The Red Tango

On 29 May 1945 a British Dakota brings to Athens Nikos Zachariadis, until then a prisoner at Dachau. The followers of the Left greet him like a messiah.

In the hard conditions of the time, with the White Terror raging, he professes reconciliation. Yet his choices sharpen the conflict, and the civil war — with consequences ruinous for the country — drives him and his comrades into exile.

There, fresh conflicts bring about his fall. Later banished to Siberia by the very regime to which he had devoted himself — isolated, under round-the-clock police watch — he ends his life, turning a radiator pipe into a makeshift gallows.

The Red Tango is a novelistic psychograph of the man once held to be the “god” of the Left. In its pages, fictional characters coexist with historical figures — Nikos Beloyannis; Markos Vafeiadis, commander-in-chief of the Democratic Army; and the women who loved Nikos Zachariadis, Mania Novikova and Roula Koukoulou. In cinematic fashion, events are shown prismatically, bringing to life the era that marked modern Greek history.

An epic novel about the man who came to embody the country’s greatest tragedy.