The Impact of the Russian Revolution 1917 on the Turkish Left through the Experiences of Three Leading Communists

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jglobfaul.4.2.0150
• Pages: 150-162
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• Date: 01 February 2018
• Author: Mustafa Yasacan

150

Journal of Global Faultlines, 2018

Vol. 4, No. 2, 150–162.

The Impact of the Russian Revolution 1917 on the Turkish

Left through the Experiences of Three Leading Communists

Mustafa Yasacan

 Mustafa Yasacan is a PhD student in Keele, working for a PhD thesis on “Turkish communists, Turkish

state and Soviet foreign policy during the early Cold War era.”

(Communist Party of Turkey founder Mustafa Suphi (right) met a mysterious fate when he tried to take on the Ankara govern-

ment. Wikimedia Commons Bulent Gökay, Keele University)

This article is about three significant members of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP).

Each was from a different section of the Ottoman society, with different background, educa-

tion and training, but each was influenced by similar Turkish nationalist ideology and mili-

tary/bureaucratic culture of the late Ottoman and early Republican period. They were all

involved in the same struggle while their society was in turmoil and the Ottoman Empire was

on the edge of collapsing.

The waves of insurrection in the old world were a sign of the class war between the

rotten ruling classes and newly born progressive classes which had been occurring since

1789.1 The foundations of the Ottoman Empire were seriously shaken during a period of

almost a hundred-year-long continuous decline, and faced with the challenges of new ideas

as parliamentarism, nationalism and restriction of the obsolete power of the sultan2 led to

the total collapse of the empire after the defeat at the end of the First World War.

Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, new revolutionary waves were

shaking the world; the first was the 1905 Russian Revolution, followed by the significant

challenges for the rulers of the Ottoman Empire in 1908. The October Revolution in Russia

in 1917 sparked the new ideas all over the world including the Ottoman lands. The Turkish

communist movement emerged during these troubled days.3

Many books and articles concerning this period in Turkish history have been pub-

lished, explaining and interpreting the October revolution and its impact on local condi-

tions and incidents such as the murder of the Turkish Communist Party leader Mustafa

Subhi and his comrades.4 In English not much has been written5; George Harris, one of the

leading researchers in the 1960s, produced a book on the communist movement in Turkey.