Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (58 page)

With the coming of the refugees, the city acquired a new workforce, desperate for jobs, expecting help now not from its communal or religious leadership as in Ottoman times, but rather from the highly bureaucratic if disorganized state. The Greek government turned itself into a major employer, and the number of civil servants rose. But it found itself too in the middle of a series of increasingly bitter conflicts between workers and management. To the north the Bolsheviks were triumphant, and a new vocabulary of
agitatsia, lockoutarisma
and
provocatsia
started to be heard. For interwar Salonica was the cockpit of violent class struggle and a powerful labour movement built on the foundations laid by the old Workers’ Solidarity Federation. Venizelos and his generation, one-time revolutionaries, now became guardians of what they themselves called “the bourgeois status quo.” Labour militancy threatened the authority of the state, brought the city to a standstill, and eventually provided the pretext for the establishment of an anti-communist dictatorship in 1936.

A C
ITY OF
W
ORKERS

A
FTER HALF A CENTURY
of industrialization, Salonica had become a city of workers. Two-thirds of the labour force of 105,000 recorded in 1928 worked for someone else; another 25,000 were self-employed or assisting relatives. But this was a world of tiny operations and small family firms, not giant combines or industrial plants. The manufacturing sector was mostly producing foodstuffs, textiles and leather goods just as under Abdul Hamid. Only 5000 men belonged to firms of any size. The rest were shoemakers, bakers or confectioners—much prized in the city—tailors, metal-workers and carpenters, odd-job men who owned carts and, later, cars. Heavy industry was virtually non-existent and regular wages the privilege of a few.

Too many hands and changing tastes made most of the old trades precarious and uncertain. Jewish
hamals
still shouldered huge loads for shoppers and traders, and carters stabled their oxen and horses in the burnt-out ruins in the fire zone. But furriers, fez makers, organ-grinders and tinsmiths were on the way out. The lamplighters, street-butchers, sellers of salted fish and Albanian
halvades
slowly disappeared; so did the wandering vendors of
salep
and lemonade. Refrigeration and electrification eliminated the ice-sellers of Hortiatis. As a result, state-run soup kitchens at the bottom of the slump were feeding as many as fifty thousand people daily.

As early as February 1922, before the flight from Asia Minor had begun in earnest, businessmen in Athens were already being alerted to the fact that refugees in Salonica, unable to find work there, were “ready to come to Piraeus, Athens or other cities in Greece to work in factories at a wage advantageous to their employers.” Thousands of men were sitting in the
kafeneia
waiting for a job to turn up. “I turned right and left looking for work. There was nothing,” recalled Petros Pasalides, a shepherd from Konya in Asia Minor. He worked on the railways for a time, tried the mines, then fell in with a market gardener. Over the next few years he tramped all over Greece, partly driven by the need to earn his living, partly in the hope of finding relatives and “compatriots” from his birthplace.
²

Some refugees set themselves up as traders, pedlars and shopkeepers. But once mild inflation gave way to prolonged deflation the real value of their debts increased and many faced bankruptcy. Not coincidentally, there were fires at the oil storage depot of the Asiatic Oil Company in 1923, while another the following year in the commercial district destroyed sixty shops. A wary bank manager in the city noted in 1929, at the onset of the real commercial crisis, that there were “frequent, almost daily fires in shops, several of which proved to be not casual.” The local Lloyd’s agent reckoned that 90% were caused deliberately.
³

Politicians in far-away Athens, having fought so hard to conquer the New Lands, were too busy to pay much attention to their economic needs: they were overwhelmed by the refugee issue, and obsessed by constitutional arguments between republicans and royalists. The horizons of the “political world” in the capital seemingly petered out before they ever reached the city. Few Salonican firms were listed on the Athens Stock Exchange and no minister of national economy was ever appointed from Macedonia: the paucity of figures from northern Greece in the upper echelons of power in Athens was a constant local complaint. An International Fair was founded in the city in 1926, but although it provided publicity for regional firms, its benefits were limited, its flashy kiosks good for a day out but little more. The city’s businessmen felt marginalized and ignored.
⁴

Tobacco processing was still the most important “industry,” just as it had been in Ottoman times. By 1940 at least one hundred companies, mostly Greek but including Jewish, American and Armenian houses, were based in Salonica and traded in the preparation and export of tobacco leaf, and in a few cases, the manufacture of cigarettes themselves. For a brief period, the market boomed, and in the mid-1920s
production soared well above the levels known in former times. But Greek tobacco was an expensive commodity, and as world prices began to fall, they took tobacco with them. By the end of the decade, the sector was in serious crisis.

Even before the slump kicked in, the well-organized tobacco workers were the main source of labour militancy in the city. The Tobacco workers Federation of Greece fought hard over pay, working conditions, unemployment benefits and the regulation of exports and in 1919 they won the right to an eight-hour day. These gains were the fruit of more or less constant struggle with employers—demonstrations, shut-downs, factory occupations and lock-outs, punctuated by clashes with police and army. In August 1924, workers intercepted deliveries of tobacco bales to the docks which exporters were trying to ship before they had been processed: the bales were cut open and the bundles of leaf tossed into the sea. Three months later, strikers occupied the Florentin warehouse and fortified it against the police. Even though the Federation was forcibly disbanded in 1930 as a communist front, the power of its members was far from broken, as would be seen most impressively in their nationwide strike six years later.

But the tobacco workers were not alone and in the 1920s the city was hit by a wave of stoppages. After a nationwide general strike in August 1923, the government responded nervously by temporarily dissolving
all
unions. The following June the docks came to a standstill. Key services such as water, railways and trams were also hit; printers, leatherworkers, bakers, butchers and even civil servants took industrial action while the Union of Ex-Servicemen shouted pacifist slogans and got into fights with the nationalists of the Macedonian Youth movement. In short, throughout these years the city streets saw incessant protest, and the White Tower, the Pantheon cinema and even the Skating Palace—anywhere in fact where orators could harangue a sympathetic crowd—became the scene of violent clashes. In the eighteenth century, it had been the plague that brought Salonica to a standstill; in the early twenty-first, it was traffic. But for much of the twentieth, it was the strikes and demonstrations of organized labour and mass politics.

Ironically, Venizelos himself had encouraged the formation of a nationwide Greek union movement in the hope that it would back him up at the peace talks in Paris after World War One. It was his wartime administration that had founded the Workers’ Centre in Salonica. But the wave of strikes and demonstrations which hit the country
alarmed him deeply. From 1919—with Greek troops committed to the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war—pro-government newspapers called for labour unions to be banned, and Venizelist army officers formed units against the “Bolsheviks” and “anarchists” at home. The workers themselves meanwhile were moving rapidly to the left; in Salonica the Workers’ Centre became the focus of socialist life. With a claimed twelve thousand workers under its command, the large centrally located two-storey villa had its own library and reading room, and acted as a kind of college for working men and women, where the victories of the Red Army in Poland, Ukraine and Siberia were chalked up daily on a large blackboard. In 1922, a gun battle in the street outside ended with a gendarme shot dead and after the Centre was searched for weapons, the police announced that they had uncovered thirteen boxes of explosives with which “the Bolshevik anarchists” planned to attack the authorities and “set up a state like that which the Communists have in Russia.” Later it transpired that the explosives were in fact fireworks, left behind by Serbian army engineers who had used the building during the war.
⁵

C
OMMUNISTS AND
A
NTI
-C
OMMUNISTS

T
HE
W
ORKERS’
C
ENTRE
testified to the potency of a Marxist sub-culture in a city where large numbers of workers were increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as the rule of the “bourgeois state.” Many were illiterate but deeply conscious of the value of self-improvement. “Take a newspaper not a coffee in the mornings,” the
Workers’ Voice
reminded comrades. The
Biblioteka Sosyalista
distributed Marx and Engels in Judeo-Spanish among the Socialist Workers’ Youth groups in the poorer quarters down by the rail stations. The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) set up its Lenin Upper School in the Café Byzantion, another pro-labour hangout with a conveniently large basement. When the First of May was celebrated in the Beshchinar Gardens, thousands of onlookers were treated to poetry recitals, gymnastic displays and speeches.

By this point, the authorities were afraid that Salonica had turned into a major centre of communist activity in the Balkans. The police—mostly peasant boys recruited from the villages of Crete and the Peloponnese—were suspicious of the multi-ethnic character of local labour activism. “No separate activity is carried on by Jewish, Armenian,
Turkish, French, Bulgarian and Greek communists,” agents observed. “All work together for the cause.” Jews as well as Orthodox Greeks were put under surveillance and imprisoned or sent into internal exile, just as they would be during the civil war too. Armenian activists were deported to Soviet Armenia “since they scandalously propagandize among their co-nationals for communism and give significant backing to Greek and Jewish communists.” The refugees too were widely accused of being responsive to the communist “virus,” much to the annoyance of their leaders.
⁶

As old anxieties about the activities of Kemalist and Italian fascist agents subsided international communist policy itself gave ample new grounds for police fears. In Moscow in 1924, the Comintern, hoping to promote revolution in Bulgaria, adopted the Bulgarian Communist Party’s slogan of “a united and independent Macedonia” (one which would unite the lands taken by Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria in 1912–13 in a larger communist Balkan federation). The Greek Communist Party publicly declared its adherence to the new line and although many party members resigned in protest, the party itself stuck to this deeply unpopular position for a decade. As a result, in the following year high-ranking party cadres were put on trial for treason as “autonomists.” In the minds of the authorities, they had become pro-Bulgarian and anti-Greek protagonists in a new round of the Macedonian Struggle. Far-fetched claims circulated in police headquarters that leading international Bolsheviks had descended from Vienna to make the Macedonian capital their base as they prepared to overthrow Greek rule. Under the shadow of the Russian revolution, the old Slav peril thus resurfaced in a new guise. “With … the development of industry, especially tobacco, the tram-drivers, docks and the railways,” noted the police in 1927, “Thessaloniki brings together a great mass of workers upon whom communist propaganda finds fertile soil, given the lack of any kind of countervailing anti-communism to forestall its attacks, and given the absence of preventative measures able to hinder the impact of the nation-destroying activity of certain rootless blind organs of the Third International and the Russian Communist Party.”
⁷

Inside the movement, however, the tensions, disagreements and limitations were unmistakable. The KKE split almost immediately after its formation into several factions who detested each other as much if not more than they detested the representatives of “the bourgeois state.” Benaroya, one of the founders of the Greek labour movement, was expelled, while rival groupings such as the
Trotskyite “Archive Marxists,” who gave priority to worker education over revolutionary activism, rejected the Comintern line over Macedonia: their fights with party members were every bit as frequent and violent as those with the police.

The party’s Macedonia policy damaged it deeply. It disturbed relations between the Salonica branch and the central committee in Athens, and led to many defections. In 1926 the party lost control of the trades union federation, and marginalized itself further by recruiting primarily factory workers and ignoring the villages. Although it did fairly well in the general elections of November 1926, winning 4 per cent of the vote nationally, and nearly 11 per cent in the city itself—which returned three of the ten communist deputies to parliament—it was a false dawn. By 1927 the Salonica branch had run out of funds. A decade later, in the critical elections of 1936, when the communist vote rose substantially over its 1926 levels in most of the country, it slipped in Salonica, the centre of labour activism. In fact, what is surprising is how limited the party’s appeal remained within the Greek working population for most of the interwar period.