Sasha
3rd June 2013, 14:27
while researching the current events in Turkey is stumbled uppon this intrestring read, i thought i share:
Socialism in One Country Before Stalin, and the
Origins of Reactionary Anti-Imperialism:
The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925
Loren Goldner
All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present timeUntil the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the Westa potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational workand at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.
Leon Trotsky
Secret memo to Lenin,
Zinoviev et al. June 1920[1] (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/turkey.html#_ftn1)
Prefatory Note: The following article had its origin in a Letter to the Editor, ca. 2001, to a Trotskyist group, inquiring about a commercial treaty signed by the Soviet Union with Kemalist Turkey in March 1921, a mere two months after 15 leading Turkish Communists were murdered just off the Turkish coast. Those who ordered and those who committed these murders were never identified and are the basis for numerous theories, but everything points to some person or persons in the Kemalist movement, up to the highest levels. What interested me was of course not a murder mystery but the fact that the Soviet Union entered into an alliance with a government that was patently killing and jailing pro-Soviet communist militants, and said and did little or nothing about it. That dynamic was of course familiar to anyone acquainted with post-1945 world history, as in the case of Nassers Egypt or other progressive Third World regimes, but here was the same pattern only four years after the Russian Revolution, i.e. in a period when almost everyone, myself included, thought that the dominance of Soviet national interests over proletarian internationalism really emerged into full view only with the triumph of Stalin and socialism in one country in 1924.
Some years later I began an e-mail correspondence with a Turkish comrade, during which I inquired about the 1921 episode and to what extent it still figured in the historical self-awareness of the Turkish left. In due course I received a remarkable pamphlet answering my initial question, and more. For it emerged that the January 1921 murders and March 1921 treaty were merely one, very dramatic episode in a much longer and more complex process of ebbs and flows of the Soviet-Turkish relationship, and the intimately linked fate of Turkish communists during those shifts.
Not long after I first read this pamphlet, the group to which my Turkish correspondent belonged joined the International Communist Current. Not my crowd, of course, but during a two-week stay in Turkey in fall 2009 these same individuals received me with the fullest comradely hospitality and for many hours, and on several occasions, we discussed our agreements and differences.
On my last day in Istanbul, the chance discovery of a small bookstore on an obscure side street led me to the second source without which this article could not have been written: Paul Dumonts Du socialisme ottoman a linternationalisme anatolien (1997), 500 pages of detailed history of Turkish communism of a quality (generally, political judgements aside) I would like to have for the major Western countries with which I am more familiar. To pre-empt the embarrassment of having quoted this book perhaps 70 times in the 140-odd footnotes, I can only say that the contents of a book, in French, from an Istanbul publisher, with such material about a communist movement in a country most people (myself included) know little or nothing about, deserve to be better known.
I begin with this personal account to ask the readers forbearance for the perhaps excessive detail with which I have tried to nail down this political history. I felt at times like the Borges character who discovers the G-H volume of the encyclopedia of a disappeared civilization in a used bookstore and spends the rest of his life trying to find the other volumes. I knew next to nothing about Turkish history before this encounter and I still know very little. But I went to the lengths I did because if the tale these Turkish comrades have to tell is true, it represents a theoretical bombshell for the international revolutionary movement, such as it is, today.
In addition to the forty-odd pages of text, there are fourteen pages of footnotes and a thirteen-page Core Chronology. I composed the latter, initially for my own benefit, to cut through the blur of unfamiliar names and places and events compressed into a relatively short time span; I append it for the reader who may experience the same confusion reading the text that I did in writing it.
complete article: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html
Socialism in One Country Before Stalin, and the
Origins of Reactionary Anti-Imperialism:
The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925
Loren Goldner
All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present timeUntil the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the Westa potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational workand at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.
Leon Trotsky
Secret memo to Lenin,
Zinoviev et al. June 1920[1] (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/turkey.html#_ftn1)
Prefatory Note: The following article had its origin in a Letter to the Editor, ca. 2001, to a Trotskyist group, inquiring about a commercial treaty signed by the Soviet Union with Kemalist Turkey in March 1921, a mere two months after 15 leading Turkish Communists were murdered just off the Turkish coast. Those who ordered and those who committed these murders were never identified and are the basis for numerous theories, but everything points to some person or persons in the Kemalist movement, up to the highest levels. What interested me was of course not a murder mystery but the fact that the Soviet Union entered into an alliance with a government that was patently killing and jailing pro-Soviet communist militants, and said and did little or nothing about it. That dynamic was of course familiar to anyone acquainted with post-1945 world history, as in the case of Nassers Egypt or other progressive Third World regimes, but here was the same pattern only four years after the Russian Revolution, i.e. in a period when almost everyone, myself included, thought that the dominance of Soviet national interests over proletarian internationalism really emerged into full view only with the triumph of Stalin and socialism in one country in 1924.
Some years later I began an e-mail correspondence with a Turkish comrade, during which I inquired about the 1921 episode and to what extent it still figured in the historical self-awareness of the Turkish left. In due course I received a remarkable pamphlet answering my initial question, and more. For it emerged that the January 1921 murders and March 1921 treaty were merely one, very dramatic episode in a much longer and more complex process of ebbs and flows of the Soviet-Turkish relationship, and the intimately linked fate of Turkish communists during those shifts.
Not long after I first read this pamphlet, the group to which my Turkish correspondent belonged joined the International Communist Current. Not my crowd, of course, but during a two-week stay in Turkey in fall 2009 these same individuals received me with the fullest comradely hospitality and for many hours, and on several occasions, we discussed our agreements and differences.
On my last day in Istanbul, the chance discovery of a small bookstore on an obscure side street led me to the second source without which this article could not have been written: Paul Dumonts Du socialisme ottoman a linternationalisme anatolien (1997), 500 pages of detailed history of Turkish communism of a quality (generally, political judgements aside) I would like to have for the major Western countries with which I am more familiar. To pre-empt the embarrassment of having quoted this book perhaps 70 times in the 140-odd footnotes, I can only say that the contents of a book, in French, from an Istanbul publisher, with such material about a communist movement in a country most people (myself included) know little or nothing about, deserve to be better known.
I begin with this personal account to ask the readers forbearance for the perhaps excessive detail with which I have tried to nail down this political history. I felt at times like the Borges character who discovers the G-H volume of the encyclopedia of a disappeared civilization in a used bookstore and spends the rest of his life trying to find the other volumes. I knew next to nothing about Turkish history before this encounter and I still know very little. But I went to the lengths I did because if the tale these Turkish comrades have to tell is true, it represents a theoretical bombshell for the international revolutionary movement, such as it is, today.
In addition to the forty-odd pages of text, there are fourteen pages of footnotes and a thirteen-page Core Chronology. I composed the latter, initially for my own benefit, to cut through the blur of unfamiliar names and places and events compressed into a relatively short time span; I append it for the reader who may experience the same confusion reading the text that I did in writing it.
complete article: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html