Leon Trotsky: The New Turkey

[Kievskaya Mysl No. 3, January 3, 1909, The Balkan Wars. New York-Sydney 1980, p. 9-15]

The Young Turks have reached the zenith of their influence. They have a majority in parliament. The president is a Young Turk. The sultan is tirelessly clasping the former mutineers to his bosom. European diplomacy is ready to caress them to death … Have many years passed since the day when Ahmed Riza, an émigré living in Paris and editor of an underground paper, appealed to the First Hague Peace Conference to defend the Turkish people from the unbridled tyranny of Constantinople? He was brusquely shown the door. Not one diplomatic ear was inclined to listen to him. The Dutch government threatened to expel him from the country as a “trouble-making foreigner.” He knocked in vain at the doors of influential parliamentarians: they would not receive him. Only the socialist Van Kol gave him any support, calling a meeting under his chairmanship at which Ahmed Riza appealed for the sympathy of his audience. Now, however, the semiofficial organs of the European governments hasten to assure the president of the Turkish parliament that he enjoys the well-merited goodwill of all the cabinets of Europe. … Bülow does not hesitate to testify in the Reichstag to the high esteem he feels for the Turkish officers who are the heroes of a revolutionary coup d’état. (“We shall remember what you have said, Herr Reichskanzler!”, wrote Parvus in connection with this speech.)

Victory is the most effective of arguments, and success the most persuasive of recommendations. But what is the secret of this victory and where lies the key to this astonishing success?

On this subject Rech has written, reproaching the Left: in Turkey the different classes went into battle maintaining the same hierarchy among themselves that binds them together in the country’s economic life; the economically dominant classes retained their hegemony over the masses in the revolution — hence the victory.

And Novoye Vremya, in its turn, with moralizing hypocrisy, calls upon the Cadets to note that the Young Turks, unlike the doctrinaire liberals of Russia, held firmly to the banner of patriotic nationalism and never for one moment broke with the monarchist and religious beliefs of the people — that was why they came to power.

In politics as in private life there is nothing cheaper than moralizing — nothing cheaper or more useless. Many people, however, find it attractive because it saves them from having to look into the objective mechanism of events.

What explains the startling triumph of the Young Turks, their victory won almost without effort or sacrifice?

In its objective meaning, a revolution is a struggle for state power. The latter relies directly upon the army. This is why every revolution in history has put the question bluntly: Whose side is the army on? and has answered it in one way or the other. In the Turkish revolution — and this constitutes its special physiognomy — the army itself stepped forward as the bearer of liberating ideas. Not only did a new social class not have to overcome armed resistance by the old regime but, on the contrary, it had only to play the role of sympathetic chorus to the revolutionary officers who led their men against the sultan’s government.

By its origins and historical traditions, Turkey is a military state. At the present time it stands first among the European states as regards the relative size of its army. A large army required a large number of officers. Some of these rose from the ranks by length of service. But the Yildiz, for all its barbarous resistance to the requirements of historical development, was obliged to Europeanize its army to some extent, and to give the country’s educated men access to it. The latter did not keep the army waiting. The insignificance of Turkish industry and the low level of development of urban culture left the Turkish intelligentsia with hardly any openings apart from service as officers or officials. Thus, the state organized within itself the militant vanguard of the bourgeois nation in formation: the thinking, critical, discontented intelligentsia. In recent years there has been a continual series of disturbances in the Turkish army, due to non-receipt of pay or delays in promotion. Troops seized a telegraph station and engaged in direct negotiations with the Yildiz. The sultan’s camarilla had no alternative but to yield. In this way, regiment after regiment passed through the school of rebellion.

After the success of the revolt, many European politicians and publicists spoke with a mysterious air about the brilliantly conceived organization of the Young Turks, which was said to have had its tentacles everywhere. This naive notion merely reflected their fetishistic superstitious when confronted with success. In actual fact the revolutionary links between the officers, especially in the garrisons of Constantinople and Adrianople, were extremely inadequate. As Niazi Bey and Enver Bey themselves admitted, the revolt broke out at a moment when the Young Turks were “quite unprepared” for it. But the automatic organization of the army itself came to the rescue. The spontaneous discontent of the hungry, ragged soldiers naturally impelled them to support the officers who were politically opposed to the government, and so the mechanical discipline of the army was transformed naturally into the internal discipline of the revolution.

Associated with the army revolt was a breakdown of the bureaucratic machine. In the little book by the Serbian former minister Vladan Georgievic we find a statement that at the start of the revolt the kaimakams and mutessarifs* of three Macedonian vilayets prompted the inhabitants to send to the Yildiz telegrams petitioning for restoration of the Constitution of 1876. In these circumstances there was nothing for Abdul Hamid but to offer himself as honorary president of the Shura i Umet (Union and Progress) Committee.

In the tasks before it (economic independence, unity of nation and state, political freedom), the Turkish revolution constitutes self-determination by the bourgeois nation and in this sense it belongs with the traditions of 1789-1848. But the army, led by its officers, functioned as the executive organ of the nation, and this at once gave events the planned character of military maneuvers. It would, however, have been utter nonsense (and many people were guilty of this) to see in the events of last July in Turkey a mere pronunciamento and to treat them as analogous to some military-dynastic coup d’état in Serbia. The strength of the Turkish officers and the secret of their success lie not in any brilliantly organized “plan” or devilishly cunning conspiracy, but in the active sympathy shown them by the advanced classes: the merchants, the craftsmen, the workers, sections of the officials and the clergy, and, finally, the countryside as embodied in the peasant army.

But all these classes bring with them, besides their “sympathy,” also their interests, demands, and hopes. All their long-suppressed social aspirations are coming out into the open now, when a parliament has provided them with a center for their strivings. Bitter disappointment awaits those who think that the Turkish revolution is already over. Among the disappointed will be not only Abdul Hamid hut also, it seems, the Young Turk Party itself.

First and foremost stands the national question. The motley composition of the population of Turkey, as regards nationality and religion, results in powerful centrifugal tendencies. The old regime thought it could overcome these by the mechanical weight of the army, recruited exclusively from Muslims. In fact, however, this brought about the disintegration of the state. In Abdul Hamid’s reign alone Turkey lost Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Dobruja. Asia Minor has fallen helplessly under the economic and political dictatorship of Germany. On the eve of the revolution, Austria was about to build a railway through the sanjak of Novibazar, to provide a strategic route into Macedonia. On the other side, Britain, in opposition to Austria, was directly promoting a project for Macedonian autonomy. … No end could be foreseen to the dismemberment of Turkey. Yet an extensive and economically unified territory is a necessary precondition for industrial development. This applies not only to Turkey but to the Balkan Peninsula as a whole. It is not its national diversity but the fact of its splintering into many states that weighs upon the latter like a curse. Customs frontiers divide it artificially into separate bits. The machinations of the capitalist powers are interwoven with the bloody intrigues of the Balkan dynasties. If these conditions continue, the Balkan Peninsula will go on being a Pandora’s box. Only a single state of all the Balkan nationalities, with a democratic, federal basis, on the pattern of Switzerland or the U.S.A., can bring internal peace to the Balkans and create the conditions for a mighty development of productive forces.

The Young Turks, however, have decisively rejected that road. Representing the dominant nationality and possessing their own national army, they wish to be and to remain national centralists. Their right wing consistently opposes even provincial self-government. Struggle against powerful centrifugal tendencies makes the Young Turks supporters of a “strong central authority” and impels them toward an agreement with the sultan quand meme [no matter what]. This means that-as soon as the knot of national contradictions starts to unwind within the setting of parliamentarism, the Young Turks’ right wing will openly go over to the side of counterrevolution.

After the national question comes the social question.

In the first place, there is the peasantry. Carrying the heavy burden of militarism, subjected to semi-serfdom, one-fifth of them landless, the peasants will in one way or another present their account to the new regime. And yet only an organization in Macedonia and Adrianople (Sandansky’s Bulgarian group) and the Armenian revolutionary organisations (the Dashnaks and the Hnchaks) have put forward more or less radical agrarian programs. As regards the ruling Young Turk Party, in which landowning beys are prominent, in its national-liberal blindness it utterly denies that a peasant question even exists. Evidently the Young Turks hope that a shake-up of the administration, together with the forms and procedures of parliamentarism, will by itself satisfy the peasant. They are quite mistaken. The discontent in the countryside with the new order of things will, moreover, inevitably find reflection in the army, which is made up of peasants. The soldiers' self-awareness must have increased considerably in recent months. And if a party that is based on the officers, after giving nothing to the peasants, starts to tighten discipline in the army, it may easily happen that the soldiers will rise against their officers just as, previously, the officers rose against Abdul Hamid.

Besides the peasant question there is the labor question.

Turkish industry is, as I have said, very weak. Not only did the sultan’s regime undermine the country’s economic foundations by the policy it pursued, it also deliberately obstructed the establishment of factories, out of a salutary fear of the proletariat. However, it proved impossible to safeguard the regime completely against this danger. The very first weeks of the Turkish revolution were marked by strikes of bakery workers, printers, weavers, tramway employees, and tobacco workers in Constantinople, as well as port and railway workers. The boycott of Austrian goods should have welded and inspired the young proletariat of Turkey still more, for the mass of workers, especially the port workers, played a decisive role in this campaign. How has the new regime responded to the political awakening of the working class? With a bill imposing forced labor for going on strike. The Young Turk program utters not a word about any definite measures to help the workers. And yet, to treat the Turkish proletariat as a quantité negligeable [inconsequential force] means risking some serious surprises. The importance of a class is never to be estimated by its mere numbers, The power of the proletariat of today, even when it is small in size, lies in the fact that it holds in its hands the concentrated productive power of the country and the most important means of communication. Against this elementary fact of capitalist economy the Young Turks may crack their heads severely.

These are the profound, as yet hidden, social contradictions on the basis of which the Turkish parliament is called upon to function. Of its 240 deputies the Young Turks have the support of about 140. About 80 deputies, mainly Arabs and Greeks, form the bloc of “decentralists.” Prince Saba-ed-Din aims to find a basis for political influence through alliance with them: it is hard to make out as yet whether he is a dilettante dreamer without much sense, or an intriguer who has so far not shown his hand. On the extreme left are the Armenian and Bulgarian revolutionaries, who include a few Social Democrats.

Such is the external — still too external — physiognomy of the Turkish representative assembly. But the Young Turks and the “decentralists” are at present vague political blurs that have yet to take shape through contact with social problems. Even more important, however, for the fate of Turkish parliamentarism are those forces that operate outside parliament: the “aliens,” the peasants, the workers, the mass of the soldiers. Each of these groups wants to mark off as big a place as possible for itself under the roof of the new Turkey. Each has its own interests and its own revolutionary orbit. To determine in advance the resultant of all these forces in the Turkish parliament through speculation, that is, by calculations made in some study or office, and then to take this as a sound basis for universal conciliation, is a plan worthy only of the utopian doctrinaires of liberalism. History never works like that. It ruthlessly bangs together the living forces of a country and forces them to achieve a “resultant” through harsh struggle. This is why I maintain that the military revolt in Macedonia last July, which led to the summoning of parliament, was only the prologue to the revolution: the drama still lies ahead.

What are we going to witness in Turkey in the immediate future? It is futile to make guesses about this. One thing only is clear — namely, that victory for the revolution will mean a democratic Turkey; a democratic Turkey will provide the basis for a Balkan federation, and a Balkan federation will once for all clear the “hornets’ nest” of the Near East of the capitalist and dynastic intrigues which hang like black thunderclouds not only over the unhappy peninsula but over all Europe.

Restoration of the sultan’s despotism would mean the end of Turkey and a free-for-all to grab pieces of the carcass of the Turkish state. A victory for Turkish democracy, on the other hand, would mean peace.

The drama still lies ahead! And while behind the irreproachably welcoming smile of European diplomacy directed at the Turkish parliament are concealed the predatory jaws of capitalist imperialism, ready to utilize Turkey’s first internal difficulties in order to tear her to pieces, European democracy stands with all the weight of its sympathy and support on the side of the new Turkey — the Turkey that does not yet exist, that is only about to be born.