a cornerstone of the KKE's vital contribution to the National Resistance movement against the Fascist occupiers (1941-1944). After the German invasion of Greece in 1941, Nazi Germany transferred him to the Dachau concentration camp from where he was released in May 1945. Returning to Greece, he reassumed the leadership of the KKE from Georgios Siantos, the acting general secretary of the KKE since January 1942. The bloody Dekemvriana had just ended with the communists' defeat. Zachariadis now declared his political intention for the KKE to fight for people's democracy by elections. Civil War However, Zachariadis' plans changed. He attributed his change of stance to the White Terror. That made him decide to boycott the 1946 Greek legislative election, a starting point of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). Zachariadis conducted the military operations of the communist Democratic Army of Greece, which was formed to install a socialist people's democracy in Greece. He ordered the ELAS commander Markos Vafiadis to abandon guerrilla warfare tactics and adopt a strategy of conventional warfare. According to Vafiadis, that had a strongly negative effect on ELAS. Vafiadis was expelled from the KKE for challenging Zachariadis and kept under house arrest in Albania, accused of being a British agent. During the Greek Civil War, Zachariadis ordered also the assassination of various left-wing opponents of the KKE, particularly in Athens. However, Joseph Stalin had made a deal with the Western Allies that Greece would be considered part of the western sphere of influence after the war and was opposed officially to any communist seizure of power. He ordered the KKE leadership to co-operate with the British military when it landed in Greece in 1944 and refused to supply any assistance to the KKE when they took up arms against the royalist government imposed by the British. Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia initially supported the KKE but withdrew the support after the break between Tito and Stalin in 1948. The military intervention of the United Kingdom and the United States, combined with the lack of external support from Stalin or Tito, led to the defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece in 1949. The KKE leadership and the remnants of the Democratic Army fled into exile to the Soviet Union and other communist countries. Postwar The leadership of the Communist Party found refuge in Tashkent. However, after Stalin's death in 1953, Zachariadis clashed with the new Soviet leadership, as he