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Nikos Beloyannis

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Nikos Beloyannis
Personal details
Born(1915-12-22)December 22, 1915
Amaliada, Greece
DiedMarch 30, 1952(1952-03-30) (aged 36)
Goudi, Athens, Greece
Political partyCommunist Party of Greece
Domestic partnerElli Pappa
OccupationPolitician, political commissar
Military service
Branch/service Democratic Army of Greece
Greek People's Liberation Army
Years of service1946-1949 (Democratic Army of Greece)
1943-1945 (Greek People's Liberation Army)
RankPolitical commissar
Unit10th Division (Democratic Army of Greece)
9th Regiment (Greek People's Liberation Army)
Battles/wars

Nikos Beloyannis (Greek: Νίκος Μπελογιάννης; 1915 – 30 March 1952) was a Greek resistance leader and leading cadre of the Greek Communist Party.

Biography

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Beloyannis was born in Amaliada (Peloponnese, Greece) in 1915. He came from a relatively prosperous family and went on to study law in Athens, but before being able to graduate, he was arrested and jailed in the Akronauplia prison (Nauplion) by the Ioannis Metaxas regime in the 1930s and transferred to the Germans after the Axis occupation of Greece (1941). He escaped in 1943 and joined the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) in Peloponnese on the side of Aris Velouchiotis. After becoming Political Commissioner of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) during the Greek Civil War, he was one of the last to leave the country (1949) after its defeat.[1]

In June 1950, Beloyannis returned to Greece in order to re-establish the Athens organization of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) that had been declared illegal. He was arrested on 20 December 1950 and was taken before a court-martial on charges of violating Compulsory Law 509/1947, which criminalized KKE. He was accused of treason, allegedly having transmitted information to the Soviet Union. The Beloyannis trial started in Athens on 19 October 1951. In total, 94 people were accused. One of the three members of the court-martial was Georgios Papadopoulos[2] who later (1967) became the leader of the military dictatorship of 1967-1974. Beloyannis denied all accusations and stressed the patriotic nature of his actions during the anti-Nazi resistance (1941—1944), the British intervention (1944–1946) and the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). He became globally known as the "Man with the Carnation" and as such, he was depicted in a famous Pablo Picasso sketch. Beloyannis made an impassioned defense of the achievements of the resistance and exposed the fact that in the postwar years people who had fought the Nazis were persecuted for their left-wing views, while Nazi collaborators were rewarded with posts in the Greek government due to the Cold War atmosphere.[3]

Despite national and international appeals for clemency, between 15–16 November, the court-martial sentenced Beloyannis and eleven of his comrades to death.[4] On 1 March 1952, Beloyannis and seven others were sentenced to death. Within a week, the Greek government received from all over the world hundreds of thousands telegrams against the death sentence, while an international campaign -- with the participation of personalities like Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Éluard, Nazim Hikmet and others -- asked for the cancellation of the military tribune's verdict.[5] Four prisoners were taken from Kallithea on the early morning of Sunday, 30 March 1952, and executed in the Goudi camp.[6] The sentences of the other co-defendants of Beloyannis were commuted to life imprisonment, and by the mid-1960s, all were released from prison.

Beloyannis was the one of the most prominent of the Greeks who collaborated with the Soviet Union after World War II. His name was given to the village of Beloiannisz, Hungary, which housed Greek left-wing refugees who fled Greece at the end of the civil war (1949) until they were allowed to return to Greece by the first Andreas Papandreou government in the early 1980s.[7][8]

A monument of Nikos Beloyannis in former Communist East Berlin.

Writings

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In his last letter, written from death-row, Beloyannis mentions two books that he appears to have written on the economic development of Greece and the country's history of literature.[9] The manuscripts of the former were published in 2010 under the title Foreign Capital in Greece (Το Ξένο Κεφάλαιο στην Ελλάδα, To Kseno Kefaleo stin Ellada).[10] Through the detailed analysis of Greece's external borrowing, its history is presented as one of subjection to foreign powers and financial institutions who ended up controlling most of its economy and resources to the dismay of the working class.[11]

Cultural references

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  • Pablo Picasso created a sketch named The Man with the Carnation honouring Beloyannis, inspired by a portrait of him.
  • Peter de Francia painted The Execution of Beloyannis in 1953. It was sold to a private collector in 2011 by James Hyman Gallery[12] It has since become part of the Tate collection.[13]
  • Nikos Tzimas' movie The Man with the Carnation (1980).
  • Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet wrote a poem called The Man with the Carnation in 1952 about Beloyannis.[14]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Liakos, Antonis, and Marchetos, Spyros (2013), 'Nikos Beloyannis', in Lane, Thomas A. (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, Vol. I: A-L. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp. 74-75 (p. 74).
  2. ^ Van Dyck, Karen (1998). Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry Since 1967. Cornell University Press. p. 12. ISBN 0-8014-9993-3.
  3. ^ Gerolymatos, André (2016). An International Civil War: Greece, 1943-1949d. Yale University Press. p. 297. ISBN 978-0-300-18060-2.
  4. ^ rizospastis.gr, October 2001 Archived 24 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Mottas, Nikos (30 March 2017). "NIKOS BELOYANNIS, The Man with the Carnation: Always alive in the hearts and consciousness of the people". In Defense of Communism.
  6. ^ 1952: Nikos Beloyannis, the man with the carnation, Executedtoday.com; accessed 25 July 2018.
  7. ^ Danforth, Loring M., and Riki van Boeschoten (2012), Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 69.
  8. ^ Clogg, Richard (24 June 1996). "Obituary: Andreas Papandreou". Independent. Archived from the original on 21 June 2022. Retrieved 21 September 2018.
  9. ^ Beloyannis, Nikos (1952), 'To Those Who Are Trying to Save My Life', in Beloyannis, Nikos and Elli Ioannidou (eds), Letters from the Death Cell. London: League for Democracy in Greece. pp. 5-8 (p. 8).
  10. ^ Michael-Matsas, Savas (2011), 'Greece and the World Capitalist Crisis', in Ticktin, Hillel (ed.), Marxism and the Global Financial Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 135-148 (p. 143).
  11. ^ Dimoulas, Constantine, and Vassilis K. Fouskas (2013), Greece, Financialization and the EU: The Political Economy of Debt and Destruction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 192.
  12. ^ "The Execution of Beloyannis - Peter De Francia - James Hyman: Fine Art and Photographs". James Hyman - Fine Art and Photographs. Archived from the original on 21 March 2012. Retrieved 26 July 2018.
  13. ^ "The Execution of Beloyannis - Peter De Francia - Tate". Retrieved 19 December 2019.
  14. ^ The related news bulletin containing the poem (in Turkish) Accessed on 12 June 2015
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