Nikos Zachariadis (; 27 April 1903 – 1 August 1973) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956, and one of the most important personalities in the Greek Civil War. Early life Nikos Zachariadis was born in Edirne, Adrianople Vilayet, Ottoman Empire, in 1903, to an ethnic Greek family. His father, Panagiotis Zachariadis, was of petty-bourgeois origin and worked as an expert in the Regie Company, a French firm possessing the tobacco monopoly in Turkey. In 1919, Nikos Zachariadis moved to Constantinople, where he worked in various jobs, including as a soldier. It was there that he carried out his first organized work in the working-class movement. After the defeat of Greece during the Greco-Turkish War and the population exchange between the two countries, the Zachariadis family was forcibly relocated to Greece and fell into poverty. In 1922 to 1923, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he became a member of the Komsomol. He studied at various political and military institutions of the Soviet government and of the Communist International, including the International Lenin School. Political activity in Greece In 1923, he was sent back to Greece to organize the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE). Imprisoned, he subsequently fled to the Soviet Union. In 1931, he was sent back to Greece to restore order in the highly-factionalised KKE. The same year, he was elected general secretary of KKE. In 1935, during the 7th Congress of the Communist International, he was elected to its Executive Committee. In the years until 1936, Zachariadis was a successful leader of the KKE by tripling the number of its members, gaining seats in the Greek Parliament and even acquiring control of some labour unions. In August 1936, he was arrested by the State Security of Ioannis Metaxas's regime and was imprisoned. From prison, he issued a letter urging all Greeks to resist the Italian invasion of October 1940 and to transform the war into an antifascist war. Some KKE cadre members, who did not believe that the ongoing war between the big imperialist powers differed from the First World War because of the existence of the Soviet Union on the world scene, considered that the letter had been fabricated by the Metaxas regime. Zachariadis was even accused of releasing it to win the favour of Konstantinos Maniadakis and to be released from prison. Zachariadis's letter remains