Remembering Galiyev through the pen of Halit Kakınç(*)

On August 7, 2026, journalist and  author Halit Kakınç was sent off to eternity. 

Kakınç was known for his books and articles on international relations, history, geopolitics, and politics.

However, Kakınç stood out in the Turkish public sphere for his work on Sultan Galiyev. He was considered one of the authors who was influential in the recognition of Sultan Galiyev's ideas.(**)

Who is Sultangaliyev?

Sultangaliyev is the most important leftist thinker of the Turkish-speaking geography. He was not a chauvinistic nationalist, a racist, or a fundamentalist; he was one who explained most clearly the fact that even the most progressive ideologies can be distorted by imperialist residues.  He was the only revolutionary who developed a theory of world revolution with an anti-colonial origin and a future-oriented perspective. In my opinion, he was one of the most prominent  names of the 20th century in terms of leftist thought. He had foreseen that the Soviet experiment would collapse, along with its reasons, as early as the 1920s, and what he predicted  also came to pass.

What were Halit Kakınç's works on Sultan Galiyev?

• Sultangaliyev

The book began as an academic doctoral thesis but was later published as a book. In this work, Kakınç examined Galiyev's life, his ideas, and his understanding of "national communism."

• Slave Revolutionary Sultangaliyev

He summarized Galiyev's political struggle, his position within the Bolshevik movement, and his conflicts with the Soviet administration.

• Red Turan-Sultangaliyev

One of his works that examines Galiyev's ideas on the Turkic world,  socialism, and Eurasia.

Why was Galiyev  recognized late in the Turkish public sphere?

Mirsaid Sultan Galiyev is known as a leader who could not realize the Turan socialism he envisioned because national consciousness had not sufficiently formed among the Turkic-speaking peoples who had remained under Russian rule for a long time. He was forgotten and made to be forgotten for a long time.

 This lateness stems, in essence, from the weakness of at least a segment of the Turkish intelligentsia in grasping the world. The foreign-sourced views and criteria they use as tools in their understanding have dominated them since the Tanzimat era. In other words, the main reason for the delay in recognizing Galiyev can be explained as «the dominance of Eurocentric views” over the Turkish intelligentsia.

How can we summarize Galiyev's ideology?  

I believe that understanding Galiyev's ideology has two important outcomes. The first is to understand 20th and even 21st-century imperialism, the colonial world, and anti-colonialism; the second is to understand the problems and solutions of the  Turkish-speaking geography.

Galiyev, in his article titled “Some of our views regarding the principles of socio-political, economic, and cultural developments of Asian and European peoples” explains his approaches.

According to him;

• “At the core of surplus value, there is the contradiction between oppressed nations and oppressor nations rather than the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. In other words, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between 'proletarian nations' and 'metropolises (the West).' This is also the contradiction that will eliminate capitalism.

• Western culture is built upon the accumulation created by capitalist exploitation. In this context, Western culture, on one hand, legitimizes the continuation of exploitation, and on the other, prevents oppressed nations from constructing an original culture that would eliminate this exploitation. It imposes the dominance of a single Western and capitalist culture in the world.

• The bourgeois or proletarian culture shaped in the West carries a parasitic, reactionary, and degenerate character because it is built upon foundations of plunder. Instead of Western culture, Galiyev advocates for the revival of Eastern culture, which existed in the East before colonialism on the basis of non-ownership and equality. According to Galiyev, Turkic, Mongol, Arab, Indian, and Chinese civilizations and cultures have been superior to the West in history in terms of action and thought.

• Class struggles in Western countries are reformist in nature and have remained far from achieving revolutionary transformation. This is because Western laborers have shared a portion of the resources transferred by capitalist countries in global exploitation. For this reason, the situation of laborers in metropolitan countries is much better than that of laborers in the colonies. In this sense, they are collaborators.

• The Western working class ties the permanent and deep-rooted protection of its class interests to the continuity of imperialism. Due to this characteristic of the Western working class, it is not possible to see and organize all laborers in the world on one front at the beginning.

• A world revolution against imperialism can be realized through the struggle that oppressed nations will wage against imperial states. In the success of the struggle, the national liberation wars waged by colonial nations against imperialism are decisive.

• In the struggle to be waged against capitalist world exploitation, in the final analysis, 'Proletarian Nations Internationalism' must be established.”

Galiyevism and Turan Socialism

The main goal of Turkic-speaking revolutionaries under Galiyev's leadership was to re-establish the Turkic States that Tsarist Russia had destroyed on the basis of egalitarianism. For this reason, they interpreted the Bolshevik Revolution as an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial communist movement. In other words, Turkic-speaking peoples supported the Bolshevik Revolution in line with the intertwining of their liberation wars and the ideal of communism. The promises of the Bolsheviks also included these. This situation also determined the fate of the revolution. Because those who made up more than half of the Red Army were Turkic peasants. If it were not for the Red Army with the aforementioned composition, the White Army and imperialist units could not have been expelled from Soviet lands.

Following the completion of the revolution, Galiyev put forward views and engaged in various activities aimed at establishing a Turan Socialist Federation with equal rights to Socialist Russia. The federation was to consist of three states: the Muslim Caucasus Federation, the Tatar-Bashkir Socialist Republic, and the Turkestan Soviet Republic.

The Turan Socialist Federation to be established would have triggered and supported National Liberation Wars in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, China, and India. Through these national liberation wars, British imperialism would be dismantled, and the global revolutionary process would begin.

However, after Lenin's death, the Soviet government, dominated by Stalin, implemented an approach that envisioned the hegemony of Russian culture. Under the guise of socialism, Russian colonialism was imposed upon Turkic-speaking peoples. For instance, Turkestan, which shared a common language, culture, and economy, was fragmented into pieces, and extraordinary policies were implemented to create divisions among Turkic-speaking peoples. The classic imperialist strategy of 'divide and rule' was carried out against the Turks. In the process we are experiencing today, is this not the reason why the leaders of the Turkic states in Central Asia cannot communicate with each other except in Russian?

Ultimately, the party under Stalin's control, which was the sole authority in the Soviet Union, carried out the liquidation of Galiyev and other Turkic revolutionaries and sentenced them to death. In this context, the Russians sent Turkic intellectuals in Turkic-speaking states into exile and killed most of them, leaving these peoples without intellectuals. The famous Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov recounts in his memoirs how his father and his friends were destroyed.

I respectfully remember Halit Kakınç, who introduced Sultan Galiyev to the Turkish public through his scientific studies.

(*) Years ago, in my article titled 'Atatürk and Galiyev' in Dağarcık Türkiye, I wrote about the parallel thoughts of Atatürk and Galiyev regarding Western imperialism and the egalitarian basis of the world's peoples.  In this article, I attempted to summarize Galiyev's ideology.  (See: https://dagarcikturkiye.com/2011/11/01/ataturk-ve-galiyev/.)  (**) I have not forgotten that Attila İlhan also played a major role in Galiyev's recognition by the Turkish public. (See: 'Sultan Galiyev - The Ghost Wandering in Eurasia, 2000')

Alexandre Bennigsen's books, which have been translated into Turkish, are also worth reading regarding Galiyev: 'Sultan Galiyev and Soviet Muslims', 'Sounds of the Adhan in the Steppe', and 'Sultan Galiyev / The Father of the Third World Revolution' are among them. August 8, 2026

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