2025 State Prize for Testimony-Biography-Chronicle-Travel Literature

“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Starting from this phrase by Marx and Engels, Kostis Karpozilos explores the history of twentieth-century Greek communism, focusing on the “real movement” of its people –the communists themselves– and tracing its multiple geographies: Thessaloniki of the Federation in the years of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state; Constantinople and the networks through which a new generation of revolutionaries made their way to Moscow before eventually settling in Greece; the villages, neighborhoods, and cities of refugee settlement that became sites for the formation of Greek communism; the Greek and Greek-speaking communities of the Soviet Union, the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, and the Paris of the Popular Front; Egypt and Palestine during the war years; Bucharest and Tashkent, the two capitals of the expatriate communists in the aftermath of the Civil War; and the capitalist metropolises of the postwar West, the shared destination of migrants, students persecuted by the dictatorship, and the new currents of democratization that reshaped Greek communism.

Bringing together six pivotal chapters in the history of Greek communism through the lens of transnational history, this book narrates and seeks to interpret the movement of its protagonists –those who felt that class constraints and the regime of exploitation were not the self-evident condition of existence– these lives of revolutionary wandering that could not be contained within a single national territory.