Among the stories that Against the Liberal Order tells, one of the most important is about Russian socialists' embrace of Turkish nationalism. As internationalist and class-oriented as Marxism-Leninism may have been in theory, the Soviet government accepted and eventually welcomed allies like the Kemalists. At the heart of this convergence was a sense that, in a world where powerful Western states benefitted most from global capitalism, economic nationalism was a necessary response.

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Below, I have posted a 1925 Soviet survey of the Turkish economy, which displays many of the assumptions that shaped the Bolsheviks' evaluation of Kemalism. The authors advance an explicit argument in favor of the Kemalists, and they refer frequently to international political economy. They describe the group in Ankara around Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as nationalist, committed to the industrial development of the country, and hence in conflict with "foreign capital." They claim his opponents were based in İstanbul, had gotten rich on international trade and thus adopted pro-Western politics, and would even agree to the colonial exploitation of Anatolia. The Soviet authors applaud the Kemalists' tariff policy and protectionism, but they also praise Ankara's desire to expand exports. The political economy they espoused was nationalist but not isolationist, an early version of the statist internationalism that would become more pronounced in the 1930s. 

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In addition to the explicit argument, the document's language itself reveals ideological sympathy for economic nationalism. Often, particular usages of common words are telling: the insistence that a nation's political independence must have an "economic foundation"; the idea that a nation's economy is an "organism"; the claim that such an organism is "incomplete" without industry. Sometimes, historically specific phrases like "port bourgeoisie," "semi-colony," or "kabala" require context. In the footnotes, I have indicated the pages in Against the Liberal Order where this context can be found.

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The survey was produced by Rabkrin (The People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection), a supervisory entity that audited Soviet institutions. The report generated a number of principles to guide the work of Soviet diplomats and trade organizations, and, in my archival work, I found numerous later references that invoked these principles to justify new policy recommendations. For more on the context for the report and its authors, see Against the Liberal Order, pages 92-94.  

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I have translated with an eye to readability in English, but I have left some older usages (essentially transliterated from Russian) for historical context (for example, the use of "Constantinople" for İstanbul, "Adalia" for Antalya, and "Smyrna" for İzmir).