Communist Party of Turkey (1920)
터키 공산당 (1920)
The communist party of Turkey founded at a congress in Baku on 10 September 1920 with Mustafa Suphi as chairman. The following year Suphi and fourteen other leaders were killed off Trabzon, and for most of the 1920s and 1930s it operated as an illegal party. During the Cold War it worked clandestinely, largely through its leadership abroad, until in 1988 it merged with the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) into the United Communist Party of Turkey.
In depth
According to the Turkish-language source, socialist groups in the Ottoman period remained small, and some, such as the Turkish Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party led by Şefik Hüsnü, later joined the communist party. Mustafa Suphi, exiled to Sinop in 1913 for opposing the Union and Progress government, escaped to Russia and, under the influence of Bolshevism, founded the party at a congress in Baku on 10 September 1920. According to the English-language source the congress, with 74 delegates, elected Suphi chairman and Ethem Nejat general secretary.
Suphi's group contacted Mustafa Kemal in order to support the War of Independence and entered Anatolia, but on 28–29 January 1921 Suphi, Nejat and thirteen others were killed off Trabzon, which marked the beginning of the party's illegal struggle. The Turkish People's Communist Party (THİF), founded in Ankara in December 1920 as the party's legal organisation, was closed in January 1921, and in September 1922 the government banned the party again. At a secret congress in 1924–1925 Şefik Hüsnü became general secretary, but after the Sheikh Said rebellion the Law on the Maintenance of Order closed all political organisations other than the CHP.
At the end of the 1920s an opposition group led by the poet Nâzım Hikmet, which called for proletarian revolutionary struggle against Kemalism and the bourgeoisie, was expelled by Şefik Hüsnü. The party was reorganised in the early 1940s and followed an anti-fascist line during the Second World War; in 1946 it set up two parties for legal work, both banned in December that year. After the mass arrests of 1951 its foreign representative İsmail Bilen directed activity abroad, with a major contribution from the exiled Nâzım Hikmet, and Bizim Radyo, which began broadcasting in 1958, became the main instrument of its work.
In the 1960s the party supported the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP), and in the 1970s, under general secretary İsmail Bilen, it gained a mass base in the trade-union (DİSK), youth and women's movements. After the 1980 coup most of its cadres were arrested and some died under torture. In October 1987 TİP chairwoman Behice Boran and TKP general secretary Nabi Yağcı announced that the two parties would merge into the United Communist Party of Turkey (TBKP), and the English-language source says the party's existence ended with this merger in 1988.