Three years after Kostis Kornetis' Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the Long 1960s in Greece, another excellent monograph has been published with Berghahn Books, which engages with the post-dictatorial moment of the left-wing youth in Greece, specifically in the period between the collapse of the military junta in 1974 and the early 1980s. While Kornetis centered his attention more on left-wing student activism and the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the early 1970s, Nikolaos Papadogiannis investigates how left-wing collective action was framed by a variety of left-wing youth organizations throughout the 1970s, ranging from socialist, Eurocommunist, pro-Soviet, to Maoist circles. Major emphasis lies on the main socialist and communist youth organizations, the pro-Soviet Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) and the Eurocommunist Rigas Feraios (RF), whose role in shaping left-wing “youth culture” Papadogiannis is carefully uncovering in this densely written account. The author approaches the making and practicing of “youth culture” through the lens of leisure activities and sexual practices, questioning the definition of leisure as “non-obliged time” (2), and instead examining its “interconnections with politics, sexuality, and gender” (3). The author states that left-wing youth organizations were, in contrast to their right-wing counterparts, “actively engaged in the shaping” of their members' “leisure activities” (3). While the youth organizations were aiming to indoctrinate “not only their members, but the entirely of Greek Youth,” the author rightfully observes that these organizations were yet “malleable entities” that became with the time gradually “involved in experimentations with the “relationship between the individual and the political collective” (16).

Furthermore, as he convincingly argues, “1974” and the end of the dictatorship constituted nothing more than a “semi-rupture,” in the sense that the mid-to-late 1970s “witnessed neither a continuation nor a substantial reconfiguration” of leisure and sexuality (277–78). The author also objects to a clear-cut definition of a unified, left-wing youth culture, and instead stresses the increasing heterogeneity of leisure activities among the left-wing youth. Throughout the book, the reader becomes engaged with a great diversity of leisure activities that were revolving around theater, writings, discussions, tourism, music, cinema, sexuality, student clubs, bars and pubs, and cultural associations. What might be considered the only “distinctive element” of “youth culture” was the young people's longing and search for “sociality, namely the formation of [young] peer groups” (8).

Against this more general background, the author elaborates in the first two chapters how left-wing organizations slowly gained ground, especially since the 1960s, and actively engaged with impulses from the western “1968” counterculture and Soviet-type/Chinese youth cultures. Papadogiannis carefully outlines how Greek left-wing youth organizations in the post-authoritarian years succeeded in influencing broad masses to embrace left-wing cultural activities (279) and in spreading a Greek “progressive” youth culture (27), and a “progressive” way of life (65). In Chapter 3, the author outlines how left-wingers not only consumed “youth culture” but became significantly invested in the late 1970s in producing “progressive” cultural products, such as literature, theater, music, and cinema. Chapter 4 reproduces the ongoing diversification and de-politicization of the left-wing youth movement and their leisure pursuits in the late 1970s (189). The parties' institutionalized “youth culture” became more and more contested, as Papadogiannis uncovers in Chapter 5, in so far as partly humorous and sarcastic, spontaneous protest questioned the need for “progressive” leisure (225). The last chapter concludes with an analysis of how criticism of dominant sexual norms invaded left-wing collective reflection in the 1980s by means of which the relationship between sexuality, gender, and leisure could slowly become redefined (252).

While the volume tends at times to present slightly too much detail on the very many and differently-profiled youth organizations and overwhelms the reader with too many acronyms, the author offers a very unconventional insight into the complex power struggles over and among the Greek youth. He masterfully switches between the institutional perspective of the former youth organizations, speaking through an extensive body of written sources, and the perspectives of their formerly young members, voiced through over 50 oral testimonies, recorded in Athens and Thessaloniki. At times, it would have been valuable to introduce a bit more biographical background as well as longer narrations of the interviewees to get a better grasp of the biographical origins of their political orientation and leisure activities. Yet, only due to the author's ambitious attempt to interweave normative-collective discourses with narrations of individual experiences does the reader slowly comprehend how “leisure pursuits” could turn into “a ‘serious fun,’” that is, an individual yet collective experience of leisure and pleasure in post-dictatorial Greece (278).