Part 5

As the struggle between Stalin and Zinoviev began to intensify, Fyodor Raskolnikov, operating under the name Petrov, a Stalinist, became the official head of the Eastern Section, replacing the Zinovievist Safarov as its leading figure. From that moment on, the Eastern Section’s watchword was Bolshevization. Almost immediately, it set to work organizing a new party congress in close collaboration with Şefik Hüsnü and his faction, which in the meantime had modified its position on Kemalism to align itself with that of the Eastern Section: to support the Kemalists, but only when they were in grave danger.

The congress was held in February 1925 in Istanbul. Some of the most important left-wing militants, such as Ginzberg, Navshirvanov, Süleyman Nuri, and Torosyan, did not attend because they had fled to Russia or the Caucasus and had been excluded from the party’s work. Non-Muslim communists were represented by a new ally of Şefik Hüsnü, Nikos Zachariadis, a young Greek member of the IWU.

Before the congress, two distinct currents emerged among the delegates from the central line of Aydınlık: a pro-Kemalist right wing, led by Ahmet Cevat Emre, and a left wing, led by Salih Hacıoğlu and Nazım Hikmet and supported by some veterans of the Baku section, such as Hamdi Şamilov and Mustafa Börklüce, who criticized the party for flirting with the Kemalists, now completely compromised with imperialism and reaction. Apart from Hacıoğlu, the only other veteran leader of the left present was Kazım of Van.

Among the criticisms of the right, it was said: “Our cause is not that of the intellectuals, but that of the workers. We also need intellectuals, but the main issue is to raise the consciousness of the working class. Let us devote all our energies to organizing the workers and winning their sympathy, and to establishing a more sincere and solid unity among ourselves.”

Şefik Hüsnü made a dramatic self-criticism. However, thanks to the support of the Eastern Section, he was elected party secretary without opposition and his powers were greatly expanded. Neither the right nor the left wing managed to gain a foothold during the congress. The Central Committee that emerged was a compromise. The Aydınlık center was the largest and included Vedat Nedim Tör, elected secretary of the CC, Sadreddin Celal, and Hasan Ali Ediz; Ahmet Cevat Emre and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir represented the right, while Salih Hacıoğlu, Hamdi Şamilov, and Nazım Hikmet represented the left.

However, the compromise went beyond the establishment of the new CC. The line of the Eastern Section, defended by Şefik Hüsnü, was formulated in an apparently radical way, so that inexperienced left-wing militants would commit themselves to the opposition, and sufficiently favorable to Kemalism to keep most of the right wing in line with the center.

The first test for the new CC came with the Sheikh Said rebellion in northern Kurdistan: a relatively small nationalist reactionary movement that was brutally suppressed by the government. The party leadership enthusiastically supported the Kemalist repression.

Cut off from work in Turkey, the leaders of the old left turned their attention to young Turkish militants attending the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow or Baku. The formation of the Left Opposition faction, led by Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri, was announced to the Comintern on November 17, 1925. The left’s appeal, entitled Declaration on the Situation of the Turkish Communist Party, consisted of two sections: political and organizational.

The criticisms of the new CC’s conduct were:
     - denying the existence of a working class in Turkey;
     - the aim of the workers of Turkey was to promote the process of national capital accumulation;
     - shifting party recruitment towards radical university students by pursuing a bourgeois left-wing policy.

Ginzberg also noted that the new leadership treated the various nationalities present in Turkey as “enemies of the people,” failing to criticize the forced exodus of Greeks.

The left explained that it had obeyed discipline as long as it could, but a point had been reached where the interests of the class in Turkey had been compromised. For this reason, the time had come to form an opposition faction:

"The crises of the Turkish Communist Party, arising from the contradictions between the growing activity of the awakening Turkish working class and the petty-bourgeois passivity of the hostile party leadership, compel us, as active working-class militants and founders of our party, to raise our most energetic and insurrectionary voice of protest in the interests of the Turkish proletariat and the Comintern against the bourgeois collaborationist policy of the Turkish party, which is destroying the party of the proletariat and deceiving the Comintern with artificially created bluffs. The interests of the Turkish proletariat demand an inevitable revision of the line of conduct of the Eastern Section of the Comintern towards the leadership of the Turkish Communist Party. The errors of this line have been pointed out many times before and after the Fifth Congress.

“We, the members of the Turkish Communist Party who have signed this document, as disciplined militants, not only did we not prevent the implementation of this line, but we did not violate it until the errors and crimes of the Central Committee accumulated to such an extent that they changed the character of the party leadership. To close our eyes to such a leadership, which has objectively become an agent of the bourgeoisie in the Turkish workers’ movement, would be to commit murder against our class.“

Thus going on the offensive, the Left Opposition listed its demands:

”In this context (...) we put forward the following demands:

"Convene an emergency conference with the emigrants of our party, with the founders of our party, who were comrades of Comrade Suphi, and with representatives of the communist workers of the KUTV (...)

The conference should prepare the Party Congress by examining the following issues:
     a) The preparation of the theoretical part of the program,
     b) Revision of the minimum program,
     c) Preparation of the political theses on the question of peasants and national minorities,
     d) The question of a united trade union front and its conquest,
     e) The reorganization of the party on the model of factory and workshop cells,
     f) Improvement of the party’s statutes and social composition to ensure the organizational and managerial hegemony of the workers in the party,
     g) The organization of the party’s secret apparatus and the publication of a newspaper and a magazine,
     h) Financial issues,
     i) Revision of the educational program for Turkish communist workers in the KUTV. Appointment of a special commission to objectively examine the causes of the deaths and suicides of exiled comrades and the situation of the Turkish section in the KUTV.

In particular, in its approach to resolving the party’s problems, the left showed itself to be in favor of a “single trade union front” rather than a united front with other like-minded parties. This was nothing new for the left: the Istanbul left had always opposed any kind of collaboration with non-communists and had worked actively to destroy the socialist and social democratic parties.

The Anatolian left had gone so far as to merge with left-wing nationalists and had paid the price, risking losing the party because of its questionable leaders. The Baku left had been born out of the rejection of the idea of a common front between communists and Kemalists, which had led to the death of Mustafa Suphi and his comrades.

As for the reference to the reorganization of the party on the model of factory cells, this should be considered together with Ginzberg’s 1924 text entitled “The Revolutionary Growth of the Workers’ Movement in Turkey,” which discusses the organization of groups in factories, trade unions, and neighborhoods. We can therefore conclude that the left’s approach was not opposed to the formation of factory cells, but did not limit internal organization to such limited bodies, rather it was in favor of the creation of unions and local groups.

In addition to Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri, the most important left-wing figures excluded from the party’s work for opposition were Navshirvanov, Kazım of Van, and Torosyan. It is difficult, though not impossible, to trace the left in history after the formation of the Left Opposition. Kazım of Van was co-opted into the Central Committee in 1926, and there is no evidence that he played an active role in the opposition after this time.

The speaker finally presented three documents relating to the last section of this work.

The first is the “Declaration of the Left on the Situation of the Turkish Communist Party.”

The second is the article entitled “The Situation in Turkey” published in Die Fahne Des Kommunismus (“The Flag of Communism”), the newspaper of the German left-wing opposition organization Leninbund, on July 19, 1929.

The third is the introduction to the Turkish translation of Trotski’s “The Real Situation in Russia,” which is notable for its praise of Trotski as the leader of communism without identifying itself as Trotskist.

The three texts will be reproduced in the extended publication of the report.