, mostly unpublished. Two texts on national anniversaries are included in the first part: the 200th anniversary of the 1821 Revolution and the 50th anniversary of the fall of the junta. The second part covers the military dictatorship itself, the Resistance, and the Left: the role of the Americans, the relations of the junta with the communist regimes, the split of the KKE in 1968, and the crisis of the KKE (Interior) in 1972-1973. Reviews of books referring to that era are also included. The third part of the book addresses the collapse of European communism with an article on the “Balkan 1989”, while a text on the economic relations between Greece and the USSR during the Cold War is added. The volume concludes with four obituaries on friends and comrades of the author, the lives of which were connected to the book’s themes.
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