Ideology on Trial: The Prosecution of Pan-Turkists and Leftists at the Dawn of the Cold War in Turkey, 1944-1947

James Ryan

A series of trials carried out between 1944 and of 1947 against intellectuals belonging to ultranationalist and leftist camps would drastically alter the political and intellectual landscape in Turkey as the nation moved into the multiparty era and faced the new challenges of the Cold War environment. The trials roughly coincided with Turkey’s deliberate shift towards the Allied powers after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad – Turkey would halt trade with Germany in April 1944 and formally enter the war in February 1945 – and the multiparty parliamentary elections in July 1946 – in which the newly formed Democrat Party would win 64 of 465 seats. These trials greatly impacted two sets of opposition voices in Turkish politics that had been growing in prominence and popularity since the 1930s, and which had accelerated over the course of World War II. This article examines the archival, press, and memoir accounts of the prosecution of Pan-Turkist¹ figures including Nihal Atsız, Reha Oğuz Turkkan, and Zeki Velidi Togan, which began in 1944, saw a conviction in early 1945 and carried on through their victory in appeals later that fall and retrial requests in 1947, and the 1946 trial of Halil Lütfü Dördüncü, Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel – the owner and editors of Tan – who were convicted in March 1946 of defaming the republic and members of the Grand National Assembly, but would win an appeal that fall.²

The timing of these trials and the domestic and foreign political consequences provide a unique opportunity to explore how legal suppression of regime opponents on the basis of anti-communist or anti-fascist fears during the height of World War II came to be viewed as an important aspect of Turkey’s transition to multiparty democracy. It helps us locate in this space between the emerging poles of the Cold War the tensions and contradictions in the relationship between democratization and the fight against various sorts of radicalism.³ Through the publicity surrounding the trials, and the subsequent lionization of the defendants in each case, the trials turned each of the defendants into personifications of the ideologies they supposedly represented, as well as Turkish stand-ins for conspiracies of a German or Russian fifth column, real or imagined. On the one hand, although the prosecution severely damaged the immediate political potential of the Pan-Turkists, the appeals process rehabilitated the intellectual currency of some of the defendants and laid important ideological groundwork for the revival of their movement in subsequent years and decades. Continued suppression of leftist activities following the Sertels’ victory in appeals court, on the other hand, virtually ended the public careers of the Sertels, who found little freedom in a toxic environment for leftists and fled to the Eastern Bloc in 1950, ending their nearly half-century long journalistic careers in Turkey. As Semih Gökatalay has shown in the case of the prosecution of left-leaning professors Behice Boran, Niyazi Berkes, and Pertev Naili Boratav that followed the prosecution of the Sertels, prosecutions against perceived communists in the late-1940s was driven by recently-empowered factions within the ruling party that favored the Pan-Turkists. While a sizable group within both of the competitive political parties favored more liberal approaches to confronting the communist threat, such groups, as Gökatalay deftly demonstrates, were ineffective in their efforts to protect such figures from legal repression until after the 1950 elections.⁴

This article examines these cases along two axes – how the courts and the state negotiated the ideological valences of each trial differently, and what rhetorical and political strategies were deployed by the defendants.⁵ In both these cases it is clear that the trials meet the standard of Otto Kirchheimer’s fourth level of political trial – “the artificially created political offense.”⁶ Such cases normally appear as perjury or libel suits, and present a particular choice to the defendant: whether or not, or to what extent, is it necessary to accept the premises of the suit, and the legal system that underpins it.⁷ The difference in the way these defendants answered this question highlights the ways the two ideological camps related to the state in this transitional period. In a time when the government helped create a toxic environment for leftism, out of a fear of Russian encroachment on Turkish territory, the Sertels condemned the premises of the suit against them, without offering any defense or articulation of their ideological preferences. Ultimately, they won on appeal in shorter order and with less pain than the Pan-Turkists, but their movement sustained continued repression throughout the 1940s, to the point that they left the country in exile in 1950.⁸ The Pan-Turkist trial was far more contentious, but, as this article demonstrates, this trial placed the matter of the acceptability of Pan-Turkism and racist ideologies to the Turkish state and society at its center. The various stages of this trial ended in a decision that effectively declared irredentist ethno-nationalism suitable for the multiparty environment – a decision made amenable by the fact that Nazi Germany no longer proved, after V-E day, the threat that it had at initiation of the trials in 1944.

The classical scholarship on the multiparty era in Turkey, in concert with contemporary accounts, celebrated the ruling Republican People’s Party (CHP) as they peacefully handed over power to the Democrat Party (DP) in 1950, usually brushing aside the heavy-handed measures against certain opponents in the years prior.⁹ This article moves towards a revision of a triumphalist narrative that pitches the years of single party rule under the CHP as a successful “tutelary democracy” by emphasizing the rather undemocratic suppression of political opponents who were otherwise loyal to the Kemalist regime, and critical to the articulation of opposition politics under the single party rubric.¹⁰ In the case of the Pan-Turkists, the CHP sought to mark opponents who were at once uncomfortably close to Nazi Germany and enthusiastic supporters of the ethno-nationalist directives of Kemalist ideology as dangerous traitors whose presence risked upsetting Turkey’s carefully balanced neutrality, at best, or overturning the government in a violent coup, at worst. With the leftists, principally Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel, the government, after declining to prosecute anyone for the violent attack that destroyed their newspaper business, sought to further ostracize them to insure they would wield little or no influence over the newly formed DP in the 1946 elections.¹¹ The intended effect of these trials, I argue, was to inoculate any potentially successful opposition party, primarily the DP, from advocating policies that could in any way be conceived as supporting fascism or communism and thus posing a serious threat to Turkey’s precarious place in the early Cold War order. The ultimate result of the trials was that in the critical, precarious period of inter- and intra-party struggle to define the political and ideological preferences of both of the competing parties, once-prominent advocates for left- and right-wing alternatives to the status quo were forcibly marginalized from the public conversation.

The Pan-Turkist Trials 1944-1947

The trial of Pan-Turkists followed a protest against the faculty of Ankara University and Sabahattin Ali, a leftist novelist and teacher, on May 3, 1944. Nihal Atsız had lost a libel suit with Ali and organized much of the boisterous incident. He was arrested along with roughly two dozen others on May 9 in Istanbul, which was still under Martial Law, based on a list prepared by Education Minister Hasan Ali Yücel.¹² Later that year, the education ministry would publish a volume collecting seventy editorials that were published in May 1944, and all of the public speeches of President İsmet İnönü, Prime Minister Sükrü Saraçoğlu, Education Minister Hasan Ali Yücel, and the General Secretary of the CHP, M.Ş. Esendal, all supporting the arrests and denouncing the ideology of the protesters.¹³ In September, twenty-eight people were brought to trial, and ten of those were found guilty of conspiracy charges in a verdict delivered in February 1945. The guilty parties were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten years (Zeki Velidi Togan) to nine months (Alparslan Türkeş). The primary charge against the group as detailed in the indictment published in September was “attempting treacherous actions against the fatherland and the nation while forming a secret society with the aims of Racism and Turanism.”¹⁴ The evidence centered on letters between the various members confiscated following their arrest. The most prominent circle of conspirators identified in the indictment were associates of Zeki Velidi Togan. Togan was accused of rejecting Atatürk’s conception of a “bordered nation” (hudutlandırılmış milliyeti) in a confiscated letter sent to Reha Oğuz Turkkan and Cihat Savaşfer, of collaborating with Turks in Germany to aid a Nazi victory over Russia, the creation of a Turkish Union, and the overthrow of the Turkish state.¹⁵

A complete collection of the questioning and defenses in this trial has been made available very recently.¹⁶ The two most prominent defendants – Zeki Velidi Togan and Nihal Atsız – accused the prosecution of doctoring evidence, including the letters.¹⁷ In the questioning portions of the trial, the judge focused on questions of ideology – how to define Turkism, racism, and nationalism; what was each defendant’s relationship with racist-Turanism and other ideologies like Republicanism, Communism, and liberalism. In response to these questions, Togan stated that, “never in my life have I found myself to be a sycophant to anyone. I wasn’t to Atatürk either,” but that the accusation that “he harbored bad thoughts about Atatürk was among the greatest injustices” of the indictment.¹⁸ He explained his opposition to racism as a political philosophy, “I have never bothered with the race question,” and that the racist systems of the Nazi or Italian fascists were “more international than national movements, are not appropriate for the Turkish national spirit.”¹⁹ Unlike Togan, Atsız defended his belief in a racist, irredentist philosophy – identifying the three stages of national ideals among which were “national unity [milli birlik] with its co-racialists [ırkdaş] outside the country,” and “world domination [cihanı istila].”²⁰ He rejected the idea that the Turkish republic was a “classic republic” because it lacked opposition parties and free elections.²¹ Atsız also asserted that the Turkish state had operated on racist principles from the beginning, naming key moments in Turkish history that justified his cause, including supposed betrayals during the Frist World War and Independence War by non-Turks, the Şeyh Sait Revolt and the assassination attempt on Atatürk in 1925, and the infamous Independence Tribunals, whose conveners he believed were, “acting on racism.”²²

What the defenses and testimony of Atsız and Togan show is the abiding concern amongst the Pan-Turkists that they were on trial because of their ideological position. They did not see themselves as revolutionaries, despite holding irredentist views contrary to Kemalist policy. What transpired over the following two years leading up to their acquittal, was a debate within the military court system over the appropriateness of the Pan-Turkist or racist-Turanist ideology given the current political context. Günay Göksü Özdoğan has noted the odd concurrence of the decisions with the geopolitical direction Turkey was swinging in from the beginning of the trials in 1944 – when a pro-German position would have been unhelpful – and the final rejection of the retrial request in 1947 – two years after Turkey joined the United Nations and less than a year after the first competitive multiparty parliamentary elections in the history of the republic.²³ Through a report prepared in advance of the decisions by the Military Courts of Cassation, which was published in 2015, we can see how the justice system reversed course on Pan-Turkism as an acceptable ideology, and made the case for its constitutionality.²⁴

The four documents published from Hayri Yıldırım’s archive include the “Investigation Report of the Military Court of Cassation,” two appeals decisions from the second criminal office of the Military Court of Cassation, and the “Military Court’s General Assembly Decision.”²⁵ I will focus on the first, and longest, of these as they pertain to Togan and Atsız, which describes significant modifications to the findings of the original investigations and was completed on October 16, 1945. The investigative report reviewed the meeting held between various Turkist figures on March 7, 1944, and found that the meeting was meant to patch up differences between Türkkan and Atsız, and “in hopes of forming a tight crowd of all the Turkists around İnönü’s side and bear no other effect…”²⁶ The conclusion of this section of the report finds that the March 1944 incident “was not proof or a sign of the reunification of a secret alliance.”²⁷ In their reassessment of the charges, the investigators rationalized the penalties handed down to each of the defendants in terms of the wartime climate. They argued that because Togan was a university professor at the time he was charged, the initial trial “…showed that he personally demonstrated the abuse of the security and faith of the Turkish youth in the Turkish Republican government and especially in the case of this last war demonstrated with precision against our government’s very strict neutrality…” through his participation in a secret society, which is outlawed in the Turkish Criminal Code’s Article 171, section 2.²⁸ Likewise, the connection with a secret society and the improper influence over students was found justifiable relating to charges against three other defendants.²⁹ However, when it came to charges that relate to the Criminal Code’s Article 142 – which makes violations of Turkey’s neutrality and attacks against its allies in wartime punishable by a minimum fifteen year prison sentence – the report granted the possibility of appeal to twelve of the defendants on the grounds that the propaganda by this group, “did not fulfill the elements of the various ideas of Article 142 and further proof was not procured to verify this in the suit’s dossier.”³⁰

The charges against Nihal Atsız had to do with activities the Military Court believed violated Articles 159 and 161 of the Turkish Criminal Code – affronting the government and parliament, and libel “with intent to excite public opinion.”³¹ The investigators delineated that Atsız’s racist outlook meant that his views ran counter to Turkey’s foreign policy aims – such as “handing over the Salonica front to the enemy in the Balkan War, or accusing Circassians and Abaz of treason during the World War” – and caused him to routinely cast suspicion of members of the Grand National Assembly who he believed were not of Turkish blood.³² They went into great detail on Atsız’s criticism of the “glorification of Atatürk as a national hero,” including his novella The Night of the Sycophants (Dalkavuklar Gecisi), letters and conversations with his co-defendants defaming Atatürk’s conception of the Grand National Assembly. The report also pointed to evidence of Atsız’s affinity for Hitler, as expressed in Atsız Mecmua (Atsız Review, his first publication), as well as books and pamphlets associated with Atsız including titles such as “Hitler and National Socialism,” “A Manifestation of Hitlerism in Turkey,” and “Turkish Fascist.”³³ Insofar as they rested on libel accusations, the charges against Atsız, unlike those against Togan and other defendants, bore a great similarity to the charges that would be brought against the Sertels and Tan less than two years later. Despite concerns over Hitlerism, the investigators noted that Atsız constructed an ideological front against “negative and communist minded professors” such as Istanbul University’s Sadrettin Celal Antel, and that the protests he instigated sought to “make a positive impression on the students… because he wanted them to find that in this country communism was a destructive view…”³⁴ The investigators also mentioned that the journal Orhun was explicitly anti-communist and that Sabahattin Ali’s libel suit against Atsız was instigated by his anti-communist essay, “The Devils Inside Us” (İçimizdeki Şeytanlar).³⁵ Evidence gathered during the investigation showed that during the organization of the May 3, 1944 protests Atsız and collaborators sought to “take precautions against leftist activities,” and that the protests, though violent, featured no slogans or actions against the government, indeed the “Independence March” was sung, and chants of “Long Live İnönü,” “Long Live The Turkish Republic,” “Long Live the Turkish Nation,” “Long Live Turkish Justices,” “Long Live the Turkish Youth,” and “Damn the Communists” were shouted.³⁶

The tension between these two lines of the investigation – the wariness towards racism coupled with a general approval of broadly nationalist and anti-communist activities – sums up the quandary in front of the appeals court. It would have been difficult to grant appeal without approving of both ideologies simultaneously, but the investigators sought solutions to this riddle. In the analysis of the evidence regarding the May 3^rd protests, the investigators suggested that the evidence did not satisfy Article 161 of the criminal code, but because of the wartime conditions and the “reckless” (pervasız) nature of the protests in front of observers who represented foreign governments, it would have been more appropriate for Atsız to have been charged with breaking Article 6 of the Criminal Code – which pertains to the endangerment of Turks living abroad. This suggestion shifted the focus of the crime to purely strategic considerations while punting on the issue of racism’s appropriateness in the public sphere.³⁷ In the initial provisions and conclusions by the investigators, they recommended charges be upheld in all cases for Atsız with the exception of the charges relating to the May 3^rd events, while charges relating to his attacks on parliamentarians and influence on students as a teacher were not recommended for appeal.³⁸

Next, the President of the Court Martial (Adlî Amir), attempted to square Pan-Turkist views with the prevailing Turkish nationalist vision in a summary of his case for approving the appeals request that was prepared on April 24, 1945. Here, attention shifted from the applicability of the Criminal Code to questions of the constitutionality of racism. Prosecuting the Pan-Turkists posed a direct challenge to Article 88 of the 1924 Turkish Constitution, which reads, “In Turkey, from the perspective of citizenship, everyone is a ‘Turk’ without distinguishing between race [ırk] or religion.”³⁹ The Court Martial President suggested that this article’s meaning was altered by the recent change to Article 2 removing “Islam is the state religion of Turkey,” and also to a recent discussion in parliament that came to the conclusion that “Turkishness is a community that can accommodate those coming from any root [uruk]” to establish a framework for the interfacing of race and Turkishness.⁴⁰ Taking these points into consideration, the President of the Court Martial determined that while “racist propaganda dissents from the principal qualities of our Constitution and as a result violates the third clause of Article 142 of the Turkish Criminal Code,” it was not the case that “the actualization of this crime constitutes propaganda on behalf of a foreign regime.”⁴¹ He argued that the Pan-Turkists’ society and the organization of the May 3^rd protests constituted a protected expression of political opposition precisely because there was no explicit proof connecting them a foreign regime.⁴² He argued that although the protest was “not a random gathering” and that he recognized the importance of maintaining order during a global political crisis, and that Nihal Atsız had admitted to directing the message of the protest in vicious terms against various men of state, especially Education Minister Hasan Ali Yücel, the evidence did not meet the standards of Article 161 of the Criminal Code, and recommended his acquittal on those grounds.⁴³ The Court Martial President’s recommendations were initially rejected by the Martial Law Administration, although they agreed that there were inconsistencies in the charges against Atsız and Reha Oğuz Turkkan regarding secret societies and the intent of the May 3^rd protests to harm national interests, forwarding a recommendation to the tribunal that the trials be re-heard on those counts.⁴⁴

While much of the report was compiled in April of 1945, it was not submitted to the Military Court of Cassation for review until October 16^th of that year – after the close of the war, and after the Turkish government had signaled its intent to sign the United Nations charter. A week later, the four-judge panel handed down a full appeal. Their decision affirmed the appropriateness of the investigation, noting that the “bad thoughts and intentions of breaking the security of the state in directed movements and especially making foreign propaganda against the security of the state and the regime” during the state of emergency, but found that the objections to the requests for appeal by the defendants to be “completely inappropriate” to the court’s purposes.⁴⁵ The justification of the decision came down to four principal objections. First, they referenced changes to the Criminal Code’s Article 142 which were made in 1936 and 1938 that lowered penalties for this transgression from a maximum of five years down to two and removed the language regarding the criticism of Turkey’s neutrality, placing instead attacks “on behalf of a foreign regime” and against “the principal qualities of the state or that undermine national pride.” The second objection affirmed that according to Article 88 of the Constitution, it is “clearly specified that the differences between religion and race cannot be an impediment to the nation” and that the text of the article indicated that “citizenship was found to be related to this aspect,” however, in order to bring charges against a movement for violating this article, it was necessary to prove that they were “outside the borders and scope of this understanding with scientific considerations…” Third, they noted that the secret alliance the defendants were charged with had scattered since its formation in 1941, and held the opinion that this did not meet the standards of the charge. Finally, they referenced the specifics of the law enacting Martial Law in certain areas of Turkey starting in 1940, noting that the primary activities occurred outside of geographic purview of the court, and that the jurisdictional prerogatives of the Martial Law Administration outside of those regions was limited to “operationalized” (eylemsel), “contractual” (sözleşmesel) and “distributional” (yayınsal) activities which would have to be under the control of the group.⁴⁶ On these bases, all the defendants were acquitted and ordered to be released from prison.

The question of why and how politics factored into the decision to acquit the Pan Turkists in the Fall of 1945 is one without a clear answer. Much of the scholarship on this question points out the concurrence of the appeals verdict with Turkey’s shifting political stance against the Soviet Union, and an environment more favorable to nationalist voices and assuming a more or less unitary voice of the state in support of the acquittal.⁴⁷ However, even at that time Turkey’s geopolitical situation vis-à-vis Russia was still precarious, and in the midst of the anti-communist riot on December 4, 1945 the state took extra precautions to steer the riot away from the Soviet Embassy.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the head of the military Tribunal that issued the appeal, Ali Fuad Erden, resigned from his post in the days following the appeal, purportedly because his life-long friend President İnönü disagreed with the decision.⁴⁹ Hayri Yıldırım, giving an overly sympathetic reading to the Court Martial President’s report, insists that the decision was not political at all because the report and the decision by Erden’s tribunal totally cohered.⁵⁰ As I have argued, this report did try and square a political circle by finding a way to exonerate the ideology of the defendants while still recognizing the danger they posed to Turkey’s neutral position in the war. Perhaps the acquittal was a recognition of the fact that the war had now ended, and that threat was lessened, but in any case, military prosecutors more favorable to İnönü filed objections to the appeal that were heard, and ultimately rejected, at both the Military Court of Second Instance, and the General Assembly of the Military Courts in the fall of 1947.⁵¹ Additionally, the facts of the arrest, more than a year of imprisonment, and evident torture of the defendants while in prison cannot be discounted as a factor in the disorganization of the Pan Turkist movement in the years immediately following their release. It would only be later in the 1940s, closer to the eve of the Democrat Party’s success in 1950 and after İnönü’s party took more liberal stances towards opposition parties (with the notable exceptions of left-wing groups) in 1947, that some of these figures would re-emerge in public life.

The Tan Trial

In the wake of the destruction of the Tan offices on December 4, 1945 the government proceeded to take several measures to suppress communist and left-leaning opposition voices in the Turkish press and in academia. One of the more consequential actions taken by the state was to hand down a series of indictments against the owners and editors of Tan. The first indictment, levelled against Zekeriya Sertel and Halil Lütfü Dördüncü of Tan and Ali Rıza oğlu⁵², came on December 15^th and accused them of violating the 27^th and 30^th Articles of the Press Law which prohibit false accusations of criminal activity or corruption against members of parliament and printing false news. They would be found guilty and handed short prison sentences of three months, and a fine of a few thousand liras, but would win on an appeal issued March 18, 1946. The second indictment, which would include the above parties plus Sabiha Sertel and Cami Baykurt, would carry more severe penalties and would result in a second hearing in March.⁵³

In the first trial, Zekeriya Sertel was prosecuted for two articles published on November 12 and December 1, 1945 that accused members of parliament of corruption. In the first article, entitled “How Does a Citizen Ask for Accountability?” Zekeriya Sertel suggested that some members of parliament had acquired wealth during the war by ill-gotten means. He wondered why the Turkish public was uninformed about the sources of wealth amongst its political class, noting that “most of them are not the owners of inheritances from their fathers.”⁵⁴ He called for new laws that require bureaucrats and politicians to release their financial information, and closed by referencing the Ottoman-era poet Tevfik Fikret, “But if the time comes that the citizens can ask for accountability, we will know ‘how many come out pure and sparkling!’”⁵⁵

In a second article, “We Want Accountability in Front of the Nation!”, published December 1, 1945,” Zekeriya Sertel accused the CHP of secretly providing 400,000 liras to a group in the Anatolian city of Sivas to publish a newspaper. The practice of the party funding a newspaper was in itself inoffensive to Zekeriya Sertel, but the paper had launched into personal attacks against him, asking where he got the money to buy his house in Moda. Zekeriya Sertel responded by detailing his openness about the finances and aims of his newspapers, and then leveled a significant accusation – he wrote that in 1938 and 1939 he had launched an investigation into a number of government representatives and ministers who had deposited significant sums of money into foreign banks, mainly in Switzerland. He claimed that a government commission which was charged with discovering foreign agents in Turkey compiled a list of these individuals and provided it to the government, but that the government refused to publish it. He closed the article demanding the government publish the list,

We are asking that those that have in their hands the list of the Swiss organization… be obliged to publish a statement. We want those who yesterday were not allowed more than five para to be made clear and accountable in front of the nation. Let’s take a look at this accounting, How many come out pure and sparkling.⁵⁶

As intimated by these two articles, the Sertels had been mounting a campaign to expose financial indiscretions by the CHP throughout the fall of 1945, and had the printing house not been destroyed, it likely would have continued.

The indictment from Istanbul’s Assistant Prosecutor Hicabi Dinç rested on an argument for limiting free speech,

Here is where we find the practicable difference between freedom of the press and unrestricted freedom of thought. In every democracy, it is this way and so it is in ours. Otherwise it will be the responsibility of the newspapers to the masses to verify the truth of every conjecture that is written and according to whether the people react negatively or positively they might find it more enriching to make propaganda to suit those moods, and as their circulation increases accordingly, as it provides benefits and they will find that it possible to publish whatever thoughts are desired. The above-mentioned editorials thus have for a long time, and systemically hid under the mask of criticism and it is impossible to say that the spreading of propaganda is a qualification of press freedom.⁵⁷

The prosecutor closed his remarks repeating the accusation that Sertel “held the freedom of the press like a weapon,” and that this offended the spirit of the Press Law’s Article 30.⁵⁸

At this point, it is important to remember that absolutely no charges were brought against any of the participants in the riot that destroyed Tan Press on December 4, that some of the purported organizers of the riot were arrested and released after a brief detention, and that the government, Prime Minister Şükrü Saraçoğlu in particular, had begun building this exact case against the Sertels almost immediately after the riot.⁵⁹ In a statement to the foreign press on the day of the riot, Press Director Nedim Veysel İlkin only contested that reports from the Soviet Tass Agency of placards and slogans that wished death on the Russians were mistaken, and that with regards to any damage that had occurred, “appropriate measures have been taken by the governmental authorities.”⁶⁰ The following day, at his monthly press conference, Saraçoğlu expressed some of his long-held concerns about revising the restrictive Article 50 of the Press Law, “In in our meeting four months ago I said, ‘In due course, I have been thinking about working to bring Article 50 into a more gentle state. But I am afraid that in these matters the main concern is troublesome journalists.’ Today, my fear is not lessened, it is increased.” He then went on to complain that there were still many examples of “lying journalists” in the Turkish press that posed a violent threat to the nation’s children. To exemplify this, Saraçoğlu described the accusations made by Sertel, and then stated that he had brought these accusations up to Celal Bayar, who denied them as mere rumor, during a secret party meeting and that he inquired at the Police Ministry, the Prime Ministry, and all the records of the party meetings for the list of foreign wealth holders that Sertel had insisted the government produce, and could not find it.⁶¹ Sertel would be indicted ten days after this press conference. Additionally, reports in the American archive from the Office of War Information from that time suggest that Saraçoğlu was contemptuous of the Sertels and may have continued their prosecution in order to save his job, which had become precarious by early 1946.⁶²

In their defense statements, the Sertels clearly recognized that these charges amounted to legal vendettas against them by Saraçoğlu and his partisans. Zekeriya Sertel contested the application of Article 30. He summarized the accusations into three distinct categories, “1 – To attack the trustworthiness of the office (mevdu vazifeler) in a publication; 2 – To, without material evidence, create vagueness and doubt about the offended party in writing; 3 – To attack the honor and dignity of these parties.” He defended himself against the first instance by pointing out he did not name a single individual in his article, and that there was “not one line of personal criticism, nor affront, nor triviality,” in his writing, and offered a contrasting view on freedom of speech, “A democracy establishes three types of controls that a citizen can use to exercise their right to call for accountability; the first is the Parliament; the second is the Press; the third is opposition parties… in countries with a democratic administration the Parliament’s rostrum is free; the press is free and opposition is free.” Against the second charge, Sertel insisted that if requesting that a list of war profiteers be published by the parliament is a crime, then he is not the first to be guilty and in fact no less a person than President İsmet İnönü would be guilty of it, since he insisted in his Youth and Sports Day Speech in 1945 that “We will not by any means be involved with the dirt of war profiteers that is found in the administration and the seat of power.”⁶³ Given this statement, and others by Saraçoğlu acknowledging corruption, Zekeriya wondered why it should be any surprise that rumors and gossip about war profiteering and corruption had spread, and the press should request a clarifying statement from state officials. Against the final charge Zekeriya asserts that the crime of insulting the honor and dignity of an official depends on criminal intent (kasıt), but that in his writings, “there is no criminal intent, there is defense (müdafaa).”

In his closing, Zekeriya addresses concept of press freedom offered by the prosecutor. The suggestion that bounds on speech and press freedom must be asserted by the state deeply disturbed Zekeriya Sertel. He saw this accusation as part of a wider campaign against press freedom and asserted that “the goal of the thoughts counted as crimes in my writing is freedom.” He argued that his present prosecution was out of character with the democratic tradition, citing examples of western leaders who did not respond to harsh criticism with libel suits or criminal charges, including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Neville Chamberlain. In a final, powerful example, Zekeriya brought the court’s attention to Tevfik Fikret – the poet who was a staunch critic of the despotic Abdülhamid II at the turn of the twentieth century, and whose line “how many come out pure and sparkling,” served as the refrain of Sertel’s defense. The Hamidian regime represented the total anathema of the Republican ideal, yet, although, “that time did not know the freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience… no suit was brought against Tevfik Fikret, nor was any legal proceeding, nor was his writing called into account for asking this question.” He demanded to know of the court, “Is the Republican administration not to exceed the levels of freedom of criticism, speech and thought set by the rule of Adbülhamid’s tyranny? Is this the public prosecutor’s understanding of freedom?”⁶⁴

In the second trial, Zekeriya Sertel was joined by his wife Sabiha and Cami Baykurt to defend articles they wrote in late August and early September 1945 assessing Turkey’s role in joining the United Nations and the possibility of multiparty elections in the coming year. In his indictment, Assistant Prosecutor Hicabi Dinç once again accused Zekeriya Sertel of insulting the Grand National Assembly by insinuating that that the Assembly “responded to the base of opposition with a degree of ignorance that was far from humanity and with a tyrannical spirit.”⁶⁵ Sabiha Sertel was accused of the same charge of insulting the Grand National Assembly, and Dinç added that she had accused the majority of “using a radio interference machine [parazit makinesi] as a signal to silence the opposition and truly departing from political decorum to the point of whistling and stomping feet and banging on desks to silence them.”⁶⁶ Cami Baykurt was accused of threatening the personal safety of members of the Assembly.⁶⁷ Taken together, Dinç argued that “it is understood that while cloaked in the mask of criticism the ideas put forth and the general meaning of the opinions with these publications [the defendants] affronted and dishonored the lofty status of the Grand National Assembly and the Republic.”⁶⁸

More than the previous trial, the accusations and issues at the center of this trial were political and ideological. None of the articles mentioned by the prosecution go as far as Zekeriya Sertel’s previous articles that insinuated corruption on the part of the CHP. Zekeriya Sertel’s incriminating article, “Can We Wait for Something from the Government and the Assembly?” published August 22, 1945, casted doubt on the prospects for truly fair elections, criticized Prime Minister Saraçoğlu’s claim that the Turkish regime’s vitality and democratic nature was proved merely by its having escaped entanglement in the war, and called for a revision of laws restricting the freedom of speech, particularly Article 50 of the Press Law.⁶⁹ Sabiha Sertel’s article, published September 3^rd and titled “The Cry of the Consenting”, indeed mentions radio interference as the indictment accused, but the offending sentence is clearly a metaphor – the article criticizes the Press Law and the power the governing party has to censor dissenting voices, which often occurred by disrupting speeches from opposition members on the floor of the Assembly.⁷⁰ These two offending articles doubted the sincerity of Turkey’s assignation to the UN Charter in August 1945 at a time when Turkey could ill afford to appear out of step with potential patrons in the Western hemisphere.

Zekeriya Sertel’s defense set the terms of this political trial, “…this trial is not a trial over a measly insult, it is a trial for the freedom and democracy of the country.” He argued that the prosecutor “while choosing articles in which I have written in defense of freedom and democracy, had continuously worked to surely incriminate me.”⁷¹ He asserted that his editorial, which followed İsmet İnönü’s August 19 speech on Turkey’s signing of the United Nations charter that had called for the reform of laws that may be acting as a barrier to democratization, had “taken inspiration from these signals from the President, and I was searching for what type of changes to the law would be necessary for the progression of democracy in the country.”⁷² He argued that the indictment offered a new interpretation of the term “insult” (hakaret), as it pertained to the 159^th Article of the Criminal Code, meaning an “affront (tahkir), contempt (hor görme), dishonor (tezyif), belittling (küçültme), [or] humiliation (aşağılama)” and argued that, “if we understood an insult this way, it will become necessary to deny the opposition… Because in a democracy the role of the opposition is to use contempt, belittlement, and humiliation while criticizing and mocking [tehzil ederek] the majority by any means in any situation.”⁷³ Zekeriya Sertel saw this trial as an attempt to silence opposition politics broadly by targeting of Tan writers for their ideology, and cited articles by the liberal writer Ahmet Emin Yalman that assailed the single party system and the selection of candidates for the parliamentary elections.⁷⁴ Following this, he came to the conclusion that the prosecutor could not find “the reason for the actions against Tan to take lawful or judicial paths, so it became necessary to search for political justifications. To put it another way, this trial is not a judicial trial, it can only be a political trial.”⁷⁵

As to what the political crime the Sertels had committed was, Zekeriya Sertel had a clear answer:

…the government did not close newspapers using the rights that were afforded to it by Article 50 of the Press Law. Because in a democratic country, it is a beastly thing to close a newspaper as understood by the Americans, who were assured that the government would no longer close a newspaper without cause. At the same time, we found out that an international commitment had been made that we would observe human rights and basic freedoms as condition of entering the United Nations’ society.⁷⁶

Zekeriya Sertel proceeded to argue that they were being tried under these flimsy accusations because no proof could be found tying them to the Soviet Union in the wake of the December 4 riot.⁷⁷ In his closing, Zekeriya Sertel asked the judge to recognize that the courts were the last line of defense against despotism in his country, “Tan has been closed, the Tan-ists have been imprisoned, the newspapers are silenced and the opposition has been frightened. Our only consolation and our only hope is that the preservation of the court’s honor and dignity will be scrupulously and sensitively found.”⁷⁸

Zekeriya Sertel’s impassioned argument was intensified by Sabiha Sertel’s defense. She admonished the police for “taking me from my house in the middle of the night like a thief, like a murderer,” for writing an article that was meant to defend opposition parliamentarians whose speeches were drowned out by a jeering crowd when they attempted to address potential reforms in light of the United Nations accords.⁷⁹ Addressing the charges, she attacked the prosecution’s mendacious understanding of her writing, noting that the prosecution had confused the subject and predicate, and her use of simile and metaphor, “The subject that is being criticized in this writing is not the racket made by the representatives, it is the majority representative’s silencing of the opposition representatives. In this respect, the racket is not fundamental, power is.”⁸⁰ After this rebuke, Sabiha Sertel turned to a defense of a critical press in a multiparty democracy, warning of the dangers of criminalizing dissent on the eve of the multiparty elections, “If the People’s Party counts criticism directed towards it as a crime, that means that tomorrow, criticisms of the activities and program of the Democrat Party… or others will also be a crime.”⁸¹ She recalled a moment in an earlier hearing where she had asked the prosecution whether the charges were politically motivated and the prosecutor denied that accusation, stating that he was acting in the “public interest” (amme menfaatı). Sabiha wondered aloud, “if the prosecutor is acting in the public interest, why did he not see it necessary to bring prosecution against those who destroyed Tan Press?”⁸²

Sabiha Sertel argued that her articles espoused broader democratic reform, “I have defended the transition to a true democracy in Turkey, bringing an end to the single party system, choosing national representatives with a free election, raising the level of welfare for the people, the prevention of graft and profiteering, and likewise any of the people’s worries as being in the public interest and the people’s interest.”⁸³ It is clear that she wanted to highlight the precarious point at which democracy in Turkey had arrived. Her defense centered on the argument for a free and open multiparty democracy, and the role that critics such as herself played in the health of that democracy. She defended her criticism of the regime, “Criticism and debate of the economic, social, and political mistakes of the People’s Party and the government are not destructive, their true connotation is constructive,” and that she desired changes to laws to make the country “based on more free and democratic principles, on the principles of a society that guarantees human rights…”⁸⁴ She argued for the power of criticism in a democratic society, “Criticism is not a mask, nor is it a suit of armor that girds and shelters its ideas and intentions… The motor of progress is criticism.”⁸⁵

Sabiha Sertel emphasized the backwards step that their indictment represented, citing President İnönü’s May 19, 1944 speech – the same that denounced the Pan-Turkists two weeks after their arrests – as a “harbinger of the transition to a wider democracy” and noting that this commitment was substantiated by a second speech at the opening of the Grand National Assembly in September 1945 that mentioned the need to amend Article 50 of the Press Law and other anti-democratic laws. In light of this, she said, “for us to be brought into court for a crime such as this after the signing of the United Nations Constitution represents an antinomy.”⁸⁶ She saw her prosecution as a distinct departure from the meaning of Turkey’s signature to the UN accords, which she understood as protecting “individual human rights irrespective of differences in race, religion, or sex…”⁸⁷ Taken together, Sabiha and Zekeriya’s defenses characterized the trial’s political nature, but also brought the full tension of Turkey’s precarious transitional status to bear on the court’s decision.

The initial decision found all the parties guilty, but not before completing a set of linguistic acrobatics similar to those used to convict the Pan-Turkists. The judge began with what seems like an assent to the defense, claiming that in Zekeriya Sertel’s article, “even if the words directed at the government are severe, they do not convey the meaning of the words dishonor (tezyif) and affront (tahkir)” and that Sabiha Sertel’s article, “does not have the character of dishonoring or affronting the spiritual personality of the government (hükûmetin manevi şahsiyetini), not in a word and sentence and aggregate meaning.”⁸⁸ Yet, the judge almost immediately turned to parse the meaning of the Criminal Code’s Article 159 in a less favorable light, “Nevertheless, according to the Turkish Criminal Code’s 159^th article, the crimes of dishonoring and affronting the Grand National Assembly and the spiritual personality of the government are separate from one another, each are individual crimes.”⁸⁹ The judge decided that while some of Zekeriya Sertel’s language was ambiguous, the comparison he made in his defense statement between his situation and the situation in Mussolini’s Italy to say that given the context, “In this heavy meaning and expression, to say that ‘the base (tabanlar) [of the party] should respond’ to the Assembly is an affront to the Assembly.”⁹⁰ In Sabiha Sertel’s case, the judge denied her argument that she was criticizing the party, not the parliament on the grounds that, “On the date this writing was published, there was essentially no other party in the Assembly than the Republican People’s Party.”⁹¹ Ultimately, the judge handed down a one year prison sentence each to Zekeriya and Sabiha, and a reduced sentence to Cami Baykurt, on account of his age. The Sertels were also assessed with a fine of 2,200 kuruş to cover court fees.⁹²

The trial concluded in March 1946, but the Sertels, Baykurt and Dördüncü would successfully win an appeals decision two months later, on May 14, 1946, just two months before the general election. The appeals court demolished the reasoning behind the initial decision. In acknowledging that Zekeriya Sertel’s main purpose was to call for, “the transition to a true democracy in a broader sense in the country” after the signing of the UN Charter, the appeals court saw that, “the court had that these sentences were included in [the meaning] of dishonor and affront, but a justification [mucip sebebi] was not shown.”⁹³ In Sabiha Sertel’s case, the court clearly noted that although it was not mentioned in the article, it had appeared shortly after Fuat Köprülü and Adnan Menderes had suggested changes to the Press Law and Criminal Code, only to be shouted down in the Assembly in the manner described by Sabiha Sertel. The appeals court found that although the CHP was the only sanctioned party at the time of publication, “it is possible to discover that a minority existed that had separated from the party.”⁹⁴ The appeals court granted the defendant’s release from prison and the return of 500 kuruş in inappropriate fines.⁹⁵

The two trials and appeals cases of the Sertels occurred between the announcement of the Democrat Party’s formation in late November 1945, and the run-up to parliamentary elections on July 21, 1946. The Saraçoğlu government was on the defensive in the run-up to the July elections, and it is possible that his aggressiveness cost him his job by the time he was replaced with Recep Peker in August 1946. Throughout the trials, the recriminations associated with the December 4^th attack on Tan Press would reverberate through the press and intellectual circles. In just one example, in the days after the riot a few Istanbul University students established a journal, Üniversiteli [The Collegian], and defended their participation in the riot as a patriotic act – this publication contravened an incredulous statement by the University Rector that read, “There is not nor could not be any relationship between our university youth and undergraduates and the events of December 4.”⁹⁶ The cause of the Üniversiteli students was picked up later in May 1946, just days after the Sertels were acquitted, by Tanin – the newspaper that published the Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın editorial that instigated the riot in the first place – who published a letter from the students to the state’s prosecutors urging them to take note of a new publication, Gün [Day], that had emerged in the wake of Tan’s disappearance as a flagship leftist journal.⁹⁷ Gün, edited and run by one of Tan’s former writers, a communist lawyer named Esat Adil Müstecaplioğlu, and in response to Yalçın’s attacks, published a lengthy editorial by Müstecaplioğlu defending the rights of the students to protest, but insinuating that the destructive behavior was partly directed from above, and partly the result of a “mob mentality” (serseri gürûhu). Müstecaplioğlu closed the editorial with excerpts from the minutes of the Sertels court hearings that defended the students’ right to protest, wherein Sabiha Sertel wrote, “In an age where the youth of the entire world are struggling for a more progressive, more just democracy, I absolve the university from the stain of this attack on democracy,” followed by an excerpt from her husband’s defense statement, “The association of the university youth with this protest is a heavy slander against the country’s youth.”⁹⁸ In this example, we see how even though the events of 1945 and 1946 were in some ways the beginning of the end for a certain generation of leftists in Turkey, their leading protagonists remained relentlessly optimistic about the future of the country, and placed an enormous faith in the democratization process even as they were being shut out of it.

Conclusion: The Birth of the Cold War Conflict in Turkey

The fortunes of both the leftist and Pan-Turkist camp following these trials demonstrates the changing ideological grounds on which Turkish politics would operate in the Cold War era. As Jacob Landau characterized the events, even though the period between 1944 and 1947 witnessed severe repression of Pan-Turkist ideas, “the campaign against the movement in general served the Pan-Turkist cause admirably, giving Pan-Turkism the extensive free publicity which it had long desired,” and that with the final acquittal in 1947, “Pan-Turkism had been vindicated by the Courts as neither subversive nor illegal.”⁹⁹ Indeed, even as İnönü would affirm his commitment to a two-party democracy in a special statement on July 12, 1947, the remainder of the decade would witness ever-increasing anti-communist fervor from both political parties, proving a fertile field for the rhetorical talents of some of the newly rehabilitated Pan-Turkists – Atsız and Togan in particular.¹⁰⁰ For aggressive nationalist movements in Turkey, these trials would serve as their origin story, the initial instantiation of their grievance with opponents amongst the left and with the Kemalists, and, considering the accusations of torture, a political narrative of victimhood that served as a seductive element. For the Kemalists, as Turkey moved closer and closer to the anti-communist orbit, they would learn to first legally forgive, then politically tolerate the Pan-Turkists as their attention turned towards combatting real and perceived Soviet designs on Turkish territory.¹⁰¹ One cannot point to similar sorts of redemption in the eyes of the state for the careers of leftists targeted in the Tan trial, and other incidents of repression, such as the sacking of leftist professors at Ankara University in 1947 – many of whom were antagonists of the Turanists, who, perhaps not coincidentally, were recently acquitted of their charges.¹⁰²

In his recent biography of Niyazi Berkes, Şakir Dinçşahin characterizes the shifts in ideological contestation during and after World War II as one in which, “the ideological conflict between ultranationalists and progressives was replaced with an ideological antagonism between the left and the right.”¹⁰³ This article presents one example in which the legal persecution of regime opponents helped bring about this shift. Dinçşahin argues that the contested elections of 1946, and what was perceived as a surprising success for the Democrat Party, occurred simultaneously with repressive measures against freedom of the press and academic freedom.¹⁰⁴ It is true that the tactics of repression demonstrated prior to 1947 would be reprised over the remainder of the 1940s – Pan-Turkists would loudly accuse the government of torture during the imprisonment of their comrades, anti-communist demonstrations against leftist professors at Ankara University would result in the aforementioned sackings of leftist professors, and leftist publications would be routinely shuttered or forced into illicit publication networks. However, one should be careful not to draw too sharp a distinction between the conflicts during and after the war in terms of their intellectual content, and the state’s preferred strategies of tamping them down. After all, the ideological content of the Pan-Turkists and the leftists did not undergo a significant shift that one could credit to the end of the war, and neither did the wartime Turkish anxieties over Russian encroachment dissipate as Turkey worked to ensconce itself in the Western alliance.

What did change was the language in which this conflict was expressed. In one way, the primary tension of ideological contestation in the single-party era was one between the struggle to define a nation, and the struggle to build a democracy. For Kemalists, the goal was to obliterate this tension – constructing the nation meant grooming national citizens that would serve as a vehicle for political modernization and the transition to democracy. The dawn of the Cold War, and the self-conscious transition fostered by the İnönü regime towards a greater focus on building a democracy, meant that the internal dynamics of ideological contestation – fundamentally an internal struggle over what ideas ought to shape Turkish society – were reshaped to suit the global context of a struggle between Soviet communism and western democracy. While this shift superficially favored increased democratization, one effect was an intensified focus on the “enemy within” that painted figures on the left who may have otherwise been loyal to the Turkish republican project as fifth columnists. Even as Turkey would slowly open up its electoral democracy to a new multiparty contest, the legal dimensions of the Turkish state would be used to constrict expression and demolish the careers of some of the most prominent thinkers of the Kemalist era.

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