Agis Stinas
Agis Stinas was a Greek politician and political activist. He was an executive of the Communist Party of Greece and then an executive of various small Trotskyist parties. During the Axis occupation of Greece, he promoted a revolutionary defeatist position. He was the political mentor of Cornelius Castoriadis.
Biography
He was born in the village Spartylas in Corfu. In 1918, he became a member of the Socialist Workers' Party of Greece, later renamed the Communist Party of Greece. He took part in the Greco-Turkish War as an active party member. He was sentenced to death, but instead he was imprisoned. During the 1926 Greek parliamentary election, he was a parliamentary candidate in the Corfu region. In 1931, he was expelled from the party.In 1932–33, he was a member of LAKKE party. In 1935, he joined the Bolshevik–Leninist Organization of Greece – OMLE.
During the 1935 Greek coup d'état attempt, he was a critical supporter of the democratic army officials. The same year, he joined the Communist Internationalist Union of Greece – KDEE, a splinter group of OMLE. In 1936, he promoted the need for a general strike. Later, he was arrested by the 4th of August Regime and jailed in Acronauplia. In prison in 1937, he formed the opinion of not supporting the USSR in the next world war.
In the early 1940s, with the assistance of the far-right metropolitan bishop Panteleimon, he managed to escape prison. In 1942, he founded the Trotskyist party KDKE with comrades Yannis Tamtakos and Cornelius Castoriadis, who rejected the Communist-led National Liberation Front and promoted revolutionary defeatism. In 1946, he tried to stop his party from working with the Communist Party, and accused the Communist Party as a stooge of the Soviet Union.
In his memoirs, Stinas wrote that he was a member of the Fourth International until 1947. In April 1948, Stinas was represented by Cornelius Castoriadis in the Second World Congress of the FI. After the Greek Civil War, he worked against United Democratic Left.