During the 1950s, policymakers in the United States decided they wanted Turkish soldiers to fight and die for American interests—and, for a price, Turkish leaders were willing to provide these soldiers. The United States’ desire for Turkish military cooperation enabled leaders in Turkey to pursue otherwise unsustainable economic policies. This paper draws on British, Turkish, and American archival sources to show how Turkey’s diplomats played their American and European allies against one another to secure more economic assistance and sustain their rapid industrialization drive. Though all the governments involved had a shared interest in containing communism, Turkey’s leaders perceived that the American desire for a strong, stable Turkey was far greater than that of its European allies. When European governments pressed Turkey to repay its growing debts, Turkish leaders could rely on their American counterparts to call for more moderate demands. The sense that the United States would not call Turkey to account led various European countries to cut bilateral deals with the Turkish government in an attempt to prioritize their debts over those of their neighbors. All of this activity bought Turkey’s leaders extra time to build factories, power plants, and roads (and to win elections). By providing an account of the negotiations surrounding Turkish debt in the mid-1950s, this paper illustrates how countries like Turkey exercised a degree of agency within the confines of the American-led Cold War order. In doing so, it argues that the Cold War must be understood not only in terms of how American and Soviet systems were imposed or applied around the world, but also in terms of how people around the world actively navigated those systems.

This research analyzes the decline and the defeat of leftist movements in Iran and Turkey in a comparative historical perspective. The relatively easy defeat against the state apparatuses, resulting in the destruction of the organized Left, has led to common academic and public misconceptions that the Left has not been influential. Most of the existing academic literature contextualized these defeats almost exclusively in their native contexts. These explanations often produced common arguments such as “inability to reach the masses”, “ideological and theoretical poverty”, “factionalism”, “over-reliance on determinism”, or “over-reliance on a foreign theory”. While these factors have undeniably played a part in the eventual defeat of the Left by brutal state repression, they do not necessarily explain why the organized Left could not resurface as it did in previous defeats such as after the in 1953 Anglo-American Coup in Iran or the 1971 Coup in Turkey. Such overlaps in academic explanations point to the necessity of a comparative analysis, primarily because the conditions in which the state crushed the organized Left was considerably different. Relying on a study of selected leftist intellectuals and groups, including Khalil Maleki, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Fedayeen-e Khalq from Iran and Naz?m Hikmet, Hikmet K?v?lc?ml? and Dev-Genç from Turkey, I show that three domestic factors strongly contributed to the making of leftist politics: the Left’s experiences with and understanding of the authoritarian modernisms of Reza Shah Pahlavi and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; the Left’s understanding of the socioeconomic divides in their domestic contexts; and finally, the Left experiences with state securitization and violence. While I do not contradict the existing explanations, I add that the decline of Marxist-Leninist Left’s influence was also the result of a longer process of hegemonic struggle where the Marxist-Leninist model, similar to the global context, failed against right-wing, religious ideologies and eventually lost its hegemony over anti-systemic movements. Democratic deficits of the organized Left, including gender/sexuality and ethnicity based critiques, strongly contributed to this process. Finally, I claim that although the state effectively crushed the organized anti-systemic opposition and the Marxist-Leninist model lost its hegemony over progressive movements, native determinants of leftist politics maintained their relevance among oppositional social blocs. This results in a continuity of leftist narratives and demands in contemporary progressive/leftist oppositional politics.

In this paper, I examine the historical circumstances which made the emergence of Beirut’s first communist party, the Lebanese People’s Party (LPP), possible in 1924. In the limited existing historiography, the rise of the LPP is explained by the economic and social trauma of WWI; yet this telling divorces the party from both the wider global context—in particular the Russian Revolution of 1917—as well as from the social and economic shifts which took place in the region during the final decades of the nineteenth century. I ultimately present an alternative history of the rise of communism in Beirut, arguing that it was primarily a product of regional change and social unrest that extended back to the late Ottoman period. To make this argument, I focus on the life and writings of Fu’ad al-Shamali, a founder of the LPP. Born in Mount Lebanon in 1894, Fu’ad al-Shamali’s status as a labor migrant was not uncommon for a period in which one-third of the region’s peasant population emigrated. For nearly a decade after leaving Mount Lebanon for Egypt, al-Shamali worked in a tobacco factory in Alexandria where he organized strikes and eventually joined the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP). In 1924, al-Shamali returned to Beirut and helped found the LPP alongside the middle-class journalist Yusuf Yazbak. Building on the work of scholars like Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and Jens Hanssen, this paper puts the LPP’s emergence in the context of late Ottoman radical thought and popular protest. I rely largely on al-Shamali’s previously unexamined writings from the 1920s and 1930s about his role in founding the LPP, his conceptual understanding of socialism and communism, and his time spent in Russia at the Sixth Communist International Congress in 1928. I also make use of Yazbak’s reflections on the founding of the LPP. Additionally, I incorporate research from contemporary periodicals like al-Sahafi al-Ta’eh and al-Insaniyya. As a broader historical intervention, I aim to reintegrate the social history of the late-Ottoman era with the history of Mandate Lebanon and to reintroduce the history of political projects that were not primarily concerned with nationalism to this period.

On July 25, 1950, one month after the Korean War broke out, the first democratically elected new government of Turkey announced its decision to send a brigade to join the United Nations Command in Korea, even without asking the approval of the Grand National Assembly. From 1950 to 1953, four annually rotated Turkish brigades served on the Korea Peninsula. Why did Turkey send troops to a seemingly irrelevant conflict thousands of miles away? Existing literature is confined to Turkey’s developing relations with the U.S. and Turkey’s NATO membership. Yet equally important Turkish domestic aspects have long been neglected by English-language accounts. Drawing on a largely diversified body of public and private sources in Turkey, the US, China and the UN archives, this paper argues that the newly elected Democratic Party used Turkey’s participation in the Korean War to consolidate legitimacy and gave space for the public and soldiers to express their religious identities. Through content analysis of the recently available archival documents from Turkish Military archive (Genelkurmay Askeri Tarih ve Strateji Etüt), memoirs of Kore Gaziler and tabur imamlar?, Turkish newspapers’ coverage on Hürriyet, Cumhuriyet, Ak?am, Vatan, Zafer, Ulus, Yeni Sabah and Milliyet, Turkish government statements, photo collections, oral histories and interviews with Kore Gaziler, this paper suggests that Turkey’s road to the Korean War was framed as a religious necessity to defend Turkish vatan against atheist communists. Turkish Military played a pivotal role in the religious framing. It distributed the religious propaganda published by the Diyanet (The Directorate of Religious Affairs) to Turkish Brigades and sent civilian imams accompanying the troops in Korea. This research contributes both to the histories of the Korean War by focusing on Turkish Brigades and especially civilian imams who remain largely ignored, and Turkish studies by examining the role of myth (the legend of the Turk in Korea) and the “Other” (atheist communists) played in the formation of religious national identity when Turkish government brought Islam from the periphery to the centre as the antidote of communism.

Numerous accounts have been written about Turkish writer Nâzim Hikmet’s dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1951. However, relatively little is known about Nâzim’s life after he fled Turkey—for example, in Kemal Sülker’s 1500-page opus Nâzim Hikmet’in Gerçek Yasami, just 9 pages are devoted to Nâzim’s life between 1951 and his death in 1963. Despite the fact that literally dozens of biographies have been written about Nâzim, none of these works have systematically employed the abundant documentary source material available in Moscow. Drawing upon Russian and Turkish-language documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), this talk examines the Soviet political context that Nâzim encountered upon arriving in the USSR in June of 1951. Because Nâzim’s communist views had brought him more than fifteen years in Turkish prisons, his biographers tend to assume that his party credentials in 1951 were “impeccable.” In fact, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nâz?m’s Turkish Communist Party (TKP) and Comintern files were riddled with depictions of Nâz?m as a “Turkish spy,” “police agent,” and even a “Trotskyite.” This is because of Nâzim’s role in an apparent effort –involving at least a couple dozen individuals—to gain control over the party organization following mass arrests in 1927 that decimated the TKP leadership. Moreover, Nâzim had unwittingly crossed into the USSR at a time of heightened suspicion in Moscow toward sudden arrivals. Several Turks who had similarly arrived unexpectedly in the 1940s had, by 1951, just recently been tried for espionage and sent to Soviet labor camps. Nâz?m’s old friend and comrade Ismail Bilen, who as the de facto head of the TKP in the USSR would become Nâzim’s political collaborator and mentor in the months following Nâzim’s arrival in Moscow, had himself been the subject of secret police investigation just two years earlier. Nâzim and others from his generation had led international lives in the 1920s, then found themselves targeted--in both Turkey and the USSR--for their border-crossing backgrounds in the 1930s. By the early 1950s, these individuals—facing the Iron Curtain—had to choose one side of the border of the other. Nâzim’s dramatic story of flight and exile was not, in fact, so unique, as many Turkish communists of his generation faced a similar fate.