The poet of Turkish communism

Abstract

In his doctoral dissertation published by I. B. Tauris in 1997 as: A Clash of Empires; Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism, 1918–1923, Gökay, managing a vast amount of primary and secondary sources, presented an elegant international history thesis on the shaping of modern Turkey. One is tempted to say that a sociological equivalent of Gökay’s earlier work can be found in the work by Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, first published in 1964 by McGill University Press. Whereas Berkes, a sociologist of Cypriot origin, is focusing on the social, economic and cultural/religious processes of the transformation of the late Ottoman Empire and early modern Turkey in an international and interactive context, Gökay masterfully analyses the geo-political dynamics of the First World War in relation to the Eastern Question. The argument is that the settlements produced after the Kemalist victory in Anatolia over imperial Britain’s proxy, Greece, represented not merely an arrangement between Greece and Turkey, but rather a much broader geo-political understanding over the fate of the Middle East and Central Asia. In effect, the Clash of Empires established that modern Turkey arose out of a decades-long fierce geo-political struggle between Britain and Russia in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia and that this is the locus in which the Eastern Question and the ‘Great Game’ cross each other. Moreover, it argued that early Soviet policy towards early modern Turkey had, in the main, followed the general foreign policy principles of the Russian Empire towards the Eastern Mediterranean, the Straits and the Caucasus/Central Asia. Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey, as the author acknowledges in the Introduction, is a sequel of this earlier work, although in between there has been a significant corpus of intellectual production, ranging from edited volumes on the issue of Caspian oil, to monographs on Eastern Europe and US neo-imperial foreign policy. Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey looks at the ways in which the USSR attempted to manipulate Turkish elites (to a lesser extent) and Turkish communism (to a greater extent) for geo-political purposes and in order