This essay is a revised English translation of “Kadro ve Kadrocular: Marksizmden Kemalizme”, originally published in Turkish by Birikim on July 21, 2008. The translation preserves the article’s central arguments while correcting several dates and clarifying concepts and institutions for international readers.

Published monthly between January 1932 and December 1934, Kadro was one of the most significant intellectual journals in the history of the Turkish Republic. Although its publication life was relatively short—thirty-six issues in total—the journal and the intellectual movement gathered around it continue to occupy an important place in discussions of early Republican political thought.

This essay offers a general account of Kadro by situating it within the political and economic conditions of Turkey and the wider world during the 1920s and 1930s. It then examines the movement’s relationship with Marxism and its subsequent engagement with Kemalism, the ideology associated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding reforms of the Turkish Republic.

The terms Kadro and Kadrocular require some explanation. Kadro, meaning “cadre” in Turkish, was the name of the journal. Kadrocular—which may be translated as the Kadroists, the Kadro circle, or the Kadro intellectuals—referred primarily to its five leading contributors: Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Vedat Nedim Tör, İsmail Hüsrev Tökin, and Burhan Asaf Belge.

Although other writers contributed to individual issues, these five figures constituted the journal’s central intellectual group. Understanding why they described themselves as a “cadre” requires an examination of their political backgrounds and the circumstances that brought them together.

The Formation of the Kadro Circle

Şevket Süreyya Aydemir was born in Edirne in 1897. He participated in the First World War and initially embraced Pan-Turkism, an ideology that envisioned political and cultural unity among Turkic peoples. After the war, he travelled to Azerbaijan as a teacher, believing that the region might provide a practical setting in which to pursue these ideals.

The Bolshevik advance into Azerbaijan exposed Aydemir to a different political world. His earlier Pan-Turkism gradually gave way to an engagement with Marxism. He studied economics at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and, after returning to Turkey in 1923, joined the Communist Party of Turkey. He also began writing for Aydınlık, one of the principal publications associated with the Turkish socialist movement.

Aydemir was arrested during the suppression of communist organisations in 1925 and sentenced to prison. He was released under an amnesty after approximately eighteen months. This period marked the beginning of his separation from the Communist Party. His interpretations of Marxism, his growing opposition to directives from the Communist International, and his disagreements with the party leadership eventually led to a definitive break.

Between the late 1920s and the founding of Kadro, Aydemir worked in various state institutions and moved increasingly closer to the political circles in Ankara. His 1932 book İnkılâp ve Kadro—Revolution and Cadre—established him as the movement’s principal theorist.

Other members of the circle followed comparable intellectual trajectories. Vedat Nedim Tör encountered Marxism while studying in Germany and became one of the founders of the Turkish Workers and Peasants Socialist Party. İsmail Hüsrev Tökin first engaged with Marxist ideas during his education at the Austrian St. George’s School in Istanbul and later studied economics at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. Burhan Asaf Belge encountered Marxism while studying architecture in Germany.

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu was the only central member without a Marxist background. A prominent novelist, parliamentary deputy, and figure close to Atatürk and İsmet İnönü, he played a decisive role in obtaining permission for the journal’s publication.

Yakup Kadri later recalled that many members of parliament belonged to the ruling Republican People’s Party without clearly understanding its principles, including devletçilik, or statism. He hoped that a journal might explain these principles to party officials and the public. Burhan Asaf Belge introduced him to Aydemir and the other former Marxists, who possessed a developed body of ideas but lacked the political connections and institutional means to publish them.

Yakup Kadri’s account reveals two important aspects of the Kadro project. First, the journal sought to formulate an ideological roadmap for the Turkish Revolution. Its immediate audience, however, was not primarily the general population. The Kadroists initially wanted to influence the political and bureaucratic elite responsible for administering the new state.

Second, the sceptical response of Recep Peker, an influential figure in the Republican People’s Party, exposed the tension between the intellectuals and the Kemalist political establishment. Peker believed that defining the ideology of the revolution was a responsibility belonging to the party itself. His position reflected a broader lack of trust between the governing elite and intellectuals who attempted to intervene in the ideological direction of the regime.

A Generation Shaped by War and Revolution

With the exception of Yakup Kadri, the central Kadroists belonged broadly to the same generation. Their intellectual outlooks developed amid the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

By the early 1920s, the major ideological currents of the late Ottoman period—Islamism, Ottomanism, and Pan-Turkism—no longer appeared to offer adequate responses to the political transformations taking place around them. The Bolshevik Revolution presented these young intellectuals with a powerful alternative. Their encounters with Marxism in Moscow and Germany profoundly shaped their subsequent thinking.

After returning to Turkey, several of them published in Aydınlık and participated in communist political organisations. Yet their relationship with the Communist Party increasingly became strained. Party organisation moved away from a tightly centralised underground Bolshevik model and experimented with looser networks among workers, while disagreements arose over the authority of the Communist International. Aydemir and Vedat Nedim Tör eventually broke with the party.

Their move toward Kemalism should not therefore be understood as a sudden rejection of everything they had previously believed. Elements of their Marxist education—historical materialism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and an emphasis on economic structures—continued to shape their attempt to interpret the Turkish Revolution.

Before Kadro: From Marxism toward Kemalism

Each issue of Kadro opened with an unsigned or collectively framed editorial bearing the journal’s name. These introductory texts demonstrated that Kadro was more than a collection of individual articles. It understood itself as an intellectual movement possessing a shared programme.

The journal published essays on politics, economics, culture, and the arts, but almost every discussion was related in some way to the Turkish Revolution. Its authors attempted to explain the meaning of the Republic’s founding transformation and to identify the direction it should follow.

By the early 1930s, the former Marxists within the group had developed an interpretation that departed substantially from orthodox Marxism. Aydemir continued to regard historical materialism as an important method for understanding humanity as a social being. Yet he also argued that Marxism had concentrated too heavily on class conflict within industrial societies and had not given sufficient attention to struggles between imperial powers and colonised or semi-colonised nations.

For Aydemir, the decisive conflict of the twentieth century was not solely between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It also existed between industrialised imperial centres and nations that had been denied industrial and economic development. A more rational international distribution of the means of production could emerge only through national liberation struggles against colonial powers.

This position distinguished Aydemir from Lenin’s emphasis on the international unity of workers and oppressed peoples. Lenin maintained that liberation from national oppression ultimately required a common revolutionary struggle against landowning and bourgeois classes. Aydemir instead gave greater autonomy and historical importance to national liberation. In this respect, his position was closer to the national-communist ideas associated with the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev.

The Kadroists nevertheless remained strongly anti-capitalist. They interpreted the Great Depression of 1929 not as a temporary interruption but as evidence of capitalism’s structural collapse. Burhan Asaf Belge described it as a transformation generated by the disintegration of the capitalist order—reactionary for capitalist societies but potentially revolutionary for countries such as Turkey.

Turkey had not yet become a fully capitalist economy, although it suffered heavily from the collapse of international trade. Belge therefore regarded the crisis as an opportunity. A country that had not fully entered the capitalist system might avoid repeating the mistakes of industrialised Western societies.

Predictions of capitalism’s imminent disappearance did not materialise. Nevertheless, the crisis strongly influenced the Kadroists’ search for a third path. They regarded neither capitalism nor a socialist system organised around class struggle as appropriate for Turkey.

Vedat Nedim Tör argued that the new Republic needed to accomplish economic and social development rapidly while avoiding the errors of other countries. The Kadroists were especially concerned that class divisions might fracture the unity of the nation. Rather than treating class struggle as the engine of history, they regarded it as a threat to national cohesion.

Their proposed alternative was statism. Yet the statism they imagined went far beyond temporary government intervention in the economy. It was intended as a comprehensive political and economic ideology capable of preventing both capitalist exploitation and socialist class conflict.

At certain points, this model displayed affinities with the authoritarian and corporatist ideologies gaining strength in interwar Europe. Aydemir rejected fascism as a form of dictatorship and criticised its imperialist and colonial ambitions. Yet the Kadroists’ emphasis on national unity, the transcendence of class divisions, and the authority of an organising elite inevitably brought their project into proximity with contemporary authoritarian models.

The Kadroists were also anti-feudal. İsmail Hüsrev Tökin’s studies of agriculture identified landlords, rural entrepreneurs, small property owners, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers as components of a structure that required radical transformation. Their economic project therefore combined anti-capitalist and anti-feudal positions with an emphasis on state-directed national development.

The wider context was equally important. The Treaty of Lausanne had abolished the Ottoman capitulations, although some restrictions on Turkish customs policy remained temporarily in force. By 1929, Turkey had regained greater tariff autonomy. The Great Depression encouraged many countries to adopt inward-looking economic policies, while the brief experiment with the liberal opposition Free Republican Party in 1930 was followed by an intensification of statist economic planning.

The Kadroists interpreted these developments through a materialist perspective but placed their work under the political leadership of Atatürk. They attempted both to explain the reforms already carried out and to formulate a roadmap for the revolution’s future. Their larger ambition was to provide the Turkish Revolution with a systematic ideology.

Kadro and Kemalism, 1932–1934

Having distanced themselves from the Communist Party, the Kadroists moved closer to the Kemalist state. Through the journal, they presented the Turkish Revolution as a transformation unlike the major revolutions of modern European history. They tried to construct its theoretical foundations and proposed social, political, cultural, and economic directions for its future.

The relationship between Kadro and Kemalism involved both agreement and conflict. Their disagreements can be examined under three principal headings:

  1. The intellectual foundations of the Turkish Revolution

  2. The relationship between Turkey and the West

  3. The meaning and scope of statism

The Foundations of the Turkish Revolution

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk emerged as the political and military leader of the new state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He also became the central figure behind the sequence of reforms introduced after the establishment of the Republic in 1923.

In explaining the new political order, Atatürk acknowledged the historical importance of the French Revolution and its ideal of liberty. He argued that Turkish democracy had followed the path opened by the French Revolution while developing according to Turkey’s own social conditions and historical needs. The Turkish Revolution was therefore understood as nationally distinctive but still connected to the intellectual inheritance of the French Revolution.

The Kadroists took a different position. In defining the Turkish Revolution, they tended to reject the idea that it was derived from Western models. Burhan Asaf Belge opposed descriptions of the Republic as a simple project of Westernisation. According to him, Turkish revolutionaries were not attempting to reproduce another society from an imported blueprint. Their project was to create a nation and a country through an original historical process.

This claim overlooked the much longer history of Ottoman Westernisation. Beginning with Selim III and accelerating under Mahmud II, the Ottoman state had introduced reforms designed partly to transform its military, administrative institutions, clothing, and public culture along European lines. Republican reforms such as the 1925 Hat Law could also be interpreted as interventions intended to make public appearance conform more closely to European norms.

The Kadroist insistence on absolute originality therefore functioned as an ideological aspiration more than an accurate description of historical continuity. It enabled the movement to imagine the Turkish Revolution as an unprecedented national project rather than another example of state-led Westernisation.

Yakup Kadri similarly argued that the concepts associated with the French Revolution—fraternity, liberty, and justice—had lost their earlier political authority after the First World War. Fascist Italy, for example, no longer organised itself around the republican principles of 1793. In the Kadroist account, the new political climate was increasingly shaped by authoritarian and statist forms of government that displaced the liberal emphasis on individual freedom.

Aydemir likewise suggested that the French Revolution’s most intellectually productive period had been limited to the years between 1789 and 1793. He believed that its egalitarian and emancipatory ideals had subsequently declined and that, by the twentieth century, the revolution’s historical model was effectively exhausted.

The disagreement between Kemalism and the Kadroists therefore concerned more than the origin of particular reforms. It involved the historical meaning of the West itself. While Atatürk recognised the French Revolution as one of the foundations of modern political development, the Kadroists wanted to detach the Turkish Revolution from European intellectual authority.

Eurocentrism and Kadroist Occidentalism

Aydemir criticised Eurocentric historiography for treating societies outside Europe as subordinate objects within a European narrative. He compared Eurocentrism to the Ptolemaic model of the universe: just as Ptolemy had placed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos, Eurocentric history placed Europe at the centre of human development.

For Aydemir, the fundamental outlines of Turkish history could not be written from within this framework. His position anticipated later critiques of Orientalism by challenging the assumption that Europe constituted the universal measure of historical progress.

The Kadroists consequently supported the work of the Turkish Historical Society and the Turkish History Thesis developed under Atatürk. Both projects sought to construct a history of Turkish civilisation that was not dependent upon European narratives.

Yet the Kadroists’ critique did not simply revise Eurocentric historiography. It sometimes reversed its hierarchy. Their writings produced what might be described as a Kadroist Occidentalism: an essentialising representation of Europe as capitalist, imperialist, spiritually exhausted, and historically destructive.

Burhan Asaf Belge, for example, described European technological development as the expansion of humanity’s capacity to dominate and injure others. The same human being who had once used a primitive axe against a rival could now command machinery of extraordinary power while producing suffering on a much larger scale.

Despite their critique of Europe, the Kadroists did not directly oppose Kemalism’s efforts to introduce Western cultural practices into Turkish society. At a time of rapid cultural Westernisation, such opposition could easily have been associated with counterrevolutionary forces. The Kadroists therefore accepted cultural reforms even when they sat uneasily beside the movement’s criticism of Western historical authority.

In this respect, they adopted a position similar to that of the Kemalist elite: transformation would be conducted “for the people, despite the people.” The immediate demands of the population were not their primary concern. The people were imagined as a unified nation, and the strengthening of the state was regarded as the necessary condition for national prosperity.

Competing Conceptions of Statism

The most significant disagreement between the Kadroists and the Kemalist establishment concerned the meaning of statism.

By the beginning of the 1930s, the end of the capitulatory economic order and the effects of the Great Depression required the Republic to develop a new economic strategy. The Free Republican Party had been established in 1930 with Atatürk’s encouragement as a controlled opposition to the ruling Republican People’s Party. Its rapid growth and its ability to attract groups dissatisfied with the regime alarmed the government. The party dissolved itself after only a few months, bringing Turkey’s multiparty experiment to an end until the mid-1940s.

The popularity of the opposition suggested that the Republican reforms had not secured widespread social consent. After the termination of the Free Republican Party experiment, the ruling party increasingly became intertwined with the state.

The liberal economic programme advocated by the Free Republican Party also encouraged the Republican People’s Party to define its own statist position more clearly. Official Kemalist statism promoted state planning and intervention, but largely as instruments for developing national industry and creating a domestic entrepreneurial class. Once these objectives had been achieved, state involvement in the economy might be reduced.

The Kadroists proposed a more extensive and permanent model. They regarded statism not as a temporary response to underdevelopment but as an ideology in its own right.

According to İsmail Hüsrev Tökin, the nationalist state should not serve any particular class. It should be administered by an organising cadre representing the long-term interests of the nation and by technical specialists capable of directing economic activity toward those interests. The state’s intervention would therefore constitute a lasting system of governance rather than a short-term corrective measure.

Kadroist statism was based on two central principles. The first was the protection of national independence against external powers. The second was the development of the national economy and the expansion of national income in accordance with collective interests.

The concept of a classless society occupied a central place in this project. In this respect, Kadroist statism shared certain characteristics with the corporatist models of fascist states, even though the Kadroists explicitly rejected fascism, National Socialism, and Soviet communism.

Kemalist political discourse also tended to minimise social class divisions by describing Turkey as a unified or “classless and privilege-free” nation. Yet official Kemalism continued to recognise the existence of peasants and entrepreneurs while largely refusing to acknowledge an autonomous working class. The Kadroists’ vision was more radical: they imagined the eventual elimination of all class divisions.

Aydemir insisted that Turkish nationalist statism differed from fascist, National Socialist, and communist models because each of those systems represented a particular form of class dictatorship. Turkish statism, by contrast, would neither enable one class to exploit another nor permit one nation to exploit another through imperialism. It was presented as a historical reaction against both the capitalist and imperialist order of Europe.

The distinction became particularly visible in the journal’s twenty-second issue, which included an article by İsmet İnönü on statism. İnönü warned against a rigid application of the principle that the state should perform only those tasks individuals could not accomplish themselves.

Commenting on İnönü’s position, Vedat Nedim Tör observed that even the most liberal countries, including the United States, intervened in their economies when necessary. Turkey’s circumstances, however, were different. Western states already operated through established political and economic systems, whereas the Turkish Republic remained in the process of construction. It therefore needed to build its institutional foundations according to its own conditions.

For the Kadroists, statism was thus the permanent ideological foundation of national development. They portrayed Turkish nationalist statism as distinct from German and Italian fascism as well as Soviet communism. The central disagreement between the Kadroists and the Kemalist establishment lay precisely here: the government understood statism primarily as a practical economic policy, while the Kadroists wanted to transform it into a comprehensive ideology of the state and society.

Conclusion

This essay has traced the intellectual development of Kadro and the movement associated with it, focusing on the Kadroists’ Marxist backgrounds, their movement toward Kemalism, and their relationship with the political elite of the new Republic.

With the exception of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, the principal Kadro writers came from Marxist political and intellectual backgrounds. Their engagement with Kemalism did not entirely erase this inheritance. Historical materialism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and an emphasis on structural economic transformation remained visible in their work.

At the same time, their rejection of class struggle separated them from orthodox Marxism. Their dialectical and materialist interpretation of history also distinguished them from the more positivist tendencies of official Kemalism. They occupied an unstable position between the two traditions without belonging completely to either.

The Kadroists’ legacy can therefore be understood as a Kemalist interpretation shaped by revisionist and national-left readings of Marxism. Their project attempted to formulate an ideology for a postcolonial national revolution, reconcile materialist analysis with national unity, and establish statism as a permanent alternative to capitalism and socialism.

This intellectual synthesis also carried significant contradictions. The movement opposed colonialism while supporting an authoritarian conception of social transformation. It criticised Eurocentrism while accepting Westernising reforms at home. It rejected fascism but adopted ideas of classless national unity and rule by an organising elite that resembled the corporatist tendencies of the interwar period.

These tensions explain why Kadro remains important. Its writers did not simply move from Marxism to Kemalism. They attempted to reconstruct both traditions in response to the political and economic dilemmas of the early Turkish Republic.

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