Revision of Ataturk’s Legacy in Modern Turkish Historical Politics

Abstract

The author analyzes the features and directions of development of revisionism in the modern memorial culture and historical policy of Turkey. It is assumed that the historical memory in its revisionist version reflects the main trends in the transformation of collective ideas about the past, including the images of the Ottoman Empire and Atatürk’s policies. The article highlights the main problems that form the information agenda of modern Turkish historical revisionism as a form of memory politics. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main directions of development of historical revisionism in the modern memorial culture of Turkish society. The author uses the methods proposed in the framework of the memorial turn in modern interdisciplinary historiography, which make it possible to identify and systematize the features of the transformation of the collective historical memory of Turkish society through the prism of historical revisionism. The article is one of the few attempts to interpret the historical politics of memory in modern Turkish society in contexts of the development of revisionism, focused on the revision of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the modernization policy of Atatürk. The article analyzes the main vectors and trajectories of the use of historical revisionism as one of the components of modern Turkish memorial culture. It is assumed that the policy of the ruling elites stimulates the processes of moderate re-Islamization of Turkish society, which inspires a revision of the collective ideas about the Empire and a revision of the interpretations of authoritarian modernization, proposed earlier in the political tradition of Kemalism. Modern ruling elites stimulate political and ideological contradictions between Turkish experts and intellectuals concerning collective historical and political experience of the Empire and the Republic, which is reflected in memorial cultures that have different ideological foundations. It is shown that modern historical politics actualizes the situation of parallel co-development of various memorial cultures based on mutually exclusive images of the Empire and the Republic. The author believes that the political elites of Turkey are forced to maneuver between the Kemalist and revisionist versions of historical memory. It is shown that revisionists are forced to take into account the norms of the Kemalist memorial canon, which does not allow them to radically revise the foundations of memorial culture, dismantling the cult of Ataturk and turning imperial images based on the neo-Ottoman ideology into the basis of the dominant memorial culture.