128. The DP government, which won the elections in 1950, sent troops to the Korean War less than two months after taking power, in order to curry favor with Washington and to include Turkey in the newly formed NATO alliance. Thus, from its accession to NATO in 1952 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Turkey became a bulwark and outpost of US imperialism in the Middle East against the USSR-led Warsaw Pact.

129. In 1951, the TKP, which had campaigned against the deployment of troops to Korea, faced a massive wave of arrests. This operation, in which the main leaders and many members of the TKP were arrested, largely paralyzed the party.

130. Following the path paved by the CHP in the last years of its rule, the DP government abandoned economic planning in favor of rapid foreign investment incentives and free market policies. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, increased inflows of goods and capital, and investments in infrastructure, Turkish capitalism experienced rapid growth in the 1950s, reflected in improved living standards.

131. By the mid-1950s, rapid economic growth based on infrastructure investment, foreign capital inflows and credit led to a balance of payments crisis. The policies pursued led to high rates of inflation, shortages of critical goods and weak economic development. The DP government responded to the crisis with “stabilization measures,” including the devaluation of the Turkish lira in 1958, while taking increasingly authoritarian steps against growing social opposition.

132. The Turkish industrial bourgeoisie, which wanted to invest in the domestic market and protect itself from foreign competition, was also extremely uncomfortable with the situation. On May 27, 1960, a group of military officers called the National Unity Committee overthrew the DP government and declared its allegiance to NATO and the Western allies. The military junta, which remained in power for the next eighteen months, put the DP’s top leaders on trial for “unconstitutional rule and treason.” Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, Foreign Minister Fatih Rüştü Zorlu, and Finance Minister Hasan Polatkan were executed.

133. The Stalinists, for the most part, attributed a “progressive” role to the 1960 coup and the army officers who carried it out. In a telegram to the National Unity Committee on May 28, Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, who had played a leading role in the Stalinist movement from the 1920s, declared: “May your second holly Kuvâ-yi Milliye^[1] war be blest. May Allah not deceive you in true democracy.” On June 28, 1960, Behice Boran, who would become one of the leaders of the legal Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) founded in 1961, wrote a letter to junta leader Cemal Gürsel declaring her support for the military coup, which she described as “the second great step in the socio-political development of our country since the Tanzimat [Reform Era], after the Independence War and Atatürk’s reforms.”^[2]

134. This support came under conditions where young officers in Egypt in 1952 and Colonel Qassim in Iraq in 1958 overthrew their respective kingdoms, implemented bourgeois nationalist programs, and moved closer to the USSR. Both the Egyptian and Iraqi Stalinists attributed a progressive role to these coups, and to the Arab bourgeoisies, in line with the theory of “two-stage revolution.” In Turkey, this Stalinist understanding, which attributed a progressive role to the “national bourgeoisie,” Kemalism and the army, played a significant role in the left student movement that developed in the late 1960s.

135. During the same period, the Socialist Workers Party in the US was moving toward an unprincipled reunification with the Pabloite “International Secretariat,” which was aligned with Stalinist policies and bourgeois nationalist movements against the building of independent Trotskyist parties in the colonial and semi-colonial countries and against the program of permanent revolution.