The day when the Red Flag, the banner of the first socialist state, the Soviet Union, was raised triumphantly over the Reichstag by the Red Army, which had crushed the main part of the allegedly invincible armies of Nazi Germany, remains one of the brightest pages in the people’s history. 

Germany surrendered unconditionally at daybreak of the 9^th of May 1945. Japan also surrendered four months later (2 September 1945) after the victory of the Soviet troops over its army in Manchuria. Thus the victory of the peoples against the fascist imperialist bloc comprised of the capitalist states Germany-Japan-Italy and their allies was sealed.

The KKE pays tribute to all those who gave their lives or were disabled on the battlefields and in the underground resistance in order to smash the fascist monster, which was created by capitalism. To the communist parties all over the world which led the national liberation struggles.

 To all those who fought with weapons or with leaflets in their hands, maintained a heroic stance in the dungeons and in the face of the execution squads. To the countless who died in the bombings and from of hunger, the main victims of which were children. To the millions who were tortured in the terrible concentration and death camps, and in every place where unspeakable horrors were committed, where the exploitation of man by man reached its nadir, with the absolute degradation of human existence.

We honour and defend the enormous contribution of the USSR

We honour and defend from distortion the enormous contribution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).  The Soviet Union shouldered the main burden of the war. It is characteristic that in the summer of 1944, when the US and British forces in Western Europe faced 75 German divisions, the Red Army had pinned down 200 divisions on the Eastern Front. The USSR made a decisive contribution at an enormous cost. The figures are shocking: over 20 million dead, amongst them the flower of the communists, the youngest, most capable and productive age groups. In contrast, Britain’s dead reached 375 thousand and the USA’s 405 thousand. The human sacrifices of the USSR, together with the disabled and wounded, approached 30 million!

The majority of the infrastructure, the factories, the wealth that had been created through the great toil and enthusiasm of the Soviet people, through two decades of socialist construction, was destroyed and looted by the Nazi invaders. The figures are staggering: 1,710 cities were turned into rubble, 70 thousand villages and towns were burnt, 32,000 industrial enterprises and 65,000 kiliometers of railway lines were fully or partially destroyed. 98,000 Kolkhoz were ransacked, as well as 5,000 Sovkhoz and Machine Tractor Stations, thousands of hospitals, schools and higher education institutes and libraries. 

For this reason, the Soviet Union, its people, the Red Army, the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks which was at the head of this titanic struggle, its youth the Komsomol, deserve the recognition and gratitude of all those who honour the anti-fascist victory. As the smallest tribute to this immortal epic, everyone must condemn the wretched attempts to blacken its name, something which the organizations and mechanisms of the bourgeois class and capitalism are constantly attempting. 

The victory of the Soviet Union, with J.V. Stalin as its leader, over Nazi Germany and its allies was achieved due to: the role of the working class soviet power in the creation and organization of the defensive buttressing of the Soviet Union. Due to the advantages offered by the socialization of the means of production and the central planning of the economy. Due to the leading role of the popular masses, with the working class as the leading force. To the role of the Communist Party as the revolutionary workers’ vanguard. It is a hugely important historical lesson for the present and future of the revolutionary movement.

 The salvation of the Soviet Union would not have been possible if it had not traveled, in the 20 years after the end of the civil war that followed the October Revolution, an enormous distance along the road of consciously planned socio-economic and cultural development, socialist construction. 

The Soviet epic is a legacy for all those who struggle to establish socialism-communism. It does not belong to governments like Putin’s , pillars of Russian imperialism which exploit the 9^th of May to ideologically reinforce the capitalist restoration in the USSR, hijacking the sacrifices of millions of communist men and women and concealing who created the soviet achievement and for what reasons they did so.

We defend the historical truth, we highlight the lessons from the heroic struggle of the peoples.

 The KKE is proud that it was the instigator, organizer and main provider of men and women to the great EAM-led resistance of our people.

The national liberation movement of our country, the armed struggle of ELAS, emerged as one of the most mass movements in the occupied countries, together with that of Yugoslavia. All the national liberation movements, the partisan units, through their heroic armed struggle pinned down hundreds of enemy divisions. They did a significant amount of damage to the occupation armies. 

We are inspired and we learn from history in order to deal with the tasks of the present and the future with greater maturity and readiness. 

The KKE addresses itself to the working class, the poor popular strata and especially to the young men and women and calls on them to seek out the truth, the real facts and the reasons that caused global and local wars, the rise and domination of fascism-Nazism in certain countries. 

The inter-state unions and every kind of official organ that serves capitalism harbour unalloyed hatred for May 9 1945, because it is the symbol of the antifascist victory of the peoples. They are attempting to erase it from the people’s memory, to distort its content, to turn the historical truth on its head. This is a component of their anticommunist-antisocialist propaganda in order to conceal the organic connection of the Nazi-fascist monstrosity with monopoly capitalism and the major responsibilities of the bourgeois and social-democratic parties. The European Union is in the frontline of this organized and dirty campaign.

They must not achieve their aims. The working class and the popular strata, the scientists, the intellectuals, all the people who do not accept the distortion of history and anticommunism have a duty to oppose them. All those who understand that historical knowledge and the scientific conclusions that arise from it are essential resources for the consciousness and the victorious struggle of the peoples and youth against the iron boot of the dictatorship of the monopolies and the horror of the imperialist wars. So that they can finally put an end to the womb that gives birth to these phenomena and the terrain that nourishes them.

This is what determines the task to protect the peoples and younger generations from the great threats against them which are created by the sharpening imperialist competition, the capitalist crises, the great impasses of ageing capitalism that is in decay. 

As the great communist intellectual, Bertolt Brecht, underlined:

 “In fascist countries capitalism only survives as Fascism, and Fascism can only be resisted as capitalism, as the most naked, brazen, offensive, and deceitful form of capitalism. How does someone propose to speak the truth about fascism, to which he is opposed, if he does not propose to speak out against capitalism, which produces it? How will this truth have practical importance?”

The KKE, with a sense of responsibility, vigorously defends the historical truth and highlights the lessons from the heroic struggle of the peoples and the communist movement. It considers that it is a primary task to systematically research and utilize in the formation of its strategy the conclusions from the struggle of the revolutionary movements. It courageously underlines its own mistakes and weaknesses and those of the movement. The prettifying of reality is alien to communists. There is an abyss that separates our criticisms and self-criticism from the slanderous ideological offensive of the KKE’s and revolutionary movement’s enemies, as well as from the idealization and one-sided focus on mistakes which is characteristic of opportunism. Our motives and aims are diametrically opposed to these approaches.

With a century’s worth of experience, struggles and sacrifices for the people and socialism, the KKE highlights the need for a consistent ideological-political front against every form of capital’s dictatorship, such as the Nazi-fascist one. 

Fascism emerges from the bowels of the capitalist system and is not merely the result of a form of management e.g. the neo-liberal policy, as the opportunist and social-democratic forces of Europe are claiming. It is one of the forms used by the monopolies to exercise power. It also defends capitalist ownership of the means of production, the exploitation of man by man. Particularly in conditions of capitalist crisis, poverty, unemployment, and the decay of the governing bourgeois parties, the bourgeois classes utilize the Nazi parties in multiple ways, as fortified redoubts to serve its interests. It utilizes bourgeois activity which, with its extreme nationalism and alleged “solidarity”, casts a net over popular forces, the unemployed, ruined petty bourgeois strata and assimilates them. 

The KKE in a well-substantiated way reveals to the people that the bourgeois class and the capitalist state abolish or bypass bourgeois democracy, bourgeois parliamentarianism and legality, which they themselves had established. When their interests demand it and they judge it to be necessary, they carry out military and political coups, suspend their own laws, in order to intensify state and every other form of violence and repression, restrictions on any political and trade union freedoms.

The KKE stresses that the struggle against fascism, for the defense of the workers’ rights and the people’s gains must not be detached from the struggle against the monopolies, against capitalist exploitation and capitalist power, that it must not slide into alliances with bourgeois and opportunist forces which seek to rescue the parliamentary form of the capitalist dictatorship. The goal of working class power must be a firm commitment. The goal of the people’s alliance as a social alliance with an antimonopoly-anti-capitalist direction, as a working class-people’s opposition against bourgeois power should not change its direction or its content. Only in this way can the people’s struggle safeguard its prospect. 

The imperialist wars are a result of the major sharpening of the inter-imperialist contradictions. During the 20^th century, our planet was engulfed in the flames of global imperialist wars on two occasions. Both the 1^st and 2^nd World wars (1939-1945) were the result of the significant exacerbation of the inter-imperialist contradictions and the struggle for the redivision of the world. These contradictions intensified even further due to the existence of the Soviet Union, in combination with the global capitalist economic crisis (1929-1933). After a certain point, they could not be resolved other than through an armed confrontation between the capitalist states. Both before and after the outbreak of the 2^nd World War, the goal of the two imperialist blocs, fascist and non-fascist capitalist states, was the destruction of the first workers’ socialist state, the USSR, which was a beacon for all the peoples. 

Both the two global imperialist wars, as well as the hundreds of local ones that occur due to the interests of the strong capitalist states, were monstrous imperialist crimes against humanity, including thousands of crimes of mass murder of unprecedented savagery and unspeakable acts. However the 2^nd World War surpassed the previous one. It lasted 2,194 days and extended over 22 million square kilometers. Over 110 million people were enlisted into the regular armies. Over 50 million people died, both military and civilians, in the war. 

In our country, The dead reached 405,000 (deaths from hunger, executions, battles, from the Greek-Italian and Greek-German war, thousands who were exterminated in the concentration camps, mainly Jews from Thessalonica, etc.).

After the 1^st World War, despite its defeat and the Versailles Treaty, Germany was able to become a strong imperialist power again, in essence due to the backing it received from the victorious capitalist powers in order to turn it against the Soviet Union. 

There is conclusive evidence that the great economic and military power of Germany was acquired thanks to the direct support provided to it by the USA, France and Britain. Its first military operations were tolerated by them. Their financial and monopoly colossi played a leading role in reinforcing Germany and continued to cooperate with it during the 2^nd World War, something that was tolerated by their governments.  The Catholic Church, social-democratic, conservative and other bourgeois parties of the so-called Centre, along with the business groups, supported Hitler and Mussolini, while after the war German war criminals staffed NATO and the secret services of “democratic” imperialist states.

 The mass popular base which they acquired demonstrates that the capitalist crisis, poverty do not on their own lead the popular masses to a radical position. On the contrary, under certain conditions, they can lead to retreat and a distortion of class and political consciousness, to the emergence of reactionary mass movements.

 The first military operations began the 19^th of September 1931, when Japan attacked Manchuria and a few years later (3 October 1935) Italy attacked Ethiopia.

On the 18^th of July 1936, the fascist-military movement of Franco emerged in Spain against the Popular Front government. So the Spanish Civil war began, which ended in spring 1939 with the victory of the fascists. 

Germany and Italy played a decisive role in this development, providing enormous assistance in terms of military personnel and equipment to the Spanish fascists. There was also the hypocritical stance of the strong capitalist states, Britain, France and the USA, which in the name of alleged ‘non intervention” and the policy of “appeasement” towards the fascist danger and war, deprived the Spanish people of the necessary means to fight and in this way they helped Franco and his allies.

 A characteristic example of the role of the social-democratic governments was the stance of France’s bourgeois Popular Front government (with Leon Blum as its Prime Minister), which politically assisted Franco in his offensive against the Spanish people and left the fascist organization in France undisturbed, as the same time when the French bourgeoisie, its parties and the Catholic Church created, reinforced, and armed fascist organizations (‘Croix-de-Feu » etc). The Popular Front government in France, amongst other things, handed the Spanish military fleet that had sheltered in French ports to Franco, and returned the Spanish gold, which was the security for its loans.

 In contrast, the only who reacted and expressed their support in a practical way with the people of Spain were the USSR and the international communist movement. The Soviet Union was the main supplier of weapons, food, medicines, and clothing which it transported by sea, taking many risks breaking through the ambushes of the German and Italian submarines. It also provided specialists and officers. The International Brigades, consisting of thousands of international volunteers, above all communists,  including hundreds of Greeks, made a special contribution, and fought at the side of the Spanish people, even paying the price with their lives.. 

On 25 November 1936, Germany and Japan sign a pact of anti-communist military cooperation, the “anti-Comintern pact” against the Communist International.

 In parallel, the USA, France and Britain tolerated the annexation of Austria by Germany on 12 March 1938, while a year later, on 12 April 1939, Italy conquered Albania.

 On 29 of September 1938, The Munich Agreement was signed which handed over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany. The agreement was signed between Chamberlain and Daladier, the Prime Ministers of Britain and France, on the one hand and Hitler and Mussolini on the other. Chamberlain indeed stated that the Munich Agreement guaranteed peace in our time.

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which had refused to sign a military assistance pact with the USSR in case of war. The agreements of mutual assistance signed by Poland with Britain and France were not honoured and the war declared by Britain and France against Germany was not in fact waged. It became known as the “Phoney War”…

Nazi Germany, the spearhead against the USSR

 The USA, Britain, France maintained a negative stance to the constant efforts of the Soviet Union to conclude an anti-fascist agreement. Indeed they continued their policy of undermining the USSR.

 It was very clear that the non-fascist capitalist states supported and gave impetus to Germany so that it would attack the Soviet Union as quickly as possible. In these conditions and in order to gain breathing space, its leadership signed the “German-Soviet non-aggression pact”, known as “Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement”. the on the 23^rd of August 1939 

Using this agreement as a pretext, every enemy of the USSR, amongst them the opportunists, attempt to turn reality on its head with lies and distortions. They conceal the fact that the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement” was signed, only after the Munich Agreement and the failure of all the previous pro-peace efforts of the Soviet Union, including the efforts to establish an anti-Hitler front.

 Especially as regards Poland, they conceal the fact that 3 months before the German offensive, the USSR had proposed a mutual assistance agreement in case of war, which the Polish government rejected and did not allow Soviet troops to enter its territory even when the Germans were on the advance and threatening to occupy all its territory.

 They also conceal the fact that the areas of Poland, which the Red Army detached from it in 1939, were territories of the USSR, which had been occupied by the reactionary Polish government in 1918-1921, after fierce battles against the revolutionary peoples of Russia. Then, Poland exploited the “favourable” circumstances of the international imperialist military intervention against the October Revolution in order to expand their domain eastwards.

 The “Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement” ensured 21 valuable months of peace, which proved to be priceless for its war preparations in light of the inevitable German offensive. It lasted until the 22^nd of June 1941, when Germany violated it.  Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the well-known operation “Barbarossa”, with a military force the like of which the world had never seen. Hitler was not alone in believing that he would conquer the USSR in a few months and crush the first socialist state and exterminate the communists.

 Meanwhile, when Germany attacked France (10 May 1940), which it conquered on the 25^th of June without meeting resistance,  and when it had conquered most of the countries of Europe, the tactics of the British bourgeoisie changed and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister (10 May 1940). Later on the USA also declared war on the Germany-Japan-Italy Axis, after Japan’s attack (7 December 1941) on Pearl Harbour in the Pacific. Apart from anything else, the interests of the Japanese monopolies came into conflict with the respective interests of the US monopolies in the Far East.

 An indicator of their goals was that the USA and Britain opened a second front in Europe against the Axis with the Normandy landings, on 6 June 1944, 3 years after the creation of the “antifascist agreement” (12 July 1941) which included the Soviet Union! This happened after the epics of the Red Army at Stalingrad and Kursk, which was when the tide of the war turned against the “Axis”, and 1944 was the year when the Red Army chased the German troops out of the Soviet Union and was preparing to liberate the occupied countries of Europe. The governments of the USA and Britain were rightly afraid that the Red Army might enter Berlin alone.

 The 2^nd World Imperialist War demonstrated that the confrontation between capitalism and socialism continued unabated in the framework of the antinazi-antihitler alliance. Imperialism never loses sight of its strategic goal. No provisional alliance with a section of it in the context of a war must lead to a dilution of the class criterion. 

The KKE, from the very first moment, gave a clarion call of resistance against the invader

 On the 28^th of October 1940, fascist Italy declared war on and invaded Greece from the territory of Albania. The Glixbourg-Metaxas dictatorship expressed bourgeois power in cooperation with Britain, with the consent of the bourgeois parties that gave a vote of confidence and toleration to this government. The mobilization of the people and their heroism on the battlefields in the Pindus Mountains temporarily impeded the invasion. 

The KKE, from the very first moment, gave a clarion call of resistance against the invader, despite the fact that it had been seriously damaged by the Metaxas Dictatorship, with thousands of its members in prison and exile. With his first open letter, which was published on the 2^nd of November 1940, Nikos Zachariades, the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE, from the state security prison in Athens, where he was being held, called on the Greek people to lend all their strength to this struggle, stressing that “The prize for the working people and the completion of today’s struggle must be and will be a new Greece of the world of work and of freedom, liberated from every foreign imperialist dependency, with a truly popular culture.” Two other letters of N. Zachariades followed, which correctly characterized the war as imperialist and called on the army-people to overthrow the government and take the defense of the borders into their own hands with the support of the Soviet Union. These two letters were never published because, unknown to Zachariades, they were delivered by informers into the hands of the state security. The “Old Central Committee” of the KKE had from the beginning the same direction as N. Zachariades.

 In addition, the imprisoned communists from the very first moment demanded to be released in order to fight at the front, something that was refused however by the Metaxas Dictatorship, which then later handed them over to the German occupiers.

 On the 27^th of April 1941, German troops entered Athens and the country found itself under the triple occupation of Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. A section of the bourgeois political world chose open collaboration with the occupiers. Another section escaped, together with the Palace, abroad (Cairo, London), taking enormous amounts of the state’s gold reserves with them. A third section stayed in Greece and stood aside from the struggle, looking in an opportunistic manner to future developments, while another section undertook an anti-occupation struggle, while at the same time cooperating with the occupiers in order to strike against EAM-ELAS and the KKE.

 The KKE devoted all its forces to organizing the resistance against the occupier. A handful of communists who were free and others who escaped from the prisons began the struggle to develop the resistance in the difficult conditions of the triple occupation and the defeatism and passivity fostered amongst the people by the bourgeois forces. It was the basic instigator, guide and provider of men and women for the EAM resistance. It gave its best children to this struggle. At its initiative, the Workers’ National Liberation Front was created immediately after the beginning of the occupation (EEAM-16^th of July 1941) and on the 27^th of September 1941 it founded EAM. EAM and its organizations (ELAS, EPON, Ethiniki Allilegi, ETA, OPLA, ELAN) rallied the great majority of the working class and the popular strata.

EAM organized the people’s resistance and saved them from hunger, ELAS (The People’s Liberation Army) developed a very significant armed struggle. The seeds of a new power were created in the liberated areas (local government, People’s Justice). The people’s cultural ascendance was nourished in these conditions. On the 10^th of March 1944, The Political Committee of National Liberation was formed (PEEA), the central political body that administered the liberated areas.

 It organized elections the conditions of the occupation (23 of April 1944) for the “National Council”, which had its headquarters in Koryschades (30^th of April 1944). Women and young people over the age of 18 voted for the first time in these elections. About 1,800,000 people voted. It should be noted that in the parliamentary elections of 1936, 1 million people took part, as women did not have the right to vote then.

 Thanks to the activity of EAM, not one worker was sent to work in the German factories, with the exception of those the Germans had captured as hostages. Thanks to EAM not one person was sent to fight against the Soviet Union, while ELAS forced 8 to 12 enemy divisions to remain in Greece.

 Thousands of communists and other supporters of EAM gave their lives. Kaisariani, Kournovo, Akronafplio, Kokkinia, Haidari, Ai-stratis, Monodendri, the “Pavlos Melas” camp are only a few of the places where these sacrifices were made.

 It is a provocation and an act of desecration for SYRIZA to present its ascendance to government as a vindication of EAM’s struggles, when it continues to politically defend the bourgeois class and its power and the country’s attachment to the imperialist organizations and alliances, like NATO, the EU and the USA, when everyone knows that EAM and ELAS came into armed conflict with imperialism in order to serve the just cause of the people and not simply for the provision of a few soup kitchens and crumbs for the people.

Conclusions from the strategy of the KKE and Communist International

This mass popular struggle was not able to achieve the final victory. The KKE, despite its contribution, was not sufficiently strategically-politically prepared to pose the issue of conquering working class power as a result of the resistance struggle and as the prize of the people’s struggle. It was not able to form the preconditions for a trajectory that could, at least in terms of the subjective factor, have led to victory, to workers’ power. 

It detached the struggle against war and fascism-Nazism from the need to fight for workers’ power.

The coexistence of the class content of the people’s struggle with the national-liberation element, aside from the other political and military conflicts against the military organizations of the “collaborators”, which in any case contain a class element, was confirmed by the armed confrontations between ELAS and the anti-Hitler pro-British organizations like EDES and EKKA. The constant conflicts with the British also lead to the same conclusion, as well as the unabated ideological and political struggle of the Greek bourgeois governments in the Middle East against PEEA and EAM-ELAS, against the Antifascist Military Organization (ASO) in the Middle East.

Especially after the crushing of the Germans at Stalingrad (2 February 1943), the thinking and activity of the British, Greece’s bourgeoisie, including the collaborationist government led by I.D. Rallis, was focused on how they would control the postwar/post-occupation developments, how they would safeguard bourgeois power in Greece. The reason for this was that the divided bourgeois class and disreputable bourgeois political forces were faced by a robust armed people’s movement guided by the KKE. Their basic choices had deep class criteria. They supported the formation of EDES and the Security Battalions, which were created by the occupation governments with the main aim of dealing with the armed people’s movement of EAM-ELAS. They, together with the Greek government in Cairo, utilized repression in April 1944 against the heroic Antifascist Military Organization (ASO), which had been created in the Greek army in the Middle East, and sent 20 thousand antifascist-militant Greek officers, soldiers and sailors to concentration camps. The heroic struggle of the people of Athens, the armed conflict against the British and the bourgeois state in December 1944 expressed this reality and the need to fight for workers’ power.

 The deeper reasons that did not allow the KKE to take the options that would have advanced the struggle of the armed people’s movement towards the conquest of workers’ power flowed from the contradictions in its own strategy and that of the Communist International (CI). Problems of ideological and strategic unity manifested themselves throughout the CI’s entire course in relation to the character of the revolution, the character of the coming war after the rise to power of fascism in Germany and the stance towards social-democracy. The dissolution of the CI (May 1943), despite the problems it had regarding unity and regardless of whether it could have been maintained or not, deprived the International Communist Movement both the centre and the potential to elaborate its revolutionary strategy in a coordinated way so that it could transform the struggle against imperialist war and foreign occupation into a struggle for power, as a unified task for every CP in the conditions of their countries.

 The problematic strategy of stages which it had in the period 1941-1944 was based on the decision of the 6^th Plenum of the CC (1934), on the decisions of the CI (7^th Congress) and the 6^th Congress of the KKE in 1935. This strategic line was expressed at the 2^nd National Conference (1942), as well as in the Programmatic Declaration “People’s Rule and Socialism”. Mistaken political choices of the KKE’s leadership were made on this basis, such as the Agreements of Lebanon and Caserta. These agreements also had the feature of compromise with bourgeois forces.

 More generally in the capitalist west, the CPs did not form a strategy of transforming the imperialist war or the national liberation struggle into a struggle for the conquest of power. The strategy of the communist movement did not appreciate the fact that the contradiction between labour and capital was contained inside the antifascist-national liberation character of the armed struggle in a series of countries, so that they could place the problem of power on the agenda, as socialism and the communist perspective are the only alternative solution to capitalist barbarity.

The war created conditions characterized by the significant sharpening of the class contradictions inside many countries, but the antifascist struggle only led to the overthrow of bourgeois power in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, thanks to the decisive support provided by the Red Army, and the USSR in general, to the people’s movements.

The attempt to rewrite the history of the 2^nd World War

 Particularly after the victory of the counterrevolutions in the former socialist countries (1989-1991), the attempt to rewrite the history of the 2^nd World War has taken on the dimensions of an intensely coordinated campaign.

 Imperialism is attempting to erase the contribution of the communist movement in order to conceal the achievements of the socialist system. They are attempting to manipulate the younger generations with black propaganda in order to subjugate them in a mass way to their crimes today. Anticommunism is expressed by the global ideological and political activity of capital’s forces in order to impede the people from escaping the setbacks brought about by the counterrevolution of 1989-1991.

 The imperialist centres conceal the fact that the unjust wars emerge from the heart and veins of the capitalist system and that they are not caused by some maniacs, as Hitler and Mussolini are often presented as being. On the contrary, the Soviet Union having eradicated the exploitation of man by man, abolished the incentive for taking part in the division and redivision of the world. It is precisely for this reason that of the participating states only the USSR was conducting a just war.

 They deliberately hide the fact that the 2^nd World War revived the hopes of the counterrevolutionary forces in the Soviet Union, which saw it as great opportunity to restore capitalism and consequently allied with the Germans.

 They conceal the fact that the crimes against humanity were not only committed by the Axis powers, but also by the governments of the “democratic” bourgeois states.

The USA committed the most massive and awful crime of all these, when it dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9^th of August 1945), without there existing any military need to do so.

The bombing of Dresden was one of the most characteristic crimes of the USA-Britain (13-19 February 1945) despite the fact that it had no military importance for the outcome of the war. The bombing reduced the city to rubble, and over 120,000 people lost their lives and priceless cultural wealth was destroyed.

The bourgeois staff manufacture monstrous lies and falsifications in order to slander the USSR

 The anti-communist “centres” label resistance “terrorism”. They present the exemplary punishment of the collaborators as being the massacre of civilians. They argue that the basic reason for the creation of the “Security Battalions” and their collaboration with the occupiers was the need to protect “innocents” from the bloodthirsty rampaging unleashed against them by the communists.

The anticommunist centres fabricate monstrous lies and do not hesitate to utilize slanders-provocations of the Nazis in order to throw mud at the USSR! A characteristic example of this is the so-called “Katyn massacre”. EU governments and organs as well as those of other countries accuse the USSR, despite the fact that the execution of the Polish officers took place, according to the findings, after the autumn of 1941, when the region had been occupied by the Nazis. It is well-known that the head of Nazi propaganda himself, Goebbels, in his diary recognized that the Germans committed the crime, that the bullets found were German and gave instructions for this to be concealed and for the slanderous propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union to continue.

 The imperialist and opportunist propaganda even claims that the peoples of the USSR fought and resisted due to the terror exerted on them by the state’s leadership! It is anti-communism bordering on the irrational. The surge of initiative, heroism and sacrifice demonstrated by the majority of the Soviet people could only be and was only the result of conscious participation and discipline. It is inconceivable that those who built socialism could have done it conditions of terror, those people who transferred thousands of factories and enterprises from the western regions to the hinterland of the Soviet Union so that production could continue. Those who, amidst war, rebuilt the destroyed regions, when the German armies had abandoned them. Hundreds of thousands of women started to work in the factories, replacing the men, who were fighting at the front, in production. More than 1 million women became drivers and mechanics in the Kolkhoz. Over 200,000 became responsible for production units and presidents of Kolkhoz, while 1 million took part in fighting, at the front and in the partisan units.

 The bourgeois, enthusiastically supported by opportunism, continually and repeatedly produce propaganda about the “division of the world” that was allegedly agreed to at Yalta (11 February 1945) between the USSR and the USA-Britain. They are not only slandering the Soviet leadership, Red Army and proletarian-socialist internationalism, as they always do, but they exonerate the imperialist interventions of Britain and the USA in Greece.  At the same time, they incriminate the armed struggle of the people in December 1944 and between 1946-1949, because despite its defeat, they are afraid of its legacy. The heroic struggle of the people of Athens and Pireaus in December 1944, as well as the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) were a milestone and the most intense moments of the class struggle in Greece.

 The EU, playing the leading role in the anti-communist hysteria, established the 9^th of May as the “Day of Europe”, canceling out the “Day of the People’s Victory”! It is no accident that the expulsion of the German armies and liberation of the countries of Eastern Europe by the Red Army is labeled as occupation! The deserters from the German army, who defected to the opponents and chiefly to the Red Army, are essentially considered to be a “national shame” in Germany and Austria.

 The EU and the USA support the attempt to historically rehabilitate and vindicate the fascists in the countries of the Baltic and Ukraine, who during the 2^nd World War aligned with the Nazis. They labeled them “militants for democracy” because they fought against the Red Army and Soviet power. And while the fascist crimes of the SS legions, the so-called “Ukrainian Liberation Army” and other similar organizations are well-known, they present them to the younger generations as “patriots” and “democrats”. The official propaganda in the Baltic countries reached the point of presenting the concentration camps as “reformatory centres”.

 Recently the EU and the USA, in the framework of their competition with Russia, openly intervened in the developments in Ukraine in order to overthrow the elected government. They did not hesitate to support fascist forces in order to promote their geopolitical designs.

Nazism can only be dealt with by the development of the class struggle

The KKE honours the 70^th anniversary of the people’s victory over fascism and calls on the working people, the pensioners, and the youth in Greece to decisively condemn and isolate Nazi criminal Golden Dawn.  It is a vehicle of the reactionary theory known as National Socialism, which is a mixture of ideas and slogans of utopian petty bourgeois socialism with nationalism. It follows the examples of Hitler, the fascist regimes that butchered the peoples and humanity, the Security Battalions -the collaborators with the occupation forces- the dictatorship of 1967-1974. It promotes crude anticommunism and hatred against the labour and people’s movement. It organizes and carries out criminal acts against it. It has connections with sections of the state apparatus and especially the forces of repression and with criminal networks. It is directly supported by sections of capital.

 The murder Pavlos Fissas, a 34 year old man from Keratsini, the attack against members and cadres of the KKE in Perama are part of a series of criminal attacks against immigrants, tradesmen, workers, young people that reveal the true criminal face of Golden Dawn.

The emergence of Golden Dawn and the rise of its influence in Greece occurred in conditions of a deep and protracted capitalist economic crisis, with the rapid reduction of the influence of the parties that have served for decades as pillars of the bourgeois political system, in a period when the movement has not regrouped its forces in an anti-capitalist antimonopoly direction. Golden Dawn utilized the vague “anti-memorandum” rhetoric that was also used by the “leftwing” SYRIZA, concealing the real causes of the crisis and the ferocious attack against the people’s rights, the role of the EU etc in order gain support and an audience for its fascist demagogy. It utilized the well-known slogans about the “kleptocracy”, “loan sharks”, “thieving politicians”. In addition, it was accommodated and covered by various activities that were permeated by the reactionary and disorienting slogan “parties out, trade unions out”.  Golden Dawn is being reinforced by the anticommunism and the hatred which is fostered by the system towards the workers’ and people’s struggles. It was benefited by the promotion of the reactionary theory of the “two extremes”; by the demagogy and the racist ideological constructs of the bourgeois parties regarding the issue of immigration, which is a product of the imperialist wars and interventions, of the uneven development and the internationalization of the capitalist market. It is fed by the decay of the bourgeois system, by the EU guidelines which equate fascism with communism and demand measures be taken against “extremism” and “radicalism”.

The people and the movement should not be complacent despite the arrests and the trials, in relation to the murderous attacks, both of the leading cadres of Golden Dawn and of those cadres who actually implement the decisions. No one should forget that Golden Dawn was provocatively promoted and prettified by a large section of the mass media, and that there are attempts to utilize it in the various plans for the reformation of the political system. The coalition government of SYRIZA-ANEL also bears great responsibilities as cadres of both parties are fostering an attitude of tolerance vis-à-vis Golden Dawn utilizing various parliamentary procedures as a pretext. 

Golden Dawn and Nazi activity cannot be tackled using theories about “constitutional”, “parliamentary” and “democratic” arcs, by the alleged improvement of the functioning of bourgeois democracy, as other political forces like SYRIZA, PASOK, “POTAMI” suggest in various ways.

The reactionary bourgeois state is neither wiling nor able to tackle Nazism root and branch; neither can the so called “antifascist fronts”, an alliance of the labour-people’s movement in cooperation with bourgeois political forces. Only the people’s alliance, the development of the class struggle with the aim of overthrowing the monopolies’ power, the capitalist system can deal with Nazism. Only the mass struggle and the decisiveness of the people and the youth can delegitimize and root out Golden Dawn from among the masses, once and for all.

 It is a duty and a necessity for the teachers, scientists and artists to expose, fight and create antibodies in the schools, youth and society more generally against the poison of fascism-Nazism.

The only alternative solution is socialism-communism

70 years after the end of the 2^nd World War, the lessons from it reinforce the theoretical position that the only alternative solution to capitalist barbarity is socialism-communism. It is the liberation of the working class from exploitation, the establishment of the new social relations, the social ownership of the means of production, central planning, the active participation of the workers in the organization-management of social production and social services.

The study of our party’s history up until this point and of the international communist movement demonstrates that the biggest problem was the lack of the ideological-political and organizational readiness of the CPs to direct the workers’-people’s uprising in revolutionary conditions towards the overthrow of capitalist power. Historical experience shows that the complete preparation must be achieved in non-revolutionary conditions. The precondition for this is: That the current economic and political struggle must not be detached from the main revolutionary political task, whether the conditions characterized by dynamism or retreat. The goal of workers’ power must not be sidelined by some transitional governmental goal on the terrain of capitalism, in the name of dealing with the deterioration of the working class’ and popular strata’s living conditions, due to the deep and prolonged economic crisis, imperialist war, the open terrorism against CPs and the labour movement by Nazi-fascist organizations, the intensification of state violence etc.

 The recent economic crisis has sharpened the competition and the contradictions between the capitalist states and their various imperialist alliances which are becoming increasingly aggressive against the peoples in order to reinforce their geopolitical position, for the division of the markets, the control of the energy resources and the transport routes. The sharpening of the contradictions and the escalating imperialist interventions and wars in Ukraine, Middle East, North Africa, Balkans, etc are outlining even more intensely the threat of a generalized imperialist war in our wider region as well as around the world. The conditions that create or stoke up serious dangers for our country are: participation in NATO and the military structure of the EU, in their aggressive plans and interventions, the bourgeois nationalist aim to enhance Greece’s geopolitical role in the imperialist campaigns and wars. The constant competition of the bourgeois classes in the region, on the terrain of which the repeated provocations of Turkey and the greying of the Aegean take place with the toleration and support of the USA-NATO. The existence of many war flashpoints in our wider region, in which our country’s bourgeois class is one way or another involved or could be involved in, as the development of military cooperation with Israel etc. demonstrates.

 The KKE has taken a clear position regarding an imperialist war in a complicated situation which is being formed e.g. in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, taking into consideration the domestic and external contradictions: the workers’ and people’s movement must not be trapped in the framework of the aims of the Greek bourgeois class or follow any possible different choices, or identify itself with a differentiated stance of sections, parties or institutions of the bourgeoisies in the framework of the two-sided schema of imperialist war-imperialist peace.

 The struggle for the defense of the borders, for the defense of the sovereign rights of Greece from the standpoint of the working class and the popular strata cannot be separated from the struggle for the overthrow of capital’s power. In the instance of Greece's involvement in an imperialist war, either in a defensive or aggressive war, the Party must lead the independent organization of the workers'-people's struggle in all its forms, so as to lead to the complete defeat of the bourgeois class, both the domestic one and the foreign invader, and link it in practice with the conquest of power.

 The developments increase the need to reinforce the labour-people’s movement against the Nazi-fascist criminal intimidation, as well as against the reformist, opportunist cooption, which negates the potential for the situation to be radically changed.

 The endurance and ability of the KKE as an ALL-WEATHER PARTY is a precondition to bring to the fore all the virtues of the working class, as the class that will liberate itself from exploitation, crises and imperialist wars, together with its allies.

For this reason, the KKE has set as its goal, as it approaches its 100^th year anniversary, and seeks the strengthening of its ability at every level, in every workplace and sector, in every village and city so that: it plays the leading role in the development of the struggles without detaching this activity from the propaganda and struggle for the historic mission of the working class, the abolition of the exploitative social relations. To connect every economic and political struggle, in the framework of any correlation of forces, with the main political task, the struggle for revolutionary workers’ power. To repel the anti-communist offensive and to be vigilant.

 We honour the antifascist struggle of the peoples, we are inspired and learn from it.

 We continue with greater urgency and understanding.

 The KKE, with the blood of its best sons and daughters, has demonstrated its devotion to the working class, the just cause of the people, socialism, proletarian internationalism!

 We advance with optimism and determination.

 Our conviction that the 21^st century will be the century of the communist movement’s revival, new dynamic and victorious socialist revolutions is deeply and scientifically founded. Our era is the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism.

The negative correlation of forces does not discourage us, because we know it will be overturned.

 We have confidence in our positions that are borne out be the developments, we have confidence in the working class.

 The KKE enters the confrontations ahead more experienced and better equipped.

 We advance ahead with only one goal: to meet the challenges of the times, to build the great people’s anti-capitalist alliance that will fight against the anti-people political line and will put an end to the barbarity of capitalism, wars, crises, exploitation, poverty, unemployment and oppression.

 In order to vindicate the struggles and sacrifices of past generations, in order to pave the way for and fulfill the dreams and contemporary needs of the people and youth through the worker’s-people’s victory, socialism-communism.

APRIL 2015

 THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE KKE

04.05.2015