This is, perhaps surprisingly, the first major scholarly biography of Eleutherios Venizelos, surely the most influential Greek political figure of the twentieth century, to appear in English. S.B. Chester's study (1921) was contemporary and necessarily provisional, whilst that by the Cypriot intellectual Doros Alastos in 1942 provided penetrating insights but could not be a comprehensive attempt to reconstruct the man and his context. This first volume of Michael Llewellyn-Smith's major project – skilfully meshing English and Greek-language sources - takes the story from Venizelos’ birth on 11 August 1864 through to the point where the Balkan wars of 1912-13 metamorphosed into a wider European struggle. Venizelos’ international stature, and his most critical decisions shaping the destiny of Greeks, for good or ill, still lay ahead when this volume terminates. But the essence of the man himself, not least his political nature, had already been formed.
Ll-S. is the ideal historian to engage with the subtle paradoxes involved. As long ago as 1973 he published what remains the classic account of Greece's involvement in the conflicts in Asia Minor during 1919-22. His own distinguished career as a British diplomat – much of it concerned with Greece – give a seasoned tone to his reconstruction of political and strategic events. As the author also of a study of Crete, ‘the great island’, he has a sensitivity to Venizelos’ true homeland, whose troubled and often bloody path to union with Greece constitutes more than half of the current book. In elegant, always balanced prose the author displays a knack for exuding a great fondness for Greece alongside an ability to make detached analysis. This is especially important when dealing with Venizelos, whose own ‘Greekness’ was at the same time undeniable and yet open to qualification. Those qualifications surely go to the heart of the mystery of Venizelos himself.
Any biography of Venizelos is bound to be preponderantly political given the materials available. Ll-S. makes good use of books in Greek by L. Makrakis and N. B. Tomadakis providing scarce details on Venizelos’ early years. Most poignant on the purely personal plane, and well used here, are the courtship letters between Venizelos and his wife-to-be Maria Katelzou whilst he was a student at the University of Athens. Maria died in 1894 of puerperal fever following the birth of their second child. It had clearly been an affectionate marriage. Afterwards Venizelos appears to have sublimated his powerful capacity for feeling into an exclusive passion for political engagement. Much later, during an important visit to London in December 1912, he met and later married the Anglo-Greek heiress Helena Schilizzi. What bound them from the first was a preoccupation with the Greek ‘national’ idea. But the balance of Venizelos’ thoughts and actions seem not to have been affected. By 1914 the truly personal elements in his life had become impenetrably obscured behind a veil. There, in large part, they can only remain.
That said, there is a related psychological dimension to this evolution that Ll-S. brings out effectively: Venizelos’ lack, not so much of roots, since he was quintessentially Cretan, but over time of a residual centre of gravity or equilibrium. Even in Cretan terms it was notable that he never enjoyed anything like a dominant role in the island's affairs. Suggestively, Venizelos’ most dramatic episodes in the struggle against Ottoman rule and the determining of its post-Ottoman trajectory – the supposedly revolutionary ‘risings’ in the Akrotiri peninsula during 1897 and in the White Mountain fastness of Therisso in 1905 – involved retreating into remoter districts, not remaining at the heart of local society. The veteran politician Ioannis Sfakianakis, for example, represented the essence of a Cretan world more authentically than Venizelos ever did. Perhaps, in part, he was too bourgeois and narrowly professional for that. Sfakianakis had an earthiness he lacked.
An underlying uncertainty as to position and status was only compounded after Venizelos’ move into Greek national politics after 1909. James Bourchier, the influential journalist of Balkan politics for The Times, commented on Venizelos that ‘….he knew little of Greece’. It could hardly be otherwise, since he had travelled in the country outside Athens only to a very limited extent. Perhaps more telling was the warning given to Venizelos on one occasion by a Greek collaborator that ‘You do not have so many friends that you can offend them so easily’; and throughout his later career the fact that he tried to keep Cretan confidants closest to him showed that if other Greeks were sometimes uneasy with him, he did not feel sure of them. Hence the political coalitions he forged were tactical and fleeting, lacking that personal depth otherwise characteristic of Greek political culture. Ll-S. remarks of Venizelos that for these sorts of reasons, and taking his life as a whole, ‘it could be said that he never established a settled home outside Crete or Paris.’ One has a sense after reading this book that a highly complex, almost suppressed, marginality is a key to the puzzle. The paradox is that this can be said of a leader who played such a central role in modern Greek history.
The ambiguities surrounding Venizelos’ real beliefs and purposes both in Crete and Greece perhaps have some connection to these fragilities. One of the many strengths of this book is the tracing of the highly intricate detail of Cretan developments following the Halepa Pact of 1878 and thereafter the spurts of violence in 1889-90 and after 1895-6. Venizelos did not play any prominent role before the last of these dates. Even then, though a key figure in the Halepa-Chania-Akrotiri region, he was for some while barely known in the rest of the island; and though occasionally prone to ‘raising the standard’ for union with Greece, when in fact there was no chance whatsoever of such an outcome being made to stick, Venizelos invariably emerged as a natural negotiator, happiest in a frock coat, not as a fighter.
But what did Venizelos think he was negotiating for? This remains problematical. At key moments in the struggle over Crete he chose essentially symbolic actions in a demand for union with Greece. But when it came to talking practicalities, Venizelos always focused on reforming the status quo in ways that met the immediate priorities of the Christian community under Ottoman rule; that is, with the here and now, not an idealized future. It was only the contingency of the massacre of Christians in Heraklion during September 1898, and perhaps especially the killing of seventeen British soldiers on the same occasion that created, rather unexpectedly, circumstances in which the Powers insisted on the dismantling of Ottoman administration and the departure of the Sultan's troops – punishment also for the Sultan's recent depredations against Armenians. Venizelos’ role in this crucial passage was minimal.
Suspicions of Venizelos’ true aims in some quarters only intensified under the ensuing autonomous regime. He became embroiled in a bitter political struggle with the new High Commissioner, Prince George of Greece, and his supporters. The latter believed that far from being committed to union with the Hellenic motherland, Venizelos was angling to put autonomy on a lasting basis, only with himself, not a member of the Greek royal house, at its head. The fact that Prince George remained more popular with most Cretans throughout this period indicates that the suspicions were widely shared. Again, in the end, it was the Powers who sent Prince George rather humiliatingly back to Athens, fully aware that this would benefit Venizelos’ ascent; though on his last day in the island large Cretan crowds, some sporting hefty sticks, tried to block the Prince's departure.
In the years that followed, including after Venizelos’ move into Greek politics proper, his leverage over fellow Cretans remained limited, and indeed as Prime Minister of Greece he sought to prevent Cretan deputies when they tried to take up seats in the Parliament in Athens. The greatest lesson Venizelos took from his Cretan career was the absolute necessity to stay within the parameters set by the Powers, even at the cost of national aspirations. This was the key to his own survival amidst the visceral divides of Christian Crete, and the lesson was to be constantly re-applied later on, with variable effects. Certainly, when Crete at last became part of Greece in February 1913, the climax came about as part of the wider Balkan flux, not because Venizelos or any other Greek took a binding decision for explicitly Cretan ends.
Ll-S.'s coverage of the process whereby Venizelos passed from Cretan to Greek politics following the outbreak on 14 August 1909 at Goudi engineered by a Military League is telling. Here was yet another ‘rising’ marking an important passage in Venizelos’ career of which the real import was opaque. With all the old politicians temporarily blindsided, and no obvious programme of government as such to advertise, the League turned to an outsider to validate its intervention. Venizelos was the only candidate. In coming to Athens at the League's invitation he was embodying in himself the nebulous fact that, in Ll-S's words,‘change was in the air’, and Venizelos himself the convenient emblem of a new type of politics.
The evanescence of this, however, gave Venizelos very little to work with. The speech he gave in Constitution Square soon after arrival acquired mythical status, but its pronouncements were oblique. Instinctively he fell back, as he had in Crete, on tinkering with the status quo. Far from pitting himself against the royal house, he worked co-operatively with it, and ironically found himself closer to old King George I than to the restless Crown Prince. The vitriol surrounding the language question in particular indicated the limits of any new governance. Ll-S makes a strong case for Venizelos here, arguing that he was a demoticist at heart but realized that the road lay through an adaptation of the purist katharevousa. Yet at the time some felt betrayed, as others had in Crete before: ‘he retracted on a vital question’ was how one previous supporter put it. From reading this account one is struck by the extent to which Venizelos was hamstrung by the circumstances in which he arrived close to power in Greece. It was the only way he could ever have made such a transition, but it left him with a muddied sense of direction for the future and little capacity to act independently.
The primacy of external policy dictated by events from 1911 onwards provided a coherent focus for Venizelos’ actions. To this degree Greek circumstances resembled those in other countries, by no means only in the Balkans, where prospects of war veiled internal deadlock. For one thing, it brought the Powers into the Greek equation more insistently than ever. Venizelos felt more confident playing on their sympathies than he did at weaving between Greek factions where his footing was less assured. Increasingly this meant one Power in particular: Britain. Venizelos was brought up learning French, and had then, at his father's encouragement, turned to German. To him English was a Johnny-come-lately. Nonetheless, one of the characteristics of his final years in Crete had been fruitful interaction with successive British consuls. Ll-S. traces this shift adeptly, dwelling especially on the connection he forged with the Liberal ministers Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George in London during December 1912 - January 1913. This was to pay dividends, though ultimately one lesson of the earlier Cretan story that there was only so much distant naval power could do to help you, when push came to shove, on land did not fully lodge in Venizelos’ political imagination.
As Ll-S. clearly illustrates, the critical insight that Greece ‘could not be left behind’ as Serbia and Bulgaria girded themselves to assault the Ottoman rump in the Balkans, only intensified the very themes of agonizing choices and alleged betrayals that had already marked Venizelos’ career. His searing focus on gaining Salonica in the ensuing military operations against Turkey, and on achieving a ‘balance’ between Balkan successor-states – that is, on what seemed achievable and sustainable – meant abandoning Greek communities in eastern Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace. The author quotes Philippos Dragoumis’ outburst that at this point Venizelos displayed ‘a complete lack of national feeling’. That Venizelos was subject to such tirades, however unfairly, in parts of the Greek public realm was to be important. Meanwhile it was ironic that the disappearance under British naval oversight of the Sultan's flag over Suda Harbour on 13 February 1913, and thus the final liquidation of Ottoman ‘suzerainty’ over Crete – so hotly contested over many years, and so much a part of Venizelos’ formative experience – passed off with an almost eerie quiet on the margins of a wider struggle pivoting on Macedonia and Thrace, regions which had once mattered little to him.
It is such fractures and discontinuities, often unsettling, in Venizelos’ life that stand out in Ll-S's masterly biography. There is perhaps a certain unifying logic that such an engrossing volume therefore ends just when Venizelos, and Greece itself, entered a turbulent era – a National Schism that was to define Venizelos’ later career and profoundly shape the life of the country. The second volume will be eagerly anticipated, but meanwhile the work already constitutes a major addition to the historiography.
