Konstantinos Tsivos

This study traces the development of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) between the end of World War II and 1956. Special attention is paid to the period after the military defeat of the KKE in Greece (1949), which led to the relocation of KKE’s leadership and its core members to socialist exile. It was there that the People’s Republic Greece was created – an imaginary country with no defined borders and primitive state institutions in which the KKE, with the assistance of sister communist parties, exercised power over a limited number of Greek and Macedonian citizens. The thesis analyses the functioning of this hybrid country, using the example of Greek émigré communities in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, based on archive materials of Greek and Czechoslovak provenience and exile émigré press. The thesis examines the composition of émigré communities and the functioning of their exile organisations against the background of the political developments in the host countries. The author views the phenomenon of Greek post-war communism, in particular its social history, through the prism of transnational history, offering an opportunity to compare the narrative prevailing in countries of real socialism with the story of communism in Greece.