71. The post-1923 Turkish bourgeoisie had extremely limited capital accumulation apart from the confiscated property and wealth of the Armenians and Greeks. The Kemalist government was faced with the problems of keeping the new state apparatus alive, including a large army and a massive bureaucracy, repaying the foreign debts inherited from the Ottoman Empire, importing industrial goods vital to the economy, maintaining and developing bourgeois rule, and creating a strong Turkish capitalist class and a national market.

72. The internal logic of capitalist development and the consolidation of the national state created conflicts between the Kemalist elite and some pre-capitalist Kurdish rulers, sheikhs and landlords who had previously been able to move freely in the Kurdish regions in exchange for sending troops and paying taxes to the Sultan. Moreover, the proclamation of a modern republic, the abolition of the Caliphate, and the banning of dervish lodges also weakened the ties between Ankara and its former allies, the local Kurdish rulers. They now had to pay taxes and submit to a secular state, a situation not easily accepted by all Kurdish feudal lords, despite the Kemalist elite’s abandonment of land reform.

73. The unrest in the Kurdish provinces caused by the moves of the Kemalist elite—which was unable to peacefully resolve the democratic demands of a large national minority and tried to completely ignore and assimilate the Kurds—provoked uprisings that in many cases intertwined religious and national-democratic demands. After each mass uprising, thousands of poor and landless peasants were killed or imprisoned. Kurdish tribes that did not cooperate closely with Ankara were exiled to different parts of the country.

74. Repression was not limited to the Kurds. Under martial law, the Kemalist government banned all workers’ organizations, and emergency courts sentenced thousands of dissidents, including communists, to prison and exile.

75. In the 1930s, Ankara established close economic and political relations with the USSR under Stalin, as well as with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In 1936, it adopted some paragraphs of the fascist Italian penal code that prohibited all class-based organizational and propaganda activities, namely communist organizations and propaganda. The words of the “Tenth Anniversary March,” prepared in 1933, summed up the official ideology: “We are a mass without privilege, without class, united.”

76. Attempts to move towards a multi-party system in the 1920s and 1930s, with Atatürk’s approval, ended with the closure of the new parties out of concern that they were rapidly gaining significant popular support. In the second half of the 1930s, the CHP and the state apparatus became identical. The secretary-general of the CHP was now the minister of the interior, and the provincial chairmen of the party were governors.