opposed the new direction taken by the Soviet Communist Party under Nikita Khrushchev. In May 1956, during the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee of the KKE, the Soviet Communist Party intervened to expel Zachariadis from his post of General Secretary. In February 1957, Zachariadis was also expelled from the KKE, as were many of his supporters. Zachariadis spent the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, initially in Yakutia and later in Surgut, Russian SFSR. In 1962, desperate from the devastating conditions of his exile, he somehow managed to reach Moscow. There, he visited the Greek Embassy and asked to be transported to Greece, where he wanted to stand trial for his actions. Whether or not his request was taken into consideration is not known. Immediately after he left the Greek embassy, he was arrested by the Soviets and was taken back to Surgut. There he committed suicide, aged 70, in 1973. According to a few of his followers, he was executed. On the base of documents, declassified from the archives of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, it has been confirmed that Zachariadis committed suicide. In December 1991, just a few days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Zachariadis' remains were returned to his homeland of Greece, and he was given a funeral, which gave his supporters the opportunity to honour him. He is buried in the First Cemetery of Athens. In 2011, a National Conference of the Communist Party of Greece fully rehabilitated Zachariadis as General Secretary of the KKE. That was in line with the KKE's general political reorientation since the collapse of the Soviet Union; the party has adopted the view that the Soviet Communist Party of the Soviet Union embarked on a revisionist line after Stalin's death and Khrushchev's takeover. References External links Nikos Zachariadis Archive at marxists.org Collected works of Nikos Zachariadis 1903 births 1973 deaths 1973 suicides 20th-century Greek politicians 20th-century people from the Ottoman Empire People from Edirne People from Adrianople vilayet Greek atheists General Secretaries of the Communist Party of Greece Stalinism Anti-revisionists International Lenin School alumni Dachau concentration camp survivors Democratic Army of Greece personnel Exiles of the Greek Civil War in the Soviet Union Suicides in the Soviet Union Burials in Athens