Greece, Relations with

GREECE, RELATIONS WITH

Ideas originating in Greece, a country in southeastern Europe that occupies the southernmost part of the Balkan Peninsula and is bordered by the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Ionian seas, first influenced Russian culture as early as the tenth century, during the golden age of Kievan Rus. Prince Vladimir (978–1015) adopted Eastern Orthodoxy, which reflected his close personal ties with Constantinople, a city that dominated both the Black Sea and the Dnieper River, Kiev's busiest commercial route. Adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Church had long-range political, cultural, and religious consequences for Russia. The church liturgy was written in Cyrillic, and a corpus of translations from the Greeks had been produced for the South Slavs. The existence of this literature facilitated the East Slavs' conversion to Christianity and introduced them to rudimentary Greek philosophy, science, and historiography without the necessity of learning Greek. Russians began to look to the Greeks for religious inspiration and came to regard the Catholics of Central Europe as schismatics. This tendency laid the foundation for Russia's isolation from the mainstream of Western civilization.

Seeking warm-water ports, Russian explorers were attracted to Greece. No part of mainland Greece is more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from water, and islands constitute about one-fifth of the country's land area. By the nineteenth century, as the Russian Empire expanded to the southwest, its population grew more diverse and began to include Greek Orthodox peoples.

After Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905, the government began to take a more active interest in the Balkans and the Near East. The decline of the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe") encouraged nationalist movements in Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria. In 1912 the Balkan League, which included Greece, defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War. A year later, the alliance split, and the Greeks, Serbs, and Romanians defeated Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War. Russia tried to extend its influence over the new nations. Greco-Russian relations became strained when Russia sided with Serbia in the conflict between Serbia and Greece for control of Albania.

Greece fought on the side of the Western allies and Russia in World War I, and similarly on the side of the Allies, including the Soviet Union, in World War II. In the immediate aftermath of the war, tensions arose between the legitimate Greek government and the Soviet Union. The Greek resistance movement during World War II, the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its army (ELAS), were dominated by the Communist Party. When the Greek government-in-exile returned to Athens in late 1944 shortly after the liberation, the communists tried to overthrow it, and in the ensuring civil war they were supported by Josef Stalin's USSR and (more enthusiastically) Tito's Yugoslavia. Britain funded the non-communists, but when the economic commitment exceeded its postwar capabilities, the United States took on the burden with the Truman Doctrine. Thanks to massive military and economic aid from the United States, which came just in time, the communists, who had established a provisional government in the northern mountains, were ultimately defeated.

Relations between Greece and the USSR cooled with the former's admission to NATO in 1952. Beginning in the mid-1950s, NATO's southeastern flank experienced periodic cycles of international tension. The problem in Cyprus, where the population is split between Greek-Cypriots (approximately 78%) and Turkish-Cypriots (18%) led eventually to a Turkish invasion of the island on July 20, 1974, to protect the Turkish-Cypriot minority.

Nevertheless, Greek-Soviet ties established during the 1980s not only survived the political upheaval that ended the Soviet Union, they even improved. In 1994 Greece signed new protocols with Russia for delivery of natural gas from a pipeline to run from Bulgaria to Greece. In 2002, during its fourth presidency of the European Union (EU), Greece repeatedly called for improved relations with Russia. At the Russia-EU summit in Brussels on November 11, 2002, Prime Minister Costas Simitis emphasized the importance of implementing the Brussels agreement on the Kaliningrad region, an enclave on the Baltic Sea that would be cut off from the rest of Russia by the Schengen zone when Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. Greece also prepared a new strategy for greater cooperation between Russia and the EU, which is Russia's largest trading partner.

See also: balkan wars; kievan rus; orthodoxy; route to greeks

bibliography

Gerolymatos, André. (2003). The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond. New York: Basic Books.

Gvosdev, Nicholas. (2001). An Examination of Church-State Relations in the Byzantine and Russian Empires with an Emphasis on Ideology and Models of Interaction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Joseph, Joseph S. (1999). Cyprus Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: From Independence to the Threshold of the European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Koliopoulos, John S. (1999). Plundered Loyalties: World War II and Civil War in Greek West Macedonia. New York: New York University Press.

Prousis, Theophilus. (1994). Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

Johanna Granville