Purger Purged

The young Greek who arrived in Moscow in 1928 passed all the tests in applied terror and subversion at the Lenin International School. Three years later Joseph Stalin, embarked on his drive for absolute power, made Nicholas Zachariades boss of the strategic Greek Communist Party. Inside or outside Russia in the next quarter of a century there were few more devoted Stalinists.

Brawling his way to power in 1935, Zachariades (who toughened himself by bathing in freezing water after the ancient Spartan custom) knifed a policeman to death in an Athens street fight. Next year Greek Dictator John Metaxas locked him away in a medieval prison on the island of Corfu. In prison, learning that Stalin was still honoring his pact with Hitler, Zachariades ordered Greek Communists to cease resisting the 1940 Italian invasion. When Greece fell to the Axis, the Germans shipped Zachariades from Corfu to Dachau, where the U.S. Army found him in 1945 and flew him home to Greece.

Back in Athens Zachariades resumed leadership of the Communist Party. For a couple of years he organized political support for Communist guerrillas in Macedonia, notwithstanding Stalin's promise to Churchill in 1944 that Greece would stay a British sphere in return for a British hands-off in the Balkans. With the outbreak of full-scale war between the guerrillas and the Greek army in 1947, Zachariades took to the hills. It was Zachariades' idea to kidnap thousands of peasant children and hold them hostages for the loyalty of their parents. When the U.S.-backed Greek army defeated the Communist partisans in 1949, Zachariades fled to Rumania. At Stalin's bloody-minded behest, he ordered the execution of Partisan General Markos Vafiades. Thereafter he dribbled Communist spies into Greece, whom he denounced whenever the police got on their trail.

But Zachariades' most slavish service to Stalin occurred in the period following Tito's defection in 1948. A big wheel in the vast Cominform propaganda machine, Zachariades spewed abuse on Tito, accused him of bringing about the defeat of the Greek partisans. Gimlet-eyed Tito (also a Moscow alumnus) did not forget. Last year, when Khrushchev and Bulganin came to eat crow at Tito's table, one of the first remarks made by Tito was: "Zachariades has got to go." Said Bulganin: "Don't worry. Time will take care of things." Last week time caught up with 53-year-old Zachariades. The Cominform announced that he had been found "guilty of serious political mistakes of a sectarian nature" and "incorrect Leftist policy during the Greek people's struggle during 1945-49." Dropped from the leadership (but not yet expelled from the party), Zachariades was replaced by 65-year-old Apostolos Grozos, a virtual unknown.

In Communism's purge of the purgers, Zachariades' was the first head to fall outside the Soviet Union.

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