An anecdote from Hasdal Military Prison:

“Trotskyist” as a political term of abuse

Published by İletişim Yayınları in 2007 as the eighth volume in the Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce (Political Thought in Modern Turkey) series, Sol (The Left) is a multi-author collection that examines the different currents of left-wing thought in Turkey, across a broad spectrum ranging from social democracy to communism, in the light of their historical development and their relationship to practical struggles.Though it has many aspects open to criticism, it remains a useful volume nonetheless. In this article, I would like to focus on an anecdote recounted at the beginning of Ali Rıza Tura’s contribution to the volume, titled “Trotskyism in Turkey”. Tura writes:

It must have been 1982. Following a raid on the ward in Hasdal Military Prison where I was being held together with members of various left-wing groups, I was transferred, along with four or five others, to the ward housing those of THKP-C origin. The ward representative came over to each of us in turn and asked, in the terminology of the period, what our “politics” were - that is, which groups we belonged to. When my turn came, I said, in a slightly tense tone of voice, that I was a Trotskyist. He laughed, thinking I was joking, and said, “Never mind. I’m with the MLSPB (Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Union); they call us that as well. What’s your real politics?” 

Ali Rıza Tura

When I said, in an even tenser tone, that I was not joking and really was a Trotskyist, he first gave me a startled look, then went over to his comrades and told them what was going on. The result was a growing number of bewildered stares. They were talking among themselves, trying to make sense of the situation. For a while, I was subjected to a kind of de facto isolation. Three or four days later, however, a few of those whose collective trials were still under way spoke with their comrades from other prisons during the hearings and learned that there were, if only in tiny numbers, Trotskyists in other prisons as well, and that they had taken part in the resistance there. After learning this, the ward representative came over to me and said something along the following lines: “Sorry, mate. We had always thought Trotskyism was just a word used to denigrate other people; at first, we thought you were mad.” (Ali Rıza Tura, “Türkiye’de Troçkizm”, in Murat Gültekingil (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, Vol. 8: Sol, Istanbul, İletişim Yayınları, 2007, p. 78.)

This brief anecdote, the sort that brings a bitter smile to one’s face, is noteworthy for the extraordinary clarity with which it lays bare an important aspect of Stalinist political culture in Turkey. Here, “Trotskyism” is not understood as the name of a concrete current within Marxism, with its own distinctive theoretical theses, organisational form, historical references and political aims. On the contrary, it is used as a term of denunciation with no fixed content, one whose meaning shifts according to circumstance and which often serves merely to vilify the other side - a catch-all slur, or, so to speak, a banana good for every purpose. To my mind, the phrase “they call us that too” is the most striking sentence in the passage. For it reveals that, when Stalinist circles called one another “Trotskyist”, they were in many cases perfectly well aware that the people concerned were not Trotskyists at all, yet still used the label in an utterly malicious manner.

Moreover, that is not the whole story. Even before the first half of the 1970s, when no genuine Trotskyist milieu yet existed in Turkey, “Trotskyism” had already come to occupy a ready-made place in the imagination of the Stalinist movement. From the late 1920s onwards, various individuals and groups were subjected to this accusation. One early example was Nâzım Hikmet, who in the early 1930s was accused by his own party, the TKP, of being a “police agent”, a “Kemalist” and, of course, a “Trotskyist”. In other words, even before any real, organised Trotskyist movement existed - and the reasons why Trotskyism emerged so late in Turkey are themselves an important question deserving separate discussion - there was already a phantom of “Trotskyism” that had to be condemned.

Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Trotsky for Beginners, Pantheon Books, 1980, New York, p. 7.

For all the variants of Stalinism in Turkey, Trotskyism was less a real political current than a semi-demonic, semi-mythological entity. (For a considerable number of Stalinists, that has still not changed very much even today.) In the materials placed before generations drawn to socialism - in the official histories of the CPSU, in the “explanatory” footnotes appended by Soviet ideologues to Lenin’s works, and in the writings of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and others - there was no explanation of what Trotskyism actually stood for; instead, on the basis of distortions and outright lies, readers were taught why it was something to be hated. What we are dealing with here, then, is not a genuine political or intellectual debate, but the production of a reflex. In the mythology of the Stalinist inquisition, “Trotskyism” was a kind of bogeyman: its name was known, but its content was not; yet people were drilled to hate it and to crush it wherever it appeared.

What makes the Hasdal scene truly instructive is that it shows how ignorance and hypocrisy can coexist within the same mentality. Confronted with someone who actually identified himself as a Trotskyist, they were utterly bewildered; they found themselves wondering how anyone could describe himself in such terms. For the first time, they were face to face with a living adherent of a political current that had for years been presented to them as an object of fear - a current they had never in fact encountered and had never imagined they might encounter.

But those very same people, by saying “they call us that too”, also readily admit that the term had long been used in an arbitrary and instrumental way in struggles within the left. In other words, what we are dealing with here is not ignorance alone, but also conscious political bad faith and hypocrisy. Whether the “accusation” is true or not carries no weight whatsoever in their eyes; what matters is simply that it should serve to stigmatise the other side and drag their name through the mud. It is inevitable that such a political culture - one that has made a habit of labelling instead of seeking the truth, and of using concepts as clubs instead of explaining them - should produce cadres of this kind: Stalinist monsters great and small.