Between 1924 and 1950, Mustafa Kemal and his followers in the ruling Republican People's Party (RPP) attempted to remake Turkey's populace in the example of Europe, as they perceived Europe, with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism.Footnote 1 The self-celebratory rhetoric of the Kemalist elite and the journalistic accounts of contemporaneous Western observers presented these attempts as a revolutionary process of social and cultural transformation. “We have accomplished many great tasks in a short period of time,” Mustafa Kemal declared in 1933, at the tenth anniversary of the republic.Footnote 2 To find out if such a transformation took place, this article turns to the early republic's villages. In 1927, 83.7 percent of Turkey's 13.5 million citizens lived in villages, and by 1950, when the population increased to 20.8 million, 82.5 percent continued to do so.Footnote 3 The success or even the existence of the “Kemalist revolution” would have necessitated significant transformations at the village level, but multiple first-hand accounts and statistical data suggest that change in Turkey's villages was limited to an insignificant minimum in this period.
A comparison with the transformations of sedentary Soviet Central Asia in the same period, an area that roughly corresponds to today's Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, further highlights this point.Footnote 4 As Adeeb Khalid has suggested, this comparison is warranted for multiple reasons. The Soviet Union and the Turkish Republic both originated from the collapse of “the European imperial order” at the end of World War I. They were both “activist, interventionist, [and] mobilizational” modern states that sought to “sculpt [their] citizenry in an ideal image.” Their leaderships each “pursued shock modernization programs that involved . . . radical interventions in the realms of society and culture, featuring state-led campaigns for the ‘emancipation’ of women, spreading literacy, the elaboration of new literary languages, and secularization.” The Turkish political elite were inheritors of the Ottoman Empire's Westernist intellectual movements, to which the political elite of the Soviet Union's Muslim-inhabited territories was also deeply connected.Footnote 5 Moreover, the Soviet and Kemalist leaderships carefully observed and learned from one another.Footnote 6
The demographic and economic circumstances of Turkey and sedentary Soviet Central Asia were relatively similar as well. Decades of violence and resulting migrations in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia had concentrated an almost entirely Muslim, though ethnically diverse, population in the territory that became the Turkish Republic in 1923, whereas sedentary Central Asia had long hosted a predominantly Muslim and ethnically diverse population. Civil war in Central Asia and the War of Liberation in Turkey prolonged the devastation of World War I and left behind ravaged populations in both regions. Industry was nearly absent, infrastructure was in tatters, and agriculture required serious recovery in both regions under observation, although some areas such as the Aegean or Cilician plains in Turkey and the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia offered better prospects for recovery. Compared to Turkey's over 80 percent rural population until 1950, sedentary Central Asia remained about 75 percent rural between 1913 and 1940, after which that figure slowly decreased, reaching 66.2 percent by 1960.Footnote 7
Despite these similarities in regimes, regime ideals, and postwar circumstances, the following analysis reveals that by the mid-20th century the Soviet state was able to penetrate rural society and transform it, while the Turkish state was not. Comparisons with other mobilizational states, such as Iran,Footnote 8 or colonial territories, such as Iraq and Syria, may highlight the Turkish experience in the second quarter of the 20th century as a success story. Yet, the Soviet comparison offers a different conclusion. The effectiveness of the Soviet regime was partly due to its disregard for human costs, and therefore, the present evaluation of its effectiveness should not be taken as a moral estimation of superiority. However, when measured against each regime's avowed goals of transforming a predominantly peasant population into a modern nation of well-educated and secularly minded citizens, the achievements of the Turkish state lagged far behind that of the Soviet Union at least until the 1950s.
Similar to Senem Aslan, who examines the Turkish state's failure to transform its Kurdish citizens, I highlight ideology and resources to explain the discrepancy in the effectiveness of the Soviet and Kemalist transformation projects. However, while Aslan considers the Kemalist regime to have been “ideologically rigid” due to its uncompromising policies of linguistic assimilation,Footnote 9 I conceive of ideology as more than an inflexibly pursued political objective and define it as a comprehensive vision of social and political reality that informs utopian ideals as well as strategies to achieve them. In my examination of resources, on the other hand, besides assessing their availability, I question each regime's ability to mobilize what was available to it.
Informed by a Marxist understanding of social change, the Soviet state attacked existing authority structures in society (again, and importantly, at great human cost), replaced them with new ones linked to the Communist Party, and mobilized those new authority structures to induce large-scale social and cultural transformation. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, in contrast, was informed by an eclectic mix of positivist and populist ideals that did not amount to a systematic ideology. In other words, what this article offers is not a juxtaposition of capitalism and Soviet socialism as two rival ideologies. Both capitalism and Soviet socialism entailed the development of a more or less integrated market at the national level even as they differed on whether supply and demand mechanisms or the state's planning institutions should regulate that market. The effects of this integration then extended to the economies of culture and politics. The interventions of the early Turkish state failed to produce such an integration. Otherwise, the effects of the integration of dispossessed and pauperized Algerian peasants into a capitalist economy in colonized Algeria in the 19th century could offer an equally enlightening contrast to the experience of Turkish peasants a century later.Footnote 10 In the absence of a coherent ideology, the Kemalist elite adopted a piecemeal and unsystematic path to change. They targeted culture first and primarily through education and modeling. Yet, they lacked the necessary personnel, funds, and infrastructure for top-down intervention that the realization of this ambitious aspiration would require. Moreover, because they neither attempted nor were able to dislodge existing authority structures at the village level, the introduction of revolutionary transformations through bottom-up mobilization also remained beyond their reach. Consequently, the social and cultural impact of their policies upon the country's peasant majority remained minimal. If a revolution took place in the early Turkish Republic, it missed the villages.Footnote 11
NOTES ON TURKISH HISTORIOGRAPHY
Historiography of the Turkish Republic has come a long way from the “modernization” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s, which assumed that the Kemalist leadership's legal and administrative reforms amounted to or would eventually translate into large-scale social and cultural transformation.Footnote 12 This assumption about a continuum from elite interventions to societal transformation still pervades official Turkish historiography, but scholarly literature has challenged it in multiple ways especially in the past two decades. In 1997, for instance, Joel Migdal suggested looking at the “physical and social spaces where” the elites and “the poor or marginal groups of society” intersected to test if the Kemalist reforms had actually changed the society.Footnote 13 Since Migdal's suggestion, several excellent studies have located and explored those sites of interaction in the archives and periodical collections of Turkey's small towns. Their findings at this provincial level have revealed that Turkish citizens did not simply receive the Kemalist leadership's state-induced transformation projects but negotiated, modified, and sometimes even thwarted them.Footnote 14
Yet, if we take the contributions of this growing literature one step further to question the Kemalist reforms’ social and cultural ramifications beyond small towns at the village level, we are still in relatively uncharted territory. Undeniably, the fate of Turkish villages and villagers has concerned many studies since at least the 1930s. As the sociologist Mediha Esenel observed in 1941, earlier examples of these studies were quite amateurish.Footnote 15 Among the later works, most are highly descriptive. Some are worth noting for the authoritative information they provide,Footnote 16 and others are helpful as sources of raw data.Footnote 17 A few studies published in the 1960s, though primarily based on research from the late-1940s, are analytically rich but tend to subscribe to the modernization paradigm of the post–World War II period.Footnote 18 As microlevel case studies, all of these reports reflect the regional peculiarities of the villages they feature, and many of them need to be evaluated carefully for possible prejudices and research deficiencies. However, cross-evaluating their findings and further verifying the emerging picture against the broader suggestions of macrolevel statistical surveys, as I do in this article, offers a reliable view of the overall state of Turkish villages before the 1950s in the republican period.
Remarkably, hardly any historical analyses have utilized these village studies systematically to assess the effectiveness of state-induced social and cultural transformation projects in the early Turkish Republic. Nancy Margaret Alderman's 1975 dissertation constitutes a noteworthy exception in this regard. Although she too writes within the modernization paradigm, her language would probably be dismissed as Orientalist by today's readers, and her research on Turkey's religious movements is rather superficial, she nevertheless provides an historical analysis that aptly concludes that “Kemal's secularist reforms . . . did not affect the countryside immediately.”Footnote 19 However, this unpublished dissertation seems to have remained virtually unnoticed in the field. Writing more recently, Gavin D. Brockett and Hakan Yavuz both assert, without citing Alderman, that the Kemalist reforms failed to transform rural society in Turkey. However, Yavuz ’s research concentrates mainly on fieldwork among Turkish Islamic groups in the 1990s and, although he studies an earlier period, Brockett explores active “resistance” in contexts much more visible than the mundane routines of ordinary village life. Therefore, while both authors make insightful comments about the early republic, neither seeks to demonstrate how and why the Kemalist reforms failed to transform villages and villagers in this period.Footnote 20 Thus, Erik Jan Zürcher writes in 2010 that “there is still a great need for studies on the impact of the Kemalist regime on the population outside the major towns,”Footnote 21 to which I would add, not only in the small towns, as highlighted in the most recent literature, but also in the villages, where the overwhelming majority of Turkish citizens lived.
BRINGING CULTURAL PROGRESS TO THE VILLAGES IN TURKEY
World War I and the subsequent War of Liberation (1919–22) prepared the grounds for the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Mustafa Kemal, who emerged from the War of Liberation as the new republic's leader, was a genius in organization and strategy. He consolidated military and administrative power in Ankara, eliminated all political opposition within a few years,Footnote 22 and introduced a plethora of Westernizing reforms through administrative fiat, from the abolishment of the caliphate in 1924 to the adoption of a Latin-based alphabet in 1928.Footnote 23 He also used the republican state's punitive forces to pacify all popular resistance.Footnote 24 It is true that open resistance to this seemingly grandiose transformation project was limited, but not necessarily because Turkish society was weak and acquiescent, as has been suggested,Footnote 25 nor solely because the government's intrusions in everyday life could be mitigated through everyday forms of resistance.Footnote 26 If we recognize that the country's society included the villagers and not just urban dwellers, it becomes apparent that the early republican state's ability to, aspirations for, and attempts at transforming that populace were too limited to evoke sustained confrontation.
This is not to say that the Turkish state paid no attention to the villages. Mustafa Kemal and his followers wanted to create a “modern” and “civilized” nation, and this could not be achieved without the peasants. Thus, from the very beginning, they espoused a populist desire to “civilize” peasants and integrate them into the emerging nation.Footnote 27 The Turkish parliament passed a “Village Law” in 1924 and successive republican governments supplemented it with several regulations and directives. If implemented, this legislation would have turned the country's villages into idyllic communities of peace and productivity.Footnote 28 But while the Kemalist elite's positivist world outlook, which at times blurred into more radical views of scientism and materialism, offered “blueprints for a future society” in Şükrü Hanioğlu's words,Footnote 29 it did not provide an executive strategy for the implementation of a large-scale social reconstruction project. Socialists in the Soviet Union and Kemalists in Turkey both improvised as they worked toward actualizing their blueprints, but as Stephen Kotkin has convincingly suggested, the socialist blueprint was grounded in transforming societal relations and offered a tangible strategy, primarily through the elimination of private property.Footnote 30
Changing culture, as opposed to the substructure that social engineering projects informed by Marxism targeted, was key to the Kemalist elite's endeavor to build a nation.Footnote 31 Mustafa Kemal and his followers believed in the ultimate magnetism and triumph of the “civilized” and “national” way of life that they were creating in the cities and expected villagers to work toward that urban model on their own over time. According to one proponent of Kemalism in 1941, being attracted to the amenities of city life was “human nature.”Footnote 32 Yet, the early republican state did not (or could not) allocate substantial resources from the central budget to carry these amenities, such as electricity or running water, to the villages. Moreover, it was the peasants who financed the creation of the Kemalist elite's urban models with their taxes, further contributing to rural poverty.Footnote 33 In the end, the improvements that the republican elite expected to take place in the villages—from the delineation of field borders to the elimination of quack healers—did not have enough urgency or relevance for Turkey's villagers to spare their time and paltry resources. Therefore, they typically disregarded legislative guidance. And, as we shall see, unlike their Soviet counterparts Turkey's Kemalist leadership was not interested in forcing the peasants into a promised life through an upheaval of existing social structures and the concomitant violence.
In fact, the Kemalist leadership's one sustained effort that approximated a strategy for rural transformation, the “peasantist movement” (köycülük hareketi) of the 1930s, considered villages as bastions of social and political stability. The proponents of this movement targeted national development through the distribution of industry to villages in small-scale manufacturing enterprises. Coming in the wake of the Great Depression, peasantism was an international response to the high risk involved in the potential failure of nationally integrated economies or the destabilizing—that is, socialist revolutionary—effects of concentrating the proletariat in the cities through urban industrialization.Footnote 34 A prominent proponent of this movement, Nusret Köymen, posited in 1934 that villages were not susceptible to socioeconomic fluctuations because they could feed themselves and therefore be self-sufficient. According to him, the Soviet Union and the United States were both suffering from the concentration of agriculture in grand-scale enterprises. And peasantism, he explained, would aim for creating economically independent, agriculturally self-sufficient, industrially productive, and culturally progressive village households.Footnote 35
However, the economic aspect of this development plan failed as the republican state lacked the resources to stimulate such diffused development. As Aslan also points out, qualified civilian personnel were in short supply.Footnote 36 The few existing civil servants heavily concentrated in major towns and in the ministries that were charged with collecting taxes or preserving order—not with transforming society. As opposed to the 9,294 employees of the Ministry of Finance or the 7,924 employees of the Ministry of Justice, for instance, the Ministry of Education employed just 3,397 personnel in 1931.Footnote 37 If the state wanted to launch transformative projects, it had to collect taxes to finance them, but after years of devastating war, the republic was dirt poor. War had consumed the male population in villages, severely disrupting agricultural production. Moreover, the majority of the wealthier and more entrepreneurial non-Muslim minorities had been removed from the social fabric through deportations and extermination. There was not much tax to be collected in the country and whatever was collected had to be spent first and foremost on keeping the state running. The Ministry of Education's share in the general budget remained at less than 5 percent until 1944, then slowly climbed to 9.3 percent by 1950, while the share of the Ministry of Defense ranged between 20.9 percent in 1933 and well over 40 percent during World War II, then gradually declining to 24.3 percent by 1950.Footnote 38
The introduction of horse-carts instead of ox-driven tumbrels (kağnı) and carts, iron ploughs instead of wooden ploughs, and slightly more productive seed and stud varieties marked the limits of technological improvement in the Turkish villages until the late 1940s.Footnote 39 In 1949, over 34,000 villages in Turkey owned 3,195 tractors, about 3.15 million draft oxen, and 384,065 draft horses. About 4.4 million hectares of wheat were sown and about 4.73 million hectares of land were left fallow. The country's level of wheat production in 1950 still remained close to that of 1912. Tractors as well as some other mechanical tools, such as seed sowers, started to appear after World War II but only in specific areas where relatively more fertile soil actually enabled capital investment.Footnote 40
Inspired by state planners from the Soviet Union, the early Turkish Republic invested in railway construction, boosting the length of its lines from 2,333 miles in 1923 to near 4,766 miles in 1950.Footnote 41 But without an extensive network of highways and village roads, or trucks to haul produce, this would have little impact on life in the villages. The republic also built roads and almost tripled the length of its highways from 11,393 miles in 1923 to 29,254 miles in 1950.Footnote 42 This, however, was hardly enough to stimulate national development by linking the economies of various regions in the country, let alone to integrate villages into the national economy. According to 1938 numbers, the high cost of transportation increased the price of wheat from three kurushs in Urfa, where it was produced, to ten kurushs in Hakkari, less than one hundred miles away. The price of garlic increased from two kurushs in Konya, in central Anatolia, to forty kurushs by the time it arrived in Zonguldak, in the western Black Sea region. Until after World War II perishable vegetables were available only where they were grown.Footnote 43 Strategically located industrial investment, such as a textile mill built by Soviet engineers in Kayseri,Footnote 44 created pockets of development and affected the few villages in their vicinity but did not result in enough national development for large-scale rural integration.
The early Turkish Republic's villages were not worlds apart, as global price fluctuations had started to affect their consumption patterns even in the early 19th century.Footnote 45 Yet many of them constituted a world unto themselves, limiting their procurement from the outside world to a bare minimum. Peddlers came to villages to exchange haberdashery for agricultural produce, and itinerant craftsmen provided specialized services, such as tin-coating copper kitchenware or circumcising boys. Cash money was rare and rarely used outside of the occasional trips of village men to nearby towns where they would purchase basic clothing, shoes for the winter, or perhaps agricultural tools. The purchase of oxen as draft animals was also a substantial drain on the villagers’ meager cash assets.Footnote 46 In his village notes, Mahmut Makal, a village school teacher in central Anatolia in the late-1940s, offers an illustrative example of the insulation of villages. One day, upon reading a sentence about honey in the school primer, he asked his students if they had ever seen honey. All but one of his fifty-six pupils answered negatively. The one exceptional student had seen it during a visit to another village.Footnote 47
Thus, the Kemalist leadership was able to invest in the rural economy and infrastructure only meagerly, but they were enthusiastic and significantly more proactive in introducing cultural progress to villages. In 1930, an aborted challenge to the otherwise uncontested power of the Republican People's Party (RPP) served as a catalyst in this regard by highlighting the importance of popular support.Footnote 48 In 1931, the RPP introduced “republicanism, nationalism, populism, secularism, statism, and reformism” in its program as the “principles of Kemalism” and embarked on a campaign to indoctrinate these principles in the Turkish people.Footnote 49 In 1932, it created cultural centers called “people's houses” in fourteen cities with contributions from nearly 2,100 volunteers. By 1940, the number of these volunteers had reached 154,000, and by 1950, the RPP's last year in power, 478 people's houses were in operation.Footnote 50 This was still an urban project, but with thousands of volunteers, the people's houses in the cities and towns could potentially serve as launching pads to organize campaigns for improving the conditions of villages.
The magazine Ülkü (Ideal), which was published by the Ankara People's House between 1933 and 1950 but served as an instrument of communication for all people's houses in the country, promoted and advertised such efforts to reach out to the villages in its pages.Footnote 51 For instance, the Ankara People's House supplied 15,176 pieces of reading material to village, city, and prison schools together in 1939.Footnote 52 In 1941, the volunteers of the Çanakkale People's House traveled to villages and provided medicine and various other needed items and services. A volunteer at the Fethiye People's House, who was a physician, traveled to the villages of his district in southwest Anatolia and treated hundreds of patients.Footnote 53 Earlier, in 1938, when the roads opened in March, about one hundred volunteers from the Ankara People's House organized a trip to a village in the outskirts of the city. The villagers were informed in advance and had prepared to host their guests. Together, the villagers and the people's house volunteers had a picnic and organized wrestling, horse riding, and javelin-throwing competitions. Then, the volunteers planted 1,500 trees to celebrate “earth day” and staged a play inspired by traditional Turkish theater (ortaoyunu) before returning to Ankara.Footnote 54
These efforts and their news generated awareness about village conditions among the urban elite, but they were too sporadic, disorganized, and limited to change village conditions.Footnote 55 In 1939, the RPP decided to expand the activities of the people's houses beyond cities and towns in a more systematic way by opening “people's rooms” (halk odaları) in villages. The number of these rooms would reach a total of 4,261 by 1948. The more affluent villagers in many Turkish villages already opened and operated “village rooms” (köy odaları) where village men would gather for conversation and guests from outside the village would be accommodated. The people's rooms, however, would belong to the RPP. They spurred some level of cultural activism in villages with strong support for the RPP, but otherwise, most villages failed to sponsor their activities and left them idle.Footnote 56
The early republican state's most serious effort to bring cultural progress to the villages was predictably in the fields of elementary and informal education. Many studies have investigated the ideological foundations of the Turkish state's educational initiatives.Footnote 57 Ascertaining the actual impact of those initiatives on the larger populace, however, is an ongoing project.Footnote 58 Literacy is one barometer of how effective these initiatives were. In 1928, the literacy rate in Turkey dropped to almost nil with the introduction of a Latin-based alphabet. Thanks to a campaign of adult education alongside regular schools, it rapidly increased to 20.4 percent by 1935, then slowly climbed to 32.4 percent in 1950 and 39.5 percent in 1960.Footnote 59 Another important aspect of the Turkish state's push for large-scale transformation through education was the opening of village schools. This was a slow process in the beginning: only 9,203 of the country's over 34,000 villages had schools in 1940, and underqualified teachers, appointed after a few months of crash training (eğitmens), taught in most of them. But the introduction of a new type of special teacher school, the “village institutes,” changed the picture in the 1940s. These institutes admitted only peasant children and offered practical education—including farming techniques—that would help the students serve and survive in the villages as teachers after graduation.Footnote 60 In this fashion, the Ministry of Education hired a remarkable number of 15,807 new village teachers and increased the number of village elementary schools to 15,800 by 1950 (3,860 with eğitmens).Footnote 61 Finally, some people's rooms in villages maintained small libraries (448 of them in 1935),Footnote 62 radios started to enter villages in the 1940s, especially in the latter part of the decade,Footnote 63 theater troops organized by the people's houses staged some of their plays in the villages,Footnote 64 and some nationally distributed magazines, especially the ones with large pictures and simple, humorous content, occasionally made their way into villages.Footnote 65
It is true that these developments indicate tangible progress, but we should keep in mind that more than half of Turkey's villages still lacked schools in 1950. It was mostly the urban population (25 percent in 1960) that boosted the country's modest literacy rates.Footnote 66 Female literacy remained at less than half of male literacy until the 1970s.Footnote 67 And importantly, the ability of some Turkish peasants to read or the presence of teachers in some villages did not necessarily mean that the peasants actually read anything culturally transformative or that the teachers actually transformed them.
Anecdotal information from many studies of individual villages as well as broader surveys such as İlhan Başgöz's work on the geographic distribution of personal names suggest that the most significant catalyst of social and cultural transformation in the early republic's villages was exposure to towns and cities thanks to proximity or better transportation opportunities.Footnote 68 One village to the northeast of Ankara, Hasanoğlan, was fairly advantaged in this regard. It was on a railway line, although without a train stop, and since the early 20th century it had a functioning school. When the Ministry of Education opened a village institute in Hasanoğlan in 1941, the village also acquired a train station, a post office, a telephone line, a people's room, a practice school for institute students to practice teaching, about 1,500 new residents (teachers, students, and personnel), and a significant amount of cash inflow. This was a village where one could expect transformation to take place.Footnote 69
Nevertheless, when the institute's sociology teacher İbrahim Yasa conducted a detailed study of Hasanoğlan in 1947, the literacy rate for the Latin alphabet was only 33.7 percent. Almost every household had someone literate, but in 70.6 percent of those households, no one had read anything in the past year. Those who did read were mostly elementary school students studying textbooks. Other than this, the villagers were mostly interested in books with a religious content, including the Qurʾan in Arabic and popular Sufi literature. Some read newspapers and other periodicals, typically with large fonts and copious amounts of pictures indicating the elementary level of their readership. Almost all women read nothing but the Qurʾan in Arabic.Footnote 70 Nobody attended the people's room.Footnote 71 And the villagers rarely interacted with people at the institute or with the school teachers who taught their children.Footnote 72
The three things that significantly transformed the attitudes of Hasanoğlan's villagers were a radio in one of its two coffeehouses, which increased interest in national and world affairs, the inflow of cash, which increased consumption and the variety of items purchased from outside the village, and the train station, which made day trips to nearby towns and to Ankara possible. All of these factors, as well as increased educational opportunities, would have meaningful long-term effects in Hasanoğlan, as Yasa showed in a follow-up study in 1966.Footnote 73 Yet, as the preceding observations have made clear, radios started to appear in most Turkish villages only at the end of the 1940s, the majority of those villages did not receive sudden cash inflow or even an elementary school until the 1950s, and Hasanoğlan's train station was simply a fortunate exception.
The persistence of Islam and Islamic institutions, such as marriage and inheritance practices, religious instruction by imams, and to some extent Sufism, in Turkish villages beyond the state's purview, are other indicators of the early republican state's inability to transform rural Turkey. Peasants in various parts of Anatolia and Thrace practiced Islam with variations that reflected their local and historical circumstances.Footnote 74 Some of their practices even diverted from the rulings of Sunni jurisprudence that the overwhelming majority of Turkish peasants followed. However, the question here is not whether the Turkish peasants’ religious practices complied with the textual tradition of Islam from a normative point of view. Regardless of the nature of that compliance, Turkish peasants considered Islam to be an authoritative point of reference in determining their life choices. As Talal Asad explains, although local “Islamic traditions are not homogenous, they aspire to coherence, in the way that all discursive traditions do.”Footnote 75 Ideally, the early republic's Kemalist elite wanted to replace the authority of Islam with what they considered to be “contemporary” (muasır) values brokered by the state, such as positive science, rational thinking, and national interest. But after they concluded that complete secularization in this way was not possible, they opted to monopolize religious authority in the hands of the state and to create a more positivist and prostate version of Islam.Footnote 76 The co-optation of the Ottoman high ulema by the republican stateFootnote 77 as well as the creation of a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), which appears to have pervasive if not uncontested religious authority in contemporary Turkey, may suggest achievements in this direction.Footnote 78 But this co-optation was mostly an urban phenomenon and the Directorate of Religious Affairs consolidated its power over rural imams long after the 1950s. The Kemalist elite's aspirations to secularize the Turkish populace or transform Islam did not reach the village level in the period under consideration.
The poor reception of a new, secular civil code adapted from the Swiss Civil Code in 1926 provides an illustrative example in this regard. The new code introduced many provisions that contradicted existing customs and norms that Turkish peasants associated with Islam. It banned imams from officiating marriages, for instance, and required all new marriages to be registered by civil officials. However, most Turkish Muslims considered a marriage that was not officiated by an imam as lacking sanctity and therefore illegitimate. Moreover, registering a marriage involved many bureaucratic procedures that required traveling to urban centers, obtaining documents, and paying fees. Most Turkish peasants were simply not up to this. One scholar estimated in 1950 that twenty-four years after the introduction of the Swiss Civil Code in Turkey, still less than half of the marriages in the country each year were being registered officially. This resulted in so many childbirths out of official wedlock that the Turkish parliament repeatedly had to pass laws to legitimize unregistered children.Footnote 79 The new code banned polygyny, but it was allowed in Islamic jurisprudence. Turkish men in the late Ottoman Empire's villages rarely married second or sometimes more wives, often to secure extra labor in the household or, in cases of infertility, to have a child, and they continued to do so in the republican period at least until the 1950s.Footnote 80 The new code required the equal division of inheritance between sons and daughters, contradicting Islamic legal stipulations. And daughters tended to override it by relinquishing their legal rights to their brothers in order to comply with what Paul Stirling calls the “informal system of social control” operative in their communities. This system was so strong that village communities typically settled conflicts among their members internally, without escalating their cases to the attention of state authorities.Footnote 81
Such discrepancies between state laws reflecting republican ideals and actual practices associated with Islam existed in other fields as well. In 1924, a law gave the Ministry of Education monopoly over all educational activities in the country, closed religious seminaries (madrasas), and banned imams from teaching the children of their congregations basic Islamic knowledge, including recitation of the Qurʾan in Arabic. Following the alphabet reform in 1928, the teaching of the Arabic alphabet was banned altogether. Yet imams continued to teach secretly in the villages.Footnote 82 Another law outlawing Sufi orders in 1925 and requiring the closure of their lodges was more successful.Footnote 83 However, one could still find exceptions. Makal, for instance, writes that in 1947 a Sufi master had at least fifty disciples in each of the thirty-one villages close to where he taught.Footnote 84 Or take the example of Kaşıkçı Ali Rıza Efendi, a Naqshbandi Sufi master and Islamic scholar in a village of Konya. He moved to Medina in 1934, but thanks to his lasting influence, most villagers in his former village were still unwilling to send their children to the village school in the 1940s. Perhaps out of frustration, the school teacher would in turn raid houses to catch children studying Qurʾan recitation.Footnote 85
SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION IN SEDENTARY SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA
The foregoing discussion has demonstrated the extent to which the Kemalist reforms had missed Turkey's villages before the 1950s. An account of what happened in sedentary Soviet Central Asia in the same period provides a useful comparative perspective highlighting the causes that prevented the Turkish state from transforming its rural population. Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted and continuously reinterpreted in the Soviet Union, provided both the blueprint for a future society and an executive strategy to construct it.Footnote 86 According to Karl Marx, true change in society, or revolution, necessitated the transformation of the relations of production, or the society's “substructure.” Changes in the substructure would then transform culture, or more broadly the “superstructure.” He expected the next grand transformation in human history to take place in industrialized Europe as a transition from capitalism to socialism through the revolutionary agency of the proletariat. That, however, did not happen. Thus, the Bolsheviks, who seized power in the violent turmoil of World War I, decided to build socialism through the agency of the Communist Party. They proclaimed the party to represent the proletariat, sometimes even in the absence of a proletariat as was the case in Central Asia.Footnote 87
The travails of post-tsarist power struggles, which included large-scale grain requisitions and famine, had already weakened Central Asia's Muslim communities when the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in the region in the early 1920s. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, they initially prioritized winning the loyalty of the local population over transforming it.Footnote 88 They did not hesitate to attack religious institutions when the opportunity arose, but only in a limited way, reflecting both the “thinness of Soviet rule” in this early period and the Bolsheviks’ assumption that religion as a factor of the superstructure was doomed to disappear anyway as socialism transformed the relations of production.Footnote 89 Then, around 1926, the Soviet government dropped this assumption and started to encourage anti-Islamic propaganda more openly.Footnote 90 A conspicuous aspect of the Soviet propaganda effort was an “assault” on Muslim women's face veil, which Bolshevik agents and progressive Muslim intellectuals (Jadidists) both perceived as a symbol of the oppression of women in a society governed by traditional Islam.Footnote 91
All of these interventions in the realm of culture had analogs in Republican Turkey, but unlike the Kemalist leadership, the Bolsheviks persistently targeted existing authority structures in society by isolating and dispossessing “the upper strata in the countryside” and destroying the social, religious, and economic institutions that sustained them.Footnote 92 This destruction went far beyond the republican Turkish government's focus on closing madrasas and Sufi lodges. During the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan of 1928–32, Moscow launched a “proletarian cultural revolution” to parallel rapid economic development.Footnote 93 This translated into more concerted and direct attacks on the clergy and Islamic institutions in Central Asia. Besides the propaganda effort of local enthusiasts, it was the Soviet Union's notorious secret police organization that directly answered to Moscow (Joint State Political Administration, or OGPU) and the higher party personnel who carried out such attacks. The result was the final abolishment of qadi courts, the closure of Muslim schools, even if they had reformed and introduced secular subjects, the banning of religious instruction in all schools, and the purge of Islamic scholars.Footnote 94 By 1929, the majority of Islamic scholars had been killed, imprisoned, or exiled,Footnote 95 and many had escaped to distant villages where they could still make a living.Footnote 96 Furthermore, as a new generation of local Bolsheviks trained in Soviet educational institutions moved into positions of authority, the Communist Party also purged progressive Muslim intellectuals, whose services and mediation it had initially used, thereby ridding itself of all vestiges of the past regime.Footnote 97
Whereas many institutions and practices of the old order had an afterlife, such as officially closed mosques that continued to function secretly or women who unveiled at party meetings only to reveil “to walk back home,”Footnote 98 changes at the turn of the 1930s in the form of the collectivization of land and the expansion of cotton monoculture decisively broke authority structures and communal solidarities in sedentary Central Asia. Although party enthusiasts had already been encouraging peasants to join collective farms for some time, in 1929 Stalin launched a Union-wide campaign for collectivization. The campaign involved persistent propaganda, large-scale mobilization of party cadres, many incentives to join the collective farms voluntarily, and if need be, coercion in various forms, including induced famine in Kazakhstan and UkraineFootnote 99 and the use of the Red Army and paramilitary OGPU units.Footnote 100 In October 1929, only 3.4 percent of Uzbekistan's peasant households had joined collective farms. With the new campaign in effect, this number reached 37.7 percent in 1931 and 76.4 percent in 1933.Footnote 101 By the end of the decade, 96.9 percent of the peasant households and 99.9 percent of the agricultural land was collectivized in the Soviet Union, and Central Asia was no exception.Footnote 102
For Uzbek villagers, who constituted about 75 percent of the population in Uzbekistan until after World War II, collectivization meant transitioning from growing one's own produce and consuming or selling it to working for a state-owned farm enterprise as a wage worker, hence becoming dependent on the state for income and, importantly, for the supply of basic needs.Footnote 103 Moreover, in the process of collectivization, security forces had removed the wealthier and more authoritative members of rural communities as “enemies of socialism” (a process often referred to as dekulakization), thereby crushing the autonomous authority structures of village communities. The rural society in sedentary Central Asia could no longer dodge or ignore party interventions after the 1930s.Footnote 104
Further and more conclusive attacks on communal and religious institutions accompanied this push for collectivization. In Shoshana Keller's estimation, roughly 69 percent of the mosques in Uzbekistan were closed by 1935 and more than 14,000 Islamic scholars, about 70 percent of the estimated total, were purged or otherwise disappeared from records by World War II.Footnote 105 The Soviet state's campaign against Islam was at times hampered by concerns over security or by the inefficiency of government structures, but all in all, the regime was able to displace Islam “from the public arena,” relegating it to “fragmentary and fading memories of prayers, texts, and rituals” for the generations to follow. Islam continued to mark identity but ceased to dictate devotional commitment or practice at a significant level. Perhaps Islam was not totally eradicated as a religion in this early period and even acquired official recognition once again after World War II, but it was marginalized and damaged enough to eliminate popular resistance to further destruction, such as when Khrushchev closed many more thousands of mosques in the 1960s.Footnote 106
Nevertheless, as Kotkin emphasizes, the Soviet experience was not only one of destruction.Footnote 107 Purges, dekulakization, and collectivization were traumatic, inflicting pain, undermining customs and religion, and destroying existing authority structures. But this destruction also opened opportunities for the construction of a new life that the remaining villagers—now collective farm members—could hope to be better. Power was not distributed between sedentary Central Asia's Muslim villagers and the Communist Party in a zero sum game, nor did it travel on a one way alley from Moscow to local party bosses and on to the villagers. Those villagers who were willing and capable of working with the party found themselves empowered in the emerging “socialist” Soviet Union, and in turn, they put their energies into the creation of that imagined better future under the guidance of the party.Footnote 108
The Soviet future featured tractors, hospitals, and schools.Footnote 109 In 1914–15, 17,300 students attended public schools in what would later become the territories of Uzbekistan. By 1940–41, their number exceeded 1.3 million, comprising almost the entire school-age population in the republic.Footnote 110 Uzbekistan's literacy rate climbed from 11.6 percent for ages nine through forty-nine in 1926 to 78.7 percent in 1939 and 98.1 percent in 1959 despite two alphabet changes, first from the Arabic script to Latin in the 1920s and then, with directives from Moscow, to Cyrillic in the 1930s. While the statistics for ages over forty-nine are not available, the rapid growth of literacy among this younger cohort indicates the effectiveness of Soviet elementary education. Moreover, by 1959, 45 percent of the urban and 30 percent of the rural population in Uzbekistan had also received secondary or higher education.Footnote 111 In 1940, 1,278 libraries operated in rural Uzbekistan, corresponding to one library per 3,869 individuals. By 1960, the number of libraries reached 2,600, corresponding to one library per 2,137 individuals.Footnote 112 During that same year, six movie tickets were sold for each rural Uzbek citizen and sixteen tickets for each urban citizen.Footnote 113 While each of these numbers can be challenged to some extent, together they reinforce the above-told story of social and cultural reconstruction, as also confirmed by the most recent literature on the subject.Footnote 114
COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS
Nermin Erdentuğ’s depiction of polygyny in her study of the Hal village underscores the power of informal social control mechanisms in villages. All but one of the marriages in Hal were monogamous, although elderly villagers told Erdentuğ that the village population used to be one-third polygynous. The villagers related the near disappearance of polygyny to the new laws, economic circumstances, and the unwillingness of village women to face competition. However, Erdentuğ reported a different picture upon closer scrutiny. Because the Hal village barely owned any agricultural land, 80 to 90 percent of its male population traveled to various cities to earn money as seasonal workers. There, in the cities, many of them acquired second wives in religiously officiated marriages that were considered illegal by the state. To wit, the men of Hal were monogamous inside the village but polygynous outside of it. Their “parents, neighbors, and relatives” condoned the existence of second wives but did not want them in the village, and therefore, the wives from the cities never set foot in it.Footnote 115 In urban settings, the Hal men evaded or tacitly defied state laws prohibiting polygyny, but back at home, the village community was too close to evade and its control mechanisms were too strong to defy.
Considering class struggle as the foundation of social transformation, agents of the Soviet state devised strategies to undermine mechanisms of control and structures of authority in society. As Jan Gross describes in great detail in the example of Soviet-occupied Poland during World War II, this was not necessarily a top-down process. In most cases, socialist transformation involved the agitation and exploitation of existing inequalities and private grievances by making state powers, including violence, available to individuals to rectify what they thought or felt was wrong in their communities. The Soviet state did not have the capacity to infiltrate and transmute each and every community; no state does, for that matter, as James Scott highlights.Footnote 116 However, with targeted and sustained agitation backed as needed by security services, state powers, which in the Soviet Union often merged with the Communist Party, were able to incite enough strife and chaos at the communal level to induce social fragmentation, thereby introducing the party-state as the fountainhead for new authority structures and control mechanisms. This transformation rendered society susceptible to the proselytization of new normative values and cultural forms.Footnote 117
In sedentary Central Asia, The Soviet regime attacked villages and village notables, including Islamic scholars, through collectivization and accompanying purges, though without leading to immediate urbanization. The technological, military, and administrative advantages that the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsarist empire in European Russia and made available to Central Asia's local party enthusiasts contributed significantly to the effectiveness of this attack on society. As a result, the Communist Party with its Moscow-bound nomenklatura and local enthusiasts was able, in Khalid's words, to disestablish Islam “as the major font of moral and ethical values for society” in sedentary Central Asia.Footnote 118
Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, was moved by a mix of positivist and populist convictions, without the Marxist insistence on transforming the relations of production. Continuing in the tradition of the 19th-century modernizing states, the country's ruling elite attempted to improve society through a gradual process of education, modeling, and forced reform, without directly or vigorously targeting existing authority structures and control mechanisms, especially in the villages.Footnote 119 They attacked the image of Islamic scholarsFootnote 120 but did not attempt to eradicate Islamic scholars as a class. The Turkish state incorporated Islamic scholars into its executive machinery through the creation of a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı),Footnote 121 but this did not mean establishing pervasive control over rural ulema, at least in the short run.
Furthermore, the Turkish state tried to preserve villages and village communities as sources of political stability. The 1924 Village Law required each village to elect a village headman (muhtar) and a council of elders for local governance. In the absence of a significant challenge to existing authority structures, villagers elected rich notables, such as the big landowners, to these positions or sometimes conceived of the village headman as merely a scribal functionary subordinate to the influence of those notables.Footnote 122 While imams had to receive certification from and be appointed by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, once appointed they were free to engage their congregations relatively unrestricted by state interventions. The state was distant and, importantly, it was the villagers who paid the imams, not the state. If the villagers wanted imams to teach their children how to recite the Qurʾan, the imams would do so despite state interdictions.Footnote 123
Such examples of evading the law do not mean that Turkish villagers completely disregarded the state. They tried to avoid it as much as possible, but they fearfully obeyed its representatives when an encounter was inevitable. Yet, agents of the state, aside from the gendarmes, remained all too distant to affect the villagers’ daily lives. The gendarmes could be used in enforcing certain reforms such as sartorial stipulations,Footnote 124 but even this was sporadic as the gendarmerie remained an “intensely disliked” punitive force that was feared and obeyed when present but that did not have constant presence in the villages to promote social and cultural transformation.Footnote 125 Teachers, as proselytizers of the Kemalist reforms, constituted an exception in this regard, but more than half of Turkish villages still lacked schools by 1950. Where there were schools, teachers typically arrived in tight-knit village communities as suspicious outsiders. Ultimately, their survival in the village depended on their ability to maintain peace with existing authority structures. If they challenged village notables or the villagers’ existing norms and values, especially in religious matters, they were likely to face responses ranging from indifference to derision and even violence.Footnote 126
In conclusion, the regime ideals of the Soviet state and the general circumstances of sedentary Central Asia in the wake of World War I approximated those of the Turkish Republic, and both areas remained predominantly rural until after the 1950s. Yet, in the second quarter of the 20th century, the Soviet state was significantly more effective in transforming the rural society of sedentary Central Asia than was the Turkish state in transforming that of Anatolia and Thrace. This divergence in effectiveness emanated from differences in the two regimes’ ideological foundations and related choices and capacities for mobilizing resources. Motivated by Marxism-Leninism's emphasis on the necessity of substructural transformation to build socialism, the Soviet state attacked and undermined existing authority structures and communal solidarities in sedentary Central Asia. In contrast, the positivist inclinations of the Kemalist leadership did not provide a similar strategy of action in Turkey. Partly under the influence of the peasantist movement and partly because they lacked the resources to confront village communities, the republican regime preserved existing authority structures in the villages.
Yet the Soviet state did more than undermine authority structures. Through propaganda and mobilization, boosted at times by European Russia's superior military and administrative capacities, it created new authority structures subordinate to the Communist Party and filled them with new cadres who identified with the Soviet developmental ideals. The support from European Russia did not have an analog in the Turkish case until Turkey started to receive financial and military support from the United States in the 1950s. The Kemalist leadership attempted to introduce its secularist and nationalist ideals in Turkey's villages through education and urban modeling, but it lacked the means to accomplish its goals. Moreover, Turkey's villages preserved a substantial degree of autonomy and largely escaped the state's manipulative influences at least until after World War II. Consequently, if there was a Kemalist revolution in early Republican Turkey, it missed the villages, where more than 80 percent of the population lived.
