Civil War in Greece. Only one year after the Varkiza armistice, right-wing gangs killed 1,192 people, injured 6,413, and raped 159 women (official government figures). The Greek Communist Party, angered by the repeated violations of the armistice, decided not to participate in the elections, thus handing the country over to the royalist right, which secured the king’s return. At the end of 1946, the Communist Party formed the Democratic Army of Greece and resumed the civil war. For two years, violence and counter-violence raged, with occasional intervention from the British and Americans, and Stalin’s refusal to aid the Greek communists, perhaps in response to the October 1944 agreement with Churchill in Moscow. The civil war finally ended in 1949 with the complete defeat of the left.
