The KKE, KNE, and Resistance fighters’ organizations held dozens of events around the country to commemorate the Day of the Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples, which culminated on 9 May.

In Athens, a mass event was held at the monument of the Soviet soldier in the region of Kallithea. Aleka Papariga, member of the CC of the KKE, delivered a speech, noting among other things that “ (...) The Second World War was imperialist both on the part of Germany and its allies and on the part of Britain, France, and the USA. Both sides aimed to preserve at least the achievements acquired in the First World War and prevent the redivision of markets and territories in favour of Germany. The USSR acceded to the military alliance with Britain and the United States but it had nothing to do with the relentless imperialist competition. The USSR, its leadership and its people, had to defend the world’s first workers’ state and join forces for the defeat of fascist Germany, which was extended in territorial terms, and the liberation of the peoples of Europe. The struggle of the peoples against foreign occupation had a class and liberating character. (…) The war launched by the USSR, the CPs, and the national liberation and anti-fascist movements was just. Today, the struggles for the rights to life and labour rights, the contemporary needs of the peoples against the bourgeois political power, the struggles for worker’s power, for socialism, against foreign occupation and imperialist involvement are just. The fact that there was an alliance between the USSR, USA, and Britain did not mean that the unrelenting contradiction between them and the class struggle seized to exist, in the territory where the war spread and in every country (…) In the programme of the KKE we clarify that the Party and the workers’–people’s movement can in no case show trust and be under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, even when it leads the struggle against the fascist occupation; it must preserve its independent initiative and organized struggle, without cooperating with bourgeois political powers. The struggle against imperialist war, either of an aggressive or defensive character, must be included in the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power. This line was reaffirmed in the victorious October Revolution. Without the Bolsheviks’ line, the revolutionary situation would not have led to the establishment of the first workers’ state (…).”

10.05.2022