Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey, 1920-1991: Soviet Foreign Policy, Turkey, and Communism by Bülent Gökay (review)

Abstract

566 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 the strongestcapitalist power precisely because theywere Marxist ideologues. In other words, collaboration was to them one among many means of advanc ing their ideological project, based on theMarxist-Leninist supposition that capitalist states remained enemies to be divided and exploited. This supposi tion alone, as Neilson persuasively argues, meant that even ifbasic agreement on short-term methodology had, perchance, been achieved, collaboration would stillhave entailed significant dangers for the British. Neilson culls these key arguments from impressively detailed investigations of Foreign Office, CID, Treasury and War Office memoranda. He looks at memoranda not just on strictlyAnglo-Soviet affairs but on British stra tegic foreign policy as a whole. One of the strongest aspects of his study is this very comprehensiveness, for it allows Neilson to throw light on his 'core-sample' by refracting it through the lenses also of theAnglo-Japanese, Anglo-German and Anglo-American relationships. In Neilson's succinct portrayals of each of the key actors, the importance of personality comes through clearly, as well. The wide-ranging approach isuseful also indemoting reductionist portrayals ofAnglophone anti-Communism as having somehow ipso facto prevented collaboration between Britain and the Soviet Union. As Neilson shows, even a man such as Sir Samuel Hoare ? a fervent anti Communist if there ever was one ? was in late 1935 more than willing to start loan and political talkswith the Soviets ifthat could help take pressure off the British Empire. The same would apply to Winston Churchill (who bare ly makes an appearance in this book). It was not anti-Communism, then (understood in the sense of resistance to Soviet Communism under any and all circumstances), but a 'mental map' (p. 328), a worldview of which anti Communism was a part, thatwas determinative of British policy. This men talmap precluded some options outright, and it coloured decision-makers' approaches to all the policy issueswith which theyhad to grapple. All in all, this book is a significant addition to the corpus of studies that investigates the collapse of the League of Nations peace-keeping regimen and the origins of the Second World. By accentuating the ideological promptings of British and Soviet policy-making, itmakes a significant contribution, as well, to our understanding ofWestern anti-Communism in the period before the Cold War. It is an altogether impressive achievement. Department of History Markku Ruotsila UniversityofTampere,Finland Gokay, Btilent. SovietEastern Policy and Turkey, ig20-iggi: SovietForeignPolicy, Turkey,andCommunism. Routledge Studies in theHistory ofRussia and Eastern Europe. Routiedge, London and New York, 2006. xiv + 184 pp. Appendices. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. ?70.00. In thiswell-researched monograph, Btilent Gokay charts the inconstant rela tionship between the Soviet Union and leftist groups inTurkey. That relation ship was never easy to manage. On the one hand, the Turkish Republic came into being in 1923with a Leninist ? ifnot Communist ? party at the fore. The Soviets thus had a geopolitical and, to a degree, ideological incentive to REVIEWS 567 make peace with the post-Ottoman leadership as quickly as possible, not least in order to setde outstanding territorial issues in the south Caucasus. The goal of spreading the Communist revolution and undermining nationalists thus took second place to the need to protect Soviet foreign policy interests. On the other hand, from itsearliest days, republican Turkey had a sizeable number of vocal leftistactivists. The Communist Party ofTurkey was found ed in 1920, and its leaders often looked loyally to the Soviet Union for support. Balancing relations between theTurkish state and theTurkish Communists proved to be one of the thorniest challenges for Moscow's 'eastern' ? or 'southern' ? policy for most of the Soviet Union's existence. Gokay clearly illustrates the vicissitudes of relations between Moscow and theTurkish left. There is insufficientspace in a volume of under 200 pages to go into great detail, but any one of the various scenes the author paints might well become the subject of a volume in itsown right ? especially given access to new archival documents, which he uses to good effect. British and Soviet intelligence agents vie for influence in the southCaucasus and across Anatolia. Turkish Communists are assassinated on the Black Sea. Nazim Hikmet, Turkey's unofficial national poet, struggles...