In the days after I read Eleni, I realized on reflection that Gage tells another story in addition to his gripping personal story. He attempts to describe the Greek Civil War itself. In this, by the way, he has drawn some fire from those who believe he hasn’t given the Communist guerrillas their due.
But when I read Gage’s book I actually thought his portrait of said Communists was somewhat sympathetic. It’s hard to forget his description of them; one in particular was the local schoolteacher, initially a gentle idealist. The book delineates, step by careful step, how over the course of time these people compromised and hardened until they were all but unrecognizable, their dreams soured and their cause utterly transformed into something they wouldn’t have recognized (or supported) at the outset. To me, that was a twin tragedy.
Such movements, such revolutions, tend not to be the wonderfully exciting, meaningful, free places that participants imagine, but cold-hearted, calculating monoliths of purpose unimagined by the individual participants caught up in the heady romance of the moment…But to be openly abused, jailed, even executed… Such a betrayal… yet, time and time again, you read of True Believers chewed up and spit out by the momentum of the movement, a mere commodity to be used to the movement’s own ends.
Most revolutions do tend to turn on their own in time–and often not all that much time. But there’s a further aspect of it I want to discuss here, and that is this: when revolutions change into something unforeseen by their original– sometimes starry-eyed, idealistic, and naive–proponents, those early advocates often turn into opponents of the very revolution they launched. Their efforts to undo what they’ve unleashed are usually futile. Anyway, in the book there are two brothers, Prokopi and Spiro Skevis, the locals who, in Gage’s words, “sowed the seeds of Communism” in Lia, his home village, both were killed in battle rather than at the hands of their own. But Gage writes that, after the execution of his mother and four other villagers:
I don’t think Spiro would be alone among revolutionaries in having such regrets. Robespierre and Trotsky – what were they thinking in their last moments?Spiro Skevis’ success in bringing Communism to the Mourgana villages had turned to ashes in his mouth. The execution in Lia of his five fellow villagers tormented him. A captain in his battalion later told me how, shortly after the retreat from the Mourgana, Spiro went out of control and tried to kill one of the chief aides [to the judge in the trial that led to Gage’s mother’s execution], drawing a gun on him and screaming that the man was a criminal, a murderer of women. Other guerillas jumped Spiro before he could pull the trigger. He went to the grave tormented by the perversion of the movement that he and Prokopi had begun with such high intentions.
There is much about the message of Eleni. It tells the sobering tale of what can—and often does—-happen when political idealists meet up with the roadblocks of reality and yet remain stubbornly dedicated to their plans rather than abandoning them. Those mushy idealists can turn into manipulative, angry, ruthless, power-hungry tyrants quite easily, and do so with depressing regularity:
The book delineates, step by careful step, how over the course of time these people compromised and hardened until they were all but unrecognizable, their dreams soured and their cause utterly transformed into something they would not have recognized (or supported) at the outset.
