The research for Against the Liberal Order was, like the research for most works of history, as if one were putting together a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Unusually, for one critical meeting in Moscow, I found two pieces of similar size and shape that fit together, and I have translated them in the document at the bottom of this page.
On 6 May 1932, Iosif Stalin, Ä°smet Ä°nönü, and many of the most important Soviet and Turkish leaders met in an apartment not far outside the walls of the Kremlin. There, they agreed on the terms for the Soviet industrial credit that would fund Turkish purchases for the textile factories that opened in Kayseri in 1935 and Nazilli in 1937.
The documents are not quite a perfect match. The Soviet version is an abridged transcript, taken by a secretary, of that single meeting. The Turkish version is written in Ä°smet’s name and covers the meeting on May 6th as well as several previous meetings on his trip. For someone interested in the political framework in which Soviet-Turkish interactions played out, there are several key passages here. The Soviet account records Stalin’s quip that, if Turkey did not industrialize, it would be wiped from the face of the earth. The Turkish account records Ä°smet’s desire to prove that Soviet socialism and Turkish nationalism were compatible (on this point, see Against the Liberal Order, 192).
Yet perhaps the most interesting thing that these documents reveal is the improvised nature of the credit arrangement for industrial machinery. That it was improvised does not mean that it was insignificant, and you get a sense that the participants recognized the import of the moment in Tevfik RüÅŸtü’s reference to the world-historical nature of the agreement. But, despite the confidence of Stalin’s and Ä°smet’s and Tevfık RüÅŸtü’s rhetoric, the technicalities were a novelty for the Soviet Union. We know from the historical record that, in 1932, Moscow was not in the habit of exporting industrial machinery abroad. The questions captured in the documents reveal just how unsure both sides were of the details. And the later course of negotiations confirm that industrial cooperation was a process that was worked out on the fly.
The economic rivalry between the Soviet Union and the Union States during the Cold War has led us to think about a Soviet “model of development” that Moscow exported. Documents like the two attached here convinced me that I needed to think much more in terms of contingency, in terms of a process where Turkish demands were just as important in shaping the form that the industrial projects took as Soviet supply.