Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  What happened next is still murky, but Mustafa Suphi and twelve of his associates were last seen on a motorboat heading out of Trabzon. They disappeared on the Black Sea and were presumed dead. Right-wing Unionists were blamed for having organized the disappearance—effectively assassinating a key rival from the other end of the political spectrum—but the Kemalists were the clearest beneficiaries of the Suphi affair. They could now afford to court the favor of Bolshevik Russia without actually allowing Suphi’s Bolshevism to infest the ranks of Turkish nationalists. Both Communist parties—the sincere one established by Mustafa Suphi and the faux one launched by the Kemalists—were soon allowed to fade, becoming minor footnotes in the evolution of the national movement.

  The death of Mustafa Suphi had a profound effect on Nâzım Hikmet’s vision of the emerging regime in his homeland. The Kemalists seemed to have betrayed the revolution before it had even begun. After only a few months in Anatolia, Nâzım decided to cross the border into the Caucasus and join the Bolsheviks. He set off in the autumn of 1921 via the Georgian port of Batumi—just as Dmitri Shalikashvili and other supporters of Georgia’s Menshevik government were escaping to Istanbul—and made his way by train to Moscow. He was nineteen years old.

  It was the first of what would be a series of stays in Russia and a life lived, by turns, in both Moscow and Istanbul. In Moscow he read Marx beneath the statue of the poet Alexander Pushkin. He studied at the Communist University of the Workers of the East, an institution specifically designed to inculcate revolutionary values in Asian intellectuals who would then return to their homelands and take to the barricades. For the next three years, he was in the middle of a creative churning in Russian art, literature, and performance, from experimental theater to poetry that tossed out all conventions of rhyme and meter. He may have invented the first free-verse lines in Turkish during this period, doing away with the traditions of Ottoman poetry and its complex borrowings from Persian and Arabic verse. When Lenin died in 1924, Nâzım stood guard beside the coffin at the lying-in-state, one of many young representatives of world socialism to pay homage to the deceased leader.

  At the end of that year, Nâzım returned to Istanbul. He had left Turkey not long after the probable drowning of Mustafa Suphi, a time when virtually the entire population of real Turkish Communists could have fit in the same boat. Now things were different. Socialist journals were sold openly on the street. Workers’ circles met in clubs and private houses. Conferences were staged to consider the world situation and the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. He started to write for a new journal that made its political leanings clear on the masthead—Orak-Çekiç, the Turkish for “Hammer and Sickle.”

  The relative freedom did not last, however. After the first round of Kurdish rebellions in 1925 came a new law on public order. Leftist newspapers were closed. Surveillance of leftists and other activists increased. Socialists were brought before one of the Grand National Assembly’s independence tribunals. Nâzım went into hiding but nevertheless was swept up in the wave of accusations and denunciations. He was sentenced in absentia to a fifteen-year prison term.

  He soon left Turkey for Moscow, which again became a refuge. Nâzım threw himself into the artistic life of the Soviet capital. But Istanbul was home, and after only two years away he attempted to reenter Turkey through the Caucasus. He was arrested and imprisoned at the border on the odd charge of plotting to rouse ethnic minorities against the Turkish state, an accusation that seems to have had little basis in reality. After months of legal maneuvering, a court at last reversed the original sentence handed down by the independence tribunal, and Nâzım was released and allowed to resettle in Istanbul.

  His trial had been eagerly followed by Istanbul intellectuals; when he was released, he received something of a hero’s welcome, at least among the reading public. His poems had already appeared in the Turkish literary press, and in the spring of 1929 he published his first book in Turkey, a selection of poems written earlier in the decade. His work had clearly been influenced by the writings of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, just as his understanding of the rhythms of speech and the possibilities of narrative had been shaped by his acquaintance with the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. His two stays in the Soviet Union had been a kind of intellectual apprenticeship, leading him to mimic the disjointed poetic forms of Russian Futurism, its industrial aesthetics and visions of cultural transformation.

  The poet on trial: Nâzım Hikmet (left) in court.

  In 1929, he also published his first long poem, “La Gioconda and Si-Ya-U,” in which Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa falls in love with a Chinese Communist and takes flight from the Louvre, only to be burned in Shanghai after joining the revolutionary struggle herself. He became a major writer in the pages of Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), a popular journal of Turkish art and culture, and in 1930 record executives in Istanbul approached him to make an audio recording of his poems. Like Udi Hrant and Seyyan Hanım at around the same time, Nâzım could be heard in coffeehouses and private homes by people who had never met him. The record sold out in less than a month.

  Nâzım was rarely careful in his writing. More popular than ever, he had little reason to be. The restrictive law on public order had been repealed, and a new wave of liberalism swept over Turkey. But his attacks on capitalism and his unabashed admiration for the Soviet system made him the target of constant surveillance. His increasingly vitriolic dismissal of the Turkish literary establishment, especially former friends who had proclaimed their full adherence to Kemalism, left him with few allies.

  He was arrested in 1933, released in 1934, and rearrested in 1938, in part because cadets at his alma mater, the naval college on Heybeliada in the Princes Islands, had apparently been reading his latest work, entitled “The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin.” The poem expanded the boundaries of poetic language, weaving together scholarly prose, magical realism, and multiple voices, much as Human Landscapes would later do, but it was the overtly political message of “Sheikh Bedreddin,” cloaked in an obscure episode from Ottoman history, that sparked a new round of trouble.

  In 1416, a revolt against Sultan Mehmed I broke out in western Anatolia, led by a certain Börklüce, about whom little is known, and the Islamic mystic Bedreddin. Both leaders preached the essential unity of religions and social classes, and their message attracted local Muslims, Christians, and Jews as well as urban merchants and peasants resentful of heavy taxes and feudal landlords. With some difficulty, the Ottomans defeated the rebels. They seized Börklüce and transported him to Ephesus, where he was crucified, strapped to a camel, and led around the countryside as a symbol of the sultan’s wrath. Bedreddin escaped for a time, proselytizing in an area along the western Black Sea coast known as the Mad Forest (in present-day Bulgaria), but he, too, was finally captured and hanged.

  In “Sheikh Bedreddin,” Nâzım clearly overstepped the bounds of political propriety. Given its themes of oppressive rule by a deified leader and the belief in a world where rigid hierarchies and stifling social conventions would melt away, the poem gave the Turkish government a convenient excuse for leveling a charge of inciting mutiny. Nâzım was tried and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Unlike his previous sentences, however, this one more or less stuck. He spent the next twelve years incarcerated as a threat to the Turkish state, a rejecter of Kemalism, and a traitorous admirer of the Soviet Union, which had gone from being an early ally of Turkey to a regional rival in the run-up to the Second World War. He was released in 1950 in a general amnesty of political prisoners and only then after a sustained international campaign supported by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European intellectuals.

  Nâzım lived several lives and in several senses. In his personal life, he carried on deeply romantic and sincerely loving relationships with many women, usually young and already married. In his art, he was by turns a naïve patriot, a flirtatious Futurist, a reflective prison poet, a writer of epic verse, and a skillful se
ntimentalist. His output was enormous. The Turkish edition of his collected works, published from 1988 to 1991, runs to twenty-seven volumes. In his politics, he was genuinely committed to the revolutionary cause, but his encounters with the communism of Joseph Stalin made him long for the Soviet Union he had known during his first visit as a nineteen-year-old, self-exiled from the emerging Kemalist republic. Among the many foreigners who had been seduced by the artistic socialism of a Meyerhold or a Mayakovsky, Nâzım was among the most wistful for that earlier era of Soviet experimentation, before Stalin and the Gulag. His weakness was a common one among his generation: the ability to will himself to look through the awfulness of Stalinism back toward a time when going to Russia could seem, to a teenaged Turk, the ultimate form of liberation.

  If there is a theme that runs through all of Nâzım’s work, however, it is not a political one at all. It is rather a call for valuing life’s casual diversity. Human Landscapes is as much a celebration of the randomness of the world—the attractive messiness of meeting an old friend unexpectedly on a crowded Istanbul street, say—as it is a coded call for human liberation and justice. His love poems, addressed to women on two continents, are among the most moving and maturely unsentimental that one can find. “On Living,” written during his long prison sentence, is a salute to life beyond the political struggle:

  Living is no laughing matter:

  you must live with great seriousness

  like a squirrel, for example—

  I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,

  I mean living must be your whole life.

  After his release from prison, Nâzım traveled and lectured widely outside Turkey—the government, in fact, eventually stripped him of his Turkish citizenship—but the Soviet Union became his adopted home. By then, the revolutionary élan of the 1920s was long past. He was a curiosity from the developing world, surrounded by plenty of other leftist dissidents, former spies, and castoffs from capitalism, with no inkling of how popular his work would later become. Toward the end of his life, he was something of a one-man carnival act, lauding the flourishing of the arts under Soviet socialism and denouncing their putrefaction in the bourgeois oligarchies. His literary voice became that of the wizened ex-prisoner, not the firebrand poet of earlier years. Even his love poems began to take on the air of factory oil and ore smelters. “You are a field / I am the tractor. / . . . / You are China, / I am Mao Zedong’s army,” he wrote in 1951. When he died, in 1963, he lay in state at the headquarters of the Soviet Writers’ Union and was buried, in the company of Chekhov and Gogol, in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. “Some people know all about plants, some about fish,” he had written. “I know separation.” He remains there, far from Istanbul, probably the world’s most celebrated national poet still in exile from his homeland.

  The magnetic pull of the Russian revolution attracted many Turkish intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, and Nâzım Hikmet’s life and work would continue to inspire Turkish socialists, even to the present day. (His Turkish citizenship was finally restored, posthumously, in 2009.) In one of the many ironic twists in Istanbul’s history, however, Nâzım’s journey north toward the Soviet Union began around the same time that another revolutionary, a Russian, was heading south. He blew in on a winter gale along with his wife and son—a “cooperative of three,” he called them. They were immediately the most famous Russian family in Istanbul, but, unlike Wrangel’s flotilla of 1920, they were not Whites. The head of the family, with his round glasses and pointy Vandyke beard, had been one of the supreme leaders of the Reds.

  ISLAND LIFE

  Bosphorus bounty: A fisherman sorts his catch of mackerel.

  LEON TROTSKY WAS PERHAPS the most reluctant visitor ever to arrive in Istanbul. Even before he had stepped ashore, he handed a note to the customs official who boarded his ship. “Dear Sir,” he wrote, addressing Mustafa Kemal. “At the gate of Constantinople, I have the honor to inform you that I have arrived at the Turkish frontier not of my own choice, and that I will cross this frontier only by submitting to force. I request you, Mr. President, to accept my appropriate sentiments.”

  The note was dated February 12, 1929. It was one of the coldest winters ever. Trams had to be dug out from snowdrifts, wolves were spotted in outlying neighborhoods, and for the first time in more than a century, ferries stayed moored to their piers to avoid the chunks of ice that floated down the Bosphorus. The train from Paris spent several days buried in a snowdrift, the incident that would inspire Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Trotsky and his wife, Natalya Sedova, had spent the previous twenty-two days on trains as well, slowly covering some three thousand miles westward from Kazakhstan to the port of Odessa. For two years, the family had been in internal exile in Central Asia, relegated to the far reaches of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin.

  Although Trotsky had been one of the makers of the Bolshevik Revolution—a close associate of Vladimir Lenin and leader of the Red Army during the civil war—Lenin’s death in 1924 had opened the door to Stalin’s ambition. Stalin had chipped away at the edges of the old Bolshevik elite for years, but by the late 1920s he was powerful enough to take on Trotsky, the figure with the widest following outside Stalin’s own circle and the clearest claim to succeed Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. On Stalin’s orders, the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, first escorted Trotsky and Natalya to the windy plains of Kazakhstan. Then the police were on hand in Odessa to supervise the family’s transfer to the steamer Ilyich, with no cargo and no civilian passengers besides the Trotskys and their son Lyova, and the voyage to Istanbul. Turkey had agreed to allow the family to enter the country, but this was not a gesture of sympathy for Trotsky’s politics. It was the opposite: evidence of the fact that, by the late 1920s, the Turkish state believed it had adopted the most useful bits of the Soviet model while successfully scotching direct Soviet influence.

  In any case, the Soviets intended to keep an eye on their most famous exile. Trotsky was accorded the full courtesy of the Soviet Embassy as he made arrangements for housing. For the next several weeks, a wing of the embassy was reserved for his use. Yakov Minsky, the Istanbul representative of the OGPU, was put in charge of keeping tabs on him as well as helping the family to find longer-term living quarters. It was odd for Trotsky to be treated like a guest by a government that had officially condemned him, in absentia, for counterrevolutionary activity and plotting the overthrow of the state. It was even stranger for the government to allow him to write letters of protest to the New York Times and other Western newspapers. But no one, least of all Trotsky himself, believed his predicament would last for long. He had arrived in the city under duress, and he had no intention of staying.

  Trotsky had been exiled twice before, to Siberia and the Russian North, during his period as an underground revolutionary in the tsarist era, and he was used to the concept of starting a new life as an émigré. The two earlier periods of exile had given way to triumph: the 1905 Russian revolution that forced the tsar to create a Russian parliament and the October 1917 revolution that elevated the Bolsheviks to power. He had no desire to stay in a country where he could not speak the local language, he told Turkish journalists, and he hoped that soon a visa would come through for Germany, Britain, or France. There, he would be able to continue his political work on behalf of international socialism while also railing against the usurper Stalin.

  The Soviets likewise believed his Turkish exile would be a temporary affair. Istanbul had the triple virtue of being an easy sail from the Soviet coast, located in a country willing to take in Trotsky, and full of people who might relish the chance to kill him. After all, with plenty of Whites still hanging around the back alleys of Pera, someone would surely find irresistible the prospect of assassinating an old Bolshevik enemy. Minsky, the Soviet secret police agent, even seems to have kept Trotsky informed about all the White and foreign spies working in Istanbul. That may have been a way of helping Trotsky avoid them. I
t may equally have been a clever trap: a way of arousing Trotsky’s curiosity and laying the groundwork for branding him a foreign spy himself, if he ever happened to have contact with capitalist operatives.

  Natalya and Lyova were allowed to leave the embassy to look for housing, and Trotsky himself could occasionally be seen walking along the trolley tracks in Pera, bundled up against the winter cold and flanked by guards. Minsky was nervous about keeping the Trotskys in the embassy for too long, for fear that he would become the de facto landlord of Stalin’s nemesis. In the end, Minsky became a reluctant real estate agent. He came forward with multiple options for accommodation, all of which failed to suit Trotsky’s specifications, especially in terms of security. Exasperated, Minsky finally booted the family out of the embassy and down the street to the Tokatlian Hotel, from which Natalya could continue the housing search on her own. After another move to an apartment, in late April 1929 she managed to find a place an hour and a half by ferry from the city center. It was a house where Trotsky could continue his writing and political work in relative safety while making plans for his next move.

  Büyükada, or Prinkipo, was the largest of the Princes Islands, a group of nine arid islands popping up like a dinosaur’s back from the Sea of Marmara. A convent on Büyükada had once served as the preferred locus of exile for Byzantine nobles who had run afoul of the emperor, and smaller islands in the chain had continued to be dumping grounds as late as the Young Turk era. Stray dogs, for example, had been one of Istanbul’s public health hazards for centuries, and beginning around 1910, in a rolling campaign for order and cleanliness, the city government ordered tens of thousands of them rounded up and shipped to the rocky Hayırsızada—Good-for-Nothing Island. Rival packs formed to guard rainwater pools and fight over stray birds. For years afterward, it was said that on quiet evenings, with just the right southerly wind, Istanbullus could still hear their yelps and howls.