Farewell of Vasilis Papasotiriou to the legendary saboteur of Olympus Antonis Vratsanos

26 November 2008

My dear comrade and beloved friend Antonis,

Forced to stay in bed these days, I bid you the last farewell from afar.

At this moment of silence, the mountain peaks of Kissavos and Olympus, Siniatsikos and Pieria, Grammos and Vitsi, your favorite straights of the Tempi valley, bid you, the legendary saboteur of Olympus of ELAS and DSE, farewell.

The thousands of partisans of ELAS and DSE, the two hundred communists of Kessariani, the tens of exiles in Siberia and the many thousands of Greek communists from Tashkent and other People’s Republics who rose against Krushchevian revisionism, bid you farewell.

Fellow-fighter Antonis Vratsanos.

- We found ourselves together in the trenches of the Greek-Italian war against the Italian fascist invaders following the call to arms made in the historic letter of Nikos Zachariadis, the country’s chief partisan and architect of the epic National Resistance.

- We were together in the trenches of EAM-ELAS fighting, under the guidance of KKE, against the Italian, German and Bulgarian occupiers and, then, against the English imperialists.

- We found ourselves together in the ranks of the glorious Democratic Army of Greece fighting, under the guidance of KKE headed by Nikos Zachariadis, against the monarchists-fascists and the Anglo-American imperialists.

- We found ourselves together, after the retreat of DSE, in the Soviet Union of the great Stalin and in other socialist countries carrying on the revolutionary struggle in new conditions and forms in the ranks of our heroic party, the revolutionary KKE liquidated by the barbarous Krushchevian interference in 1955-56.

- We found ourselves together, since the mid1950’s, in the front line of struggle against the counter-revolutionary Krushchevian revisionism – that destroyed socialism in the Soviet Union and other countries and ruined the international communist movement – adhering to the revolutionary line of Joseph Stalin and Nikos Zachariadis whom the revisionist clique of Brezhnev-Florakis murdered in Surgut, Siberia after 17 years of exile.

My dear comrade and beloved friend Antonis,

Despite the persecutions by the Krushchevian revisionists’, you remained always a courageous, untiring and unyielding revolutionary communist until the last moments of your life; a firm and recalcitrant opponent of the Greek and international Krushchevian revisionism, who set a shining example for the new generations.

You will live forever in the history of our country and the revolutionary struggles of our workers and peasants, of our people.

Vasilis Papasotiriou

President of the Movement for the Reorganization of KKE (1918-1955) and publisher of the newspaper “Anasintaxi”.