War and genocide: Ottoman socialism's trial by fire

The Italo-Turkish war broke out on 29th September 1911, with the invasion of the Ottoman Empire’s Libyan territory; it was to last until October 1912. Italy, which had been preparing for war since the summer, was a latecomer in the race to divide up the planet, and with the number of places not already occupied by the other great powers running out, the Italian bourgeoisie's initial military hesitations soon melted away. Despite its initial hesitations due to its weaker position the Ottoman state, led now by a militarist Union and Progress government, also managed to mobilize for war. Known today in Turkey as the Tripolitan war, this conflict like others at the time was a ‘practice run’ for World War I. In Italy there was great conflict within the Socialist Party, with the right wing declaring their open support for the government and the intransigent left wing waging a bitter struggle against it.1 As for Ottoman socialism, the lines weren't so clear. The revolutionary socialists unsurprisingly opposed the war while the right wing elements cooperating with Union and Progress unsurprisingly supported the government, but the Italo-Turkish war was to be of immense significance for the evolution of those elements in the middle. The Socialist Workers’ Federation of Thessaloníki condemned the war but did not condemn Union and Progress as strongly as the Italian government, putting the main blame on the Italians. However, the war made the Federation question its line and eventually the split in Italian Socialist Party led the group, perhaps the most active Ottoman organization in the Second International, to side with the left wing of the international socialist movement. In the Social Democrat Hunchak Party the position of its Students’ Union, while similar to that of the Socialist Workers’ Federation in not holding Union and Progress responsible, went a step further in describing the war more generally as a product of the capitalist order, though they still placed the main blame on Italian capital:

“The Italian-Turkish war is still going on. Its sole cause is Italian capitalism’s policy of aggression (…) We the socialist students have the belief that this war which is incredibly harmful for the development and progress of humanity is a result of the capitalist system of the current society and that it will not go away unless this system is abolished and socialism is realized (…) We intend to express our deep anger against the war and the Italian attack and shout all together: Down with war! Down with Italy's capitalist attack! Long live socialism!” 2

The elections to the Meclis-i Mebusan in February 1912 give an opportunity to draw many conclusions about the substance of parliamentarianism on the eve of capitalism’s decadence. This is known in Ottoman history as the “election by truncheon”3 (ie the truncheons used to beat up members of the opposition): the party of the state, won the elections run by the state by using the state's tools of repression. The result, not surprisingly, was the victory of the state... The “election by truncheon” was a perfect model for elections to come, of parliamentarianism, democracies and parliaments. The Society of Union and Progress' "truncheon elections" offered a caricature of bourgeois democracies in the 20th and 21st centuries and their open or covert practices. Bu while certain Ottoman socialist candidates like Dimitar Vlahov humbly accepted defeat, the bourgeois opponents of Union and Progress in the Freedom and Alliance Party had no intention of surrendering. In May 1912, Freedom and Alliance supporters in the Ottoman Army organized themselves as the ‘Liberator Officers’ and rebelled, retreating into the Macedonian mountains, in an action similar to the July 1908 mutiny. The government fell and the Freedom and Alliance Party came to power. Just as it had in July 1908, the centrist tendency of Ottoman socialism saw this as a moment of triumph. Once it had consolidated its position the Freedom and Alliance government did indeed briefly relax the repression against socialist organizations. But after only a short time the left wing was once again proven correct; as far as the workers were concerned the new boss was the same as the old one. Socialists, strikes and workers’ struggles were soon suppressed again; Freedom and Alliance just like Union and Progress before it had no intention of letting the socialists do as they please.4

In October 1912, even before the Italo-Turkish war was over, the war in the Balkans began. Known in history as the First Balkan War, it opposed the Ottoman Empire to the Balkan League of Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria. Even more than the Italo-Turkish war, this conflict was a rehearsal for World War I. A total of 340,000 Ottoman soldiers were either killed in battle, wounded, captured or died from disease, Balkan League losses numbered 145,000. The war ended in an Ottoman defeat, which doomed the new Freedom and Alliance government and led to a coup d’état when on January 23rd 1913 a prominent group of Union and Progress members raided Bab Ali, the center of government. With this began the reign of the three pashas, whose names and cruelty are still remembered today: Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talat and Ahmet Cemal. As a result of the Treaty of London that ended the First Balkan War the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all its territories in Europe, including Adrianople. Thessaloníki, was definitively lost to the Empire. Having come to power with ultra-nationalist slogans against the failure of Freedom and Alliance in the war, Union and Progress was itself incapable of improving the situation. A mere two weeks after the end of the First Balkan War in March 1913 the second began, this time among the Christian Balkan states with Bulgaria which had led the war effort in the first war now confronted by Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania. The Ottoman Empire entered the war against Bulgaria allied with the other states and in the end managed to retake Adrianople. The Second Balkan War was much shorter than the first, ending a few months later with the Treaty of Bucharest signed on 18th July 1913. Peace reigned in the Balkans - yet it was a peace pregnant with a greater war of unimaginable horror and destruction.

The Balkan wars changed the whole landscape of Ottoman socialism. The organization most affected was the Thessaloníki sub-section of the International, the Socialist Workers’ Federation, had always seen itself as an Ottoman organization. After 1913 Thessaloníki was no longer an Ottoman city but a Greek one – and despite developing a position against the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Federation reluctantly became a part of the workers’ movement and socialist movement of Greece. More than the Italo-Turkish war, the Balkan Wars had pushed the organization further to the left; it organized mass demonstrations against the war in Thessaloníki and openly condemned differences of religion and nationality.5 All this experience contributed to the Federation taking an internationalist position in the coming World War I and later participating in the formation of communist organizations in Greece.6

The effect of the Balkan Wars was not limited to the Thessalonian federation. The loss of Thessaloníki and the Thessalonian federation seriously affected organizations of the left wing in the Empire. Despite criticizing the Thessalonian federation’s opportunism and its cooperation with bourgeois forces, the left had a history of relations with it, and unlike the Social Democrat Hunchak Party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaks) and the Ottoman Socialist Party, both the left and the Thessalonian federation were international organizations, organizations consisting of members of different nationalities. In this sense, with Thessaloníki now outside the Empire, the Ottoman revolutionary socialists stood alone. Led by the organization in Constantinople that had taken the name Türkiye Sosyalist Fırkası (Socialist Party of Turkey), the revolutionary socialists, together with the union organizations around them, had courageously protested against the Italo-Turkish war.7 The Balkan wars also practically separated the Ottoman revolutionary socialists from the Bulgarian Narrow Socialists as well, and this was reflected politically in their positions on elections from 1912: unlike the Bulgarian Narrow Socialists who participated in the elections, the Ottoman revolutionary socialists took an anti-parliamentarian position against the compromising attitude of the socialists in the Meclis-i Mebusan.8 The left wing of Ottoman socialism evolved into a separate tendency in the international socialist movement rather than being a mere reflection of another tendency. Its anti-war position in 1914 was also quite radical compared to other socialist organizations in the Empire. This was clearly demonstrated in a address to the international proletariat written a shortly before the start of World War I, by the Constantinople organization:

“On this historical day when battle cries of protest from the exploited of the whole world are united once again, we too protest with you against capitalist society, the exploitation of labour, the oppression of the workers, this great social injustice.

Being aware of our class interests and duty, we fraternally declare once again our contribution and commitment to the great social revolution which is the only thing that can end the exploitation of human beings by other human beings and this system of misery. (…)

The war called the Balkan War which we unfortunately could not stop has produced results that will delay the new awakening of the population and the proletarians, the effects of which the working class of the East will not shake off for a long time.

This war left thousands of urban and rural workers' families in poverty, their orphans left to the mercy of this vicious society.

This war destroyed cities and villages and brought with it misery and poverty making the whole population tremble.

This war incited the grudges and bigotry between the nations of the East and strengthened the nationalist mentality which is in the interests of the rulers and capitalists.

This war emptied the state treasury; and now they are making us, their slaves pay for that money.

This war brought a political oppression unseen before.

The streets of our cities are filled with homeless, hungry old men, women and children. The immigrants whose houses were pillaged during the invasion of Rumelia and who have nothing left now are taking refuge with us en masse, settling in Thrace and Anatolia. Now new events take place in Anatolia triggered by bigotry and sectarian grudges based on religious differences and now the local population ends up having to emigrate in the opposite direction.

The government has installed a disgusting rule of oppression on the back of the ruined population, always under the guise of being in line with the constitution: Martial law all the time, violent measures against organizations, meetings and the press...

We could not hold a demonstration on the May Day of 1914, we curse this arbitrary rule and together with you we shout once again: ‘Down with the bourgeoisie! Long live freedom! Long live the social revolution!’”9

Ottoman socialism and especially its revolutionary wing had openly condemned the Italo-Turkish war and the two Balkan wars and only remained in existence thanks to the support of the working class. Socialism, and especially its left wing, defended the most beautiful future possible, both for the Ottoman territories and the whole world. The internationalist organizations of Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Jewish, Turkish and other workers were convinced that the working class in the Ottoman territories, together with the workers of all countries, would make a social revolution in order to create a socialist world. Their conviction was as pure as the dreams of the future they hoped to see, and if they made mistakes during the course of their struggle, these were honourable mistakes. Yet waiting at the door was a great catastrophe for international socialism and the world working class - and yet another great catastrophe for Ottoman socialism and the working class.

On June 28th 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian nationalist from Bosnia, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, crown prince of Austria, and the world changed. Of course, the causes of World War I went far deeper then a Serbian student killing an archduke; the assassination merely provided a pretext. By the beginning of August, the four big nations of Europe - England, Germany, France and Russia - had entered the war. All the leading factions in the Ottoman Empire, under the de facto dictatorship of the Enver-Talat-Cemal troika (Ministers of War, Internal Affairs and the Navy respectively), were also more or less certain that the Empire would enter the war - the question of the day was, on which side? The faction led by Cemal tried to form an alliance with England and France, whereas Enver and Talat thought they must enter the war on Germany's side. Following the failure of Cemal and his friends to ally with England and France, Enver and Talat had it their way and on August 2nd a secret treaty was signed with Germany. On the 30th October, following several days of skirmishes in the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire and Russia declared war on each other.

Yet the Magnanimous Ottoman State10 was planning more for its population than just giving them guns and sending them to die or kill their class brothers. Albeit temporarily, the Ottoman state bourgeoisie had more or less solved its internal conflict; Union and Progress had won, Freedom and Alliance had lost. Indeed Union and Progress had won so overwhelmingly that Freedom and Alliance didn't even have the strength to go into opposition, as Union and Progress had done when it lost power. The state bourgeoisie had put its house in order. But the victory of Union and Progress was not absolute; it had not mastered the working class despite the latter's defeat – the class struggle was still alive, strikes still broke out, the memory of the 1908 strikes was still fresh, and a revolutionary internationalist left was still intact. For the bourgeoisie, the most advanced, most militant, most dangerous elements of the Ottoman working class had been among the non-Muslims. And there was another force that Union and Progress had not yet mastered: the non-Muslim bourgeoisie still dominated industrial, mercantile and commercial capital, and retained its position as an independent power. Although the most powerful political representatives of non-Muslim capital, the Dashnaks, had accepted Union and Progress’ call to defend the motherland in the coming war, they had not accepted the demand for their organizations in Russia to act on behalf of the Ottomans against Russia.

This was a period in history when not just the balance of forces within the capitalist system were changing but the whole substance, form and functioning of the system itself. During the 19th century, the bourgeoisie had generally resolved problems arising from ethnic or religious differences without, shedding too much blood – at least by the 20th century standards.11 But in the 19th century, no state bourgeoisie had become such a powerful and important actor within society. Expanding across the globe had made the capitalist mode of production a relatively healthy body in the 19th century. But on reaching the natural limits of its expansion, this healthy, upstanding youngster had turned into a sick old man, and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called ‘sick man of Europe’, reflected this transformation in the extreme. The dominant role played by the state bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state in the Ottoman Empire in these years was to become more or less the norm for most states in the new century. The Ottoman state bourgeoisie wanted to control everything, everyone. It could not feel comfortable and secure without doing so. And in order to do so, the state had sought a new ideology and found it in Turkish nationalism. If there was to be private capital outside the state, if there was to be an industrial, mercantile and commercial bourgeoisie, the Ottoman state would be unable to sleep soundly without knowing that this bourgeoisie was devoted and loyal in each and every way, on every possible issue, to the state. The solution could only be the ‘Turkification’ of capital, regardless of how much bloodshed or how many lives it cost.

The Magnanimous Ottoman State was terrified of the non-Muslims. It was terrified of the non-Muslim workers for they were leading the whole Ottoman working class, and it was terrified of the non-Muslim bourgeoisie for they were an independent force who controlled all the main arteries of the Ottoman economy. The state bourgeoisie felt inferior to the non-Muslim bourgeoisie. They felt inferior also because they were sitting at a table surrounded by greater and more powerful states; if there was a weak link among all the European states, it was the Ottoman Empire. Can a state go insane? Faced externally with the need to negotiate with forces every single one of whom could bring down the Empire, and internally with the need to co-exist with a force it was terrified to death of, the Ottoman state perhaps became the first state in history to go insane.

The fear of the working class felt by the Ottoman state was of course not at all unfounded and shared with all the states of the world. Just how well founded this fear was become clear in October 1917 with the victory of the proletarian revolutionary wave, which made the capitalist world tremble in the following years. The Ottoman state's fear of non-Muslims might seem irrational: the non-Muslim bourgeoisie faced the same dangers as the Magnanimous Ottoman State, and had a trust in the Ottoman state as complete as it was unfounded. Until deportations began of prominent Armenian politicians in Constantinople in 1915, the largest Armenian party, the Dashnaks, had been enthusiastic and loyal supporters of the Ottoman state, which was planning the massacre of all Armenians. It is said that one of the leading Armenian deputies known for being close to the Dashnaks, Krikor Zohrab, on the day before his deportation to be murdered, was playing backgammon with Talat Pasha, one of the most prominent architects of the Armenian genocide, in the Union and Progress club in Pera, Constantinople. Whether this rumour is true or not, it illustrates the general political line of the Armenian politicians.

And yet, only a short while after the declaration of the constitutional regime, plotting had started against non-Muslims and specifically the Armenians. Although it was officially condemned as an act against the constitutional regime generally, many individual members of Union and Progress had declared their support for the Adana massacre directed against the Armenians in 1909, and some may have even participated personally. In 1914, Greeks began to be conscripted into Labour Battalions, where they were forced to work for eighteen hours a day. These were an early example of the forced labour camps set up by many states, especially in the first half of the 20th century. Their aim was the annihilation of the targeted ethnic population by working them to death. In February 1915 attacks against non-Muslims took a different turn when Armenians also began to be forcibly conscripted into the Labour Battalions. On April 20th 1915 there were clashes in the city of Van between Armenians and Ottoman armed forces., after the mostly Armenian population refused mayor Cevdet Bey's order to conscript 4,000 people in order to get rid of the male population. By the beginning of May, 55,000 Armenians had been massacred. On the night of April 24th, also known as the Bloody Sunday, deportations of Armenians in Constantinople began. Since May, the Armenian population had been subjected to forced emigrations, walks of death, massacres and concentration camps. Nor was it only Armenians: in November 1916, the Greeks of the Black Sea were targeted for similar attacks. All Greeks from Tirebolu to Samsun, men, women, children, young and old, were forced out of their homes, not allowed to take any of their belongings, and forced on a walk of death which cost the lives of 350,000. By the end of the war, the number of Armenians murdered was as high as 1,500,000. The 20th century was to be a century of genocides and the Ottoman state had the privilege of committing the first of the new century. The heir of the Ottoman state - the Republic of Turkey - and the heir of the Union and Progress tradition - the Kemalist movement - were to continue the same policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing, due to the same fears and pursuing the same purposes. But the Turkish state bourgeoisie, however many rivers of blood it shed, however many deaths it visited on the homes of working class families, still longed for the safe and comfortable sleep that it was condemned never to enjoy.

Ottoman socialism, especially the revolutionary socialists, had managed to pass the trials of the Italo-Turkish and Balkan wars, though they had been badly weakened by them. The war that began in 1914 and the genocides that took place in the following years broke the back of Ottoman socialism. The workers’ movement was strong enough to protect the socialist movement in the wars prior to 1914 but, just as the Ottoman state was the weakest link among the European states, the Ottoman working class was the youngest and most inexperienced in Europe, and Ottoman socialism was among the newest and most dispersed currents of international socialism. Moreover, the genocides had targeted non-Muslims who constituted the majority of socialist militants in the Empire. Although a tradition of solidarity with non-Muslim workers had begun to develop during the strikes, Muslim workers, were not sufficiently class conscious to show solidarity with the victims of such a large and organized practice of genocide in a way that could make a difference; in other words through mass actions. And non-Muslim workers lacked the influence to trigger such actions. Only a revolutionary minority of socialists had the will, clarity and determination to defend the principles of internationalism till the end no matter what - and it turned out that they lacked the strength even to protect the physical existence of their organization.

By 1914 there were only two organizations in the Ottoman Empire which could be considered truly socialist: the Social Democrat Hunchak Party and the revolutionary organization in Istanbul (the Turkish Socialist Party12) coming from the Narrow Socialist tradition. After years of cooperation with Union and Progress, the Dashnaks had nothing left to do with socialism and in fact the party had spent its final years in the Empire trying to gain democratic reforms in the Meclis-i Mebusan. Huseyin Hilmi's Ottoman Socialist Party had been easily suppressed with the exile of its leading members as soon as Union and Progress started to crack down on the opposition in 1913. A socialist tendency arising among the Muslim population, the circle led by Dr. Hasan Riza who had made contact with the Second International, did not even manage to form a party. The Armenians among the revolutionary socialists whose organization included militants of all ethnicities, were also active in the Hunchak Party. Both took a position against war. The Hunchak congresson July 24th 1914 came up with the following resolution:

“We are going through a very important and serious period, unseen in the history of the world before. The entire human civilization has been foundering under the suffocating pressures of the war. The event of today is nothing but an awful and horrible strike of the malicious movements and thoughts of the past (…) Despite this pessimistic and inappropriate situation, we happily declare that these events are among those brought by reaction in this period revolution which is universal, they will not survive in the coming period and humanity will vigorously embrace our social liberation by getting rid of these destructive and reactionary influences.”13

Since 1913, the Hunchak Party held the line that it was necessary to engage in illegal activities against the Ottoman state. In the year the Ottomans decided to go to war, the Party accelerated its activities against the rulers (these were not related to the Volunteer Corps formed under the Russian armed forces mainly by the Caucasian Dashnaks). On June 14th 1915, 20 Hunchak militants were picked up from their homes for activities against the state and the war, and the next day were executed in Beyazit square in Constantinople. Mateos Sarkisian, also known as Paramaz, was to say as his final words on the gallows:

“You can only make our bodies disappear, our ideal never. This ideal will be realized in the near future and the whole world will see it. Our ideal is socialism.”14

The 20 revolutionary militants hanged on the 15th June 1915 were the first martyrs of Ottoman socialism. Ignored today by the nationalist Turkish left and remembered only by Armenian nationalist organizations, these militants had with their final breath shouted their hope of a socialist future. For this, their memory truly belongs only to the international proletariat and will always remain so. But the genocide developing against the Armenians did force a decision on the Social Democrat Hunchak Party which throughout its history had zig-zagged between the contradictory ideas of socialism and national liberation in its program and ended up a centrist grouping. 1914 did not cause a split between those who were against the war in general and those whose principal concern was the Ottoman state. But the intensification of the massacres targeting the Armenians sharpened these divisions, with opponents of the Ottoman state now defending joining the pro-Russian Armenian Volunteer Corps like the Caucasian Dashnaks. Events and the lack of a working class reaction turned the tide in their favor, and in a short time, those in the party against supporting Russia were declared traitors. Sapah-Gulian, now leader of the pro-Russian faction in the party, wrote:

Now, instead of appreciating our works regarding the Armenian volunteer organization and expanding them, some sides, based on doctrinaire, childish views are arguing for closing down this organization, ending this. No! This is murder! We will not stop the Armenian volunteer organization, we will not end this, no, quite the contrary, we will intensify it till the end, we will increase it. We will be in the front everywhere as the leaders. Till the end, till the damnation, destruction of the enemy, with our muscles and chests we will be at the side of the Russian cossacks (…) Treacherous tongues making criticisms on the question of the volunteers should shut up, sinister hands should stop making disturbances! (…) Today our number one enemies are the Turks. Those against the volunteer organization, either secretly or openly, those who try to limit this forces are considered internal enemies”.15

Thus the Social Democrat Hunchak Party became yet another party of the Second International that betrayed the working class and internationalist principles by supporting the war. The leaders of the internal enemies mentioned by Sapah-Gulain were without doubt members of the revolutionary socialist organization. However, as the war and the genocides advanced, it wasn't really possible to conduct an effective opposition within a party which had chosen to actively integrate itself into the war effort; and those Hunchaks who did not go to war lacked an organization able to maintain underground political activity and were thus condemned to passivity. Not many who could lead such an opposition remained anyway: of the leading Armenian internationalists, the poet Ruben Sevak was among those arrested on April 24th 1915 and murdered in August; as for Gevorg 'Arkomedes' Gharadjian, he returned to the Caucasus. But it was the death of Karekin Kozikian which had the greatest impact for the Armenian revolutionary socialists. In the city of Trebizond, where he went to work as a teacher, Kozikian and his wife ended up jumping into a river in order to avoid capture. A militant worker, a leader of the printers’ strikes in Constantinople and a revolutionary socialist devoted to internationalism, Kozikian was a tragic loss not only for the Armenian socialist movement but also for the Ottoman working class as a whole.16

The war also destroyed the revolutionary socialist organization which was suppressed, and the offices of the Constantinople Association of Unions were closed down. Many non-Muslim revolutionary socialists had to flee, and those who did not (or could not) were conscripted, under horrific conditions, and many perished during the war. A great majority of the workers from Muslim backgrounds influenced by the group were also conscripted and a significant number of them died also.17 The catastrophe of war and the catastrophe of genocide was a catastrophe for Ottoman socialism as well. And yet, despite everything, despite their limited influence due to their weakness, here and there the remaining revolutionary socialists continued to defend internationalist principles and fought against the imperialist war.18 When the war ended there was neither a workers’ organization nor an effective revolutionary structure left in the Ottoman Empire. Yet in a short time it would turn out that they had not disappeared without touching the course of history. The Ottoman Empire was no more, nor were the Constantinople Association of Unions, the Socialist Center of Constantinople, or the Socialist Party of Turkey. Kozikian and Sivachev were dead, Glavinov was in Sofia, Gharadjian was in the Caucasus, Papadopulos was in Greece and Vezesthenis had fled to America. On the other hand, the spark lit by a numerically small but principled and determined group of militants had, without being able to burn down the bourgeoisie of Constantinople, nevertheless spread considerably. And despite the fact that a large number of the workers defending internationalist socialism had died during the war, or were in exile or at least cut off from the movement, it would soon turn out that the embers of internationalism were still alive. The first communists of Turkey and Constantinople were to come from the tradition that had lit those flames.

1 International Communist Current. “The Italian Communist Left”. 1992. p. 15

2 Haupt, George and Paul Dumont. “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Sosyalist Hareketler”. Gözlem Yayınları. Istanbul. 1977 p. 142

3 Sopalı Seçim

4 Dumont, Paul. “Yahudi, Sosyalist ve Osmanlı Bir Örgüt: Selanik İşçi Federasyonu”. “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Sosyalizm ve Milliyetçilik” Editor: Mete Tunçay and Erik Jan Zürcher. İletişim. 2004. Istanbul. p. 106-107

5 Haupt, George and Paul Dumont. “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Sosyalist Hareketler”. Gözlem Yayınları. Istanbul. 1977 p. 175

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers%27_Federation

7 Ginzberg, Roland. “Beynelmilel İşçiler İttihadı A”. “Beynelmilel İşçiler İttihadı (Mütareke Istanbulu’nda Rum Ağırlıklı Bir İşçi Örgütü ve TKP ile İlişkileri)”. Editor: Erden Akbulut and Mete Tunçay. Sosyal Tarih Yayınları. 2009. Istanbul. p. 46

8 Ibid.

9 Haupt, George and Paul Dumont. “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Sosyalist Hareketler”. Gözlem Yayınları. Istanbul. 1977 p. 191–192

10 This was an official title adopted by the Ottoman state.

11 This does not of course mean that capitalism was ever a 'peaceful' society, as is witnessed by colonial massacres of indigenous populations, or the pogroms against the Jews in Tsarist Russia, for example.

12 Not to be confused with the Socialist Party of Turkey, which was the name taken by the Ottoman Socialist Party after World War I.

13 “Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri ve İhtilal Hareketleri”. Editor: Mehmet Kaynar. Der Yayınevi. Istanbul. 2001. s. 206–207

14 Çetinoğlu, Sait. “Türkiye ‘Sol’ Hareketlerinde Milliyetçi Virüs 2”. www.norzartonk.org/turkiye-%e2%80%9csol%e2%80%9d-hareketlerindeki-milliyetci-virus-%e2%80%93-2

15 “Ermeni Komitelerinin Emelleri ve İhtilal Hareketleri”. Editor: Mehmet Kaynar. Der Yayınevi. Istanbul. 2001. p. 214

16 Çetinoğlu, Sait. “Türkiye ‘Sol’ Hareketlerinde Milliyetçi Virüs 1” and. “Türkiye ‘Sol’ Hareketlerinde Milliyetçi Virüs 2”. www.norzartonk.org/turkiye-%e2%80%9csol%e2%80%9d-hareketlerindeki-milliyetci-virus-1 and www.norzartonk.org/turkiye-%e2%80%9csol%e2%80%9d-hareketlerindeki-milliyetci-virus-%e2%80%93-2

17 Ginzberg, Roland. “Beynelmilel İşçiler İttihadı A”. “Beynelmilel İşçiler İttihadı (Mütareke Istanbulu’nda Rum Ağırlıklı Bir İşçi Örgütü ve TKP ile İlişkileri)”. Editor: Erden Akbulut and Mete Tunçay. Sosyal Tarih Yayınları. 2009. Istanbul. p. 46

18 Dimitrov, Georgi. “The European War and the Labour Movement in the Balkans”. The Communist International. 1924, No. 5 (New Series), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1924/x01.htm