CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Elliott III, Robert Alan |
|---|---|
| Title | Chasing the Specter in Anatolia: Politics and the Discourse of Communism and Anti-Communism in Early Cold War Turkey, 1945-1960 |
| Summary | Despite the opening of archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union, very little has been written about Turkey at the onset of the Cold War. While some recent texts have attempted to fill this historiographic gap, these texts focus primarily on high politics. Additionally, the literature on communism in Turkey focuses principally on two periods, the 1920’s and then the 1960’s to early 1980’s. This thesis serves as a pre-history of 1960’s leftist radicalism in Turkey, examining the events and discourse from 1945 to the 1960 Coup and charting the development of Cold War leftist militancy. This thesis seeks to address three central questions. First, what political activities were the Turkish communists conducting as Turkey entered the Cold War? How did the state respond to these activities? Lastly, how did the communists respond to anti-communist policy? To answer these questions, I will utilize a wide array of primary sources, including court documents, communist and non-communist newspapers, the diaries of politicians and activists, declassified state documents, and the memoirs of politicians and communists from this period. Based on my analysis of these sources, it appears that the communists during the onset of the Cold War critiqued state policy, often using Kemalist language, and advanced a reformist rather than revolutionary agenda. The heavy-handed attempt to repress these voices, through legal and financial intimidation, resulted in the widespread flight of the left, many seeking the support of the Soviet Union. Rather than silencing the communists, this experience of political disenfranchisement contributed to radicalism and hardened their stance toward the Turkish state. |
| Supervisor | Wilson, Michael Brett |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/elliott_robert.pdf |
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