Eleftherios Stavridis

Eleftherios (Lefteris) Stavridis (; 1893–1966) was a Greek journalist and politician. He was initially an activist of the Left, serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece in 1925–26, before being expelled from the Party in 1928 and undergoing a rapid ideological transition to the far right, becoming an ardent anti-communist. He participated in the fascist National Union of Greece, collaborated with the Metaxas dictatorship and the Germans during the Axis occupation of Greece, and served as a prominent anti-communist propagandist for successive right-wing governments after the Greek Civil War, until his death.

Early life Eleftherios Stavridis was born in the town of Silivri, near Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, in 1893. He became an orphan at a young age, and his uncle, Nektarios Karabounis (later sainted by the Eastern Orthodox Church) became his guardian.

He later went to Constantinople, where he went to school at the Great School of the Nation. After finishing school, he left the Ottoman Empire and went to Athens, where he studied at the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School of Athens, where his uncle was headmaster. Appointed as a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, he was called up for military service in the mobilization of 1915, being sent to Drama, where he was cut off following the occupation of the area by the Bulgarian army in 1916. In 1917, along with the rest of the city's male population he was moved to a concentration camp in Pleven in Bulgaria, where he remained until the capitulation of Bulgaria at the end of World War I. At his return to Greece, he was appointed to the Eastern Macedonia Directorate at Drama. Over the next few years Stavridis remained a member of Kafantaris' party and a close collaborator of Kafantaris himself, but at the same time he was actively involved in the foundation of a far-right and pro-fascist group, the National Union of Greece (EEE). Stavridis later collaborated with the dictatorial 4th of August Regime of Ioannis Metaxas, and during the Axis occupation of Greece served as director of the Akropolis newspaper.

In 1946, Stavridis went to Thessaloniki, where his only child, a daughter, was born. With the outbreak of the Greek Civil War later in the year he returned to Athens, where he lived in hiding in a hospital until the end of the war in 1949. In that year he returned to Thessaloniki, where he wrote for the local newspapers Makedonia and Ellinikos Vorras. In the virulently anti-communist climate of the post-Civil War years, Stavridis soon became a major government-sponsored propagandist against the banned KKE and communism in general. In 1952 he was named director of the Thessaloniki Radio Station, and in 1953 he returned to Athens as advisor to the Chief of the Hellenic Army General Staff, Lt. General Solon Gikas, and as instructor on ideology and the history of the KKE in the National Defence Academy, the War School and the Hellenic Gendarmerie Academy.

From 1958 until 1964, under the National Radical Union governments of Konstantinos Karamanlis, Stavridis was appointed advisor to the Ministry of the Presidency of the Government.

Dismissed from his post as adviser by the Centre Union governments, in 1966 he was recalled to the post by the Stefanos Stefanopoulos government, but died on 14 May 1966, before assuming duties.