How should we understand the way that ideology shapes human behavior? This question, even if it is not always in the foreground, runs through Against the Liberal Order.

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Often, analysis of Soviet foreign policy treats ideology as a discrete phenomenon, something whose influence can be measured in relation to other factors. Academics draw distinctions between “ideological” and “pragmatic” thinking, as if politicians imagined state interests without drawing on deeper political and cultural assumptions. In the case of the Soviet Union, scholars typically associate ideology with the immediate pursuit of world revolution and pragmatism with more traditional forms of diplomacy, including trade agreements and security arrangements.

 

In the document at the bottom of this page, I have shared a letter that demonstrates why it is impossible to isolate ideology as a discrete element of human thought. The letter was written in July 1923 by Iakov Surits, recently appointed Soviet ambassador to Ankara. This was Surits’s first significant report from Ankara, and he offers a wide-ranging analysis of Turkish politics, Soviet foreign policy, and international political economy.

 

The Kremlin had dispatched Surits to Ankara at a critical moment in Soviet-Turkish relations. After the Bolsheviks and the Kemalists had formed a partnership in opposition to Western military intervention, the Kemalists' peace negotiations at Lausanne brought the possibility of Turkish reconciliation with the West and a subsequent pivot away from the Soviet Union. In Surits’s letter, the word “Lausanne” serves as shorthand for something concrete—diplomatic negotiations in the Swiss city—but also for something more abstract—improved Turkish relations with the West.

 

Surits’s arrival also followed a significant worsening in Soviet-Turkish relations, in particular in the economic sphere. The Turkish government objected to the Soviet government’s claim to legal privileges for the state-run trading agency—Vneshtorg—which led to a standoff that was referred to in Moscow as “economic war.” Surits’s predecessor, Semyon Aralov, had believed that the Vneshtorg conflict reflected choices being made in Lausanne, and he had aggressively sought to counter what he believed was a full-blown Turkish “pivot” to the West. As Aralov’s personal relations with individual members of the Turkish government worsened, his position in Ankara became untenable. Surits was dispatched to replace Aralov, and he was instructed to begin by patching up the conflict over bilateral economic relations.

 

Surits’s letter is long, but I decided to translate it in full. He begins with issues that might seem technical and trivial to the modern reader, but it is worth noting how he interprets the legal issues for his Soviet audience back in Moscow. He clearly recognized that the Turkish objections to Vneshtorg were substantive, that they were not a pretext to spoil relations with the Soviet Union and cozy up to the West. Surits repeatedly relates the legal issues to European—including Tsarist—meddling in the Ottoman Empire. I cite this letter is in chapter 2, where I argue that Lausanne was an important moment when Soviet elites began to recognize what anti-imperialism looked like through Turkish eyes (see Against the Liberal Order, 73–80).

 

The letter really begins to reveal Surits’s ideological assumptions as he engages in predictions for the future course of Turkish foreign policy. In the traditional way of thinking about Soviet ideology, Surits is pragmatic: he is uninterested in the Kemalists’ repression of Turkish leftists and advocates improved relations not only with the Turkish government but also with what he refers to as “the national bourgeoisie.” But his calculations are clearly the product of a deeply ideological worldview. He bases his predictions for Turkey’s relations with Britain, France, and the United States on analysis of the kind of capital interests that prevail in each of these countries. And Surits subscribes to an assumption that I consistently found in Soviet writing about Turkey: that Western imperialism primarily sought the exploitative extraction of natural resources and would inevitably clash with industry-oriented elements in the Turkish economy. Indeed, Surits’s faith that Soviet Union could productively engage with the Turkish government even after the latter’s reconciliation with the West was predicated on the sense that the Soviet Union’s and the national bourgeoisie’s interests converged on the question of development. The letter contains a fascinating passage where Surits refers to “war nationalism,” “national NEP,” and the “economic heights,” suggesting that Surits was imagining Turkey going through a process of development similar to the Soviet Union’s own (see Against the Liberal Order, 121–122).

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 and "Smyrna" for İzmir).