When Ataturk ruled. Republic instead of empire. How Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey. Opinion about the ruler

Kemal Ataturk - the great reformer-revolutionary (2)

Ataturk, like a banner, will always fly in the soul of the Turkish people.
The Daily Telegraph, London

Those who intend to stay in power by the sword are doomed.
The history of any country is written primarily not with the sword, but with the plow.

Kemal ATATURK

The war with the interventionists is over. But the former capital and largest city - Istanbul - is under the control of English and French commandants. The formal head of state, Sultan Vahideddin, who has long turned into a puppet of the invaders, also resides in the city. Formally, the government of the Sultan, headed by Tevfik Pasha, also operates.

A military victory must be secured politically and diplomatically. On the agenda is the abolition of the sultanate and the proclamation of a republic. During dinner with his companions, the ghazi utters the phrase:
“The hour has come. First we will separate the Sultanate and the Caliphate, and then we will abolish the Sultanate, proving that the supreme power belongs to the Grand National Assembly (GNA).”

The action is so unusual and unexpected that even some of Mustafa Kemal’s associates do not immediately perceive this proposal. The monarch in Turkey in one person was both a secular and spiritual ruler: the Sultan and the Caliph. That is why the first step must be the separation of temporal and spiritual power.

Time doesn't wait. The VNST begins to discuss a resolution to transfer all power to parliament. Passions run high, Mustafa Kemal personally participates in the debate, and he manages to convince the undecided. Some propose a roll call vote, but the presiding ghazi rejects it:

“It is no use, I am confident that the Grand National Assembly will unanimously accept the principles aimed at preserving the independence of the nation and country forever... Accepted unanimously!” - Kemal repeated.

On November 1, 1922, at 18:30, the Sultanate in Turkey was abolished. About a year later, on October 13, 1923, a republican form of government was introduced and a government led by Mustafa Kemal was formed.

This meant a significant psychological break. Even a few years after the proclamation of the republic, peasants in Anatolia sincerely believed that Kemal Pasha was the new Sultan. What a president and a republic are was completely incomprehensible to them.

Two weeks later, Sultan Vahideddin, despite the support of the occupiers, decided to leave the country. He left for Malta on an English ship. His cousin Abdulmecid, the crown prince, agreed to become the caliph elected by the Grand National Assembly.

On November 20, 1922, Abdulmejid was proclaimed caliph of Muslims and custodian of holy places. The enthronement took place in accordance with the traditional ceremony in the presence of a parliamentary delegation. The only departure was that the new caliph was dressed in a tailcoat in its Turkish version instead of the historical mantle inherited from Sultan Mehmet, the conqueror of Byzantium.

As might be expected, the new caliph shows a desire to play an important political role. When Abdul-Mejid is not busy praying, he holds meetings with foreign diplomats.

For his part, Kemal declares that national sovereignty is not divided into parts, it belongs to the nation, and only to it alone. In these words there is an intention to carry out significant secularization. But as an experienced politician, he understands that public consciousness is not yet ripe for such changes. Some VNST deputies demand recognition of the caliph's powers.

It wasn't even a matter of the caliph's ambitions - there were enough ways to limit them. The religious character of the Turkish state, even under a republican form of government, came into irreconcilable conflict with the need for accelerated modernization of the country.

And if the Russian Orthodox Church became part of the government and never contradicted it since the time of Tsar Peter, then in Turkey the conflict had an objective nature due to the characteristics of Islam as a religion with close intertwining of religious and secular social relations. Most of the religious leaders were in opposition to the new authorities and did not approve of the republic.

According to the Russian Turkologist Kireev, the military victory allowed the “national, patriotic forces of the young republic” to provide the country with the right to further transformation and modernization of Turkish society and the state. And it was impossible without Europeanization and secularization.

The first necessary condition on the path of modernization - the liquidation of the sultanate - was fulfilled. Now it was necessary to accomplish the second thing - the creation of a secular state.

On February 29, 1924, the last traditional Friday ceremony of the last Caliph of Turkey visiting the mosque in Istanbul took place.

The next day, opening the next parliamentary meeting, Mustafa Kemal made an accusatory speech. In it, he dwelt in particular detail on the centuries-old use of the Islamic religion as a political instrument and demanded that it be returned to its “true purpose” and that “sacred religious values” be decisively saved from all sorts of “dark goals and desires.”

Within a few days, laws were passed on the abolition of Sharia legal proceedings and the transfer of waqf property (property transferred to a religious organization, most often immovable. - Author) to the disposal of the general directorate of waqfs being created. All scientific and educational institutions were transferred to the Ministry of Education, thereby creating a unified secular system of national education. This also applied to religious educational institutions. Of the 29 religious schools, only two remain.

It should be borne in mind that relations with religion in Turkey were significantly different from what it was in the USSR. Kemal did not fight against religion as such - he fought against clericalism. He believed that religion is a personal matter for everyone, that it should be freed from reckless rituals so that it does not oppose the nation. Although, as subsequent events showed, he did not win a complete victory. Today's Türkiye is experiencing something of a religious renaissance, with the secular nature of the state increasingly being questioned.

The story of the “Hat Law” clearly shows how difficult the reforms were. It would seem, well, what difference does it make what kind of headdress any citizen of the country wears? In principle, this is a personal matter. But in the conditions of Turkey at that time, the shape of the headdress acquired political significance.

Mustafa Kemal was a supporter of the European form of clothing and did not recognize the fez, the traditional Turkish headdress in the form of red caps, introduced by Sultan Mehmed II in 1829 instead of the turban.

Despite the fact that the fez allowed prostration during prayer without removing it, its introduction then caused an explosion of indignation. But gradually they got used to it so much that the ghazi hat looked very unusual. However, it was decided to make a kind of revolution in clothing. And the matter, as they say, is not just in the bag.

Kemal delivers his “hat speech” on August 27, 1925. The speech begins with well-known topics: national sovereignty, the abolition of the caliphate and the creation of a secular state. Addressing an audience where some were dressed in traditional attire and others in European costumes, Kemal offers civilized attire.

“On your feet you have boots or shoes, then trousers, a vest, a shirt, a tie and, of course, it all ends with a hat that protects you from the sun,” he states.

But if only this, perhaps his political opponents would somehow reconcile. But hats are only a prelude to something much more important and significant.

“In villages and cities, I see that the faces of women, our comrades, are completely covered... My friends, all this is the result of our selfishness... Our women feel and think, just like us. Let them show their faces to the world and look closely at the world themselves. There is nothing to be afraid of."

And this is already on the verge of a psychological revolution - a break with centuries-old tradition. Kemal has no illusions.

“We know that sheikhs, dervishes and other religious figures do not support the republic. The goal of the reforms is to transform the people of the Turkish Republic into a modern society, both in form and content... Those who do not perceive this reality will be destroyed.”

He knew what he was saying. In Sivas, Kayseri, Erzurum, Rize, Marash, Giresun, Samsun and many other cities, the hats caused a storm of protest. The demonstrations were most often led by religious figures, who were joined by the opposition. But what outraged them most was not the hats, but the fact that women were forbidden to cover their faces.

The government responded harshly, not without reason suspecting foreign interference. The city of Rize was even shelled by a cruiser. The instigators of the riots were repressed.

Kemal understood perfectly well that a woman’s covered face is only an external manifestation of her lack of rights. Including property. The emancipation of women is impossible without its legislative implementation.

Just two months after the “hat story,” a number of more important laws were adopted.

International time and calendar replace the traditional Muslim system. A new civil code was adopted, which established liberal secular principles of civil law and defined the concepts of property and ownership of real estate. The code was rewritten from the Swiss civil code, then the most advanced in Europe.

Polygamy is prohibited; only a marriage registered by a state representative is considered legal; The divorce must be submitted to the court for decision by the husband or wife. In this case, the woman is given the right to family property and inheritance. Somewhat later, women received voting rights. Any propaganda against the principles of a secular state is prohibited. But this is already from the criminal code, also adopted.

The revolutionary surge of reforms has swept away almost all landmarks. In the words of the French journalist Gentison, the people were literally “turned inside out.” New values ​​are not absorbed immediately. Some governors, mayors and police chiefs have been removed for abuse of power.
The Minister of Finance prohibited customs officers from taking bribes, but after nine months he was forced to award bonuses to those who would inform on the officials receiving them. Old habits turned out to be persistent, but it's not just them. Corruption has received a new impetus.

Public works, construction, development of Ankara, and the participation of many politicians in private enterprises created an unhealthy social climate. One of those close to Kemal went so far as to start selling cigars under the name “Gazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha.”

The problems were largely explained by the rapid pace of reforms, as well as the lag of modernization from the general democratization of society. There is a gap between ambitions and reality. This is the lot of many reformers. And the more revolutionary the changes, the more difficult and slower they come into life. As Karl Marx said, “there is no stronger fortress than the human forehead.”

How to carry out reforms if there is almost universal illiteracy in the country? The 1924 constitution made primary education compulsory and free for all Turks, women and men, and the army was encouraged to train recruits in agricultural techniques.

In 1926, school enrollment had doubled since 1923, but more than half the children, including four-fifths of girls, did not attend primary school, and the illiteracy rate was still around 90%. Teachers, “pilots of future liberation,” are tasked with solving a huge and complex task.

Their dedication, dedication, and sense of responsibility to the republic will become one of the traditions of the political life of the new Turkey. But how many years will it take them to overcome the resistance of the peasants who do not understand why girls should be taught to write and read! In 1935, out of 40 thousand villages, 35 thousand did not yet have schools, and only 350 thousand children out of 1.9 million were learning to read and write.

“If I were not the head of state, I would like to be the minister of education,” admitted Kemal, who attached paramount importance to education.

And here another reform was needed - the language. In May 1928, parliament decided to romanize the Turkish alphabet. The issue of language reform has been the subject of discussion for several generations.

The Ottoman elite spoke a mixture of Turkish with elements of Arabic and Persian and used the Arabic alphabet. But the Arabic script does not correspond to the structure of the Turkic languages. The Turkish people did not use the Ottoman language of the elite, limiting themselves to the "meager language of the shepherds", as the Sultan's government called it. Thus, language reform was long overdue and was an obligatory step.

The issue of switching to the Latin script was discussed at the Turkological Congress in Baku in March 1926. The Latin alphabet was approved by the majority of congress participants. Many around Kemal feared the reform would fail. It took decades. I couldn't wait that long for the ghazi.

“This needs to be done in three months or not done at all!” - concludes Kemal.

When the National Assembly voted on the law on the new alphabet on November 1, 1928, the movement for its development would spread throughout the country. Kemal inspires others by his own example.

“He himself acts as a teacher,” wrote the French ambassador Chambrun, “teaching officers, officials, businessmen, schoolchildren, people randomly chosen from the people, conquered both by the authority of his personality and by the magical attractiveness of the discovery that should eradicate ignorance.”

“The first professor” Kemal opened about 20 thousand schools to teach adults the new alphabet. In one year, about 500 thousand Turks will learn to write and read, and between 1928 and 1935 literacy will increase by 10%.

The government decides to punish all prison governors if a person released after six months of imprisonment has not learned to read and write. The revolution of alphabet graphics forever separated Turkey from the Ottoman Empire.

Kemal himself literally devoured books, especially historical ones, making notes in red and blue pencils. His train had a mobile library with 800 volumes. Close friends, ministers, deputies, intellectuals were invited to exchange ideas and opinions.

A French businessman who arrived in Ankara to open a branch of the Citroen automobile plant received an invitation to dinner with the President of the Republic. The young man, deeply impressed by Kemal's personality, almost had a stroke when the ghazi addressed him:

“I am an absolute zero in economics. Explain to me what should be done to feed the population."

The young republic lacked an intellectual elite and personnel. Most ministers and many deputies had a university education and were full of energy and enthusiasm, their competence was beyond doubt. But there were too few of them to complete the enormous task of modernizing the country.

Universities were created and expanded. The best teachers were invited. Professors expelled by the Nazis from Germany found refuge in Turkey, taught and conducted research at Istanbul University, pushing it to the most advanced positions. The Turkish government spared no expense on education.

First of all, it was necessary to solve economic problems. Everything here was much more difficult than the transition to hats, the Latin alphabet, and even the emancipation of women, although all these problems were closely related and could only be solved as a whole.

At first they tried liberalism, but the Turkish bourgeoisie did not want to engage in industry, preferring trade and speculative real estate transactions. Prime Minister Ismet was a supporter of statism (state capitalism). Those who nevertheless decided to invest money in production were provided with significant tax benefits and were allocated free land.

Foreign capital was actively attracted, its working conditions did not change for years, sometimes decades. The country developed rapidly, GDP growth reached 7% per year. And even the crisis of the early 1930s. did not hit the economy very hard. Two plans were adopted - industrial development and road construction. This was very important for an agricultural country.

Not everyone liked what was happening in the country. Oppositionists appeared in the government Republican People's Party. Among them are the heroes of the war of independence Rauf Orbay and Kazim Karabekir, who believed that the social and political life of Turkey should not be radically changed. They founded the opposition Progressive Republican Party, led by Kazim Karabekir.

An uprising of the reactionary forces of Sheikh Said Piran broke out in the southern part of Anatolia. Kemal blamed the opposition for this. Karabekir and other leaders of the opposition party were arrested and a trial was held. Many were sentenced to death; Karabekir was released under an amnesty a few years later.

Despite the introduced authoritarianism, Kemal remained committed to democratic development.
"What is the reason? - asks Kemal. — The government is doing everything it should, but this is clearly not enough; what needs to be done to overcome the low effectiveness of government policies?

And the ghazi declares:

“We need to create an opposition party to give more freedom to debate in the National Assembly.”

And it was created in 1930.

However, it soon became clear that the opposition party was gaining more popularity than the government one. Kemal’s inherent authoritarianism had an effect. Another attempt to create an opposition based on the European model was unsuccessful.

Other parties were allowed in Turkey in 1945 after Kemal's death, under President İnönü.

The ghazi felt very strongly about the failure of his democratic projects. He dreamed of a European-style democratic country. The following dialogue after the municipal elections of 1930 is quite remarkable:

— Which game won? - the ghazi asked a trusted person.

- Well, naturally, our party, my Pasha!

- No, no party won.

- But why, my Pasha?

“It’s the administration’s party that won, my friend.” Party of governors, sub-prefects, officials, police, gendarmerie. Remember this!

In November 1934, the Grand National Assembly adopted a law on surnames. Before this, the Turks did not have them, only names and nicknames. Everyone tried to find a Turkish surname for themselves; foreign endings were prohibited.

Prime Minister Ismet became İnönü in memory of the two battles he won during the War of Independence. The future surname of Ghazi attracted everyone's attention. Saffet Arykan, former secretary general of the Republican People's Party, suggested Turkat's surname. In Turkish, "ata" means "father" and "ancestor". Everyone approved of the choice of “ata” and its combination with the definition of “Turk”.

Still, the majority believed that although “Turkata” is grammatically more correct, it is less harmonious than Ataturk - the father of the Turks, although in Turkey they prefer the translation - the father of the nation. The Grand National Assembly on November 24, 1934 unanimously proposed that the ghazi become Atatürk. At the same time, it was established that no one else could have the surname Ataturk.

Kemal was married once. But the marriage with Latife Khan did not last long: too strong characters united in him. However, the European-educated Latife played a major role in the emancipation of Turkish women. After her divorce in 1925, she lived in Istanbul, withdrawing from public life. Every time Ataturk came there, she left. After the divorce they never saw each other.

In Turkey, they are very jealous of Ataturk’s biography (he passed away in the fall of 1938). Any deviations from its official version are met with hostility. As cinema historian Zahit Atam said, the official ideology, the army and especially Turkish television only want to see him as a hero who won the national liberation war and carried out reforms.

In November 1951, a correspondent for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet in Washington reported on Kemal's conversation with General MacArthur in Istanbul in 1932. Then the Turkish leader allegedly made the following forecast:
“The Americans... refused to engage in world politics and therefore did not allow the truce (in November 1918 - Author) to turn into genuine peace. As a result, Germany continues its attempt to subjugate Europe. The war will occur between 1940 and 1945.

The Germans occupy all of Europe except Russia and Great Britain. America would not be able to remain neutral, and its entry into the war would hasten Germany's defeat. But the real winners will be the Bolsheviks... From now on, they will become the most serious loser not only for Europe, but for all of Asia.”

If this is true, then one can only be surprised at such a prediction. But it is quite possible that this is just a beautiful legend. However, it fully corresponds to the image of Ataturk, his entire life and work.

Yuri RAIKHEL,

"Day"

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25.02.2011

Kemal Ataturk - the great reformer-revolutionary (1)

“Defending freedom and independence at any cost, if necessary, fighting to the last man, to the last drop of blood - this is the basic and immortal principle of peoples who are aware of the high price of independence and freedom.”

Kemal ATATURK

Commander

When people talk about great leaders and statesmen, they most often name the American and French presidents Franklin Roosevelt and General de Gaulle, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; communists will definitely remember Vladimir Lenin.

At the same time, another glorious name eludes our attention - Kemal Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal), the creator and first president of the Turkish Republic, a man who, with his revolutionary reforms, became a role model for many generations of statesmen - from Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi in India to Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

In Soviet times, it was fashionable to talk about the world-historical significance of the October Revolution. At the same time, naturally, it was never mentioned that all this world-historical significance was largely due to financial support from Moscow. Parties and organizations were created to spread communism, and the Land of Soviets did not disdain armed aggression.

And very close to Transcaucasia and on the southern shore of the Black Sea, a genuine revolution took place, which truly had world-historical significance. Where is communism and its offspring, the USSR, now?

A generation of people has already grown up who have never lived in it and do not always understand what Soviet realities were like. And there are fewer and fewer people who want to restore the Soviet country. But the example of the creation of a modern Turkish state after centuries of backwardness and semi-colonial existence remains worthy of imitation for many. A great cause will always have followers, and they don’t need any money to win a just cause.

A humorous newspaper was once published at the Faculty of Law of Ankara University. To the question “Who is a Turkish citizen?” students responded:

“A Turkish citizen is a person who is married under Swiss civil law, convicted under the Italian criminal code, tried under the German procedural code, governed by French administrative law and buried according to the canons of Islam.”

This is how the reforms of Kemal Ataturk, who borrowed all the most progressive things from world experience, are described in a humorous manner.

Mustafa Kemal is everywhere in Turkey. His portraits hang in government buildings and coffee shops in small towns. His statues stand in city squares and gardens. You will find his sayings in stadiums, parks, concert halls, boulevards, along roads and in forests. People listen to his praises on radio and television.

Surviving newsreels from his time are regularly shown. Mustafa Kemal's speeches are quoted by politicians, military officers, professors, trade unions and student leaders. On the desk of every student in Turkish schools is a copy of his famous speech “Nutuk” (Speech), and especially the part of it that is addressed to Turkish youth.

It is unlikely that in modern Turkey you can find anything similar to the cult of Ataturk. This is an official cult. Ataturk is one, and no one can be connected or compared with him. His biography reads like the lives of saints. More than 70 years after the death of the first President of the Republic, his admirers speak with bated breath of the penetrating gaze of his blue eyes, his tireless energy, iron determination and unyielding will.

And this is not a cult of personality imposed from above, but a tribute to the deepest respect of the people for their outstanding son and great revolutionary reformer.

The Making of a General

The Ottoman Empire, like the Russian Empire, was a peripheral European power, to which the impulses of progress that originated in Paris, London or Berlin reached slowly, with great delay, and, moreover, in a significantly distorted form.

On the one hand, cultural and, more importantly, military ties forced both St. Petersburg and Istanbul to introduce various types of Western innovations - economic, technical, military. On the other hand, in both empires there were objective restrictions on the use of everything new, associated primarily with religion.

Moreover, for an Islamic power they were, naturally, a more serious obstacle to Westernization.

Orthodoxy sometimes rejected changes not so much because they were incompatible with faith, but because they violated tradition and the existing balance of power. But the principles of modern European economics really did not fit well with some of the norms of Islam. It turned out: either faith or economic transformations.

Europeans could carry out reforms, and it was relatively easy for them to adapt to different economic conditions, while the Turks needed to take a fresh look at life and transform fundamental values.

The first reformer who tried to really learn something in Europe appeared in Istanbul only towards the end of the 18th century. Sultan Selim III began to send people to the West, invited officers and craftsmen from there, built a power vertical, and also tried to form a new bureaucracy and state industry.

Attempts at reform were made in the first half of the 19th century. The Commercial Code, copied from Napoleonic's, played a certain role in liberalizing the economy and attracting foreign capital.

Where the country has not succeeded at all is in the financial sector. First, the Crimean War undermined the already fragile budget, and then the Sultan, tired of reforms, went all out. He built a new luxurious palace and generally threw money left and right. At the end of his life, the monarch succeeded mainly only in harem affairs, producing an incredibly large number of children.

He died in 1861 at the age of 38. Meanwhile, the empire got into such debts that it was no longer possible to get out of it. In 1875, the Turkish government declared default. Naturally, after this, the interest of European business in the Ottoman Empire dropped markedly. It probably seemed to many that this state was completely unreformable and was forever doomed to vegetate under the rule of pitiful, stupid rulers.

Sick man of Europe - sick man of Europe. It is generally accepted that this is what Russian Emperor Nicholas I called the Ottoman Empire during a discussion of the “Eastern Question” on the eve of the Crimean War in a conversation with the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg Seymour.

Six years after the default, a boy, Mustafa, was born in Thessaloniki (now a Greek, but then an Ottoman city). The exact date of his birth is unknown. The official History of the Turkish Republic, published in 1935, gives the year 1880; Atatürk's best biographer, Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, sticks to the date January 14, 1881; another Turkish biographer of the future creator of modern Turkey considers his date of birth to be December 23, 1880.

The ambiguity surrounding Kemal's date of birth is not unusual. At that time, Turkey did not have a regular calendar. The birthdays of the overwhelming majority of its subjects were not celebrated. Makbule, Mustafa’s younger sister, recalled that her mother told her that he was born “that evening when there was a strong snow storm.” And the storm could have happened in December, January, or even February. Ataturk chose May 19 as his date of birth, the day the struggle for Turkish independence began.

The father of our hero, Ali Ryza Effendi, was born in 1839 in Thessaloniki. His family came from the village of Kojadzhik, which is located in the territory of modern Macedonia in the community of Centar Župa. Now there is a memorial house for this family. During his life, Ali Ryza changed several professions. In 1876 he joined the army, became an officer and was given command of a militia battalion when the Russo-Turkish War began.

The military rank of an effendi roughly corresponded to the rank of “lieutenant.” At the end of the war, he became a customs officer, then traded timber. There was no commercial success, the family lived in poverty. Ali Ryza Efendi died at the age of 49. According to his widow, his husband was crippled by commercial failures, he lost the will to live - and his body stopped resisting disease.

In 1878, Ali Ryza Efendi married Zübeyda Hanım (born in 1857 - author's note), they had five children, of whom only son Mustafa and daughter Makbule survived. Zübeyde Hanım received only a primary education, but compared to most women in the then Ottoman Empire, this was a very high educational level, since it was believed that women did not need to be able to read and write at all. Because of such education, some friends called her “Zubeyde-mullah.”

Kemal rarely spoke about his father. Nevertheless, I recalled his role in choosing an elementary school. The fact is that the parents were very worried whether Mustafa would survive, because their previous children had died. According to ancient custom, the father pulled out a saber and drew a wide circle over the newborn’s head. This is how he drove away evil spirits.

The mother swore that the surviving son would devote himself to serving Allah. Zübeyde Hanim was a very religious woman. When Mustafa turned 6 years old, he was sent to maktab (mekteb). This educational institution was considered the first stage of Muslim education.

The means of education in the maktab were not only slaps, slaps and fists, but also blows with sticks on the soles of the feet - the teacher (oja, domulla) beat the offending student with sticks “chubuks”. According to one very plausible legend, a week later the boy categorically refused to go to the maktab because the teacher beat him.

When his mother began to insist, he uttered one of his famous phrases: “I will return, but only to settle accounts with Kaymak.” That was the name of the teacher who offended him. The father agreed with his son, and Mustafa was sent to a secular school. Very soon he received a nickname there, which became his middle name - Kemal, which in Turkish, although this word is of Arabic origin, means smart, perfect. That's what his math teacher called him for his academic success and quick wit (although there are other versions of this episode - author's note).

However, he did not stay long at this school either. Ataturk himself recalled:

“Our neighbor was Major Khatip. His son Akhmet studied at a military school and wore the uniform of this school. I wanted to be dressed like him. I often met officers on the streets and realized that I had to go to military school to become like them. My mother was very afraid of military school and fiercely opposed my becoming a soldier. I entered a military school through a competition on my own, without my mother’s knowledge. Thus, I confronted her with a fait accompli.”

He studied at a school in Thessaloniki, then at the Cadet School in Manastir and the Military Academy in Istanbul (1899-1901).

To think that Mustafa decided to become a military man only because of his shiny uniform would be a great oversimplification. It can be assumed that his desire to become a military man was dictated by more complex motives than the desire to defend his homeland. A military career in the Ottoman Empire was a kind of social elevator for people from the lower classes. For them, it was quite possible to become a pasha (general) if they had certain talents and personal courage.

In 1910, Mustafa Kemal was sent to France, where he attended the Picardy military maneuvers. In 1911 he began serving in Istanbul, on the General Staff. During the Tripolitan War with the Italians, Mustafa Kemal fought with a group of his comrades in the area of ​​Tobruk and Derna. Mustafa Kemal defeated the Italians at the Battle of Tobruk on December 22, 1911, and on March 6, 1912, he was appointed commander of the Ottoman troops in Derna.

During the Balkan Wars, Kemal played a major role in the reconquest of Didymotikhon (Dimetoki) and Edirne (Andrianople) from the Bulgarians. In 1913, Mustafa Kemal was appointed to the post of military attaché in Sofia, where in 1914 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. The young officer served there until 1915, when he was sent to Tekirdag to form the 19th division.

During the First World War, Mustafa Kemal successfully commanded Turkish troops in the Battle of Çanakkale during the Dardanelles Operation of the Anglo-French troops, inspired and organized by Winston Churchill. In March 1915, the Anglo-French squadron attempted to pass through the Dardanelles, but suffered heavy losses. After this, the Entente command decided to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

The British and French, who landed at Cape Aryburnu, were stopped by the 19th Division under the command of Mustafa Kemal. The battle was very difficult. It was then that Kemal uttered the famous phrase: “I am not ordering you to advance, I am ordering you to die!” .

Mustafa Kemal was promoted to colonel. When British troops went on the offensive again in August 1915, a group of troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal won the Battle of Anafartalar. About 230 thousand Turks died in the Battle of Canakkale, but the Allies were unable to advance to Constantinople. For this, Emperor Wilhelm awarded Kemal the Iron Cross. Despite his anti-German sentiments, Mustafa was very proud of this award.

After the battles for the Dardanelles, Mustafa Kemal was promoted to division general (lieutenant general) and appointed commander of the 2nd Army in the Caucasus, where he fought quite successfully against the Russian army. After short service in Syria, Mustafa Kemal returned to Istanbul. From here, together with Crown Prince Vahidettin, Efendi went to Germany. Upon returning from this trip, he became seriously ill and was treated in Vienna and Baden-Baden.

In August 1918, as commander of the 7th Army, he successfully repelled attacks by British troops. After the end of the First World War, he returned to Istanbul, where he began working in the Ministry of Defense.

Military and diplomatic victories

Türkiye was on the verge of collapse. The British and French landed in Istanbul. The Italians occupied Cilicia, the French - Antalya. Greek troops landed in Izmir (Smyrna). According to the Treaty of Sèvres, the creation of an independent Kurdistan was envisaged, to which the south-eastern part of Turkey was to go.

As inspector of the 9th Army, on June 22, 1919, Mustafa Kemal issued a circular: “The independence of the people will be saved by the will and decision of the people themselves”, and also announced the convening of deputies for a congress in Sivas. This was followed by the Erzurum Congress (23 July - 7 August 1919), followed by the Sivas Congress, held from 4 to 11 September 1919.

Mustafa Kemal, who ensured the convening and operation of these congresses, thus determined the ways to save the country. After the occupation of Istanbul by the Entente forces, Kemal convenes a new parliament in Ankara - the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNT). Kemal was elected chairman of parliament and head of government.

It became absolutely clear to the patriots that the independence and territorial integrity of the country could only be ensured through an armed struggle against foreign intervention. The GNST and the government led by Mustafa Kemal began to implement laws aimed at the successful completion of the National Liberation War.

The capital of the country, Istanbul, was occupied by British and French troops. Entente military commandants actually ruled the city and country. The Sultan and his government were puppets and could not do anything without the consent of the occupiers. The parties of the past have completely discredited themselves. The most far-sighted and patriotic politicians and officers joined Mustafa Kemal.

Only the central part of Turkey - Anatolia - remained free. On the Anatolian plateau, Ankara became the center of the struggle for independence. The small provincial town, whose population then amounted to just over 38 thousand people, was completely unsuited for this.

Malaria, swamp fever and typhoid fever were rampant there. Not many houses were suitable for habitation. The deputies were forced to camp in the boys' school building. A shared bedroom, a dining room at strictly defined hours, a meager budget - all this made a depressing impression. Parliament sessions took place under the light of kerosene lamps.

Day and night, Mustafa Kemal stood on the podium - energetic, ambitious, sharp, cautious, invincible; a speaker who often spoke for hours. One opposition MP exclaimed: "Make him shut up or he will eventually convince me."

Until the end of 1929, there was only one old, worn-out car in Ankara, at the disposal of Kemal. The ministers traveled in phaetons along dusty, dirty streets without sidewalks. Jelal Bey, having become Minister of Economy, preferred to ride a horse. Water supply appeared only in 1926. But for those who joined the resistance movement, Ankara is a “great city.”

Chosen as the new capital, Ankara, in addition to being purely strategic and therefore seemingly temporary, performed another most important function: it represented a break with the past. The new country needed another center, so on October 13, 1923, Ankara was declared the capital. Today it is home to more than four million people. The city is the second most populous after Istanbul.

Greek troops launched an offensive. The Turkish army was created on the basis of poorly armed and, most importantly, undisciplined partisan detachments, which were often impossible to distinguish from bandits. And even under these conditions, Colonel Ismet, near the village of Inenu, managed to inflict two defeats on the Greek invaders. But these were only tactical successes. The interventionists continued their offensive. It seemed that there was no way to repel it.

And then Mustafa Kemal takes command of the army. In a difficult battle on the Sakarya River, which lasted 22 days, Turkish troops won and began a general offensive. After the capture of Izmir in September 1922, the war was effectively over. Arriving in the liberated city, Kemal declared: “From now on, Türkiye belongs to the Turks” .

For this victory, the VNST awarded Mustafa Kemal the title of marshal and the honorary title of Ghazi, which was given to great winners.

Military successes would have been impossible without a clear foreign policy. And here Mustafa Kemal discovered another facet of his talent as a statesman. The country was in international isolation, and breaking through it and finding allies became no less important a task than military problems. Soviet Russia came to Turkey's aid. Moscow and Ankara had a common enemy - the Entente, and the most dangerous - England. The commonality of goals determined the rapid rapprochement.

At the beginning of February 1920, Kemal addressed the military commanders with a message in which he analyzed the situation and proposed: "We must... make contact with the Bolsheviks in order to coordinate military operations and obtain new resources" .

In April, he sent a message to Lenin in which he proposed establishing diplomatic relations between Moscow and Ankara to participate in the “common struggle against imperialism.” In return, Kemal asks for help: an advance of five million British pounds in gold, ammunition, weapons, medicine and food.

“We ask for rifles, when you send them to us, we need rifles again, and when we receive them, we need rifles again,” he told Soviet representatives and military instructors in Ankara.

According to Soviet official data, in 1920-1922. 39 thousand rifles, 327 machine guns, 54 guns, 63 million cartridges, 147 thousand shells were delivered to Turkey. During the period of heavy fighting in the summer and autumn of 1922, a division of submarines of the Black Sea Fleet operated near the Turkish coast to support the army of Mustafa Kemal. This period of cooperation is described in detail in the memoirs of the Soviet ambassador in Ankara, Semyon Aralov.

Many of Mustafa Kemal's associates greeted the rapprochement with Bolshevik Moscow with hostility. So far there have been few grounds for mutual trust. The expansionist policy of Tsarist Russia had a red continuation. It was not for nothing that the Turkish proverb said: if the water can sometimes stop, then Russia will never stop. However, there was no way out - there was nowhere to look for other allies.

In the spring of 1920, Moscow was no less in need of external support: the Poles were approaching Kyiv, General Wrangel went on the offensive from the Crimea, Bolshevik power in Azerbaijan was very unstable, and unrest began in Dagestan. The Red Army takes no action, allowing the anti-communist government of Yerevan to suppress the uprising organized by the Armenian Bolsheviks.

In Baku in 1920, the Turkish Communist Party was created, led by Mustafa Subhi. Kemal is proactive. “We decided,” he writes, “that the most reasonable and simple step was to allow the creation of a Turkish Communist Party within the country with the help of reliable friends.” But the official newspaper “National Sovereignty” puts everything in its place:

“We would be grossly mistaken in revolutionary principles if we tried to apply Russian methods in Turkey... Blind imitation is bad in any case, but especially when it comes to revolution.”

Life story
"Ataturk" translated from Turkish means "father of the people", and in this case this is not an exaggeration. The man who bore this surname is deservedly called the father of modern Turkey.
One of the modern architectural monuments of Ankara is the Ataturk Mausoleum, built of yellowish limestone. The mausoleum stands on a hill in the city center. Vast and “severely simple,” it gives the impression of a majestic structure. Mustafa Kemal is everywhere in Turkey. His portraits hang in government buildings and coffee shops in small towns. His statues stand in city squares and gardens. You will find his sayings in stadiums, parks, concert halls, boulevards, along roads and in forests. People listen to his praises on radio and television. Surviving newsreels from his times are regularly shown. Mustafa Kemal's speeches are quoted by politicians, military officers, professors, trade unions and student leaders.
It is unlikely that in modern Turkey you can find anything similar to the cult of Ataturk. This is an official cult. Ataturk is alone, and no one can be connected with him. His biography reads like the lives of saints. More than half a century after the president's death, his admirers speak with bated breath of the penetrating gaze of his blue eyes, his tireless energy, iron determination and unyielding will.
Mustafa Kemal was born in Thessaloniki in Greece, on the territory of Macedonia. At that time, this territory was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. His father was a middle-ranking customs official, his mother a peasant woman. After a difficult childhood spent in poverty due to the early death of his father, the boy entered a state military school, then a higher military school and, in 1889, finally the Ottoman Military Academy in Istanbul. There, in addition to military disciplines, Kemal independently studied the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hobbes, and other philosophers and thinkers. At the age of 20, he was sent to the Higher Military School of the General Staff. During his studies, Kemal and his comrades founded the secret society "Vatan". "Vatan" is a Turkish word of Arabic origin, which can be translated as "homeland", "place of birth" or "place of residence". The society was characterized by a revolutionary orientation.
Kemal, unable to achieve mutual understanding with other members of society, left Vatan and joined the Committee of Union and Progress, which collaborated with the Young Turk movement (a Turkish bourgeois revolutionary movement that aimed to replace the Sultan's autocracy with a constitutional system). Kemal was personally acquainted with many key figures in the Young Turk movement, but did not participate in the 1908 coup.
When World War I broke out, Kemal, who despised the Germans, was shocked that the Sultan had made the Ottoman Empire their ally. However, contrary to his personal views, he skillfully led the troops entrusted to him on each of the fronts where he had to fight. So, at Gallipoli from the beginning of April 1915, he held off British forces for more than half a month, earning the nickname “Savior of Istanbul”; this was one of the rare victories of the Turks in the First World War. It was there that he told his subordinates:
"I'm not ordering you to attack, I'm ordering you to die!" It is important that this order was not only given, but also carried out.
In 1916, Kemal commanded the 2nd and 3rd armies, stopping the advance of Russian troops in the southern Caucasus. In 1918, at the end of the war, he commanded the 7th Army near Aleppo, fighting the last battles with the British. The victorious allies attacked the Ottoman Empire like hungry predators. It seemed that the war had dealt a mortal blow to the Ottoman Empire, which had long been known as the “Great Power of Europe” - for years of autocracy had led it to internal decay. It seemed that each of the European countries wanted to grab a piece of it for themselves. The terms of the truce were very harsh, and the allies entered into a secret agreement to divide the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain, moreover, did not waste any time and deployed its military fleet in the harbor of Istanbul. At the beginning of the First World War, Winston Churchill asked: “What will happen in this earthquake to scandalous, crumbling, decrepit Turkey, which does not have a penny in its pocket?” However, the Turkish people were able to revive their state from the ashes when Mustafa Kemal became the head of the national liberation movement. The Kemalists turned military defeat into victory, restoring the independence of a demoralized, dismembered, devastated country.
The Allies hoped to preserve the sultanate, and many in Turkey believed that the sultanate would survive under a foreign regency. Kemal wanted to create an independent state and put an end to imperial remnants. Sent to Anatolia in 1919 to quell unrest there, he instead organized an opposition and launched a movement against numerous "foreign interests." He formed a Provisional Government in Anatolia, of which he was elected president, and organized a united resistance to the invading foreigners. The Sultan declared a "holy war" against the nationalists, especially insisting on the execution of Kemal.
When the Sultan signed the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and gave the Ottoman Empire to the allies in exchange for maintaining his power over what remained, almost the entire people went over to Kemal's side. As Kemal's army advanced towards Istanbul, the Allies turned to Greece for help. After 18 months of heavy fighting, the Greeks were defeated in August 1922.
Mustafa Kemal and his comrades well understood the country's true place in the world and its true weight. Therefore, at the height of his military triumph, Mustafa Kemal refused to continue the war and limited himself to holding what he believed to be Turkish national territory.
On November 1, 1922, the Grand National Assembly dissolved the Sultanate of Mehmed VI, and on October 29, 1923, Mustafa Kemal was elected president of the new Turkish Republic. Proclaimed president, Kemal, in fact, without hesitation became a real dictator, outlawing all rival political parties and faking his re-election until his death. Kemal used his absolute power for reforms, hoping to turn the country into a civilized state.
Unlike many other reformers, the Turkish President was convinced that it was pointless to simply modernize the façade. In order for Türkiye to survive in the post-war world, it was necessary to make fundamental changes to the entire structure of society and culture. It is debatable how successful the Kemalists were in this task, but it was set and carried out under Ataturk with determination and energy.
The word “civilization” is endlessly repeated in his speeches and sounds like a spell: “We will follow the path of civilization and come to it... Those who linger will be drowned by the roaring stream of civilization... Civilization is such a strong fire that whoever ignores it will be burned and destroyed... We will be civilized, and we will be proud of it...". There is no doubt that among the Kemalists, “civilization” meant the unconditional and uncompromising introduction of the bourgeois social system, way of life and culture of Western Europe.
The new Turkish state adopted a new form of government in 1923 with a president, parliament, and constitution. The one-party system of Kemal's dictatorship lasted for more than 20 years, and only after the death of Atatürk was replaced by a multi-party system.
Mustafa Kemal saw in the caliphate a connection with the past and Islam. Therefore, after the liquidation of the sultanate, he also destroyed the caliphate. The Kemalists openly opposed Islamic orthodoxy, clearing the way for the country to become a secular state. The ground for the Kemalist reforms was prepared by the spread of European philosophical and social ideas that were advanced for Turkey, and by the increasingly widespread violation of religious rituals and prohibitions. The Young Turk officers considered it a matter of honor to drink cognac and eat it with ham, which looked like a terrible sin in the eyes of zealots of Islam;
Even the first Ottoman reforms limited the power of the ulema and took away some of their influence in the field of law and education. But theologians retained enormous power and authority. After the destruction of the sultanate and caliphate, they remained the only institution of the old regime that resisted the Kemalists.
Kemal, by the power of the President of the Republic, abolished the ancient position of Sheikh-ul-Islam - the first ulema in the state, the Ministry of Sharia, closed individual religious schools and colleges, and later banned Sharia courts. The new order was enshrined in the republican constitution.
All religious institutions became part of the state apparatus. The Department of Religious Institutions dealt with mosques, monasteries, the appointment and removal of imams, muezzins, preachers, and the supervision of muftis. Religion was made, as it were, a department of the bureaucratic machine, and the ulema - civil servants. The Koran was translated into Turkish. The call to prayer began to be heard in Turkish, although the attempt to abandon Arabic in prayers did not succeed - after all, in the Koran, in the end, it was important not only the content, but also the mystical sound of incomprehensible Arabic words. The Kemalists declared Sunday, not Friday, as a day off; the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul was turned into a museum. In the rapidly growing capital Ankara, practically no religious buildings were built. Across the country, authorities looked askance at the emergence of new mosques and welcomed the closure of old ones.
The Turkish Ministry of Education took control of all religious schools. The madrasah that existed at the Suleiman Mosque in Istanbul, which trained ulema of the highest rank, was transferred to the Faculty of Theology of Istanbul University. In 1933, the Institute of Islamic Studies was opened on the basis of this faculty.
However, resistance to laicism - secular reforms - turned out to be stronger than expected. When the Kurdish uprising began in 1925, it was led by one of the Dervish sheikhs, who called for the overthrow of the “godless republic” and the restoration of the caliphate.
In Turkey, Islam existed on two levels - formal, dogmatic - the religion of the state, school and hierarchy, and folk, adapted to the life, rituals, beliefs, traditions of the masses, which found its expression in dervishdom. The inside of a Muslim mosque is simple and even ascetic. There is no altar or sanctuary in it, since Islam does not recognize the Sacraments of communion and ordination. Common prayers are a disciplinary act of community to express submission to the one, immaterial and distant Allah. Since ancient times, the orthodox faith, austere in its worship, abstract in its doctrine, conformist in its politics, has been unable to satisfy the emotional and social needs of a large part of the population. It turned to the cult of saints and to the dervishes who remained close to the people in order to replace or add something to the formal religious ritual. Ecstatic gatherings with music, songs and dances took place in dervish monasteries.
In the Middle Ages, dervishes often acted as leaders and inspirers of religious and social uprisings. At other times they penetrated the government apparatus and exerted enormous, albeit hidden, influence on the actions of ministers and sultans. There was fierce competition among the dervishes for influence on the masses and on the state apparatus. Thanks to their close connection with local variants of guilds and workshops, the dervishes could influence artisans and traders. When reforms began in Turkey, it became clear that it was not the ulama theologians, but the dervishes who were providing the greatest resistance to laicism.
The struggle sometimes took brutal forms. In 1930, Muslim fanatics killed a young army officer, Kubilai. They surrounded him, threw him to the ground and slowly sawed off his head with a rusty saw, shouting: “Allah is great!”, while the crowd cheered their deed. Since then, Kubilai has been considered a kind of “saint” of Kemalism.
The Kemalists dealt with their opponents without mercy. Mustafa Kemal attacked the dervishes, closed their monasteries, dissolved their orders, and banned meetings, ceremonies and special clothing. The Criminal Code prohibited political associations based on religion. This was a blow to the very depths, although it did not fully achieve the goal: many dervish orders were deeply conspiratorial at that time.
Mustafa Kemal changed the capital of the state. Ankara became it. Even during the struggle for independence, Kemal chose this city for his headquarters, since it was connected by rail with Istanbul and at the same time lay out of reach of enemies. The first session of the national assembly took place in Ankara, and Kemal declared it the capital. He did not trust Istanbul, where everything was reminiscent of the humiliations of the past and too many people were associated with the old regime.
In 1923, Ankara was a small commercial center with a population of about 30 thousand souls. Its position as the center of the country was subsequently strengthened thanks to the construction of railways in radial directions.
The Times newspaper wrote mockingly in December 1923: “Even the most chauvinistic Turks recognize the inconvenience of life in a capital where half a dozen flickering electric lights represent public lighting, where there is hardly any water running from the tap in the houses, where there is a donkey or a horse.” tied to the bars of the little house that serves as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where open gutters run down the middle of the street, where modern fine arts are limited to the consumption of bad raki and the playing of a brass band, where Parliament sits in a house no bigger than a playing room. cricket."
- Then Ankara could not offer suitable housing for diplomatic representatives; their excellencies preferred to rent sleeping cars at the station, shortening their stay in the capital in order to quickly leave for Istanbul.
Despite the poverty in the country, Kemal stubbornly pulled Turkey by the ears into civilization. For this purpose, the Kemalists decided to introduce European clothing into everyday life. In one of his speeches, Mustafa Kemal explained his intentions this way: “It was necessary to ban the fez, which sat on the heads of our people as a symbol of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, hatred of progress and civilization, and to replace it with a hat - a headdress that is used by all civilized people.” peace. Thus we demonstrate that the Turkish nation in its thinking, as in other aspects, does not in any way shy away from civilized social life." Or in another speech: "Friends! Civilized international clothing is worthy and suitable for our nation, and we will all wear it. Boots or shoes, trousers, shirts and ties, jackets. Of course, everything ends with what we wear on our heads. This The headdress is called a "hat".
A decree was issued that required officials to wear a costume “common to all civilized nations of the world.” At first, ordinary citizens were allowed to dress as they wanted, but then fezzes were outlawed.
For a modern European, the forced change of one headdress to another may seem comical and annoying. For a Muslim this was a matter of great importance. With the help of clothing, a Muslim Turk separated himself from the infidels. The fez at that time was a common headdress for Muslim city dwellers. All other clothes could be European, but the symbol of Ottoman Islam remained on the head - the fez.
The reaction to the actions of the Kemalists was curious. The rector of Al-Azhar University and the Chief Mufti of Egypt wrote at the time: “It is clear that a Muslim who wants to resemble a non-Muslim by adopting his clothes will end up adopting his beliefs and actions. Therefore, one who wears a hat out of inclination to religion, another and out of contempt for one’s own, is an infidel.... Isn’t it crazy to give up one’s national clothes in order to accept the clothes of Other peoples?” Statements of this kind were not published in Turkey, but many shared them.
The change of national clothing has shown in history the desire of the weak to resemble the strong, and the backward to resemble the developed. Medieval Egyptian chronicles say that after the great Mongol conquests of the 12th century, even the Muslim sultans and emirs of Egypt, who repelled the Mongol invasion, began to wear long hair, like Asian nomads.
When the Ottoman sultans began to carry out reforms in the first half of the 19th century, they first of all dressed the soldiers in European uniforms, that is, in the costumes of the victors. It was then that a headdress called a fez was introduced instead of a turban. It became so popular that a century later it became the emblem of Muslim orthodoxy.
A humorous newspaper was once published at the Faculty of Law of Ankara University. To the editor’s question “Who is a Turkish citizen?” The students answered: "A Turkish citizen is a person who is married under Swiss civil law, convicted under the Italian criminal code, tried under the German procedural code, this person is governed on the basis of French administrative law and is buried according to the canons of Islam."
Even many decades after the introduction of new legal norms by the Kemalists, a certain artificiality is felt in their application to Turkish society.
Swiss civil law, revised in relation to the needs of Turkey, was adopted in 1926. Some legal reforms were carried out earlier, under the Tanzimat (transformations of the mid-19th century) and the Young Turks. However, in 1926, secular authorities for the first time dared to invade the reserve of the ulema - family and religious life. Instead of the “will of Allah,” the decisions of the National Assembly were proclaimed to be the source of law.
The adoption of the Swiss Civil Code has changed a lot in family relations. By prohibiting polygamy, the law gave women the right to divorce, introduced the divorce process, and eliminated legal inequality between men and women. Of course, the new code had very specific specific features. Take, for example, the fact that he gave a woman the right to demand a divorce from her husband if he hid that he was unemployed. However, the conditions of society and the traditions established over centuries restrained the application of new marriage and family norms in practice. For a girl who wants to get married, virginity was (and is) considered an indispensable condition. If the husband discovered that his wife was not a virgin, he would send her back to her parents, and for the rest of her life, she would bear the shame, like her entire family. Sometimes she was killed without mercy by her father or brother.
Mustafa Kemal strongly supported the emancipation of women. Women were admitted to commercial faculties during the First World War, and in the 20s they appeared in the classrooms of the humanities faculty of Istanbul University. They were allowed to be on the decks of ferries that crossed the Bosphorus, although previously they were not allowed out of their cabins, and were allowed to ride in the same sections of trams and railway cars as men.
In one of his speeches, Mustafa Kemal attacked the veil. “It causes a woman great suffering during the heat,” he said. “Men! This happens because of our selfishness. Let’s not forget that women have the same moral concepts as we do.” The President demanded that "the mothers and sisters of a civilized people" behave appropriately. “The custom of covering women’s faces makes our nation a laughing stock,” he believed. Mustafa Kemal decided to implement the emancipation of women within the same limits as in Western Europe. Women gained the right to vote and be elected to municipalities and parliament
In addition to civil law, the country received new codes for all sectors of life. The criminal code was influenced by the laws of fascist Italy. Articles 141-142 were used to crack down on communists and all leftists. Kemal did not like communists. The great Nazim Hikmet spent many years in prison for his commitment to communist ideas.
Kemal did not like Islamists either. The Kemalists removed the article “The religion of the Turkish state is Islam” from the constitution. The Republic, both according to the constitution and laws, has become a secular state.
Mustafa Kemal, knocking the fez off the Turk's head and introducing European codes, tried to instill in his compatriots a taste for sophisticated entertainment. On the first anniversary of the republic, he threw a ball. Most of the men gathered were officers. But the president noticed that they did not dare to invite the ladies to dance. The women refused them and were embarrassed. The President stopped the orchestra and exclaimed: “Friends, I can’t imagine that in the whole world there is at least one woman who can refuse to dance with a Turkish officer! Now go ahead, invite the ladies!” And he himself set an example. In this episode, Kemal plays the role of Turkish Peter I, who also forcibly introduced European customs.
The transformations also affected the Arabic alphabet, which is indeed convenient for the Arabic language, but not suitable for Turkish. The temporary introduction of the Latin alphabet for Turkic languages ​​in the Soviet Union prompted Mustafa Kemal to do the same. The new alphabet was prepared in a few weeks. The President of the Republic appeared in a new role - a teacher. During one of the holidays, he addressed the audience: “My friends! Our rich harmonious language will be able to express itself in new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from the incomprehensible icons that have held our minds in an iron grip for centuries. We must quickly learn new Turkish letters “We must teach them to our fellow countrymen, women and men, porters and boatmen. This must be considered a patriotic duty. Do not forget that it is shameful for a nation to consist of ten to twenty percent literate people and eighty to ninety percent illiterate people.”
The National Assembly passed a law introducing a new Turkish alphabet and banning the use of Arabic from January 1, 1929.
The introduction of the Latin alphabet not only facilitated the education of the population. It marked a new stage in the break with the past, a blow to Muslim beliefs.
According to the mystical teachings brought to Turkey from Iran in the Middle Ages and adopted by the Bektashi dervish order, the image of Allah is the face of a person, the sign of a person is his language, which is expressed by 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet. "They contain all the secrets of Allah, man and eternity." For an orthodox Muslim, the text of the Qur'an, including the language in which it is written and the script in which it is printed, is considered eternal and indestructible.
The Turkish language in Ottoman times became difficult and artificial, borrowing not only words, but also entire expressions, even grammatical rules from Persian and Arabic. Over the years he became more and more pompous and inelastic. During the reign of the Young Turks, the press began to use a somewhat simplified Turkish language. This was required for political, military, and propaganda purposes.
After the introduction of the Latin alphabet, opportunities opened up for deeper language reform. Mustafa Kemal founded the linguistic society. It has set itself the task of reducing and gradually removing Arabic and grammatical borrowings, many of which have become entrenched in the Turkish cultural language.
This was followed by a bolder attack on the Persian and Arabic words themselves, accompanied by overlaps. Arabic and Persian were the classical languages ​​of the Turks and contributed the same elements to Turkish as Greek and Latin contributed to European languages. The radicals of the linguistic society were opposed to Arabic and Persian words as such, even though they formed a significant part of the language spoken by the Turks every day. The society prepared and published a list of foreign words condemned for eviction. Meanwhile, researchers collected “purely Turkish” words from dialects, other Turkic languages, and ancient texts to find a replacement. When nothing suitable was found, new words were invented. Terms of European origin, equally alien to the Turkish language, were not persecuted, and were even imported to fill the void created by the abandonment of Arabic and Persian words.
Reform was needed, but not everyone agreed with extreme measures. An attempt to separate from a thousand-year-old cultural heritage caused impoverishment rather than purification of the language. In 1935, a new directive stopped for some time the expulsion of familiar words and restored some of the Arabic and Persian borrowings.
Be that as it may, the Turkish language has changed significantly in less than two generations. For a modern Turk, sixty-year-old documents and books with numerous Persian and Arabic designs bear the stamp of archaism and the Middle Ages. Turkish youth are separated from the relatively recent past by a high wall. The results of the reform are beneficial. In the new Turkey, the language of newspapers, books, and government documents is approximately the same as the spoken language of the cities.
In 1934, it was decided to abolish all titles of the old regime and replace them with the titles "Mr" and "Madam". At the same time, on January 1, 1935, surnames were introduced. Mustafa Kemal received the surname Atatürk (father of the Turks) from the Grand National Assembly, and his closest associate, the future president and leader of the Republican People's Party Ismet Pasha - Inönü - after the place where he won a major victory over the Greek interventionists.
Although surnames in Turkey are a recent thing, and everyone could choose something worthy for themselves, the meaning of surnames is as diverse and unexpected as in other languages. Most Turks have come up with quite suitable surnames for themselves. Akhmet the Grocer became Akhmet the Grocer. Ismail the postman remained the Postman, the basket maker remained the Basket Man. Some chose surnames such as Polite, Smart, Handsome, Honest, Kind. Others picked up Deaf, Fat, Son of a Man Without Five Fingers. There is, for example, the One with a Hundred Horses, or the Admiral, or the Son of the Admiral. Last names like Crazy or Naked could have come from an argument with a government official. Someone used the official list of recommended surnames, and this is how the Real Turk, the Big Turk, and the Severe Turk appeared.
The last names indirectly pursued another goal. Mustafa Kemal sought historical arguments to restore the Turks' sense of national pride, undermined over the previous two centuries by almost continuous defeats and internal collapse. It was primarily the intelligentsia who spoke about national dignity. Her instinctive nationalism was defensive in nature towards Europe. One can imagine the feelings of a Turkish patriot of those days who read European literature and almost always found the word "Turk" used with a tinge of disdain. It is true that the educated Turks forgot how they or their ancestors despised their neighbors from the comforting position of “superior” Muslim civilization and imperial power.
When Mustafa Kemal uttered the famous words: “What a blessing to be a Turk!” - they fell on fertile soil. His sayings sounded like a challenge to the rest of the world; They also show that any statements must be coupled with specific historical conditions. This saying of Ataturk is now repeated an infinite number of times in every way, with or without reason.
During the time of Ataturk, the “solar language theory” was put forward, which stated that all languages ​​of the world originated from Turkish (Turkic). The Sumerians, Hittites, Etruscans, even the Irish and Basques were declared Turks. One of the “historical” books from the time of Ataturk reported the following: “There was once a sea in Central Asia. It dried up and became a desert, forcing the Turks to begin nomadism... The eastern group of Turks founded the Chinese civilization...”
Another group of Turks supposedly conquered India. The third group migrated south - to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and along the North African coast to Spain. The Turks, who settled in the Aegean and Mediterranean areas, according to the same theory, founded the famous Cretan civilization. Ancient Greek civilization came from the Hittites, who, of course, were Turks. The Turks also penetrated deep into Europe and, crossing the sea, settled the British Isles. “These migrants surpassed the peoples of Europe in arts and knowledge, saved the Europeans from cave life and set them on the path of mental development.”
This is the stunning history of the world that was studied in Turkish schools in the 50s. Its political meaning was defensive nationalism, but its chauvinistic overtones were visible to the naked eye
In the 1920s, the Kemal government did a lot to support private initiative. But socio-economic reality has shown that this method in its pure form does not work in Turkey. The bourgeoisie rushed into trade, house-building, speculation, and was engaged in foam production, thinking last of all about national interests and the development of industry. The regime of officers and officials, who retained a certain contempt for traders, then watched with increasing displeasure as private entrepreneurs ignored calls to invest money in the industry.
The global economic crisis struck, hitting Turkey hard. Mustafa Kemal turned to the policy of state regulation of the economy. This practice was called statism. The government extended state ownership to large sectors of industry and transport, and on the other hand opened markets to foreign investors. This policy will later be repeated in dozens of variants by many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the 1930s, Türkiye ranked third in the world in terms of industrial development.
However, the Kemalist reforms extended mainly to the cities. Only at the very edge did they touch the village, where almost half of the Turks still live, and during the reign of Ataturk the majority lived.
Several thousand “people's rooms” and several hundred “people's houses”, designed to propagate the ideas of Ataturk, never brought them to the heart of the population.
The cult of Ataturk in Turkey is official and widespread, but it can hardly be considered unconditional. Even the Kemalists who swear allegiance to his ideas actually go their own way. The Kemalist claim that every Turk loves Ataturk is just a myth. Mustafa Kemal's reforms had many enemies, open and secret, and attempts to abandon some of his reforms do not stop in our time.
Left-wing politicians constantly recall the repressions suffered by their predecessors under Atatürk and consider Mustafa Kemal simply a strong bourgeois leader.
The stern and brilliant soldier and great statesman Mustafa Kemal had both virtues and human weaknesses. He had a sense of humor, loved women and fun, but retained the sober mind of a politician. He was respected in society, although his personal life was scandalous and promiscuous. Kemal is often compared to Peter I. Like the Russian emperor, Ataturk had a weakness for alcohol. He died on November 10, 1938 from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 57. His early death was a tragedy for Turkey.

How did the reforms in Turkey, rightly associated with the name of the great Kemal Ataturk, begin? Turkey survived the First World War, the occupation of part of the territory, the war of liberation against the invaders, the fall of the Young Turks and the final liberation from the Sultan's regime, the collapse of the empire. The Ottoman Empire was a state ravaged by war and internal contradictions. As a result of the war, Türkiye lost almost all of Eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. Nearly three million men were drafted into the army, leading to a sharp decline in agricultural production. The country was on the verge of collapse. The victorious allies attacked the Ottoman Empire like hungry predators. It seemed that the war had dealt a mortal blow to the Ottoman Empire, which had long been known as the “Great Power of Europe.” It seemed that each of the European countries wanted to snatch a piece of it for themselves. The terms of the truce were very harsh, and the allies entered into a secret agreement to divide the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain, moreover, did not waste any time and deployed its military fleet in the harbor of Istanbul. At the beginning of the First World War, Winston Churchill asked:

“What will happen in this earthquake to scandalous, collapsing, decrepit Turkey, which does not have a penny in its pocket?”

During these years, an understanding of the need to create a new Turkey began to take shape. The spokesman for these interests was Mustafa Kemal37.

Mustafa Kemal was born in Thessaloniki in Greece, on the territory of Macedonia. At that time, this territory was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. His father was a middle-ranking customs official, his mother a peasant woman. After a difficult childhood spent in poverty due to the early death of his father, the boy entered a state military school, then a higher military school and, in 1889, finally the Ottoman Military Academy in Istanbul. There, in addition to military disciplines, Kemal independently studied the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hobbes, and other philosophers and thinkers. Even at school, for his success in studies, he was called by his middle name - Kemal (valuable, impeccable). In 1905 he graduated from the General Staff Academy in Istanbul, after which he was sent to serve with the rank of captain in Damascus38.

At the age of 20, Mustafa Kemal was sent to the Higher Military School of the General Staff. The military profession chosen by Kemal was of great importance for his overall political development. Economic stagnation, political lawlessness, the dominance of foreign capital, and the disintegration of the regime gave rise to a desire among progressive youth, especially military school cadets, to find a way out of this situation. If not revolutionary, then at least liberal ideas penetrated into educational institutions from the West, combined with the enormous influence of Turkish educators of the 19th century. - progressive writers and poets Ibrahim Shinasi, Namık Kemal, Ziya Pasha, Tevfik Fikret and others - developed patriotic feelings and national identity among young students. An important role in this process was played by the fact that in feudal Turkey the army was the only consistently centralized part of the state organism. The military intelligentsia was the first to act as a spokesman for the interests of the still nascent national bourgeoisie. Representatives of the military intelligentsia were also the first participants in underground circles, which later joined the secret Young Turk organization “Unity and Progress”39.

During his studies, Kemal and his comrades founded the secret society "Vatan". "Vatan" is a Turkish word of Arabic origin, which can be translated as "homeland", "place of birth" or "place of residence". The society was characterized by a revolutionary orientation.

And the reason was that the empire experienced an economic, political and military crisis. Abdul-Hamid II (1876-1909) sat on the Sultan's throne - despite his opposition to any reforms, he was forced to introduce a constitution in December 1876, but extremely limited its effectiveness. The Ottoman Empire was proclaimed as a single state, not subject to dismemberment. This situation came into conflict with the national liberation movement in all regions of the empire40. Repeated uprisings were suppressed with monstrous cruelty by the commanders of the troops, who adhered to the official doctrine that considered all subjects of the Sultan, regardless of nationality and religion, as members of one society. During the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. Turkey suffered a number of major defeats and was forced to recognize the complete independence and autonomy of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania under the Berlin Treaty. Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia. England, under the pretext of helping Turkey, occupied Cyprus, Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1881, France captured Tunisia, a former colony of Turkey, and in 1882, England occupied Egypt. In the year of Mustafa’s birth, the Ottoman Empire declared itself financially bankrupt and, according to the Sultan’s Muharrem Decree, agreed to the creation of the Office of the Ottoman Public Debt, into whose jurisdiction a portion of state revenues was transferred to foreigners41. Turkey had lost its independence in foreign policy affairs and in the international arena now acted not as a subject, but as an object of policy of the great powers, who were preparing to divide the inheritance of the “Bosphorus patient”.

Kemal, unable to achieve mutual understanding with other members of society, left Vatan and joined the Committee of Union and Progress, which collaborated with the Young Turk movement (a Turkish bourgeois revolutionary movement that aimed to replace the Sultan's autocracy with a constitutional system). Kemal was personally acquainted with many key figures in the Young Turk movement, but did not participate in the 1908 coup.

Kemal's independent position and his popularity in the army worried the leadership of the Young Turks. In an effort to somehow distance him from the government and at the same time reward him for his assistance in restoring Young Turk rule, the authorities sent him to France in the summer of 1909. France made a huge impression on the young officer and contributed to his desire to adopt the best achievements of the West. During the period of the Tripolitan and Balkan wars (1911-1913), Kemal came to the conclusion that it was impossible to preserve the multinational Ottoman Empire in its previous form, and at the same time became convinced of the effectiveness of the partisan movement. When World War I broke out, Kemal, who despised the Germans, was shocked that the Sultan had made the Ottoman Empire their ally. However, contrary to his personal views, he skillfully led the troops entrusted to him on each of the fronts where he had to fight. Thus, at Gallipoli, from the beginning of April 1915, he held off British forces for more than half a month, earning the nickname “Savior of Istanbul.” This was one of the rare victories of the Turks in the First World War. It was there that he told his subordinates: “I am not ordering you to attack, I am ordering you to die!” It is important that this order was not only given, but also carried out. In 1916, Kemal commanded the 2nd and 3rd armies, stopping the advance of Russian troops in the southern Caucasus. In 1918, at the end of the war, he commanded the 7th Army near Aleppo, fighting the last battles with the British and knowing full well that Turkey had lost the war42.

At the end of the First World War, there was a real danger of the disappearance of Turkey as a state. However, the Turkish people were able to revive their power from the ashes, turning away from the Sultan and making Mustafa Kemal their leader. The Kemalists turned military defeat into victory, restoring the independence of a demoralized, dismembered, devastated country.

Sent to Anatolia in 1919 to quell the unrest there, he instead organized an opposition and launched a movement against numerous “foreign interests.”43 He formed a Provisional Government in Anatolia, of which he was elected president, and organized a united resistance to the invading foreigners. The Sultan declared a "holy war" against the nationalists, especially insisting on the execution of Kemal.

When the Sultan signed the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and gave the Ottoman Empire to the allies in exchange for maintaining his power over what remained, almost the entire people went over to Kemal's side. After Kemal's army marched towards Istanbul, the Allies turned to Greece for help. After 18 months of heavy fighting, the Greeks were defeated in August 192244.

Subsequently, he said: “While in Istanbul, I could not imagine that misfortunes could awaken our people so much and in such a short time.” He began to hold congresses of “Societies for the Defense of Rights.” A major political event was his speech at the opening of the Erzurum Congress on July 23, 1919. The most important of the fundamental provisions contained in it concerned the issues of the indivisibility of the country and its right to independent existence, the primacy of Anatolia in relation to Istanbul and the need to convene a national assembly and form government “based on the nation”45.

Then in September, at the All-Turkish Sivas Congress, national patriotic organizations - Societies for the Protection of Rights - that emerged in various regions of Anatolia and Rumelia, approved the principle of national sovereignty. Thus, a fundamentally new concept of power began to be put into practice: power does not come from the Creator and belongs not to his viceroy - the monarch, but to the people. However, the idea of ​​a republic was still far from being accepted, and Mustafa Kemal understood this. Most of the participants in this congress could not yet imagine the further development of events without the participation of the Sultan's power.

The Sivas Congress united all the Societies into a single organization - the Society for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia and elected its governing body

A representative committee of 16 people (headed by Kemal) as an independent government, opposing itself to Istanbul. The committee stated that the goal of the movement is “the unification of all Muslim citizens in the struggle for the integrity of the Ottoman homeland, the inviolability of the high sultanate and caliphate, and the independence of the nation.” The Committee also acquired powers based on the protection of the independence and indivisibility of the country within the boundaries of the Mudros Truce and the demand for the resignation of the government of Ferid Pasha46.

At this congress, Kemal completed the development of the foundations of a national program, which had begun in Erzurum, later formalized under the name

National vow. These events went down in history as the beginning of the Kemalist revolution.

Mustafa Kemal and his comrades well understood the country's true place in the world and its true weight. Therefore, at the height of his military triumph, Mustafa Kemal refused to continue the war and limited himself to holding what he believed to be Turkish national territory.

The formation of the state system of the new Turkey went through several stages. As Turkey's military and international position strengthened, Kemal's position in the Majlis also strengthened. The first victory over the interventionists near the village of Inenu in January 1921 allowed Kemal to consolidate in the Law on Basic Organizations the principle of national sovereignty and the unconditional supreme power of the Majlis. In response to attempts to challenge this position, Kemal vigorously declared: “The nation has acquired sovereignty. And she acquired it through rebellion. The acquired sovereignty is not, for any reason or in any way, given back or entrusted to anyone else. To take away sovereignty, you need to use the same means that were used to acquire it. On August 5, 1921, the VNST appointed Kemal as supreme commander with unlimited powers.

But on November 1, 1922, the VNST adopted a law on the separation of secular power from religious power and the liquidation of the sultanate. Mehmed VI fled abroad. This was a historic victory over feudal reaction. Kemal publicly argued that objectively events had already led the people to understand the need to overthrow the sultanate. But now we need to go further, turn Turkey into a modern country and move in step with civilization.

Subsequent legislative acts, which completely completed the transformation of the state system, fell to the lot of the second Majlis, where the right-wing opposition was much weaker. October 29, 1923

Following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, the Majlis proclaimed Turkey a republic, and on March 3, 1924 the caliphate was abolished.

Kemal's understanding of the principle of national sovereignty included a new interpretation of the Turkish national idea. Kemal’s nationalism was much more progressive than the pan-Ottoman and pan-Muslim quasi-nationalism of the “new Ottomans” or the Turkism of the Young Turks. Kemal clearly limited Turkism from the doctrine of pan-Turkism, which was close to it in its social roots, but, in essence, anti-national. In Kemal’s understanding, Turkism is nothing more than Turkish nationalism within the borders of Turkey, but it is purely Turkish, different from Ottoman or Islamic. "Nation,

He said, “it changed the age-old forms and even the essence of the relationships established between the people belonging to it... The nation united its sons not by the ties of religious doctrine, but by belonging to the Turkish nationality.”

The defense of the gains of the Kemalist revolution had to be carried out, of course, by the Kemalist party. Kemal, as the recognized leader of the Turkish people, also remained the main conductor of all further reforms, so that a long series of bourgeois reforms all proceeded under the auspices and on the initiative of Kemal. Having found the long-awaited peace, Türkiye delved into internal affairs. Kemal steadfastly fought off all attacks on him personally and his policies. Having become the country's president on October 29, 1923, he was then invariably re-elected to this post every four years. Usually he announced his desire to address the nation on a particular issue.

“I am confident,” he said, “that my work and actions have won the trust and love of my people.”

On November 10, the 74th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, was very solemnly and thoroughly celebrated in Turkey. He died at the age of 57 and is buried in a mausoleum in Ankara

Everyone in Turkey knows the canonized biography of Ataturk (as was once the case with the biography of the Soviet idol leaders Lenin and Stalin) almost by heart, but in reality it is full of mysteries and inconsistencies. So, there is no reliable information about the date of birth - either 1880 or 1881. Mustafa himself chose May 19 as his birthday - the day the struggle for independence began.

The place of birth is also questioned. Thessaloniki? Traditionally - yes, Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city. There is no documentary information about the nationality of Mustafa's parents. It is possible, or most likely, that the father was Albanian by origin. It is widely believed that he belonged to the Jewish sect “Dönme”... His mother seems to be Macedonian, but there is also no exact information. Biographers claim that Mustafa was an active, hot-tempered, independent, uncompromising child. Of course, purposeful and independent. From the age of 12 he received his education at a preparatory military school and further up to the Ottoman Academy of the General Staff. He criticized the Abdulhamid regime and participated in the Young Turk coup...
Without a doubt, Ataturk was the greatest state, political and military leader of his country. He was able to “pull the Ottoman Empire out of the hole” after defeat in the First World War and lay the foundations of a modern state. Atatürk managed to gather the remnants of the troops of the former Caucasian Front and put them together into “kuvvval-i milliye” - “national forces”, creating a bourgeois-nationalist movement, later called “Kemalist”. It was directed primarily against the Greeks and Armenians, the Republic of Armenia. The main goal of the Kemalist movement was to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. From the first day of the start of the “movement,” Kemal declared that “Turkey will not cede an inch of land to Armenia” and will “wage a decisive struggle against any movement that sets itself the goal of creating an independent Armenia.” He formulated his territorial claims on the opening day of the Grand National Assembly - April 23, 1920: “Turkey’s borders should include Kars, Batum, Ardahan in the Caucasus, Mosul and Diyarbakir in Mesopotamia.”
Speaking about the war with Armenia, Kemal was extremely conceptual and bloodthirsty: “We must destroy the Armenian army and the Armenian state.” In the captured Armenian cities and villages, he essentially continued the genocide organized by the Young Turks.
In 1920-1921 Kemal began a rapprochement with Soviet Russia, which was due to the well-known kinship of souls with Lenin and the anti-Entente position of Turkey. Half-starved Russia more than generously, royally, provided assistance to Turkey in two steps. The rapprochement led to friendly embraces - negotiations in Moscow and the Moscow Treaty of 1921. Let us remember that the agreement was signed without the participation of Armenia. Ataturk beat Lenin and Russia and achieved valuable territorial gains mainly at the expense of Armenia. In Transcaucasia, he received 26 thousand sq. km, of which 24 thousand were the territory of the Republic of Armenia.
Subsequently, Kemal continued to cheat no less successfully: on the one hand, he eloquently declared his unremitting desire to maintain relations with the USSR, on the other, he pursued a real and effective policy of rapprochement with Europe and the USA.
In recent weeks, almost all Turkish publications, as well as some foreign ones, have devoted articles to the Turkish leader, whose life and death are full of secrets. In “democratic” Turkey they are clearly not trying to solve them.

“Bin Yasha, Bish Yasha, Mustafa Kemal Pasha”

“Bin Yasha, bish Yasha, Mustafa Kemal Pasha,” “thousands of years of life to you, our beloved Ataturk,” sings Hamid, a Turkish bagel seller on the corner of one of the Istanbul streets. On November 10, at exactly 09:05, it suspends its trading and freezes to the long wail of sirens that sounds throughout the country in honor of the next anniversary of Atatürk’s death. Along with him, passersby on the street, schoolchildren, housewives, market traders, carpet sellers, construction workers and even drivers of passenger sea trams and metro trains, who stop the train cars in the dark tunnels for exactly five minutes, freeze in silent respect. Today, around ten thousand people gathered at Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace, where the former Turkish leader died, to honor his memory and lay white chrysanthemums, Atatürk's favorite flowers, at the foot of his bed.
“Ataturk was a professional military man,” says thirteen-year-old Istanbul schoolgirl Aishe Arman, who came here with her parents. “He studied in Thessaloniki and graduated from the General Staff Academy. During the First World War, which led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, he led the national liberation movement against the victorious countries: England, France, Italy, Greece,” continues schoolgirl Aishe. The war, as is known, ended with the proclamation of an independent Turkish state. Ataturk abolished the Islamic calendar, introduced a new civil code that established equality between the sexes, separated religion from the state, and adopted a new alphabet and the Turkish Constitution. Over the years of the existence of the Turkish Republic, the propaganda machine created its own biography of the leader, not disdaining even the most ridiculous myths. “Ataturk loved flowers and children,” says an Istanbul school student in an interview with CNN Turk, “once he was forced to hide from enemies in the snowy desert. He had not eaten for several days, was chilled and terribly cold, and could not find his way. He was helped by an eagle, which flew in and showed him the right path,” continues the ten-year-old schoolgirl.
The real data on the leader’s personal life, however, is still classified and is in secret archives, experts say. Despite the fact that every Turkish schoolchild knows the details of the life of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Ataturk still remains the most closed and untouchable figure in Turkish society. The memory of the founder of Turkey is sacred, and a special law protects the reputation, honor and dignity of the former leader. Any insufficiently respectful mention of him in a public place risks a long prison term.
“Turkish society is not ready to accept Ataturk for who he really was,” says Turkish citizen H... Several years ago, letters, diaries and memoirs of the leader’s ex-wife, Latifa, with whom he lived for several years, were first published in Turkey , and then divorced... This caused a real shock in Turkish society. Prominent representatives of the Turkish intelligentsia proposed arresting and sending the authors of the publication to prison. “Latifa was the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Izmir, she was a self-sufficient, intelligent, independent, educated woman,” wrote the authors of the publication, a group of Turkish historians and scientists, “she could not accept the leader’s too harsh temperament, his jealousy and temper.” She also could not get along with his lifestyle. In recent years, Ataturk drank a lot and had long drinking sessions with friends. He visited European neighborhoods, loved the company of liberated free women, met with Russian emigrants from Russia, loved to dance, drank a lot, mostly strong alcoholic beverages, for which he was called a drunkard behind his back. Excessive alcohol consumption, according to official data, caused the death of the Turkish leader. Doctors diagnosed cirrhosis of the liver, but the autopsy data were never made public. This gave rise to an incredible number of rumors, many of which are still popular today. A number of historians, for example, claim that Ataturk was killed, that he could have been destroyed by forces that did not want the rise of Turkey, in particular members of the Jewish-Masonic lodge, who in those years had quite a large force in Turkey, to which, according to historians, he belonged and Kemal himself.
The fact is that there were conspiracies against the leader during his lifetime. Many of his comrades opposed Ataturk's one-man rule. At the end of 1926, show trials were held in Istanbul against his associates, who planned his physical elimination. The American film star Zaza Gabor, known not so much for her roles as for her numerous marriages and novels, is allegedly involved in the murder. She was called “the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour.” In the early thirties, Zaza Gabor married a Turkish diplomat and moved to Turkey. She secretly met with Ataturk, had a close relationship with him, and after his death she unexpectedly secretly left for America.
Turkish researcher Ali Kuzu, author of the book “Who Killed Ataturk?”, believes that the Turkish leader could have been poisoned with a potent diuretic that contains mercury and is extremely dangerous with long-term use. When specialists from France came to treat Ataturk, his health improved, and when Turkish doctors again took care of him, his health deteriorated again,” he writes.
“I have photographs of one of the doctors who performed an autopsy on Ataturk’s body,” said the famous historiographer and collector Muhamed Yukce in an interview with Turkish TV on the eve of the next anniversary of Ataturk’s death, “in the photo, his body lies on foil, the abdominal cavity is opened. An autopsy of the leader's body was performed two days after his death by a group of Turkish doctors - Akyl Mukhtar, Mehmed Kamil, Sureya Hedo. The doctors said they did not even dare take a sample of the leader’s blood. However, autopsies have already been performed all over the world. Nobody knows what happened there. The part of the documents describing the autopsy is missing.”
After his death, Ataturk's body was embalmed and hastily sent to the ethnographic museum, and later buried in a mausoleum in Ankara. Experts claim that data on the autopsy of the body exist, but are still classified and are in the state archive. The opposition newspaper Sezhdu, for example, claims that Ataturk was poisoned in the same way as much later Turkish President Turgut Ozal, who died in 1993. The remains of Ozal's body were exhumed in early October this year. According to Turkish newspapers, tissue samples from the former ex-president's body contained a potent poison, strychnine, which was allegedly added to his food and drinks. Official authorities deny this information.
“We are still terribly afraid of Ataturk,” writes the famous Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand. “He evokes in us admiration and fear, which we have absorbed since childhood, from school. These feelings were in the eyes of our mothers and grandfathers, who told us bedtime stories about his heroic deeds. I experienced these feelings in the army every time the Turkish flag was raised. We still don’t know reality, it’s more convenient for us to live with the myth that was instilled in us since childhood, and we don’t want to part with our childhood dream.”

So in Thessaloniki, or in Malatya?

Recently, information about the Armenian or Kurdish origin of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has again begun to actively circulate in Turkey. The reason for such conversations were the arguments according to which Ataturk was born not in Thessaloniki, but in Malatya, where the Armenian and Kurdish population predominated. A columnist for the Turkish newspaper Radikal, Orhan Kemal Cengiz, addressed these conversations in his article.
“We are a country that has left nothing in the past and has failed to move forward. We were unable to sincerely look at the events that happened in the past, we were unable to grieve the pain, however, no matter how painful it is, we need to have the strength to withstand the pain of reality. We have chosen to forget most of our history. This burden has become so heavy on our shoulders that today, because of this weight, we cannot solve any of our problems,” wrote Kemal Cengiz.
He noted that such rumors are periodically spread right and left, but they fail to face them bravely, just as, for example, they could not easily accept the fact that during the Çanakkale war, an Armenian officer, Sargis Torosyan, became a hero. That is, when, on the one hand, the Young Turks were destroying the Armenians, one Armenian officer fought for his country. Of course, Torossian's name is not in any of our history books, because the story of an Armenian who fought to the death for his country bothers us and reminds us of the burden on our backs. Addressing talk that Atatürk was born not in Thessaloniki, but in Malatya, Cengiz writes: “This information can be both true and false. It is quite possible that the information about Ataturk’s birth in Thessaloniki was also invented.” To prove this, the journalist recalls that until recently, all sorts of facts were invented to deny the existence of the Kurds. Today their existence is accepted, but they are not given equal rights, they even refuse to recognize their right to their native language. “We need to take a sincere look at our history. Then we will see the struggle of the Armenian officer in Canakkale, and we will perceive Ataturk and the Kurdish rebels as they are, and, leaving aside the burden on our shoulders, we will move on,” he concludes.

TURKISH-ARMENIAN WAR. RELATIONS WITH THE RSFSR

The main stages of the Turkish-Armenian war: the capture of Sarykamysh (September 20, 1920), Kars (October 30, 1920) and Gyumri (November 7, 1920).
Of decisive importance in the military successes of the Kemalists against the Armenians, and subsequently the Greeks, was the significant financial and military assistance provided by the Bolshevik government of the RSFSR from the autumn of 1920 until 1922. Already in 1920, in response to Kemal’s letter to Lenin dated April 26, 1920, containing a request for help, the government of the RSFSR sent the Kemalists 6 thousand rifles, over 5 million rifle cartridges, 17,600 shells and 200.6 kg of gold bullion.
When the agreement on “friendship and brotherhood” was concluded in Moscow on March 16, 1921, an agreement was also reached to provide the Angora government with free financial assistance, as well as assistance with weapons, according to which the Russian government allocated 10 million rubles to the Kemalists during 1921. gold, more than 33 thousand rifles, about 58 million cartridges, 327 machine guns, 54 artillery pieces, more than 129 thousand shells, one and a half thousand sabers, 20 thousand gas masks, 2 naval fighters and “a large amount of other military equipment.” The Russian Bolshevik government in 1922 made a proposal to invite representatives of the Kemal government to the Genoa Conference, which meant actual international recognition for the VNST.
Kemal’s letter to Lenin dated April 26, 1920, read, among other things: “First. We undertake to unite all our work and all our military operations with the Russian Bolsheviks, with the goal of fighting the imperialist governments and liberating all the oppressed from their power. “In the second half of 1920, Kemal planned to create a Turkish Communist Party under his control - to obtain funding from the Comintern; but on January 28, 1921, the entire leadership of the Turkish communists was liquidated with his sanction. The main Turkish communist Mustafa Subhi and his closest associates were executed - it seems they were drowned in the Bosphorus.

GREECO-TURKISH WAR

According to Turkish tradition, it is believed that the “National Liberation War of the Turkish People” began on May 15, 1919 with the first shots fired in Izmir against the Greeks who had landed in the city. The occupation of Izmir by Greek troops was carried out in accordance with the article of the 7th Armistice of Mudros. Until August-September 1921, luck favored both sides, but the outcome of the war was decided by the General Offensive of the Turks and the victory over the Greeks at Domlupınar (now Kütahya. Mustafa Kemal was awarded the title of “gazi” and the rank of marshal.
On August 26, the Greek positions were broken through, and the Greek army actually lost its combat effectiveness. On August 30, Afyonkarahisar was taken, and on September 5, Bursa. The remnants of the Greek army flocked to Izmir, but there was not enough fleet for evacuation. No more than a third of the Greeks managed to evacuate. The Turks captured 40 thousand people, 284 guns, 2 thousand machine guns and 15 aircraft. About a million people on both sides were left homeless.
On September 9, Kemal, at the head of the Turkish army, entered Izmir; the Greek and Armenian parts of the city were completely destroyed by fire; the entire Greek population fled or was destroyed. Kemal himself accused the Greeks and Armenians of burning the city, as well as personally the Metropolitan of Smyrna Chrysostomos, who died a martyr’s death on the very first day of the Kemalists’ entry: the commander Nureddin Pasha handed him over to the Turkish crowd, which killed him after cruel torture. (Chrysostom is now canonized.)
On September 17, 1922, Kemal sent a telegram to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which proposed the following version: the city was set on fire by the Greeks and Armenians, who were encouraged to do so by Metropolitan Chrysostom, who argued that burning the city was the religious duty of Christians; the Turks did everything to save him. Kemal said the same thing to the French admiral Dumenil: “We know that there was a conspiracy. We even found that Armenian women had everything they needed to set fire... Before our arrival in the city, in the temples they called for the sacred duty of setting the city on fire.” French journalist Berthe Georges-Gauly, who covered the war in the Turkish camp and arrived in Izmir after the events, wrote: “It seems certain that when the Turkish soldiers became convinced of their own helplessness and saw how the flames consumed one house after another, they were seized with insane rage and they destroyed the Armenian quarter, from where, according to them, the first arsonists appeared.”
Kemal is credited with words allegedly spoken by him after the massacre in Izmir: “Before us is a sign that Turkey has been cleansed of Christian traitors and foreigners. From now on, Türkiye belongs to the Turks.”
Under pressure from British and French representatives, Kemal eventually allowed the evacuation of Christians, but not men between 15 and 50 years old: they were deported to the interior for forced labor and most died.
On October 11, 1922, the Entente powers signed a truce with the Kemalist government, which Greece joined 3 days later; the latter was forced to leave Eastern Thrace, evacuating the Orthodox (Greek) population from there.
On July 24, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) was signed in Lausanne, ending the war and defining the modern borders of Turkey in the west. The Treaty of Lausanne, among other things, provided for an exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, which meant the end of the centuries-old history of the Greeks in Anatolia. In October, the Kemalists entered Istanbul, evacuated by the Entente.
Based on materials
foreign,
incl. Turkish press
Prepared for the newspaper "New Time"

Türkiye is a unique country. Unlike their Arab neighbors, the Turks managed to build a secular state. The main merit in this Mustafa Kemal, later nicknamed Ataturk, i.e. father of the Turkish people. Mustafa is one of the most colorful and significant characters of modern times. Mustafa Kemal was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1881. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. The father of the future hero of Turkey was a timber merchant. He didn’t earn much money, but he was able to give his son a good education. In the Ottoman Empire, the military was held in high esteem in society. The reason for this is the peculiarities of the state. The Ottoman Empire united many peoples under the rule of the Turks. Mustafa quickly decided on his future profession; he wanted to become an officer. Kemal has studied at two military schools.

Having laid the foundation for his knowledge and skills, he went to study at the General Staff Academy, which he graduated at the age of 24. Mustafa was an ideological patriot, his intentions were pure. So he entered the “Young Turks” (young Turkish officers) movement. The “Young Turks” were dissatisfied with the regime existing in the country. Young people were surprised by the medieval cruelty that flourished in their state. So in 1908 there was a coup, and Kemal took an active part in it. The hopes of the young Turks were not justified. In place of cruel despots, embezzlers came to power. The officer stops getting involved in politics and devotes himself entirely to a military career, participates in wars with Italy, and fights on the fronts of the Second Balkan and First World Wars. In these campaigns he established himself as a gallant and skillful military commander.

Despite the technical backwardness of the army, Kemal managed to win victories due to the talent and courage of his soldiers. In 1916, the commander received the rank of general and the title “Pasha,” which was very honorable. The results of the First World War were disappointing for Turkey. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. Arab lands became part of English possessions, Greece and the Balkan countries gained independence. Large European states were seriously thinking about how to “pull” Turkey even further. Kemal was appointed by the government of Sultan Mehmed IV as inspector of troops in Eastern Anatolia. Under the cover of his position, Kemal stockpiled weapons and ammunition and carried out propaganda work in different parts of the country. The Sultan's policies caused increasing discontent among the population, because he indulged the British without thinking about the interests of his own state.

This is how the Civil War flared up in Turkey. The civil war in Turkey flared up between the Sultan and Kemal’s supporters, whose main ideology was Turkish nationalism. The Muslim clergy declared Kemal an apostate. In the territories controlled by Kemal, uprisings broke out every now and then and provocations were committed. Kemal's troops fought with the Greeks. The soldiers of Greece behaved very cruelly even towards the civilian population. The years of rule of the Ottoman Empire took their toll. Resentment and hatred for past humiliations moved the Greek warriors to not the most noble deeds. Although they can also be understood. In August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres was published. It was compiled by the allies for the defeated Turkey. In fact, the country was losing its independence. The publication of this document increased Kemal's supporters. In the spring of 1921, the Greeks reached Ankara itself, the capital of Mustafa’s supporters. During prolonged bloody battles, the Turks soon pushed the enemy away from the city. By August, the Greeks were already at the sea and were fleeing.

Now Kemal could deal with the Sultan without any problems. The general succeeded in this, not without the help of the Soviet Union. Soviet revolutionaries actively helped the rebels with gold. Kemal won a final victory over the Sultan, defending the independence of his homeland. In 1923, Kemal Mustafa came to power in Turkey. He declared Turkey a republic. Ankara became the capital of the state. A few years after taking power, Türkiye and Greece exchanged populations. About one and a half million Greeks living in Turkey went to their historical homeland, while ethnic Turks made the return journey. This broke the country's economy. The Greeks were good entrepreneurs and played a significant role in the Turkish economy. Kemal brought innovation to Turkish society.

He strove for pan-European values, he liked the new world and the achievements of civilization. The Caliphate was abolished, Muslim schools were closed, and secular ones were opened. Society no longer lived according to Sharia law. The right came first. The civil code was borrowed from Switzerland, the criminal code from Italy, and the commercial code from Germany. Women no longer wore tents and practiced European dances; polygamy was prohibited. Instead of traditional greetings, Kemal enforced the usual European handshake. This is how secular Turkish society developed. In 1934, Kemal obliged all Turks to receive a surname. Until this time, people were called only by their first names. The National Assembly gave Kemal the surname Ataturk, which translated from Turkish means “father of all Turks.” The law prohibited any other Turkish citizen from taking such a surname. Under Ataturk, Türkiye did not make a qualitative economic and industrial leap forward, but it became a secular state. died at the age of 57, in 1938. Today his name enjoys unprecedented respect and honor among the local population.

 

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