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Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of city details. Ford Profense Simple offers flexible financing solutions for all kinds of businesses, whether you're an electrician, or run an organic farm. Because we know that your business demands financing that works when you need it. Like when your landscape and company lands a new account. Wherever you see your business headed, Ford Profense Simple can help you pursue it with financing solutions today. Get started at FordPro.com/financing. Welcome to the new books network. Hello, and welcome to the new books network. My name is Ruben Silverman, a researcher at Stockholm University's Institute for Turkish Studies. And with me today is Samuel Hurst, an assistant professor in the International Relations Department at Bill Kent University. Today, we will be discussing his new book against the liberal order. The Soviet Union, Turkey, and statist internationalism, 1919-1939, which is just out from Oxford University Press. It looks at the years between the first and second world wars when Turkey and the Soviet Union came together and shared opposition to the emerging liberal order. So with this, as always, we like to talk a little bit about the author's background. So perhaps we can talk about yours, which has led you from America, to Russia, to Turkey, en route to this new book. How have these experiences shaped the book and the sorts of questions you address in it? Well, thank you, Ruben, for that introduction and for the invitation. Over the years, I've listened to a fair share of new books, podcasts, and I've listened to some of the ones you've hosted. I'm grateful for the work that you and the other interviewers do. And I'm delighted to be able to contribute to the project today. The premise of your question is apt because my book is based both in a reading of academic literature and in personal experience. And I suppose in terms of the latter, the place to begin is 2002 when I was an undergraduate student at the Washington University in St. Louis. And that year I decided to do an undergraduate year abroad. And that year I went to both Russia and Turkey for the first time. Russia was already by that point a long-standing interest in terms of the history and the literature. But Turkey was more of a chance coincidence. There's a family connection to Turkey. And I wasn't really thinking of these two countries as connected. It was more just sort of an undergraduate experience. And as someone who had grown up in the United States, when I got to Russia and Turkey, I was struck by something that seemed different to me. Again, having grown up in the United States, I was accustomed to this strange American combination of private wealth, of immense private wealth in public squalor. And in Russia and Turkey, the public-private relationships seem different to me. There seemed to be a prominent role for the states. And my book is about statism. And it was in that initial arrival in Russia and Turkey that some of that interest emerged. I should say here that it wasn't necessarily state capacity that struck me. To this day, I retain a very, I think, understandable respect for the power of the American government in extracting income taxes. And I don't necessarily have that same feeling in Russia, having lived in Russia for a long time and having lived in Turkey for a long time. I don't have that same feeling. But what it is in Russia and Turkey is that there seems to be a valorization of the state that I was not accustomed to. As I moved into graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I quickly recognized that there were quite a few people interested in the connections between Russia and Turkey. And these scholars who I began to read were calling for a new approach, a new conceptual framework that would allow us to treat the Soviet Union Turkey or Russia and Turkey as part of a similar set of questions. And, you know, academics like to break down walls. And I think what was happening was that the Cold War area studies model was breaking down. And the Soviet Union had been an area unto itself. Turkey had been part of the Middle East sometimes, but rarely had these two regions, if we were to think about them broadly, been part of the same set of conversations. And the works that I was reading that were calling for them to be treated together seemed to me, and I know now that I was perhaps reading the literature somewhat simplistically. But it seemed to me that many of the calls for putting Russia and Turkey or the Soviet Union and Turkey into the same context were coming from a comparative approach. That is, the argument was that the Russian and the Ottoman empires had been large agrarian empires. They had been autocratic. They had had multi-ethnic societies. And that's as different as the Bolsheviks and Kemelists' paths out of that imperial experience were, the Bolsheviks and the Kemelists also created two of the most prominent modernizing experiments of the 20th century. And I was seeing these calls for what I thought to be calls for comparative approach. And given my interest in statism, I was worried that I would end up with sort of a 19th century orientalist account of Eastern despotisms. And so I was a little bit wary of the comparative approach. And this was strengthened my own experience in Russia and Turkey. I remember arriving in Turkey for the first time in 2002, in September. I arrived at the airport, this was before they built the big new airport out in the middle of nowhere. And the Hovash bus, the sort of the bus that took you into the city, made its first stop in Oxerai. And I knew Russian at this point decently, but I didn't know word of Turkish. I didn't really didn't understand much about the city, got off in Oxerai. It's a somewhat seedy neighborhood still is. To my great surprise, everyone around me was speaking Russian. I say this because in the wake of Putin's assault on Ukraine in 2022, Istanbul has acquired a reputation as a hub of Russophone immigration from both Ukraine and Russia and elsewhere. But at the time, I didn't have an existing framework for understanding the connections that I was seeing, and it wasn't just Oxerai, I arrived at Bill Kent University. I now teach at the institution, but I spent nine months here as an undergraduate exchange student. And when I arrived at Bill Kent, I found that the vast majority of the foreign students, they weren't necessarily exchange students. Many of them were here for a full course of study. But the vast majority of the foreign students at that time spoke Russian. Many of them were from the former Soviet Union. The lingua franca among the international students, as it were, was the lingua ruscha. And so as I began to read history books to try and find a subject that would allow me to think about the connections between Russia and Turkey, I learned that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union had sent industrial machinery to Turkey and helped build large factories in the towns of Nozzly and Kaiserie. I learned that Turkey had been one of the first foreign states to voluntarily adopt a five-year plan that was partly designed by Soviet economists and planners. And so this seemed like a natural subject given my emerging interest at the time. And since 2002, since I first visited the country, I've probably spent a total of eight years or so in each. And in that extended time in both Russia and Turkey, I think allowed me to sort of tell a narrative in the book against the liberal order that really gives a sense of place and is rooted in a lot of archival research. In answer to your question, Ruben, I have stressed the personal because that's how the question was framed. But I think that as it is the case for almost any scholar, it's really difficult to separate the intellectual interests and the personal background. And when I was in graduate school, it was the crest of the transnational wave. I don't use the word transnational in my book. I see my book more as a history of international relations, a history of the international order. But I was certainly influenced by all of the scholars who are engaging in what was then widely spoken about as transnational history at the time. And I think what my book shares with that moment, the moment in which I did much of the research for it, is an attempt to write history beyond the borders of the nation state or at least without privileging the borders of the nation state. And that's sort of where I, how I arrived at this project and personal and somewhat graduate school terms. Well, that makes a lot of sense. You know, I mean, in addition to Turkey and Russia, though, one thing I was struck reading the book was the way you're in conversation, not just with those two countries in their histories, but also with a large number of other recent works that I've been seeing about the emergence of a liberal order in this era. So I thought maybe the first thing we can really talk about is how you situate this book how you see it, reflecting these larger debates. What is this international order you're talking about which you in the book talk of as the Paris order, how are scholars like yourself thinking about this. So the title against the liberal order is much more than a marketing gimmick. The idea of a liberal order shaping Soviet Turkish relations really runs through my thinking about the book. I'm thankful Ruben for your careful reading, and for the fact that you began with that question. I should begin by saying that this wasn't always the case I didn't always have this liberal other out there as I was thinking about Soviet Turkish relations. When I first entered the archives both in Russia and in Turkey, I was reading a lot of transcripts of conversations between politicians between commercial representatives, even between artists. And in these conversations I would find Turkish actors and Soviet actors referring to a shared sense of purpose. What this shared purpose was it changed based on the individual who was speaking on time and on place, and a large part of my work has been devoted to trying to figure out how we can bring those various instances together and name and then describe this shared purpose. When I first published on inner-war Soviet Turkish relations in 2012 in a journal article, the article had the term anti-Westernism at the fray in the title. And at that time, this was before all the photo ops with Erdogan and Putin in them. It was much harder to sell a work that was interested in a shared anti-Westernism in Russia and Turkey. One of my first critics said, "How can you describe Attic as anti-Western if he was engaged in westernizing sartorial reform?" The easy response at that time for me was that, well, Joseph Stalin was engaged in convincing forge motor company to help build automobile factories in the Soviet Union, but surely we would allow for some kind of anti-Westernism in Stalin's or in Soviet politics. But I learned early and quickly that I had to be careful in the way that I was using this phrase anti-Westernism and to make sure that it was clear, I wasn't talking about anti-civilizational anti-Westernism, but a resentment and a jealousy even of Western power in the international system. And then in the years since I published that article, I have read works that I should have read previously and read new works. And these are the works that you referred to in your question, Rubin. I've been very influenced by early works by Mark Mazauer and Patricia Clavin, more recent works by Nicholas Mulder and Jamie Martin, works that have returned to the 1920s in particular and rethought the way that international relations evolved in this period. All the scholars that I've just mentioned in various ways argue that liberal internationalism really came to shape international relations in a new way in this period. You know, not least by contributing to the emergence of institutions and practices that we're dealing with to this day. This moment in the 1920s was when we see sanctions being used in peacetime. This is when we see politicians aspiring to an idea of global economic governance, and this helped me think through what I was seeing in Soviet and Turkish sources. Now, as you know, I use the term the Paris order in my work to describe the liberal internationalism of the 1920s. And I admit that I was trying to be somewhat provocative when I choose that term, you know, the work of the scholars that I've just mentioned has seen a significant shift in the historiography. It used to be that we approach the 1920s through the prison of the 1930s. And so there was great emphasis placed on the fact that the United States did not join the League of Nations that the League of Nations failed to meet many of its stiffest challenges and ultimately the order building that happened in Paris in 1918 and 1919 failed to produce to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. And so this idea of a liberal order emerging in the 1920s will presumably not convince some readers who will be persuaded by the older interpretation that given the League's failures at some of its most basic goals, it doesn't make sense to think about an order that was cohesive or coherent in the 1920s. And indeed I think for scholars or students of relations between the United States and the United Kingdom or France and Germany, then perhaps the idea of a Paris order is not going to be particularly helpful. But I'm optimistic for some, depending on the geographic perspective that they approached the 1920s from. The idea of a Paris order will be helpful. One of my inspirations for this phrase was an article by Eric White's in which he refers not to the Paris order but the Paris system. And he uses the phrase very effectively to draw a contrast between the Vienna system a century earlier, and then the Paris system that emerged in the 1920s. And White's is really interested in political concepts and ideas, but I think that certainly if we take a perspective from the vantage point of Moscow and Ankara, then it behooves us to think of the military power of the Paris order as well. The Bolsheviks and the chemists formative experience, the period in which they assumed power fought for that power, and then established their states was one in which they were fighting against foreign occupying forces. Allied troops and these were multilateral invasions coordinated from Western capitals occupied significant chunks of the former Ottoman and the former Russian empires. And to my mind, one of the reasons for writing this book and framing in the way that I have, is that Soviet Turkish relations offers a sort of mirror in which we can see the Paris order in its cohesion and its strength. Well, that, that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, you're right, it did start as a military experience of this order for the Soviets and the Kamalas. So let's look at that early period. Obviously you know their, their aims their strategies their relationships changed over time during the interwar years but in that early period. Did their fighting you talked about, but also their later negotiations with Western European governments during the Russian Revolution, the Turkish War of Independence, the Treaty of Lausanne. How did this shape their attitudes towards the Paris order and with one another. So this question requires me to engage in a bit more of that description of shared purpose that I referred to earlier. The period between 1920 when the Bolsheviks and Kamalas really established their first political connections and 1922. In these first few years, one way to describe the shared experience of the Bolsheviks and the Kamalas would be in terms of insurgency. And insurgency is a word that Adam twos uses in his work about this period the deluge. He uses, I think very effectively the idea of insurgency to describe resistance to the emerging US led international order and then the Paris based international order that emerges at the end of the First World War. This is the word insurgent in particular for Germany and Japan and Italy for those states that would really come to seek the overthrow of the liberal order of the 1920s during and then in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The imperialism would be another way to describe what was happening in the connections between Moscow and Ankara, and then between 1920 and 1922. Both Bolsheviks and Kamalas used the phrase anti imperialism or at least described their shared purpose as an attempt to fight off Western imperialism. But that anti imperialism recedes with time. In 1927, the Soviet Union helped create a league against imperialism that is a formal anti imperialist institution and Turkey didn't even bother to send a representative. In my mind, after 1922, the insurgency, the anti imperialism recedes in Soviet Turkish relations, but rather than leading to a weakening of the relationship I think that we actually see a shift to a much more substantive phase in the Turkish relationship, indeed, and certainly the phase that produces the industrial cooperation of the 1930s. And now let me preface what I'm about to say next by saying that Soviet politics in the 1920s were diverse Turkish politics in the 1920s were diverse, and then a relatively short book like my own I can't help to do. But I hope to do justice to either in their entirety. What I'm writing about in against the liberal order is the strands of Soviet and Turkish politics that ran parallel to each other. Why I say this is that the Soviet Union continued to be an insurgent and important ways throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the common turn continued to work for world revolution and the overthrow of the existing capitalist But 1922 was a turning point, and there were other Soviet institutions in addition to the common turn. There's a commissariat of foreign affairs the commissariat of economic affairs. And these institutions began to engage with the existing liberal order and 1922 really was a turning point. I think we don't often enough recognize that within the matter of months in 1922, the Western allies invited the Bolsheviks and the chemists to sit down and renegotiate the terms of the Paris settlement. This was an invitation to the Bolsheviks to negotiate at Genoa in April, and then to the chemists to negotiate in Lausanne in November. And while those two conferences produced very different results. I think that we can describe what comes out of it is a phase of peaceful coexistence this was a phrase that both the Bolsheviks would have used at the time to describe the relation with the West. It's a great phase that the the chemists would not have used but I do think that we can see certain similarities. For both the Bolsheviks and the chemists post 1922, there was a real desire to import Western technology, Western industrial machinery to help rebuild devastated economies and also to industrialize. But there was also an understandable weariness given this recent history of violence. And so I think that we can see coming out of that 1922 turning point, a shift towards a phase not of insurgency or of anti imperialism, but of a wary but peaceful coexistence. And obviously I'm talking about similarities here and I do think that as much as I emphasized in an answer to an earlier question that I'm really trying to think about connections. I do think it pays to reflect for a moment on what it was that the Bolsheviks and the chemists shared. And I don't think it's term in terms of larger structural phenomena, but really in terms of a set of ideas that they brought to power. The Bolsheviks and the chemists both established developmental states, they were both revolutionary groups, they both believe that their autocratic predecessors have been corrupt had been arbitrary. And these new revolutionary elites hope that they could through rational government and the use of science, help their societies advance through the historical phases towards something that we might now describe as industrial modernity. But this wasn't the only thing that Bolsheviks and the chemists discount shared it wasn't just a relationship to the societies they governed. It was also a sense of the relationship between those societies and the world abroad. I think when we look at Bolshevik and chemists thought in the 1920s, you see a real sense that the foreign world and foreign markets were not neutral observers, and that the tools of the state thus had to be used. Not only to transform society at home, but also to manage relations between society in what would become the Soviet Union and the Turkish Republic and the world abroad. And now to finally answer your question in very narrow and direct terms you asked what came out of these early engagements with the Paris order. Well, I think the simplest way to describe what we see in Soviet Turkish relations coming out of that earlier period of insurgency is a commitment to bilateralism. And I know this is a terribly unsexy word. I wish I could say that the Bolsheviks and the chemists had formed an alliance that word has a much more resounding ring. But I think taking bilateralism seriously is helpful because it forces us to recognize just how powerful the Paris order was. Coming out of the First World War, liberal internationalists expended enormous amount of energy trying to discredit bilateral arrangements of any sort. They argued that bilateralism had been characteristic of European diplomacy, of the balance of power, and that had been bilateral alliances that had turned the assassination of a single individual in Sarajevo into a global conflict that claimed millions of lives. And precisely because the chemists were aware that bilateralism was being questioned. The chemists were very wary about signing a new bilateral pact with the Soviet Union after Lausanne. And it took until 1925 for Soviet and Turkish diplomats to figure out what bilateralism would look like in this new multilateral moment. In 1925, the Soviet Union and Turkey signed a pact on neutrality and nonaggression as a very short pact. Today, when you read it, it doesn't seem particularly important. And nevertheless, almost immediately after the signing of the pact, the Soviet Soviet Commissariat to Foreign Affairs pivoted to the world and said we have arrived at a new model of international relations. Quickly, Turkey would sign bilateral packs with Afghanistan and with Iran. The Soviet Union would sign bilateral packs with a host of neighboring states. And what this bilateralism was, it was a reflection of a fear that the West, the Paris Order, would force Turkey or any other state into conflict with the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks were the great others in this moment in the 1920s, and the League had tools like sanctions, which were to be used in multilateral fashion to punish the miscreants of the international order. And so bilateralism was, in a sense, a pledge that Turkey and the Soviet Union would not allow their commitment, their new and emerging commitments to the Paris Order to get in the way of the bilateral relationship. I think it's best if I leave it there so that we can move on to other themes, but readers will find that I draw connections between this bilateralism of the 1920s, and the Soviet Union's relations with what would come to be known as the Third World in the 1950s. Yeah, no, and I found that historicization and new way of looking at bilateralism to be very interesting in your book. The other aspect that I found very interesting was how it made me think a little bit differently about the 1920s, because often when people talk about Turkey during the 1920s, there's this idea that the government was pretty restrained in its actions in terms of the economy. It was limited by its agreements with Western European countries. That's changed a little bit in recent years now there's more emphasis among scholars of Turkey, looking at the efforts to nationalize the economy and what that really meant. You pick up on this and I think you do a really interesting job of talking not only about how the Turkish government sought to nationalize its economy, but how the Soviet government reacted to this tendency among Turkish leaders. So perhaps we can talk about that during the 1920s, how did Soviet officials understand and how did they react to this nationalist economic policy that was going on in Turkey during the 1920s. Yes, you're absolutely right, Ruben, for a long time, and until quite recently scholars would refer to Turkish economic policies in the 1920s as liberal. And this seems to go against my claim that the Turkish state came off as elites were engaged in a project that might be described as being formed against the liberal order, but I think it's possible to reconcile these two claims. The early model for understanding Turkish economic policies in the 1920s was formed in comparison with the statism of the 1930s, and it was formed by looking at budgets and tariffs. We see, Kemalist elites of the 1920s, and it might be hard to remember this now, but the elites of the 1920s were deathly afraid of inflation. They associated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire with inflation, and the Turkish government retained a remarkable commitment to a balanced budget throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. The elites would put them in a non interventionist space on the spectrum of economic policy. The other big issue you referred to is tariffs. And again, tariffs is one way that we can recognize the power of the Paris order in the 1920s. The government at Lausanne agreed to sacrifice autonomy over its terrorist tariff policy for five years from the ratification of the agreement, in other words, into 1929. And it's very difficult to write the revisionist account of those topics. Whether the narrative has shifted to acknowledge a more nationalist economics in the 1920s is in the work of a younger cohort of scholars who have focused in particular on the history of non Muslim groups in the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. And these scholars argue that the Turkish government intervened repeatedly in markets, what this looked like was favoring particular individuals or enterprises, and the goal was the creation of a Muslim bourgeoisie. And this literature has helped to reshape the general narrative, which now recognizes that the Turkish state's investment in railroads was part of a nationalist economics that existed already in the 1920s. It doesn't really contribute a lot on the question of Turkish economic policy in the 1920s itself, but as you're right, and in the question to say that what I do is to bring the Soviet perspective on this question into the story. Because it's been difficult to find archival materials in Turkey about the treatment of non Muslim groups. A lot of historians have relied heavily on British and French archives. And when you go into the archives in London and Paris, you find British and French diplomats who are wringing their hands about Turkish prejudice about the violation of international law about what they often considered to be irrational political behavior. And I come back to the idea that the Soviet Turkish relationship in many ways offers us a mirror to the Paris order of the 1920s. Soviet diplomats were doing the exact opposite. Soviet diplomats were much more likely to be sympathetic to the chemolists arguments they were likely to see the minor ethnic minorities as agents of foreign powers. The ethnic minorities as groups who would work for profits and for global capitalism, rather than for the development of the local or the national territory. And as I'm talking now, I realized that I'm doing something that I bought against when writing the book, that is when I was doing the research, I felt that I got to know a number of individuals quite well. As I tried to be concise in the writing, I fell back on these broad terms like the Bolsheviks and the chemolists, the Soviet Union and Turkey. And so to try and work against that for a moment here, I'll introduce one individual whose story I found particularly helpful in thinking through this moment. This is a man by the name of Vladimir Gurko Krashen. He was one of the foremost Turkey specialists in the Soviet Union. I know we like to think about area study, this is an invention of the Cold War and area studies, studies specialist is something that was particularly true of Western academic culture. But the Soviet Union in the 1920s had their own area study specialists and Gurko Krashen was probably the leading Turkey specialist. And initially, Gurko Krashen wrote quite negatively about ethnic nationalism in Turkey. He drew a negative contrast with what he saw as the much more inclusive and tolerant politics of Soviet federalism. But then gradually, as he watched the chemolists engage with the Paris Order, he came around to a position that was very similar to the chemolists own, or at least it was compatible. And where Gurko Krashen's story intersects with the Turkish economic story about the 1920s that you asked initially about Ruben is that I think that the Soviet perspective helps us to see continuity between the 1920s and the 1930s. In the initial telling of the story of a liberal Turkish 20s and a statist 1930s, the Great Depression played in a really significant role in explaining the shift from one decade to the other. And it's unquestionable that the Great Depression was incredibly important. It's unquestionable that the economic nationalism of the 1920s was different from the stateism of the 1930s. But I do think that we can ask what was carried on from one decade to the other. The Bolsheviks and the chemolists in the 1930s as in the 1920s, we're likely to see major ports like Izmir and Istanbul, as sites of foreign capitalism, as sites that were heavily influenced by Western corporations in which ethnic minorities would be prominent as collaborators in cooperation with these foreign interests, and Soviet Turkish cooperation, if it was to happen, was to be something that would be centered on the national economy. It would be based in the Hinterland, it would be tied to Ankara and connected to groups that were the majority population of the country. And so this, I think, introducing the Soviet perspective on Turkish economics in the indoor period allows us to see that shift from national economy in the 1920s to stateism in the 1930s as, yes, a question of two different decades, but also an evolution in a broader response to global capitalism. That's good. And that brings us to the 1930s, which is what I'd like to shift our focus to now. During this period, the leaders of Turkey and the Soviet Union did move closer together. So maybe we can, before we get into specifics, maybe we can talk about what accounts for this intensification of relations. Did communist elites in the Soviet Union and the nationalist elites in Turkey agree on the benefits of working together? What sort of debates were happening as the two countries moved closer together? So, as I pieced this story together, I tried to leave ample room for historical contingency, and the Great Depression, the early 1930s, really were a moment when it seemed like history could have gone another way. You asked about the intensification of relations, Reuben, and if we were to identify a peak in the Soviet Turkish relationship, I think it would have to be 1932, when the then Prime Minister is met in a know who was known as, is met Pasha at the time, decided to embark on a trip to the Soviet Union and this was the first visit by a sitting Turkish Prime Minister to Moscow. But not only that, is met took with him a whole retinue of Turkish politicians and journalists, and it was out of their meetings in Moscow that the decision to export Soviet industrial machinery and know how to Turkey was taken. This would seem to be a logical outcome of the processes that I've been describing in our conversation so far. In fact, however, as the Great Depression set in, the Soviet Turkish relationship really seemed like it was in jeopardy. In 1927, the Chinese nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek, and this was someone who had been in an alliance with Moscow, he had received military and economic aid from the Soviet Union. Chiang Kai-shek set on the Chinese Communist Party, murdering thousands of Chinese communists. And in response to what many in the Soviet Union saw as Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal, many in the Soviet Union called for a broader reevaluation of relations with nationalists abroad, among them, Mustafa Kemalataturk and the Kemalist state. And this reevaluation coincided with the Cultural Revolution and the Soviet Union, in which a younger generation of often more ideological, more radical individuals came to power, and many of these individuals were calling in the early 1930s. For the Soviet Union to shift support from the Turkish state to Turkish workers and Turkish peasants, groups that were seen as having more evolutionary potential and more worthy of Soviet support. And this pressure to really break relations with the Turkish state was growing right as Ismet Pasha reached out to Moscow. Now the Turkish government's considerations were entirely different, as the Great Depression said in, the Turkish government had given up on the idea of obtaining industrial technology and industrial machinery through trade with the West. And Ismet Pasha reached out simultaneously to the Soviet Union and to Italy. This was clearly an illiberal response to the failure of trade with the liberal West. But it was also clearly not a pivot towards the Soviet Union, the inclusion of Italy in this foreign gambit made clear that Ismet was not pivoting towards the Soviet Union alone. And I should say that I haven't found a single document in which a Soviet diplomat or a Soviet economist argued that the export of industrial machinery or any form of aid really to the Turkish Republic was going to convert Turkey to socialism. But the fact that the Soviet Union began to send industrial machinery was wasn't a fluke either. In the 1930s the Soviet Union sent industrial machinery to Iran and Afghanistan. And this was clearly part of a broader sense that's non Western or anti colonial anti imperialist countries might benefit from industrialization that was aided by the Soviet Union. What I mean to say is that it was far from a given that Turkey would be included in this moment in the 1930s. In terms of explaining how the two sides saw each other, I might begin with an anecdote again from Ismet Pasha's visit to Moscow in 1932 shortly after his arrival. Ismet Pasha asked for a meeting with the just love Molotov. Molotov was essentially Ismet's equivalent in the Soviet system the Soviet Union didn't have a prime minister but if it had had Molotov would have been that man. And Ismet specifically asked for intimacy. He asked that Molotov not bring the foreign commerce sorrow so that Ismet wouldn't have to bring his own foreign minister. So they could have a meeting that would essentially just have a couple of translators and a stenographer and we have a full transcript from this conversation between Ismet Pasha and Molotov it's in the archives in Moscow. And my favorite moment in the conversation is one where you can almost feel Ismet's body language changing. I imagine him sort of opening up his stance towards Molotov and he argues, he says to Molotov, you know, you guys are socialists and we're nationalists. And the trick is not to make these ideologies compatible. It's not to try and find a way to make these ideologies converge. Rather what we have to do is to figure out a way to cooperate above below I don't remember the locational referent, but we have to find a shared purpose in spite of our ideological differences. And it was this idea of a non ideological or super ideological and almost technocratic union that led me to the phrase, status internationalism, which is in the subtitle of my book. And the phrase, status internationalism is a historical I didn't find a single usage of it in the inner period. But I think status internationalism is helpful in thinking about an answer to that question you asked, Ruben, how did these two elite see each other. This was an international exchange that both sides were committed to, but it was one in which the ideological aspect was awkward. And so there was an emphasis on the status approach that was often defined in odds with Western liberal internationalism and was roughly identified in association with the development of the societies at home. Well, then let's look, let's bring this to a head by looking at two of the most sort of flashy joint endeavors that were done between Turkey and the Soviet Union during the 1930s and you talk about, and you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast I think too. There's a factory in nozela and a factory in Kaiserie that are built so let's look at these in turn how did each of them reflect the sorts of collaboration efforts. You're talking about, and how successful were they. And even if they weren't successful, did they have legacy is that we can still see. I like where you end that question I think I'm actually going to begin from the end here and begin with legacies in the former Soviet Union. I think you would struggle to find many people who know that Soviet machinery contributed to the emergence of these factories in Kaiserie and Turkey in the 1930s, you would probably find people aware that the Soviet Union sent industrial aid to Egypt and India in the 1950s. After all the cults music figure Vladimir Wysotsky sang about industrial aid to what by the 1950s was being referred to as the third world. But in terms of legacy I think that these endeavors would be seen as sort of a tool of Russian foreign policy, one which you can see an echo of today and Russia's relations with China and India. I think what my work contributes to that existing narrative is that my work shows that this really wasn't the question of Russian foreign policy. In the chapters of my book I try to show and this is something that I very much felt reading through the documents that Turkey and Turkish politicians traders were absolutely instrumental in shaping the status internationalism that emerges in the 1920s and the 1930s. In Turkey, the legacy question would be very different. The factory buildings in nozzly and Kaiserie still exist. There's a museum now on the grounds of the former factory in Kaiserie there's the beginnings of a museum in nozzly as well. And in many ways there's a nostalgia for these places, because they seem to represent an alternative form of development. In contrast to a lot of the manufacturing in Turkey today, these factories really clearly aspired to a national economy. They were also very clearly connected to the chemolist socialist social transformation. And since the social transformation that the chemolists imagined in the 1930s didn't play out in the way that many had hoped for, factories and nozzly and Kaiserie really do today in Turkey for some, not for all certainly, but for some harbor this sense or create this sense that there could have been an alternative path of development. In Turkey I think the connection to the Soviet Union is something that was more likely to be forgotten. Because today we are in a moment of a lot of nostalgia for the stateism of the 1930s and a lot of frustration with liberal internationalism and the liberal international order. I think it's worth taking separately the two aspects of the factories in relation to Turkey's national history. If we begin with the economics, then we see that, nozzly and Kaiserie, these factories that were built in these two sites really did have for both the Bolsheviks and the chemolists, the goal of independence from global capitalism. There was a real desire to end the dependence on foreign imports. At the beginning of the 1930s textile imports were one of the largest items of Turkish imports. And Soviet advisors arrived in late 1932 to calculate just how much domestic textile production would be necessary to end the import of textiles. The factories were both built to provide for Turkey's domestic textile consumption, and they were remarkably successful. If at the beginning of the 1930s, most of the textiles consumed in Turkey were imported by the end of the decade, the vast majority were produced domestically. But we have to be careful when we think in terms of failure and success in relation to these factories alone. We should remember that in the 1930s international trade was being transformed entirely as a result of the Great Depression. The factories in Nozzly and Kaiserie began to produce behind tariff walls, and in circumstances of low competition competition. There's quite a lot of evidence that the products from the early Nozzly and Kaiserie factories were coarse, that a lot of the textile produce went to the military and to bureaucrats that is to captive markets. This voted worryingly for what would happen when that protectionism would be removed. But I think the limits of independence, and this really was the aspiration, the limits of economic independence became clearest during the Second World War. During the Second World War, the Turkish government repeatedly lobbied its trading partners, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, for spare parts. Turkey never produced machines that produced machines. And so while the factories in Kaiserie and Nozzly could produce textiles to substitute for textile imports, in order to keep producing, they required spare parts and materials from abroad. And so during the Second World War, Turkish elites, much as Latin American elites at the same time, discovered that import substitution industrialization, as we would refer to it today, often actually increased dependence on global markets in the short and even in the medium term. If we switch to thinking about the social transformation that was clearly associated with these factories, the picture is equally complicated. The goal was absolutely there. I've referred to the Bolsheviks and the chemists as developmentalist elites. On both sides, there was clearly the hope that the factories in Nozzly and Kaiserie would not only produce textiles, but they would also transform the laborers who were producing those textiles. And so the factories in Kaiserie and Nozzly had sports teams to train the body. They had cinemas to train the mind, but they had much less success in one of the areas that was really targeted as a potential breakthrough that would come with these factories. And that was in the question of female labor, textiles were associated with female labor. And whether we're talking about the chemolist bureaucrats who were involved in these projects, or the Soviet planners and economists, there was a real hope that the labor force in both Kaiserie and Nozzly would be significantly female. And when you look at the Turkish newspaper in Kaiserie in the 1930s, you see, exhortation after exhortation for the city's women to go and work at the new factory there. But by the eve of the Second World War, only a tiny fraction of the labor force in Kaiserie and Nozzly was female. So, in terms of national history, in terms of economic independence, economic development, in terms of social transformation, I think that the factories in Kaiserie and Nozzly, both a mixed bag. And in response to your very first question, I said that I set out to write a history that's moved beyond the easy borders of the nation states. And so, readers will presumably conclude that I am biased, I certainly am. But I think that the legacy of Kaiserie and Nozzly are really best thought about in international terms. In 1932, it's Matt's Pasha and Stalin met in an apartment just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin. They signed this agreements that are ranged for the exports of industrial goods, almost immediately. Soviet Turkish exchange picked up in music, in film, in civilian aviation. And there were real breakthroughs in all of these fields films were made, planes flew, Dimitri Shostakovich traveled to Turkey and collected Turkish folk music. And what we see here is, I think, a really dynamic and diverse status that internationalism. It would come to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the Second World War. The Soviet Turkish relationship deteriorated fast as the Second World War approached, but the status internationalism of the war period would reemerge in the 1950s and for readers who are interested in the way that I trace the longer historical continuities. My story is in the epilogue. I recognize that we need to wrap up shortly here and so if you'll allow me to conclude with a couple of crude analogies. Definitely. Now I began by emphasizing that when I began working on this project, I had a sense that I was interested in sort of a chance connection between Russia and Turkey. And I began with that because I think that that would probably not be familiar to a reader today. Connections between Russia and Turkey recently have been so prominent. That's, it seems like I'm sort of perhaps speaking there in the early portions of our conversation against a straw man. So in the conversations about Russian Turkish relations today, I frequently see references to, you know, these deep and longstanding structural similarities, the idea that's the Putin Erdogan relationship is sort of an authoritarian relationship that's been brewing for decades. And I think that we have my work suggests that we have to allow for a much more contingent process that has contributed to that relationship and a relationship that has often been in the context of a much broader international order so that's the first crude analogy. The second crude analogy would be that there's a lot of talk at the moment about liberal internationalism or the liberal international order in crisis. And one of the predictions for the future is more a target or more inward looking nationalist states. And I think what my work shows is that from the very beginning from the triumph of liberal internationalism in Paris in 1919. Even a statist internationalism that has coexisted, and this statist internationalism might celebrate the idea of independence or autonomy, but it has certainly not been a target or isolated and I think the Soviet Turkish relations of the 1920s really ask us to take seriously the idea of competing internationalisms. Well, I think that does a very nice job of giving listeners a sense of these this relationship, this time period its relation to the larger time period in which it occurred. But what I'm wondering and what we can maybe wrap up with here is you look at the 1920s you look at the 1930s and as you say the relationship breaks down deteriorates in 1940s so what are you thinking for your your next project. What do you take this are you taking this forward are you moving in a different direction. Oh, what do you have going next. The story of how the relationship ends is, I think, partly one of historical irony. This is the bilateralism of the 1920s really was designed for the decade of the 1920s and the peak the intensification of the Soviet Turkish relationship came in the 1930s when the liberal order was already in crisis when the Paris order was already on its way out. So that story is one that I address to the best of my ability in against the liberal order the first book that I worked on. I am taking the story forward for one project and taking it into the 1950s, but that's that's very much a long term project. And at the moment I've actually shifted to a project of a very different kind with a colleague on their history. I'm writing a Turkish language history of the Soviet Union. And this is a completely different kind of writing my my first book was very much based in archival work. This second project is based on a reading of the existing literature. And I have to admit I'm really enjoying the change of pace. But I think that there is a certain continuity in these two projects. And that is the question of how we think about geographic perspective and history, owner and I are writing a history of the Soviet Union based in Turkey. And our frame of reference is Turkish history. And Turkey in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution happened was a largely agrarian country that's of many of whose members aspired to industrialization. The perspective on Soviet history that one gets writing from a Turkish perspective is very different than the perspective one gets if writing from Moscow or from London or New York. And so really I think that where I'm taking the insights of the first book forward is using geographic perspective to reframe how we think about large historical narratives. I mean having read articles by owner, and articles by you and owner together. I think that'll be a really interesting work to read as well. However, for listeners in the meantime, this current book is also a wonderful book and I must say I learned so much from it. I learned so much from getting this perspective from sources from the Russian the Soviet archives that I would never been able to read or access myself and I think listeners will also get such an interesting array of perspectives and details. Anecdotes from your book that I really hope they go out, find it and read it I think they'll get a lot from it. Well thank you for those kind words Ruben and thanks for the opportunity to be here with you today and for the conversation. [Music]
