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Their leader, appropriately, was an uprooted soul. Lean, sinewy Markos Vafiades, like many other Greek Communists, was a refugee from Turkey. In 1922, he was caught up in that melancholy trek to his Greek "homeland" where he had no home, known as the "exchange of populations" after the Greco-Turkish War. Other Communist leaders were spawned in that tragic migration. Nicolas Zachariades, father of Greek Communism; Demetrios Partsalides, who became head of the Communist-front EAM; Petros Roussos, who became editor of Rizospastis, principal Communist newspaper in Greece; Roussos' petite, intense wife Chryssa Hadjivassilou, who now likes to think of herself as Greece's Ana Pauker.
Urge to Boss. "I became an orphan too early," Markos told a Russian correspondent last week. He was one of seven children. His father, a schoolteacher in the village of Tossia in Asia Minor, where Markos was born 42 years ago, died when Markos was eleven. For the next few years he worked in a grocery, served as a carpenter's apprentice. Markos was 16 at the time of the great trek of 1922. For a year he peddled oranges in Constantinople, ran messages, barbered. He lived mainly on money sent by an uncle in New York.
In 1924 Markos went to Kavalla in northern Greece, a tobacco center where many wretched fellow refugees from Turkey had gathered. Markos joined the Tobacco Workers' Union and the Communist Youth Organization. Nicolas Zacha-riades had just formally transformed the Socialist-Labor Party into the KKE (Kommounistikon Komma Ellados—Hellenic Communist Party) and brought it into the Third International. From then on Markos' life was the into-jail, out-ofjail of Balkan revolutionaries. Called up for army service, he went into the cavalry. "I managed to acquire good military knowledge," he says. He also acquired a dishonorable discharge as a Communist.
"They imprisoned me ten times," he reminisces. His last and longest imprisonment, from 1938 to 1941, began under the Metaxas dictatorship, ended under the Nazis. He escaped from the Germans in 1941, helped to organize the resistance group EAM and their army ELAS. He became kapitanos of the "Macedonian Group of Divisions"; in October 1944, as the Germans withdrew from Salonika, Markos entered the city as liberator without firing a shot. He, not the Greek resistance's commanding general, led the parade, wore the hero's laurel wreath, took the public bows. He then set himself up as regional commissar. Allied officers then in Salonika said: "He believed in running everything himself. No detail was too small, no decision too trivial to require his personal attention. He had the urge to be boss in a big way." When Zach-ariades decided to boycott the national elections of 1946 and to build up a Communist revolutionary force, Markos took to the hills.