16. The 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the restoration of the constitutional monarchy (the Second Constitutional Era), which, like the 1906 Iranian Revolution and the 1911 Chinese Revolution, developed as one of the aftershocks of the 1905 Russian Revolution, failed to solve any of the fundamental problems that would soon bring about the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire became a semi-colony of the imperialist powers in the last period of the nineteenth century and its territorial loss accelerated. It lost today’s Libya in the Italo-Turkish War and a large part of its European territories in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, resulting in a massive Muslim migration from the Balkans to Anatolia. The ruling elite of the Ottoman state, which was an important target of the imperialist powers during World War I, joined the war on the side of German imperialism with the dream of regaining the territories they had lost in the previous years.

17. The reactionary ambitions of the Ottoman ruling elites, far from preventing the inevitable disintegration of the empire, accelerated it and led to the death or maiming of millions of people. The great territorial losses in the Balkan Wars alarmed the Istanbul government concerning the Armenian people, who had experienced various pogroms and whose demands for autonomy and independence had come to the fore in previous decades. Following the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman army sustained a major defeat at the hands of the Russian Empire in Eastern Anatolia, where a large Armenian population lived in 1914-15. Then came the Gallipoli campaign, which began in 1915. The Turkish government of the nationalist Committee of Union and Progress responded by enacting the “Deportation Law” under the pretexts of “collaboration with the enemy” and “rebellion.” It then subjected Armenians to forced marches and deportation toward the Syrian Desert, which led to a genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were shot by soldiers and gangs or died of disease and starvation. This was accompanied by the systematic confiscation of Armenian property, which continued after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. According to the 1914 Ottoman census,^[1] there were approximately 1.2 million Armenians living in Anatolia, but as a result of this ethnic cleansing, the Armenian population was reduced to 77,000 in the 1927 Turkish census.[2]

18. With the decisive defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the war, the imperialist powers began to redraw the borders in the Middle East and to divide the region among themselves. The territory of the Ottoman Empire, which before the war had been reduced to a semi-colony of German imperialism, was occupied by British, French, and Italian forces for colonization. However, the main state that the nationalist forces led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk would directly confront in the war of independence between 1919 and 1922 would be Greece, which invaded Anatolia as a proxy force of British imperialism.

19. The victory of the War of National Liberation in Anatolia and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 were a direct byproduct of the October Revolution of 1917. In the midst of the catastrophe of war, the Bolshevik regime established in Russia inspired workers and oppressed people all over the world and gave impetus to their struggles. Without this groundbreaking event in world history and without the direct support of the Soviet government, the victory of the national liberation movement in Turkey would not have been possible. Turkey also became an important testing ground for Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. The entire experience of Turkey would prove to be a very powerful vindication of this theory in the negative.

20. In 1920, the Socialist Labour Party of Greece-Communist (SEKE-K, renamed the Communist Party of Greece, KKE, in 1924), which had declared its allegiance to the Third International, tried to mobilize opposition among Greek soldiers through anti-occupation propaganda, identifying the imperialist-backed reactionary character of the Greek invasion of Anatolia. Among the communists arrested during this heroic internationalist struggle was Pandelis Pouliopoulos, later to become one of the founders of the Greek Trotskyist movement.[3]

21. Under conditions where the Ottoman government in Istanbul was collaborating with the imperialist powers in their death throes, resistance organizations against occupation began emerging in many parts of Anatolia. At the same time, the developing national liberation movement was united in the Grand National Assembly, proclaimed in Ankara on April 23, 1920, under the leadership of Atatürk. The young Soviet Republic, led by Lenin and Trotsky, came to the aid of this movement.

22. Atatürk’s bourgeois nationalist leadership led the independence movement in Anatolia to victory by maneuvering between the imperialist powers and Soviet Russia, and even between the imperialist powers divided among themselves. Each of the latter was grappling with severe political, economic, and social crises at home and the specter of proletarian revolution in the aftermath of World War I and the October Revolution. In this process, the Kemalist leadership followed an extremely pragmatic path that sought to reconcile the contradictory interests of the social classes and strata it depended on. While claiming that the caliphate and sultanate were being rescued, it did not hesitate to paint itself in “red” colors in negotiations with Moscow. However, from 1922 onwards, steps such as the abolition of the Sultanate, the proclamation of the Republic, the Abolition of the Caliphate, and the granting of equal rights to women represented historic advances that had to be embraced by the working class.

23. The war of independence in Turkey can only be properly understood in the context of international and historical conditions, not in the context of national and conjunctural ones. The approach of the Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919 under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, to nationalities and colonies constitutes a critical foundation in this respect.

24. Viewing the October Revolution in 1917 as the beginning of the world socialist revolution and leading the Comintern as the revolutionary vanguard of the international working class, Lenin and Trotsky put forward a strategy of permanent revolution that united the fate of the proletarian revolution in capitalist centers and the revolution in the colonies. The Manifesto of the Communist International, written by Trotsky in 1919, declared:

The emancipation of the colonies is conceivable only in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class in the metropolises. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers, and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only in that hour when the workers of England and France, having overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau, will have taken state power into their own hands. Even now the struggle in the more developed colonies, while taking place only under the banner of national libera­tion, immediately assumes a more or less clearly defined so­cial character. If capitalist Europe has violently dragged the most backward sections of the world into the whirlpool of capitalist relations, then socialist Europe will come to the aid of liberated colonies with her technology, her organization, and her ideological influence in order to facilitate their transition to a planned and organized socialist economy.

Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hour of your own emancipation![4]

25. At the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, Lenin, speaking on behalf of the “Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions,” stated that the characteristic feature of imperialism was that “the whole world, as we now see, [is] being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces.” He continued:

The vast majority of the world’s population, over a thousand million, perhaps even 1,250 million people, if we take the total population of the world as 1,750 million, in other words, about 70 per cent of the world’s population, belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies as, for example, Persia, Turkey, and China, or else, conquered by some big imperialist power, have become greatly dependent on that power by virtue of peace-treaties.^[5]

26. Lenin made the assessment that “In the present world situation following the imperialist war, reciprocal relations between peoples and the world political system as a whole are determined by the struggle waged by a small group of imperialist nations against the Soviet movement and the Soviet states headed by Soviet Russia.” He added, “Unless we bear that in mind, we shall not be able to pose a single national and colonial problem correctly, even if it concerns a most outlying part of the world.”[6]

27. The complex character of the national liberation movements developing in colonial and semi-colonial countries was one of the important topics of discussion of the commission. Lenin’s following assessment of the nature of the colonial bourgeoisie was to be confirmed by numerous examples:

There has been a certain rapprochement between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often–perhaps even in most cases–the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, while it does support the national movement, is in full accord with the imperialist bourgeoisie, i.e., joins forces with it against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes.[7]

28. The perspective of Lenin and Trotsky, which also guided the Bolshevik policy on the national question in the Soviet republics, was based not on the creation of independent bourgeois nation-states, but on the international socialist revolution and the creation of a world socialist federation. As Lenin stated:

Wherever conditions permit, they [Communist Parties] should at once make attempts to set up Soviets of the working people.

… The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of economic development is inevitable for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal–in that event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development.[8]

29. The perspective outlined by Lenin in his speech was elaborated in the resolution adopted at the Second Congress. Based on Lenin’s draft theses, it once again emphasized the strategy of international revolution and underlined the impossibility of the complete elimination of national oppression under capitalism:

From these principles it follows that the entire policy of the Communist International on the national and colonial question must be based primarily on bringing together the proletariat and working classes of all nations and countries for the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landowners and the bourgeoisie. For only such united action will ensure victory over capitalism, without which it is impossible to abolish national oppression and inequality of rights.[9]

30. “In regard to the more backward States and nations, primarily feudal or patriarchal or patriarchal-peasant in character,” the resolution resolved that “All communist parties must support by action the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries,” and declared that “resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries which are not genuinely communist in communist colours.”[10]

31. The Communist Parties were given the task of supporting the national movement in the colonies while never compromising their own political and organizational independence:

The Communist International should collaborate provisionally with the revolutionary movement of the colonies and backward countries, and even form an alliance with it, but it must not amalgamate with it; it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is only in an embryonic stage.[11]

32. The international background against which the war of national liberation in Turkey developed was an international revolutionary workers movement set into motion by the Russian Revolution. In 1921, at the Third Congress of the Communist International, the situation was described as follows:

The month of March 1917 witnessed the overthrow of Tsarism. In May 1917, a vehement strike movement broke out in England. In November 1917, the Russian proletariat seized the power of Government. The month of November 1918 marked the downfall of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies. In the course of the succeeding year, a number of European countries were being swept by a powerful strike movement constantly gaining in scope and intensity. In March 1919, a Soviet Republic was inaugurated in Hungary. At the close of that year the United States was convulsed by turbulent strikes involving the steel workers, miners, and railroad workers. Following the January and March battles of 1919 the revolutionary movement in Germany reached its culminating point shortly after the Kapp uprising in March 1920. The internal situation in France became most tense in the month of May 1920. In Italy we witnessed the constant growth of unrest among the industrial and agrarian proletariat leading, in September 1920, to the seizure of factories, mills, and estates by the workers. In December 1920, the Czech proletariat resorted to the weapon of the proletarian mass strike. March 1921 marked the uprising of workers in Central Germany and the coal miners strike in England… In Asia and in Africa, the movement aroused and intensified the revolutionary spirit of the great masses of the colonial countries.[12]

33. “But this powerful revolutionary wave did not succeed in sweeping away international capitalism, nor even the capitalist order of Europe itself.”[13] This was not because the working masses were not ready to fight for revolution, but because of the betrayal of the social democratic parties of the Second International:

… During the two and a half years following the war, the proletarians of various countries have exhibited their self-sacrifice, energy, and readiness for the struggle to such an extent as would amply suffice to make the revolution triumphant, provided there had been a strongly centralized international Communist Party on the scene ready for action. But, during the war, and immediately thereafter, by force of historic circumstances, there was at the head of the European proletariat the organization of the Second International, which has been and remains up to date, the invaluable political weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie.[14]

34. At the time when British, French, and Italian imperialism emerged victorious from World War I and the Greek and Armenian forces they were using as proxy forces seized the Straits and much of Anatolia, the major powers were divided among themselves over disputes over imperialist distribution. This was accompanied by their looming defeat in the Russian Civil War—which they had launched to destroy the young workers state by invading Soviet territory and supporting the counterrevolutionary White Army—as well as the threat of social revolution in their own countries.

35. Under these conditions, the formal occupation of Istanbul by the Entente in March 1920 and the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Ottoman government in August 1920, which provided for the dismemberment of Anatolia and the cession of a small territory to Turkey, gave a powerful impetus to the national liberation movement which was developing across the country. This national independence movement developing in an oppressed, semi-colonial country would also play a progressive role by serving as a barrier to a powerful imperialist attack on the young workers state, the heart of world socialist revolution, through the Straits and from the south of the Soviet republics.

36. In the same period, in Turkey, as elsewhere, various communist organizations inspired by the October Revolution were developing. The underground Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), founded in Ankara in the summer of 1920, declared its allegiance to the Third International and stated its goal as follows:

A Communist, i.e., Bolshevik, party has been established in Turkey in order to ensure that the world revolution, which will provide prosperity and happiness to all humanity, takes place in Turkey as soon as possible and to realize socialism. The TKP will struggle with all its might for the liberation of all oppressed nations and classes from the oppression of capitalism and imperialism.[15]

37. Turkish communists in the Soviet republics who worked directly with the Bolsheviks organized the founding congress of the TKP in Baku in October 1920, with the participation of delegates representing 15 communist circles. Mustafa Suphi was elected as the chairman of the TKP. In the program adopted at the congress, which was also attended by representatives of the Comintern, it was explained that industrial capitalism, urbanization, and the proletariat were underdeveloped in Turkey, and it was stated that “in Turkey, which has set foot in bourgeois democracy in its present form and style of government, the class conflict is experiencing its primitive period of development.”[16]

38. On the national liberation movement developing in Anatolia, the TKP stated the following:

Today, the participation of the poor classes in the national uprising against the victorious and plundering Entente states in Turkey is characterized by fighting together with the “enemy of the enemy,” i.e., fighting together with the profiteering and usurping petty bourgeoisie within the country.

Thus, the continuation of this conflict directed against the imperialists on the one hand, and the spread of social revolution in Europe on the other, had a significant impact on the development and strengthening of class consciousness, helping the movements in Turkey to take on a social character and preparing the conditions for the establishment of a republic of workers and peasants councils on the basis of socialism.[17]

39. The TKP’s program stated the following on the national question in Turkey:

The party accepts the formation of a republic of workers and peasants councils belonging to various nations and prefers the federation method on the basis of ‘free unity of free nations.’ In order to avoid bloody conflicts between nations whose working and peasant classes are also caught up in the temptation to live completely separate and independent lives, the Party points to the settlement of such questions by plebiscite or universal suffrage.[18]

40. The TKP Central Committee, in its “Report on the First Congress,” emphasized that they supported the Ankara government in accordance with the Comintern resolution, but that it was their main duty to preserve the party’s independence, stating:

In accordance with the decision of the Second Congress of the Third International to support and strengthen national movements against imperialism, the [TKP] congress supports the Anatolian movements but considers the preservation of the party’s independence as one of its most important and fundamental tasks.[19]

The TKP decided to move its headquarters to Turkey in order to “help deepen this movement against imperialism in Anatolia, and on the other hand, to prepare the ground for the achievement of workers power, which is the main goal and aspiration of the working people.”^[20] The subsequent massacre of the TKP leadership in the Black Sea on January 28-29, 1921, and the persecution of communists expressed the bourgeoisie’s urge to violently crush any independent political threat from the working class under conditions of the developing world socialist revolution.[21]

41. While supporting the national liberation war, the TKP continued to expose the desire of the bourgeoisie to compromise with imperialism and their inability to complete the democratic revolution. The resolution adopted at the congress convened in August 1922 stated:

The TKP will provide all possible assistance to the national liberation movement, to the armed struggle at the fronts. In addition, it will constantly explain to the broad masses of the people that the bourgeoisie wants to extinguish the national liberation movement by compromising with reactionary circles, with foreigners, with imperialists, and to prevent this war from rising to a deep democratic revolution, thereby exposing the true face of the bourgeoisie.[22]

42. The Ankara government’s persecution of the communists, which continued throughout the war, accelerated with the decisive defeat of the British-backed Greek forces in August 1922 and the development of conditions for a certain rapprochement with the Western imperialist powers (agreements had already been reached with France and Italy). The Kemalist regime considered that the reconciliation with imperialism and the establishment of bourgeois power required the violent suppression of the workers movement and the communist movement, which was still in its early stages of development but which had the Soviet Union and the Third International behind it.

43. The “Open Letter to the Communists and Working Masses of Turkey,” presented by TKP delegate Orhan (Sadrettin Celal Antel) and unanimously adopted at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, stated that the workers and peasants of Turkey had provided “the living example of a revolutionary independence movement,” but that the nationalist bourgeois government in Ankara was “ready to come to terms with the imperialists for the sake of certain concessions in favour of the Turkish big bourgeoisie.”[23]

While protesting the persecution suffered by the TKP and the closure of the workers organization in Istanbul, the letter stated that “The Communist Party of Turkey has always supported the bourgeois national Government in the struggle of the working masses against imperialism.” It added, “The Communist Party of Turkey even proved its readiness, faced by the common enemy, to make temporary sacrifices in regard to its programme and ideals.”^[24]

The Open Letter stated the following about the Ankara government:

They want to get rid of the class-conscious representatives of the working class and the peasantry, who will demand the fulfillment of the promises of democratic reforms made in order to win our support, and to appear at the Lausanne conference as a truly bourgeois Government. … In preparation for an understanding with imperialism, the nationalist Government wants to annihilate your real representatives and separate them from your friends outside.^[25]

Then it declared:

The Fourth Congress of the Communist International protests emphatically against this barbarous act and considers it its duty to declare solemnly that it is willing to support any government or political party which does not play the part of a gendarme of imperialism, which will continue the fight against imperialism and reaction, and will bring about democratic reforms in favour of the Turkish working masses.^[26]

44. At the same congress of the Comintern, Karl Radek, of the Bolshevik Party, declared in his November 23 speech:

…even in this moment of persecution, we tell the Turkish Communists: Do not in the present situation forget the immediate future. The task of defending Turkish sovereignty, which has great international revolutionary importance, is not over. You should defend yourself against your persecutors, you should return blow for blow, but you should understand that historically the moment for the liberation struggle has not arrived; you will still have to travel a considerable way with the revolutionary forces that are even now only beginning to crystallise out in Turkey.^[27]

Radek’s comments on China represented a more explicit revival of the Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution, an approach that would come to dominate the Comintern and form the political basis for the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. He said:

The first task of the Chinese comrades is to focus on what the Chinese movement is capable of. Comrades, you must understand that in China neither the victory of socialism nor the establishment of a soviet republic is on the agenda. Unfortunately, even the question of national unity has not yet been historically placed on the agenda in China. What we are experiencing in China is reminiscent of the eighteenth century in Europe, in Germany, where the development of capitalism was still so weak that it had not yet given rise to a single unifying national centre.^[28]

This perspective was diametrically opposed to the Theory of Permanent Revolution that guided the October Revolution of 1917. Trotsky’s growing opposition to the Comintern’s policy in China under Stalin in the following years must have been strongly informed by the experience in Turkey.

45. In April 1923, one of the leaders of the TKP, Şefik Hüsnü, who represented the tendency towards class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, stated that three main tendencies were now possible in the country: 1) the Kemalist tendency, “represented by those who made the present revolution and are determined to keep it alive,” 2) the reactionary tendency, tied to feudalism and the monarchy, and 3) the socialist tendency, which aimed to deepen the revolution for the benefit of the poor masses of workers and peasants and the middle classes and complete it with a social revolution based on common property. Hüsnü argued that the Kemalist government and the socialists should act “hand in hand for a long time” against “reaction” and “confront the evil forces as a single body.”^[29]

46. However, the Turkish bourgeoisie, by its very nature, was incapable of fulfilling the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. It was not possible for this class to achieve full independence from imperialism, establish a democratic regime, provide a radical solution of the land question to the detriment of feudalism, and resolve the Kurdish question and other minority problems. Nor could they recognize the basic rights of the working class, such as the right to organize, engage in collective bargaining, and strike.

These tasks could only be fulfilled by the proletariat taking power as part of the international socialist revolution. As Leon Trotsky explained in 1929 in The Permanent Revolution:

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.^[30]

47. The solution to the problem of minorities by the Turkish and Greek ruling elites, who attempted to consolidate their bourgeois nation-states after the war, was forced population exchange. More than 1 million Greeks were deported from Turkey to Greece and about 500,000 Turks were deported from Greece to Turkey.

48. By proclaiming the dominance of the Turkish ethnic identity, the Kemalist government also set out to oppress other Muslim minorities, especially the Kurds. The comments in a report of the Eastern Section of the Comintern, submitted to Lenin in January 1922, contained an accurate observation:

The Kurdish uprising [during the independence war], the Armenian massacre, the beating of the Greeks are the main stages of the national question in Turkey. The government of the Grand National Assembly [in Ankara], however, claims that there is no national question in Turkey. The slogan of the Sivas Congress was: There can be no right to self-determination, only local autonomy. It seems that these pathetic developments will continue to adorn the pages of history for a long time to come.^[31]

49. The Kurdish people, estimated to make up around one-fifth of the population at the time, were not granted autonomy. Their cultural and political rights were violated and they were subjected to violent repression. In Ankara, there was also room for Kurdish feudal lords who accepted the power of the Kemalist regime, which represented an alliance between the emerging Turkish bourgeoisie and the big landowners. In the 1920s and ’30s, Kurdish uprisings that challenged this and mobilized poor peasants were bloodily suppressed and the Kurds were forced to relocate within the country. Today the Kurdish people in Turkey, as well as Syria, Iraq, and Iran, confront the same issue because the bourgeoisie was and remains incapable of solving this international problem peacefully and democratically.

50. The establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 was the continuation of the bourgeois revolution of 1908, which introduced multiparty politics under the Ottoman parliament in a two-tier electoral system and established the Second Constitutional Era. While progressive steps were taken, such as the abolition of the Sultanate and the Caliphate, the goals of “national unity” and “secularism” remained incomplete. What was at stake was not consistent secularism, but the control and use of Islam by the newly established state. On the same day that the Caliphate was abolished in 1924, a state-affiliated Directorate of Religious Affairs was established.

51. The roots of the authoritarian and antidemocratic character of today’s regime in Turkey also date back a century. While the parliament established in 1920 had a multi-political factional character during the war period, this gave way to a one-party (the Kemalist Republican People’s Party, CHP) regime that lasted for over two decades after the establishment of the Republic in 1923.

52. Clearly oriented towards Western imperialism but forced to maneuver between the imperialist powers and the Soviet Union for its partial independent capitalist development, and confronted with rival bourgeois factions as well as an emerging working class and communist movement, while being unable to establish complete military and political control in Kurdistan, the Kemalist regime’s main response to the fundamental social problems was state repression.

53. As Leon Trotsky would later explain:

Surrounded by decaying capitalism and enmeshed in the imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semi-fictitious, and its political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people—such is the regime of the “People’s” party in Turkey, the Kuomintang in China; Gandhi’s regime will be similar tomorrow in India.^[32]