The documents of the left of Ottoman socialism and the Communist Party of Turkey which we present below are not only of immense importance to the resurrection of the communist tradition in the Near East, but have an international significance to all who study the history of our party.

Although the documentary evidence of the left’s existence is limited to twenty five years (1909-34), this period was one where numerous major historic events, starting with the 1908 revolution and including the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan Wars, World War 1, the Armenian genocide, the emergence of the national independence movement against the occupations of parts of Turkey by the Entente, the victory of Mustafa Kemal against the Greeks and internal reactionary revolts, the Greek-Turkish population transfer, the consolidation of Kemalist power and the suppression of consequent Kurdish revolts took place.

For this reason, we categorized the documents according to time period and will deal with the particular circumstances the documents we are presenting were written while introducing them separately.

Although the transcription of these documents, as well as various others we used in our study of the history of the left in Turkey, have been published in various Turkish sources, mostly thanks to the Comintern archives, no current has ever claimed the tradition which broadly produced these texts as its own.

Before going into the history of the left and the documents themselves, we felt it necessary to give some general information on the situation that lead to the development of capitalism and the consequent emergence of socialism in the Ottoman Empire.

The end of the 18^th century found the Ottoman Empire a well-developed yet stagnating feudal monarchy ruling over vast territories. Through its relationship with the West, capitalism begun to expand into and develop within the Empire at the turn of the century. The bulk of the bourgeoisie emerged from the extremely large and influential non-Muslim minorities of the Empire, who were directly linked to Western capital and trade. They had been traders and shopkeepers before and certainly were not the most important section of their communities but their status rapidly increased as they enlarged their businesses and capital in an Empire where the main source of riches was still the land.

Factories started to emerge in cities. The increasing power of the non-Muslim bourgeoisie lead to the creation of schools to teach positive sciences even in remote villages. New ideologies like liberalism and nationalism spread. In turn, peasants begun to immigrate to the cities, forming the bulk of the newly born working class.

Soon, the rulers of the Ottoman state were faced with an alarming situation. First, they tried to repress this unwanted development using suppression but this only incited the flames of nationalism and lead to wars of national liberation, many of which were successful in creating new nation states (independence of Greece in 1829, Bulgaria in 1876 and Serbia in 1878). Nevertheless, the number of remaining non-Muslims, such as Armenians, Greeks and Jews and more importantly their weight within the Empire’s newly born industrial bourgeoisie remained very significant.

Western capitalism joined local calls for reforms. At the same time, the Ottoman bureaucracy was beginning to find the solution to the failures of the Empire in its attempts to compete with European states in the previous centuries in modernization in technology, ways of management, industry and science. They too begun to defend the introduction of capitalism to the Ottoman Empire and even bourgeois democratic reforms. After the 1830s private industries rapidly started replacing artisans among Muslims too. In the face of the pressure of the pressure of bourgeoisie, bureaucrats and military officers, the monarchy issued the Imperial Edict of Reorganization in 1839 and declared the First Constitutional Regime in 1876. The appearance of capitalist relations lead to class struggles between thousands of recently proletarianized peasants and the newly emerging bourgeoisie. Protests in the factories begun as early as the 1800s. Initially the most common action of the workers movement in the Ottoman Empire was sabotage of the means of production. Eventually such acts were eclipsed by strikes. The first recorded strike in the Ottoman Empire occurred in 1863, in the coal mines of Ereğli, but strikes became widespread from the beginning of the 1870s, culminating in 1876.

Industry was developing rapidly during this period and many experts and workers were sent out from countries like England, France and Italy. Foreign workers went on strikes together with native non-Muslim and Muslim workers. Thus, native workers with no experience of strikes could struggle together with and benefit from the experiences of European workers.

Sultan Abdulhamid II who would rule the Empire with an iron fist for decades responded with a wave of repression against workers struggles in 1878, making strikes a rare occasion for a while. Still, it would turn out that repression could not prevent the development of the workers movement forever.

Initially, socialism emerged in the Ottoman Empire among separate nationalities. The first of such organizations was the Revolutionary Hunchak Party, which was launched by Eastern Armenian students such as Avetis Nazarbekian and Ruben Khan-Azad in Western Europe with the intention of organizing in the Ottoman Empire. In 1888 Hunchaks published their maximum and minimum programs, the former being socialism and the abolition of private property, the latter being the national liberation of Ottoman Armenia. As can be seen, their program was not dissimilar to other parties of the Second International at the time:

     «The present social system is based on injustice, oppression and slavery. This organization, based on economic slavery, can develop only among the owners of power who believe in the truth of their fists, who plunder the working class and thus create inequality and injustice in human relations. This inequality is manifested in all spheres of life, economic, political, social and material. A small minority of humanity has seized and consolidated power and acquired social and political privileges at the expense of the sweat and blood of labor power.
     «Private property is based on the slavery of all humanity in its various forms. This is the fundamental principle and the main characteristic of the minority that rules the world today.
     «Only socialist organization can remedy this deplorable and unjust situation by establishing and protecting the direct power of the people, by giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the regulation of social affairs. The socialist system truly defends the natural and undeniable rights of the people; it promotes the full development of all the powers, all the abilities and possibilities of each individual under various forms; it organizes all social and economic relations in peace, and is the true expression of the will of the people.
     «In accordance with these fundamental beliefs, the Hunchak group is socialist».
     «The Armenian people in Turkish Armenia today live as a community in chains of political and economic slavery. Under the direction of an economically bankrupt government, they are oppressed by various direct and indirect taxes, which double or triple with each successive financial crisis. Their land is constantly attacked by the government and the products of their labor are plundered by both the state and private individuals. Trapped in these conditions, the people work and produce only to feed the government and the insatiable classes».
     «In order to lift the people out of their poverty, to set them on the right path, and to enable them to realize the ultimate goal of socialist organization, it is imperative, first and foremost, as short-term goals, to establish a broad-based democracy, political freedom and national independence in Turkish Armenia».

In 1889, the first Hunchak organizations emerged in the Ottoman Empire after Ruben Khan-Azad moved to Constantinople. In 1890 the Hunchaks participated in the formation of another Armenian organization, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks), which was made up of socialist and anti-socialist factions. The program of the new organization defended some aspects of socialism without naming it. The unity lasted six months. By 1891 it had turned out that the anti-socialists were at the helm of the Dashnaks and the Hunchaks declared they had nothing to do with this organization.

In the meanwhile, in 1891 the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party, founded earlier around Dimitar Blagoev on orthodox Marxist positions, organized the first socialist organization in Ottoman Macedonia lead by Vasil Glavinov, the Union of Revolutionary Social Democrats of Macedonia. The organization’s position on the national question was similar to that of the Revolutionary Hunchak Party. In 1893, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, an armed national liberation movement emerged in Ottoman Macedonia and Macedonian socialists started participating in its activities. By 1898, the Macedonian socialists had changed their evaluation of the Macedonian national movement, condemning the expansionist ambitions of Bulgaria in Macedonia. Blagoev’s formulation of a Balkan Socialist Federation was applied instead, without abandoning the idea of Macedonian national independence. In 1894-5, the Ottoman Workers Society, the first workers organization of the Muslim population, was formed by arsenal workers in Tophane, Constantinople. The organization, influenced by the Paris Commune, and hoping to spread the Communist Manifesto, aimed to organize the workers and incite them to rise against Sultan Abdulhamid II. Following a year of activity, the leadership were arrested and the organization dispersed. In 1901-2, the founders of the Ottoman Workers Society returned to Constantinople and made an attempt to regroup. These efforts were met with great interest and many discussion meetings take place with the aim of re-founding the organization, but the leading militants were again arrested and the organization repressed.

At the same time, the newly emerged socialist movements of non-Muslim nationalities continued to confront the national question.

In1896, two factions emerged in the Revolutionary Hunchak Party, the traditional socialists lead by Nazarbekian who controlled the party center, and the anti-socialists. The latter group split from the party by organizing a separate congress, and the Hunchaks rejected practices such as mass demonstrations and armed actions, emphasizing instead the socialist doctrine.

Nevertheless, the Hunchak themselves had already become too moderated for more class based Armenian socialists. In 1898, the Marxist Armenian Workers Group, on the left of the Hunchaks, was founded in Tbilisi, lead by Gevorg Gharadjian (Arkomedes), one of the founders of the Revolutionary Hunchak Party and writers of its program, and Karekin Kozikian (Yessalem) from Ottoman Armenia. The new organization had close ties with Georgian socialists. In 1900-1901 the Marxist Armenian Workers Group published an illegal publication, Banvor (Worker), which was strongly critical of the Dashnaks as well as the Hunchaks, and proposed that only the working class could solve the Armenian question. The organization was eventually destroyed by police repression. In 1903, Stephan Shaumyan, a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, arrived in Tbilisi and organized the League of Armenian Social Democrats with the remnants of the Marxist Armenian Workers Group.

Lenin welcomed its formation in his text titled On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social-Democrats where he quotes new group’s following positions approvingly:

     «In its activities, the League of Armenian Social-Democrats, as one of the branches of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party which extends the network of its organizations far and wide over the entire expanse of Russia, is in complete accord with the R.S.D.L.P., and will fight together with it for the interests of the Russian proletariat in general, and of the Armenian proletariat in particular».
     «The attainment of the socialist ideal, is, in our opinion, conceivable neither through the working class' efforts in the economic sphere nor through partial political and social reforms; it is possible only by completely smashing the entire existing system, by means of a social revolution, to which the political dictatorship of the proletariat must be the necessary prologue».

The same year, due to the pressure of the new organization, a distinct left faction based on the Caucasus, lead by Nazarbekian and Khan-Azad and arguing that the members in the Caucasus should join the RSDLP while the party continued the struggle in the Ottoman Empire, and a more nationalistic faction based on the Ottoman Empire emerged in the Revolutionary Hunchak Party. In 1905, the left faction of the Revolutionary Hunchak Party split and joined the RSDLP. The leaders of the Hunchak left did not side with the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, but some Hunchak organizations in cities like Yerevan and Baku joined the Bolsheviks. The remaining, Ottoman based Hunchaks renamed themselves as the Social Democratic Hunchak Party.

It would not be soon before the Ottoman Hunchaks too would feel the pressure from the left. In 1906, the internationalist left wing of the Armenian socialist movement focused on the Ottoman Empire regrouped around the paper Yerkri Tzayn (Voice of the Country), launched in Tbilisi in the same year. Among the leaders of this group was Kozikian of the Marxist Armenian Workers Group. The paper opposed any collaboration with the Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist opposition movement, and called for all Ottoman workers to organize together. In contrast, in 1907 the Dashnaks joined the Second International and at the same time formed an alliance with the Turkish nationalist Committee of Union and Progress, the most major Young Turk organization.

The Bulgarian and Macedonian socialist movements were also confronted with the same questions. In 1900, a right wing faction, more moderate in its socialism and more nationalistic, emerged in Bulgarian and Macedonian socialism against Blagoev’s leadership. In 1903, the left and right wings of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party split into the narrow and the broad factions. The right opposed the left’s policy of appealing to the proletarian base, refusing to cooperate with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies and organizing as a narrow party of militants. Macedonian narrows, lead by Glavinov, completely distanced themselves from the broads and the national movement.

In 1905, Macedonian narrow socialists established the Social Democratic Workers Organization of Macedonia and Adrianople, which, like the Armenian left, was opposed to any collaboration with the Young Turk movement. At the 1908 Congress of the Narrows, it was declared that:

&     «The Congress of the (Narrow) BSDLP… wishes that the proletariat of Turkey will continue its struggle for the abolition of the absolutist regime and for the complete emancipation of the proletariat of Turkey, and that it will achieve complete victory in this struggle. The proletariat of Turkey can attain its complete emancipation only through its own class organization, under the banner of socialism, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the international social democratic forces».

In 1908, a military mutiny known as the Young Turk revolution toppled Sultan Abdulhamid II and the Second Constitutional Regime was announced. The revolt was followed by a period of mass strikes. At least 119 strikes take place in cities including Constantinople, Thessaloníki, Smyrna, Beirut, Mytilene, Varna, Samsun, Skopje, Bitola, Alexandroupoli, Aydın, Afyon, Gevgelija, Kavala, Drama, Eskişehir, Ankara, Konya, Ereğli, Zonguldak, Manisa, Adrianople, Svilengrad, Mitrovica, Zbekche, Damascus, Riyaq, Aleppo, Balıkesir, Diyarbakır, Hareke, Xanthi, Adana and Jerusalem. Workers from nearly all sectors of the Ottoman proletariat took part. The total numbers participating has been estimated to have been above 100,000. The narrow socialists were the most important political tendency to take an active part in the strike wave./p>

In 1909, the Narrows founded the Socialist Center of Constantinople, lead by the Bulgarian Teodor Sivachev, the Greek Zaharias Vezestenis as well as the Armenian Karekin Kozikian. Roland Ginzberg, one of the leaders of the left of the Communist Party of Turkey recalls these days in a 1921 Report to the Profintern as follows:

&     «The first elements of class struggle and workers' solidarity emerged among foreign workers or among native workers who had lived in European cities. A systematic social movement in the direction of trade-unionism began only in 1909. It can be said that the first propagators of these ideas, brand new for Constantinople, were the Bulgarian proletarians. Today our comrades remember with appreciation the struggle of comrade Teodor Sivachev, a member of the Bulgarian “Tesniak/Narrow socialist” party, a typesetter who has passed away. It was he and a few comrades who founded the first socialist organization in Constantinople. This organization celebrated May Day that same year with red flags, wreaths, etc».

This was the first united, international organization of the left wing of Ottoman socialism. The same year, the Socialist Workers Federation of Thessaloniki was founded by the collaborated efforts of the local narrow and broad socialists although the relationship between the two factions were rocky from the start and lead to a split in a few months. The narrows, who consequently found the Social Democratic Workers Organization of Thessaloniki, were in a minority in the city, but lead the workers organizations in the rest of the Empire, including the Constantinople Association of Unions, which consisted of eight unions organizing Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Jewish and Bulgarian workers and describing themselves as revolutionary internationalist class unions, with a numerical strength more or less equal to that of the Socialist Workers Federation of Thessaloniki. By 1910, the number of unionized workers in the Empire reach 150,000 according the Avraam Benaroya, leader of the Socialist Workers Federation of Thessaloniki.

The Ottoman Narrows published papers in several languages: İşçiler Gazetesi (Workers Gazette) in Turkish, Nor Hossank (New Current) in Armenian, El Laborador (The Worker) in Ladino, Ergatis (The Worker) in Greek. Along with Rabotnicheski Iskra (Workers Spark) launched on the same year by the Social Democratic Workers Organization of Macedonia and Adrianople, the left wing of Ottoman socialism published in five languages in the Empire. The political line of all the publications was based on proletarian internationalism. Thus in İşçiler Gazetesi, it was written:

     «The workers of the Ottoman country, who have not yet been able to form a general union with their brothers living in foreign countries for the purpose of mutual solidarity and the development of relations, publicly declare to their friends in Europe that they are always with them in their hearts. In the near future the workers of the Ottoman country will be among the pioneers of both Europe and the labor army».

     «Although economic development in Turkey is very slow and mechanized industry has only just begun... Turkey is already on its way to becoming a capitalist country. The class struggle has already begun... Tens of thousands of workers are employed in the country's factories, workshops and railways and are undoubtedly more exploited than ever before. Are they to remain silent and show no reaction while waiting for Turkey to reach the level of Europe?»

     «This newspaper is published in order to bring together the socialists of the Ottoman Empire and to establish here an international socialist party – 'an international party' because no other kind of socialism is possible in the Ottoman Empire – and to be its mouthpiece. Therefore, we will not exclude any Turk, Jew or Bulgarian who wants to join us, if they are socialists».

The right wing of Ottoman socialism also continued to have an influence. In 1910, the Ottoman Socialist Party was founded by a small number of Muslim intellectuals such as Hüseyin Hilmi, a reformist, Refik Nevzat, a nationalist, and Baha Tevfik, an anarchist. The Ottoman Socialist Party, along with the Hunchaks and the Broad socialists, supported the liberal opposition of the Freedom and Accord Party against the Dashnak-backed Union and Progress regime. The Ottoman left opposed both sides.

In 1911, the Ottoman Empire entered the Italo-Turkish war, clearly opposed on internationalist and revolutionary grounds by the left of Ottoman socialism.

In 1912 the Freedom and Accord Party briefly overthrew the Committee of Union and Progress following their disastrous defeat in the Italo-Turkish war, in a revolt organized by a group in the army called Liberator Officers. The Ottoman Empire then entered the First Balkan War, once again clearly opposed by the left of Ottoman socialism.

In early 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress retook power following their opponents disastrous defeat in the First Balkan War, increased the level of political repression, entered the Second Balkan War the same year and World War 1 the next year.

Though the principled stance of the left was intact, its organization had been weakened consistently and pushed into illegality so the left could not give a public strong response to the World War as it had to the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars. Socialist organizations in the Empire were destroyed after the start of the war and the unions completely outlawed.

In 1915, the Armenian genocide begun. Kozikian jumped to a river to die in order to avoid capture, Gharadjian fled to the Caucasus. Sivachev also died during the war, Glavinov fled to Sofia and Vezesthenis to America.

Documents

The three documents we present below are from the years 1913 and 1914, and clearly demonstrate the left’s principled internationalist rejection of imperialist wars as well as its opposition to all sorts of opportunist currents active in the Ottoman workers’ movement.

Also visible is a criticism of nationalism and parliamentarianism, far removed from anarchism.

Nevertheless, some influence of European anarcho-syndicalism is evident, at least in the documents by Vezesthenis, author of two of the three texts available to us and reproduced here.

1. The Awakening of the Working Class in Turkey

The social question that is occupying all humanity today had to have an echo in the working class of the East who is never conscious of its situation and interests.

So far the working class of the East, cut off from the working class of the other countries for a long time, did not manage to take its place in international class struggle and demonstrate its solidarity with its brothers throughout the world. Now, it seems like it finally woke up from its long slumber, wanting to shake up the slavery oppressing it and ensure its own liberation at the same time as other countries.

The question standing before the working class of the East is the same: The exploitation of humans by humans, the oppression of the people by the state, the degradation of the individual by law.

Moreover, serfdom dominates in our country and replaces itself with new slavery, economical serfdom.

Yet everywhere, from the serf’s hut to the industrial worker’s slum, a new spirit. A spirit of uprising appears. The awakening of the working class in Turkey begins. As the harbinger of social revolution, the socialist ideal is seen on the horizon.

2. Economic Slavery

Volumes won’t be enough to display in what different forms the state rules; I will suffice to explain the most basic characteristics of the economical situation in our country.

As in neighboring countries, the mode of production is small agriculture and small industry in our country. Machines are known very little, means of transportation are primitive; to conclude we are far from seeing the end of small production. This being said it has to be admitted that the struggle has begun and the primitive situation of production is bound for transformation.

Economically, our country can be divided into two regions. The first region includes central Anatolia along with the great Arab lands.

In this region, the absolute lack of means of transportation and communication preserves the old feudal regime with its patriarchal traditions and customs. Husbandry, hunting, small scale agriculture, these are the modes of production limited by local needs. Trade almost doesn’t exist. The strongest families rule over weak families in these regions where justice is secured by the sword and the rifle. Who is strong is right, this watchword rules alone.

In this region, small scale agriculture and husbandry is more developed in the regions of Kurdistan and Armenia. Yet the unequal distribution of land drag the peasants to a harsh and painful slavery and subjects their labor to a more or less direct exploitation.

Thus the Kurdish, Armenian or Turkish small property owners who are often victims of natural disasters, stormy rains, harsh winters, hail, floods, have to struggle against the raids of the quite numerous bandits of the region and ask for neighboring rich property owners’ aid. In order to survive and continue to take care of their animals, they borrow one or two sacs of barley or corn from their neighbors. The feudal lords take advantage of their misery, and give them loans but in return make them sign debentures with %50 or even %100 interest.

In a few years the indebted peasant loses his land and ends up a slavery. One has to go there to see the misery of the peasants who are thus dispossessed and become the slaves of big feudal landowners. One has to go there to examine the real reasons of the rebellions in Kurdistan and Armenia. Contrary to the claims of the Armenian parties – including the socialist ones – who present them as Armenian serfs’ efforts to achieve political rights and national independence, the reasons behind these rebellions can be observed to be completely economic.

For us who know that our Kurdish and Armenian brothers have no consciousness of political rights, the problem remains completely economic. Thus we can express, quite the contrary, that the peasant toiling class of these countries have a deep consciousness of its economic interests which will certainly lead it to liberation from their subjugation under their feudal masters.

* * *

In the other economic region covering the rest of our country, the people’s activities are made up of small industry and small trade regime.

In every city, the toilers are gathered in different guilds depending on their vocation. For example tailors, just like carpenters, builders etc. have their own guild. Almost all small artisans and small traders have similar groupings.

These guilds played a large role in the past as political and social factors and continue to do so in certain cities today.

The bosses and the workers work for fifteen or sixteen hours; they live in the same rooms, the workshop is dark and devoid of healthy conditions. They are classified by a certain hierarchy in their work.

Boys aged ten or twelve enter the workshop as apprentices. The bosses make the families sign a contract where they promise that the apprentice will spend ten years, fifteen years or more. After this period is over, and the sold slaves learn the trade, the boss pays them forty or fifty Turkish Liras for this long period of work. This being said, the families of these poor children receive some of this money up front. Having become adult males, and trained in their trade well, these children can move and start working on their own behalf, or if their old boss wishes, if they are accepted by the guild and if they earn the respect of their coworkers, they can form a partnership with their old boss.

The work is intense, continuous and done with rough tools. There are no weekly or monthly holidays. They work all they long, and sometimes during the night as well. Three or four times a year, during religious holidays, workshops close, these slaves of work fill the streets, churches, mosques and entertainment venues in their special clothes, and with their pale faces and weakened states from working too much.

Their nightmare is the steam engines that will end their order of work and lead to the abolition of their guilds. Yet progress is inevitable and will take place regardless of all their efforts.

Indeed, this development already started to proceed in our country. The steam engine and developed work tools have taken their place in all lines of work, and the smoke coming out of the high chimneys of factories today shows us the victory of capitalism with the gradual destruction of small businesses. Today, a large network of railroads, numerous shipping and transportation companies, a series of rich firms, thousands of factories, and a mass of large trade and financial enterprises that exploit the labor of thousands of men, women and children at their disposal thanks to the full liberty and absolute power bestowed by international capitalism – itself a product of the exploitation of the labor of other countries – dominates the economic situation of the country.

We are the exploited of this new born capitalism, coming from the great family of the toiling people, we are the proletarians of the East, we are the children of our peasant and artisan fathers sold to capitalism for a morsel of bread. Our slavery is full. We neither have a safe refuge, nor do we have any security for tomorrow. Our working conditions are at the hands of the capitalists. When we work, we are in misery; in periods of mandatory unemployment, we starve to death. When we are not given work, we are thrown to the streets, learning both the shames of modern society and villainy of the bourgeoisie.

For a long time, a deep consciousness of our economic interests lead us to struggle against capitalist exploitation even during Abdülhamit’s regime of tyranny. Nevertheless, because of our isolation from all our brothers in the workers international, and because we are still subjected to the defects of religious and national fanaticism, our organizations and our resistance against the exploiters did not yield any positive results. Organizations of aid and charity, always at the hands of the bosses, great philanthropists, annual religious ceremonies and prayers did not improve our economic situation one bit. Our misery continues to rise.

Fortunately, after the Constitution of 1908, many of us started creating a number of unions outside all sorts of religious and political influence, unions of struggle and action against the bosses for the liberation of the workers. These first unions were formed at the same time in Constantinople and Thessaloniki. In a short time, these unions grew stronger materially and morally.

Yet the moment the workers saw they were free of the religious and bosses’ yoke, another phantom confronted them in order to subjugate them. This is the phantom of parliamentarianism of certain reformist comrades. In Thessaloniki, such a current took over the workers movement and the socialist and union Federation and it diverted all the forces brought together by the union movement towards parliamentary action in order to get one of its militants elected into the Assembly.

With us, the developments in Constantinople were not like in Thessaloniki. Despite our reformist comrades’ efforts, the workers club of our unions managed to resist the parliamentarian current and rejected to take part in statist politics. It managed to separate the “Social Studies Group” from non worker-union elements.

Following the example of our syndicalist brothers in France and Italy, the Union of our Club changed its statutes and established the Constantinople Union of Syndicates based on the foundations and principles of revolutionary syndicalism. Today, we can say we are marching towards our goal with great steps.

3. The Moral and Intellectual Situation

Our moral and intellectual situation is a result of economic slavery, the weight of which has been felt over eastern peoples for centuries. Our lives, beliefs, traditions, temperaments and habits are shaped by the hereditary ignorance and rudeness we inherited from our ancestors. Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and all the other ‘sick men’, we are all truly sick of faith in God and dogmatic and violent morality along with all the superstitions we practice without being aware of it. Looks towards the past and hands opening to the sky makes our minds sick with ideas about God’s providence and the afterlife promised by the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an, making us indifferent to misery and other evils of our present lives, unable to look for ways to remove them.

We blindly obey the clergy and the administrators, we give our children to the hands of these villains and thus cause the destruction of their personality and feelings of independence, and the poisoning of their virgin brains and innocent hearts with the imposition of feelings of slavery and hatred.

When we leave the family and the school, we are full of national and religious fanaticism and we detest each other. Turks and Greeks, Greeks and Jews, Jews and Armenians mutually hate each other; as each other’s enemies, we remain divided and strangle each other; however at the same time our masters, in perfect unity, take advantage of our division and hatred in order to enslave us easier.

* * *

Ignorance includes everyone: there are no schools or literature. In the few national and community schools, education carries the religious brand and the methods do not have any aspect that would free the mind.

Among other reasons for the continuation of ignorance we can count the following: For the Muslims, deep religious fanaticism, the nearly complete lack of elementary schools, the difficulty of the written language and the lack of popular literature; for the Greeks national fanaticism meghali idea (the great idea, the idea to once again conquer the world), Byzantinism in the families, schools and society, religious fanaticism and digliossi (written language purified with what is said to be living language); for the Armenians religious superstitions and national fanaticism: for the Jews too, religious fanaticism, expectation of a Messiah, superstitions and the idea of having a motherland, Sion.

Yet our material liberation requires, above all, our moral and intellectual liberation. Trusting only in ourselves, we should try to educate ourselves according to science, struggle against the idea of God’s providence and try to set ourselves free from all sorts of repressive authorities. We should turn our unions into free schools for all toilers, explain the truth with conferences, papers and pamphlets in factories, families, cafes and meetings, teach our communist ideal, and awaken the spirit of uprising in minds, that spirit without which no social environment can improve.

4. Political Subjugation

Thus enslaved and exploited morally and materially, we are at the same time subjugated to the despotism and tyrannical oppression of the state. If we cite only this period of history, for five hundred years we’ve been living under the rule of a political regime based on violence and despotism and at every protest we make in the name of justice and humanity, we are tortured and slaughtered.

Broken with pain, subjected to all sorts of poverty, prisoner of diseases and victim of all sorts of misery, we are subject to the great padishah the sultan and our master lords and their sons, and we have to sacrifice the last remnants of freedom and individuality which are left from the rulings of the Law and Sharia to which all our behavior, including those going into our most private lives.

The deputies of this state, our clergy and administrators, have found it appropriate to tie religion to the laws. Accordingly, the government that rules over us is a theocratic government, for the ruler, the sultan is at the same time the Caliph of all Muslims, the clergy are at the same time administrators, and faith in God is obligatory for everyone, under pain of death.

The founder of modern Turkey and the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet, in order to decrease the new slavery of the defeated, not only accepted the Patriarch of the Greek nation as a religious and a national leader, but gave him a series of privileges that are still in effect today so that he could rule over his believers. This precaution spread to the other non-Muslim nations of the Empire. Having been tied to the state as such, the Church continued its work by preaching subjugation to the masters and consent to misery.

* * *

The martyrdom of our fathers slaughtered during the long period of tyranny, the massacre of innocent elders, women and children, the massacre of the people in Constantinople in daytime, this is the rule of the old Janissary and Abdulhamid regime.

Oppressed nations have always rebelled against these villainies, and, in vain, many peoples searched for freedom by forming independent nations. Thus Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro and Bulgaria were formed. Yet these countries thought it well to preserve the same form of state with all its errors and faults. And the peoples of these small states, under the rule of their new despots, princes and kings, blinded by misery, followed the imprisoned politics of their masters and engaged in a daring and Quixotic struggle against us in order to take over our lands and ports in the name of the “Cross” and “the oppressed”.

* * *

While our masters squandered the riches of the country and the labor of people, laying down on the comfortable beds of their authority, a great change that would transform the society of the time was taking place in the old European states. This was the birth of capitalism and the end of feudalism.

The discovery of a new route by sea to India, a fabulous country with incredible riches, and the discovery of America with its endless beds of gold and silver, caused masses of riches to pour into Europe. These riches, gathered with the trade and theft of European adventurists, paved the way for the birth of capitalism.

The discovery of machines and qualified tools, the newly born capital appeared as aids to the king and his ambitions. Capitalism aimed for the government. It didn’t even have to struggle to obtain it: All monarchies were tied to capitalism and swore to protect and support it. As a show of gratitude for this protection, capitalism opened the money purse and lent money to the rulers of monarchies and their states, making them indebted to itself; thus it established its domination and it forced them to truly serve its interests by securing and developing means of transportation, by conquering and preserving colonies, by fighting wants against rival trade nations etc.

Colonial politics, that is the plunder of foreign countries and the distribution of good or bad products, thus became the entire politics of the new capitalist states of Europe.

The first victim of this profitable politics, after the semi savage countries, was our country, the East. After the capitalist forces of Europe, the great traders and industrialists saw our little cultivated plains, our cities with just small industry, our quiet rivers, they considered how many bags of gold they can make out of these untouched riches and how they could subjugate the native peoples to the rule of capital and in the end they swore they would bring us “civilization” that is exploitation. They started to purchase districts where they would push surplus products from time to time, or ports to activate their trade under the pretext of protecting oppressed Christians.

And our masters who needed money, and a lot of it in order to meet the luxurious expenses of their harems, did not feel the slightest worry of the capitalist occupier. Quite the contrary, they served him and borrowed such great sums that they weren’t able to pay the interest. Soon enough, European capitalist creditors took over everything in our kitchen. Ports, railroads, highways, mines, forests etc. were all sold to European capitalists. Moreover, in order to get a 30% income assurance, they built a prettier and “higher” palace next to the High Porte Palace: the Public Debt Administration Palace. They started to rule the country and regulate its economic life from here.

Thus our masters found their own masters.

* * *

Faced with the perspective of losing all their authority, the children of our masters rebelled in order to save their inheritance and their gold covered sashes of ranks, in order to replace their father and reform the bankrupt empire. In the name of the weakened and cowardly people, and with the fake representation they received from it, a few military officers and civilians without authority overthrew Abdulhamid and took power. The constitutional sign with the slogans of Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity was thus hung on gates of the state. These are the reasons behind the Young Turk Revolution of July 23rd.

Today, for us, it is clear that these statist maneuvers are done by the sons of our masters, for their own interests and in order to preserve their authority against threatening Europe. Generally, nothing has changed in our situation. How else could it be? Are the evils of the state tied to the people who come to power? No. These are always inherent to the system and so deep that no change, even a change in the system can’t deal with them.

Parliamentarianism is as bad as palace absolutism; its tools of preserving the order, the police and the state, are as suppressive as in the Abdulhamid regime; the laws passed by the Assembly of People’s Deputies demonstrate what the freedom and equality promised to us are. Do laws against drifters (that’s what they call unemployed and homeless workers), laws against the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, strikes etc. bring more freedom than before?

Despite their chivalrous airs, they are trying to defend their selfish individualism, they sow seeds of hatred among nations and establish the absolute rule of their centralized state. Supporting chauvinism, keeping alive fanaticism, there is all their political activity.

They dragged us to war against the Arabs who had rebelled to shake the oppressive state rule, they dragged us to war against the Albanians who were tired of their poverty, they dragged us to the Battle of Tripoli and the war against the Balkan states.

The ever greedy and unwary Young Turks have done all they could to increase the misery in the country and the people’s disaster.

* * *

Without a doubt, all of you participated in electoral fairs and listened to the speeches of the candidates for the opposition parties. Who knows how many of you, with good intentions, fell victim to the fraud of these men and voted for them thinking your fate would improve?

Political parties: the reactionary Freedom and Accord Party, religious-nationalist Greeks’ O Ethnikos Ellinikos Syndesmos, the Armenian nationalist party Dashnaksutyun, labeled “social revolutionary”, the Armenian national party Hunchak labeled “social democratic”, and our social parliamentarianists, independents, they are all parties of politicians who want to take advantage of the state together; the desire they all share is to rule over us and to take power in order to govern in an authoritarian way.

Can the interests of these parties be the same as our interests? Can their statist, liberal, radical or collectivist programs save us? Can the tactic of the “good servant” be our tactic? Can the patient and suffering attitude of our social parliamentarianist comrades be our attitude? Can the struggles they conduct in order to get the breadcrumbs from the masters’ tables concern us? No.

What does our individual liberation require, what does the totality of our interests as proletarians require; what does freedom, equality and justice require; what is needed by whole humanity, above all, is not found in temporary remedies to the ongoing great social injustice.

God, Property, State and Authority, these are the main obstacles to our liberation and the causes for our catastrophe. God is tyranny in all its forms, property with all its monopolies, the sacralization of pain, the denial of the rights to comfort, happiness and pleasure. God is the non-humanization of humanity.

Property is what leads to the exploitation of men by men, what creates the proletariat, what continues the wage system. Property is the wild and vicious representation of selfishness, and the greatest murderer of humans.

The state is oppression and despotism in its authority, acting like the master and creating the slave.

Everyone who wants the freedom and liberation of his existence and fellow humans, must struggle against the masters, against today’s society in an irreconcilable way, in line with our communist ideal.

As we have said before, our ideal, our goal, the goal of our syndicalism is to set labor free, the struggle to form the Free Commune by destroying today’s society in order to ensure our liberation; it is common action.

The review of our forces, as well as the examination of our present situation, made on the occasion of May 1st, showed us our great losses caused by the war unleashed by the bourgeoisie to conquer new lands and men to exploit.

Locked up in our Workers' Club – the Young-Turk government, based on the state of siege, had forbidden us any external demonstration – we talked for long hours about all that a year of mutual slaughter of our brothers in the Balkans has cost us, and especially about the misery that is mercilessly raging because of a terrible unemployment whose end is not seen.

The small report of the office of the Union showed us with figures that more than four thousand of our unionized comrades have disappeared, taken away undoubtedly by militarism or driven away by the economic crisis and misery.

In the employees' union, the situation is the same. The bosses, taking advantage of the crisis, lock out the unionized workers, lower their wages, increase their working hours and treat them roughly. In the union of workers in cigarette paper factories, three hundred and fifty unionized workers are locked out for protesting against their bosses' insults and wage cuts. Two hundred and thirty brewery workers have also been locked out for three months. As a result of the economic crisis, our bookbinding comrades are out of work. Forced unemployment is also rampant among the carpenters.

And as if by irony, life has become ten times more expensive. Bread now costs ten times more than before; meat – let's not talk about it – has become a luxury. The price of cheese has tripled; coal, salt, olives have increased considerably. And the vultures, under the pretext that they have suffered a tax increase, are raising rents by 200 percent.

And with all this, the war continues and will continue, because it is a rather lucrative business for the kings of finance and a very amusing game for the patriots.

* * *

But all this does not discourage us. The war, the massacres of our brothers, the unemployment, the misery and all the other misfortunes which overwhelm us will not be able to stifle the spirit of revolt in us but on the contrary will make it even more ardent. Tomorrow, instructed by yesterday's events, we will work courageously to reconstitute what we have lost and, always having in mind our errors and weaknesses of the past, we will try to take a step forward.

And no doubt our older brothers of the Workers' International, more advanced than us, will do for us in this circumstance what they could not do to avoid the cause of our misfortunes: the Balkan War. We count on their moral help to support and encourage us in the struggle against the exploitative capitalists of the East.

This was the opinion of all of us and our vows for the future.

On this historic day, when once again the cry of protest of the exploited of the whole world is united, we, together with you, protest against capitalist society, against the exploitation of labor, against the oppression of the working people, against the great social injustice.

Conscious of our class interests and the duty of each one of us, we fraternally reaffirm our contribution and our commitment to the realization of the great social revolution, the only thing that can put an end to the exploitation of man by man and to the miserable order of things...

The so-called Balkan War, which unfortunately we could not prevent, had consequences which the working class of the East will not be able to shake off for a long time and which will delay the new awakening of the people and the proletarians.

This war left thousands of families of urban and rural workers, who today are starving, orphaned and at the mercy of this cruel society.

This war destroyed cities and villages and brought with it misery and hunger that devastated the entire population.

It revived hatred and bigotry among the nations of the East and strengthened the nationalist mentality for the benefit of rulers and capitalists.

This war has left the state treasury broke; now they are making us, their slaves, pay for it.

This war has brought unprecedented political tyranny.

The streets of our cities are full of homeless, hungry old people, women and children. Immigrants, whose property was confiscated by the invaders of Rumelia during the war, are taking refuge in caravans and settling in Thrace and Anatolia. Consequently, new incidents erupt in Anatolia, fueled by bigotry and religious hatreds, and the local population is forced to migrate in the opposite direction.

On the backs of the devastated population, the government imposed a disgraceful repressive regime, always under the label of constitutionality, of course: Permanent martial law, violent measures against organizations, meetings and the press...

On May 1, 1914, we could not march, we protest against this arbitrary rule and shout once again with you: Down with the bourgeoisie! Long live freedom! Long live the social revolution!

The background of the foundation of the Communist Party of Turkey can more or less be directly found in the October Revolution in Russia.

The first effect of the revolution on Turkey, which until then was at war with Russia, was very direct. The Russian soldiers returning from Eastern Anatolia left power to a soviet government representing Turks, Kurds and Armenians based in Erzincan where red flags were hoisted on administrative buildings by the locals. Beyond Erzincan, the new soviet government had influence in Erzurum, Dersim, Bayburt and Sivas but it was nevertheless soon repressed by the Ottoman army before the Committee of Union and Progress surrendered to the Entente and its leaders such as Enver and Talat pashas fled the country. Thus, Constantinople and most of Anatolia were occupied by the victors of the war.

The First Congress of Turkish Left Socialists was held in Moscow in 1918 and attended by former prisoners of war, resulting in the establishment of the Communist Organization of Turkey, lead by Mustafa Suphi, Sharif Manatov and Süleyman Nuri.

In late 1918 and 1919, legal socialist organizations, such as the Socialist Party of Turkey lead by Hüseyin Hilmi and numbering 14,000 in its prime and the Social Democratic Party numbering 2,000 emerged in Constantinople. To their left, Turkish students returning from studying abroad, above all Germany, formed the Workers and Farmers Party of Turkey, later renamed the Workers and Farmers Socialist Party of Turkey. The party, lead by Ethem Nejat and Şefik Hüsnü, ideologically followed the line of the USPD.

Lastly, some of the remnants of the left of Ottoman socialism reorganized in Constantinople around Roland Ginzberg as the Communist Group, under the influence of Bolshevism. The Communist Group started organizing international class unions and also came into contact with the newly emerging left oppositions in the Socialist Party of Turkey lead by Kazım of Van who went on to form close relations with it, and the Social Democratic Party lead by Zinatullah Navshirvanov who later left Constantinople to join the communist movement in Anatolia.

The communists in Constantinople were also aided by Sharif Manatov, representing the newly formed Communist International, who was later imprisoned by the French and had to leave the city following a daring escape organized by Navshirvanov’s group. In his 1923 booklet titled Comrade Ethem Nejat, Navshirvanov would describe the political situation in Constantinople as follows:

     «Experience had shown us that in the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party the traditions of social revolution and workers' interests were in the minority. Therefore, although there was sympathy among the workers, it was not possible to advance it. The stooges and henchmen of the big bourgeoisie, such as Dr. Hasan Riza, who had participated in the founding of the party for political position and interest alone, and the stooges who tried to become petty bourgeois were trying to prevent the party from having a classist structure and taking on a revolutionary character, and they were leaving the revolutionary elements alone in the internal war. On the other hand, the same war was going on in the same situation for the Socialist Party of Turkey, which was nesting under the dictatorship of Hüseyin Hilmi».
     «Since the Workers' and Farmers' Socialist Party of Turkey was, according to Comrade Ethem Nejat, an organization of intellectuals, it was necessary to unite with the Social Democratic and Socialist Parties of Turkey, which were organizations of the masses of the people. In my opinion, while in the absence of such a merger, it would be difficult to attract the masses to the new party, it would not be possible to do much for the benefit of the workers with the 'semi-bourgeois' majority among their leaders».

In the meanwhile, the National Forces emerged in Anatolia as irregular militias in 1919, opposing the occupation. Soon a number of officers, lead by Mustafa Kemal pasha, defected from the Ottoman army and through a series of congresses, assumed the leadership of the movement. Mustafa Kemal and his allies formed the Society for the Defense of Law which soon organized throughout Anatolia. By the end of the year, the National Forces numbered around 7,000. In 1920, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey was established by the Society for the Defense of Law in Ankara as the alternative of the Assembly of Deputies in Constantinople. A number of left nationalist deputies lead by Nazım Resmor and Sheikh Servet, sincere in their opposition to the direction of the new government, Hakkı Behiç, a government supporter who was later discarded and Yunus Nadi who represented the remnants of the Committee of Union and Progress, formed the Green Army, which was a political rather than a military organization.

In a few months, the National Forces grow in size to 15,000, the strongest portion of which was the Mobile Forces numbering 5,000 and lead by Ethem the Circassian, a self-declared proponent of Bolshevism. The Mobile Forces were based in Eskişehir, where a section of the Socialist Party of Turkey cut off from the center in Constantinople was organized. The Mobile Forces often engaged in acts of expropriating the wealthy for the benefit of their cause. They included a 700 strong Bolshevik Battalion, so named because it was commanded by a follower of Mustafa Suphi. Ethem spent most of the year suppressing insurrections in favor of the Caliphate against the Ankara government.

Nevertheless, following increasing tensions with Mustafa Kemal, Ethem the Circassian joined the Green Army. At this point, the parliamentary group of the Green Army, named the Popular Faction, controlled 85 of 200 seats in parliament and briefly elected Resmor as the Minister of Interior, only for Mustafa Kemal to quickly reach an agreement with Yunus Nadi and cause Resmor’s resignation. The Popular Faction deserted the Green Army, which was reduced to an organization controlled by Resmor and Sheikh Servet.

It was in those days that Sharif Manatov arrived in Ankara and together with dissident military veterinary Salih Hacıoğlu and a few other comrades, declared the establishment of the Communist Party of Turkey in July 14 after rejecting the program of the Green Army. The party was as opposed to the Ankara government as it was opposed to the Constantinople government. Navshirvanov soon joined the party after he arrived from Constantinople.

The Communist Party of Turkey soon started to operate among the militia supporting Ethem the Circassian in Eskişehir. Seyyare Yeni Dünya (Mobile New World) in Eskişehir, owned by a journalist who supported Ethem, published articles written by leaders of the Communist Party and the Communist International’s Call to the Peoples of the East.

Though Manatov was arrested and expelled by Kemal’s forces, by the end of the year, the party numbered 350-400 militants in Ankara, Eskişehir, Kızılcahamam, Çamlıdere, Yozgat, Kastamonu, İnebolu, Şebinkarahisar, Alanya, Konya, Sivas and Trabzon, aided by the now Caucasian based Communist Organization of Turkey in the Black Sea region. An example of the position of the party regarding Turkish politics of the past and present period can be observed in their text titled Bolsheviks and Unionists:

     «Bolshevism is not partyism as we know it. Bolsheviks are a group of humanity determined to establish socialism in the world…
     «Let's leave aside all the misdeeds of the Unionists, their foolish, stupid and ignorant actions and sanctions, and their oppressive rule. How can one erase from memory the fortunes and war riches created out of nothing by those cruel administrators who gave corruption and bribery the name freedom, pushed immorality to the extreme in every part of the country, and elevated theft to the skies? How can these evil spirits come out and bear the great name of Bolsheviks? No, friends, no! It is impossible that among the Bolsheviks of Turkey there should be a single Unionist with a dark face and bloody hands, nor a single Accordist, who is worse than the Unionists and who, especially in recent times, has joined hands with the British interests, who are the enemies of all the Muslims of the world, of all the workers and poor of the world.
     «This doubt and hesitation in the general opinion is justified only in one respect. That is, the Unionist leeches, who are very cunning and devilish in nature, can be introduced among the Bolsheviks in places where they are not known, this is possible. But no matter how much devilish sincerity they show, they will soon be exposed. And when they are exposed, they will immediately receive the treatment they deserve.
     «It should be noted that the Bolsheviks of Turkey are proud to see all honest people among themselves. Therefore, any citizen, regardless of which of the old parties he belongs to, who has not worked to the detriment of the poor people, who has not committed cruelty and brutality, and who, in the latest fashionable expression, has not engaged in freeloading, and who is known for his honor and virtue, can join the Communists of Turkey».

Yet it was neither the Communist Group in Constantinople nor the Communist Party of Turkey founded in Anatolia who would establish first contact with the newly formed Communist International by sending representatives to Moscow, but the left social democratic Workers and Farmers Socialist Party of Turkey. İsmail Hakkı of Kayseri, one of the delegates of this party at the Second Congress of the Comintern, expressed a position completely contrary to that of the Anatolian communists:

     «After the Russian Revolution and the partition of Turkey by the European imperialists, when the Janus face of the English and French capitalists showed itself openly to the Turkish people, a new movement began in Turkey, a liberation movement. The Anatolian movement, which is now led by the Democratic Party, is the best answer to the ruthless exploitation to which Turkey was subjected by the countries of the Entente. The occupation of Constantinople particularly poured oil on the flames and the movement grew even faster. Now the revolutionary state in Anatolia, which is gathering around itself all the forces hostile to the Entente which are driven by a century-old hatred of imperialism, is preparing for the struggle against European imperialism. The toilers of Turkey will not permit themselves to be enslaved once more by the Entente, and thanks to the Russian revolution, which is the best friend of toiling Turkey, the Turkish people will very shortly achieve complete freedom and, together with the toilers of every country, take up the struggle against imperialism throughout the world».

Soon afterward, the First Congress of the Communist Organization of Turkey was held in Baku between September 10 and 16. The organization was renamed as the Communist Party of Turkey and Mustafa Suphi became party leader. The only organization from Turkey represented at the congress was the Workers and Farmers Socialist Party from Constantinople, whose leader Ethem Nejat became party secretary. Nevertheless, the Baku organization included quite radical militants so the documents of the congress were considerably to the left of the positions of the Workers and Farmers Socialist Party:

     «We are convinced that the national revolutionary movement going on in Anatolia is helping the proletarian movement of the whole world with its struggle against the imperialism of the whole world, and it is certain that this national movement, with its development and deepening within the country, serves the emergence of class consciousness and thus prepares a suitable field for the social revolution of tomorrow. On the one hand, the Communist Party of Turkey will help to deepen this movement against imperialism in Turkey, and on the other hand, it will strive to prepare the principles for the real goal and final aspiration of the toilers, the working people, to achieve the rule of the employees».

Moreover, under the influence of Bolshevism, the congress acknowledged the genocide of the Armenians and adopted a proletarian internationalist approach on the question of nationalities:

     «They did not hesitate to create enmity between the Turkish and Armenian people. They have made enemies of these two nations who have lived together throughout history. It is the poor, helpless people who die everywhere and always, who are oppressed and deprived of the right to live. During the World War, which was a consequence of European imperialism, the poor Armenian peasants again fell prey to the lies of the British, the lies of the Dashnaks and the inciting of the priests. They started slaughtering poor Muslim people in Van and Bitlis, burning their houses and looting their property... In response, the Committee of Union and Progress government acted relentlessly, the Armenians were deported, their property was confiscated and most of them were killed by secret orders».
     «Like every nation, Arabs, Kurds and Bulgarians will decide and determine in what way they will live themselves. As Russia accepts federation, so too must we. Not only us, but all nations must accept this principle. Only through this principle will humanity be able to become a vast family».
     «Just as the Communist Party of Turkey will attempt to save Turkish workers and peasants from the influence of the Unionists and the treacherous socialists, it is obliged to separate the oppressed classes of the Greek, Armenian and Kurdish nations from the Dashnak or Badr Khan organizations, uniting them in the name of the same interests and purposes as one class and directing them to fight against both internal parasites and external forces».

Soon after the congress, the International Workers Union, a coordination of militant workers hoping to form revolutionary class unions, was founded in Constantinople on October 1920 by the remnants of the left of Ottoman socialism, including the Communist Group. Initially the organization was inspired by the American Industrial Workers of the World whose principles were imported by Vezesthenis, by now more or less an anarchist. Nevertheless Seraphim Maximos, the first head of the union and also an anarchist, sent a warm letter to the Communist International announcing the foundation of the union and applied to join the Profintern. According to its Regulations:

     «The aim of the IWU is to unite all workers into a great organization fighting against capitalist exploitation on the principle of revolutionary class struggle for liberation from the yoke of wage slavery».

All these developments alarmed Mustafa Kemal, who proceeded to found an official, pro-government Communist Party of Turkey in late 1920 under the leadership of Hakkı Behiç, formerly of the Green Army. The fake party’s application to join the Communist International was denied.

Nevertheless, the fake party forced the Communist Party in Anatolia to come out illegality in order to prevent the masses from being deceived. In an effort to set up a legal organization, the Communist Party of Turkey merged with the remnants of the Green Army lead by Resmor and Sheikh Servet, assuming the name Popular Communist Party of Turkey on November 22 and became a legal party on December 7. The party line changed, attempting to broaden its appeal to classes other than the proletariat, and softened on the Kemalists. The party held conferences in Ankara on subjects such as communism and women, communism and Islam, Bolshevik foreign policy, and whether an agreement with the West is in the interests of Anatolian proletarians and continued to be active among Ethem’s militia. The merger was explained as follows in a 1921 Report of the Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International:

     «In the fall of 1920 the Kemal Pasha government established 'its' Communist Party of Turkey. Among other tasks, this party set itself the task of fighting the illegal communist party and was successful enough thanks to the priorities of its legal existence and the tricks it pulled. This being the case, the illegal party decided to do everything in its power to become legal and to take more effective measures in the fight against provocative activities. The RSFSR government provided some assistance to the illegal party.
     «Before legalization, the party found it necessary to come to terms with the most revolutionary members of the Green Army CC and the left wing of the Populist faction in the Parliament. Negotiations began and the possibility of unification on a common communist basis was identified. On September 22, 1920, the agreement was signed and since then the new party, the Popular Communist Party of Turkey, has existed (1. to distinguish it from the party established by the government; 2. to emphasize the common character of the two merged groups, it was called the “Popular” party)».

As the party in Anatolia merged with left nationalists critically supportive of Mustafa Kemal, Mustafa Suphi had begun to openly complain of the presence of those communists who weren’t as warm to the idea of supporting Mustafa Kemal’s bourgeois government as he was:

     «Until now, the undoubtedly high and humane, but at the same time excessive statements of some people who occasionally appeared in Anatolia and talked about communism, about their desire to suddenly cleanse the earth of all filth, all kinds of oppression, discomfort and famine, had given rise to the erroneous idea in some parts of the government that the Communist Party of Turkey thought that the conditions necessary for the realization of the social revolution in Asia Minor were ripe.
     «On the other hand, the fact that the new parties and groups formed by our former politicians in the Grand National Assembly after the beginning of the uprising movement in Anatolia, jumped a few steps to the left without even addressing the issue of private property, aroused the suspicion of some of our communist comrades that “are we again facing artificial and false movements?”.
     «We, on the other hand, argue that these false ideas and misunderstandings have no place, and that the movements that began in Asia Minor are natural. Is it possible that the social movement that started in Russia and rippled through Europe and America could be ineffective against Asia Minor, which is opposite Russia? The populist and popular factions, which are the main organizations behind the Grand National Assembly, are also a set of cells born in the wind of the workers' and farmers' revolution – Bolshevism».

Mustafa Suphi had begun to exchange letters with Mustafa Kemal and was convinced of the pasha’s good intentions, expressing in one of his letters that:

     «Our organization adopted a program and organizational charter at the Baku Congress and determined the policy it would follow in the country after becoming a party. The Communist Party of Turkey has decided to support the Government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey with all its strength during the time it is at war with the imperialist states, to avoid all kinds of presumptuousness that will cause weakness and disintegration on the war fronts, and to ensure that the feelings of war against oppression and plunder are deepened among the people, and it has deemed it necessary to start the activity of the party in order to ensure that the feelings of war against oppression and plunder are deepened among the people, and it hopes that the Government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey will not refuse permission for this to be realized legally».

Despite the warnings of militants such as Manatov and Süleyman Nuri, Mustafa Suphi, convinced the majority of the party leadership established at the Baku Congress to travel to Anatolia openly. When they arrived in Erzurum, the local section of the Society for the Defense of Law incited the population into attacking them. The same scenario was repeated in Trabzon where they moved next. Mustafa Suphi, Ethem Nejat and other comrades decided to return but after they left the city on a boat, they were approached by another boat carrying assassins and were all murdered on orders from Mustafa Kemal. Following this great trauma for the communist movement in Turkey, the Baku branch divided into a left lead by Süleyman Nuri and a pro-Kemalist right lead by Ahmet Cevat Emre.

In the meanwhile, the Communist Group struggled within the International Workers Union against the influence of anarchism. Ginzberg of the Communist Group expressed this struggle in his 1921 Report to the Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International:

     «The IWU... has had a bad policy in the past five months because of the acceptance of the principles and program of the IWW of America; but now we are carrying on a vigorous campaign at home and this is changing».

The Communist Group engaged in military action against the presence of the Whites in Constantinople, sinking a ship carrying weapons to the Russian counter-revolutionary armies, bombing the embassy of Wrangel and robbing a bank owned by White emigres in Constantinople. Ginzberg, while not completely disapproving of such actions, rather attributes them to the presence of evolving anarcho-communists in the group until 1920. In any case, union work was the major priority for the Communist Group. While the Communist Group published a pamphlet titled the Formation of the Soviets in Greek, the International Workers Union launched a weekly union publication, also in Greek, Neos Anthropos (New Human) and organized the May Day demonstration in Constantinople. The Communist Group begun to focus on attracting the thousands of workers following the Socialist and Social Democratic Parties to the International Workers Union by exposing the treacherous and collaborationist opportunism of their leaders. As these parties failed to lead strikes, their bases were partially attracted to the IWU.

In 1921, the Communist Group merged with the left wing of the Social Democratic Hunchak Party in Constantinople, lead by Bedros Torosyan, assuming the name Communist Party of Constantinople. The party thus acquired an Armenian publication, Yerkir (Country). The Communist Party of Constantinople acted together with a small communist group active in the International Workers Union mostly made up of militants from a Muslim background and lead by Kazım of Van, leader of the left of the Socialist Party of Turkey. In a report dating 1924 titled A Brief Overview of the Turkish Labor Movement, Ginzberg described these events as follows:

     «There was also an Armenian social democratic party (Hunchakist) in Constantinople with 2,000 members, mostly workers... In 1921, the IWU Communist Group... came into contact with the left wing of this party and the two groups merged to form the Constantinople Communist Party in December 1921... The communist Armenian faction of the Constantinople Communist Party carried out a massive campaign in favor of both Soviet Russia and Soviet Armenia through the press, conferences and agitation.
     «Until the Franklin Bouillon agreement, the political line of the Communist Party of Constantinople was to support the Kemalist movement, but after this agreement, which was considered a betrayal of the independence movement, the party did not hesitate to unmask the Kemalists and lead the working class, while supporting every progressive step, to fight against the local bourgeoisie and imperialism through class struggle».

Later in 1921, guerrilla leader Ethem the Circassian joined the fake Communist Party of Turkey whose publication declared him the commander of the Red Armies of Turkey. The conflict between Mustafa Kemal’s Regular Army, numbering 6,000, and Ethem’s irregular forces intensified. Eventually, Ethem avoided fighting Kemal and surrendered to the Greeks, fearing a worse defeat at the hands of the Greeks, numbering several times the number of all the Turkish nationalist forces, even if he wins over Mustafa Kemal. Following Ethem’s desertion, the fake Communist Party was shut down having served its purpose, and the Popular Communist Party of Turkey was outlawed and its leaders were imprisoned despite not actually supporting Ethem himself, especially after he joined the fake Communist Party.

Documents

The first two documents we are presenting here are the founding documents of the Communist Party of Turkey, and they are praiseworthy for their doctrinal clarity and principled approach even if these were partially revised in order to merge with left nationalists and become a legal party.

The third document, the speech of Naciye at the Congress in Baku for the liberation of the Peoples of the East, which has a general significance for the whole Comintern in the East, is unfortunately the only document left authored by a communist woman of the period although it is well known that in Constantinople as well as Anatolia there were a minority of militant communist women, active in party work.

The fourth document, “In the East”, published first in Ziya (Light), the Turkish paper of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, and later in Emek, the organ of the Popular Communist Party of Turkey, signifies the continuation of ties and cooperation between the communists of two countries.

Lastly, Süleyman Nuri’s bold speech at the 3^rd Congress of the Comintern expresses the Baku left’s views on the extent the Turkish nationalist movement should be supported and when they should be opposed in the aftermath of the murder of Mustafa Suphi and the other comrades.

1. A Communist, i.e., Bolshevik, Party has formed in Turkey to establish socialism and to make sure that world revolution which will assure prosperity and well being to all humanity will take place as soon as possible in Turkey.

2. The Communist Party of Turkey will struggle with all its might for the salvation of all oppressed nations and classes from the tyranny of capitalism and imperialism.

3. As regards form of administration, the Turkish Bolsheviks accept the principles of Russian Soviet organization.

4. The Turkish Bolsheviks will bring into being a true people’s government in the life of society by means of village, county, district, provincial, and central Soviets and will impose the dictatorship of these Soviets formed from the deprived poor until the institution of socialism.

5. The Turkish Bolsheviks will deprive the present bourgeois and oppressor classes of the right to vote in the elections for the Soviet governments.

6. In order to be successful in this struggle and in order to serve all humanity, the Turkish Bolsheviks have concluded a close union with the communist socialist organizations in every country and will act together with them. They are also attached to the Third International.

7. The Turkish Bolsheviks reject war and militarism and all the inequalities and injustices caused therefrom. War and fighting they consider legitimate only until the destruction of militarism and imperialism.

8. A temporary revolutionary army should be formed until the institution of socialism in the world as a result of social revolution.

9. The Turkish Bolsheviks would entirely nationalize, i.e., would recognize as the joint property of the nation, all sources of wealth and industry, such as land, banks, factories, businesses, buildings, railroads, ships, etc. On this basis pandering to individuals is to be abolished. And production and general wealth are to be shared equally by the general public on condition that each works according to his mental and physical capabilities.

10. Foreign trade and commerce are to be entirely in the hands of government monopoly. Internal free trade will be abolished immediately after cooperatives have been completely formed.

11. Ornaments and consumption materials that do not generate wealth and which are in excess of the quantity necessary for any individual are to be confiscated.

12. Those who are destitute, aged, maimed, and sick should share equally in the general wealth.

13. The Turkish communists would oblige every person attaining the age of puberty to work an average of 8 hours a day.
     a. Pregnant women should not work from 6 weeks prior to childbirth until 6 weeks after.
     b. As far as possible small children should be looked after by wet nurses and governesses, while those from 4 to 8 years of age should receive instruction in nurseries and kindergartens.
     c. The goal as regards general education presently consists of compulsory education for all children from 8 to 14 years of age without cost and where possible as boarders; and the goal in the future will be to extend this to those from 6 to 16 years of age.
     d. Youths from 14 to 18 years of age and those who serve in mines and other difficult trades should work a maximum of 6 hours a day, and those in light occupations should work a maximum of 10 hours a day.
     e. Although higher education would not be mandatory, it should be free for everyone. Beyond this, special night schools for adults to learn to read and write in their spare time, general libraries, theaters, and museums should be set up.

14. The Turkish communists would separate government and religion. They recognize the total freedom of religion and do not violate the conscience of anyone. They proclaim freedom of conscience.

15. The Turkish communists recognize the free development of nations and would entrust to each nation the question of determining its own fate.

16. The Turkish Bolsheviks would abolish the old courts. Revolutionary tribunals would be set up only for a temporary period. Eventually it will be sufficient to have courts for civil compensation only.

17. The Turkish communists would apply the death penalty as a legal recourse against the supporters of reaction only. In other matters the death penalty would be abolished.

18. The Turkish Bolsheviks would abolish normal political frontiers and customs formalities between Turkey and other nations that accept socialism.

19. The Turkish Bolsheviks consider the general debts charged against the nation and all treaties and stipulations to be null and void. And they would not recognize any sphere of influence on Turkish soil.

20. At the start of the revolution, indirect taxes are to be abolished. Other taxes would be collected as income taxes levied according to the principle of geometrically increasing proportion. If need be, a new taxes can be collected from the bourgeois class in the name of indemnity. Naturally all these measures would continue until the day when money is abolished.

21. Doctors would be state officials and would be obliged to treat and care for the sick without charge. All hospitals and pharmacies would serve everyone gratis.

22. The Turkish Bolsheviks recognize poor human workers, such as the peasants, workers, public employees and servants who live solely by the labor of their hands and minds, to be the most sound supporters and elements of the party.

23. The Turkish Bolsheviks see it as their duty to act with complete openness and bravery in ideological debates to be held against the outmoded mentalities and superstition which must be destroyed in administrative and social organization. They abhor dissimulation and all administrative and political secret, concealed intrigue, and they absolutely will not hesitate to speak the truth openly to the people.

24. They consider it their duty to defend and protect all members against persecution and attacks made in any form on comrades who teach with the aim of serving the socialist Bolshevik party.

25. The Communist Party of Turkey will continue to enlighten and teach the people on these principles until receipt of the decisions of the Baku Congress of the “Third International” in Moscow.

General Headquarters of the Communist Party of Turkey

A Communist Party affiliated to the Third International has been established in Turkey with its headquarters in Ankara and with the aim of establishing socialism.

The social revolution that broke out in Russia spread in three years, with a blinding speed, to Vladivostok in the east, to Poland in the west, to the Ice Sea in the north, to Central Asia and Persia in the south, despite the fact that all capitalist governments, foreign and domestic, had exerted all their forces to extinguish this tremendous revolution.

When the true nature of the Russian Revolution, which achieved such a great success in such a short period of time, is understood, there is no hesitation or doubt that oppressed nations all over the world are inclined to liberate themselves from capitalist bondage.

There is no doubt that the Turkish nation is the most unfortunate of the nations subjected to the oppression and domination of the capitalists. The salvation of us, who, on the one hand, are crushed under millions of liras of foreign debt and writhing in the chains of capitulations, on the other hand, groaning under the tyrannical and oppressive rule of adventurous and partisan men transmitted from our own citizens and the local bourgeois and tyrant rulers whom they trust, and who are deprived of the progress of civilization in every sense of the word, consists only and only in accepting the ideal of an international social revolution and establishing an administration built on these beliefs. It is for this reason that the Communist Party was born in Turkey.

The Communist Party of Turkey emerged with the aim of awakening the people from ignorance within the framework of its charter consisting of the principles of communism and gathering the citizens around this great goal in order to overthrow the existing style of administration built on the old mentality and old perspectives and to realize social revolution.

To form people's governments on the basis of the principles of the Russian Councils (Soviets) by appealing to and comparing the opinions of the people, and in the first elections to deprive the tyrannical ruling team and the bourgeoisie of the right to vote and to appoint and declare the dictatorship of the poor workers, to abolish personal and private property and to nationalize the means of production, work tools and all kinds of similar items of use and consumer goods, to organize production with forced labor and to equalize needs and consumption with equal shares, to ensure prosperity and happiness of society; To make primary education and subsequent education compulsory and free of charge and to try to direct the education and training system, which is very backward, to the target in a short time.

While analyzing the current situation, the Communist Party of Turkey sees the country and the people under the influence of two currents. One of these is the issues put forward by the Constantinople government and the other is the issues put forward by the National Forces.

The Constantinople government is essentially nothing but a committee trying to revive the old sultanate era. In order to succeed in establishing these principles, the Constantinople government is nothing but a mass without honor, without dignity and even without conscience, which does not hesitate to unite with the capitalist allied states, which are the enemies of all oppressed people, to trust them with all its being, and which takes pleasure in making the people break against each other and in trampling the country on the most despicable enemies.

As for the government of the National Forces, formed by Mustafa Kemal Pasha: In the face of the horrible position taken by the palace government, the nationalists in the country gathered around the aforementioned person with the confidence of the democratic bourgeois class of the country and formed the national uprising of Anatolia against the Constantinople government and the Grand National Assembly, which took over all the affairs of the nation with the aim of forming an extraordinary government.

Since Anatolia, coming out of a long and crushing war, was at a loss and exhausted in this situation, it was necessary to revive this tired people, to give them a new spirit and especially to increase their moral strength by giving them a foothold. The National Forces government had no difficulty in finding this.

They presented the Russian Soviet government, which proclaimed to the people that it was hostile to international capital, determined to overthrow capitalist states and to bring about a social revolution all over the world, and promised to support the Islamic world, as an anchor. After a while, they even announced with official declarations that an alliance had been reached with the Russian Soviet government and that they would receive money, artillery, weapons and even soldiers from them.

However, this bourgeois-dominated government did not abandon its policy of deception. Under the influence of the bourgeoisie, it could not leave nationalism and did not hesitate to applaud the movement in Russia. It proved that it could not leave nationalism by maintaining the old administration for months and especially by intervening in the communist movements, but it also proved that it did not abandon the policy of deception by sending masked nationalist politicians as delegates to the Russian Soviet government and even to the Third International Congress.

In conclusion: On the basis of the above mentioned facts, the Communist Party of Turkey is convinced and officially declares that in the present situation: two political systems exist and prevail: on the one hand, there are two political systems, one of which is tyrannical and the other deceitful; more precisely, on the one hand, there are the Freedom and Accordists, who are tools of British politics, and on the other hand, there are the old Unionists, who are no different from them in the eyes of the people, but who appear in disguise, and declares that it has nothing to do with both governments.

The Communist Party of Turkey, which considers it its most sacred duty to work together with its communist friends all over the world under the red flag as an army of the world revolution, considers it an honor to greet its comrades with respect and sincerity. And considers their success as its own success.

General Headquarters of the Communist Party of Turkey

The women’s movement beginning in the East must not be looked at from the standpoint of those frivolous feminists who are content to see woman’s place in social life as that of a delicate plant or an elegant doll. This movement must be seen as a serious and necessary consequence of the revolutionary movement which is taking place throughout the world. The women of the East are not merely fighting for the right to walk in the street without wearing the chadra, as many people suppose. For the women of the East, with their high moral ideals, the question of the chadra, it can be said, is of the least importance. If the women who form half of every community are opposed to the men and do not have the same rights as they have, then it is obviously impossible for society to progress: the backwardness of Eastern societies is irrefutable proof of this.

Comrades, you can be sure that all our efforts and labors to realize new forms of social life, however sincere and however vigorous our endeavors may be, will remain without result if you do not summon the women to become real helpers in your work.

Owing to the conditions caused by the war, in Turkey women have been obliged to quit the home and the household and take on the performance of a variety of social duties. The fact that women have had to take over the responsibilities of the men who have been called up for military service, and especially the fact that women in the roadless localities of Anatolia which are inaccessible even to pack-animals have been themselves dragging artillery equipment and munitions to where the troops need them cannot, of course, be called a step forward in the conquest of equal rights for women: people who see the fact that women are making up with their labor for the shortage of beasts of burden as contributing to the cause of equal rights for women are unworthy of our attention. We do not deny that at the beginning of the 1908 revolution some measures were introduced for women’s benefit. In view, however, of the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of these measures we do not regard them as highly significant.

The opening of one or two lower and higher schools for women in the capital and in the provinces, and even the opening of a university for women, does not accomplish one thousandth part of what still needs to be done. From the Turkish Government, whose actions are based on the oppression and exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, one cannot, of course, expect more fundamental or serious measures on behalf of women held in bondage.

But we know, too, that the position of our sisters in Persia, Bukhara, Khiva, Turkestan, India and other Muslim countries is even worse. However, the injustice done to us and to our sisters has not remained unpunished. Proof of this is to be. seen in the backwardness and decline of all the countries of the East. Comrades, you must know that the evil done to women has never passed and will never pass without retribution.

Because the session of the Congress of the Peoples of the East is drawing to its close we are obliged through lack of time to refrain from discussing the position of women in the various countries of the East. But let the comrade delegates who are entrusted with the great mission of taking back to their homelands the great principles of the revolution not forget that all the efforts they devote to winning happiness for the peoples will remain fruitless unless there is real help from the women. The Communists consider it necessary, in order to get rid of all misfortunes, to create a classless society, and to this end they declare relentless war against all the bourgeois and privileged elements.

The women Communists of the East have an even harder battle to wage because, in addition, they have to fight against the despotism of their menfolk. If you, men of the East, continue now, as in the past, to be indifferent to the fate of women, you can be sure that our countries will perish, and you and us together with them: the alternative is for us to begin, together with all the oppressed, a bloody life-and-death struggle to win our rights by force. I win briefly set forth the women’s demands. If you want to bring about your own emancipation, listen to our demands and render us real help and co-operation.
     1) Complete equality of rights.
     2) Ensuring for women unconditional opportunity to make use of the educational and vocational-training institutions established for men.
     3) Equality of rights of both parties to marriage. Unconditional abolition of polygamy.
     4) Unconditional admission of women to employment in legislative and administrative institutions.
     5) Everywhere, in cities, towns and villages, committees for the rights and protection of women to be established.

Undoubtedly we can ask for all of this. The Communists, recognizing that we have equal rights, have reached out their hand to us, and we women will prove their most loyal comrades. True, we may be stumbling in pathless darkness, we may be standing on the brink of yawning chasms, but we are not afraid, because we know that in order to see the dawn one has to pass through the dark night.

The great defeat of Baron Wrangel on the Crimean peninsula took the Entente Powers by surprise. England and especially France had always wanted to occupy the Bolsheviks through Wrangel and Balachowicz. But after forcing Poland to make peace, Russia's red soldiers attacked the others with all their might and soon drove them out of their territory.

After Wrangel was defeated, Venizelos also fell and fled Greece. Then even General Paraskevopoulos, the commander-in-chief of the Greek troops on the Izmir front, left the battlefield and took refuge in France. As a result, the Greek troops were devastated and Mustafa Kemal Pasha's “National Forces” gained strength.

While Wrangel was in Crimea and Venizelos was ruling in Athens, Constantinople was between two fires and the political and military influence of the Entente States in Constantinople was great. At that time the Constantinople Government did not know what to do. After the fall of this grand vizier, Tevfik and İzzet Pashas replaced him, and the reason for this change was to reconcile Constantinople and Anatolia. But this reconciliation is a bit difficult today. Because the forces of the Entente States in the East have been broken. Wrangel was a great obstacle against the spread of Bolshevism in Anatolia. Wrangel is now gone. Let's skip this and instead of Venizelos, who was the puppet of England, Ralis and Gonaris, old friends of Germany, are in charge.

The Entente Powers wanted to use Greek soldiers to divide Turkey among them. Because they cannot muster their own troops. Venizelos made a big Greece out of a small Greece, but this dictator still fell because the Greek society is tired of this long war and does not want to fight anymore. Britain and France do not have much confidence in the new Greek government, they do not trust it. Turkey is also more difficult to break up because of the Greek military.

For this reason, even the strength of Mustafa Kemal Pasha has increased. He even asked for the evacuation of Izmir and Thrace in the note he recently sent to the Entente States. On the other hand, the Western states are looking for a way of reconciliation and agreement with Anatolia. Probably now the situation in the East has changed and Mustafa Kemal Pasha is the one who holds sovereignty in Anatolia. It is not possible to determine in advance what color things will take in the future. But today the feelings of nationalism are very strong in Anatolia. And this is a natural situation. Because every nation strives in every way to liberate its own land from foreign yoke.

Now let us assume that in the future Mustafa Kemal Pasha wins great victories and liberates Anatolia and even the whole of Turkey from the hands of foreigners. Could this ensure the future of the Turks? Before World War I, Turkey was not under foreign occupation. There was a Turkish government and Sultan in Constantinople. Their orders were considered obligatory to be carried out in all provinces. However, the common people of Turkey, the mass of the people, were still in poverty and there were always wars. At that time, the poor worked and the beys, pashas and officials ate. In other words, the majority of the people were suffering and a handful of “greats” were abusing the situation. Just as Venizelos made a big Greece out of a small Greece, but he could not improve the situation of the people, Mustafa Kemal Pasha cannot make the people of Anatolia happy, no matter how many victories he wins. Because it is clear from science and philosophy that one or a few people can never save the people from misery.

Nationalism is now bankrupt. The most important thing in the world today is to eat, drink and live. If there is no food and drink for a Turk or a Bulgarian, whether Turkey or Bulgaria is big or small, it is the same for them. If I and my family die of hunger, then let the world burn! That is why, after the war against foreigners is over in Anatolia, an economic struggle will be waged against the capitalists – the rich – and this will be done by the workers and farmers of the whole world gathering under red flags.

3rd Congress of the Comintern (1921)
Süleyman Nuri’s speech

Comrades, on behalf of the Communist Party of Turkey, I wish to inform the congress regarding its work and the national movement in Anatolia.

The Turkish independence movement is extremely important for the East. Before the World War, Turkey, like the other countries of the East, was under the yoke of imperialism. The Turkish people, the peasants and workers, were driven against their will and desire into this imperialist war by their oppressors, the pashas. During the War, a great many of the Turkish youth – officers and soldiers – were taken prisoner and interned in Russia, Germany, and other countries. There they learned about the meaning and origins of the War, and when they returned home, they brought with them the spirit of the socialist and Communist movement. And when, after the War, the pashas signed the Versailles Treaty, the Anatolian workers and peasants rose up to fight for independence, arms in hand.

This independence movement was headed by the same pashas – Kemal Pasha and others. Kemal Pasha’s role and policies were the same as under the earlier Turkish government. On the one hand, the government in Ankara carried out an armed struggle for independence against the Entente, and on the other it sought to repress any Communist movement. The death of our comrades, above all Comrade Suphi, and the imprisonment of many others shows that Kemal is carrying out a bitter struggle against the Communists.

The party organized by Kemal was founded for purposes of provocation, in order to persecute the Communists and to stamp out any Communist influence. Our Communist Workers’ Party has nothing in common with this party.

But the Anatolian peasants and workers are well aware that as long as the independence movement continues, they – and also we Communists – must support it. The destruction of the Entente and of the imperialists is the basis and the beginning of world revolution, which will destroy every form of slavery. And the Anatolian workers and peasants will therefore support this struggle, as long as it is directed against the Entente.

But if Kemal Pasha dares to break off this independence struggle and accept a compromise, the Anatolian workers and peasants will rise up as one man to overthrow Kemal and march over his body to the front, where they will fight alongside the entire East for independence.

Our Communist Party, which held its first congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, continues its agitational activity in Turkey, despite all persecution. It expresses the hope that the world revolution, carried out under the banner of the Third International, will be victorious and will liberate the oppressed people and the working class of the entire world.

1922 was the year the influence of the Communist Party of Turkey peaked. In Anatolia, the leaders of the Popular Communist Party were released from prison after the battle of Sakarya. Following a period of reorganization, the party launched new publications such as the central party press Emek (Labor), the magazines Yeni Hayat (New Life) in Ankara published by Resmor, Kurtuluş (Liberation) published by Hacıoğlu in Kırşehir where he was exiled and Doğru Öz (True Essance) in Mersin.

Resmor emerged as the leader in this period and his opportunist and conservative faction opposed the presence of women comrades in meetings on patriarchal grounds, forcing the old guard of the party into opposition. A Leftmost and Revolutionary Faction was formed in the regional sections of the party around Ruşen Zeki, while the central leaders of the left were Navshirvanov and Hacıoğlu. In the meanwhile, the Eskişehir section of the Socialist Party of Turkey, numbering 2,000 workers applied to join and many were admitted on an individual basis.

The party started attempts at organizing class organizations throughout Anattolia and tried to extend its influence outside, sending militants to Kurdistan and Syria. Sheikh Servet’s tour of Kurdistan was very successful, with masses of workers carrying the preacher on their shoulders after his speeches at mosques. Unfortunately Servet was captured by the Kemalists soon after his return and renounced communism. The efforts in Syria, coordinated from Mersin where the party set up a center of class organizing, were relatively more successful, leading to a more long lived communist presence in the region and contacts with the local national movement against the British.

The same year, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Constantinople, thousands of Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Jewish etc. workers gathered together in their unions organized around the International Workers Union and celebrated May Day in Constantinople. Ginzberg describes the events around the May Day demonstration in Constantinople as follows in his 1924 Report to the Eastern Section of the Comintern titled Communist Groups and Revolutionary Trade Unions:

     «The Communist Party of Constantinople had the mass of workers under its influence, and this was proved by the demonstration of May 1, 1922, despite martial law, the martial law court and the special prohibition order. This party managed to bring to the streets over 6,000 workers of different nationalities under its absolute leadership. The car of the Yellow chiefs (Socialist Party of Turkey) was even sold to pay for this May Day demonstration and the money was spent on the demonstration. After this May Day, by July, the trade union organization included more than 4,000 workers and strong communist nuclei in almost all the unions that led them... The Social Democratic Party was completely disbanded by the Communist Party and no longer exists as a party... Obviously, the government, seeing that the influence of the IWU was growing and strengthening, began a desperate crackdown, forbidding conferences, meetings, confiscating dues, banning its newspapers, etc., while issuing arrest warrants against its militants».

Moreover, the left in Constantinople faced more than government repression. After the May Day demonstration, the anarchists in the International Workers Union lead by Maximos were alarmed at the growing communist influence and decided to take action. Ginzberg described the events as follows in his 1924 report titled A Brief Overview of the Turkish Labor Movement:

     «After May 1, 1922, a sharp struggle began between the anarcho-syndicalist tendency and the communist tendency. The first tendency was represented by Maximos, the general secretary, and the Central Committee, which at the June plenum demanded the withdrawal of the IWU from the Red Trade Union International. However, they became a minority in the face of the activity and energetic attitude of the members of the Constantinople Communist Party. In the elections that followed, members of the Constantinople Communist Party were elected as general secretary, to the Central Committee and the newspaper».

The Communist Party of Constantinople wanted to push for the formation of a General Confederation of Labor and invited the magazine circle Aydınlık (Clarity), made up of the remnants of the Workers and Farmers Socialist Party, which the party had come into contact with during the May Day demonstration, to a union congress it was organizing, in order to extend its influence over the Muslim masses. Ginzberg desribed the events as follows in the report quoted above:

«The Constantinople Communist Party committee decided to call a congress of all workers organizations for July 15... On July 10, despite the hostile attitude of the Constantinople Communist Party towards Aydınlık, which they saw as nothing more than bourgeois revolutionaries, I succeeded in getting them to take the decision not to leave them on their own and to try to change their attitude by drawing them into activity... On July 10, I had a meeting with the leaders of their bureau, Dr. Şefik, Sadrettin Celal... I explained the situation to them and said, we have decided to convene the conference on July 15th and we expect you to actively participate in it. After about fifteen minutes of discussion between them separately from me, they told me that they were also thinking about doing something like that. I told them that there was nothing to think about anymore; the preparatory work has been done, more than 20 workers' organizations will respond to our call; it is time to act actively and we think that they will not refuse.

     «Then Sadrettin Celal asked: 'Who will take the initiative in calling the meeting?' I told them that this was not a fundamental issue. Then he said let's set the agenda. We worked on the agenda. After that he said, 'Let's write the invitation letters'. I said I have to submit the agenda to the IWU and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkey first. They said no, why waste time, let's send the invitation letters immediately and seal the letters. I refused and said there was no need to rush: I left them saying that I would reply to them after submitting the agenda to our committees for approval. The next day we received the invitation letter sent by Aydınlık... We were all stunned... Despite the hostile attitude of the IWU CC and the Communist Party of Constantinople committee, it was decided to participate.
     «Two days later, committees from about 15 workers organizations asked the IWU CC what was the purpose of Aydınlık and its invitation. Our answer was to take the plunge. On July 15th, the conference opened. 23 delegates representing 22,000 organized workers attended. The first two sessions were spent reading reports on the state of the organizations and making speeches. In the third session it was unanimously agreed that all unions should merge and dissolve into a General Confederation of Labor.... We were thinking of going on a general strike to force the government to accept the IWU as the General Confederation of Labor, and for this we wanted the members of Aydınlık – as Turkish militants – to engage in daily agitation and propaganda in this direction. In one session we proposed to elect commissions for this task. Aydınlık was supposed to take part in these action commissions with all its members. However, Aydınlık refused to engage in daily practical activity. This led to general anger. A worker delegate took the floor and said: 'Now we understand very well that you are all talk, but when action is mentioned your true face is revealed, you refuse to educate the working class. But we don't want ten red Hilmis instead of one yellow Hilmi'... On the way out, everyone, all the worker delegates from different organizations were saying: 'But they are all Beys (bourgeois)'».

The destructive behavior of the Aydınlık leadership was challegened not only by the Communist Party of Constantinople but a group within Aydındınlık’s youth group, Communst Youth Union of Turkey, lead by its secretary İsmail Hakkı (not to be confused with İsmail Hakkı of Kayseri). İsmail Hakkı and his comrades were expelled from the Aydınlık youth and joined forces with the International Communist Youth Group, formed two years ago along with the Communist Group itself. The ICYG established a legal Young Workers and Students Society tied with the International Workers Union. The ICYG was the main contact of the Communist Youth International in Constantinople in this period. The ICYG regarded the activities of Italian fascists in a similar fashion to how the Communist Group did so with the Russian Whites and distrupted a fascist meetings with stink bombs without ever advocating a political united front against fascism.

In the meanwhile, the Popular Communist Party of Turkey started the preparations for a party congress. The government outlawed the congress because foreign Comintern delegates were among the participants. Nevertheless, what was effect is the Second Congress of the Communist Party of Turkey was held in illegality on August 15-16 in a village near Ankara. Present were comrades from Amasya, Tokat, Sivas, Kayseri, Trabzon, Karahisar, Adana, Ankara and Mersin, while the sections in Tarsus, Zonguldak, Konya, Kastamonu, Malatya and above all Constantinople could not be present. The party set its priority as the organization of the union movement through the country, leading to the formation of the Anatolian Red Unions. The Draft Program of the party prepared for the congress read as follows:

     «The Party considers it its duty to spread among the masses of workers and proletarians the ideals of class struggle, social revolution and communism.
     «The Party will organize the masses of the working people and use all the forces at its disposal to defend these aspirations aimed at securing the interests of the working class and the poor peasants.
     «The attitude of the Communist Party towards bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organizations with an idealistic world view and conservative character is based on the following point of view: To relentlessly fight against all kinds of pro-Western groups, to establish relations and cooperate on certain political questions with the Populists and other parties and groups that defend the interests of the middle peasants and intellectuals.
     «The Popular Communist Party of Turkey is not a party of individuals, but of the most progressive sections of the working class and peasants, with steel internal organizational discipline, persistent and determined, ready to sacrifice everything for the liberation of the proletariat and peasants. Armed with invincible Marxist methods, the party invites all conscious proletarians of Turkey to the field of class struggle for the liberation of all working humanity from the ongoing exploitation and oppression».

Ruşen Zeki, a delegate from Sivas and member of the Leftmost and Revolutionary Faction and some other comrades warned the Comintern not to consider the Grand National Assembly of Turkey a revolutionary government and send it aid. M. Golman, delegate to the congress reported as follows:

     «(Some comrades) warn us in very harsh language not to regard the Turkish Grand National Assembly as a revolutionary government and not to help it. Because with our gold the police can accomplish their work, and with our gold and weapons the government can shoot the Turkish workers and peasants. Naturally, we objected and told them that they should understand politics of the past».

Soviet Russia gifted Mustafa Kemal’s government 3,065,000 gold rubles and 100,000 Ottoman gold in 1920, 9,400,000 gold rubles in 1921, and 4,600,000 gold rubles in 1922, amounting to a total of 10,791,42 liras, along with 37,812 rifles, 324 heavy and light machine guns and 44,587 crates of ammunition. The Anatolian left’s criticisms of Soviet Russia giving all this gold and weapons as a gift to the Kemalists, without benefiting the communist movement was shared by the left in the party in general. Nevertheless, despite disagreeing with the objections of the most radical militants of the Anatolian left about whether Kemalism should be supported, the Comintern backed the left against the supporters of Resmor who was replaced by Hacıoğlu at the helm of the party and would soon depart the communist movement for good. According to Goldman:

     «Despite his insane provocations, Nazım (Resmor) remained outside the new CC. We were in favor of Salih's candidacy for the secretariat of the CC... The Nazımists had to be dispersed and unanimity had to be won... After Salih's election, this old man (Nazım) said: 'When I was secretary, I gave you a quiet life, security and an uneventful existence. Let's see if Salih can give you those.' This governor without a domain did not understand that if Salih had acted as he did, he would never have been elected secretary, because party life is not a quiet life, but a life of struggle».

During the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, a decision was taken to merge all organizations adhering to the Communist International in Constantinople and Anatolia. The new Organizational Bureau consisted of three people: Hacıoğlu of the Popular Communist Party, Kazım of Van broadly representing the left in Constantinople, and Şefik Hüsnü representing the right organized around the magazine Aydınlık. Şefik Hüsnü was given the secretariat of the bureau in order to counterbalance the influence of the left who made up the majority of the bureau. The protests of the delegates of the Communist Party of Constantinople such as Ginzberg to such decisions of the congress were excluded from the stenographic records. Moreover, Navshirvanov clashed with Ahmet Cevat Emre, leader of the right in the Baku branch. Nevertheless, under Hacıoğlu as the head of the delegation, even Aydınlık delegate Sadreddin Celal expressed criticisms of the support given to the Kemalists. Hacıoğlu’s Letter to the Eastern Section of the Comintern expressed the general mood of the party at this point:

     «The recent attack and offense suffered by the Communist Party of Turkey in Anatolia by the national bourgeoisie, which has acquired its class consciousness with the financial and political help of the Soviet government, no matter how great its intensity, can neither force the communists of Turkey to bow down before the national bourgeoisie, nor can it interrupt the currents of social revolution in Turkey».

The response to this general left sentiment was given by Karl Radek at the congress:

     «We do not regret for a moment that we told the Turkish Communists that their first task after organizing themselves as a separate party is to support the national-liberation movement in Turkey... And, 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 crystallize out in Turkey».

Indeed, there was a great lack of clarity on the part of Communist International about the real situation in Turkey, the capitalist and revolutionary nationalist history of which was not taken into consideration, and the potential of its class movement ignored. Nevertheless, on December 12, during the Second Congress of the Profintern, the International Workers Union of Constantinople, claiming about 10,000 members represented by Ginzberg and Kazım of Van and the Anatolian Red Unions, claiming 10,000 members organized in cities such as Ankara, Eskişehir, Mersin and Cilicia, Konya, Adapazarı, Kayseri, Samsun and Bafra merged, forming the League of Red Unions of Turkey. The Resolution on the Unification of the Anatolian Red Unions and the International Workers' Union read as follows:

     «The delegates of the Anatolian Red Unions and the Constantinople International Workers' Union, who were present at the 2nd Congress of the Red Trade Union International, held a meeting on December 12, 1922, and after discussions they decided on the organic union of both organizations».
     «Taking into consideration the new situation created by the recent political events, which have resulted in the government's fierce repressions, taking into account that both organizations have been disbanded by the government and have gone out of the legal field of work, and in this framework, in a situation where we do not know the current state of our organizations, we have decided to unite, to continue the work of the red unions and to establish a bureau in Constantinople consisting of 2 Anatolian delegates, 2 IWU delegates and 1 Profintern representative».

Against the genocidal provocations targeting non-Muslims in Constantinople following the Kemalist takeover of Smyrna, under the direction of the Communist Party of Constantinople, the IWU took action. In his 1924 report titled A Brief Overview of the Turkish Labor Movement, Ginzberg described the general attitude of the left towards the Kemalists since the end of the war and its reaction against the feeling of nationalist frenzy as follows:

     «With the Mudanya Agreement, we realized that the death warrant of the National Pact had been signed. In order to enlighten the workers about their class interests and the meaning of the Kemalist 'victory', the Communist Party of Constantinople (IWU) printed a statement in Turkish, which read as follows: The working class welcomes every blow dealt to imperialism. However, the Kemalist bourgeoisie entered into a compromise with the imperialists with the Armistice of Mudanya. The Kemalist bourgeoisie will not realize the material aspirations of the workers. Whereas before it was the British, French and Italian police under the command of foreign imperialists who suppressed strikes, today it is the Turkish police under the command of the Kemalist bourgeoisie who suppressed the strike of tramway workers against a French company a few days after its 'victory'. Both the Turkish and foreign bourgeoisie are enemies of the working class. Only through struggle and force can the workers impose their rights on the bourgeoisie of all kinds. The Turkish bourgeoisie is trying to weaken the ranks of the workers with chauvinist demagogy. Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Jewish workers are brothers and have one common enemy: All the bourgeoisie. The unity of all workers, regardless of race and nationality, and the struggle against the Kemalist bourgeoisie and imperialism, etc... Taking advantage of the big demonstrations in the streets, this leaflet was distributed among the demonstrating workers and pasted on almost all the walls of the city.
     «At the same time there was a tendency to massacre the Greeks. In every neighborhood we secretly formed committees of Turkish, Greek and Armenian workers whose task was to turn a possible racial massacre into a class struggle. Greek, Armenian and Turkish members of the IWU participated together in all street demonstrations. A very meaningful phenomenon: While the masses took the hats off the heads of passers-by and harassed those who did not wear fezes, the Greek, Jewish, Armenian members of the IWU with their hats on their heads, together with their Turkish comrades, walked undisturbed among tens of thousands of demonstrators and participated extensively in the action of smashing with stones the windows of the houses of bourgeois of different nationalities in the rich districts».

The first of the documents we are presenting is an article, “Nationalism and Socialism”, by Ruşen Zeki, one of the leaders of the Leftmost and Revolutionary Faction of the Anatolian party, elaborating his views – some of which can be considered fully Marxist only with some reservation – on nationalism and how it related to socialism.

The second document from this period, “Materials on the History of the Revolutionary Movement in Turkey”, by Zinatullah Navshirvanov, is a detailed history of the national revolution which expresses the continuity between the founding documents of the party from 1920 that rejected supporting the Kemalists from the beginning and the left’s position in 1922.

Thei third text, “The Ways of Turkey’s Toilers to Liberation”, by İsmail Hakkı, is significant for publicly making the same point about the gold and weapons of Soviet Russia being used against the working class in Turkey.

The Red Gazette, among whose editorial committee in the Soviets was Ginzberg and poet and young Aydınlık leader Nazım Hikmet, seems to have been the central union publication of the party. From the Red Gazette we publish the Program dated 1922. Also from the Red Gazette of 1922 we reproduce the article “The Question of Nationality,” which describes the subjugation of various ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire. Both reflect the line of the left.

From the newspaper Ziya, also from 1922, we transcribe “Sultans and Palaces”, an article by a communist youth leader, İsmail Hakkı, which emphasizes the proletarian internationalist perspective in the struggle against monarchism.

The next document is the speech made at the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Bulgaria by Petsopoulos, a member of the Communist Party of Greece who continued to the defend the Greek party’s earlier line of relentless opposition to the occupation of Anatolia and was later kicked out of the Greek central committee for his internationalism.

The effectiveness of the Greek communist soldiers’ opposition to the occupation of Western Anatolia is referenced by the left in Turkey in the last text too, “Masks Down”, which in general reads like a manifesto of the party left.

One is a life that has been lived, experienced, and whose happiness and disasters have been determined by dates and statistics; the other is the life and the path that the awakening that has come into being with the painful experiences and lessons of this life, and finally the method sought in desperation and the ideal that has emerged, have begun to keep alive... Let us summarize these: Today's nationalism, today's socialism.

Methodists divide the history of mankind into parts that jump from one to another, that are transformed in terms of their way of life and their ideals: religion, nation, etc. The history of mankind records many struggles at the time of the transition from one of these creeds to another, and perhaps they also say that all struggles are due to a transition, a jump, a revolution. In this respect, today we are again experiencing a great struggle, the source of which we are no strangers to. While we are running to get rid of the murderous life we have been living for years and to realize the happiness of the people and the oppressed, those great ambitions, the atrocities that suffocate humanity and make the oppressed people groan, the reigns adorned with the blood of the oppressed, the evil, the hypocrisy, the lies, all the poisons of the past, of the life we have experienced by living, stand in front of us by hiding behind the principles of nationality, which have received the decree of legitimacy in terms of social affairs for centuries, and say to us: “No! You will not go, you will not advance!” and finally they try to stop us with the cruelty they have been accustomed to for centuries.

We socialists, communists would like to put aside the advice against the rightists in the communist program, which has been created through endless bitter experiences, and we would like to show great kindness and talk to them again; we would like to talk to them again by considering the past and the present, by putting forward human needs and the results of science.

If the nationalists recognize a sociology and take sociology as a science, as a concept that has the essence of truth, they should know that there is also socialism. The basic element of sociology is not the sultan but the people, the prisoner rather than the judge, the oppressed rather than the oppressor, the hungry rather than the well fed. Let us consider history: These are the traces of all revolutions. They are the ones who brought all revolutions into being.

If socialism was born out of this, if the nationalists can see such a gleam, there is no doubt that this is a child of sociology, which they claim to be the mother of their doctrines; it is the child of sociology which, when it gives birth to one of its children, shrouds and buries the other.

At the same time, science and morality have not been satisfied by applying their principles in any of the methods they have given birth to over the centuries. Which nationalist can show a social structure, a social form in which the moral principles and sociology of science and morality have been fully implemented and lived. On the contrary, in the methods experienced so far, many factors that muddy and scratch the moral principles of science have been nurtured and clawed. However, socialism is completely based on the moral principles of science. In this respect, it has achieved the ownership of morality and the trust of conscience.

Socialism and communism are more of a remedy to fill the stomach. Everything of humanity, its feelings, intellect, ideals, morals, customs, depends on its stomach. We can say that the stomach of humanity dominates everything, taking into account the close connection between spirituality and materiality. Therefore, socialism is the struggle of the starved stomachs to be satiated. To summarize; socialism springs from three great sources that include the legitimate authority to claim the life of humanity and to govern it. It rests on three great pillars without collapsing: Science, morality, stomach.

Let the nationalists, with a clear conscience, look at the histories they have written, examine the lives they have lived, if the social style they advocate satisfies these three factors, we are with them. But they have always complained that although they want to satisfy these three factors, they always admit that their principles do not lead them to this goal, and they always try to make many reforms, to repair the ruined parts of their buildings, which they do not realize are rotten, and to plaster the collapsed parts. But they do not listen to the voice of their conscience. We know this and continue on our way. Even if we do not understand anything, we can choose from the histories they have written that they will oppose us with their passion until the last minute. They are shouting and shouting! And finally they say: “You are running after unnatural things, how can you deny nationality, you are blind, you are throwing up so many fusses».

No!... We are not blind at all. We know the nation. We record its existence in our principles. But our understandings are different. If the principle of nationality means that every nation, every village, even every individual should have its own destiny, should live free and happy in a legitimate way, not to the detriment of others, then the social movement of socialism and communism fully guarantees this goal. If the principle of nationality means the establishment of empire at the expense of the common people and glory at the expense of the hungry, if the principle of nationhood means ensuring one's own rise and development to the detriment of neighboring and condemned nations, there is no socialism in this. And in this respect, the sharp-witted nationalists are the neighbors of all humanity. But the socialists will no longer give the palace, the average reactionary, any room against a truth they have realized.

The nationalists should know well that science, morality and the stomach have unanimously determined a path, a direction for humanity towards socialism and communism with such great power that it can defeat all armies and overthrow all reigns. To stand against this trail, this direction, this movement is nothing but a madness born of greed...

Zinatullah Navshirvanov

1. Near History

In order to explain the political situation today, it’s necessary to briefly remember the past of the Anatolian revolutionary movement. Understanding the events of today are only possible by going to their roots.

I believe to speak of the “Anatolian national movement” by looking at one side of the medallion would be wrong. The Anatolian movement of today was prepared by the Union and Progress Party around the period of the Armistice of Mondros (October 20 1918), or perhaps earlier, considering the possibility of defeat in the World War.

During the Balkan War, the Freedom and Accord Party lost to the Union and Progress Party. Henceforth Union and Progress remained the single independent party administrating the Ottoman Empire. At the start of the world war, this party dispersed the newly developing Ottoman Socialist Party, shut down its paper İştirak (Association), and exiled, imprisoned and otherwise disabled its bravest and most valuable elements such as Ahmet Samim, thus freeing its hands completely.

During the war, the Union and Progress Party ruled as it pleased. In the long period of the war, the organizational work of the party was completed both in Constantinople and Anatolia, and through their loyal followers (or brothers to use the expression they use) established numerous national, religious, social, educational societies as well as financial, industrial, economic, commercial and agricultural societies with national characteristics. With the help of these societies, it attracted the intellectual sections, took the most talented ones under its patronage, and taught them the good aspects of bourgeois lifestyle. Under the pretext of military needs, they formed state monopolies in the fields of food, transportation and certain areas of trade and disregarding the various Sharia and bourgeois laws in the Ottoman Empire, helped its military and civilian members enrich themselves with great speculations and cheats.

Actually, most of the financial, industrial, commercial and agricultural national associations were formed after the establishment of state monopolies and with all sorts of excuses during the war, prepared the conditions for the economically oppressed elements to enter the struggle at the appropriate time. Right after the signing of the truce, those oppressed under the national economy, the Armenians and the Greeks, together with the leaders of the Freedom and Accord who were suppressed because of their enmity towards the Union and Progress Party, basing themselves on the support of the Allied States who promised them certain privileges, started attacking the Union and Progress Party and its financial, commercial, industrial societies. Societies well hidden which based themselves on the principles of international bourgeois organizations, for example “national defense” and Red Crescent with their contradicting interests, even those representing many tendencies of those who were oppressed during the world war participated in this mobilization.

The first basic organizations, such as the British Lovers Society of the Freedom and Accord Party, Commission of Public Welfare, the National Liberal Party, Peace and Ottoman Welfare Party, Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, Kurdish General Education and Publication Society, Radical People’s Party etc. were established and begun to struggle against the Union and Progress Party. In most situations, the Greeks and the Armenians united in societies of this kind and struggled.

On the other hand the Ottoman Socialist Party was resurrected and turned into the Socialist Party of Turkey. Workers’ and Peasants’ Socialist Party of Turkey was formed with the participation of certain socialist elements who had been in Germany and had participated in the revolutionary movement there. Additionally, dockers and boatmen formed the Social Democratic Party. Post and telegraph workers, railway workers, teachers and certain other groups of toilers founded numerous union organizations and aid societies. They too intended to participate in the class struggle.

Like the first group basing its actions on the Allied states, the second group that wanted to enter the fight to defend the interests of the class were mostly against the Union and Progress Party and its leaders… Thus, in order to succeed in its struggle, the Union and Progress Party had to explore many avenues: 1. It had to fight against the Armenians and the Greeks; 2. It had to fight the Freedom and Accord Party and other organizations, associations and persons who were its enemies; 3. It had to fight against the toiling elements; 4. It had to preserve its existence in the face of the Allied states; 5) In short, it had to strengthen nationalist currents.

In order to achieve these goals, the Union and Progress Party had to wither from the inside the organizations of the “monarchist conservatives” and “Christian nationalists” supported by the Allied states on the one hand and the parties and organizations that participated in the struggle of the toiling elements on their own on the other hand, and at the same time preserve the existence of its associations and organizations. For this purpose, it organized a congress and changed the name and program of the Union and Progress Party, partially turning into the Renewal Party. At the same time, the Conservative Party was founded to unite elements who kept their distance from or sympathized with the Union and Progress Party. Using the appropriate moments, parties and organizations hostile to the Union and Progress Party were infiltrated, and thanks to these infiltrators the Union and Progress Party could take over the newspapers of their enemies ⁽¹⁾.

And in the end, the Unionists gather a couple of delegates from all the associations formed during the war and the new parties they created, and organized a National Congress with the intention of electing a constant Executive Commission.

* * *

As soon as economic relations with America and Europe begun, the “national economy” created artificially during the war started experiencing a terrible depression. Organizations made up of “national economists” collapsed one after another. Next came the reduction and destruction of the Ottoman Imperial army. On this subject, the Allied states gave directives to Freedom and Accord Party and did everything so that as many Unionist officers as possible were kicked off the army. 15-20 thousand reserve officers recruited from high schools and universities were kicked off the army and became unemployed. The same thing happened to several thousand regular officers. Most them became unemployed too.

In the end, it was understood that working in occupied Constantinople was not enough to preserve political and economic existence. A national revolution was needed in order to fight against the military repression started and intensified by Europe despite the provisions of the ceasefire.

The Allied states who had occupied Constantinople and taken it under its financial influence, taking over Turkey’s financial affairs were not just cautious against the Unionists but they were also afraid of toiling elements organizing into small parties and groups. Especially, not only were there parties in the persons of the most left leaders (socialist, social democratic, workers’ and peasants’), but the socialists, who tried to form relations with Turkish elements from the Black sea coasts to the capital, suffered the repression of the Allied states who were supporters of the Freedom and Accord and the Christian nationalists.

The fact that Constantinople and Anatolia, which were clearly leaning towards new currents, was so close to revolutionary proletarian Russia terrified Western imperialists. Soon, Kurtuluş (Liberation) and Kaplan (Tiger), followed by İdrak (Cognition) which had resumed publication after the armistice, and other socialist newspapers and magazines were shut down. As the economic depression continued to deepen, unemployment was constantly on the rise in many state and private sector institutions. Under these circumstances, a reconciliation between the toilers and the Unionists making up the young Turkish bourgeoisie was inevitable. In fact, the Unionists tended towards common action with revolutionary Russia, which they hoped would defend the “national economy” and the “national movement” from their perspective. Yet, this was only after they had pushed Anatolia into an international blockade. They spoke of this tendency to toiling elements and claimed to be on the side of toilers’ revolution. Because of their horrible living conditions and needs, toilers had to join this movement.

Thus, there were a number of elements and groups who were in favor of launching the Anatolian movement for political and economical reasons and joining it due to their conditions.

1. Reserve officers whose commissions were canceled (it would be wrong to consider them the same with regular officers). These youths, all of whom were students, were first called to the army and then kicked out, losing their means of existence. Most of them belong to the class of poor and could have been in favor of the revolution along with the toilers.

2. The officers, commanders and generals who were left on the street after the Allied forces’ liquidation of the Ottoman army. As stated before, most of them were callous Unionists.

3. Revolutionary toilers who became unemployed and who were subjected to the repression of Allied states and their tongs.

4. Bigoted religious groups who resented the use of force and felt religious hatred against European culture (they managed most mosques and religious foundations and thus were in favor of the development of agriculture, and were afraid of the rise of American wheat and flour merchants’ influence in Anatolia).

5. Unionists masquerading as political, social and scientific associations and parties in Constantinople, Anatolia and Rumelia. We can divide them into several subgroups.
     a) Criminals and murderers afraid of being accused of, and punished for the massive Armenian massacre and other murders by the Allied states provoking the Greek armies to divide Turkey, and certain Muslim environments.
     b) Owners of large farms and grain merchants who lost the Constantinople market after the beginning of wheat and flour exports from America and certain colonies who wanted to at least save Anatolia from this competition ⁽²⁾.
     c) Industrialists trying to protect and continue production in the new and national industrial enterprises created by the esteemed “brothers” of the Union and Progress Party government’s policy of promoting national industry and national economy, from the competition with European goods.
     d) Prominent members, founders and administrators of numerous small and large commercial and financial institutions formed under the patronage of the “national economy” government during the war.
     e) Responsible secretaries of the Union and Progress Party and other important members of the organization who represented the party in every city of Anatolia, who turned their positions into a source of personal profit using the local organs.
     f) Certain propagandists, orators, doctors, lawyers etc.

* * *

As a result of the influence of Western imperialism, the economic class differences of the Ottoman Empire didn’t take prominence politically and the class war didn’t take a hard form. In order to strengthen their rule, political circles of imperialist Europe were conducting nationalist propaganda among various elements of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire of various religions and races. This propaganda which united the population of the Ottoman Empire as various racial and religious groups, overshadowed the class war by promoting national struggle among these groups.

Because the large economical and financial owners of the Ottoman Empire were mostly outside Turkey, in Europe, the Turkish workers and peasants couldn’t realize their economic slavery at first glance. For this and other similar reasons, the class war, while continuing to exist in real life, remained weak as long as imperial rule continued and the level of its conscious comprehension remained low.

During the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the temporary victory of international capitalism, a temporary compromise was reached: Various classes and groups who couldn’t reach an agreement due to their different interests engaged together in the defensive war. Thus, a great portion of the Muslims of Turkey participated in this war; Armenians, Greeks and other non-Muslims, together with the Freedom and Accord Party whose interests were one with those of the palace became its enemies.

In the first period, revolutionary or rebel movements like the Izmir Rejection of Annexation Society in Constantinople, Eastern Provinces Defense of Law Society and the National Congress were managed by the commanders of the Caucasian Battalion who were in Constantinople; and groups such as Rejection of Annexation in Anatolia were managed by what would later become the Defense of Law Society in Rumelia and Anatolia in Erzurum and Sivas.

The regular army created by the revolution didn’t exist yet. In those days, class consciousness did not gain much ground in the revolution as the need for unifying defense came to prominence. In this period, the defense forces were made up the irregular gangs called the National Forces. A part of the commanders of these gangs were regular army officers and reserve officers; however a great majority were made up of warrior leaders who came from the people and Unionists who fled to the mountains after the armistice because they had participated in the massacres of the Armenians during the war.

The Constantinople government expelled the reserve officers from the army first and those who wanted the movement to turn into a worker-peasant revolution weren’t few among them. Revolutionary workers and socialists also participated in the liberation movement. Even the Unionists, who made up the most important part of the liberation movement, claimed they were in favor of socialist views ⁽³⁾.

* * *

In September 1919, the congress of various societies founded by the Unionists in Rumelia, Constantinople and Anatolia was held in Sivas. The decision to organize this congress was taken at the Erzurum Congress of the Eastern Provinces Defense of Law Society in June 1919. The Sivas congress explained the principles of the Anatolian movement and established provincial committees in every city tied to the Defense of Law Society. These committees were sort of arms of the Committee of Representatives of the Defense of Law Society of Anatolia and Rumelia supposedly formed by the Sivas Congress. The mentioned committees from among great farm owners, industrialists, mullahs such as muftis and religious judges, members of the Union and Progress Party who knew how to use a gun and oppressive landlords, appointed and directed by the center (that is Sivas or the national congress and the Izmir and Constantinople Defense of Law Societies) and the local “responsible secretaries” of the Union and Progress Party. Responsible secretaries of the Union and Progress Party who didn’t work well in this or that city they were active during the war would go to other cities, working for the Provincial Committee there ⁽⁴⁾.

Representatives of the National Forces, still being built up in the rural regions, also took part in these provincial committees. The provincial committees increasingly started to gain power, and engaged in oppressive policies in the areas falling under their jurisdiction, using their influence based on repression and brute force to make the National Forces units under their command change and sometimes arrest or force to flee town chiefs, religious judges, governors, and commanders and officers from the old Imperial army. Parliamentary elections were held between October and December 1919, and those appointed by the Defense of Law Society of Rumelia and Anatolia in Sivas and the National Congress in Constantinople, under the armed threat of the National Forces, were elected by the votes of fifty thousand citizens per deputy ⁽⁵⁾.

On March 1920, the parliament, made up of two assemblies, was occupied by the military forces of the allied states (the unofficial occupation had developed spontaneously after the armistice) and some of the deputies were arrested, being sent to the political prison in Constantinople known as Bekir Agha Ward. Later, they were exiled to Malta ⁽⁶⁾.

Many important members of the Union and Progress Party were hiding in Rome. The actions of these fugitives there aren’t known. What is known is only that Rahmi Bey participated in most of the transactions the Unionists wanted to do with the British, and that he worked together with Cavit Bey, minister of finance during the war, who had fled prison and lead the Roman section of the secret organization the Union and Progress Party was based on. This section has a post box which is used for connections between Unionist capitalists and those working in Europe under the pretext of import and export commissioning between Germany – Turkey, and their supporters. The first advertisement for this this commissioners’ island, which has sections in Hamburg and Zurich, and which is managed by Rıza Rıfat & Co, came out in Yeni Gün in Ankara and reprinted in and propagated by all Unionist papers in Constantinople.

Some of the deputies escaped by going to Anatolia. The most silent ones, or those who were most cunning in their movements managed to stay in Constantinople. When those who escaped Constantinople merged with Mustafa Kemal and Ali Fuat Pasha who had managed to gather many officers and armed troops around them, it wasn’t difficult at all to gather the new assembly that would operate in Anatolia. All the necessary organizations were ready: In every city, there was a Provincial Committee of the Defense of Law Society, and these committees were made up of great traders, industrialists, farm owners, high ranking mullahs and influential secret society members, along with secondary electors chosen for the dispersed parliament by the provincial committees. The Pashas had extremely talented, effective and intelligent officers under their command. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey, or most of it, was made up of five person per township in addition to the deputies who had escaped from Constantinople.

* * *

The Grand National Assembly of Turkey, together with the Defense of Law committees in other cities, continued to take over the state organ, and expel from this organ those who were not suitable to them. The Defense of Law township committee, with the help of the National Forces gangs they commanded through their commanders, was conducting defense against the Greek offensives, as well as suppressing the rebellions that occurred in many provinces and cities. Here it’s necessary to remember two interesting phenomena: 1. The National Forces and the National Assembly feared the rebellions, and in particular they feared Konya, the hotbed of reaction, would not join the national movement. At the same time there was a great need for weapons and military equipment. For this reason, the Konya province was occupied by the Italian military troops (until the national government was strong enough) and arms and ammunition was brought from Italy via Antalya. After the National Assembly government started to dominate the situation, the Italians pulled their troops back to parts of Anatolia where the National Assembly’s mediator was present, and an agreement was signed between the Stefani Agency, part of the Information Bureau of the Italian government, and the Anatolian Agency.

During the second half of 1920, Sami Bey, former commander of interior of the National Assembly government, was acting as a mediator for the relations between Roma and Ankara in Rome where he was present as the representative of the official government. The statement about this agreement signed in the name of the press directorate was made by Hamdullah Suphi, General Director of Press and Publications, in the open session of the assembly upon a question of a group of deputies. The caused a struggle between him and Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Mustafa Kemal rejected this statement about the agreement and accused Hamdullah Suphi of lying.

Hamdullah Suphi resigned from his duty as press director after this incident and went to Anatolia. His return, after quite a while, happened thanks to Mustafa Kemal having him “elected” as Minister of Education. Yet, the harsh opponents of Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his fellow commanders Nihat and Nurettin Pashas who had merged in a group with the “Military” agreement of November 12 1921, that is the deputies of Eastern provinces, such as Kurdistan, Erzurum, Van and Bitlis, deposed of this “nationalist orator” Minister of Education with a passionate offensive. Like Nihat and Nurettin Pashas’ loss of their commissions, Hamdullah Suphi’s resignation should be evaluated as a defeat suffered by Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s “Soldiers’ group” at the hands of bourgeois liberals.

A large majority of the news serviced by the Anatolian Agency was made up of news gathered from Stefani via the island of Rhodes.

1. The presence of Cavit Bey, one of the ringleaders of the Unionists, in Rome from the beginning of the Anatolian movement, 2. The Italian aid received by Unionists trying to escape into Anatolia from Constantinople and 3) The hiding of Unionists who escaped from Malta in Rome and similar issues demonstrates that the Anatolian movement was tied to Italy from very early on, and in an essential way.

The II. Rebellion that took place in Konya in September-October 1920 was organized by the great export and import merchants because of the trade crisis that emerged after the routes to Constantinople and Adana were closed. The people were fooled into joining this rebellion thanks to propaganda made in favor of the Caliphate. People like Kazım Hüsnü (who was a friend of Halim Sabit Bey and wrote for the Yeni Dünya (New World) newspaper published in Baku as Islahi) were involved in the preparation and administration of the rebellion. Back when he was at the head of his own business in Constantinople, Kazım Hüsnü had made a great contribution to the newly emerging nationalist movement in Anatolia and later he became a deputy to the National Assembly from Konya.

* * *

In those days, the National Forces, mostly made up of unemployed toilers, were the main vein of the Anatolian movement. The historical section of Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s statement, dated September 19 1921, about the military operation and the emergent situation after the victory of Sakarya contradicted the facts: The purpose of this statement was to praise the regular army commanders who were on their feet thanks to the “military alliance” among the commanders, and discredited Ethem Bey and Mehmet Efe who had rebelled against him. The experience from the rebellion had shown that the Defense of Law committees were incapable of successfully defending against the rebels, and that the Turkish bourgeoisie could only exploit and rule in an environment of peace.

Yet the National Assembly, made up of merchants, industrialists, great farm owners, leading members of the clergy, staff officers, generals, doctors and lawyers begun to understand the deeply revolutionary essence of the National Forces better. A section of this assembly made up of bourgeois groups who were a little uncomfortable with existing laws started propagating for the National Forces to be replaced by the regular army.

In fact, another group was enjoying this propaganda. Hundreds of staff officers and pashas were crossing to Anatolia in search of work after being thrown on the street as a result of the liquidation of the Ottoman army by the Allied states. According to them, “the liberation of Turkey” was only possible with the establishment of a regular army. This was in line with the interests of the revolutionary pashas too, as they valued power and command over all of life’s pleasures, and were in love with their gilded shiny epaulets.

For the National Forces were made up of very passionate men, getting them used to obedience was extremely difficult and because their numbers rose, along with revolutionary socialist elements among them, because the National Forces was being grafted with revolutionary views, they would pose a threat to the pashas in the future. The regular army was much more suitable to wear the shiny uniform and command, to be commander-in-chief, marshal or ghazi...

2. Towards the Class War

For this reason, the officers and staff officers coming from Constantinople were being pushed to found a regular army (“a national army in regular order”) with the decision accepted by the majority of the National Assembly. The interests of a major part of the mullahs were the same as the interests of great farm owners. Most of them were manages of religious foundations’ properties such as land and farms. These managers were either the inheritors themselves or were appointed by the Ministry of Foundations.

Depression started in the people’s army called the National Forces as a result of this attitude. Factions who were a part of the National Forces and whose interests were in line with the preservation of the social order not only went on to create the regular army, but also engaged in efforts to drive a wedge between the regular army directorates hostile to the National Forces and the commanders of the National Forces.

The revolutionary toilers circles, who were inside and outside the National Forces, and who worked in the lower ranks of state establishments, were trying to make use of the National Forces to expand the revolutionary socialist movement. All these were happening between the years June and November 1920. One of the reasons the socialist movement was rightly expanding among the people and within the National Forces was that the whole National Assembly, taking into consideration certain political issues, was trying to portray itself as supportive of socialism. The efforts of the (Secret) Communist Party of Turkey, lead by comrades Hacıoğlu Salih, Sharif Manatov, Ahmet Hilmi and Zinatullah Navshirvanov, and the Secret Workers Committee organized by comrade Nazım in Amasya and Samsun were being very successful too.

However there was a strata, or rather a group in the National Assembly which was made up of different bourgeois groups which was positioned in the middle of revolutionary toiler elements and the elements who followed a military oppressive and conservative policy. This group had acted as traders during the war, had worked for various financial and commercial societies, and had managed to own some commercial or financial capital, if a little.

Doctors, lawyers, journalists and other deputies hoping for benefits of cooperation with them were on the side of this group which was working for comprehensive social reforms that would increase the flow of capital and better develop trade better while not destroying the existing system completely. Those who made up this group had been members of the Union and Progress Party along with the officers, great farm owners and the mullahs who had an interest in the preservation of conservatism, and they retained their membership. From the start, they begun to collaborate with certain revolutionary elements and form the Green Army organization, the purpose of which was national and Islamist communism.

They too wanted to use national forces for their own purposes. Their purpose was to portray the Green Army as the revolutionary organization of the toilers and making the revolutionary elements around it into its tools, thus collecting them and elements supportive of the socialist revolution by their side. It didn’t suit their interests that the (Secret) Communist Party of Turkey was working as separate revolutionary organizations, and for this reason they had to wage war against this party.

Trying to take over the National Forces which was entering the sphere of influence of organizations and elements in favor of revolutionary toilers, the Green Army recruited commanders of the National Forces, while waging a theoretical war against communist organizations, accusing them of “fondness of extremism” and not knowing the circumstances of the country. Thus the revolutionary and socialist elements within the Green Army begun to move away from the majority made up of their reformist friends. In the meanwhile, that leading soldiers of the Assembly and their leader Mustafa Kemal Pasha with his tendency for military dictatorship, who was irritated because the commanders of the National Forces were being recruited by the Green Army took a hostile stance against this organization.

Under these circumstances, symptoms of dispersal begun to appear within the Green Army. The reformist elements left with a bourgeois-liberal program of reforms and formed the People’s Faction. This group’s program was prepared masterfully and it was so veiled and flexible that it wouldn’t scare the revolutionary, reformist and even conservative and pro-sharia elements. Right after its founding, this group made a clever maneuver and gathering the majority of the members of the Assembly other than the prominent soldier deputies, and got the Tokat deputy comrade Nazım, who, as a socialist, had insisted on continuing the activities of the Green Army and refused to join the People’s Faction, elected as the Minister of Interior. The purpose of this was to attract comrade Nazım to the group and make use of his organizational talents.

This election of this deputy, who was the life of the Green Army and who had tried more than anyone for the National Forces to join the Green Army, as the Minister of Interior greatly disturbed the supporters of the regular army and the conservatives. The reformist-liberal leaders of the People’s Faction understood that they couldn’t win over comrade Nazım by electing him a minister, and that he would work for the continuation the activity of the Green Army even as a minister.

Comrade Nazım, Minister of Interior, had to resign in 2-3 days (September 1920)

3. The Unity of the Class of the Rich Against the Class of the Poor

The People’s Faction had to fool one of the currents against it, and destroy the other. To its right was the regular army which had completed its organization partially but which wasn’t strong enough yet, supported by the conservatives (mullahs, great farm owners) and the military commanders in the Assembly: to its left were the National Forces who made it clear it was preparing for war against the regular army, who gained the sympathy of socialist circles increasingly and who included numerous revolutionary elements and communist organizations that wanted to take it over.

In the National Assembly made up of members suggested by the Defense of Law Committee and approved by the “group of representatives”, proponents of revolutionary socialism and supporters of the National Forces who helped the revolutionary movement were very few.

Other than that, in its newspaper Yeni Gün, it was implied that the Green Army might have collapsed and the secret communist party had not managed to complete its organization.

However the greatest problem for the People’s Faction was that the leaders of the Communist Party of Turkey and the journalists who supported the politics of these leaders and even published their articles in their newspaper Yeni Dünya (New World), showed no tendency or proximity towards unity with these bourgeois liberals. Both sides attacked each other in the newspapers. In fact, for this group, there was no chance of even trying to come to an agreement with left groups. It was much more possible for the People’s Faction to unite with conservatives and proponents of military oppression. Though the People’s Faction and the rightist elements listed were different from each other, they were either the elements of the tongs of the same bourgeois class. Indeed, the National Assembly was exclusively made up of different bourgeois groups.

Former proponents of comprehensive reforms and the military commanders came to a temporary and deceptive agreement among each other, and together with Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his friends they took a stance against the revolutionary current and the National Forces. In fact, the military groups, who wanted to dismantle the National Forces and stop the socialist current, needed such a compromise. In short, this compromise between right and center currents on their existing common class interests came to be spontaneously. In fact, previously (until the great imperialist war), these economic groups were members of the Union and Progress Party. Even now, because they had joined with the secret remnants of this party and gathered around its common table, they were not in a state of open and determined war against the conservatives, the military dictatorship and reformism. There wasn’t a certain line separating the policies of these groups, which were not very different in the first place. Because their economical interests, like those of the Cadets and the Octobrists in Russia, wasn’t of the sort that could be considered antagonistic. The differences that had begun to appear among these groups had their roots in the 10 years after the declaration of the constitution in Turkey, and especially the characteristics of different economic fields taken over and activated in the years of the world war. When the members of the Union and Progress Party which was in power during the war declared mobilization in the economic front, they were dispersed to areas of the economy such as great agriculture, trade, baking, national industry, transport and others depending on their environment, inclinations and talents.

As these different fields of the economy paved the grounds for those who worked in them for a long while in terms of program or tactics, capitalist bourgeois parties were feeling the need to struggle among themselves as the period didn’t last long and because the Turkish economic life came to be under full domination of the West. However, all these differences didn’t transcend the limits of emotion and tendency. These were the reasons that led the reformist People’s Faction into reuniting in the National Assembly with the conservative great farm owners, foundation administrators, and the officers and generals who were trying to take over the tools of military oppression by founding a regular army.

As a result of this merger, the National Assembly engaged in hostile actions against the revolutionary elements, against socialist newspapers trying to spread socialist views and against the National Forces protecting them. These hostile actions were threats and attempts to intimidate at first, though they later turned to a few arrests.

Then, some deputies left the People’s Faction, saying that the direction had shifted too far to the right. These deputies radicalized, and started looking for comrades among the leftist remnants of the Green Army organization and other revolutionary elements.

The threats, the attempts to intimidate, and the arrests made as a result of the common activity of the conservatives, the military group and the reformist People’s Faction couldn’t scare the revolutionary elements and push the National Forces to the right. Quite the contrary, they pushed certain National Assembly deputy communists from the National Forces into leaving the People’s Faction, and paved the ground for the attitude of the National Forces against the Assembly.

Faced with these circumstances, the cunning supporters of the People’s Faction, that is traders and financial capital owners from the Union and Progress Party, in order to cut the revolutionary movement off of the National Forces and take it over, made a new maneuver of trying to appear in opposition to Mustafa Kemal Pasha and the majority of the Assembly while preserving their relations with secret committee members, shifting left, or rather wanting to appear that way. They established the “Communist Party” of Turkey under official patronage, supposedly with the aim of widening the revolutionary movement. Bourgeois liberals from the People’s Faction organized the party. As such, they wanted to appear as if they’d given up on fighting revolutionary currents and the National Forces. Under the influence of the military group, the majority of the National Assembly had to defend and promote this fake communist party.

For it was more or less understood that it wasn’t possible to shift the revolutionary current and the National Forces right and trying it might cause a “dangerous” civil war. But still, the opinion that prevailed was that although it wasn’t possible to deceive the communist organizations operating in secrecy this way, at least leaders of the National Forces who were mostly ignorant and not really aware of what was going on could be fooled.

On the other hand, such a party was needed for foreign policy. It was necessary to secure the moral and material support of Russia in the face of the Greek offensive, by showing that at least we had a “communist” party after repeating we weren’t communists for the last 6-7 months. The first delegation of the National Assembly who visited proletarian Russia claimed they were making a communist, Soviet revolution and even declared that agricultural communes had been established even in Turkey’s villages. However the day the first embassy delegation came to Ankara, several communists were held in the prison of this city. The night of the day the Russian embassy delegation came to Ankara, comrade Sharif Manatov, born in Bashkortostan, who had been working so that Anatolia learned revolutionary socialism before Menshevism and opportunism, was taken from prison and deported from Anatolia.

Angry articles against communism were published in official newspapers such as Hakimiyet-i Milliye (National Rule) as well as left Unionists’ Yeni Gün.

The protected “Communist Party” of Turkey was created for this purpose and with these slogans even according to its published statues, and with the unchanging founders in its CC. The founders and CC members of this party were old Unionist secret society members who ran the transport vehicles between Inebolu and Ankara, who owned commercial and financial businesses and enterprises, and who had the lumber and timber trade under their monopoly in Western Anatolia. This “communist party” shook the hands of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the founder of the young regular army, the most repressive of the military commanders in the Assembly, and the group leader of the Rumelia and Anatolia Defense of Law Society Representatives, which stood for all the bourgeois elements of the country, so that they could act together in order to separate the national forces from the revolutionaries and disperse the illegally operating communist organizations.

13 thousand Liras were allocated for the work of the new “party” from the secret coffers of the government (that is the money envisaged for the use of the secret police and spies). For instance, National Assembly members who were National Forces commanders such as Ethem Bey’s brother, Saruhan deputy Reşit Bey were recorded as members of the CC of the “communist party”. Thus the Circassian Ethem Bey, one of the most important commanders of the “national” or with its other common name, “mobile” forces was taken in the “communist party”, supposedly without the knowledge of the military commanders and the government. Yeni Dünya newspaper, published under his protection, was transported from Eskişehir to Ankara with its printers in order to become the organ of the “new” party.

In that period, finally an open struggle between the regular army and the National Forces broke out (November 1920). In those days, the Yeni Gün newspaper was full of praises for Ethem Bey and Demirci Mehmet Efe, another commander of the National Forces, going as far as to describe Ethem Bey as the commander of the “Red armies” of the future. The Central Committee of the “communist party” sent special propagandists and agitators to Eskişehir where the revolutionary movement was rapidly spreading among the National Forces. Their purpose was to infiltrate the National Forces and the communist organizations.

When the “communist party” under official patronage emerged, the (Secret) Communist Party of Turkey faced the danger of dispersal. As soon as the new party emerged, the government published an official circular, banning those who weren’t members of the government party and didn’t have the officially stamped membership certificate were banned from propagating communism and in general engaging in communist activity ⁽⁷⁾. The purpose of the circular in question was to take all the revolutionary elements under the administration of the bourgeois organization, and to disperse the revolutionary organizations working in secrecy. Under these circumstances and faces with this circular, the (Secret) Communist Party of Turkey had no chance but to appear officially and turn into a “legal party”.

There were no deputies among the members of the (Secret) Communist Party of Turkey to support it. Lacking such members, it didn’t have a chance to appear officially. Thus there was a need for comrade deputies. For this reason the party, uniting with a few revolutionary deputies who were abandoned by and remnants of the People’s Faction, that is with the Green Army organization lead by comrade Nazım, together with the left populist deputies who split from the People’s Faction due to its compromise with the governments, appeared with a new detailed program for the People’s Communist Party of Turkey. This organization presented its program and statues to the government with a call on November 28th 1920, and on December 7^th, a document was received notifying the party that the government was informed by its founding.

The forces the party which previously worked in secrecy depended on while appearing under this name was made up of PTT (Post and Telegraph Organization) employees, Ankara-Sivas railroad workers organizations, unorganized workers and peasants, certain Green Army organizations who stayed loyal to their revolutionary “leaders”. The comrades who became members of the assembly without elections were accepted only as an official and legal support. Because they haven’t yet lost their supporters among their national forces completely, these forces can be considered among the supporters of the party. However after this proletarian party officially appeared, it wasn’t able to conduct an essential work in organizing. The struggle between the national forces and the government based on the regular army hardened and lead to a separation.

If the “communist party” which was under official patronage and which supposedly worked with the national forces took on the path of revolution by staying loyal to the communist program it presented to the people and the national forces, the defeat of the regular army, the dispersal of the Assembly and the victory of the revolution would be inevitable. People’s Communist Party of Turkey, a truly revolutionary organization, wasn’t able to take over the initiative because: 1. It hadn’t completed its preparatory and organizational work, 2. The “communist party” under official patronage managed to provoke certain relations between the revolutionary elements and the National Forces and won over the proponents of the National Forces, 3. When the armed resistance of the National Forces begun, the most serious and brave leaders of the People’s Communist Party of Turkey were arrested and imprisoned (January 1921).

Due to the activities of the official “communist party” in favor of the government, and because they sent organizers and propagandists to the National Forces and Eskişehir so that they could conquer the fortress from within, the issue was resolved without bloodshed and proponents of the National Forces were defeated by the regular army and the government and had to flee to Greece ⁽⁸⁾.

* * *

Afterward, it was necessary for those elements who incited the organization and the National Forces to rebellion to be put to court and dispersed according to the law as well as the class war. It was know that the members of the “communist party” with official patronage, former members of the People’s Faction, formed relations with the National Forces and incited them to rebellion. Everyone was aware that the leaders of the National Forces were working with the “communist party” in the last days. There were many evidences that demonstrated that this rebellion was prepared by “communist” capitalists, which were known to the government too. Although the members of the People’s Communist Party of Turkey demonstrated with hundreds of events and evidences that they were innocent, while the official “communists” were guilty, there wasn’t even an investigation about these “communists” let alone a trial. The government continued to protect these former members of the People’s Faction.

Eventually it was understood that between the government held by the conservatives, rightist Unionists and military commanders, and the leftist Unionists making up a part of the People’s Faction (official “communists”), there was an agreement foreseeing the suppression of the workers and peasants revolutionary movement, and the dispersal and suffocation of the national forces and the newly developing People’s Communist Party of Turkey. As the members of People’s Communist Party of Turkey were held in jail and tried by the Ankara Independence Court, the capitalist managers of the “communist party” were sent to Europe as delegates by the National Assembly government so that they could look for ways to reconcile with European, and above all British imperialists and capitalists.

The delegates who went to London made offers to British imperialism against the revolutionary movement in the East. It was Bekir Sami Bey, the governor of Syria under the Union and Progress Government and a leader of the group which fought the yoke of the military group in the National Assembly who went furthest in these offers. Celalettin Arif, Yunus Nadi and Izmit deputy Sırrı Bey also participated in these offers. Erzurum deputy Celalettin Arif Bey was the rich chairman of the Constantinople Lawyers’ Society, a tool of slander in the hands of the Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party during the war, as well as chairman of the Constantinople assembly dispersed by the British. Aydın deputy Yunus Nadi was a partner and board member of numerous anonymous financial, commercial and agricultural companies in the Aydın region, and was thus one of the capitalists whose interests was harmed the most by the Greek occupation in the Aydın province. Being able to sell his newspaper Yeni Gün in these regions which had plenty of readers in Constantinople and the regions under Greek occupation was very important to Yunus Nadi ⁽⁹⁾.

Sırrı Bey’s trade between Anatolia and Izmit had almost completely stopped. Massive amounts of raw materials in Bekir Sami Bey’s large mansions in Amasya and Burdur regions was waiting for trade to open with Europe. His property in Amasya faced a different danger too, since the revolutionary current was strong there.

As understood from all this, the calculations of these men and similar “national heroes” who patched themselves to the Anatolian revolution under the influence of many “national hopes” turned out to be wrong and they begun to be harmed by the economic and commercial crisis. For this reason, ceasing the military operations in Anatolia, and stopping or changing the direction of the cause was much more in line with their interests. However as they offered the hand of friendship to Britain, the most authoritative representative of Western civilization, at St. James palace, the Greek armies, under the patronage of British military circles, was preparing for a new offensive against the army of the National Assembly.

For centuries, the people of Turkey have been ruled by cruel, tyrannical monarchs and a bunch of parasites who were recruited into the palace to be their servants, trained and educated there, and then transferred to the sultanate and ministries.

While the West was churning in great changes and innovations and laying the foundations of civilization that darken our eyes today with gigantic steps, Turkish sultans were either holding weddings and banquets in palaces,: inner agha (!) outer agha (!) and I don't know what else agha!... or they wasted the treasury, which was the product of the hard work of the poor nation, by stringing pearls and diamonds around their necks out of their madness and delusions, or they spent their lives by granting a lot of legal rights and privileges to foreigners and finally they became the sole founders of today's misfortune and decadence.

This situation, which continued until the Tanzimat period, took a completely different form after that. When the heavy industry that emerged in the West completely saturated the Western markets and had to look for other positions and other exit gates to catch its breath, the eyes of the European bourgeoisie turned to the East, which was drowning in ignorance and shortsightedness, and especially to Turkey, which served as a bridge between Europe and Asia for the passage of European industry to the world market.

Since Turkey was a beautiful continent that attracted the attention and desire of European capitalists and imperialists not only because of its geographical situation but also because of its raw materials and natural riches, the Westerners decided to divide it among themselves and to break it up, and although they put this decision into practice in the field from time to time, the fact that the piece was too fat resulted in a lack of compromise in the division, and this country has been able to survive in this state until today.

On the one hand, these greedy people, through their own subversives, from time to time set fires in the most vigilant points of the country, and through the revolutions and rebellions they organized, pitted the masses living on the soil of Turkey against each other and thus created new problems for the government every day; on the other hand, they forced the government and forced it to finally carry out reforms by always complaining about the ongoing disorder in the country, supposedly because there was too much bloodshed due to the lack of protection of minority rights and many other similar excuses: “Edict of Gülhane”, which we consider to be the first period of the penetration of European capital into Turkey, was the product of this pressure.

Since the other elements also had the freedom of disaster and started to fulfill their duties as commissioners for European capital, from this date on-wards, the Turkish industry was gradually withdrawn from the market and replaced by European industry, and thus Turkey became a free market for Europe.

Especially since Abdulhamid's cruelty and oppression of the people and this rogue sultan's submission to every proposal of the Europeans, and the fact that, despite all the legal rights and privileges he granted them, he made the local people slaves in his own country, helped the western imperialists to increase their influence and influence on Turkey even more, the European capital, which knew how to take good advantage of this situation, has now succeeded in turning Turkey into a semi-colony by spreading its tendrils all over the country, so that Turkey has not been able to avoid becoming the Turkey of England, France, Germany and Austria.

The local bourgeoisie was not satisfied with this situation; The local bourgeoisie, the aghas, beys, pashas and their representative, the Committee of Union and Progress, overthrew Abdulhamid and proclaimed the Constitutional Monarchy in his place, but since one government, which had been cracking the whip on the backs of workers and peasants, was overthrown and replaced by another, there was no improvement in the situation of the poor people, and the oppressed masses were dragged into aimless wars and groaned for ten years in the unforgiving grip of a more cruel and murderous will than before.

In order to strengthen their position, these cunning Unionists, in the first days of the revolution, made the priest and the teacher, the worker and the peasant, the poor and the rich walk hand in hand and thus deceived the public, After forming their cabinets from a select group of criminals and murderers, whom they called committee members, they were not ashamed to act with the motto of “hit the man”, thinking that their actions could not be questioned because they were in power, and in this way, they were not ashamed to inflict incurable wounds on the working people of Turkey.

Starting from the first days of their reign, they started to dismember the country one by one, for example: Crete to Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria, and finally the whole wars that caused Rumelia to be lost to the Balkan states, Tripoli to Italy, Syria, Iraq and Arabia to fall from our hands, as well as the wars in Kurdistan, Arabia and Albania that turned brother against brother with the (Panturkism, Panturanism) movements they left within us... The Balkan defeats and finally, as if all these were not enough, the World War, which we were dragged into in defense of German imperialism, were all the result of the treachery of these ringleaders.

Just yesterday, for example, one of them, Enver, the Minister of War, led a night raid in Sarıkamış, in which the enemy was only able to keep two companies of infantry and four Gatling guns out of the battle line against our division of soldiers, which he caused to be destroyed; Or when we consider that when the Russians forced the city of Sivas, and the British and French forced the Bosphorus, yet the vagabond destroyed the most distinguished Turkish laborers in Galicia and the Carpathians in front of the German ranks, and when we consider that now they want to re-enter the country wearing the Bolshevik mask, we truly believe that these men are the germs of this country alone, and that therefore there is no possibility of their finding shelter elsewhere.

If instead of these governments, which continued until yesterday and were labeled as cruel and reactionary because they played with the blood of workers and peasants, there was a more just (!) stance today, we would draw a black curtain over the abominations of the past and maybe we would be able to look back on the past. Unfortunately, since it will be clear from the following explanation that today's administration, which cannot help but criticize them from time to time, is no better than yesterday's in shaking its fist at the workers and peasants, let us now turn to how this new one was established and what good it has done for the welfare and well-being of the workers and peasants – repeating once again to our workers and peasants that no one desires our liberation but us.

When the Armistice of Mudros, the heavy and bitter result of our defeat in the World War was slapped on the faces of our people as a curse, the Unionists, whose characteristics we have mentioned above, left this defeat, which did not belong to them, to the Turkish laborers and moved to foreign countries with the last wealth of the nation they had packed in their bags – as if they were running away from a fire. While these stateless people were exchanging heated kisses with the mistresses they had abandoned a few years earlier in the foreign capitals they had joined, the Turkish people, who were still weeping over their funerals, did not understand the reasons for their catastrophe and could not find out who and where the real enemy was.

These sick masses, whose ears had been filled with war epics for centuries and whose souls had been lulled to sleep by religion and conservative superstitions, were turning a little more yellow and fading a little more every day in hunger, poverty and deprivation, despite the incalculable sacrifices they had always made in the name of their own liberation and independence, this time in Constantinople, taking the disaster of the first ones as a trophy – like a raven on a carcass – they flocked on the wounded Turkish peasants and workers, begging for a piece of blood, a morsel of bread and raising a cry of horror, while the Allied wolves and scorpions, who looked like animals that had risen up in their joy, did not feel ashamed to sign the Sevres rag with the ambition of taking over the government – let us suppose temporarily.

Sevres, one of the four masterpieces of European cunning and dastardliness in the twentieth century, divided Turkey into a number of spheres of influence, buried it in the depths of the past like Babylon and Nineveh, and on its wreckage established a great Greece, Armenia, Kurdistan, and diplomatically warned that imperialist Europe would be in charge of these. As a matter of fact, it did not take long for the occupation of Smyrna and Cilicia to show this, and the merchants of the world started the conflict again by offering one of these countries to the Armenians and the other to the Greeks.

The French from Syria, the British from the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the Italians from Antalya and its districts, each of them, in order to obtain their share of plunder from one side or the other, drowned in blood and fire wherever they entered with their colorful soldiers, marching and standing on the martyrs of a nation that had been working for centuries at the expense of others – like the slaves who raised the pyramids of Egypt under the blows of whips. Poor country, surrounded by the iron ring of the ages! At this time, it was in a heavier condition than a woman giving birth to a child: After five great years of war, it was in no condition to defend himself against the enemy bayonets thrust into its wounded body from all sides, so it could only show its teeth, its fists. It looked left and right for a moment. Those who had given it a lesson in courage in yesterday's World War were nowhere to be seen. The noise of the Russian revolution going on at its bedside was also encouraging it a little. It was then that this unconscious mass organized a movement to break out of its fortresses; this was the Anatolian uprising.

The Anatolian uprising was initially aimed not only against the European imperialists and capitalists who were pursuing a policy of extermination in Turkey, but also to eliminate the existence of the local bourgeoisie and feudal lords who were guiding them and turning the country into a slaughterhouse with their past policies. The Anatolian farmer, bareheaded, barefoot, working from star to star, pouring his crops into the government and bourgeois warehouses, joined hands with the workers employed in the companies and mines under the harshest conditions, and opposed every force that took away his bread and made him a servant and slave. Peasants in the fields, workers in the factories, women in the bazaar with their backs loaded with wood, all gathered around one word, and that word alone was liberation.

If revolutionary guides had been found for him at that time, if real leaders who understood his problems had emerged, perhaps, even then, the red flag would have waved in Anatolia, which today we see slowly becoming a farm for the European bourgeois, and would have made those miserable clusters the masters of this country. Alas, those soldiers could not be found, and since the comrades in Russia, who should have benefited the most from this, remained spectators, this beautiful opportunity was missed.

After a while, the heroes of yesterday's war, who came out of their lairs one by one, finding the field empty – the famous Anafartalar hero in the first place – gradually began to penetrate into the masses of the people and gather them around themselves, with the veil of national sovereignty they wore. In a short time, they tried to create a Grand National Assembly in Anatolia, composed of the leaders and influential people of the country, to rein in the poor people against their will, and they achieved this goal in a short time.

This collection of mere bourgeois and feudal lords, who called themselves populists, had not resorted to any remedy to improve the present living conditions of the people whom it supposedly represented, when at the very first opportunity it began to prevent the danger which frightened it most, namely, the imprisonment of the young communists who had secretly begun to organize in the country and enlisted in the world workers' headquarters. This was followed by the brutal drowning in the Black Sea of 17 workers' and laborers' guides, who had returned from Russia to their homeland, where they had been longing for years, at their invitation, and after all these murders were carried out with a sleight of hand, the dirty and disgusting ambitions that had not been revealed until then were now openly and blatantly revealed.

However, what makes us sad is that all these treachery and murders were committed while a close and sincere alliance was being organized with Russia, whose help we desperately needed.

On the one hand, their representatives in Russia declared that Anatolia was communist with columns of articles in Moscow newspapers, and on the other hand, a horde of police and gendarme constantly chased communists in the country. The gates that were open to Russia were closed and a military police organization was placed under the command of the coast. Their rulers were Osman Aga, a bandit in the vicinity of Inebolu, Samsun and Giresun, and a bandit named Kahya in Trabzon and its environs, who were assigned only to prevent the communists from entering the country and to send them to the darkness of the Black Sea.

It is now being reported that the latter of these rebelled and went to the mountains, which is a good example of the lack of unity and solidarity even among the most reliable members of the Anatolian government. Wasn't this already shown by Ethem's rebellion in the first days? When did this bourgeois administration, which existed by robbing first the outsiders and then each other, ever have a permanent consensus of opinion, so that it can have one today?

At the very beginning of its establishment, the Great National Assembly (G.N.A.) used every coloring to strengthen its success: In order to endear itself to the people, it became pro-people, and because the people rebelled against capitalism, it became its worst enemy. To understand this better, it is enough to take a look at the lines of Ankara's Takvim-i Vekayi, Hakimiyet-i Milliye, at the time.

The self-sacrificing Russian proletariat had not withheld its help and sacrifice from the rising liberation revolt in any part of the world, as it considered it as something that gave them strength. It is a pity that these aids on behalf of the Anatolian laborers did nothing but increase the oppression of the Anatolian rulers over the Anatolian laborers.

In this way, the friends of Anatolia, who gradually revived, and as they revived, forgot the East, turned their eyes to the West and sought ways of dealing with them, finally began to visit the capitals of Europe, and the London conference was a good start to this. This conference was the result not only of the desire of European robbers who felt pity for Turkey (!), but also of the efforts of our own people. When the plans drawn up at that conference were put into practice after a while, it became clear that the Anatolian viziers had not been wandering around European capitals for nothing!

Finally, when the negotiations began and an honorable (!) treaty was concluded first with the French, granting the banker France many laws and privileges that it could not obtain by force of arms, and when cruel capitalism once again clinked glasses with these old acquaintances over the corpses of the Turkish laborers who were thrown back into the struggle for life after five great years of war, the rebellion of the people faded into the past and turned into a story of “once upon a time!”.

Now, on the occasion of this agreement, there is a letter sent by Yusuf Kemal Bey, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, to his French counterpart Franklin Bouillon, which shows how our country was sold to European capitalists and how far the G.N.A. government was concerned with the nation. Yusuf Kemal Bey states:

     «The government of the G.N.A., desiring the development of material relations between the two countries, has authorized me to inform you that it is ready to grant the concession of the iron, chrome and silver mines in the Harşit valley to a French company for a period of 99 years (fortunately not 100, at least a full century?!!). The Turkish government is also ready to examine all proposals for mines, railroads, ports and rivers that may be put forward by French groups, provided that they are in the mutual interest of Turkey and France, that is, of the bourgeois classes of both governments. Finally, the government of Turkey hopes that the government of France will allow French capitalists to establish economic and financial relations with the government of the G.N.A. from the date of the conclusion of the agreement».

As if the many legal rights and privileges granted to France in the treaty they signed were not enough, the great liberators (!) tried to make up for their shortcomings with this letter and begged the banker France to enter the country one day sooner. What is the need for this? France made this peace with us because she was already enamored of our black eyes? Undoubtedly, there is an interest and obligation that led her to this state of affairs, which Tan (Temps), the official newspaper of French imperialism, explains very well in the following lines: It does not matter to us who burned the Anatolian peasants and massacred the people; we must not forget that we are the biggest creditors of Turkey. In addition to the repair account, 63% of the Duyun-u Umumiye's income goes to France).

Since Tan's very clear and explicit analyses have clearly and explicitly revealed France's thoughts about our country, let us not say much more on this subject, but only turn to the statement of Nihat Reşad (Dr. Belger), one of the Anatolian delegates, which was the subject of the Paris newspapers on the occasion of this agreement; this man, who was overjoyed, said: «With this agreement, the Ankara government has shown that it has nothing to do with Bolshevism and radicalism. By signing peace with France, the said government has shown that it is not fighting for pleasure». In other words, Nihat Bey, after explaining in the language of diplomacy that the world's toilers are fighting for pleasure, goes on to add that «this agreement was applauded everywhere from China to Morocco, and there were even festivities in the Caucasus and Yerevan». He is proud that his country is included in the average of 35 million people groaning under the French yoke from China to Morocco!

While Franklin Bouillon, who returned home with many legal rights and privileges belonging to Turkey in his briefcase, was applauded in the French Parliament for his success, the fact that the viziers of Anatolia, who claim to defend the rights of the working people of Turkey, showed such satisfaction for this victory secured for France at the expense of our country reveals the nature of their claims. But the truth will emerge from beneath these gilded phrases and we will see who is burned in this game.

As a matter of fact, after a little gossip between France and England on the occasion of this treaty, which was nothing but a quarrel (less for you and more for me!), I think the back side of the curtain is beginning to appear.

Before the negotiations between Ankara and England, which we believe have begun, take a clear shape – which will eventually be revealed and England, the greatest representative of imperialism and capitalism in the East, will get the biggest share – let us review the lines we came across in the columns of the Times these days:

The Times, in an editorial on the proposal to call a Near East Conference jointly made by Poincaré, Italy and Britain, says «The time for this conference has passed. Since the dispute between France and England has been settled, France, England and Italy no longer look at Turkey as a separate country, but consider it as part of their own. Therefore, at this time, when all diplomatic means have been seen and secured, it is the best opportunity to try not only to reinforce a formal treaty between the allied states but also to bring the existing program to a conclusion with a useful conference agreement consisting of the foreign ministers of the allied states». Of course, this was read all over the world and our friend Nihat Reşat Bey also read it, but unless he changed his glasses, I am sure he did not understand anything. Aren't they right not to understand anyway? Because even when the dead of this country are being buried, these guys still want to be at the head of that ceremony – and the movement of the opposition in Constantinople after the Armistice is a vivid example of this. - And at this time, they know that it is an obligation of their false nobility to take refuge in the European capitalists and imperialists for their nobility and virtue (!).

As for the Italian pirates: since there was already an agreement with them, it is now only trying to extend and strengthen it. Last but certainly not least, it is the turn of the biggest and newest capitalist, the United States of America.

From all the explanations given so far, it is evident that this desolate country, which until yesterday we called Germany, England and France, and Italy Turkey, is still theirs today. Except that one of them has left the ranks and another, perhaps a bigger one, has joined it.

Izvetsiya once pointed out in an editorial on the occasion of the London Conference that «those who rob and those who are robbed will never agree». Indeed, if the government were in the hands of workers and peasants, this observation would undoubtedly be true. However, for some reason, it has been forgotten that a robber class, which turns these unconscious masses to its will and pursues a 'knock, bang and play policy' on their calloused backs, is doing the job of ruling.

It is this class that today kneels before the western capital, apologizing to its master for the childishness it has practiced so far, and who can assure that after gaining the security and trust it needs, it will not take a new front against the east with a new proposal and insistence of its masters? So, who is the class that will be thrown into a new adventure in the face of this situation, and whose existence will be destroyed?

This is the class that has been living a vegetative life for centuries under such aghas, beyliks, pashliks and sultans, that has been oppressed under the despotism of various uniformed and civilian overlords and overlords, and that bears the fist of the callous vested interests called notables, The Turkish laborers, who from time to time, at the cost of their blood, have achieved no other result than to swell their coffers, need to determine their own destiny and to take measures against those who are riding on their backs and skinning their skins with a quick and sudden turn from this dead-end street, based on the possibility of being caught in a new deluge of them tomorrow.

The working people of Turkey know, of course, that the fact that the European capitalists are so interested in the Turkish government, which today is as insignificant as a soap bubble in the state order, is not because they are enamored of our black eyes. If our governments at the helm of affairs do not understand this – and they are right not to understand since this situation is in their interests – then why should we keep silent? Is it not enough that they have deceived us until today, that they have sacrificed us to the dragon called capital, to the brain worm called nationality? We have seen all the governments brought to power by this class one after another: you know, they all promised us liberation and independence. What was the result, zero, right?

They still say that they love us as comrades and brethren in religion. Of course, who doesn't love a cow to be milked? But isn't it time to put an end to these scroungers who swell up with our milk, and the more they swell up, the more they dig into our bellies?

In the World War, more than two-thirds of our immediate possessions were lost; of the three million vigorous and strong soldiers who went to the battle lines, only 25% returned home. After the World War, our debt reached 500 million liras. If we add to this a domestic borrowing of 10 million liras, and the cost of goods and properties taken from the people during the war and not yet repaid, the total reaches 550 million liras, and we do not have the income to pay even the interest on these debts. On whose backs will all these debts again be forced tomorrow? Or will we come to our senses when the gendarmes and the collectors, these bourgeois henchmen, are at our throats again, demanding taxes? What are we waiting for! Shall we talk about the present living conditions? They have become completely intolerable. As life has become more expensive, the army of the unemployed has swelled every day. In Constantinople alone, the number of unemployed today reaches 100 thousand, and if we add to this the 367 thousand refugees forced to migrate from the countries occupied by the cruel Greeks, I do not know how far our misery will reach.

Anatolian cities dazzle us! It is not only our cities that were burned down during the World War, but also the destruction of 130-140 kilometers of land in the most economically developed part of our country by the Greek forces, which after the Armistice served as the gendarme of British imperialism in Turkey, is not a horrible end?

In conclusion, our troubles are so many, our wounds so deep! What is the use of listing them if we do not find remedies to heal them!

At a time when, on the one hand, foreign capitalists are clinging to our bodies like leeches and sucking our blood every day, and on the other hand, our governments are being their lackeys and are preparing to drag us into new miseries and captivities by putting all the productive forces and natural wealth of the country at their disposal, there is only one remedy for the liberation of the working people of Turkey: That is to gather around their own organizations as soon as possible and from there break the arms reaching out to their rights, which have been trampled and usurped for centuries. As evidence of the acceptance of a definite policy in the partition of Turkey, Lord Salisbury once said: «What we need is courage, courage forever, always courage».

And today, turning our faces to the working people of Turkey, we say that if we want to end our catastrophe, we too need: Organization, organization forever, always organization. Undoubtedly, we need organization, and the day we have a strong organization is the day that the judges who ignore us today and play with our fate as they wish will then speak to us differently and will not treat us as slaves and servants: Here is the first of the ways of liberation of the working people of Turkey, which we will continue in turn.

The aim of publishing this red trade union organ is;

1. To defend the interests of the working masses of Turkey against the exploiters and the government;

2. To create and strengthen class consciousness among the working and poor masses in their class struggle;

3. To encourage them to unite and organize by enlightening them on what they can gain through good trade union organization and by uniting with the proletariat of the whole world;

4. To tear down before the masses the masks of false leaders, lying and sold-out socialists and all kinds of buffoons, to put an end to the national strife which divides the workers of Turkey and to strive to unite them in one workers' organization and under the banner of the Red International of Trade Unions;

5. To promote the platform of the Red Profintern and the Comintern and to raise them against the treacherous intentions of the Yellow International;

6. To teach the working classes to look clearly at the colonial and national questions; to unmask before them the savage greed of the capitalist great powers, the so-called civilized ones, to explain to them all the dangers facing Turkey and the whole East in the face of capitalist colonization;

7. To teach and impose on the working masses the new methods of class struggle practiced by the Profintern in Moscow;

8. To make the masses realize the greatness of the proletarian revolution and the great meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat;

9. To keep the masses constantly informed of the trade union and revolutionary labor movement;

10. To carry out the economic education of the masses, to explain to them the economic policy which the proletariat will use to lead today's society from capitalism to socialism;

11. To explain to the masses the old and new cooperative movement;

12. Finally, to popularize among the masses scientific socialism, true revolutionary Marxism.

One of the most important reasons that turn people against each other in our time is under the name and guise of “Nationality”.

It is impossible not to tremble before the bloodshed, tears and misery that this superstition, which serves as an instrument of occupation in the hands of the dominant and exploiting classes, has caused in the East and the West, in the past and the present.

The world catastrophe that caused the destruction of fifteen to twenty million lives, the maiming of thirty to forty million people, and left the fields still smoking with the blood spilled, was carried out in the name of “nationality” and “homeland”.

Right now, in the middle of Western Anatolia, two armies belonging to two nations distinguished by the names “Greek” and “Turkish” are engaged in a fight for life and death under blue and red flags with crosses or crescents; Because of this “nation”, Turks on the Marmara coast and Greeks on the Black Sea coast were expelled from their homes, their men were used for hard labor and their women for insulting services, and during the Balkan and World Wars, national hatred and fierce brutality... were brought to the level of..., hundreds of thousands of victims were sacrificed to the cruel deity called “nation”, towns were trampled underfoot; Armenian, Turkish, Albanian, Kurdish, Greek, Arab... All the nations of Rumelia and Asia Minor were at each other's throats.

A few centuries ago, we see these elements and tribes – all of them gathered under the edict, the law, the flag of a supreme sultan from the same dynasty – as servants and slaves to the state of that dynasty. It was the same fear of the janissaries that brought them together in that captivity. It was the teachers and priests who justified and sanctified that yoke for them, compensating the Sharia of the prophets with the domination of the sultans.

The janissaries and sipahi, who were raised from the children of subjects and captives as servants of the sultan with the upbringing of the hearth, and the clergymen who made people pray in the name of the “sultan of the world” in mosques, churches... synagogues, mediated the exploitation of forty or fifty million people, while they and their masters lived in prosperity and splendor.

* * *

Although for a long period of centuries all citizen elements were oppressed and abused under almost the same Sharia law, a difference between their destinies began to appear due to a more correct path and religious conflict. The sultan, who was a Muslim, trained the children of Christian subjects and captives in the midst of the dynasty not only as servants but also as Muslims, and from them he formed his soldiers and officials. He employed Christians as interpreters and sometimes as deputy officials. On the other hand, jizya and kharaj taxes were levied on the Christian subjects, which were different from and heavier than the ushr that the Muslim subjects had to pay.

Starting from this fundamental point, the separation mixed with other medieval notions of exploitation, such as the “excessive holding” of Christians, to become a powerful national chivalry and domination. In the past, the sultan used the clergy of the Christians, like the Muslim ulema, as a stratum that helped him and his state, the patriarchates as a cog in the machinery of the government, and like the ulema, the clergy were also blessed and recognized their sovereignty over the reaya, and in this way the Greek... Armenian... Assyrian... Catholic... etc. became loyal nations to the throne. With the power thus gained by the Christian clergy, they could not help inviting the resentment of the Janissary-Ulema government: it was in their class interests to make them feel their captivity and inferiority in every way. The conservatism of the Janissary-Ulema government reached such a point that, in recent years, there was no obstacle to officially using the most outrageous and disgusting words in the license issued for the burial of a priest or in the document issued for the appointment of a bishop to replace a deceased bishop. Naturally, the material and spiritual emergence of elements whose spiritual leaders were so despised could not be permitted, nor could they be allowed to become a dominant element in the law of freedom and sovereignty. The Christian infidel could not pass a Muslim on horseback: or even wear Muslim clothes.

The fact that the provinces where Christian inhabitants lived coincided with border regions meant that in all raids to Europe – that is, almost permanently – these countries were trampled by the army, and the Christian poor were subjected to permanent drudgery, the rich to heavy obligations and frequent confiscations. The feudal government, composed of janissaries, sipahi, ulema and Enderun masters, left no wealth in the hands of the commoners who had prospered through trade and shipping, crafts and farming. Since the reaya who became rich were mostly Christians for many economic reasons, they were also the ones who were persecuted.

It was natural for national enmity to develop among those who felt increasingly national oppression. The clergy, voivods, soupers (prominent Christian subjects), etc., the Christian strata that had risen and gained consciousness, began to provoke the poor.

They remembered that these elements had a glorious past, a glorious history: we once had such and such sultans, our flag used to fly in such and such places, our military used to plunder such and such places... they said, wishing with the most fervent desire for the return of that era. From then on, national separation and national animosity entered the extreme stage - even into the stage of mobs and armed rebellions.

The breakdown of the monopoly of the government armies in battles, the state being surrounded by powerful enemies from all sides, the intensification and unpredictability of the methods of exploitation at home, the heaviness of taxes and drudgery and the intensification of these confiscations, the emergence of the rebellions of the period... as the regulations increased, the emergence of rebellions, the encouragement of these rebellions and the tendency to rebellion by the enemy states, the fact that they did not hesitate to publicly patronize them... etc., exacerbated and exacerbated national animosity.

This analysis shows us that the Muslim and Turkish poor have never exploited and humiliated the Christian poor. It was only the ruling classes who, in order to strengthen and perpetuate their domination and domination, established that sinister administration and created national enmity and national division among the citizens. It is those ruling and exploiting classes who still pursue no other goal but to strengthen their domination and sovereignty by pitting nations against each other through this national enmity.

We have briefly tried to give an idea about the history and development of national antagonisms in Turkey. Now we can turn our eyes to the other two neighboring states – Russia and Austria, the Romanof and Habsburg states, which until the last war continued in a feudal state comparable to the “Ottoman Empire”. Even in them, various nations and tribes were gathered under the banner of a dynasty, as a result of conquests, military coercion and oppression. Among the subjects of Russia, Muslims – especially Muslims of the Turkic and Tatar race – constituted a large part. The feudal government of the Romanovs, which was a compromise of the dynastic, clerical, military and civil servant classes, exploited all these tribes, keeping them under oppression and domination.

Among the nations subjected to the Tsar's despotism there were also Christians, but these Christian Moscow subjects were not treated better than Muslims and did not enjoy full equality with the Russians. It is well known from history how the Russians behaved brutally against Poland, how they did not spare any pressure and violence to exterminate the Polish nation.

The Poles are Catholic Christians, while the Ukrainians, like the Muscovites, are Orthodox. However, the Russians used the same violence to punish the recently awakened Ukrainian nationalism. Of course, this policy of persecution and oppression was not created and practiced by the Russian poor and farmers; on the contrary, the Russian peasantry was also groaning under oppression and captivity. That policy was the policy of the Romanovs, the military, the church, the officials. As history shows, feudal states on all sides: sultanates, empires, qatats (aghas or local autonomous taxing administrations) are nothing but the consensus of the zadegan (Persian aristocratic) - in our case ekabir (Ottoman aristocratic), clergy – in our case ulema – military and civil servant classes to exploit the communities of the productive class – in a succession of solidarity.

The Austrian example also proves that nationality issues are nothing but a national antagonism born of feudal domination and exploitation. The Habsburg dynasty had subjects belonging to various religious denominations, including Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Mohammedan, and their nationalities differed from one another: German, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Hungarian, Serbian, Bosnian, etc. Emperors from the Habsburg dynasty employed soldiers, aristocrats and clergy to keep all these different religious and linguistic elements and tribes under their domination and dictatorship. We also observe that this dynasty often used each nation's own aristocrats and clergy as the unholy group of the state. For example, in order to give divine right to the kingdom of Hungary, the emperor traveled to Pest, dressed in the Hungarian church, by the hand of the greatest Hungarian priest, the Hungarian kings. He resides in the palace of these kings. He divided the Hungarian aristocrats into two parts and showered those who were willing to sell their services to him with favors and generosity. On the other hand, if a Hungarian aristocrat revolted against the Habsburg dynasty, he was treated with the utmost cruelty.

And it was the inability of the great feudal, the emperor, the king, who was a foreigner, to fully satisfy the national aristocracy, the national clergy and other empowered and conscious classes that caused national enmity to ferment, to erupt from time to time, and to keep some of them in regular rebellion against him. Because of the aristocratic, clerical and other powerful and organized classes, national enmity did not fail to spread to the common people.

There is no room in this small article to go into more detail in order to explain an important phase of the nationality issue, the phase of feudal domination. For the time being, we have to be content with the following conclusion. The question of nationality arose from the domination and exploitation of various elements and tribes with different religions and languages by a great feudal lord. That great feudal is a chieftain, a great overlord who takes the titles of sultan, shah, emperor, king, etc. To justify his domination, the great feudal uses the classes of soldiers, aristocrats, clergy, civil servants as auxiliaries and servants, and shares with them the products of exploitation. These classes mostly - 99% - belong to the religion, sect, race, tribe and use the language of the great feudal, but the great feudal also attaches importance to buying the clergy and elders of the subjugated nation with ranks, insignia, salaries, privileges and the power of favor, although it is impossible to provide enough intermediaries to bind all members of these classes to itself. Therefore, a large part of the aristocratic, clerical, bourgeoisie, empowered and conscious classes of the condemned nation are dissatisfied; they first of all feel national oppression and gradually develop national enmity into secret societies and armed rebellion.

The national enmity that reaches this stage extends to the common, tearful, poor laboring class. Their religion, language, morals, customs and culture are violated. As a result, the members of the condemned tribe begin to view the members of the dominant nation as enemies; and this feeling is mutual. Greeks, Armenians seeing Turks as enemies and Turks seeing Greeks and Armenians as enemies.

However, this is nothing but mutual animosity and a rivalry arising from the exploitation of the poor and working classes. The poor and the laborer, whether he belongs to a dominant or a condemned tribe, is always obliged to work and to feed the oppressor and exploiting classes – whatever their nationality – in abundance. Neither his own tribe nor the parasitic classes of soldiers, clergymen, nobles, voivodes, etc., who come from the clan or nation of the great feudal lord, can do him any good… Neither his own rulers nor the ruling classes of the other side can save him from the slavery in which he lives, because their greatness and their dominance consist solely in the fact that the poor man endures the life of a slave, and works hungry, naked, from star to star.

A.S.

In my opinion, in every country, and especially in the East, one of the most important problems that must be eliminated first and foremost are the problems caused by sultans and palaces. The respect and tolerance shown to sultans and courtiers in the East cannot be seen in any other corner of the world. In many countries far and near, big and small, the working class, the proletariat, forced the kings and emperors to leave their crowns and thrones. But in the East, the rulers and their roaming relatives and men are drowning in all kinds of privileges, wealth and riches.

Even in this poor country, people have been groaning under the chains of its ominous wars for fifteen years. But they do not stop feeding the sultans and their kin. While they themselves are deprived of finding even a small canopy, they put magnificent buildings at the disposal of a pack of animals living under the name of dynasty. They does not prevent thousands of liras from being included in the budget every month for the 'entertainment expenses' of princes and sultans, even though they themselves suffer and die in hunger and misery.

Palaces and mansions are filled with young girls and immoral sycophants. Harems serve as prisons for innocents kidnapped from various climates and stolen from their warm homes. Then, thousands of workers, millions of poor people, ignoring their own misery, hunger and lack of heat, pay homage and obedience to the bandits who, in order to appease their animalistic greed, rot innocent children and sinless wretches in the gilded cellars of palaces. They fear even the slightest rebellious idea.

At such a time when people and the workers are starving and thirsty, is it right to keep alive with our blood and lives a bunch of useless germs called padishahs, princes, sultans, courtiers and so on?

Today, with the exception of some places in the East such as Khiva, Bukhara, Turkestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, where communism is being practiced, the people of Afghanistan, Iran, India and many other countries are under the oppression and oppression of shahs, rajahs and sheikhs in a situation similar to or perhaps even worse than ours.

What is this toil for the pleasure of a handful of animals and for the continuation of palaces, courtiers and dynasties' debauchery that has been going on for centuries? What small benefits have the sultans, princes and palaces brought in the past?

Weren't they the reason why our mothers and grandmothers became widows before they turned twenty, why our fathers and grandfathers died in their youth in unknown countries like Hungary, Serbia and Russia? Are they not the ones responsible for children becoming orphans, mothers and daughters being put up for sale? Who are those who treat our ancestors and our skeletons with more disrespect than the capitalists of the West, who do not hesitate to commit all kinds of cruelties? Are they other than rulers, sultans, rajahs, princes and viziers?

Therefore, just as the workers of the West today are obliged to get rid of the kings of capital, the nations of the East are obliged to gather themselves and tear down the high walls of the palaces in order to get rid of the rulers of blood and fire, sultans, shahs, sheikhs and rajahs. We must know well that as long as harems remain, as long as transgender African slaves fill the palaces, it will not be possible to shake off a large part of the burden on our shoulders.

Let us open our eyes and call to account those vile monsters we raised as sultans and caliphs!

The memories that are passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, from ear to ear, even from book to book through histories, always encourage us to admire and appreciate these thugs who orchestrated the deaths of millions and billions of people. I pity the poor wretches who write histories, who tell us about savage crimes as “memories of victory”, because they always see the event with one eye and hear it with deaf ears. Then those fools, who have the power to accuse a man with the crudest words because “he stole so-and-so's money”, bless these looting chieftains, and venerate the miserable ignoramuses of this society who can condemn a man to death for murder.

If it were not for the dishonesty of those fools whose blindness and deafness provided them with a source of income, nations would have learned the machinations of those bloody murderers and realized the futility of such a conservative veneration. However, the screechers of dynasties and capital, who seize people with their bloody lassos from the moment they begin to read the alphabet and tighten and tighten them until they kill them, strangling and poisoning those who want liberation, do not stop, they attack the helpless and the poor with their eyes blazing with greed and rage, and all works, from books of science to holy scripture, are filled with the adventures of sultans and kings. Then, at a time when those monsters who know nothing but debauchery and disgrace are entertaining in their palaces and mansions, when young girls are danced and played in fragrant and warm tents called Otağ-ı Hümayun, why is the redness of human and worker blood flowing like a flood in the battlefields not seen? Why is the horrible howl of cannons and rifles that does not stop for hours not heard?

Why don't the wretches who cry, «So-and-so ruler conquered so-and-so cities for the protection of the homeland and fought these wars for the happiness of the nation» see and hear these things?

“Fatherland, fatherland”, what does the proletariat have to do with this word, which they use in every sentence, in every objection? What duty, what position does the mass of workers, who do not even own the tin huts they live in, have in the defense of the fatherland? Nothing...

“Workers have no country” (Karl Marx), because the proletariat is the class of those who have nothing to live on but the strength of their arms and heads. It is equally obliged to work in times of victory and defeat. But the sultans, pashas, princes are not harmed in times of defeat, and after a small victory they are showered with salary increases, decorations and gifts.

If the workers and peasants, who lost at least a few members of their families in the last bloody war, were to come to their senses and think about the situation, I am sure that they would immediately realize not only that the noble class is incompetent, but also that the bourgeoisie and the clergy are harmful and useless classes, and that they would understand the hidden causes of wars.

Today, the strength that will save these masses of workers from these savage leeches is in the warm embrace of communism that unites the world proletariat.

Let's fight for class struggle based what is right in order to reach our common goal as soon as possible!

Friends! There are hundreds of thousands of Turks in Greece, all of whom are poor people. They haven’t managed to escape being toys at the hands of the preachers who are used by the rich and the government as officers and muftis. Us and our Turkish friends are working with all our power to enlighten them and we try to awaken them and teach them how to preserve their rights with the paper Yeni Ziya (New Light) which we started publishing in Thessaloniki by showing the scandals and dishonor of the Turkish and Greek bourgeoisie.

The nationalist party in Greece constantly makes pro-war propaganda. However, the results of the war have caused the poverty of all of us, and the life of the public got worse every day. We don’t stop our cry for the Greco-Turkish war to end as soon as possible, and we say: Let everyone live where they are! We know that it is not right for 1 million Greeks to enslave 10 million Turks. In fact, this war is not good for the Greek nation either. Neither side can win anything from it. We saw no evil from the Turkish people: the poor lived well together, it is the rich who do evil. It’s not right to ruin others so that a handful of rich benefits. This war is unjust, those who make the two nations slaughter each other will get what’s coming to them. If the sea was not in between, the Greek soldiers would have never stayed there. The British are making the Greeks their sentries in order to secure the way to India. They are using Greece. The imperialists intervening within both nations poisoned them against each other, every patriot followed this policy. Thus both sides are being slaughtered and forced to become immigrants.

Greeks should exit Anatolia, however the Turkish poor should recognize the right of the Greek people to live in a humane way. To the patriots who ask what will happen to the Greek people in Anatolia if the Greek soldiers leave, we say: Wars can’t establish this, they destroy both sides, the two nations must agree among each other and make peace, and they should live well without being tools at the hands of either the Greek or Turkish bourgeoisie and capitalists. Muslims in Asia should accept this call and request, and they should preserve their rights from both Turkish militarists and rich Greeks.

Now time and everything tells that the path to liberation and fraternity between nations will be procured with communism. Loudly, we must make all the oppressed Turkish and Greek people understand this. This is the only just word.

We have always told you: Do not believe the stewards, masters, gentlemen... who have succeeded in taking over the workers' organizations by all kinds of cunning and deception, pretending to be socialists and friends of the workers. The aim of these rascals is: To live on your backs, to sell you out to the bosses, the companies and the government in order to get a position. At first, you comrades did not realize the importance of these words of the communists, the only friends of the working class, and fell for the lies and deceit of these scoundrels. Because you were so crushed under the oppression and domination of the bosses and capitalists that you accepted the guidance of these cunning politicians who promised to defend your rights, which were trampled underfoot – like a snake in the sea. You trusted them, and because you were still inexperienced you left things in their hands. You did whatever they asked: They said they needed money, you gave it to them out of your alimony. They told you to strike, you and your children went hungry. You risked being fired from your job or even death, and you did it. You did not hesitate to make any material and moral sacrifice for your society, your party. But what happened in the end? Which of your rights have you won and what is your situation today? Which workers' organization exists in the country that can stand up to the oppressive acts arbitrarily taken by the bosses' companies and the nationalist bourgeois government, which has closed down one after another the workers' associations, the C.P., and thrown communist friends into prisons?

What has become of the Socialist Party of Turkey, whose untouchable leader Hilmi Efendi and his accomplices, who once gathered more than four thousand workers and, thanks to this unity alone, succeeded in getting the enterprise to accept their demands through the power of organization? The reji (Tekel administration), bakery, harbor and coal workers' associations, which have thousands of members, are far from being genuine labor unions. Because until now these associations have been run by self-interested men who are completely alien to the interests of the workers and who have absolutely no knowledge of syndicalism and communism. Because their aim was not to create strong workers' organizations that could fight against the bosses and capitalists. They were only interested in gaining positions through deception, living off the backs of the workers, robbing and oppressing you, the workers, just like the capitalists, but cunningly, under the mask of socialism, and in order to do this, they kept you ignorant, kept you out of the affairs of the community, and smeared those who wanted to show you the true path to liberation with all kinds of lies and slander.

Let us confess that these traitors have achieved their goal. Undoubtedly, the liar’s candle burns until dusk. These rascals were soon exposed and their masks of deceit and lies fell from their faces. But what opportunities have you lost so far. How many sacrifices have you made... Yes, the treachery of all these lying socialists, Hilmis, Şakirs, Rızas, Ethem Ruhis and all other mercenaries have been exposed; their qualifications have been understood. However, you should know that the workers of Turkey are not completely free from all these friendly-looking enemies. Workers should benefit from this bitter experience of the past in order not to fall into the same trap.

We are well aware of the hypocritical policy pursued by the Union and Progress government since the beginning of the Constitutional Monarchy in order to manage the labor movement as it wished; and we know that the Union and Progress government, acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, bosses, merchants, pashas, aghas, stewards etc. had taken over the Barge Association, the Porters' Association and other associations and used them for its own purposes.

Because the Committee of Union and Progress government realized that the working class was the biggest force in Turkey, as in every country. And this class did everything possible to prevent the workers of Turkey, who were beginning to understand their class identity, who were beginning to feel the magnitude of their own power and to demand their rights, from establishing their own independent, class organization under the influence of the Russian Republic of Soviets and the workers' movements all over the world. All the workers of Turkey must always remember that the first National Assembly, composed largely of Unionist supporters, denied the worker the right to form a trade union.

But comrades, you will say that all this is a thing of the past. Now the Anatolian National Assembly is showing a patronizing attitude towards the working class, giving them trade unions and allowing the formation of the Communist Party.

Rest assured, friends, the same hypocritical and deceptive policy continues. Yes, the Ankara government allowed the Communist Party to operate. Because it needed the material and moral help of Soviet Russia to stand against the Greeks and the British. Until it could obtain this help, it was necessary to look nice to it, to be a little heartwarming. But when the Anatolian government went to the Lausanne Conference with the intention of compromising with the British and French, in a single stroke, it dismantled the Communist Party in order to look good to the imperialist governments of Europe. It closed down the publication Yeni Hayat (New Life) and threw more than two hundred communist comrades into dungeons.

There was another domestic political purpose in acting in this way: The government saw that the Communist Party, as the sole defender of all workers and the poor people, was already gaining great political importance in the country, and that if it continued to do so, it might soon become the strongest and most serious organization and become a great party, winning the confidence and support of all workers. Then the government of the G. N. A. T., which today bears the unwarranted name of national, but in reality defends the interests of the beys, pashas, aghas and all the profiteering (speculator) figures, will not be able to oppress the poor workers and farmers as it wishes. First of all, it will be obliged to give them their rights, and then it will be obliged to leave the government position to them. For all these reasons, the Anatolian government wanted to dismantle and destroy the Communist Party without allowing it to grow, strengthen and gain great influence among all the workers of the country.

As for the question of trade unions: it is not difficult to prove how hypocritical and deceptive a policy it used in this matter as well. For this purpose, it is enough to review the charter and declaration of the Zonguldak Coal Mines Leage of Labor Unions, which was established 4-5 months ago by the men of the Anatolian government.

In the very first article of this charter, the phrase «The purpose of the union is to defend the economic and social rights of the workers against capital» is used, while in the fourth article it is stated «To determine the duties of the worker to the capitalist, and to accustom them to savings in accordance with the economic conditions».

So you see, friends, the men who drafted this statute, who formed this society, want the worker to fall into a new trap and openly mock all workers... This organization was founded not to defend the legal rights of the workers, but perhaps by the bourgeois government to protect the interests of the bosses and capitalists and to deprive the workers of an organization through which they can demand their rights.

According to these men, the worker has no political rights to defend. Because the worker is not in a high political position like the beys, pashas, bosses and aghas. Because for them the worker is nothing more than a workhorse, a machine, condemned to work for them. The worker has only one duty: To work. Therefore they have no political, that is, human rights to defend. That is why they want to expel from these societies every worker who is engaged in politics, who understands humanity, who wants to participate in the life of the society in which he lives.

Comrades! In every country, along with the bosses and capitalists, there are sold-out and treacherous labor leaders, whose task it is to prevent the laborer, by means of gilded promises and traps, from gaining his class identity and wishing to fight openly against the capitalist system. If the working class constitutes the vast majority of the people in every country, and yet there has never been a social revolution in any country – except in Soviet Russia – that is, if the workers have not been able to overthrow the reign of profiteers and replace it with the reign of work, the most important reason for this is the harmful propaganda of these treacherous workers' guides. But let us confess that the treacherous labor guides of Turkey are a match for the scoundrels of other countries in terms of dishonesty and hypocrisy. For in another country, despite all their wishes, the traitorous socialists were unable to include in the statutes of one of the workers' associations they administered the article “Determining the duty of the laborer to the capitalist”. However, one of the main articles of the charter of the Zonguldak Coal Mines Workers' Union is: To determine the duties of the laborers to the capitalists, the bosses, that is, against those who rob and oppress them.

Comrades! They are having fun with you, they want to take advantage of your unconsciousness, your disorganization, your lack of vigilance and leave you in a state of slavery and misery forever. But you can no longer tolerate these disgusting lies. You cannot follow these traitors who have sold out to the bosses and capitalists. The workers have debts to colleret from the capitalists, many debts. But they have no debt, no duty towards him. The reason for the establishment of workers' associations and labor unions is not, as these traitorous and lying socialists say and want, to determine the duties of the workers towards the capitalists, but to unite the workers in strong organizations in order to take their stolen rights from the capitalists who work them like slaves, robbing and oppressing them for a morsel of bread. Yes, there is no doubt that the worker has not only rights but also duties. But this duty is not against the capitalists, as the pseudo-socialists think, but against the whole working class, against the whole human society. This duty: To liberate themselves and the whole of humanity from the capitalist robber rule, that is, to establish a human society without war, without misery, where all men are truly brothers, where everyone works for everyone else, instead of the present bestial society based on robbery and oppression by men and nations. It is only through this communist society of the future that men will be truly free and equal and that world peace and happiness will replace present misery.

This historic task belongs to the proletariat/working class in every country. And in every country, the proletarian class, which has been fighting with the bourgeoisie for hundreds of years and has gained experience, understanding and class identity, organization and strength, is meeting in Communist Parties, red unions, growing and strengthening its organizations in order to fulfill this great and sacred task. In due time, it will deal the final blow to the bourgeoisie and overthrow the government of profiteers and brokers and establish the Soviet Republic in its place.

For the first time in the world, it was the Russian proletariat that was destined to establish this workers' reign. And this heroic and self-sacrificing proletariat, which five years ago created the Soviet Republic out of Tsarist Russia, has endured endless privations and confronted all the enemies of the proletariat inside and outside. And today it is to defend and protect not only the proletariat of Russia, but perhaps of the whole world, against the capitalists of the whole world.

But friends, do you know how the Russian proletariat has achieved these wonders? How is it that in the face of the combined offensive of the capitalists of the whole world, Soviet Russia, instead of collapsing and being destroyed, is strengthening day by day and guiding the proletariat of the whole world on the path of revolution?

Comrades, this was possible only in one way: The Russian proletariat, thanks to the guidance of the Communist – Bolshevik Party, soon escaped the traps of false and treacherous socialists, early recognized its class identity, formed its own class organizations and gained great experience, strength and knowledge as a result of its ongoing struggle against Tsarism and the bourgeoisie. And only then was it able to deal the final and decisive blow to its own bourgeoisie.

The situation is the same in all other countries. That is to say, in those countries where the workers quickly got rid of the pseudo-socialists and formed red trade unions and Communist parties based on the principle of class struggle, the working class in that country was able to resist the oppression and tyranny of the capitalists and bosses and to obtain a large part of its rights. And in these countries the social revolution will happen earlier than in other countries. That is to say, the proletariat of these countries will be liberated from the tyranny and dictatorship of the capitalists and gain real freedom before the proletariat of other countries.

That's it, friends! Enough of working like slaves to fill the coffers of the beys, pashas, aghas, bosses and partnerships, in short, of all these bloodsuckers!

Enough of groveling with your children, your women, your health, your youth, for the domination of exploiters and speculators who spend their whole lives in pleasure at gambling tables and in the arms of prostitutes! Comrade Worker!

You did not come to the world to crawl, to be a slave to profiteers and merchants!

You were not born to feed the hordes of worthless slackers and vagabonds with your labor, sweat and blood!

Your lot is not to beg for a morsel and mercy, always bent double, subjugated and enslaved under the insults and curses of the bosses and the rich. Comrade Worker!

Sit up and look around you! Open your ears and brain to the voice of truth and reality! Why are you in this miserable and captive state? Why and who are you afraid of? What do you have to lose but the chains of slavery?

Are you less powerful than the boss you tremble before? Are you not the one who keeps the beys, pashas and aghas, whom you think are so big and powerful, alive and gives them strength and power? Aren't you the one who produces and creates everything that is beneficial to people in society?!

Who and what do the bosses and all the capitalists and their protector, the bourgeois government, rely on? When you raise your voice to demand your rights, when you organize against tyranny and oppression, what and with whom do they threaten you? With the army? But what does the army matter if you want it? Isn't it you who makes rifles and gatling guns, cannons, tanks and airplanes and transports them by car, train, ferry and automobile? If you want, won't the whole city be in darkness in this second? If you want, won't all transportation vehicles stop in a minute? Cannon, rifle, tank... But who uses them? Who makes up the army? Isn't it you and the workers and peasants and poor people like you who are miserable and enslaved?

Comrade worker!... Sit up and open your eyes!...And look around you!... Understand that you have all the power. You have all the right. There is only one way out of the misery and bondage in which you are wallowing: To understand your class identity, to organize, to take up the class struggle against the capitalists and the bourgeois government in a united mass, under the guidance of the Communist Party...

Comrade worker! Those who claim that it is possible to get your rights from the capitalists by pleading or begging are lying. In every country the workers have always been able to force their class demands on the bosses through the power and influence of their own organizations and often after protracted wars. Those who say that it is possible to gradually put an end to the misery and slavery of the working class by a series of laws, reforms and half measures are deceiving you. In the most developed countries, where the most labor laws have been enacted and the most reforms made, the misery and bondage of the workers are on the contrary increasing. In England, in America, millions of workers are still working like slaves, millions of unemployed laborers cannot even find a morsel of bread. This is because the laws and reforms enacted by the capitalists are always in their favor and to strengthen their own position. Even if they make some sacrifices under the force and compulsion of the workers, this is temporary: What they give today out of compulsion and fear, they will not hesitate to take for themselves in another form tomorrow when they have the opportunity, because the essence of capitalism is oppression and robbery. Real liberation will only be possible when capitalism is abolished and the workers come to power. Worker Friends!

The capitalists have not hesitated to use the most despicable tricks and traps to keep you in bondage and misery. One of these traps is religion and nationality. In all countries, the bourgeoisie have succeeded in dividing the working class, whose interests and goals are united, with the weapons of religion and nationality in order to oppress and rob them as they wish. And in this way they have prevented the workers of various religions and nationalities from uniting and embracing in order to fight successfully against their common enemy, the capitalists. But, friends, the hypocritical patriotism and religiosity of the Turkish bourgeoisie should be understood from the fact that during the World War, while on the one hand, in the name of religion and nation, they made the Turkish workers and farmers and the poor people of Turkey attack their fellow Christians, on the other hand, they have not hesitated and never will hesitate to meet under the table with Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants and brokers to suck the blood of the poor Turkish workers and farmers and the poor.

Against the traps of these faithless scoundrels who do not hesitate to use religion and nationality as a tool for their own despicable interests, all Turkish workers are obliged to confront them with the most powerful and terrible weapon of all: organization, class struggle and unity. Every Turkish worker must understand that the real enemy of a Turkish blacksmith, a Turkish stoker, a Turkish toiler, a Turkish peasant is the reactionary bourgeois government, which defends all these sectors of exploiters and bloodsuckers, the factory owners, bosses, company partners, aghas, pashas... regardless of their religion and nationality.

If the workers of Turkey, belonging to various religions and nationalities, want to get rid of the misery and bondage in which they live today, they must unite in the same organizations (the Red Unions and the Communist Party) to fight against these dark forces, which are their common enemies.

Yes, we know, some Turkish workers will say: You say that all workers are brothers and friends without distinction of race or creed, but many Greek workers shouted “Zito Venizelos!” in the streets of Constantinople and collected money for the Greek army and navy, which are servants of the imperialist states. Yes, but all these events do not prove that our ideas are wrong. It only shows that the Greek workers, like the Turkish workers, have not been freed from the harmful propaganda of their bourgeoisie under the mask of religion and nationality. If they were, they would understand their real interests, they would see who and where their real friends and enemies are, and they would attack them with all their might! Therefore, it is the duty of the Greek communists, of the Greek workers who have realized their class identity, to enlighten their friends, to show them their real friends and enemies, and the way of liberation. We must be satisfied that these friends of ours, both in Turkey and in Greece, are successfully carrying out this task. Today it is a fact that no one can deny that one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Greek army was the propaganda against the war carried out by our Greek Communist friends within the Greek army. This propaganda has had such a great influence that today the Greek government is obliged to think long and hard before dragging the country into a new war. For it is well aware that a new war will result in a greater defeat for the Greek bourgeoisie than the previous one and in the revolt and seizure of power by the Greek peasants and workers.

You may be sure, comrades Turkish workers, that these Greek Communists, who are not Turks or Moslems, have done more for the Turkish workers and poor people than the Turkish and Moslem merchant deputies and all the war riches and army contractors who, during the World War, fattened their bellies and coffers by feeding the poor people mud instead of bread.

All workers of Turkey, men and women, Muslims and Christians!... The history of Turkey and the history of all mankind is eagerly awaiting the common uprising of all the workers of Turkey against the oppressors and bloodsuckers, without distinction of race or sect.

Workers of Constantinople! It is your duty to guide all the workers, farmers and poor people of Turkey in this sacred struggle for liberation.

The Red Petrograd proletariat was at the head of the workers, farmers and soldiers of Russia who overthrew the tyranny and oppression of the Tsars and the bourgeois and established the workers' reign in its place. The entire revolutionary movement was led by the Communist – Bolshevik Party of Russia.

The Red Constantinople proletariat will always be at the forefront of the sacred struggle of all the workers, farmers and soldiers of Turkey to get rid of the oppression and tyranny of the beys, pashas, aghas and foreign capitalists and to attain true freedom and justice, and the C.P.T. will serve as the main fighting force of this army of the oppressed.

The proletariat of Constantinople will fulfill this sacred and historical duty and only then will the proletariat of Turkey gain the prestigious position it deserves in the family of the proletariat of the world and will facilitate and bring closer the world revolution which will liberate the whole world from bondage and misery forever, together with the colonies and the Eastern nations which are today groaning under the yoke of the imperialists.

Down with the traitorous labor guides of the Second International, sold out to the bourgeoisie!
Long live the Red Constantinople Proletariat!
Long live the All Turkey League of Red Unions and the Communist Party!
Long live the Soviet Republic of Turkey and the World Revolution!

1923 was a year of intense class struggle and repression in Turkey. 32,000 workers participated in the July – November strike wave in cities such as Constantinople, Adrianople, İzmir, Zonguldak, Aydın. Nationalist sentiment was high during the strike wave. Communists played a significant role is only a small number of the strikes as they were throughly repressed to the extent that by the end of the year, the League of Red Unions of Turkey were disbanded and all communist organizations forced into hiding by the Kemalists.

Despite his circle’s lack of activity among the class, Şefik Hüsnü used well his position as the secretary of the organizational bureau in order to increase his factional influence. He immediately started to slander the other members of the bureau to the Eastern Section which, lead by Grigory Safarov, favored above all the Popular Communist Party at this point. Soon Şefik Hüsnü and his allies among the Comintern functionaries were leading a smear campaign against the left.

Through Aydınlık’s lies and slanders, the Communist Youth International ceased its official relations with the International Communist Youth Group in late 1923 to which the left responded by calling for a unity of the three youth groups in the country, itself, Aydınlık youth and Anatolian youth. Although the Anatolian youth was favorable to the idea, Aydınlık youth already enjoyed the benefit of CYI’s support and had no need to engage with its factional enemies. In the meanwhile Şefik Hüsnü went as far as demanding Ginzberg’s expulsion from the party while he was in prison.

The repression of the communist left and the red unions greatly helped Şefik Hüsnü’s intellectual circle as it evened the field. Aydınlık had always been pro-Kemalist, and in his 1923 article titled Socialism Movements in Turkey, Şefik Hüsnü expressed not only his continued illusions in the Kemalist movement but also his understanding of socialism as a society introduced by national bourgeois statesmen:

     «Turkey is not without classes and a class struggle. Only in the sense that the capitalist bourgeoisie class is a very small and weak entity and the working class and the peasant class constitute an enormous majority, the class struggle takes place between the foreign capitalists and the local elite and wealthy owners who are their local servants and basically takes the form of a national struggle. Until now, individual dynastic governments have always taken the side of the capitalists, the enemies of the nation, in this struggle... From now on, the people's government, which derives its power from national sovereignty, must take the side of the righteous, that is, of the nation, and be a government of labor and workers.
     «The presence among the statesmen, such as the Deputies of Economic and Social Welfare, of persons who seem inclined to act with a Marxist mentality, makes it imperative that our government will not hesitate to take this path.
     «We want this policy to be more open and to create a more sincere and mutual trust between the working class and the peasantry and between the institutions and authorities of the government which will be guided by the interests of the working masses.
     «Only in this way will it be possible to properly absorb our present revolution. If we can develop our industry in the meantime, then it will be necessary to take new steps in the valley of socialism».

By then, the lefts in Anatolia, Constantinople and Baku had come into contact with each other too, however, and instead of waiting idly for Aydınlık to take over the party completely, they had started to struggle against the dangers right’s attempts to assert their dominance over party entailed. A 1924 Letter to Comrades written by Ginzberg gives us some idea of the scope of the activities of the left in this period:

     «In every issue of the newspaper you should publish information regarding even the smallest events and changes in the labor movement in Turkey and especially in Constantinople... Also include news about current trade union problems, current political events, peasants, taxes, etc., and news about the country, new laws, etc... Make sure there is more news from inside the country than from foreign countries. I have written a substantive article on the problems of the Communist Party of Turkey, I am sending it... Regarding May 1st, record even the smallest detail and send a long report on what happened or a long news article on Taarruz (Offensive)».
     «As you know, the future intellectuals of the Turkish communist party are moving more and more to the right. We must fight this tendency towards 'legal Marxism' with all our might, as we have done in the past, bearing in mind that if they persist in this course, the healthy elements – especially the proletarians – will not follow them. Carefully study all the articles in Aydınlık and severely criticize this deviation. Reply to them in Taarruz, and keep in close contact with them. Try to pull them into daily active work among the masses – perhaps you will be more successful than I was – engage in joint actions, ask them to take root in the masses. Only in and through action will their true face be revealed. If they remain passive, turn to the working elements in their group (if there are any), in a word, form a nucleus within their group. Lenin once said: 'It is necessary to separate in order to come together better'; this is our present situation. My view is that many of them will sooner or later fall into Menshevism. These 'luxury-loving Marxists' will claim to be members of the Communist Party of Turkey until they are driven to the wall... Either they should settle among the masses and fulfill their daily revolutionary tasks in accordance with communist principles and program, or they should go away and leave us alone. In these days of increasing reaction, it is unacceptable that some communist forces are disorganized and adrift; for two years they have been an obstacle to the consolidation of the Communist Party of Turkey. They are responsible for the uncertain situation we are in. Now our first task is to unite all the communists in the country in a solid organization. We have a huge task ahead of us and if these 'luxury-loving Marxists' still stand in the way, we will have to be content with winning very few of them».

Although Aydınlık’s theoretical framework was Stalinist before the rise of Stalin, it was severely criticized by the Ukrainian delegate Manuilsky at the 5th Congress of the Comintern. Earlier a supporter of Trotsky and later a supporter of Stalin, Manuilsky seems to have been a mouthpiece to Zinoviev’s, and more importantly his ally Safarov’s line on this question at this congress:

     «At the Second Congress we determined the attitude of the young communist sections towards the national liberation movements under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, which were marching towards power. But since then we have faced a new situation in the Eastern countries: what are we to do against the national bourgeoisies that have seized power?...
     «In the organ of the Communist Party of Turkey, Aydınlık, some articles appeared calling on the Communist Party to support the development of national capitalism against foreign capitalism. On this point we find among our Turkish comrades a tendency which finds its clear expression in the view of “Legal Marxism” once defended in Russia by Mr. Struve (who said that the working class should support the development of capitalism in Russia)».

The fact that a prominent if not very well respected old Bolshevik voiced these criticisms shows that the left’s criticisms of the right were beginning to attract attention within the International. Neither Şefik Hüsnü not any other Aydınlık leader dared respond to Manuilsky. It was instead one of the delegates of the left, Kazım of Van, who did so. Nevertheless, Şefik Hüsnü’s influence continued to grow within the party. Certain young militants of the Popular Communist Party, such as İsmail Bilen aligned with him. Thus, Bilen would shock Ginzberg, the delegate of the Constantinople left by claiming that the working class did not really exist in Turkey in his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Profintern:

     «Some comrades are of the opinion that in the Near East, during the World War, an industrial proletariat developed on the one hand and a national industry on the other, which prepared the ground for the economic liberation of the country from the imperialists. This is completely wrong... Kemalism's war against imperialism and the remnants of the feudal system is not yet complete. We are therefore obliged to support them as before and this is already in our class interests... Alongside comrades who share the view that 'the national movement in the Near East must not be supported', we also see some comrades who hold the opposite view».

In response to the brazen class collaborationism of the right, the clearest leaders of the left, most of whom were in exile at this point, sharpened their criticisms of the right as well as the Eastern Section of the Comintern while some others, mostly from the Popular Communist Party, vacillated if they hadn’t already moved towards the right. In turn the Eastern Section started to exclude the leaders of the left from party work.

Documents

The first two documents we are presenting here – “Declaration to the South and South East Branch of the Communist Youth International” ana “Letter to the South and South East Branch of the Communist Youth International” – were written by İsmail Hakkı and Aleko Stakos of the left’s youth organization. The first of the two is significant for elaborating the left’s line against fascism: a militant struggle without forming a front or alliance with other parties or deviating from the goal of proletarian dictatorship. The second is notable for including an account of the left on the strike wave of 1923.

The following two documents – “A Short Look at Turkey’s Past and Current Situation” and “The Anti-imperialist Independence Movement and the Proletariat” – express the lessons of the national revolution and the role of the proletariat drawn by Ginzberg, one of the left’s central leaders.

The fifth document, Kazım of Van’s speech at the 5th Congress of the Comintern, differs from Ginzberg’s position in the nuances of for how long the national movement will have destructive tasks against the old feudal regime. Kazım of Van also claims there are no national demands among the Kurdish minority in Turkey, a position that is arguably true regarding Kurdish uprisings in favor of the caliphate, but soon to be refuted with the emergence of the Kurdish Republic of Ararat in 1927.

The sixth document is Ginzberg’s response to İsmail Bilen at the 3rd Congress of the Profintern where he refutes the idea of the non-existence of an industrial proletariat in Turkey.

The seventh document is the Theses the left submitted to the 3^rd Congress of the Profintern. The document is significant not only in its clarity but in how it applies the lessons of the experience in Turkey to the whole region.

The last document, “Growth of the Workers Movement in Turkey”, is an oppositional article by Ginzberg, significant in solving the crisis of the party though organic means, by the selection of the best, that is the most capable comrades, instead of relying on democratic majorities and elections, as well as drawing the lessons of the 1923 strike wave.

We, gathered to celebrate the 9th International Day of Communist Youth, hereby send our fraternal greetings to the communist youth from all countries united in the CYI.

We have fought and will fight with all our might against the class enemies of the proletariat, to free ourselves from the chains and tyranny of the Turkish bourgeoisie and foreign capitalists.

In order to massacre and exploit the proletariat, the Italian fascists have organized in our country; they are training the young Turkish bourgeoisie with their harmful activities.

Our group, which is engaged in a vigorous struggle against these bandits, has won many successes and, with the help of the CYI, will fight with all its might to crush the local and international Italian fascists completely and ruthlessly.

If the reactionary elements of Turkey, enemies of Soviet Russia, dare to launch an armed struggle against the first great proletarian state, the torchbearer of the world revolution, we, the organized young communists, together with the workers' vanguard, the proletariat and the poor peasants, will stand united in defense of the first workers' republics. This will be the signal on the road to the liberation of the workers and poor peasants through revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Long live the International Day of Communist Youth! – Long Live the Proletarian Revolution in Turkey! – Long live the Red Internationals! – Long live the World Revolution! – Long live the International Youth Group of Turkey!

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the International Communist Youth Group, İsmail Hakkı, Secretary Aleko Stakos

Dear Comrades

For the membership campaign it is organizing and for the series of leaflets and pamphlets it has to publish, the International Communist Youth Group of Constantinople has had to call upon the help of young people and adults from all countries.

Since our group is composed of poor young workers, it is not able to meet the ever-growing needs of the struggle against the capitalists and all the enemies of the proletariat; despite unemployment and low wages, for three years our members have been making every sacrifice in order to fulfill their duties.

Unfortunately, since the victory of the Kemalists, things have gotten worse. Apart from prosecutions, the Kemalist – nationalist – government disbanded all the red trade unions, which were branches of the Profintern; it issued a decree dismissing non-Muslim workers in all enterprises and replacing them with Muslim Turkish workers. For two months, 90% of the Greek, Armenian, Jewish, etc. workers (these nationalities make up 60% of the population of Istanbul), 60% of the wage earners have been fired and condemned to starvation. 80,000 young and adult workers are still unemployed, including many of our members and sympathizers, who contribute greatly to the expenses of our activities.

Above all, the economic situation is deteriorating day by day. The cost of living is rising. Yet there is no change in wages. Life has become 39 times more expensive than in 1914, while wages have increased only 23 times.

The workers are poorly organized and we have a big job to do. On the other hand, there is great confusion and it is up to us to correct it. These strikes are revolutionary in character and marked by confusion. The workers – at least those who have not yet struck – believe that the Kemalists are with them against the bosses. But events prove to them something completely different: the Kemalists are the fiercest enemies of the communists and of the proletariat in general. During the strikes the Kemalist policemen and gendarmes did the same thing as the gendarmes of the imperialists in occupied Istanbul, that is, they crushed the workers' movement.

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the International Communist Youth Group, İsmail Hakkı, Secretary, Aleko Stakos

Turkey is underdeveloped industrially. Besides all industry and capitalist enterprises are at the hands of Western imperialist capitalists. As local capitalists, we have a weak bourgeoisie trying to move forward with difficulty. There are no political parties where certain material interests are directly crystallized, there are young parties solidifying to the extent of the progress of capitalist development.

The working class is weak and it’s not well-organized. As it develops, it tries to create its combat organs under Kemalist terror.

The peasant class that makes the overwhelming majority of the population is backward, ignorant and has been wrecked with repeated wars.

Lets take a short look at the events of the last fifteen years to understand the present situation better.

The main subject of discussion among the different groups representing the mass of bureaucrats and soldiers is political power (determined by indirect capitalist interests).

The groups differed on the basis of the opposed interests of the imperialist capitalists they served. Almost always, they came to power following coups based on the most enlightened and influential sections of the population. This was a regular game met with the indifference of the masses of peasants and workers, who were in a submission and a deep ignorance. Upon taking power, they served the country to be exploited by whomever they served.

In the last fifteen years, they dragged the country to a number of wars that lead to the bankruptcy of the economy and the destruction of productive forces.

Two parties played a major role in the political life of the country: “Union and Progress” and “Freedom and Accord”. “Union and Progress”, which served German interests, left power after its defeat at the world massacre. Of course with the victory of the Entente, the pro-British opposition party, “Freedom and Accord” came to power. However it could not carry much weight.

Due to the defeat the most fertile regions of Turkey, such as Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine were occupied; the effects of this were deeply felt in the economic life of the country. Additionally the mass of bureaucrats and soldiers took refuge in Anatolia.

The peasants, crushed by the weight of the war and tired of the despotic rule that would come to be with the treaty of Sèvres, rebelled and started to struggle against the imperialist occupation. The radical elements of “Union and Progress” and “Freedom and Accord” joined the movement. The movement was made up of three elements: 1) workers and peasants, 2) bureaucrats and hoarders, 3) the bourgeoisie. Depending on the situation, the clergy followed one part of these or another.

The bureaucratic and military sector, the most advanced and influential section of the population, took over the administration of the movement and with a fancy policy – the National Pact – accomplished to bring a national color to the movement.

The ignorant and unorganized worker and peasant classes moved according to the wishes of the bureaucrats promising to liberate them from imperialist domination.

The bourgeoisie, whose interests directed it to free trade with the banks and factories of Europe, wanted peace, no matter the cost. When it couldn’t stop the movement, the bourgeoisie formed “national defense committees” and had its servants elected at the elections to the Grand National Assembly. It begun to cooperate directly with the government and directed a part of the Grand National Assembly to its own purposes. They were afraid of a communist revolution. Yet, in order to appear as conceding to the desires of the poor masses and in order to take advantage of the aid of the communists in order to strengthen, they went as far as to deceptively declare they wanted to accept the Soviet system.

The communist party, conscious of its interests, aided the anti-imperialist movement with all its forces.

Kemal and his supporters did not take long to drop their masks. They participated in the London Conference of 1921 with our comrades’ arrest documents in their pockets. With this conference, British imperialism was trying to unite the two opposing governments in Istanbul and Ankara so that it could use it better in line with its interests in the East.

Seeing that British imperialism didn’t want to share the exploitation of the country, the young bourgeoisie influenced the representatives of the bureaucrats in power who were soon to betray. Indeed they didn’t take long to sign the Franklin Boullion agreement with French imperialist which promised them support. Henceforward, they started to direct their policies towards French imperialism. They rushed to be on the side and in the service of their class brothers. They rushed to the Mudanya Conference where the grave of the National Pact was dug. The peasant masses were tired of war and wanted peace. With a masterful policy, the Kemalists managed to hide their betrayal from the eyes of the peasants.

Drunk with their “victory”, they filled prisons with communists, disbanded the red unions, banned their publications, closed down their locals, clubs, libraries in order to reassure the coffers. At the same time, they took the members of the II. International under their protection, gave them the monopoly of legal workers organizations, suppressed strikes and did all they could to earn the trust of the coffers by eliminating everything that would disturb them.

Yet in Lausanne the hypocritical mask of French imperialism dropped. The Kemalists had to give up on their hopes of French support. They had to go back to establishing a front with Soviet Russia. The economic situation in the country was worsening. The peasants started to realize the catastrophe of the war. New problems emerged, making the government’s position more difficult.

The bankrupt mass of workers and the exhausted proletarians consoled themselves with the hope that “Kemalists will realize their promises after the peace and the material conditions will get better”.

With the abolition of the monarchy, the young bourgeoisie supported by a section of the bureaucrats and soldiers and the conservatives supported by the other camp begun to attempt to use the masses increasing discontent caused by their changing circumstances to their advantage. For a moment, the young bourgeoisie feared it would lose power. The elections were coming. The general situation required a strong party based on the masses. They started preparing the party by organizing the Izmir Congress (1923) where the representatives of all social strata were invited. Workers, poor and rich peasants, the bourgeoisie etc. met in this congress. Great speeches were made. Kemal said: “the peasant is the master of the country”. “The workers must organize to defend their interests etc”. Decisions that temporarily met the desires of all social strata were taken at this congress. One for all, all for one! Except the communists, of course. Their best representatives were kept in prison by Kemal at the time.

When the comedy was over, Kemal and his supporters, who had won the sympathy of the toiling masses, took part in the 1923 elections under the banner of the People’s Party formed by Kemal. They were just like the executives of “Union and Progress” and “Freedom and Accord”; their only difference was that they had on their side the young bourgeoisie which had strengthened further with the exhausted economy. All their candidates got elected, as did a lot of conservatives who had concealed themselves. The Second Assembly came to be. These masked conservatives also took part in the government that was formed. One minister followed another as their masks fell down.

No positive changes happened in the economic situation of the country at the beginning, quite the contrary in got worse. Faced with this unbearable situation, the bourgeois press raised the cry of “strong government”. The irreconcilable process between groups with conflicting interests matured. The division of opposed elements within the People’s Party became inevitable. The conservatives and the liberals faced one another. The most influential elements of the bureaucrats and soldiers supported the liberals. The liberals took action. The Caliphate, the fortress of conservatives, was abolished.

In other countries this process would be completed with bloody struggles between opposing camps. In Turkey it was a peaceful struggle, the consequences of which will be felt later. This happened because: 1) The most influential elements of the soldiers and bureaucrats were at the liberal camp; 2) the treacherous sultan-caliph was discredited in the eyes of the people during the independence struggle; 3) the peasant and worker masses’ attention was focused on material regulations for the improvement of conditions of existence. Additionally, the social elements of stability, traditions and conservatism had partially lost their influence on the psychology of the masses.

The İsmet (İnönü) Pasha government was formed. The liberals didn’t keep the promises the masses were anxiously waiting for. The economic situation worsened further. As the prices rose, the value of money dropped; this was to the disadvantage of the working class, small public employees, servants, poor peasants. The process of capitalist evolution left tens of thousands of artisans unemployed. The housing crisis is making a havoc. Tens of thousands of immigrants are waiting to be settled, those settled are waiting for work. A part of the industry was destroyed during the population transfer. The country is constantly importing goods (more than it exports). Even wheat, exported by Turkey before the war, is being imported from the United States, which is paying for the country. Regions destroyed by the war are waiting to be rebuilt. Banditry continues along with insecurity. The Circassian, Kurdish minorities used by British imperialism are burning within and demand autonomy.

Faced with this situation, what does the young bourgeoisie in power do? As a reform it has abolished the Caliphate and expelled the Caliph and his family; it has declared secular education, equality of minorities etc. Yet these don’t directly concern the exhausted, tumbling masses of peasants and workers; these masses say: “Will we be given credits, seeds, vehicles, working animals, will the taxes go down, will our destroyed villages be rebuilt, will peace and security come back?” The peasants of richer regions like Diyarbakır which have great amount of accumulated wheat stocks due to a lack of transportation equipment and which can thus compete with American wheat say: “Will I be able to transport my wheat cheaply and sell it?” Some say that the land that is without owners now that the Monarchy and the Caliphate are abolished will be distributed to the peasants. Yet the peasant says: “I don’t have the vehicles to work the land that I have. What will I do with the Caliph’s land”. The worker says: “Will the cost of living decrease? Will rent, working hours, wages increase? Will social law be made?” etc. All the exploited social strata say: ‘Will the taxes go down?” The retired officers say: ‘Will the pensions be paid?”. Yet the young bourgeoisie, allied to the bureaucrats in power, faced with the exhausted economy, destroyed productive forces, debts, money losing value, a deficit of 58 million Turkish liras, can not do anything but load new taxes on the masses.

The capitalists exploit as much as possible. The assault of the working class and poor peasants against capitalism is taking shape. This assault is indecisive and scattered due to a lack of experienced organizations in line with class consciousness and the fight.

The young bourgeoisie in power needs capital. For this, it is calling on the coffers of the Western imperialist capitalists. The capitalist imperialists are miscalculating and they dream too much that the situation will turn in favor of the reactionary conservatives and their lackeys, who are very active in the illegal field due to their help. The center of conservatives is Istanbul; with illegal organizations they try to infiltrate the mass of peasants and take advantage of the disappointment and discontent. The government arrests those it uncovers and exiles them from the rural sector. There were tens of them in the prison I stayed in: Turks, Circassians, Kurds and of all kinds. Meaningfully, the soldiers, gendarme, and police respect and sympathize with them. Together with the political factor, it should be taken into consideration that the political discontent among public employees in Istanbul is rising under the influence of conservatism.

In order to get credits from Western capitalists and earn their trust and sympathy, the bourgeoisie is furious about the smallest movements of proletarians. It can’s tolerate the smallest strike, it suppresses viciously. There isn’t a single strike without bloodshed ⁽¹⁰⁾.

The tension between social antagonisms is rapidly becoming stronger and it is now at a level that is incomparable to the past. The perspective of a land revolution is being shaped. The communists will have the last word in the struggle between the reactionary conservatives and the liberal young bourgeoisie in power. Afraid, the bourgeoisie murders, massacres, imprisons, sacrifices, expels them, and in short does not allow for a second for them to breath. Yet will it be able to save itself? Does it think it can save itself by repressing the communists when world capitalism is collapsing? The Czar acted no differently in the past.

We can now say that the young bourgeoisie can win the support of workers and poor peasants, and their vanguard, in the struggle against the reactionary conservatives who are actively trying to get back to power with the support and aid of British imperialism, by forming an alliance with Russia of the Soviets and making certain truly radical reforms that are directly in line with the material interests of the workers and peasants.

Roland Ginzberg
The Anti-imperialist Independence Movement and the Proletariat

(1924)

During the war, the economic situation of Turkey was liberated from the imperialist domination of foreign countries to a considerable degree. Following the war, the national bourgeoisie further strengthened its position. It completed the first period of accumulation of capital outside the influence of foreign capital. With the claim to hold monopoly over all the surplus value pulled off the workers and peasants, it entered the capitalist era. However the fate of Europe’s imperialist capitalism is, to a large degree, tied to the extreme profit realized to the detriment of the toilers of colonial and semi colonial countries.

The hostility between the economical tendencies of the imperialist countries and the semi colonial countries directed by their national bourgeoisies causes violent clashes between the local bourgeoisie and the imperialist states competing with it for profits.

At first, the local bourgeoisie in Turkey was strongly supported by the masses of workers. However this cooperation carried certain contradictions without an internal solution. As long as the local bourgeois truly struggled and gave the proletariat some concessions even if verbally, the working class allowed itself to be directed by the local bourgeoisie in the anti-imperialist struggle. However when the proletariat, tired of waiting for the promises to be realized and pushed into action by the need to improve its material conditions, began to struggle against the local bourgeoisie, the local bourgeoisie suppressed this movement with great violence. Thus the “single front” of the local bourgeoisie and the proletariat was destroyed due to the antagonism between the interests of the social classes in question.

Under these circumstances, the bourgeoisie had one tool to preserve its rule: Resting on the political state mechanism in its entirety, reconciling with reactionary groups internally and coming to an agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie of the external states instead of the external war.

The local bourgeoisie has not torn down all the obstacles of the semi-feudal regime. It wasn’t strong enough to carry the weight of a war or an internal revolution. It had only one way out: coming to an agreement with the foreign imperialists based on new conditions for the toilers of Turkey to be intensely exploited.

Instead of the anti-imperialist single front, now we see an imperialist and bourgeois single front against the working class.

This historical phenomenon is so obvious that the native proletariat is dividing its strength equally between the local bourgeoisie and the foreign bourgeoisie. (The strikes of 1922-1923 and the July 1924 tram strike, the beginning of a new strike wave).

The proletariat can not get rid of the imperialist bourgeoisie without overthrowing the national bourgeoisie. The struggle against imperialism exceed the national framework from now on.

As a result, the working class, while continuing to help a section of contrary elements in a way that suits its interest, needs to follow an independent goal in terms of the political struggle to take power. This help can only be conditional and directly based on the interests of the working class and poor peasants.

Comrades! The national question shows itself in four aspects in Turkey. 1. Relations between the proletariat and revolutionary nationalism in the positive and constructive field, that is the political and economical fields. 2. Relations between the proletariat and revolutionary nationalism in the negative and destructive field, that is in the struggle for national liberation against imperialism and the struggle against medieval institutions. 3. The relationship between the proletariat and the minorities. 4. The relationship between the proletariat and imperialist nationalism.

Comrade Manuilsky criticized us for focusing on the first aspect and mainly because a tendency towards collaboration with nationalism in the political and economic field was demonstrated in the Party organ (Aydınlık).

Comrades, allow me to briefly explain the birth of this tendency and the attempt to liquidate it. The struggle against imperialism and reaction (the abolition of the monarchy, the caliphate, feudal privileges and all sorts of medieval institutions) does not end with the signing of treaties or the abolition of the monarchy and the caliphate.

Indeed, this is a situation which had been seen in Turkey since Lausanne and which might be liberated in a series of countries of similar circumstances, such as China after its formal liberation from the rule of imperialist capitulations.

The irreconcilable nationalists of Turkey who have completed the first phases of the national liberation have started the struggle to complete the phase of creating a regime without capitulations that imperialist capitalists will bow before on the one hand, and against reaction to prevent an attempt at restoration on the other. The abolition of the public debt, financial auditing, sect schools like the madrasas, prevention of all sorts of imperialist capitalist interventions on for instance justice, the struggle against attempts to resurrect the monarchy and the caliphate etc… These are a series of national questions that can be resolved by struggle with the irreconcilable nationalists in the negative, that is destructive field.

I believe that it’s absolutely necessary for the proletariat to participate in this struggle for the duty is not just nationalist, but also in line with proletarian ideology. Only with the practical resolution of these questions will the class struggle against the bourgeoisie take its clearer form. Lenin, as early as 1913, taught Marxists to take the question into consideration from this perspective.

Yet there is the positive process parallel to the negative one: in this process the nationalist bourgeoisie forms a new capital, a new army, a new police, a new organ of government and to the extent that it reinforced its rule over other classes, it oppresses the toiling masses with heavy taxes, limits democracy, preventing the people’s direct participation in the government, the assembly, courts etc., refuses to recognize workers rights to strike, collective bargaining etc., does nothing for the small and landless peasants (Turkish sharecroppers who are semi serfs), creates new government monopolies and new taxes. Not to struggle against this oppressive rule would be to betray the interests of the proletariat and toiling masses. No one in the Party intends to allow the national bourgeoisie to oppress the toilers as they please.

It’s just that the relationship of social forces, due to an opportunist and reactionary opposition formed rapidly and quite strongly, makes the practice of class struggle extremely complicated. With half a dozen daily newspapers, this opposition is leading a harsh struggle against irreconcilable nationalism, accusing it of not giving trust to foreign capital and losing the credit Turkey enjoyed in Muslim countries.

Toiling masses oppressed by war taxes and prohibitive laws are easily influenced by the maneuverings of the opposition. There is discord and division even in the command level of the army and in these circumstances the danger of reaction is always present.

These extremely complicated preconditions are what determines the tendency mentioned by comrade Manuilsky. What pushes comrades from this tendency to error the most is the statism adopted out of necessity by the nationalists. Indeed, the nationalists try to go about their business without taking foreign debt. They create state incomes at the monopolies and they allocate the resources to capitalist enterprises run by the state. They buy ships, build railroads and sugar factories. In the name of municipalities they open markets, bakeries, flour factories etc.

Yet according to other comrades, the economic and political program of the nationalists is extremely clear: It is only a program in line with the middle bourgeoisie of Anatolia and their statism, which arose entirely out of necessity, is bound to be destroyed either when foreign capital starts feeding the new regime without capitulations or when its ally the opportunist and reactionary bourgeoisie is finally victorious against the irreconcilable nationalists and thanks to it a new system of capitulations is created.

The following points were observed following discussions on this question.
     1. The nationalist revolution hasn’t reached its limits yet, however these limits are foreseeable and even the most irreconcilable bourgeoisie can’t exceed them. Only the proletariat can exceed these limits and it has to struggle for the completion of national liberation from imperialist domination and for the certain abolition of medieval institutions so that the revolution is perfected. The proletariat should not conduct this struggle to reach a nationalist purpose but as a purely proletarian duty, even when the irreconcilable nationalists bow before the conditions and reconcile with foreign capital and internal reaction.
     2. The proletariat should collaborate with revolutionary nationalism only in the negative field; when the bourgeoisie starts founding institutions for its own interests, the class struggle is absolutely necessary.
     3. No matter what, the mission of the Communist Party is to organize and educate the proletariat and toiling masses against the bourgeoisie no matter what the democratic form.

We presented our situation to the program commission; we wish the national question commission can resolve this question which carries a great importance not just for the Communist Party of Turkey but for a series of other countries, for the whole International.

Now, let us move on to the second aspect of the national question in Turkey.

It is clear from what has been said above that the proletariat should participate in the struggle against imperialism and reaction. In this period, nationalists in the north of Syria organized guerillas and with the interruption of the Haliç Conference, they’re preparing for an armed rising in Upper Mesopotamia (Mosul). In this struggle, the nationalists seem to have formed an alliance with Kurdish chieftains such as Shaikh Mahmud and Simko. On the other hand, nationalism is developing against the British in Iraq. Uceymi, the famous chief of Iraq, is a great enemy of the British and he is with the nationalists of Turkey. The Senusi movement in Africa has very strong ties with Anatolian nationalists. The Communist Party of Turkey attaches great importance to this movement against imperialism. These are military fronts that can deal serious blows on European imperialism. We have to take into account not just the armed successes of the Turks but of the Kurdish uprising against Britain which caused it to abandon Sulaymaniyah and Rawandiz after bombing them numerous times. Abd el-Krim who struggles against Spanish imperialism in Morocco and forced it to flee leaving its bounty behind, also needs to be taken into account.

The Communist Party of Turkey thinks that if the world proletariat and the Communist International seriously supports this movement, what happened to Lloyd George and Poincare in Asia Minor could happen to Macdonald, Herriot and Mussolini too.

The Near East is different from other colonial and semi-colonial countries in the armed struggle against imperialism. All of 19^th century is full of a series of nationalist struggles from Etniki Eterya (National Association) in Greece to Müdafaa-i Hukuk (Defense of Law) in Turkey. The national revolutionary process carries the stamp of endless armed struggles. The struggle of Abd el-Krim against French imperialism forms a part of a same process as Shamil’s struggle against the Czar. Senusi, Uceymi, Mahmud, Riza Khan, Mustafa Kemal, Simko and others, regardless of whether they are representatives of the bourgeoisie or feudalism, are standard-bearers of the oppressed Near East against capitalist imperialism, common enemy of the world proletariat. With all available means, we must support these movements and these fronts against imperialism. Only this way can we realize Lenin’s will, according to which the duty of the world proletariat is not to enslave and colonize the lands of the East, but to win over the heart of the East by supporting it against imperialism, the common enemy.

Now let us pass on to the question of minorities. The new numbers on the population of Turkey are as follows:

     Turks                   10,000,000 -  80   %
     Kurds, Circasians, Lazi  1,800,000 -  14,4 %
     Greeks                     250,000 -   2   %
     Armenians                  350,000 -   2,8 %
     Jews and others            100,000 -   0,8 %
                             12,500,000 - 100   %

The largest minority is the Kurds; the Kurdish question appeared three of four times in feudal and partial forms in the last fifty years. A Kurdish national question, however, neither appeared nor developed. The present laws give the Muslim people the same constitutional rights. Kurdish intellectuals and bourgeois elements do not put forward any nationalist or separatist demands. The Turkish bourgeoisie behaves completely differently towards the Greek and the Armenians which it considers irreconcilable rivals and enemies due to their separatism. The nationalists are thinking of establishing residential areas for the minorities and limiting their presence in cities other than Istanbul to 10 %. The Communist Party of Turkey struggles and will struggle against all sorts of national oppression against Christian and non-Turkish minorities, however the abolition of the Patriarchate, like that of the Shaikh al-Islam, is a proletarian duty.

Let us move on to the fourth aspect of the national question in Turkey: this is the form of racial panturkism.

This form developed during the world war, especially in 1917-1918, when the Turkish army occupied the Caucasus. It’s true that Mustafa Kemal evaluated panturkism and panislamism as an adventurism. It is also true that panturkist clubs called Turkish Hearth declared that they had a completely cultural character. Yet the Turkish press, including semi-official ones are extremely, in fact methodically interested in the people of Turan, a part of the Soviet Union, since 1923. This interest always goes together with a campaign against Bolshevism. Bourgeois representatives of these peoples, such as Rasulzadah and Zaki Validov conduct a horrible campaign against the Bolsheviks, who they accuse of being imperialists oppressing the people of Turan. From the workers in Istanbul to the old peasant in the most remote village of Anatolia, the toiling masses say “the Bolsheviks are our friends”. Yet the intellectuals are completely hostile. Here’s the hardest point of the question: the distinction in the relationship between Turks and Bolsheviks.

The Communist International must pay lively attention to this current. Our party is too young and weak to deal with these questions alone, we are in a state of illegality. Very difficult experiences forced us to remain in illegality. Great mistakes were made which caused great sacrifices. The first is the error of comrade Mustafa Suphi; he believed it was possible to work openly as a legal party. He paid for this with his and fourteen other comrades’ lives. Then we gave two more sacrifices (January-February 1922). Sentenced to decades of prison, the central committee of the Ankara party lost their legality too. In 1922, another attempt at legality was made by the Ankara party and at the time our party was at the administration of the Eastern Secretariat. A leaflet published in Istanbul for the May Day of 1923 caused a series of arrests and an as of yet unresolved court case. The Communist Party of Turkey continued its way under these circumstances, growing and strengthening. Yet it is still a small illegal party. If it can’t realize the tasks that fall on its shoulders, this is because it is not strong.

We need a Marxist and Leninist literature, and a wider legal press.

The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) served us greatly. We expect even greater aid from it. It’s necessary to pay more attention to Turkish Marxist literature and the question of language. We hope to become a mass party in the near future, basing ourselves on the workers and peasants as well as the semi proletarian section of the intellectuals, with the fraternal support of the Communist International.

     Long live the Communist International!
     Long live the World Revolution!

Comrades! Had a new and remarkable question not come up during the discussion unexpectedly, I did not intend to touch on the situation of the Near East. Comrade Ismail (Bilen), who is a member of our delegation, doesn’t seem to agree with the rest of our delegation and has made the unexpected invention that the proletariat doesn’t exist in Turkey. Moreover, he has discovered that the bourgeoisie doesn’t exit in Turkey either and that the foreign trade monopoly is in the hands of the Greek and Armenian bourgeoisie. In the end, he added that we didn’t know what attitude to take in the face of the Kemalist regime.

I will read a quote from an article published in Aydınlık (Clarity), the press organ of the communist party whose approach was criticized at the 5^th Congress of the Communist International. In the quoted text, you will find thoughts that are the same as those voiced by Comrade Ismail.

«In our country it’s not the proletariat but on the contrary the unemployed whose numbers are rising. It’s the unqualified proletariat, or more correctly the lumpen proletariat whose numbers are rising. As seen in the Economics Congress held a short time ago, there is no real industry of trade in our country. Accordingly, the social foundation for a mass movement is lacking in our country. For this reason, these duties fall to the pro-discipline Republican Party. Every act, even merciless acts of power, if necessary for the defense of the Republic, is just and progressive…”

Everything is clear here. In our country we have revolutionaries who deny the existence of the working masses, and yet the number of workers in Turkey is at least 600.000 today. Instead of showing the way for the workers, time is bought with unimportant efforts and the question of how the bourgeoisie should act in order to reduce the loss of big capital as much as possible is taken up.

I have to declare that the views expressed by comrade Ismail are never shared by the Turkish members of the International Red Union and the Turkish communists.

Allow me to share some statistical data in order to demonstrate the existence of a Turkish proletariat. Zonguldak miners 15.000 Aydın region 8.000 Ergani region 6.000 Stone-cutters 4.000 Transportation workers 22.000 Miners 22.000 Other branches of industry 47.000 Public servants and teachers 15.000 Trade clerks 30.000 Agricultural workers 300.000 This is proof of the existence of masses of workers in Turkey. These masses have fought for national independence for four years. The acquisition of this independence also forms the basis of the development of the local bourgeoisie. And it (the Turkish bourgeoisie) is currently trying to create a state to solidify their profits obtained by the exploitation of the workers and the peasants in Turkey.

I have been able to demonstrate to this congress that the Turkish bourgeoisie tries to prevent the development of the workers’ movement in a way that leaves no room for any retaliation.

We have to observe that the workers work between 12-14 hours a day and are paid a salary which does not allow them to safeguard their human existence. In the last year and a half, over thirty three thousand workers acting on pure class demands went on strike. The workers fight is against foreign capitalists as much as it is against Turkish capitalists. When it comes to policies of retaliation against the working class, these two forces are in solidarity.

The Turkish bourgeoisie lacks the skill to develop on its own and in order to successfully compete outside, it needs to draw foreign capital to Turkey and exploit the workers and peasants with its help. Within these relations, the working class, in the east, has not even managed to obtain a minimal economic prosperity; it has neither won the eight hour working day, not carried into effect a worker protection law.

Yet, the working class of the East has now entered a period of counter attacking capital and this proletarian assault opens new horizons. It will unite with the peasant revolution and excel. In the duration of this war, we will succeed in consolidating and shaping the workers organization in Turkey, increase their tools of war and create organs of war against the bourgeoisie.

1. The war played a decisive role in the emergence of the industrial proletariat as a new social element, affecting the economies of the Near East countries. The suspension of economic relations with the Near East countries due to the war forced the populations of these regions to meet their own needs with their own resources, creating the need to establish national industries. As a result, a gradual process of liberation from the economic protection of imperialist states began.

2. After the war ended, Western capitalism launched a new offensive towards the Near East, hiding behind the occupying armies. It seized the most important ports and means of communication to ensure the sale of its own goods and the export of raw materials purchased cheaply in these countries. The sudden flooding of the Middle Eastern market with cheap foreign goods created serious competition for local production, halting the development of young industries in Middle Eastern countries and leading to a deep crisis.
     This crisis primarily affected workers and poor peasants, but its consequences also impacted the middle classes, the young industry, and the commercial bourgeoisie, whose interests were directly harmed by the crisis in production.

3. The influx of foreign capital into the countries of the Near East and the crisis it caused forced the local bourgeoisie to unite to defend its own interests.
     The organic weakness of the local bourgeoisie prevented it from openly fighting imperialism. Therefore, it appealed to the workers and peasants and, for example, took advantage of the clause in the Treaty of Sèvres requiring Turkey to pay 500 million lira in reparations, thereby creating an extremely chauvinistic national movement.
     In order to draw the peasants and workers into the struggle, the bourgeoisie made many promises and verbal concessions, even though it knew very well that they would never be fulfilled. Thanks to this agitation among the workers and peasants, the bourgeoisie mobilized the masses against imperialism, organized the armed struggle (in Turkey), and took control of the government.
     Similarly, the bourgeoisie knew how to take advantage of the political and economic environment that had emerged in the world (the revolution in Russia and the economic crisis of world capitalism) in order to give this struggle the character of a national liberation war. (Armed struggle in Turkey, Kemalism; national independence movement during military occupation in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc.).

4. As soon as partial political independence was achieved, the local bourgeoisie entered a transition process through various internal development stages, which can be summarized as follows:
     1) The local bourgeoisie enters the stage of accumulating capital and completely monopolizing national wealth; however, the struggle against imperialism consumes a large portion of the accumulated wealth (Turkey).
     2) The local bourgeoisie is unable to ensure the country's economic development on its own and is forced to make concessions to imperialist capitalism or come to terms with it (Turkey – Franklin Bouillon Agreement, Lausanne Agreement, etc., Egypt – Zaghloul-British Agreement, etc.).
     3) However, these concessions and compromises are detrimental to the working class and poor peasants, from whom the domestic bourgeoisie has completely distanced itself. Nevertheless, this bourgeoisie continues to keep alive the dream of a national front against imperialism among the working class and poor peasants.

5. When the struggle began, workers and peasants actively participated in the national liberation war with the hope that their interests would be protected and their demands would be taken into account by those governing the country, as promised in empty pledges; but the bourgeoisie could not escape the flaws of the semi-feudal regime. It became clear that it was not in a position to bear the heavy financial burden of war or an internal revolution. Therefore, it had to withdraw and surrender the positions it had gained to the reactionary bloc that emerged after the collapse of the national anti-imperialist bloc. In order to exploit the workers of these countries even more, the bourgeoisie had no choice but to reconcile with imperialism on the basis of new conditions.
     And today we are witnessing the realization of the single front of the bourgeoisie and imperialism against the working class, and we see that the working class is directing its struggle against the local and national bourgeoisie. As a result, we are entering a period of class warfare.
     The turmoil among the masses of workers and peasants does not escape the attention of the local bourgeoisie. The local bourgeoisie is trying to prevent the growing proletarian revolutionary movement by resorting to force. To this end, it uses every means at its disposal, arresting militant union cadres, putting them on trial, etc.
     We can say that this development process of the nationalist movement, which later turned into a proletarian movement, will be the same in all Near Eastern countries (Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, etc.) under foreign domination.
     The young proletariat of the Near East no longer distinguishes between the white bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of other races. The bourgeoisie's national revolutionary role in the Near East has come to an end (Turkey, Egypt, etc.). The war against imperialism now extends beyond national borders. The struggle must now be against all exploiters, regardless of race. Therefore, the working class must fight for power, in close unity with workers in the West, pursuing its own independent goals.

6. Even though Profintern branches are operating illegally under the regime of oppression and persecution created by the bourgeoisie in the Near East, they must not lose sight of each other; they must take advantage of all legal methods of work, organize scattered masses, etc., and at the same time create cells in all existing workers' organizations, unite workers' organizations, reorganize them on the basis of industries, and manage them with the aim of achieving specific results, such as drawing them into the ranks of the Profintern through illegal action committees.
     To this end, it is necessary, first and foremost, to fight for the enactment of social laws such as labor laws, the right to assembly, the right to unionize, and freedom of the press. This can only be achieved through general strikes and other mass mobilizations. Therefore, illegal activities must be carried out around concrete slogans that reflect the interests of the working class.

In addition, it is necessary to actively fight against the nationalist and chauvinist currents that the bourgeoisie stokes within the working class, as well as against racist prejudices.

The true nature of the enemies of the working class, such as the Kemalists (People's Party) in Turkey, the Zaghloulists in Egypt, the Zionists in Palestine, etc., who try to gain influence among the working class by various tricks, must be ruthlessly exposed.

Furthermore, the fight against all forms of influence of the bourgeois press among workers must be intensified through vigorous agitation.

In addition, the true nature of the agents of the Amsterdam International, who serve the interests of the bourgeoisie and spare no effort to undermine the workers' movement and divert it from its true revolutionary character, must be resolutely exposed.

The branches of Profintern in England and France must assist the young workers' movement in countries under the influence of British and French imperialism in every way. To this end, Profintern must maintain close relations with its branches in the Near East. Similarly, regular communication must be established between the separate branches located in different countries of the Near East. Literature in Turkish and Arabic should be published for the Near East.

Support for the national bourgeoisie against imperialism must be conditional on the interests of the Near Eastern proletariat. To this end, negotiations with the national bourgeoisie can be pursued.

Roland Ginzberg

The working class of Turkey, fragmented, divided and deceived by the bourgeoisie in Constantinople under the occupation of the Entente states, thought that the Kemalist victory and the arrival of his armies would ensure its happiness.

The working class was eagerly waiting for the Kemalist bourgeoisie – the “People's Party” – to fulfill its promises to improve the economic situation and to grant them political rights. They made big promises at the Izmir Congress and in the elections of 1923. For a while, this even dissipated the discontent that had arisen when the entry of Kemalist troops into Constantinople prevented the tramway workers from going on strike.

But since the Izmir Economic Congress, life has become more expensive, exploitation and unemployment more intense. The enterprises took advantage of the workers' disorganization and dreams to take back the gains they had made in 1922, however small. The “Union”, set up by the government to take over and divert the movement from its correct path, brought no change to the working class. On the contrary, it destroyed even the crude dreams of the most backward workers who made up the “Union”.

The workers, driven to struggle by their economic needs, found themselves suppressed by the armed power of the government and thus gained practically nothing for their situation. 33,000 workers took part in the strike. What did they achieve? Nothing!

What do they have?

They have been over-exploited for decades. Until now they work 9-10-12 hours and even 18 hours for miserable wages.

They have no political rights, no social insurance, no pension fund, nothing, nothing that is in their interests.

In this “democratic republic” there is no social legislation, no right to organize, no right to assembly, press, etc., and according to the existing laws the organizations are directly controlled and managed by the government.

However, the working class of Turkey has seen something after the Russian revolution, after five years of struggle against capital – through the work of the International Workers Union it has gained a certain experience and a certain level of class consciousness.

But the bourgeoisie promised it a lot. The facts are clear. Instead of keeping its promises, when the workers see that they have to struggle to get something, the bourgeoisie oppresses them. The recent strike of the tram workers shows us very clearly the mood of the mass of workers. For those who know the masses and their situation, the coming struggles are quite understandable and predictable.

I can say without fail that for a large part of the workers, the crude illusions about the promises made to them by the bourgeoisie have been shattered.

The majority of the workers have also grasped the tricks of Şakir and his cohorts.

However, the poorly organized, practiced, divided workers are spontaneously turning to revolt. This is the case with the tobacco workers, etc.

The situation of the workers, who had gained nothing from the previous strikes, has worsened because bread, which used to cost 16 kuruş, has risen to 21 kuruş, and all essentials have also become more expensive. Wages, which were already insufficient for subsistence, have not changed. Working hours are increasing. Because the tram, railway, etc. workers are scattered, divided, poorly organized, the capitalists exploit them even more.

Objectively, the strike of the tramway workers is the beginning of a new wave of strikes with a strong revolutionary character.

The mood of the masses in general is extremely favorable to the development and consolidation of our power and influence among the workers and to our taking over the leadership of the workers movement.

Some people think that the government will make some concessions, some small reforms in favor of the workers.

Objectively, the bourgeoisie can do nothing, because it needs more intensive exploitation in order to develop, because the press only screams about debt and the smallest strike of the workers against foreign capital makes them terribly angry (the repression during the recent strike of the tram workers and other incidents), which shows that the imperialist capitalists will agree to lend money on condition that the masses are kept in slavery.

So who is using this situation against the government? The communists or the reactionaries?

The obvious facts show that we communists have no initiative, no leadership, nothing in our activity to say that we are leading the workers in their struggle. We are not even on the tail of the workers.

The parties in favor of the restoration of the Constitutional Sultanate, the reaction, the newspaper Tevhid-i Efkar (Unity of Thought) and its cohorts are taking up the defense of the workers, secretly organizing their forces and using the frustration and dissatisfaction in the villages and the struggle of the working class against the present government. Thousands of incidents prove this. This is a great danger.

Why are we in this situation? Because the Eastern Section dragged the Communist Party of Turkey into the situation it is in today (I will continue to say this as long as it persists in its mistake).

What is the situation of the communists in Turkey?

On the one hand there is Aydınlık, a dozen intellectuals who belong to the bourgeois class and who, in terms of their social composition and living environment, have no capacity, no will, no idea to create a movement within the working class and to become its revolutionary, truly communist vanguard. The few poor students or workers in Aydınlık are also dragged along by the blinded and passive petty-bourgeois majority.

This is why Aydinlik cannot be, does not want to be and has no interest in being the real communist vanguard of the workers.

That is why for three years now, Aydinlık has not had the slightest influence, the slightest direction, the slightest initiative in the trade unions, in the struggles of the workers against the bourgeoisie.

The greatest danger is that they sabotage all activities and constitute an intermediary between the Communist International and the revolutionary workers movement and its representatives.

But Aydınlık publishes a Marxist newspaper, Marxist pamphlets, etc. Yes, but this does not correspond to the current needs of the workers, because the workers do not read them, moreover they do not understand them and do not recognize them. It does not correspond to today's needs and situation. This is pure Marxist verbiage.

The bourgeois government also prints Marx's Capital, wants to benefit from it, wants to learn from it, and Aydınlık serves the interests of the bourgeois government, not the interests of the working class. Because it is the bourgeois who read them.

But Aydınlık works illegally and publishes. True, just enough to satisfy a few spoiled students, and to satisfy the Eastern Section of the Comintern.

But Aydinlik sets up some small groups, gives Marxist lectures and so on. What I said above also applies to this.

The declaration of this party that it has 600 members (Bulletin of the V. Congress of the Comintern, June-July 1924), 300 more than last year, is not a truth but a lie, a deception, a betrayal. Aydınlık cannot be the basis for the foundation of a Communist Party. Aydınlık is only Aydınlık because, with its opportunist, collaborationist and thus pro-bourgeoisie attitude, it exists among and owes its existence to a few bourgeois intellectuals and bourgeois university students.

The day Aydınlık is banned for a few revolutionary articles, the Aydınlık group will be no more.

For the reasons mentioned above, Aydınlık cannot be the basis of a Communist Party, because the basis of a Communist Party must be proletarian.

Aydınlık cannot be used as a tool of the proletariat.

Opposing Aydınlık, another wing is forming to take over the leadership of the Communist Party (from abroad) in order to use the proletariat: these are the Cevatists, who have already come into conflict with Aydınlık. They are worse than Aydınlık, because they are more skillful, more politician-like and more foolish. II But dozens of communist workers, outraged by this policy, withdraw from the movement and isolate themselves. There are hundreds of sympathizing workers who are interested in communism in their struggle, who have fought and sacrificed and who have proven their loyalty to the Third International through their actions.

These workers know Aydınlık. They do not trust it. They are scattered in factories and trade unions, disconnected from each other and fighting separately. Sometimes they carry out propaganda and agitation in workers coffeehouses without any ties between them, because their militants, their leaderships have been repressed by the bourgeoisie and therefore the best part of them had to emigrate and those who remained in the country had to carry out illegal work.

These workers constitute the conscious stratum of the working class of Constantinople; they belong to the International Workers' Union, the left wing of the Hunchak party and their circles. Without them, who constitute the most conscious ruling element of the labor movement, without these real proletarians who have a vested interest in the struggle and who are union members and influential in the unions, the Communist Party cannot be founded and become the communist revolutionary vanguard of the working class.

Aydınlık knows this. Aydınlık also knows very well that the day there are conscious workers within its ranks, all the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opportunists will be shown the door.

That is why the so-called communist party called Aydınlık has done and is doing nothing to bring the disorganized, disconnected workers together.

One more word about the Cevatists.

Lenin characterized these elements very well in his 1914 article “Opportunism and the Unity of the Proletariat”.

Lenin says the following: «They are firmly entrenched in the legal movement and immersed in the mystery of bourgeois ideology, which hinders the development of the revolutionary workers movement».

What should be the basis of the Communist Party? The basis of the Communist Party must be proletarian and the proletariat must have the organizational and administrative hegemony of the party.

The party itself must have good leadership in order to guide the masses well. Therefore, our main organizational task is this: The formation, organization and training of a pure and truly ruling Communist Party to guide the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

«Good leadership absolutely requires a close connection with the proletarian masses. Without this link the Executive Committee can never guide the masses, at best it can only follow the masses» (Resolution on the Structure, Action and Methods of the Communist Parties, III Congress of the Comintern).

The leadership must not merely issue orders, but must set an example in daily work, in self-sacrificing action.

Such a leadership can only be achieved with proletarian elements.

Practically analyzing today's forces in Turkey, I can say the following:
     1. Give 2-3 experienced Russian comrades as leaders. Select 3-4 workers from among the best communists. There is our leadership.
     2. To regroup all the scattered workers' elements and groups. To reorganize them into groups in factories, unions, neighborhoods.
     3. With the initiative of the leadership, to bring them into daily work.
     4. To print a number of leaflets and pamphlets corresponding to the present situation and needs, and to distribute them among the masses of workers in order to explain their work to them and to expose all the maneuvers of the opportunists and agents of the bourgeoisie.
     5. To carry out preparatory work to link future strikes to a general strike.
     6. To break the sincere revolutionary elements away from Aydınlık.

Just imagine that the workers do not even have a single pamphlet to educate themselves. Leaflets are an absolute necessity for carrying out illegal work, when they correspond to their situation and clearly indicate the path to be followed.

Obviously, in the process of development, the Party must take into account the organizational and educational work of its members for its stability and strengthening.

The present situation, which, as a fact recognized by the bourgeoisie, has created an extreme wing in almost all trade unions, calls for one or two pamphlets and a series of leaflets to enlighten the workers and show them the way forward. In this way the most conscious layer of workers will grow into a vanguard and provide good militants. But it is absolutely necessary to train them, to give them some weapons, and this cannot be done by any other means than those mentioned above.

Obviously, in these few lines I have only mentioned the main thing, and even that very little. All this can be explained in detail and in great detail. I speak on the basis of the real and objective situation.

Immigrants who have worked actively in the country and therefore have influence over the workers and have their confidence, must contribute uninterruptedly to the development and strengthening of the Communist Party of Turkey. This is a decisive force that cannot be ignored.

In order to contribute to this, they must not be kept away from the work and emotionally persecuted by the Eastern Section, as is the case at present, but on the contrary they must be encouraged and guided, for many of them are the real leaders of the revolutionary struggle in Turkey, loyal to the III. International, they have been active, capable militants, and they still are.

The bourgeoisie knows their value, their abilities and punishes them mercilessly. This should not be a reason for the Eastern Section to isolate them from the Turkish movement. On the contrary, given the inadequacy of the current ruling forces, it would be extremely difficult to create and build the Communist Party of Turkey without their participation. Only they can bring a decisive solution at this juncture.

Only under the leadership of the Party Committee, the composition of which I have already mentioned above, with the above-mentioned means, with their active contribution in different ways, even if they are outside the country, can the communists have the initiative, the leadership in the revolutionary workers movement and thus prevent reaction from exploiting the workers' movement.

As the struggle between Stalin and Zinoviev begun to build up, Fyodor Raskolnikov, operating under the name Petrov, a Stalinist, became the formal head of the Eastern Section, replacing the Zinovievist Safarov as its leading spirit. The watchword of the Eastern Section from now on was Bolshevization, and it almost immediately got to work in organizing a new party congress in close collaboration with Şefik Hüsnü and his faction which had since polished its position on Kemalism to be more in line with that of the Eastern Section: they were now in favor of supporting the Kemalists but only if the Kemalists faced a serious danger.

The congress itself was held on February 1925 in Constantinople. Some of the most important militants of the left, such as Ginzberg, Navshirvanov, Süleyman Nuri and Torosyan were not among the participants as they were in exile either in Russia or the Caucasus and they had been excluded from party work. The non-Muslim communists were represented by a new ally of Şefik Hüsnü, Nikos Zachariadis, a young Greek member of the IWU.

Two distinct currents other than Aydınlık’s central line emerged among the delegates before congress: a pro-Kemalist right, lead by Ahmet Cevat Emre, and a left, lead by Salih Hacıoğlu and Nazım Hikmet and supported by certain veterans of the Baku branch such as Hamdi Şamilov and Mustafa Börklüce which was critical of the party flirting with the Kemalists who had by now compromised completely with imperialism and reaction. Aside from Hacıoğlu, the only one among the old leaders of the left present was Kazım of Van. According to Mustafa Börklüce’s account, Şefik Hüsnü faced very serious criticisms during the congress. Hacıoğlu was quoted saying:

     «Although we tried to unite our Popular Communist Party, the Worker Farmer Socialist Party of Turkey and other scattered groups and convene the 2nd Congress to elect the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey and renew the party, Şefik Hüsnü did not agree with us. Şefik Hüsnü was related to those who caused the closure of our Popular Communist Party and our imprisonments. It is these enlightened bourgeois who have been among us since 1921 and have been engaged in corruption. Had it not been for the proclamation and amnesty of the Republic in 1923 and the changes in the laws, we would not have escaped the convictions we suffered because of their betrayals and we would not be among you now. As if all these blows were not enough, it is now seen that Şefik Hüsnü is still trying to bring some of these intellectuals among us».

Faced with this criticism, Sadreddin Celal, one of Şefik Hüsnü’s lieutenants, conceded to Hacıoğlu’s criticism about Aydınlık’s previous lack of interest in organizing a party congress, blaming this on Şefik Hüsnü. Criticisms did not cease. In a similar fashion to Hacıoğlu, Kazım of Van was quoted saying: «Our cause is not the cause of intellectuals but the cause of workers. We also need intellectuals, but the main issue is to raise the consciousness of the working class. Let us devote all our strength to organizing the worker and winning the sympathy of the worker and establish a more sincere and solid unity between us».

In response, Şefik Hüsnü made a show of self-criticism. Moreover, thanks to the Eastern Section’s support, he was elected party General Secretary unopposed and his powers greatly extended. Neither the right nor the left currents managed to materialize during the congress. The resulting Central Committee was a compromise. Aydınlık center was the most numerous including Vedat Nedim Tör who was elected CC secretary, Sadreddin Celal, and Hasan Ali Ediz; Ahmet Cevat Emre and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir represented the right, and Salih Hacıoğlu, Hamdi Şamilov and Nazım Hikmet represented the left. The compromise was more than in the constitution of the new CC however. The Eastern Section’s line, imported by Şefik Hüsnü, was radically phrased enough to prevent inexperienced left leaning militants from engaging in opposition and still sufficiently supportive of Kemalism to keep most of the right behind the center even though Ahmet Cevat Emre would soon depart and end up a Kemalist member of parliament. In any case, it was, at least for the time being, a harmonious CC: The first test of the new CC came with the Sheikh Said Rebellion in Northern Kurdistan: a relatively small national reactionary movement which was brutally suppressed by the government. The party leadership enthusiastically supported the Kemalist crackdown.

Cut off from the work in Turkey, the leaders of the old left turned their attention to the young militants from Turkey attending the Communist Eastern Toilers University (KUTV). The establishment of the Left Opposition fraction, lead by Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri was declared to the Comintern in November 17, 1925. The appeal of the left, titled Statement on the Situation of the Communist Party of Turkey consisted of two sections: political and organizational. In the latter, the political line and conduct of the new CC, excluding Salih Hacıoğlu, was described as follows:

     «The ruling group of the Central Committee (Şefik Hüsnü, Sadrettin Celal, Ahmet Cevat Emre, Nazım Hikmet and their cohorts) represent nothing more than the legal editorial board of the recently closed legal newspaper 'Aydınlık'. This board embraces individual sectarian writers from the exploiting strata (pashas, generals, merchants, noble speculators, etc.) who in themselves have no connection with the proletarian masses, but with whom they have so far absolutely not severed their ties... This newspaper has never opened the debate on the immediate and ultimate aims of the class struggle. On the other hand, the newspaper has found it convenient to conduct the following debate: 'Is there a working class in Turkey?' – according to them the working class consists of the lumpen proletariat. This newspaper proposes to the workers of Turkey to increase the course of the accumulation of national capital, since, according to them, this accumulation corresponds not only to the interests of the bourgeoisie but also to those of the proletariat... In short, without carrying out any organizational work among the proletarian masses, workers, peasants, soldiers, youth, this Central Committee has moved the center of its activity to the narrow circle of radical university students... At best, it has pursued a policy in the direction of left-bourgeois radicalism without riding on the coattails of the workers movement».

Ginzberg additionally noted that the new leadership was treating the various nationalities in Turkey as if they were enemies of the people, failing to criticize the forced exodus of Greeks in Turkey. The criticisms of the new leadership’s conduct, in line with the Eastern Section, at directing the education of the students from Turkey at the Communist Eastern Toilers University:

     «The preparation of the advanced, communist workers in the KUTV for professional revolutionism is carried out by such measures that an involuntary idea has arisen that in the Central Committee there exists a nucleus of 'Zubatov' (Turkish Hilmism). Student workers are terrorized in every way. They are accused, humiliated, labeled anarchists, exiled... For every word of criticism there is no hesitation in deporting our comrades workers (with special instructions) to distant settlements in the USSR. There our comrade workers have no choice but to die of hunger and cold or commit suicide. That is why we have full right to point out that the noble hands of the present members of the Central Committee, the Struvists, the Hilmists, are reddened with the workers' blood of our dear comrades who have died or committed suicide.
     «What is the purpose of this crime? The aim of such leaders, whose hands are stained with the blood of the workers, is to sow in the hearts of the advanced Turkish proletarians a chauvinistic suspicion of the USSR, distrust of the Comintern, and thus to force them to return to Turkey without theoretical training or to turn them into submissive tools in the hands of this petty-bourgeois criminal clique.
     «Unfortunately, this aim has almost been achieved. The student workers who have not yet been exiled have been forced to leave the USSR because they could no longer endure the ridicule, oppression and humiliation of the spoiled children of the pashas and merchants.
     «These spoiled children, with the permission of the Eastern Section, directed and are directing 'communist education' and thus the revolutionary workers of Turkey. Revolutionary workers leave the KUTV for Turkey with a secret resentment against these leaders, with a chauvinist distrust of the Comintern and the USSR, and this leads to anarcho-syndicalist illusions, to a Makhnoist tendency».

The Left Opposition also exposed to the Comintern the organizational reality of the faction they had entrusted the leadership of the communist movement in Turkey:

     «The class essence of the activities of this Central Committee became clear and indisputable, especially after the government closed 'Aydınlık' (the dead played its role, it can go now). With the closure of this small newspaper, it became completely clear that the Central Committee has nothing but a newspaper on its back, that it has no party apparatus, no more or less solid organization».

The left explained that it obeyed discipline for as long as it could, but a point where the interests of the class in Turkey was compromised had been reached. This was why the time had come to form an opposition fraction:

     «The crises of the Communist Party of Turkey, arising from the contradictions between the growing activity of the awakening working class of Turkey and the petty-bourgeois passivity of the Party's hostile leadership, compel us, as active worker militants and founders of our party, to raise our most energetic and insurrectionist voice of protest in the interests of the proletariat of Turkey and of the Comintern against the bourgeois collaborationist policy of the Turkish party, which is destroying the party of the proletariat and deceiving the Comintern with artificially created bluffs. The interests of the Turkish proletariat demand an inevitable revision of the line of conduct of the Eastern Section of the Comintern towards the leadership of the Communist Party of Turkey. The errors of this line have been pointed out many times before and after the Fifth Congress.
     «We, the undersigned members of the Communist Party of Turkey, as disciplined militants, have not only not prevented the application of this line, but have not violated it until the mistakes and crimes of the Central Committee have accumulated in such quantity as to change the character of the party leadership.
     «To turn a blind eye to such a leadership, which for the future has objectively become an agent of the bourgeoisie in the Turkish labor movement, would be to commit murder against our class».

Thus on the offensive, the Left Opposition listed its demands:

     «Against this background, practically ignoring the present Central Committee of the Party, considering its activity in general as anti-Bolshevik, Struvian, Zubatovist, harmful to the interests of the Turkish working class and to the development of the Party, finding it totally impossible to cooperate with such members of the Central Committee, whose hands are stained with the blood of communist workers, we make the following demands:
     «To convene an Emergency Conference with the emigrants of our Party, with the founders of our Party, who were Comrade Suphi's companions, and with representatives of the communist workers of the KUTV... A Russian old Bolshevik comrade with theoretical preparation should be appointed by the Comintern to chair the Emergency Conference, but not one of the present employees of the Eastern Section of the Comintern, which has already demonstrated its conciliatory attitude by its continued support for the former Central Committee and its prosecution of us.
     «The Conference should prepare the Party Congress by examining the following problems: a) The preparation of the theoretical part of the program, b) Review of the minimum program, c) Preparation of the theses of the policy on the question of peasants and national minorities, d) The question of a single trade union front and winning it, e) The reorganization of the party on the model of factory and workshop cells, f) Improving the party statute and social composition to ensure workers' organizational and managerial hegemony in the party, g) The organization of the party's secret apparatus and the publication of a newspaper and magazine, h) Financial problem i) Review of the educational program of the Turkish communist workers in the KUTV. Appointment of a special commission to examine objectively the causes of the deaths and suicides of exiled comrades and the situation of the Turkish branch in the KUTV».

Notably, aside from continuing the organic approach in solving the problems of the party we have seen in previous documents, the left demonstrated that it was in favor of “a single trade union front” rather than a united front with other supposedly like-minded parties. This was not new for the left: the Constantinople left had always opposed any sort of collaboration with non-communists and actively worked to destroy the socialist and social democratic parties. The Anatolian left had gone as far as merging with left nationalists, and had to suffer the consequences, almost losing to party to their dubious leaders. The Baku left was born out of the rejection of the idea of a joint front between the communists and the Kemalists which lead to the deaths of Mustafa Suphi and the other comrades. Yet the reference is important as it gives a name to the left’s approach.

As for the reference on reorganizing the party on the model of factory cells, this should be considered together with Ginzberg’s 1924 text titled the Revolutionary Growth of the Workers Movement in Turkey where the organization of groups in factories, unions and neighborhoods are mentioned. We can thus conclude that the left’s approach was not against forming factory cells, but did not limit internal organization to such limited organs but also was for setting union and local groups.

Aside from Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri, the most important leaders of the left listed in the declaration as excluded from party work for opposition were Navshirvanov, Kazım of Van and Torosyan.

It is difficult, though not impossible, to trace the left in history after the declaration of the formation of the Left Opposition fraction. Kazım of Van was coopted into the Central Committee in 1926 and there is no evidence that he played an active role in the opposition after this point. The most important source of information on the left after 1925 is the article titled The Situation in Turkey published in Die Fahne Des Kommunismus (The Flag of Communism), the paper of the German left opposition organization Leninbund, on July 19, 1929:

     «The workers, artisans and the petty bourgeoisie of Asia Minor in Turkey supported the Kemalist movement's policy of resistance and opposition to foreign imperialism. The same elements of the population in Istanbul and European Turkey, separated from the movement in Anatolia by the occupation, formed various groups of syndicalist and socialist character. A Communist Party was formed in the South Caucasus, centered in Baku, by the Turkish intelligentsia, war veteran officers and soldiers. However, this party had almost no connection with the proletarian movement in Turkey and had no influence on it (1920-21). In 1921 the entire Central Committee left Baku for Turkey: they had overestimated the Kemalist movement, seeing it as a movement engaged in an anti-imperialist war of national liberation, closely linked to the proletarian current. However, they only made it as far as Trabzon. There they were locked in a motorboat and massacred and thrown into the sea.
     «Meanwhile, the workers and intellectuals who had worked in Germany during the war, who had gained knowledge and experience, had returned to Istanbul. They formed various small groups and in 1922 founded the Communist Party of Turkey, which was accepted for membership at the IV. Congress of the Comintern convened the following year. By 1925, 93 percent of the Communist Party of Turkey consisted of intellectuals and the labor aristocracy. The party did not work at all among the peasants, showed little activity among the workers, and completely neglected women... In 1926-27, communist members who had studied in Moscow returned to Turkey. They immediately started opposing the Central Committee of the Party. In 1927, they extended their opposition to the Central Committee of the Comintern. They formed a dissident Central Committee and then they were expelled all at once, specifically from the Party and the Comintern».

It is clear that the text above takes as the Communist Party of Turkey only the party founded by Mustafa Suphi in 1920 and Aydınlık which was recognized as the official branch in Constantinople in 1922. What may appear puzzling in the Leninbund’s account is the lack of mention of the old left in the party. This is understandable, however, given most of such militants were still in the Soviet Union at this point and well aware that the public exposure of their involvement in the international opposition would significantly limit their activities among the Turkish speaking emigres and students in Russia and the Caucasus. The communists returning to Turkey from studying in Moscow must be the KUTV students under the influence of the old left.

Given the criticisms above are in line with those of the left, up to the criticism of Mustafa Suphi, these were certainly not invented by young student militants in an environment where more experienced party leaders were already voicing them. Indeed, documents demonstrate that Şefik Hüsnü demanded from the Comintern the return of numerous KUTV students, including oppositions, in 1926-27. Moreover, a letter of Ali Cevdet, one of Aydınlık’s leaders, to Şefik Hüsnü verifies the continued existence of the left fraction in October 1927.

1927 was also the year İsmail Bilen and Hüsamettin Özdoğu, formerly of the Popular Communist Party, returned to the country, assumed the secretariat of the Adana and Smyrna committees, and launched a new opposition against the Central Committee. The arrest wave of Autumn 1927 shook the party to its core, as a significant portion of the central committee lead by Vedat Nedim Tör and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir defected to the Kemalists, betraying all the party secrets, and caused the arrests of many party members. Bilen and Özdoğu entered the central committee afterward, often clashing with the Aydınlık line represented by Hasan Ali Ediz while Şefik Hüsnü was under arrest. The arrest wave also caused Kazım of Van, who had had it with the betrayals of bourgeois party leaders, to leave the central committee and the party although he stayed in contact with “comrades with integrity”. Salih Hacıoğlu left for Russia following his release from prison and Şefik Hüsnü arranged his official expulsion from the party soon afterward.

In 1929, another opposition, lead by Nazım Hikmet, Hamdi Şamilov and Mustafa Börklüce formed within the party which was described by Hasan Ali Ediz as follows:

«Nazım and Şamil are formulating their goals as follows: 'We must fight with all our strength against the right deviation (Şefik Hüsnü and Hasan Ali Ediz group) and the left deviation (Laz İsmail and Hüsamettin Özdoğu group) within the party and play the role of Stalin throughout the Communist Party of Turkey.’»

Instead, however, the 1929 opposition quickly joined forces with the 1927 opposition. Kazım of Van worked with with the joint opposition despite not being a party member anymore. In 1930, Nazım Hikmet, Hüsamettin Özdoğu, Hamdi Şamilov and Mustafa Börklüce were informed by Hasan Ali Ediz that they had been expelled from the party by the decision of the Comintern. The leaders in question did not believe the news. In 1932, the joint opposition had organized unions as well as a congress which was so confident that it was the party that it even elected Şefik Hüsnü as general secretary in absence in order to procure party unity, although Nazım Hikmet was chosen as the de facto secretary. The congress was followed by a wave of arrests. In the meanwhile, the Aydınlık faction split into the official party lead by Hasan Ali Ediz and a youth group which claimed to represent Şefik Hüsnü better lead by Hikmet Kıvılcımlı. The former group organized a congress the same year and officially expelled Nazım Hikmet and the other leaders of the joint opposition although this was not publically announced until 1935 in the black list published in Hammer Sickle, the publication of the official Communist Party of Turkey. It was clear that the official Aydınlık leadership had lost control of the party despite all the support given to it by the Comintern.

Although the joint opposition still had hopes for a reconciliation with the Comintern, instead of supporting what Şefik Hüsnü called “the Trotskyist police opposition”, in early 1937, a few years before the dissolution of the Comintern itself, the Communist Party of Turkey was “decentralized”, that is liquidated. The joint opposition was ideologically heterogeneous as noted by Şefik Hüsnü himself in a 1934 report to the Comintern:

     «The Party was confronted with an internal difficulty which was extremely damaging to its action. The direct collaborators of the Left fraction found this opportune moment to unite in organized opposition to oppose the measures of reorganization and consolidation of discipline which the Central Committee of the Party was trying to introduce, and to attempt to seize the Party leadership... Having succeeded in capturing part of the technical apparatus of the Party and infiltrating the Central Committee and a few provincial organizations, these elements formed an unprincipled coalition with renegades of all stripes (opportunists, Mensheviks, Trotskyists, petty-bourgeois politicians or simple provocateurs) and attempted to present themselves to the masses as the real Party... The Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International, alerted by the Central Committee, gave it effective support; in a letter adopted and published by the political commission, this 'opposition' was exposed and openly condemned as a police provocation and all revolutionary workers of Turkey were called upon to fight against it and to follow the Central Committee, which has the full confidence of the Communist International».

Şefik Hüsnü admitting the existence of a separate left fraction outside the party which had collaborators within verifies that relations existed between the left and the heterogeneous joint opposition formed in 1929. Kazım of Van may have played a role in the left’s efforts to influence the joint opposition. In any case, the left failed in its attempt to bring the entire opposition to its Leninist doctrine. Although Nazım Hikmet, the formal leader of this opposition, told Hikmet Kıvılcımlı whom he knew from the Aydınlık youth that he avoided going to Russia because he thought he would be killed there; an assertion Kıvılcımlı found ridiculous, the joint opposition never openly challenged Stalinism when dealing with the Comintern. Moreover, Nazım Hikmet also wrote a pamphlet praising Stalin’s 1936 Russian Constitution for being very democratic before he was arrested for inciting the army and the navy for mutiny in 1938.

In 1946, some of the remnants of the joint opposition such as Hüsamettin Özdoğu, Mustafa Börklüce and Hamdi Şamilov, critical Stalinists, united to form the legal Socialist Party of Turkey, a left social democratic party under the leadership of a non-communist left-wing intellectual. Şefik Hüsnü responded by founding the rival legal Socialist Toilers and Peasants’ Party, indistinguishable in its social democratic program from the former party. The two parties briefly competed over influence in the union movement and negotiated a merger at the same time until they were both banned. Nazım Hikmet and İsmail Bilen, both in Russia, played an important role in the rebirth of the Communist Party of Turkey after Şefik Hüsnü’s death in 1959, setting up a Turkish language radio station which helped inspire the legal Workers Party of Turkey, a left socialist party founded by union leaders which managed to enter parliament in the early 60s. İsmail Bilen eventually became the official leader of the Communist Party of Turkey.

A Brezhnevite hardliner, he entrusted the party to Euro-communists shortly before he died. Salih Hacıoğlu who had been a supporter of the joint opposition through the years, worked as a veterinary in rural Azerbaijan and a Turkish translator and teacher in Moscow until his accidental arrest in 1949. He died in a Siberian labor camp in 1954. Kazım of Van, who lived until 1971, did not participate in the 1946 efforts to found a legal socialist party, nor did he join the Workers Party of Turkey or the official Communist Party. His 1961 memoirs, told to a member of the joint opposition who had later joined the Socialist Party of Turkey, reveal that he was critically sympathetic to the remnants of the joint opposition:

     «In Turkey, arrests followed arrests, and each time the subversion came from the bourgeoisie. In the arrests of 1925-26-27-28-29-31-32, the prosecutor explicitly asked not to punish them. When reading the names of Vedat Nedim, Baytar Ali Cevdet, Hasan Ali Ediz, the prosecutor asked for their protection.
     «At the 1932 congress, the treason came from the bourgeois side. It was the same with the legalization socialist parties of 1946.
     «After the liquidation of 1936-37, the deliberate conviction of Nazım Hikmet in 1938 did not open our eyes, so we fell into Şefik Hüsnü's trap in 1946. I think that unless we workers throw off the gullibility of falling for the gilded words of the pro-capitalist bourgeois intelligentsia, unless we clench our fists and stand guard at the factory gates, unless we put our heads to work and raise intellectual kids from among ourselves and build up our own political power, this war will always end up against us, and the bourgeoisie will eliminate us one by one before we can raise young vanguards».

Indeed, Kazım of Van was not the only one from the broad opposition who did not join the legal left socialist parties of the coming decades. Ruşen Zeki of the Leftmost and Revolutionary Faction of the Popular Communist Party who had lead the Anatolian organization of the broad opposition from Sivas also did not join either legal party.

We don’t know how long Süleyman Nuri continued his opposition activities but he lived in Azerbaijan until he was sent to Turkey in 1937 and was arrested and imprisoned until 1958, which probably saved his life considering the Great Purges were about to begin in Russia when he left. He returned to Russia afterward and lived a quiet life until passing away in 1966. Very little is known about the fate of Zinatullah Navshirvanov, except that he spent long years of his life in a mental hospital, which probably saved his life too. The fates of Roland Ginzberg, İsmail Hakkı and Bedros Torosyan are utterly unknown after 1925 but it is difficult to think they were not somehow involved in the left fraction as long as it existed.

Documents

The first of the three texts we present in the last section of this work is the political section of the left’s Declaration on the Situation of the Communist Party of Turkey, from 1925.

The second is the Letter on 1929 of the Turkish comrades to the Leninbund. Interesting in many respects, this text is also important for offering a possible explanation to why there are no further records of the left after this date as the authors declare that the left is going into full illegality.

The last is the 1929 Introduction to the Turkish translation of Trotsky’s “The Real Situation in Russia” which is notable for praising Trotsky for being a chief of communism without identifying as Trotskyist.

The conclusion of the national liberation struggle under the management of the Turkish bourgeoisie against European imperialism created all the political-economic preconditions for the acceleration of the development of local capitalism, together with the increased presence of social contradictions. The national bourgeoisie that dominated the struggle against imperialism obtained Turkish independence only with the active assistance of the working class and all sections of the peasantry. Translated into the language of social questions, this independence means the independence of the bourgeoisie from the pro-Entente finance capital (and that only to a degree) in exploiting the masses and having monopoly in owning all the surplus value created by the masses. Yet more and more, the Turkish industrial and trade bourgeoisie, for its own purposed and in order to stay in power, did not stay in the way of the revolutionary means against Entente imperialism and internal feudal reaction (the abolition of the monarchy, the expulsion of the Caliph and the struggle against him and counter-revolutionary rebellions etc.); in this process, this bourgeoisie secured the assistance of workers and peasants.

To the extent that the local bourgeoisie did not bring the bourgeois democratic revolution to its limits in giving the workers and peasants certain democratic freedoms, in realizing the workers and peasants minimum economic demands (eight hour working day, minimal wage, the freedom of strikes, press and assembly, the lowering of the taxes, land reform etc.); quite the contrary, to the extent that it took the path of despotism and reaction (strike committees, unions and the Party being dispersed, papers being shut down etc.), the proletariat and poor peasants of Turkey and their Communist Party had to make the observation that the bourgeoisie has already become unable to be at the head of the bourgeois democratic revolution in the country.

The sleeping proletariat of Turkey, connected to the wide sections of the peasants, will inevitably come to dominate this democratic revolution.

These phenomena which are the distinguishing features of the conclusion of the first stage of the liberation struggle from imperialism are worthy of attention.

The second stage of this struggle is born from the start of the proletarian domination of the democratic revolution. Class contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as well as toiling peasantry is on the rise to the extent that the development of native capital accelerates due to the increase in exploitation rates and the on the flow of foreign capital. The Turkish bourgeoisie has only recently reached a new agreement with the representatives of foreign capital that is in line with the new relationship between forces created by the conclusion of the liberation struggle.

Yet, the rise of the native bourgeoisie also means the rise of the proletariat of Turkey. The development of the class consciousness of the proletariat of Turkey has been progressing according to the general flow of the development of capitalist relations in the country: the rise in capitalist relations creates the ever growing staff of the industrial proletariat.

Finally, just as Turkish capitalism lives its first youth, the Turkish proletariat, by demonstrating an increased activity in the struggle in its own interests, is living the dawn of the acceptance of its class interests (Between 1920-23 10% of all the workers went on strike. From 23 to 25, 50,000 workers were on strike, making up 25-30% of the workers). In short, this period can be defined as an industrial increase accompanied by the rise of workers movements.

At the same time, the Turkish bourgeoisie is getting increasingly worried about such widening of the proletarian movement. Repression is not enough for the bourgeoisie. For this reason, the Turkish bourgeoisie, who has a rich tradition of police socialism (Hilmism, Kemal Pasha’s communist party of 1921 etc.) in its past, is now taking action to prevent the spontaneous workers movements from turning into the conscious struggle of the revolutionary proletarian class.

The Turkish bourgeoisie is taking action to prevent the advanced workers from being receiving revolutionary Marxist ideas and the communist vanguard from getting in contact with wide masses of workers. And thus the bourgeoisie cooperates with bourgeois or semi bourgeois elements inside the communist vanguard as a fifth column, turning them into a sectarian group made up of intellectual authors. Indeed, in this field, the historical experience of the Russian bourgeoisie (legal marxism such as that of Struve, Bulgakof and Berdiayef) and the British bourgeoisie (Fabianism) seems useful enough for the class position of the Turkish bourgeoisie in power.

Letter of the Turkish Opposition to Leninbund
Die Fahne Des Kommunismus, September 20, 1929

Esteemed Comrades!

We the Turkish opposition comrades send you our most intimate greetings and assure you that we will serve our common ideal loyally and persistently. We believe we will continue our tremendous struggle and we will do all that can be done or that doesn’t appear possible to reach our goal of proletarian world revolution.

Esteemed comrades! The empty beliefs of our dark and heavy past will not accompany our steps, quite the contrary, with our opened eyes and burning hearts, with the fire of the coming world revolution and our unshakable faith that every minute brings us closer to our goal, we will quickly move through this rocky road.

Esteemed teachers! Our situation, the situation of the Turkish proletariat, is worse than how it’s portrayed in your article. The Turkish proletariat who had added its forces to the war of liberation from feudalism was used by the Kemalists for the formation of a bourgeois republic, and now this proletariat is oppressed and crucified with heavy chains by the Kemalist state which more and more secures its position. Those who wanted to save the proletariat from this slavery and fought for this purpose were partially exiled from he country or thrown into dungeons; the remaining majority, like the Communist Party, got tired of the hardships of the struggle, and left the proletariat alone in the face of the claws of the bourgeoisie. They have lost the feeling of proletarian combat which in reality they never felt deeply, and started looking for wholes to hide in like rats.

The bourgeoisie sees the battlefield empty, feels it’s the unquestioned master of the country, and dances out of joy before the unfortunate proletariat. The bourgeoisie doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know that a more powerful and violent blow will come from the outside that will save the chained proletariat, however the proletariat, because of this aid, will give the bourgeoisie the answer it deserves.

Esteemed leaders of the great combat! This blow that will land on the bourgeoisie’s back is your leadership, your direction, your material and moral help! Receiving such a weapon from you, possessing such a tool of combat, we, the Turkish opposition, consider it our duty to make utmost use of this tool in order to save the proletariat and get it to stand on their feet, heal its wounds, and turn this desperate proletariat into an iron part of the world proletariat. It is our duty! And in this fight, we will progress quickly obeying your directives, not giving up faced with any obstacle, our eyes looking forward, our heads up, towards the goal. The dangers you mention in your letter will follow us like our shadows; however we will not cower before these dangers, we don’t pay importance to them; we pose a greater threat to the bourgeoisie that it poses us.

Now, we agree with you that we must be very careful, start our work cunningly and outwit the devil; especially in this period when we want to unite the previous oppositions around a new, young, healthy Leninist opposition, our motto is full and certain secrecy and tight togetherness. We know that the smallest error may cause us such great harm that we can’t avoid and as a result our movement would be paralyzed even if for a short while. This would be very bad and dangerous for us who have to work quickly, alive and successfully in an underdeveloped country. We want to note once again that every great danger hides the greatest victory and the most beautiful prize, and that we will face all these dangers willingly.

Ending our words, we express our happiness due to you accepting us as a part of your opposition ranks, we send our fiery communist greetings and we wish that you don’t forget us.

Turkish Opposition

This translation of Trotsky's “The Real Situation in Russia” is completely different from the numerous works about the Soviets published today. It is not a work written by the enemies of the Soviet Union, nor is it a work written with the skill of its publicists. As is well known, many books about Soviet Russia have been written in various languages by some men in Europe and America. This translated work – as we have said – is not like any of them. The author's situation is enough to prove this.

Who does not know Trotsky, “Comrade” Leon Trotsky, who, together with Lenin, laid the foundation of Soviet Russia and formed the Red Army! Trotsky, who, after Lenin, considered himself the greatest leader of Communism and Bolshevism, and sometimes even accepted Lenin's leadership with some reservations, has now been expelled from the party by Stalin, who took over after Lenin, and has now been expelled outside the Soviet borders, like a harmful counter-revolutionary.

Despite the actions of leaders like Zinoviev and Radek, who together with him had opposed Stalin's regime, to seek refuge again in the party bureau, that is to say in Stalin, Trotsky sees himself as the true leader of Communism and provides spiritual guidance to his followers.

Through letters, articles and sometimes books written in exile in the region named after Verne, he enlightened his followers about the state of civilization and gave them instructions on what to do. This volume, with a similar function, was once secretly printed and distributed in Russia. Later, when the Trotskyists were persecuted, this book was also confiscated, but a copy somehow found its way to Germany, where it was translated into German and published by Avalun – Verlag Hellerau.

In deciding to publish parts of this important book, we did not take into account either the defense of Trotsky's theses or whether his arguments with Stalin's supporters are justified. Our aim was undoubtedly to inform the Eastern political assemblies and the general public, especially Turkish-speaking readers, of the knowledge of the real situation in Russia today by a person who, by virtue of his position, would obviously know more about the situation in Russia than anyone else. In order not to damage the real value of this information, we neither comment on nor criticize the passages we have translated.

Let the esteemed readers draw their own conclusions, taking into account that Leovn Trotsky (Bronstein), yesterday the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, the Soviet Commissars of Defense and Navy, Lenin's friend and the leader of World Communism, today the indomitable leader of the adherents of “Orthodox Communism”, who, although he has incurred wrath and been expelled, persistently defends the idealistic principles of the Communist revolution!

The most important question for the left tradition in Turkey was the national question. Despite differences in nuances between the Constantinople, Anatolian and Baku lefts, throughout the years their formulation of this issue in Turkey, the attitude to be taken on the Kemalists and the national movement in general, was an exemplary application of the Theses on the National and Colonial Question from the II. Congress of the Communist International, in line with Lenin who openly said “The men at the top in Turkey are Cadets, Octobrists, Nationalists, who are prepared to sell us to the Allies” in late 1920, though often despite the directives of the International itself.

In the years the Comintern was trying to convince Western European parties to form united fronts and even workers governments with the social democrats, the left in Turkey was bent on destroying social democratic and socialist parties and winning over their bases to the red unions. As such, the left in Turkey from the start practiced the tactic of united trade union front from below, referred to as the single trade union front.

Always opposed to anarchism, the left never drifted into the errors of the European “council communists”. The left in Turkey, like the left in Italy, was always Leninist.

On organizational matters, the left initially conducted a patient struggle within the scope of party discipline yet eventually had to engage in factional struggle when it was clear that the interests of the party and the proletariat in Turkey were at stake. When the time came to finally settle accounts with the right, the left’s solution was organic rather than democratic, relying on the selection of the best comrades rather than elections and congressional majorities.

The left had many foes in the heterogeneous movement of the time, but the most important one was undoubtedly Aydınlık. Bourgeois in its politics as well as class composition, Aydınlık always acted as a bourgeois class bloc within the movement, sabotaging union work and continuously slandering the leaders of the left.

Its actions caused a reaction of workers among the left’s red union base which the left formulated as proletarian hegemony within the party. But the leaders of the left were not workerists in that they never claimed one had to be a worker to be a communist or anyone from a non-proletarian background should be expelled from the party, nor did they deny that intellectuals had a role to play in party work. Their criteria was political, not sociological. What they opposed was a bourgeois class bloc dominating the party leadership and determining party positions. Hence, given the context, the formulation was correct. Of course today, we can only interpret it as the complete hegemony of the historical program of the proletariat within the party, regardless of the class background of the militant. The most important difference between the left in Turkey and the left in Italy was that the former, trapped between Turkey and Russia, did not manage to survive as a current. As for the latter, it not only survived and kept alive the principles the two traditions shared but drew the correct lessons from the catastrophic experiences the whole movement went through in the following decades and eventually went on to reestablish the International Communist Party in 1952. It was probably due to the obscurity of the Italian and Turkish languages that the two lefts could not establish a connection while the left in Turkey still existed.

Now, however, we are convinced that the long dead militants of the left in Turkey are with our party, our comrades in time, as their strangled and forgotten words echo in the distance. They are not alone. Similar lefts existed in the communist parties of various parts of the world such as Iran, the Caucasus and Central Asia before the emergence of Trotsky’s opposition in Russia that are waiting to be studied. As the International Communist Party, our duty is to establish the connections denied to us by the circumstances of the time when left traditions physically existed, by studying their documents and histories and drawing the lessons of their experiences.

Only this way can we accomplish the resurrection of genuine communism in vast lands where it has been buried and forgotten. In this sense, this work on the internationalist left in Turkey, which we conclude for now for lack of further sources, is not merely a study of the past but a presentation of a tradition which proudly belongs among the best communist traditions history has brought forth and to all of whom the future belongs.

1. Sabur Sami, an active member who owed his fortune to the patronage of the Union and Progress Party during the war and who was responsible for the party’s commercial businesses, arranged the Alemdar (Flagbearer) newspaper with bribery, in other words the secret organization of the Union and Progress Party financially aided this newspaper through this person. At the same the time, this person, along with his brothers Nurullah Sami and Raşit Sami, secretly worked for the Anatolian movement. It was Nurullah Sami who brought out the Yeni Gün (New Day) newpasper of left Unionists during the most important Turkish-Greek clashes (July-September 1921).

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2. These large farm owners had quite a great influence in the province of Aydın, the township of Eskişehir and South West Anatolia. They joined the movement eagerly in the township of Karahisar, in Menteşe and Eskişehir. Hacı Ali Bey, one of the landlords of the Menteşe region who owned 70 villages, worked the peasants of these villages according to the methods of large agriculture and was involve in the large grain trade; it was this large landlord who funded most of the amount of money necessary for the development of the national movement. Köprülü, Halil Agha, Yeşil Agha, Zade Halil ve Hacı Hafız Ömer were among the most active members of the CC.

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3. The representative of the Social Democratic Party, who went to Ankara to participate in the Sivas Congress, was handed a telegraph by Ali Fuat Pasha informing him that he wasn’t allowed in the congress, consequently he had to return to Eskişehir. Thus the workers of Eskişehir felt what national unity results in.

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4. Necati Bey, Responsible Secretary of the Union and Progress Party who had the building used for the Grand National Assembly OF Turkey built as the Ankara Club of the Union and Progress Party was working in the Bursa, Aydın and Saruhan provincial committees. Today he is a part of the National Assembly as a deputy of Saruhan.

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5. The elections were held according to the electoral law passed by Mithat Pasha in 1878, and certain changes were made with in order to hold the elections earlier. This law envisaged a two stage election and required owning a certain amount property and paying a certain sum of money to be an elector. This bourgeois law was based on ownership of capital. These conditions of the law were taken into account, the provisions against intervention in the elections were forgotten.

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6. Rahmi Bey, who was governor of Izmir during the war, and who made millions in partnership with Yunus Nadi from grape and tobacco trades as well as his role as a mediator due to his military rank, later taking over the native traders after he got his hands on the railroads, was a prominent “brother” of the Union and Progress Party who propagated friendship with Britian and played a role in the signing of the Mondros Armistace. He escaped to London from the prison of Malta.

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7. This circular, dated October 16 1920 and numbered 1640 was distributed with the signature of Adnan Bey, Minister of Interior.

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8. The Greek army, which wanted to use the war between the regular army and the national forces to its advantage, marched towards Eskişehir from Bursa (January-February 1921) This charge resulted in the victory of the regular army on the Inonu front near Eskişehir. Known as the First Inonu Victory today, this was the first victory of the regular army against foreign armies. As a result of this victory, the situation of the government and the military group strengthened. The calculations of the bourgeoisie, which previously aimed special austerity zones for agriculture, trade and industry turned out to be wrong: the economic and commercial crisis started. The yoke of the soldiers could be harmful for the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, while celebrating the military group for its victory, it was necessary to push it to reconcile with Europe. It was this bourgeoisie who pushed the government to reconcile with Europe.

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9. Yunus Nadi was not only the publisher and owner of the liberal-bourgeois Yeni Gün newspaper, but was also a member of the CC of the government’s “communist party”. He belonged to the same group as Memhduh Şevket, the National Assembly’s ambassador to Baku.

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10. At the smallest strike of the Bomonti factory workers in Istanbul, 9 wounded, 6 of them women. These strikers disarmed a group of 50 gendarme.

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