Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation.

• Author: Mavrov, Hryhorii

By Vahram Ter-Matevosyan

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 296 pages, $60.35, ISBN: 9783319974026

Kemalism, and the various ways of interpreting it, has long sparked intense debates over its role in Turkish history. For a long time, the study of Kemalism was dominated by concepts and approaches developed in Turkish and Western scholarship. However, despite its importance, no comprehensive work has been done on how Soviet academia, Communist party officials, and diplomats have perceived Kemalism. However, due to the Soviet regime's eagerness to export the revolution to colonial and semi-colonial countries, many valuable sources from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) can deepen our understanding of Kemalism. Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union, by Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, aims to fill this gap by integrating Soviet perspectives into the study of Kemalism. His research is based on analyses of relevant periodicals, official documents, interviews and memoirs. The author approaches Kemalism's development chronologically and thematically By engaging with Soviet sources, the book covers the significant events, processes, and ideologies that influenced Kemalism's origin and evolution.

The book consists of an introduction, conclusion, and eight chapters. The first chapter examines various definitions of Kemalism and argues that there is no agreement among scholars regarding Kemalism's terminology. The author demonstrates the influence of multiple factors on Kemalism's origin and development and refrains from approaching this phenomenon within the framework of a unified political construct. He considers Kemalism as a particularly republican phenomenon that acquired its main features in the late Ottoman period. The author explicitly highlights the 1920s as the first attempt to conceptualize and integrate Kemalism into the existing modernization processes. Then, Kemalism became an uncontested political force whose supremacy was not challenged until the advent of the multiparty period. The study ends in the 1970s; Ter-Matevosyan asserts that since the 1970s Kemalism has appeared as "a structurally distinct construct" (p. 10). From this perspective, the Kemalism of the 1980s should be seen distinctively because of the internal discourses within Kemalism that were often conflicting with one another.

The second and third chapters focus on Kemalism's formation and popularization. The author demonstrates how the Kemalist elite protected and...