ABSTRACT
Leftist thought, and more specifically Marxism, was imported to Turkey like many other ideologies. After the First World War and during the Turkish War of Independence, the initial Turkish leftist groups and concepts emerged in concrete form; these incipient leftist groups covered a wide political spectrum, from left-leaning elements in the Committee of Union and Progress (İTC) to the Turkish Communist Party ( TKP). In Turkey, the Marxist left’s nature was determined, to a great extent, by the TKP. Because the Turkish left was established during the Turkish War of Independence, anti-imperialist concepts held primary importance from the beginning. For the same reason, the Turkish left supported and actively took part in Mustafa Kemal’s successful resistance movement in Anatolia; this is true despite the fact that Mustafa Kemal later separated the leftist elements from his own movement and eliminated them. Another important contemporary Turkish leftist concern was the effort to expand the already close relations between Ankara and Moscow, and to emphasize Turkish–Soviet friendship. For that reason, one aspect of Mustafa Kemal’s foreign policy that the Turkish left supported was close relations with Moscow. The Turkish left also supported another project, known in modern Turkey as the Kemalist era, which was the effort initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to modernize Turkish society. As a result the Turkish left, even if it politely criticized the harsh stance taken towards labour by the Kemalist leadership, continued to generally support the Kemalist government’s domestic and foreign policies.
