Chrysa Chatzivasileiou (1904-1950)

She joined the Federation of Communist Youths of Greece (OKNE) at the end of 1924 and after a short time she began working as a typist at the Soviet embassy in Athens. During the Pangalos dictatorship (1925-1926), she worked in the instructor’s apparatus of KKE. In 1927 she joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Chrysa was a couple with the leading member of KKE, Petros Roussos, to whom she got married in 1928. In keeping with the tradition of sending cadres to Moscow for studies, Chrysa went to the Soviet capital in 1928. She learns fluent Russian and she returns to Greece in 1931.

Upon her return from the USSR, she was entrusted with the leadership of several party organisations throughout Greece. For some time around 1931 she was in Thessaloniki and her colleague A. Partsalidi gives us an insight into her daily life in the underground. “One day I met her, she was laughing, wearing a new dress and showing it to me from afar. The civil servants took it away from me”, she said. The communist civil servants, whose core was led by Chrysa, were distressed to see her in her one dress, because wearing the same outfit all the time would catch the eye of the informers. So, they made sure that with their meager resources she got a new one. Chrysa lived in a tiny little room in the Jewish mahalla, near the fairgrounds. She was freezing and starving like everyone else. But she never lacked for books, she dug them out here and there. She always had a new book on her table to read.”

Chrysa Chatzivasileiou was the first woman to be elected a member of the Central Committee of the KKE at its 6th Congress in December 1935. During the same period, she participated in the theoretical – enlightening work of the party, was responsible for the Kommounistiki Epitheorisi [Communist Review], the party’s theoretical magazine, led the group of tram drivers in Athens and was a contributor to the newspaper Rizospastis.

During the Metaxas dictatorship, he was arrested in 1937 in Thessaloniki and exiled for two years to Ai Stratis and then to Kimolos. In exile she was a chief political commissioner of the party organisation of the exiles. Maria Karagiorgi in her testimony about her exile in the island of Kimolos, in July 1940, describes Chrysa as follows: “that person who conquered me was Chrysa Chatzivassiliou. Weak physically, delicate in health (disembodied I would say), she had a face transparent you might say, on which shone all the nobility, culture and goodness of her soul. Much tormented by persecution and struggles, she had a rare prudence, humanity and maturity. She was not old in age, perhaps about thirty-five, but she was very much overwhelmed. Her great defect was her excessive sensitivity.”

After the Germans entered Greece, Chrysa and her 36 exiled comrades gradually escaped from Kimolos in April 1941. They arrive in Athens and attempt to reconstruct the party and its organisations. Due to the dictatorship that has preceded it and the operations of the security forces that have penetrated the party, it is in a state of disintegration. As part of the reconstruction of the party in the period May-June 1941, he was a member of the New Central Committee along with P. Roussos, P. Karagitsis, and A. Tsipas. The main concern was the initiative for the creation of a resistance movement against the occupation forces. The product of these processes was the creation of the major resistance organisation, the National Liberation Front (EAM).

At the 8th plenary session of the KKE, which met in Athens in early January 1942, Chrysa was elected a member of the Political Office of the KKE and it was the first time that a woman participated in the highest body of the party.  From October 1941 to February 1942, she was sent to help rebuild the party organisation in Thessaloniki. Subsequently, and after the Second Panhellenic Conference of the KKE, -in December 1942- Chrysa took over the Organisational Office of the party and became secretary of the Party Organisation of Piraeus. At the same time, she was responsible for the organisation of the Peloponnese region.

In the context of the organisation of the resistance struggle, Chrysa moved mainly within the party, undertaking organizational work and participating in the highest authorities that determined the course of the resistance struggle. Thanasis Hatzis, the secretary of EAM, outlines the portrait of Chrysa at that time: “Chrysa Chatzivasileiou, one of the special women of the old guard of the KKE, gathered the love and esteem of all communists. Ideologically and politically composed, seriously equipped theoretically, with considerable experience from her long service in the labor movement and in the party, tireless from work, reserved and kind, she ran from organisation to organisation, transmits her enthusiasm and tries to give uniform direction, unity and uniformity to the diverse organizational structures of the original party formations in Athens and Piraeus at first, in Macedonia and the Peloponnese later. She is the party organizer’.

In the elections of the Political Committee for National Liberation (PEEA), which was the first time that Greek women had the right to vote and to be elected, Chrysa was one of the five women elected as an ethnic councilor representing the Piraeus region. Chrysa points to the crucial presence of women in the resistance struggle and how this influenced their general position in society. In her book, Chrysa states: ” The EAM, right from its foundation in its very first declarations, shouted its respect for women’s rights and called on them to fight for our national freedom. This equality of rights and obligations brought women into all spheres of the national liberation war, from the simplest jobs of welfare and child support to the most dangerous missions. The people’s authority established by the EAM, now officially recognizing women’s human rights, declared her an equal citizen of the state. Thus, the Greek woman governed within the framework of self-government. She organized entire sectors of the national liberation struggle and in many of them women’s action and initiative dominated almost monopolistically. In this unrestricted egalitarian action, the Greek woman of 1941-1945 was crushing her own feeling of inferiority inherited from long years of slavery.”

Immediately after the retreat of the Germans from Greece, Chrysa Chatzivasileiou was the main speaker at the central rally organized on the liberation of Piraeus on 13 October 1944. The joy of liberation did not last long as the tragic events of December – the armed conflict between the guerrillas and the British – followed. In the party meetings held for the cessation of the fighting, Chrysa recommends moving conciliatory and find a political solution.

Apart from the efforts for intra-party organisation, Chrysa is also engaged in the formation of the mass women’s movement. She was one of the founding members of the Panhellenic Women’s Union (PEG) in August 1945, a mass left-wing women’s organisation staffed by progressive women with gender equality as a key demand. As a member of the Greek delegation – along with the literary artist Dido Sotiriou, Fani Simitis and Georgia Paligianopoulou – Chrysa Chatzivasileiou represented Greece at the founding congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Paris in November 1945. However, due to bureaucratic obstacles, the Greek delegation was delayed in arriving at the congress, and as a result, they only made it to the closing sessions. Dido Sotiriou describes this: “I went once to Paris, in ’44-’45, with Chrysa Chatzivasileiou of the Political Bureau. She was very kind. They took out papers at the last minute. […] It was the founding of the Women’s World Federation, where we didn’t have time to talk, because the plane we were going on crashed in a storm […]. We ended up making a bumpy landing at the Spanish border that almost got us caught. And they came and took us by cars to go to a hotel and in the morning, we left for Paris. And when we got there, we went to everything that happened afterwards, still some work was not finished, but we weren’t on the day of the conference.

Shortly afterwards, the PEG took the lead in the creation of the secondary body, the Panhellenic Women’s Federation (POG), which was formed in February 1946, with 35 members – women’s associations. At its founding congress, which met in May 1946 in Athens, there was a massive presence of women from all over Greece, with the participation of representatives of about 160 women’s and mixed unions. Chrysa participated on behalf of the KKE at the beginning of this short-lived movement, the course of which was halted by the coming of the Civil War.

Chrysa Chatzivasileiou was also the first president of the Panhellenic Democratic Women’s Union (PDEG), the organisation of the women of the KKE, which was formed in the mountains in October 1948. In the international context, Chrysa, representing the newly established organization, went to Budapest to participate in the Second Congress of the PDOG convened in 1948. Chrysa Chatzivasileiou was elected a member of the Executive Committee of the International organisation. In her speech as a representative of the Greek delegation, she referred extensively to the Civil War and the participation of women in it, describing the profile of the Greek woman fighter of the DSE. (…) 15% of the strength of the Democratic Army today consists of women. And among them there are young girls who have taken part in at least 100 battles. (…) Our women know how to die heroically with courage and they even go so far as to defeat even this death (…). This is the new type of woman in Greece that the popular democratic and reformist struggle of the DSE and the Democratic Government is shaping. It shapes the fighter who, with her merit, her resistance and her courage in the face of difficulties, eliminates the medieval prejudices about women cultivated by fascism in our country.”

However, apart from her participation in the women’s movement, she continued to participate in the political sphere at a time when conditions were particularly critical, since the civil war had begun. Having a more moderate stance politically, Chrysa did not agree to the creation of the Democratic Army of Greece – the guerrilla army of the KKE – in December 1946. She initially remained illegal in Athens and, in collaboration with Nikos Ploumpidis, took over the political leadership of the illegal KKE organisations in the capital. However, in May 1948, she moved to the mountain of Grammos where the KKE leadership was based and was accused of not making sufficient efforts to supply the Democratic Army with party members from Athens and Piraeus. The suffocating pressure in the capital and the enormous difficulties of moving around under the law had made living conditions in the cities extremely difficult, especially for a high-ranking official like Chrysa Chatzivasileiou. It was a period when arrests, imprisonment and sometimes executions of dissidents were a daily occurrence.

Disagreeing with the political choices of the Zacharias leadership, in January 1949, at the 5th Plenary Session of the party, Chrysa was relieved of her duties under the pretext of her failing health. He was diagnosed with leukemia and was initially transferred to Bulgaria for medical treatment. This was followed by the defeat of the Republican Army and the retreat of the guerrillas as political refugees in Eastern European countries.

In the autumn of 1949, Chrysa was transferred to a hospital in Budapest and her health deteriorated, while at the same time she was in disfavor with the party to which she remained loyal throughout her life. While on her deathbed in preparation for the Third Conference of the KKE in October 1950, she was almost forced to write an open letter to the members of the conference, self-criticizing her course and accepting the mistakes attributed to her by the leadership. Her husband P. Roussos, having distanced himself from Chrysa because of political disagreements, does not even visit her in the hospital where she is hospitalized.

She died almost forgotten on 14 November 1950 in Hungary. Because she was in party disfavor, her death was announced in an unsigned simple note on the last page of the magazine Foni tis Gynaikas [Voice of Woman] – a magazine of women political refugees – in December 1950. In 1975 her remains were transferred to Athens and interred in the Athens First Cemetery.

Chrysa was a special case of a female communist, who was far from the average female party member. However much the KKE’s positions defended gender equality, in practice, she was the first and only woman to rise to the upper echelons of the party since the interwar period. With a coherent political discourse and meaningful participation in internal party affairs, Chrysa Chatzivasileiou dedicated her life to the ideals of the struggle and remained with the party that set her aside when she disagreed politically, standing firm to the end. She was a person of great culture, with a moderate political attitude, who was involved in a wide range of internal party activities. She participated in decision making, was involved in guiding party organizations and in organizing the women’s movement. She also translated works of classical Marxism and regularly wrote articles in party publications from the interwar period onwards.