ABSTRACT
In 1974, I was a 16-year-old who was more interested in Western rock music than anything else. In Ankara, where I was living, there were many political groups active among the students. I had no idea which one was which. In the part of the city where we lived (Yenimahalle) there was a university student, a few years older than the rest of us. He was talking about organizing campaigns against the fascist attacks. Once he brought some posters and we all went out one night to stick them on the walls. My understanding of politics was still very limited then. Neither was I really interested. There was a local association, a kind of cultural organization, Yenimahalle Kultur Dernegi or YKD (Cultural Association of Yenimahalle), where my friends and I used to visit regularly and chat with other youngsters there. Still most of our discussions were more on the recent rock LPs than political issues. I even swapped some of my rock records with some others whom I met there. I also participated in some socialist reading sessions in the YKD where we discussed Stalin’s Dialectical Materialism. Because I generally loved reading, I was borrowing more and more books and left-wing magazines from the association and reading them very quickly. As a result of these readings I started to develop a kind of worldview based on a simple pro-Soviet understanding, i.e. there was a Socialist system centred on the Soviet Union.
