Anti-Theses on the Dissolution of the Soviet Union

Not a debate, but a rigged polemic

Kemal Okuyan, General Secretary of the Stalinist Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), has a book titled Sovyetler Birliği’nin Çözülüşü Üzerine Anti-Tezler (Anti-Theses on the Dissolution of the Soviet Union), first published in November 2005. I read the third edition of this book, published in April 2014, last year. [*]

Among the dozens of books, pamphlets and articles I have read on the nature, functioning and collapse of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes, I can say without the slightest hesitation that Okuyan’s book is by far the most problematic example in terms of both method and substance - indeed, as will become clear below, downright dubious.

Okuyan’s book, as its title suggests, was written with the aim of taking up a number of theses on the dissolution of the Soviet Union - twenty-seven in all - and “refuting” them. Yet the book is marked by an astonishing methodological flaw - or rather, by outright dishonesty. Okuyan does not identify the authors of the twenty-seven theses he claims to refute; he does not quote a single passage from the writers who advanced them; nor does he make the slightest effort to cite any sources. By his own account, he himself “derives” these theses from various texts he has read and from discussions he has witnessed. In the preface to the first edition, the author says, with remarkable brazenness:

(...) the book contains no “references” whatsoever, to a quite exceptional degree. The author has ‘derived’ these “theses” from the many Turkish and English texts on the subject to which he has had access, as well as from debates he has witnessed in Turkey and in various other countries, and has taken them up one by one. (p. 16)

Instead of presenting the views he sets out to contest as they actually are, Okuyan places them within a framework of his own making, arranging them entirely as he sees fit. He himself decides how each thesis is to be formulated, which emphases are to be brought to the fore, and which arguments are to be presented in an attenuated form. In other words, rather than grappling with his opponents’ real arguments, he constructs an easily refutable caricature of them and then, with arrogant self-assurance, proceeds to smash that caricature to pieces. What emerges is, at the very least, a tightly controlled display of polemics. A more accurate description would be that it is outright intellectual charlatanry.

Kemal Okuyan

Polemical texts, of course, need not take the form of academic monographs. Yet even in such writings, a minimum degree of honesty requires that the views being challenged, the people defending them, and the context in which they are advanced should be identified. When this is not done, the reader is stripped of any real possibility of scrutiny. They cannot know whether what is being targeted is a genuinely existing argument or a version of it that the author has bent, trimmed and rendered easier to refute. The problem here is not merely the absence of references. The deeper problem is that the rules of the debate are set unilaterally by the author, while his supposed interlocutors are made to speak not in their own words, but in the words Okuyan puts into their mouths.

Such a method is compatible with neither scholarly seriousness nor intellectual honesty. It therefore cannot, under any circumstances, be defended in the name of Marxism. For genuine Marxism requires that opposing views be grasped and criticised as they are, not distorted in the process. Okuyan, however, does exactly the opposite: instead of confronting real theses, he condemns theses of his own making. For that reason, what we are dealing with in this book is not a scientific discussion grounded in the Marxist method, but a rigged Stalinist polemical contrivance.

[*] Kemal Okuyan, Sovyetler Birliği’nin Çözülüşü Üzerine Anti-Tezler, Yazılama Yayınevi, 3rd edn, April 2014, Istanbul.