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Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908
By M. Şükrü Hanioğlu
Oxford University Press (2001), 560 pp.
Reviewed by Christopher Deliso
In this new study of the intrigue and organization behind the Young Turk revolution of 1908, author and Princeton professor M. Şükrü Hanioğlu makes a compelling case that the real motivation of these plotters and political agitators was, contrary to what some have maintained, not exactly an egalitarian, liberal reform movement having the simple goal of restoring the constitution of 1876. Nor was it at bottom an inclusive movement supported by a majority of the feuding Ottoman factions under a mantle of ‘pan-Ottoman’ reform. Rather, it was a conservative, militaristic movement, and the first sustained iteration of a xenophobic, anti-European Turkish nationalism, the repercussions of which are still being felt today.
Indeed, the Turkish police’s January 2008 arrests of ultra-nationalist plotters alarmed at the apparent loss of their country to an untrustworthy government is just one recent events that a shows remarkable continuity between the present and the relatively recent past, one in which a small though determined group of agitators developed a wide network of collaborators and finally won over large portions of the military to put muscle behind their demands. The major difference between the activities of then and now was that, unlike the Turkish ‘Deep State’ of the post-WWII period, the Young Turks did not rely on illicit commerce or organized crime for propelling their revolution. But it was unquestionably in the pre-WWI period that the seeds of a future militaristic and nationalistic conservatism were sown in Turkey, one which be institutionalized and energized after the mid-1960’s.
The Young Turks: A New Picture
Since he restricts himself to the period of 1902-1908, of course, the author does not draw out these connections. What he does do in Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 is nevertheless more than enough. Although very dense and undoubtedly somewhat slow going for the more general reader, this work will prove indispensable to serious students of the Balkans and, after a somewhat sluggish start, does become somewhat more exciting as the narrative unfolds, chronicling the final frenzied months leading up to the daring revolution in July 1908.
In documenting the evolution of the Young Turk movement, the major political organization of which was known as the CPU or CUP (Committee of Progress and Union), the author reappraises the organization, tactics and goals of the group as it struggled to attain relevance, something which it did substantially between the two Congresses of Ottoman Opposition Parties in 1902 and 1907. With a small leadership body based in Paris, and with secret branches throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the CPU evolved in a few short years from an insignificant group of idealists and theorists into a pragmatic and effective network employing propagandists, assassins and plotters who were also taken seriously by European diplomats. Using previously neglected primary source material from dozens of archives across Europe, and the voluminous private correspondence of the CPU leaders themselves, Hanioğlu very objectively analyzes the evolution of Young Turk thought, and how the evolution of this thought led fatefully towards a scenario in which it could act, and in so doing change the course of history.
The new picture of the CPU that emerges from the pages of Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 is, from the idealistic perspective, a rather unflattering one: far from being liberal reformers, the Young Turks in Paris were authoritarian, conservative nationalists motivated specifically by the perception that the sultan was on the verge of losing the empire’s Balkan and Arabian provinces through crude incompetence and mismanagement. To do this was disaster for the CPU, as it would, they feared, destroy Turkey’s prominence on the world stage and reduce its contact with European scientific and other forms of “progress.”
It was the overriding desire to keep the empire that led the CPU to grasp onto concepts such as ‘Ottomanism’ – the building of a single Ottoman identity capable of including the disparate ethnic and religious groups of the vast empire. However, the very divergent rhetoric that the CPU used in appealing to different groups indicate that this abstraction was, like the others employed, just another manifestation of the Young Turks’ cunning opportunism.
Rhetoric and Its Ends
Indeed, while the CPU used Ottomanism in attempts to win over Christians such as Armenians and Greeks, they used the pan-Turkic ideal and pan-Islamist ideal when approaching the Turks of Azerbaijan and Central Asia (they even attempted, less successfully, to appeal to the Bulgarians by citing the shared Turkic roots of the Ottoman Turks and early medieval Bulgars). And the Young Turks’ appeal for support to the Kosovo Albanians was also based on the stated desire to preserve Islam and implement Sharia law, both of which fundamentalist leaders among the Albanians desired. Ironically, however, while the CPU regularly railed on Sultan Abdul Hamid in its appeals to peoples being massacred under his watch such as the Armenians, Bulgarians and Macedonians, it praised him to the Kosovo Albanians, who apparently regarded the sultan fondly as a sort of “father figure.”
On at least one occasion, the author recounts, a contemporary Greek journal pointed out the contradictions in this wildly divergent rhetoric, which would have been clear to anyone capable of reading the CPU’s printed materiel. Indeed, while the CPU was able to bring together a wide enough coalition to act with its confusing and opportunistic rhetoric, the latent contradictions in it would cripple its efforts to rule afterward, and provide direct impetus for the already rebelling ethnic groups to continue their quest- the exact opposite of what the Young Turks had hoped to avoid by their revolution. Nevertheless, by 1913, with the conclusion of the Balkan Wars, the unthinkable had happened, and the Ottoman Empire had been driven almost entirely out of Europe.
Of course, those non-Turks who signed on with the CPU were not necessarily taken in by the Young Turk rhetoric; they were merely attempting to secure their own interests. In any case, it would have been clear to them that Ottoman “equality” in the eyes of the CPU meant an understood dominant role for the Turks, who resented what they felt was special treatment for the non-Muslim populations of the empire.
Realpolitik, nevertheless, played a considerable role. The Armenian rebels in the east were in dire straits by 1907, as was Jane Sandanski’s Macedonian band of rebels, following a schism caused by this faction’s assassination of two leaders of the Bulgarian IMRO in November of that year. The Albanian Tosks in Albania proper saw alliance with the Young Turks as a precursor to independence, whereas the Ghegs of Kosovo saw it as a way to promote Islam and stave off foreign intervention, in order to keep the European Murzsteg reforms, set up to protect persecuted Christians in Macedonia, out of their lands. In the months preceding the revolution, the CPU made appeals to both the right-wing of the IMRO in Bulgaria and the Greek government, which controlled surreptitiously the Greek bands fighting in Macedonia. Both were mistrustful of the “reformist” intentions and refused to participate.
Developing a Network
This did not mean, however, that the Young Turks were not active through their secret networks in these lands. It took them several years to create this network, and even to grasp the concept of how vital it would be in any effort to make the government bend to its will. At the same time, the CPU was not prepared to dilute its message or give up any of its power to groups formed inside the bounds of the empire – what became known as the ‘internal’ committees – and the ‘external’ one in Paris.
Lawless Macedonia, then under weak European supervision with the advent of the Murzsteg reform program, proved exceptionally fertile ground for CPU local branches to operate and to infiltrate the Ottoman army. It was also able to set up branches among Turkish populations in Bulgarian towns such as Kazanlak, Plovdiv, Vidin, Shumen, Balchik and Dobrich. The Greek island of Crete, then in an uneasy state of autonomy, also contained CPU sympathizers among the threatened Muslim population.
The CPU, aware that any reinforcement troops to be sent to Macedonia in case of a rebellion would be sent from Aydin province (near Izmir in Anatolia), made special efforts to propagandize the Aydin troops against the Sultan well in advance (they would be spectacularly successful in the end in so doing). Nevertheless, on an operational level, the Macedonian port city of Thessaloniki and Bitola to the north played the major role in the Young Turk’s ‘internal’ committee structure in the Balkans.
Constantinople, the ultimate prize, proved however exceptionally hard to penetrate, as the Sultan’s “extensive spy networks” were naturally very active there (one would like to have heard more about the activities and organization of these networks). From the correspondence and records of the CPU leaders, a marvelous picture emerges of turn-of-the-century intrigue: members crossing international borders in disguise, secret notebooks meant to be stored in safes, special code numbers ofr committee members, oaths of silence and penalties of death- all these and more tell the story of the CPU as an operational force. Although to modern ears they can sound amusingly archaic at times, these were the attributes of espionage a century ago, and were taken very seriously.
Another element that is oddly touching, in light of our modern sense of cynicism, is the very real influence of written propaganda (in the form of the CPU journal, Turk and other publications) on readers. In an age when periodicals relied to some extent on payment of subscriptions rather than advertising, readership was significant to the life of any journal and the pages of Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 are full of examples of activist journals that failed. Turk, however, resonated with common people from North Africa to the Middle East and Europe, and the (to us, strangely) heartfelt letters it elicited evidence this. In fact, the CPU seems to have gotten a fair number of branch members from those who read, and agreed with, its party magazine.
Unanswered Questions and Interesting Details
The arrangement of these branches was done cleverly. CPU’s leadership in Paris was a paranoid and authoritarian lot, and to lessen the chances that field operations would not be compromised, they established each branch via written correspondence and authorized direct communication only between each branch and the center- not, at first, from branch to branch. Yet given the rapid success of the CPU in establishing and managing these branches from afar, the author could have attempted to delve somewhat into the personalities of the leaders. True, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 is neither a psychological study nor a novel: still, the reader would like to comprehend how a small group of activists only differentiated by the nuances of their ideological stance was able to accomplish so much, so fast.
Clearly, the CPU was led by some capable figures, yet we do not hear much about their individual personal qualities- just who was popular with who, and who wielded more authority than the others at various points. Nevertheless, considering the rapid expansion of CPU activity between 1906-1908, it remains a mystery to us as how a handful of men were able to deal with what must have been an ever-mounting avalanche of correspondence, and increasingly complex issues requiring immediate and careful decision-making.
There are other unanswered questions that emerge from Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908. Considering the highly controversial activities of the CPU, and its ambivalent relationship with the European powers (whom it accused of bloodthirsty imperialism in the Ottoman Empire, as well as Islamophobia, morale hypocrisy and disingenuous pontification) it is unfortunate that the author does not mention how they were allowed to operate undisturbed from the very middle of Paris. Very interesting questions are not raised, such as why the French government tolerated the group (at one point it is revealed that the French were keeping police dossiers on the CPU, apparently still in the Paris archives today), and why the Sultan never sent assassins to eliminate them.
Nevertheless, one mark of a good study is that it raised more questions the further the investigation goes, and in this Dr. Hanioğlu’s work is a fine example. Another distinction is the number of interesting details that pop up here and there, regarding which readers and scholars might be intrigued enough to delve into further on their own.
Such is the case with the tales of a Turkish professor at Cambridge University whom the CPU recruited to monitor the British media for anti-Turkish articles, or the Turkish science students in Paris who were asked for bomb-making advice. And we learn that in their early days, in fact, the Young Turks contemplated assassinating hated Ottoman political leaders with the help of Italian anarchists. We read of the uproarious case of an angry Albanian mob that gathered when it was learned that the children of Austrian railworkers in Skopje had been allowed to have a picnic in Kosovo. The surprising number of Young Turks that became Freemasons, the personal descriptions of Turkish death squads pillaging Macedonian villages, and the decisive role of Albanian irregulars in fleshing out the actual revolutionary brigades of 1908 are just a few of the great many interesting details presented in the book.
Most fundamentally, however, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 is vital for what it proves, and how it does so. From the fervent scrawlings of the Young Turks themselves, the reader of today is exposed for the first time to the intimate thoughts of these turn-of-the-century revolutionaries who, despite their own success, would hasten the downfall of an empire they had sought to save.
In the pages of this seminal work, it becomes eminently clear that all of the rich complexities and contradictions of modern Turkey – ranging from fiercely argued attitudes to Europe and the idea of “Western progress,” nationalism and the question of other ethnicities in Turkish and former Turkish lands, and of course Islam – have been not only existing, but have been actively debated, for well over 100 years. While the immediate value of the work is its historical specifics, it is the insights into an uncanny and remarkable continuity of existence that is perhaps the reader’s greatest reward.