‘Socialism in One Country’ Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary ‘Anti-Imperialism’: The Case of Turkey, 1917–1925

Abstract

A widely held view, on the Trotsky-influenced left and more broadly, dates the subordination of international communist parties to Soviet foreign policy needs from 1924 and the triumph of Stalin's doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. This article challenges that view, using the case of Turkey. In January 1921, fifteen leading members of the newly founded Turkish Communist Party were murdered in the Black Sea in mysterious circumstances, never fully clarified, but strongly implicating the newly founded Kemalist nationalist regime in Ankara, which was receiving arms and money from the Soviet Union for its war of national liberation after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. In March 1921, only two months after this massacre of leading Turkish CP cadre, the Soviet government signed a commercial and friendship treaty with the Turkish government, more or less simultaneously with the Anglo-Russian trade agreement, and moreover made no public statements about the murders for several more months. This liquidation of the central committee of the Turkish CP was the most egregious act of repression against Turkish communists during the Kemalist war of national liberation against Greece and the Western Allies (1921–1922) and thereafter, a repression that ebbed and flowed with Kemalist rapprochements with and estrangements from the Soviet government over the next several years. This article argues that Soviet national interests were already trumping ‘proletarian internationalism’ in the era of Lenin and Trotsky.