Michel Raptis

Michel Pablo (Greek: Μισέλ Πάμπλο; August 24, 1911, Alexandria, Egypt – February 17, 1996, Athens) was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis (Greek: Μιχάλης Ν. Ράπτης), a Trotskyist leader of Greek origin.

He began a lifetime involvement with revolutionary politics in the late 1930s in Greece. Drawn into the "Spartacus" faction, he represented Greek Trotskyists at the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris in 1938. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Pablo graduated from the National Technical University of Athens and continued his studies in urban planning at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was to spend much of the following decades. During the 1936 military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, Pablo was arrested and exiled in the Aegean island of Folegandros. There he was not admitted by the orthodox communists, also in exile, so he joined the company of cattle and horse thieves, who at that time were punished with exile. In Folegandros he met his future wife Elli Dyovounioti. Together they escaped from the island and later from Greece. Pablo was ill in Paris when the Second World War began. The same ill health meant until 1944 he played little part in the activities of the French Trotskyists although he was reported to have given educational classes to David Korner's Union Communiste.

By 1944 he was fully involved with the movement, and was elected the organizational secretary of its European Bureau, which had re-established contact between the Trotskyist parties. After the war, Pablo became the central leader of the Fourth International with the support of the SWP of the United States and James P. Cannon. Pablo played a key role in re-unifying, re-centralising and re-orienting the International. In 1946 Pablo visited Greece to successfully reunify the four separate Trotskyist parties. Pablo and Ernest Mandel were instrumental in these years in winning the Fourth International to a position that asserted that the Eastern European states conquered by the Soviet Armed Forces in 1944-45 had by 1948 become what they described as deformed workers' states.

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