Appendix 5: Nazim’s poem on Hacioglu Salih, who died in a Soviet labour camp in 1954

Hacioglu Salih was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Turkey. He came into conflict with the leadership of the party in the late 1920s, being denounced in 1927 as a Menshevik and expelled. Imprisoned in Turkey for being a communist, Salih made the Soviet Union ‘his second homeland’. After fleeing Turkey, Salih dedicated his professional skills (he was a veterinary surgeon) to the service of poor rural communities in the Soviet Union. In the late Stalin purges of 1949, he was denounced and deported with his wife to a labour camp. The conditions in the camp were so harsh that Salih died within five years. Nazim responds to Salih’s tragic end with one of his most outspoken poems, ‘Hacioglu Salih’, written in 1956 immediately after the Twentieth Party Congress.