Pan-Turkism

a nationalistic, chauvinist bourgeois ideology, which claims that all peoples speaking Turkic languages, and the Muslim Turks in particular, are one nation and should unite to form a single state under the aegis of Turkey.

Pan-Turkism originated at the turn of the 20th century and evolved as an outgrowth of Turkism, an early form of Turkish bourgeois nationalism. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, as reactionary tendencies became stronger in the policies of the Committee of Union and Progress, Pan-Turkism began to prevail over Turkism, which it had completely displaced by the eve of World War I (1914–18). Like Pan-Islam, Pan-Turkism was used by the Young Turks as a basic means of propaganda in their effort to draw Turkey into a war with Russia.

Pan-Turkism was also actively propagandized by certain bourgeois nationalist parties and movements in Middle Asia and Transcaucasia (Jadidism, for example), which endeavored to distract the workers from the revolutionary struggle and separate the national borderlands fom Russia. After the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, many counterrevolutionaries in Transcaucasia and Middle Asia opposed Soviet power in the name of Pan-Turkism; however, they did not find support among the masses.

The policy of Pan-Turkism was also rejected by the leaders of the Kemalist Revolution, who accepted the principles of Turkism, distinguished it from Pan-Turkism, and even replaced the term “Turkism” with “nationalism,” a concept limited to Turkish territory. However, after the death of Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), and especially during World War II (1939–45), Pan-Turkists became active in Turkey, establishing close ties with the fascist Germans, conducting an embittered anti-Soviet campaign, calling for the seizure of Soviet territories, and practically transforming Pan-Turkism into a Turkish variety of fascism. Since World War II, Pan-Turkism has been used by reactionary circles in Turkey as one of the chief instruments of anticommu-nist policy.