“We call communism the real movement that abolishes the current state of affairs.” Starting from this phrase by Marx and Engels, Kostis Karpouzelos explores the history of Greek communism in the 20th century, focusing on the “real movement” of its people and tracing its multiple geographies.
The result is an enthralling narrative featuring travelers of the revolution, exiled intellectuals, refugees, and migrants—people who cross the symbolic and literal borders of the nation.
The Ottoman and Greek Thessaloniki, Istanbul, the refugee cities of Greece, Moscow, and the Greek-speaking communities of the Black Sea during the interwar period, the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, the Paris of the Popular Front, the Middle East during wartime, Bucharest, and Tashkent of the political refugees, along with the capitalist metropolises during the dictatorship, compose a transnational history of Greek communism.
And the thread that connects them is the incessant movement of those who felt that class constraints and the regime of exploitation were not the self-evident condition of existence, the lives of revolutionary wandering that could not fit into a national territory.
