Mustafa Sübhi

Born 1882 in Giresun; died Jan. 28, 1921, nearTrabzon. One of the founders and leaders of the Communist Party of Turkey (CPT).

The son of a high-level official, Sübhi graduated from a law school in Istanbul in 1906 and then from the department of social sciences of the Sorbonne. In 1910 he joined the Ottoman Socialist Party. In 1913 he was confined to the fortress of Sinop, from where he escaped to Russia. In 1914, being a Turkish subject, Siibhi was interned and exiled to the Urals. While an unskilled factory worker in the Urals, he joined the RSDLP(B) in 1915 and engaged in revolutionary work among Turkish prisoners of war.

After the Great October Socialist Revolution, Sübhi carried out various party assignments in Moscow, Kazan, the Crimea, and Tashkent. In 1918 he founded the newspaper Yeni dünya (New World), which propagandized the ideas of the October Revolution of 1917 among Muslim workers in Russia and in the East. Siibhi attended the First Congress of the Comintern (1919) and the First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1920). In the summer of 1919 he fought against Denikin’s and Petliura’s armed bands in the Ukraine.

Sübhi was one of the organizers of the First Congress of the CPT (Baku, September 1920), during which he was elected party chairman. When he reentered Turkey, Sübhi and 14 other members of the Central Committee of the CPT and party militants were seized by Turkish gendarmes in Trabzon; they were taken out to sea and drowned.

Several works by K. Marx, F. Engels, and V. I. Lenin were translated into Turkish upon Sübhi’s initiative and with his participation.