Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: Soldier, Revolutionary, and Founder of the Turkish Republic

Few figures in the political history of the twentieth century so thoroughly transformed a state and a society as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Ottoman staff officer who emerged from the ruin of the First World War to lead a successful national resistance against the Allied partition of Anatolia, who abolished the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman sultanate and the thirteen-hundred-year-old Sunni caliphate, who proclaimed in October 1923 the Republic of Turkey with himself as its first president, and who, in the fifteen years that followed, drove through a program of secular and modernizing reform so radical in conception and so determined in execution that the country which emerged at his death in November 1938 bore only the most superficial resemblance to the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, Islamic, dynastic empire that had preceded it. He was a soldier of unusual professional competence whose Gallipoli command in 1915 had given him an early reputation for tactical insight and personal courage, a politician of intuitive genius whose ability to read the temper of an assembly and to bend its will to his own purposes was unmatched among his contemporaries, an ideologue who fashioned from a synthesis of late Ottoman positivism, French republican thought, and German nationalist theory a coherent program of cultural revolution, and an autocrat who governed the new republic with the disciplined determination of the staff officer he had once been, brooking no organized opposition and pursuing his civilizational objectives with a single-minded intensity that astonished foreign observers and that has continued to divide opinion among historians ever since.

The state which he constructed between 1919 and 1938 was, in conception and in execution, one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the modern age. He replaced an Islamic dynastic monarchy with a secular republic; an Arabic script with a modified Latin alphabet; a body of Islamic, customary, and Ottoman law with civil, criminal, and commercial codes adapted from Swiss, Italian, and German originals; a religious educational system controlled by the clerical establishment with a unified state schooling under the authority of a Ministry of Education; a fez and turban with a brimmed hat; a Friday Sabbath with a Sunday Sabbath; an Islamic calendar with the Gregorian; the legal subordination of women within the family with formal civil and political equality, including the right to vote and stand for parliament earlier than in most European democracies of the period; and a fluid network of communal identities bound by religion, dynastic allegiance, and language with a single Turkish national identity defined by territory, language, and citizenship. The program was carried through against the resistance of religious traditionalists, ethnic minorities, displaced Ottoman elites, and rural populations whose customary forms of life were upended by the new dispensation; and it was carried through with a degree of coercion that fell short of the totalitarian excesses of his European contemporaries but that involved, at critical moments, the suppression of opposition parties, the closure of religious orders, the execution of conspirators, and the forcible relocation of populations.

The Atatürk whom history remembers was therefore simultaneously the saviour of Turkish sovereignty against the partitioning ambitions of the victorious Allies of 1918, the architect of a national independence movement that became the model and inspiration for later anti-colonial struggles across the Islamic world and beyond, the founder of one of the few states of the early twentieth century to emerge from the wreckage of empire as a functioning constitutional republic, and the executor of a cultural and legal revolution whose contested legacy continues to shape Turkish political life nearly a century after his death. He was loved with an intensity bordering on veneration by the generations of Turks whose families had escaped the deposition or massacre that befell the rulers and peoples of the other defeated empires of the First World War, and his image, his name, and his political doctrine, formally known as Kemalism and codified as the so-called Six Arrows of the Republican People's Party, were entrenched in the constitution of the Turkish state, in the laws governing public expression about his person, and in the rituals of national commemoration in a manner that has remained essentially intact through every subsequent political transformation of the country. He was, by the testimony of those who served him most closely, a man of formidable personal magnetism and of equally formidable personal flaws: a brilliant conversationalist who drank to excess in his final years; a charismatic public figure whose private life was solitary and emotionally constrained; a self-disciplined officer who imposed on his country a regimen of cultural reform whose strictness mirrored the strictness he never quite achieved in his own person; and a statesman of cool strategic intelligence who took, on the great public questions of his time, decisions of an audacity that seemed to many of his contemporaries reckless and to most of his successors visionary.

The biography that follows traces in detail the long path from the Salonica of his birth in the spring of 1881 to the Dolmabahçe Palace of his death in November 1938: the childhood in the cosmopolitan Ottoman port city on the Aegean, the early schooling and the entry into the military preparatory schools at Salonica and Monastir, the years at the War College and the General Staff College in Constantinople, the early military service in Damascus and the participation in clandestine reformist societies, the involvement in the Young Turk movement and the experience of front-line command in Libya and in the Balkan Wars, the celebrated defence of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, the subsequent commands on the Caucasian, Syrian, and Palestinian fronts, the dramatic landing at Samsun in May 1919 and the organization of the national resistance, the wars against the Greek invasion in western Anatolia, the abolition of the sultanate and the proclamation of the republic, the long succession of reforms in dress, language, law, religion, education, and the status of women, the foreign policy of the new state, the personal life with the marriage to Latife U??aki and the adopted children, the final illness and the state funeral, and the elaborate posthumous cult of his person that has marked Turkish public life ever since. It is a story in which the dynamics of late imperial collapse, the violent birth of a new national state, the practical realities of front-line military command, and the visionary ambition of cultural transformation are interwoven into a single life of extraordinary historical consequence.

Birth in Salonica and the Ottoman Background

The exact date of Mustafa Kemal's birth was never recorded in any document that has survived, and the day which he himself chose in later life as his birthday, the nineteenth of May, was selected for symbolic rather than biographical reasons: it was the date on which, in 1919, he had landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast to begin the organization of the national resistance, and the choice of that day for his official birthday was one of the many gestures by which he fused his own personal history with the foundational mythology of the republic he created. The year of his birth, by contrast, is fixed with reasonable certainty as 1881, on the evidence of his school records and of the consistent testimony of his mother and his sister, and the city in which he was born, the Aegean port of Salonica, was at the time the second city of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, a cosmopolitan metropolis of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, divided among Sephardic Jews of Iberian descent who constituted the plurality of the population, Greek Orthodox Christians whose ancestors had inhabited the city since antiquity, Bulgarian-speaking Christians and Vlach-speaking Christians from the surrounding Macedonian countryside, and a Muslim community of Turks, Albanians, and converts whose presence dated from the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1430.

The Salonica into which the future Atatürk was born in the late winter or early spring of 1881 was a city in transition. Its harbor on the Thermaic Gulf, its position at the southern terminus of the principal Balkan trade routes, and its connection by railway after 1888 with the central Anatolian and central European networks made it one of the principal commercial centers of the eastern Mediterranean, comparable in scale and dynamism to the great Levantine cities of Smyrna, Beirut, and Alexandria. Its commercial life was dominated by the Jewish community, whose ancestors had been welcomed to the Ottoman lands after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and whose Ladino-speaking descendants had developed in Salonica the most prosperous and demographically substantial Sephardic settlement in the world. The Greek community, smaller in numbers but increasingly assertive in its nationalist orientation, dominated the shipping, banking, and export trades, and looked southward across the Aegean to the Kingdom of Greece, whose territorial ambitions extended throughout the late nineteenth century to the eventual incorporation of Salonica and the surrounding Macedonian territories into a Greek national state. The Muslim community, which constituted roughly a quarter of the city's population, was internally divided between an Ottoman official class drawn from the army and the bureaucracy, a Turkish-speaking commercial and artisanal class, an Albanian-speaking community of migrant workers and small merchants, and a peculiar group known as the Dönme, the descendants of the seventeenth-century followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi who had converted to Islam while preserving in secret certain Jewish practices, and who had become, by the nineteenth century, one of the most economically and educationally advanced segments of the Muslim population.

The political condition of the Ottoman Empire in 1881 was one of acute distress following the catastrophic Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, in which the armies of Tsar Alexander II had advanced to the suburbs of Constantinople and had imposed at the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878 a peace settlement that would have destroyed the European territories of the empire altogether. The settlement had been substantially revised at the Congress of Berlin in June and July of that year, where the European great powers, alarmed at the expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans, had restored to Ottoman sovereignty a portion of the territories assigned by San Stefano to a greater Bulgarian state and had granted to Austria-Hungary the right to occupy and administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The settlement had nonetheless been disastrous for Ottoman territorial integrity. The empire had lost in the course of 1878 the formerly autonomous principalities of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, which became fully independent kingdoms; the entire northern half of Bulgaria, which became an autonomous principality nominally tributary to the sultan; and substantial territories in eastern Anatolia, which passed to Russian control. The reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had succeeded his half-brother Murad V in August 1876 and who would rule until his deposition in April 1909, was conducted in the shadow of these losses and in the chronic expectation of further partition by the European powers, and the political atmosphere of Salonica in 1881, where the consequences of recent defeats and the prospect of future ones were felt with particular intensity, was one of mingled anxiety and reformist energy among the educated Muslim population.

Parents and the Early Household

Mustafa's father, Ali R?za Efendi, was a minor Ottoman official of modest fortune and uncertain ancestry, whose biographical details are known largely from the recollections of his daughter Makbule and of his wife Zübeyde, both recorded long after the father's death and both somewhat colored by the desire of the family to present a tidy account of the founder's origins. He had been born around 1839 in the small town of Söke in western Anatolia, had migrated as a young man to Salonica in search of better employment prospects, and had served in various subordinate positions in the Ottoman customs administration and in the militia of the local Evkaf or pious foundations. He had subsequently abandoned his official career to establish himself as a small-scale lumber merchant, trading in timber cut from the forests of the Macedonian interior and shipped through the port of Salonica to the cities of the southern Aegean, and the family income from this commercial enterprise, while modest, was sufficient to maintain a respectable household and to permit the eventual education of the children. Ali R?za was, in the recollections of those who knew him, a man of liberal religious views by the standards of the small Muslim merchant class of Salonica, sympathetic to the modernizing currents of late Ottoman official thought, free of the strict orthodoxy that characterized the religious establishment, and possessed of the kind of practical realism that made him a competent if unspectacular provider for his family.

Mustafa's mother, Zübeyde Han?m, was a younger woman, born around 1857 in the village of Langaza near Salonica, descended from a family of small landowners of mixed Albanian and Turkic origin in the Macedonian countryside, and educated to the modest standard considered appropriate for the daughters of provincial Muslim families: she could read the Qur'an in Arabic, was acquainted with the elementary forms of Ottoman Turkish prayer and recitation, and had been instructed in the household management skills considered essential to the wife of a Muslim merchant. Her religious sensibility was significantly more conventional than her husband's, and the tension between the relatively secular orientation of Ali R?za and the more devout piety of Zübeyde would manifest itself in the early years of their son's education in the form of a sharp disagreement over the kind of schooling he should receive. She was married to Ali R?za in the early 1870s, when she was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old and he in his early thirties, and the marriage produced six children, of whom only two survived to adulthood: Mustafa, born in 1881 and the future Atatürk; and Makbule, born in 1885 and the only sibling who would survive to share the public life of the founder of the republic.

The household into which Mustafa was born was thus a small one of Muslim merchants of modest means, settled in a two-story pink-painted house in the Kocakas?m district of Salonica, in the upper Muslim quarter of the old city, which had been built by Ali R?za himself in the years after his marriage and which would remain the family home throughout Mustafa's childhood. The house was preserved through the twentieth century with such reverent fidelity that, after the Greek annexation of Salonica in 1912 and the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, it eventually became, through the negotiation of the Greek and Turkish governments, the Turkish consulate-general in the city and a museum dedicated to the founder of the Turkish state, and it remains in that capacity today. The family life within those walls, in the years of Mustafa's early childhood, was conducted in the Turkish language of the urban Muslim population of Salonica, was nominally observant of the principal forms of Sunni Hanafi Islam as practiced in the Ottoman cities of the Balkans, was modest in its outward circumstances but ambitious for the education of the children, and was conducted under the increasingly contradictory pressures of a religiously inclined mother and a religiously skeptical father whose disagreement over the proper direction of their son's development was, by all accounts, a constant if usually quiet undercurrent of the household.

Early Schooling in Salonica

The dispute between Ali R?za and Zübeyde over Mustafa's education came to a head when the boy was around six years old, in or about the year 1887. Zübeyde wished her son to be enrolled in the traditional neighborhood Qur'an school, the so-called mahalle mektebi, where the children of Muslim families learned the Arabic alphabet, memorized passages of the Qur'an, were initiated into the elementary forms of Islamic prayer and ritual, and were prepared, for those few among them who would continue their education, for entry into the religious medreses where the next generation of Ottoman clerics and judges was trained. Ali R?za preferred the new-style modern primary school recently established in the same district by a reform-minded local teacher named ?emsi Efendi, which conducted its instruction in Ottoman Turkish according to a curriculum modelled on contemporary European practice, which taught reading and writing through phonetic methods rather than rote memorization of the Arabic alphabet, and which prepared its graduates for entry into the modern military and civil preparatory schools of the late Ottoman education system rather than into the religious medrese tradition. The compromise eventually reached, and which Mustafa would remember in later life as one of the earliest political negotiations of his career, was that the boy would enter the traditional Qur'an school for a brief and formal initiation, with all the ceremonial that accompanied such an event in the Muslim Salonica of the period, and would then transfer almost immediately to the modern school of ?emsi Efendi, where his actual education would proceed.

The ceremony of initiation at the Qur'an school took place in conformity with the customary rites of the Muslim community: Mustafa was dressed in a new suit of clothes for the occasion, mounted on a white horse, conducted through the streets of the neighborhood in a small procession of family and well-wishers, and presented at the door of the school with the traditional prayers and offerings. He attended the school for only a few days, however, before being transferred to ?emsi Efendi's establishment, where he spent the next several years receiving the modern primary education that his father had insisted upon. The years at the ?emsi Efendi school were, by the consistent testimony of those who knew him at the time, the years in which his unusual mental gifts began to display themselves: he learned quickly, he applied himself with the seriousness that the new pedagogy required, he displayed an unusual interest in mathematics and in the elementary natural sciences that were beginning to find their way into the modern Ottoman primary curriculum, and he attracted from his teachers the kind of favorable attention that the children of his class did not always receive.

The death of his father Ali R?za, in or about 1888, when Mustafa was perhaps seven years old, was the first great disruption of his early life. The cause of death is variously reported in the family recollections as tuberculosis, as intestinal disease, and as the cumulative effect of years of declining health, and it would seem to have followed a long period of illness and commercial decline in which the family had been brought to the edge of poverty. The household income from the lumber trade ceased with Ali R?za's death, the family was unable to maintain the Kocakas?m house on its own resources, and Zübeyde, with two surviving young children and no prospect of independent support, was obliged to accept the offer of her brother Hüseyin A?a, the manager of a small agricultural estate at Rapla on the Macedonian plain south of Salonica, that she and the children come to live with him in the country. The family accordingly left Salonica for a period of perhaps two or three years and lived at Rapla in the household of Hüseyin A?a, where Mustafa's formal schooling was interrupted, where his time was divided between the household chores expected of a boy of his age and the agricultural work of the small estate, and where he acquired the lifelong familiarity with the Macedonian countryside that would mark his later sense of cultural identity.

The Rapla interlude was an unhappy one for the young Mustafa. He missed the urban life of Salonica that he had known until his father's death, found the agricultural routine of the country tedious and unsuitable for his temperament, and resented the loss of the schooling that had been the principal pleasure of his early years. The interlude ended when his mother, who shared his impatience with the limitations of country life and who possessed a strong ambition for her son's future, arranged for the boy to be sent back to Salonica to live with his maternal aunt and to resume his education at one of the urban primary schools, and Zübeyde herself, with her younger daughter Makbule, returned to the city some time afterward, contracting in 1894 or thereabouts a second marriage with a minor Ottoman official named Rag?p Efendi, whose name and household provided the formal protection that a Muslim widow of her position required. The relationship between Mustafa and his stepfather was never close, was indeed marked from the beginning by a certain mutual hostility, and the boy's growing autonomy in his school years was in part a response to the discomforts of life under the new domestic regime.

The Military Secondary School at Monastir

The decisive turn of his educational career came in 1893, when at the age of twelve he sat for and passed the entrance examination to the Salonica Military Preparatory School, the askerî rü?diye, one of the new-style military secondary schools established by the Ottoman government in the principal provincial cities of the empire to prepare promising boys for eventual commissioning as officers in the modernized Ottoman army. The decision to apply for a military school appears to have been substantially his own, taken against the wishes of his mother, who would have preferred the more conventional civilian career path that the new urban primary schools were designed to facilitate, and supported by the encouragement of one of his teachers and of a neighborhood army major whose son had recently been admitted to the same establishment. The application was successful, and Mustafa entered the Salonica Military Preparatory School in the autumn of 1893 as one of the youngest and ablest cadets in his entering class. It was at this school, according to the well-known and frequently repeated story, that he was given the additional name Kemal by a mathematics teacher who, finding that there were two boys named Mustafa in the class and wishing to distinguish them, conferred on the more brilliant student the name Kemal, meaning perfection or maturity, as a recognition of his unusual aptitude. He was thereafter known as Mustafa Kemal, the name by which he would be identified throughout his early military career and which would remain his official designation until the adoption of the surname Atatürk in 1934.

The Salonica Military Preparatory School, which Mustafa attended from 1893 until 1896, was the first of three institutions through which the Ottoman military education system prepared its officer cadets. Its curriculum combined the secondary academic subjects of mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, geography, French, and Ottoman Turkish with the elementary forms of military instruction in drill, weapons handling, and basic tactical theory, and its discipline was that of a quasi-military boarding establishment in which the cadets wore uniforms, lived in dormitories, were subject to a strict daily schedule, and were instructed by a combination of military officers and civilian teachers. Mustafa proved an outstanding pupil throughout his three years at the school. He led his class in mathematics, in which he had displayed an early and persistent gift; he performed strongly in French, which he had begun to study seriously for the first time and in which he would eventually acquire sufficient fluency to read the contemporary French press and to participate, in his later years, in French-language conversation with foreign diplomats; he was a competent if less distinguished student in the historical and geographical subjects; and he was disciplined, ambitious, and ostentatiously serious in his application to his studies in a manner that distinguished him from the more lighthearted of his contemporaries.

In the autumn of 1896, at the age of fifteen, he transferred to the Military Senior School at Monastir, the askerî idadi, which was the second stage of the Ottoman military preparatory system and which was located in the inland Macedonian town of Monastir, the present-day Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia, some hundred and twenty miles north-west of Salonica. The Monastir school, which he attended from 1896 to 1899, was a more academically rigorous and more militarily disciplined establishment than the Salonica school had been, and it occupied for Mustafa a special place in his subsequent recollections as the period in which his intellectual horizons were definitively shaped. He continued his studies in mathematics, in French, and in the natural sciences; he began for the first time to read seriously in the French literary and political tradition, with a particular early interest in the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Auguste Comte, and Montesquieu; he encountered for the first time, in the somewhat clandestine atmosphere of the cadet corps, the ideas of Ottoman opposition and reformist political thought that were circulating in the military schools in defiance of the censorship and surveillance of the Hamidian regime; and he formed at Monastir, and would carry through the rest of his life, the friendships with a number of contemporaries who would later become his closest political and military associates, including in particular Ali Fethi Okyar, who would become one of the most important political collaborators of his later life.

The War College in Constantinople

In the spring of 1899, having completed the Monastir program with distinction, Mustafa Kemal was selected for advancement to the third and most prestigious stage of the Ottoman military education system, the Mektebi Harbiye or War College in Constantinople, where the cadets identified as the most promising were to spend three years acquiring the academic foundations of the staff officer's profession before being commissioned and posted to active service. He arrived at the imperial capital in March 1899, at the age of seventeen, and was installed with his fellow new entrants in the cadet barracks at Pangalt? in the ?i?li district of Constantinople, on the European side of the city looking down toward the Bosphorus and across to the Asian shores at Üsküdar. The Constantinople of 1899 was the world of the late Hamidian regime in its full bureaucratic and ceremonial elaboration: the great imperial mosque complexes of Suleyman the Magnificent and his successors dominated the skyline of the old city across the Golden Horn; the new European-style ministerial buildings of the Sublime Porte and the Galata district presented to the eye the architectural symbols of the tanzimat reforms of the mid-century; the Y?ld?z Palace complex in the hills above Be?ikta?, from which the sultan governed his empire through an elaborate and obsessively centralized system of personal rule, was at once the locus of imperial power and the symbol of the political stagnation that had become, by the closing years of the century, the principal complaint of the educated military and bureaucratic class.

The War College years, from 1899 to 1902, were a period of intensive academic and professional formation. The curriculum, modelled on contemporary European staff college practice with substantial elements derived directly from the German military academy at Berlin and the French academy at Saint-Cyr, included tactical theory at the regimental and divisional levels, the elements of strategy and operational planning, military history with particular emphasis on the Napoleonic campaigns and on the Franco-Prussian War, fortification and the theory of siege operations, topographical surveying and map-reading, military law, French as the principal foreign language of the late Ottoman officer corps, and the standard academic subjects of mathematics, physics, history, and geography taught at the university level. The instructors were drawn partly from the Ottoman officer corps and partly from a small contingent of German military advisors who had been seconded to the Ottoman army under the program of military reform initiated by the German military mission of Colmar von der Goltz in the 1880s. Mustafa Kemal performed at the highest level of his class throughout the three War College years. He was particularly strong in tactical and strategic theory, in military history, in French, and in mathematics; he was less interested in the more technical subjects of fortification and topography, but performed competently in them; and he graduated in the autumn of 1902 as one of the top eight cadets in a graduating class of approximately three hundred, qualifying him for advancement to the Staff College, the Erkân? Harbiye Mektebi, the small and highly competitive establishment in which the future general staff officers of the Ottoman army were trained.

It was during his War College years that Mustafa Kemal first became seriously engaged with the political opposition to the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The atmosphere of the War College was one of restrained but unmistakable political ferment, in which the cadets read clandestinely the journals of the Ottoman political exiles in Paris and Geneva, debated among themselves in carefully guarded conversations the political condition of the empire and the prospects for its reform, and circulated handwritten copies of political poems, manifestos, and analyses that would have brought severe punishment had they come to the attention of the imperial authorities. The Hamidian regime maintained an extensive system of police surveillance and informants, particularly in the military schools where the ideological reliability of the future officer corps was a matter of obsessive concern to the palace, and the punishments for political activity ranged from internal exile to a remote provincial posting on the one hand to imprisonment in the fortress at Trabzon or in the Fizan oasis of the Libyan desert on the other. Mustafa Kemal, despite the natural caution that the surveillance environment imposed on him, was a participant in these clandestine political activities throughout his War College years, was a member of one of the small student political circles that flourished in the cadet corps, and was already by the time of his graduation in 1902 identified by his contemporaries as one of the more politically engaged and articulate members of his cohort.

The General Staff College and Commissioning

The two years that Mustafa Kemal spent at the General Staff College in Constantinople, from the autumn of 1902 to the early months of 1905, were the most demanding and the most academically formative of his military education. The Staff College admitted only a small number of cadets from each War College graduating class, perhaps thirty or thirty-five in a normal year, and the program of instruction was conducted at a level of intellectual intensity considerably higher than that of the War College itself. The curriculum focused on the higher reaches of operational and strategic planning, on the conduct of large-scale military operations involving the coordination of multiple corps and field armies, on the principles of staff work in the field and at the levels of corps and army headquarters, on military geography with particular emphasis on the European and Anatolian theaters in which the Ottoman army might be expected to fight, on advanced military history with detailed analysis of selected campaigns, on military intelligence and reconnaissance, and on the political and diplomatic dimensions of military planning. The instructors were the best that the Ottoman army could provide, supplemented by a small number of German advisors of considerably higher seniority than those who had taught at the War College, and the standards of academic performance demanded of the cadets were correspondingly elevated.

Mustafa Kemal completed the Staff College program in January 1905, graduating with the rank of staff captain, the kurmay yüzba??, and with a final position of fifth in his class of thirty-two graduates. The graduation rank entitled him to selection of a posting from the available openings in the Ottoman army, and his preference would have been for assignment to one of the European army corps, where the political ferment and the modernizing energies of the late Hamidian officer corps were concentrated. The decision of the Ministry of War, however, taken on grounds that were never officially disclosed but that the cadets at the time and the historians since have generally attributed to the suspicions of the imperial intelligence service concerning his political reliability, was to assign him to the Fifth Army in Syria, with his initial duty station at Damascus. The posting was understood by Mustafa Kemal himself, and by the contemporaries who watched the decision, as a form of preventive exile: the Fifth Army, isolated in the Arab provinces of the empire and removed from the political currents of the European capitals, was widely regarded as a posting suitable for officers whom the regime wished to keep at a safe distance from the centers of power, and the assignment of one of the most promising graduates of the Staff College to such a remote command was a clear signal that the imperial authorities had taken note of his political activities and had decided to remove him from the immediate vicinity of the capital.

The two and a half years that Mustafa Kemal spent in Syria from early 1905 to the autumn of 1907 were nonetheless professionally productive ones. He was assigned to the operations branch of the Fifth Army staff at Damascus, where his duties involved the planning of routine internal security operations against the various tribal and confessional groups of the Syrian and Lebanese provinces, the maintenance of garrison routines, and the conduct of staff exercises and inspections within the area of the army's responsibility. He acquired during these years a working knowledge of Arabic, which he had begun to study at the War College and which he now had the opportunity to apply in the streets and markets of Damascus and in the official correspondence of the army staff; he traveled widely in the Syrian provinces in the course of inspections and exercises, including journeys to Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and the Hejaz; and he formed a generally low opinion of the political and social conditions of the Arab provinces, which he considered backward, religiously dominated, and unpromising as a foundation for a modernized Ottoman state. The Syrian experience confirmed in him the convictions that would later shape his political program: that the Ottoman Empire was overextended in its Arab provinces, that the Arab populations would in the long run prove unassimilable to a modernizing Ottoman state, and that the future of Turkish nationhood lay in the Anatolian and Rumelian heartlands of the empire rather than in its peripheral Arab territories.

The Vatan Society and the Young Turk Movement

It was during his Syrian years, in the autumn of 1906, that Mustafa Kemal organized in Damascus the small clandestine society known as Vatan ve Hürriyet, Fatherland and Liberty, the first of the political organizations with which his name would be directly associated. The society was a small one, drawn principally from junior officers of his immediate acquaintance in the Fifth Army staff, and its activities consisted principally of clandestine reading, discussion, and the circulation of political writings; it did not at this stage engage in the conspiratorial preparation for an uprising that the Macedonian-based Committee of Union and Progress, the principal Ottoman opposition organization of the period, was beginning to undertake in the European army corps. The Damascus society was nonetheless an important formative experience for Mustafa Kemal, in that it provided him with the first occasion to assume the leadership of a political organization, to articulate in conversation with his fellow officers the political program that he had been developing through his reading, and to coordinate the activities of a group of subordinates in the pursuit of common objectives.

In the autumn of 1906, having organized the Damascus branch, Mustafa Kemal traveled to Salonica on a brief and unauthorized leave with the intention of establishing a branch of the society in the Macedonian capital. The Salonica he visited was already heavily involved in the parallel work of the Committee of Union and Progress, which had been organized in Paris and Geneva by the Ottoman political exiles, which had transferred its principal organizational efforts to Macedonia in the years after the turn of the century, and which had begun by 1906 to penetrate the officer corps of the Third Army headquartered at Salonica and Monastir. Mustafa Kemal made contact during his Salonica visit with some of the leading figures of the Committee, including in particular Ahmed Niyazi and Enver Bey, who were already established as the principal military organizers of the Macedonian conspiracy. The encounter was awkward. The leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, who were planning a coordinated insurrection of the Third Army officer corps and who had developed in the course of their work a relatively centralized and disciplined organizational structure, were not inclined to recognize the small Damascus society as an equal partner, and they pressed upon Mustafa Kemal the suggestion that he merge his organization into the existing Committee structure under their leadership. Mustafa Kemal, whose temperament was already in evidence as one disinclined to subordinate himself to the leadership of others, resisted the suggestion, but ultimately accepted a loose form of affiliation that left him formally aligned with the Committee while preserving the local autonomy of his own organization.

He returned to Damascus shortly afterward, served out the remainder of his Syrian posting, and was finally transferred in the autumn of 1907, at his own repeated request, to the Third Army at Salonica, with assignment to the operations branch of the army staff. The transfer brought him back to the political center of the Ottoman opposition movement and placed him in immediate proximity to the leading conspirators of the Committee of Union and Progress in the months leading up to what would prove to be the decisive political event of late Ottoman history, the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908

The Revolution of July 1908 was not the work of Mustafa Kemal, and he played in it only a peripheral and somewhat ambiguous role. The principal organizers of the uprising were the senior officers of the Committee of Union and Progress in Macedonia, of whom the most prominent were Enver Bey, who in early July took to the hills above Monastir with a small force of supporters and demanded the restoration of the constitution of 1876, and Ahmed Niyazi, who undertook a parallel action in the surrounding Macedonian countryside. The threat posed by these uprisings, combined with the unwillingness of the local Ottoman commanders to suppress them and with the spread of the rebellion to additional units of the Third Army in the days that followed, brought Sultan Abdülhamid II in Constantinople to the decision, on the night of the twenty-third of July 1908, to restore the suspended constitution of 1876 and to convoke an Ottoman parliament for the first time since the constitutional experiment had been ended in 1878. The revolution thus accomplished without significant bloodshed a constitutional transformation of the empire and brought to power, in nominal alliance with the sultan and effective control of the parliamentary and ministerial apparatus, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress who would dominate Ottoman politics for the next decade.

Mustafa Kemal's involvement in these events was limited. He was at his post in the operations branch of the Third Army staff at Salonica throughout the critical days of July 1908, performed competently the staff duties assigned to him, and welcomed the constitutional restoration with the satisfaction of an officer who had been engaged for several years in clandestine work against the absolutist regime. He was, however, not among the leading conspirators and was not included in the inner circle of the Committee of Union and Progress in the months that followed the revolution, when the question of the new political dispensation and of the practical exercise of power was being settled in the offices of the Salonica branch and in the ministerial chambers of the capital. The principal figures of the new regime were Enver, Talaat, and Cemal, the three young officers and bureaucrats who would constitute the so-called triumvirate that effectively governed the Ottoman Empire from 1913 until 1918, and the relations of Mustafa Kemal with these figures, and in particular with Enver, were from the beginning marked by a mutual suspicion that would deepen into open hostility in the years to come.

The Counter-Coup of 1909 and the March on Constantinople

The constitutional regime established by the revolution of July 1908 proved fragile in practice and was nearly overthrown nine months later in the counter-revolutionary uprising of the thirty-first of March 1909, by the old Ottoman calendar, the thirteenth of April by the new style. The uprising in Constantinople was conducted by units of the First Army garrison, by religious students from the medreses of the capital, and by a coalition of conservative political and clerical interests opposed to the secularizing tendencies of the new regime, and it produced for a period of several days a situation in which the Committee of Union and Progress had been effectively expelled from the capital, the constitutional parliament had been intimidated into silence, and the prospect of a full restoration of the absolutist Hamidian regime appeared real. The response of the Macedonian-based leadership of the Committee was to organize at Salonica a body called the Hareket Ordusu, the Action Army, drawn from the Third Army and from elements of the local population sympathetic to the constitutional cause, and to march this force across the Balkans to Constantinople with the announced purpose of crushing the counter-revolution.

Mustafa Kemal played in the Action Army a role substantially more important than his role in the revolution of the previous year. He was appointed chief of staff to the commanding general of the expedition, Mahmud ?evket Pasha, the senior officer of the Third Army at Salonica, and was responsible in this capacity for the operational planning and the staff coordination of the march from Salonica to Constantinople in the second and third weeks of April 1909. The expedition was conducted with considerable competence under his direction. The force, of perhaps fifteen thousand troops with substantial artillery, was assembled at Salonica with remarkable speed, was moved by railway to the vicinity of San Stefano on the Sea of Marmara, and was deployed in the suburbs of Constantinople in such a position as to threaten the imperial palace and the conservative garrison units within the capital. The Action Army entered Constantinople on the twenty-fourth of April 1909, suppressed the counter-revolutionary forces in a brief and not particularly bloody operation, and restored to power the constitutional regime and the leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress. The result, beyond the immediate suppression of the uprising, was the formal deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II on the twenty-seventh of April by a fatwa of the religious authorities and a unanimous vote of the parliament, and his replacement on the throne by his more pliant half-brother Mehmed V Re?ad, who would reign as a constitutional monarch for the remainder of his life.

The Action Army episode brought Mustafa Kemal a measure of professional recognition in the army staff and a measure of personal acquaintance with the leading figures of the new regime, but it also brought a sharpening of his political differences with the dominant figures of the Committee of Union and Progress, and in particular with Enver Bey, whose role in the political settlement of the spring of 1909 had been more conspicuous than his own and whose personal ambitions and ideological orientation he increasingly viewed with suspicion. The disagreement turned on practical questions of the relation between the army and the political organization. Mustafa Kemal, drawing on his reading of the experience of the French Third Republic and on his conviction of the corrupting effects of political activity on military discipline, argued vigorously that the officers of the Committee of Union and Progress should resign their commissions and devote themselves to political work as civilians, and that the officer corps as such should withdraw from the political arena and confine itself to the technical task of national defense. Enver and his allies, who derived their authority within the Committee precisely from their position in the officer corps, rejected this position decisively, and the disagreement marked the beginning of a long political estrangement between Mustafa Kemal and the central leadership of the Committee that would persist throughout the constitutional period and well into the years of the First World War.

In the wake of the Action Army campaign, Mustafa Kemal was assigned to a series of staff positions in the Third Army at Salonica and in the Salonica-based units of the Action Army, which had been reorganized as a regular formation of the Ottoman army. He continued his political activities within the Committee but increasingly from a position of marginal influence, attending the annual congresses of the organization as a delegate of the Salonica branch but unable to win acceptance of his proposals for the separation of military and political functions. He devoted himself to professional study during these years with characteristic energy. He translated from the German a contemporary German military manual, the Vorgehen kleinerer Infanterieabteilungen im Gefecht, the conduct of small infantry units in combat, which was published in Ottoman Turkish in 1909 and 1910 under his name and which represented one of the first formal contributions to the modernizing literature of the late Ottoman army. He attended a German military exercise in Picardy in 1910 as one of the official Ottoman observers, his first journey to western Europe, and made the acquaintance during the trip of senior French and German officers whose conversation broadened his sense of contemporary European military thought. He returned from this trip with the conviction that the Ottoman army, despite the recent reforms of the constitutional period, remained significantly behind the European powers in equipment, training, and operational doctrine, and that the principal task of the next generation of Ottoman officers was the systematic modernization of the army on European lines.

The Italo-Turkish War in Libya

The first occasion on which Mustafa Kemal was to see active combat service came not in the European theaters where the Ottoman army had been concentrated since the revolution but in the North African desert, in the campaign that followed the Italian invasion of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in September 1911. The Italian aggression, undertaken in pursuit of long-standing imperial ambitions in the southern Mediterranean and timed to take advantage of the perceived weakness of the post-revolutionary Ottoman state, resulted in the rapid Italian occupation of the coastal cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Tobruk, and Derna in the autumn of 1911, but the Italian forces proved unable to extend their control beyond the immediate vicinity of the coast, and the interior of the Libyan provinces became the theater of a protracted insurgency conducted by Ottoman officers in cooperation with the local Senussi tribal confederation. The Ottoman government, which had been unable to provide regular military support to its African provinces given the closure of the Mediterranean sea lanes by the Italian navy, encouraged a small group of officers of the Committee of Union and Progress to make their way to Libya by clandestine means and to organize the tribal resistance.

Mustafa Kemal was one of these officers. He left Salonica in late September 1911, traveled by sea to Alexandria in Egypt under a false identity as a Turkish journalist, made his way overland through the Egyptian western desert into Cyrenaica, and arrived at the small coastal town of Tobruk in October to join the Ottoman command organized in the interior under Enver Bey. The campaign in Cyrenaica in 1911 and 1912 brought him his first experience of combat command, his first encounter with the tribal warfare of the African and Asian peripheries of the empire, and his first opportunity to display the qualities of operational decision and personal courage under fire that would later distinguish his commands at Gallipoli and elsewhere. He was given command of the forces at Tobruk and subsequently at Derna, conducted a series of small but tactically successful engagements against Italian columns attempting to penetrate the interior, and developed in cooperation with the local Senussi leaders a guerrilla strategy that successfully confined the Italian forces to the coastal cities throughout the period of his command. He was promoted to the rank of major in the course of the campaign, his first step beyond the captain's rank with which he had been commissioned, and he established in his correspondence with Enver and with the central command at Constantinople a pattern of frank professional disagreement with his nominal superiors that foreshadowed the difficulties of his later relations with the central authorities.

The Libyan campaign was brought to an end not by the success or failure of either side on the African ground but by the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, which obliged the Ottoman government to seek a rapid settlement with Italy in order to redirect its military resources to the defense of the empire's European provinces. The Treaty of Ouchy, signed in October 1912 between the Ottoman and Italian governments, formally ceded the African provinces to Italy in exchange for the evacuation of certain Aegean islands that the Italians had occupied during the war. The Ottoman officers in the Libyan interior were withdrawn through Egypt under the protection of the British authorities, and Mustafa Kemal made his way back to Constantinople in the closing weeks of 1912 to find an Ottoman state in the most desperate military crisis of its modern history.

The Balkan Wars and the Loss of European Ottoman Territories

The First Balkan War, which had broken out in October 1912 with a coordinated attack on the Ottoman European provinces by the armies of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro, resulted within a matter of weeks in a catastrophic Ottoman military collapse. The army of the eastern theater was defeated at the Battle of Kirk Kilise in late October and again at the Battle of Lüleburgaz at the beginning of November, and the Ottoman position in eastern Thrace was effectively destroyed by the latter engagement. The forces of the western theater, in Macedonia, conducted a series of unsuccessful holding actions before being driven back upon Salonica and Monastir, and the city of Salonica itself surrendered to the Greek army on the eighth of November 1912, the very day on which Mustafa Kemal's mother and sister, who had been living in the city, were obliged to evacuate their home and to flee with the rest of the Muslim population. The Bulgarian army, having destroyed the Ottoman field forces in Thrace, advanced to the lines of Çatalca in the immediate vicinity of Constantinople, where it was halted in mid-November by the last defensive position of the Ottoman army before the capital. An armistice was signed in early December, and a preliminary peace conference began in London in mid-December 1912.

Mustafa Kemal returned to Constantinople from Libya in late November 1912 and was assigned to the operations branch of the army staff defending the Gallipoli peninsula, where the Ottoman forces had been concentrated as a defensive position on the western flank of the capital. He served on the Gallipoli peninsula throughout the closing weeks of the war, was involved in the planning of the limited counter-offensive that the Ottoman forces undertook in the spring of 1913, and witnessed the further humiliation of the Treaty of London, signed in May 1913, which ceded to the victorious Balkan states almost the entire European territories of the empire, leaving in Ottoman possession only a narrow strip of eastern Thrace including the small town of Edirne, the historic Ottoman capital that had been captured by Bulgarian forces during the war. The terms of the London treaty were modified almost immediately by the outbreak of the Second Balkan War in late June 1913, in which Bulgaria attacked its former allies Serbia and Greece in a dispute over the division of Macedonia, was defeated by the combined forces of the other Balkan states with the eventual intervention of Romania, and was obliged to accept at the Treaty of Bucharest in August 1913 a substantial reduction of its earlier gains. The Ottoman government took advantage of the second war to reoccupy Edirne in late July 1913, an operation in which Mustafa Kemal participated as a senior staff officer of the recovering Ottoman army, and the city remained thereafter in Ottoman and Turkish hands.

The catastrophic losses of the Balkan Wars, which had reduced the Ottoman European territories to a small strip of eastern Thrace and which had cost the empire perhaps four hundred thousand square kilometers of territory and several million inhabitants, transformed the political and ideological orientation of the Ottoman officer corps. The cosmopolitan late-Ottoman vision of a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic empire was now manifestly untenable, and the response among the educated military and bureaucratic class was a movement toward a more narrowly Turkish nationalism, a movement that would find theoretical expression in the writings of Yusuf Akçura, Ziya Gökalp, and the other ideologues of late Ottoman Turkism, and that would shape the political development of Mustafa Kemal himself and of the entire generation of officers who would build the Turkish republic ten years later. The personal losses of the war were also significant for Mustafa Kemal. His mother and sister, having lost their Salonica home to the Greek occupation, made their way as refugees to Constantinople, where they would settle for the remainder of their lives, and the family was reunited under conditions of considerable hardship in the imperial capital.

Service as Military Attaché in Sofia

In the autumn of 1913, after the conclusion of the Second Balkan War and the restoration of a measure of stability to the Ottoman state, Mustafa Kemal was appointed military attaché at the Ottoman embassy in Sofia, the capital of the newly enlarged Kingdom of Bulgaria with which the Ottoman government was now obliged to maintain delicate diplomatic relations. The Sofia posting was, in some respects, a continuation of the pattern of marginalization that had characterized his earlier career: he was being moved away from the center of military and political life in Constantinople, where the rivals he had alienated within the Committee of Union and Progress were consolidating their power, and into a peripheral diplomatic post in which his activities could be more easily monitored. The appointment was, however, of considerable importance for his political and personal formation. He spent in Sofia the year and a half from late 1913 until the early winter of 1915, in a position that allowed him substantial leisure, considerable opportunities for travel and observation in the recently transformed Balkan states, and direct exposure to the operations of a small modern European parliamentary democracy of which he was an attentive observer.

The Sofia years were, by the testimony of contemporaries and of the surviving correspondence, formative ones for Mustafa Kemal's political imagination. He observed at close range the operation of the Bulgarian constitutional system, with its strong national orientation, its elected parliament, its functioning party system, and its relatively secularized public culture, and concluded that the Bulgarian state, despite its small size and limited resources, had achieved a degree of modernization in the generation since its independence in 1878 that the Ottoman state had been unable to match. He acquired during these months a competent working knowledge of the Bulgarian language, supplementing his existing command of Turkish, Arabic, French, and German. He observed with skepticism the elaborate diplomatic preparations by which the Bulgarian state attempted to position itself in the European balance of power, and developed an early conviction that Bulgaria would in due course align itself with the Central Powers in any general European war. He moved with considerable freedom in the diplomatic and social circles of the Bulgarian capital, was a regular guest at the principal embassies, and acquired the manners and conversational range of a junior diplomat in a small European capital.

It was in Sofia that he formed his first significant romantic attachment, with a young Bulgarian woman named Dimitrina Kovacheva, the daughter of the Bulgarian minister of war General Mihail Savov, who would later be remembered as the only woman of his pre-war life for whom he appears to have felt anything approaching genuine personal devotion. The relationship, which seems to have progressed during the winter of 1913-14 to the point of a discussion of marriage between the families, was eventually terminated by the refusal of the Kovachev family to consent to the union of their Orthodox Christian daughter with a Muslim Ottoman officer, and Mustafa Kemal, who in any case had no intention of converting from his nominal Islamic identity, withdrew his proposals and returned to the formal social relationship that characterized his other Sofia connections. The episode left a mark on his subsequent emotional life. The biographers who have most carefully reconstructed the affair have concluded that his subsequent reserve in romantic matters, his eventual decision to marry only at the age of forty-two and to a woman whose personal qualities did not engage his deepest emotional commitment, and his lifelong inability to sustain an intimate personal relationship beyond the surface forms of social convention, were all in part the consequences of the disappointment of the Sofia affair.

The Coming of the First World War and the Enver Alliance with Germany

The outbreak of the First World War in late July and early August 1914 found Mustafa Kemal still in Sofia, where he watched with mounting alarm the diplomatic maneuvers by which the Committee of Union and Progress, and in particular Enver Bey, who had become minister of war in January 1914, were bringing the Ottoman Empire into alliance with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia. The Ottoman-German alliance treaty was signed in secret on the second of August 1914, on the day after the outbreak of the European war, and brought the Ottoman state into a position of nominal neutrality but of effective German military alliance. The arrival in Constantinople in early August of the German battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, which had eluded their British pursuers in the Mediterranean and had been welcomed into Ottoman service under the fiction of a Turkish purchase, the appointment of the German admiral Wilhelm Souchon as commander of the Ottoman navy, and the bombardment by the Goeben and Breslau of Russian Black Sea ports on the twenty-ninth of October 1914 brought the Ottoman Empire formally into the war as a member of the Central Powers on the second of November 1914.

Mustafa Kemal opposed from the beginning the decision to enter the war and the alliance with Germany. He had argued in his correspondence with Enver throughout the months of August, September, and October 1914 that the Ottoman state was militarily unprepared for a general European war, that the German alliance was unlikely to bring the empire decisive military assistance given the strategic priorities of the German high command on the western and eastern fronts of the continental war, and that the empire would do better to maintain a position of armed neutrality from which it might profit at the eventual peace conference by selling its participation to the highest bidder. His arguments, which were forcefully put but unaccompanied by the political leverage that might have made them effective, were ignored by Enver and the central leadership of the Committee, and by the time of the formal Ottoman entry into the war in November 1914 he had begun to request a transfer from his Sofia post to an active command in the field. The request was granted in January 1915, and he was assigned to the command of the Nineteenth Division, then being organized in eastern Thrace as part of the reserve forces of the army group covering the approaches to Constantinople.

The Gallipoli Campaign: Preparations and Opening Engagements

The Nineteenth Division, to which Mustafa Kemal was appointed commander in February 1915, was a new formation composed largely of recently mobilized reservists from the Anatolian and Thracian provinces, equipped with the most modern weapons that the Ottoman army possessed, and stationed initially in the vicinity of Maidos on the Gallipoli peninsula, where the strategic situation was becoming increasingly delicate. The combined British and French naval attacks on the Dardanelles in February and March 1915, which had been undertaken in the expectation that a determined naval bombardment could force the straits and bring the Allied fleets to Constantinople, had been repulsed in the famous engagement of the eighteenth of March, in which three Allied capital ships had been sunk and three others severely damaged by mines and shore-based artillery. The repulse of the naval attack had, however, led the Allied command, and in particular the British war cabinet under the influence of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, to authorize a military landing on the Gallipoli peninsula intended to seize the heights commanding the straits and to permit the eventual passage of the fleets to the Sea of Marmara.

The Ottoman command of the Gallipoli theater, which had been entrusted to the German general Otto Liman von Sanders in his capacity as commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army, had organized in the weeks following the naval repulse a careful defensive deployment intended to meet any Allied landing wherever it might come ashore. The Fifth Army of approximately eighty thousand men was distributed across three principal sectors: a substantial force on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles around Kum Kale, where Liman von Sanders considered the most likely Allied landing to be probable; a second force at the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula around the village of Sedd el Bahr at Cape Helles, where the British landings were ultimately to be made; and a third force, including the Nineteenth Division under Mustafa Kemal's command, held in reserve in the central peninsula near Bigali, from which it could be moved to whichever sector required reinforcement.

The Allied landings began on the morning of the twenty-fifth of April 1915. British, French, and Indian forces of the Twenty-ninth Division landed at five beaches at the southern tip of the peninsula around Cape Helles, where they encountered determined Ottoman resistance but established themselves ashore with heavy casualties; and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the famous ANZAC, landed at a position some twelve miles to the north on the Aegean coast of the peninsula at a small cove that would become famous in Australian and New Zealand national memory as Anzac Cove. The ANZAC landing, which had been intended to come ashore on the broader beaches further south at Gaba Tepe, miscarried in the early morning darkness and brought the assault troops onto the narrow shore beneath the steep ridges of Sari Bair, where the advance inland was made extraordinarily difficult by the broken ground and the limited frontage of the landing beaches. The ANZAC troops, fighting their way up the slopes against initially weak Ottoman opposition, had by mid-morning advanced perhaps a mile inland and threatened to seize the central heights of the peninsula, the loss of which would have given the Allies command of the entire Gallipoli front.

The Defence of Chunuk Bair and the 57th Regiment

It was at this critical moment, on the morning of the twenty-fifth of April 1915, that Mustafa Kemal made the decision that would establish his military reputation and that would, in retrospect, prove one of the most consequential individual decisions of the entire Gallipoli campaign. The Nineteenth Division was nominally under the command of the corps headquarters at Bigali and was not authorized to move without specific orders from above, but Mustafa Kemal, observing from a distance the dust raised by the advancing ANZAC columns and judging correctly that the central heights of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair were about to fall, took the responsibility on his own authority of marching the division to the threatened sector and committing it to battle. He led personally the Fifty-seventh Regiment of his division, of approximately three thousand men, in a hasty march from Bigali to the heights, reached the summit of Chunuk Bair just as the leading elements of the ANZAC advance were beginning to crest the slopes from the seaward side, and gave to his troops the famous order that would be inscribed on monuments and in textbooks of Turkish military history thereafter: I do not order you to fight, I order you to die; in the time it takes us to die, other troops and other commanders can take our places.

The order was substantially obeyed. The Fifty-seventh Regiment, which had been brought into action piecemeal as the units arrived on the heights, fought with the desperate intensity that the situation required, was essentially destroyed in the engagements of the twenty-fifth of April and the following days, and bought through its sacrifice the time required for the deployment of additional Ottoman reserves to the threatened sector. The casualties of the regiment were so heavy that no replacement was ever made and the unit's number was never reused in the Turkish army, a unique commemoration of its destruction at Chunuk Bair. The defense which Mustafa Kemal organized on the central heights in the days that followed contained the ANZAC advance within the narrow perimeter that it had achieved on the first day of the landing, prevented the Allies from seizing the dominating ground of the peninsula, and reduced the campaign to the protracted stalemate of trench warfare that would characterize it through the remaining seven months of operations.

The Continuing Defense: August Offensive and the Final Evacuation

The Gallipoli campaign continued for another seven months after the events of the late April landings, and Mustafa Kemal remained at the center of the Ottoman defensive operations throughout that period. He was promoted to the rank of colonel in the course of the spring, was given command of an expanded sector on the central heights, and conducted the defense of his position through the long months of attrition warfare that followed the failure of the initial Allied landings to achieve their operational objectives. The campaign reached its second and decisive crisis in the August offensive, in which the Allied command attempted to break the trench stalemate by combining a renewed assault from the ANZAC sector with new landings at Suvla Bay to the north, with the intention of breaking out of the cramped perimeter on the coast and seizing the central heights from the rear. The August offensive opened on the night of the sixth of August 1915 with simultaneous assaults from the existing Allied positions and the landing of two new British divisions at Suvla Bay, where the local Ottoman defenses were thin and the Allied prospects of an operational breakthrough were, for several critical hours, real.

The breakthrough was prevented by the same combination of Mustafa Kemal's tactical judgment and personal courage that had saved the situation in April. He had been given command of the entire northern sector of the Gallipoli front on the seventh of August, on the personal recommendation of Liman von Sanders, and he conducted from his headquarters at Chunuk Bair a series of carefully timed counter-attacks that ejected the ANZAC and British troops from the central heights and that confined the Suvla Bay landing to the cramped perimeter from which it never broke out. The famous counter-attack on the morning of the tenth of August, which he led personally at the head of his troops, recovered Chunuk Bair from the New Zealand brigade that had occupied it during the night and restored the Ottoman defensive line along the central ridge. The casualties of the engagement on both sides were enormous, and Mustafa Kemal himself narrowly escaped death from a shrapnel fragment that struck his chest at the moment of the counter-attack and that was deflected by a watch in his breast pocket. The watch, which was preserved among the relics of his life and which is now displayed in the An?tkabir mausoleum in Ankara, became one of the celebrated talismans of the founding mythology of the republic.

The August offensive was the last serious effort by the Allied command to force a decision on the Gallipoli front. The remaining months of 1915 were occupied with the gradual recognition by the British and French governments that the campaign could not be carried through to a successful conclusion and with the careful planning of the evacuation that would have to follow. The decision to evacuate was taken in early December 1915, and the withdrawal of the Allied forces from the Suvla and Anzac sectors was conducted in the night of the nineteenth and twentieth of December, and from Cape Helles in the night of the eighth and ninth of January 1916, in operations of such professional skill that they were accomplished without significant casualties despite the proximity of the Ottoman forces. The Gallipoli campaign had cost approximately a quarter of a million casualties on each side, had ended in an unambiguous Ottoman defensive victory, and had established Mustafa Kemal as the most successful field commander of the Ottoman army and one of the most celebrated military figures of the war.

The Eastern Front and the Commands in Anatolia

After the conclusion of the Gallipoli campaign, Mustafa Kemal was reassigned in February 1916 to the eastern Anatolian front, where the Russian army of the Caucasus had been conducting a vigorous offensive against the Ottoman forces in the Armenian highlands and had captured in mid-February the major fortress city of Erzurum after a brief but decisive winter campaign. He was given command of the Sixteenth Corps of the Ottoman Second Army, which was being organized in the area east of Diyarbakir for an eventual counter-offensive against the Russian positions, and he served in this command from March 1916 until October of that year. The position involved him in the conduct of the small but vigorous local engagements by which the Second Army attempted, with limited success, to recover the territory that had been lost to the Russians, and he led personally a counter-attack in early August 1916 that recovered the city of Bitlis and Mu? from Russian occupation, the most successful Ottoman operation of the entire eastern front during the year.

The Anatolian command brought Mustafa Kemal into direct contact for the first time with the catastrophic consequences of the Armenian deportations of 1915, the systematic removal of the Armenian population from the eastern Anatolian provinces that had been ordered by the central Committee of Union and Progress government in May 1915 and that had been conducted with such violence and such heavy mortality that it has been characterized by most subsequent historians as a genocide. The provinces through which he traveled and in which he conducted operations in 1916 had been the principal Armenian-inhabited regions of the eastern empire, and the destruction of the Armenian communities of those provinces was a visible reality of the landscape that confronted any commander operating in the area. The position that Mustafa Kemal adopted on the deportations during his Anatolian command was characteristic of his subsequent treatment of the question: he did not participate directly in the organization of the deportations, which had been the responsibility of the Committee of Union and Progress political organization and of the local civilian administrators rather than of the army; he did not protest publicly against the policy, which would have brought him into immediate conflict with the central government; and he subsequently maintained, both during the war and after it, a position of guarded distance from the Committee leadership that he held responsible for the policy and from the policy itself, while denying that the empire had any moral obligation to make amends to the surviving Armenian communities.

He was promoted in April 1916 to the rank of brigadier general and was awarded the title of Pasha, the principal mark of senior rank in the Ottoman military hierarchy, becoming known thereafter as Mustafa Kemal Pasha until the adoption of the surname Atatürk eighteen years later. The promotion was an unusual one for an officer of his age, who was thirty-five at the time, and reflected both his Gallipoli achievement and the increasing recognition within the army command of his exceptional professional abilities. The promotion brought him no warmer relationship with Enver, whose suspicion of Mustafa Kemal's political and personal ambitions had if anything deepened with the latter's military success, and the central command at Constantinople continued to manage his career through a series of postings designed to keep him at a safe distance from the principal political center of the empire.

The Syrian and Palestinian Fronts

In October 1916, Mustafa Kemal was transferred to the command of the Hejaz Expeditionary Force, a body intended for service in the campaign against the Arab Revolt that had broken out in June 1916 under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali, with British encouragement and material support, and which had by the autumn established Arab control over Mecca, Jeddah, and most of the western Arabian coast. The Hejaz expedition was, however, postponed and ultimately abandoned in favor of a more pressing assignment, and Mustafa Kemal was redirected in March 1917 to the Syrian front, where he was given command of the Seventh Army being organized in Aleppo for the defense of the southern Levantine provinces against the British offensive that had begun to develop from Egypt under the command of General Edmund Allenby. He arrived at the Seventh Army headquarters in Aleppo in early May 1917, found the command in a state of severe organizational disarray, and conducted in the following months a series of inspections and reorganizations intended to prepare the army for the defensive battles that were anticipated for the autumn.

The defensive plan adopted by the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, who had been appointed commander of the entire Y?ld?r?m Army Group in July 1917 for the defense of Syria and Palestine, called for an offensive operation against the British in southern Mesopotamia rather than for a strict defense of the Palestinian frontier. Mustafa Kemal disagreed strongly with this plan, which he considered both strategically unsound and operationally impractical, and the disagreement led him in early October 1917 to submit a formal report to the central command at Constantinople in which he argued for a complete reorganization of the operational plan and a substantial change in the leadership of the army group. The report was rejected by Enver, and Mustafa Kemal, considering his position at the Seventh Army untenable, requested and obtained in mid-October a transfer to extended sick leave. He left Aleppo for Constantinople, where he spent the late autumn and winter of 1917 in formal retirement from active command and in continued political conversations with the few allies he had retained within the political and military establishment of the capital.

The Syrian front collapsed catastrophically in September and October 1918, when Allenby's offensive at Megiddo broke the Ottoman defensive line and drove the remnants of the Y?ld?r?m Army Group northward through Damascus to Aleppo. Mustafa Kemal had been recalled to active service in August 1918 and given command of the reconstituted Seventh Army for the closing operations of the campaign, and he conducted in September and October the long retreat from the Palestinian frontier to the line of the Taurus mountains that constituted the final defensive position of the Ottoman army in the war. He arrived at the small town of Adana in southern Anatolia at the end of October 1918, established his headquarters there for the conduct of the final defensive operations, and was occupied with the reorganization of the army when news reached him of the armistice that had been signed at Mudros on the thirtieth of October between the Ottoman government and the Allied powers, formally ending Ottoman participation in the First World War.

The Armistice of Mudros and the Occupation of Constantinople

The Armistice of Mudros, signed aboard the British battleship Agamemnon in the harbor of the small Aegean island of Mudros on the thirtieth of October 1918, was a comprehensive instrument of Ottoman capitulation. Its provisions included the immediate cessation of hostilities, the opening of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to Allied warships, the demobilization of the Ottoman army except for forces required for internal security, the Allied right to occupy any strategic point in the empire whose security they considered threatened, the surrender of the Ottoman garrisons in the Hejaz, Yemen, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Cilicia, and the establishment of Allied control over the railway and communication systems of the country. The terms were severe but were initially understood by the Ottoman signatories, and in particular by the chief Ottoman negotiator Hüseyin Rauf Bey, to constitute a temporary measure pending the formal peace conference at which the final disposition of the Ottoman territories would be settled. The interpretation proved naive. The Allied governments proceeded in the months following the armistice to implement an increasingly comprehensive program of military occupation and territorial dismemberment, the contours of which became progressively clearer through the winter of 1918-19.

British forces occupied the area around the Mediterranean coast and the southern interior; French forces occupied Cilicia and the surrounding regions; Italian forces landed at Antalya in southern Anatolia; Greek forces landed at Smyrna, present-day Izmir, on the Aegean coast on the fifteenth of May 1919 with British and American naval support and began an occupation of the western Anatolian provinces that quickly extended into the interior. Allied warships had entered the Bosphorus in mid-November 1918 and had anchored in the Golden Horn opposite the Dolmabahçe Palace, and a substantial Allied military and civil administration had been established in Constantinople under the supervision of the British, French, and Italian high commissioners. The sultan, Mehmed VI Vahdettin, who had succeeded his brother Mehmed V Re?ad in July 1918, governed his diminished and occupied empire from the Y?ld?z Palace under the close supervision of the Allied authorities, and the central Ottoman government conducted its business under conditions of effective Allied tutelage.

Mustafa Kemal returned from Adana to Constantinople in mid-November 1918, took up residence in a modest house in the ?i?li district that he had purchased some years earlier, and spent the following six months in a watchful observation of the developing situation. He was not at this stage involved in any organized opposition to the Allied occupation or to the policies of the sultan's government, but he was deeply pessimistic about the prospects of the empire under continued Allied tutelage and was increasingly convinced that the only path to the preservation of any portion of Ottoman sovereignty lay in the organization of a national resistance in Anatolia, drawing on the remnants of the army and the still substantial Muslim Turkish population of the central and eastern provinces. He conducted in this period a series of private conversations with sympathetic officers and political figures in the capital, including in particular his old comrades Hüseyin Rauf, Ali Fethi, Ali Fuat, Refet, Kâz?m Karabekir, and a few others who would later constitute the inner circle of the national resistance leadership, and he gradually developed during the winter and spring of 1919 the political conception that would inform his actions in the following years.

Inspector of the Ninth Army and the Landing at Samsun

The opportunity to act on his developing political conception was provided in the spring of 1919 by what was, from the perspective of the sultan's government and the Allied authorities, a routine administrative appointment. The Black Sea coast of northern Anatolia, in the area around Samsun and the surrounding districts, had become the scene of escalating violence between the Muslim Turkish population and the local Greek Orthodox communities, who had been encouraged by the Greek occupation of Smyrna to consider the establishment of a separate Pontic Greek state along the Black Sea coast and who had begun to organize armed bands for the purpose. The Ottoman government, under pressure from the British authorities to suppress the disorder, decided in mid-April 1919 to dispatch a senior officer to the region with broad powers of inspection and command, charged with the disarmament of the local Turkish and Greek bands, the restoration of order, and the demobilization of the remaining Ottoman military forces in the eastern Black Sea provinces in accordance with the armistice provisions. The officer selected for the assignment, on grounds that have never been entirely clarified but that probably involved both the desire of the sultan's government to remove from the capital a figure of his prominence and the personal influence of his friends in the war ministry, was Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

His official appointment, signed on the thirtieth of April 1919, designated him Inspector of the Ninth Army Inspectorate with command authority over the army units stationed in seven provinces of northern and central Anatolia, with civil supervisory authority over the provincial governors of the same region, and with broad powers to disarm irregular bands, to relieve officials who failed to carry out the armistice provisions, and to report directly to the war ministry on the condition of the region. The appointment, which had been approved with reluctance by the British high commissioner under the explicit understanding that Mustafa Kemal was to undertake the suppression of Turkish nationalist activity in the region, contained the seeds of its own subversion: the powers granted to the inspector were so extensive, the geographic area of his authority so substantial, and the supervision of his activities from the distant capital so impossible under the conditions of the early postwar period, that they constituted in effect a free hand for the organization of a parallel command structure in Anatolia under his personal authority.

He left Constantinople on the sixteenth of May 1919 aboard the small Turkish steamer Band?rma, accompanied by a staff of perhaps eighteen officers and a sum of money sufficient for the initial expenses of his mission, and landed at Samsun on the morning of the nineteenth of May 1919. The date, the nineteenth of May, was the date that he would later select as his official birthday and that would be celebrated thereafter as the anniversary of the founding of the Turkish national movement. His public activities in the first days at Samsun were ostensibly devoted to the official inspection of the local military and civil authorities, but the private conversations he conducted in those days with the officers of the local garrison, with sympathetic civilian figures of the town, and with the representatives of the various national resistance groups already operating in the interior were the beginning of the organization of the political movement that would transform the situation. Within a week of his arrival he had decided to move his headquarters from Samsun, where the proximity of Allied warships in the harbor made his activities increasingly conspicuous, to the small interior town of Havza, where he established himself in late May 1919 and from which he began to issue a series of circulars and proclamations addressed to the military and civilian authorities of the region.

The Amasya Circular and the Beginnings of National Organization

The decisive political step came in late June 1919 with the issuance of the document known to subsequent Turkish historiography as the Amasya Circular, drafted at the small Anatolian town of Amasya on the twenty-first and twenty-second of June 1919 in consultation with the senior officers of the national movement, Mustafa Kemal himself, Hüseyin Rauf, Ali Fuat Pasha, and Refet Bey, with the subsequent telegraphic endorsement of Kâz?m Karabekir Pasha, the commander of the Fifteenth Army Corps at Erzurum. The circular, which was distributed by telegram throughout the military and civil authorities of Anatolia, asserted in unmistakable terms that the territorial integrity of the empire was in danger, that the central government in Constantinople was unable to discharge its responsibilities, that the nation must take responsibility for its own salvation through the convocation of representative congresses in the various provinces, that a national congress representing the entire country should be convened at Sivas in central Anatolia, and that a preparatory congress representing the eastern provinces should be convened immediately at Erzurum. The circular constituted, in its substance and in its tone, an act of insubordination against the sultan's government and a declaration of the existence of a parallel national authority operating from Anatolia.

The response of the central government was relatively prompt. The minister of the interior at Constantinople, recognizing the implications of the Amasya Circular, dispatched orders for the immediate recall of Mustafa Kemal to the capital and for his arrest if he refused to comply. The orders reached him at Erzurum, where he had traveled in late June after the issuance of the circular, and he responded by resigning his army commission on the eighth of July 1919, abandoning thereby the official authority that had legitimized his presence in Anatolia and assuming thereafter the position of a private citizen acting in cooperation with the resistance organizations of the various provinces. The transition was a critical moment in his career and one that he himself often emphasized in subsequent recollections as the decisive personal commitment to the national cause. He had given up the rank, the pension, and the social position that constituted the principal external markers of his identity, had placed himself outside the legal framework of the Ottoman state, and had cast his future entirely upon the success of a movement whose prospects in the summer of 1919 were, by any realistic measurement, extremely doubtful.

The Erzurum and Sivas Congresses

The Erzurum Congress, which convened on the twenty-third of July 1919 in the eastern Anatolian city of the same name with delegates from the six eastern provinces of the empire, was the first formal political assembly of the national resistance movement. The congress, over which Mustafa Kemal was elected to preside despite his recent resignation from the army, adopted in the course of two weeks of deliberations a series of resolutions that constituted the political program of the movement: that the territorial integrity of the country within its current boundaries must be preserved against all Allied designs for partition; that the establishment of any non-Turkish state in any part of the territory inhabited by a Turkish majority population must be rejected; that the nation must take responsibility for its own salvation if the central government failed in its duties; that no special privileges should be granted to non-Muslim minorities beyond those already established in existing treaties; that the principle of unconditional Turkish independence must be the foundation of any settlement; and that a representative committee should be elected to direct the affairs of the resistance organizations until a fuller national congress could be convened.

The Sivas Congress, which convened on the fourth of September 1919 in the central Anatolian city of Sivas with delegates from all the provinces of Anatolia and Thrace, completed the political organization of the movement. The Sivas Congress essentially confirmed and extended the resolutions of Erzurum, established a unified national resistance organization to be called the Society for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia, elected an executive committee of fifteen members of which Mustafa Kemal was the chairman, and committed the movement to the convocation of a freely elected national assembly that would settle definitively the constitutional questions of the postwar period. The Sivas Congress also issued a formal demand to the sultan's government in Constantinople for the dismissal of the cabinet of Damat Ferid Pasha, who had been the principal political opponent of the national movement and who had attempted in late August to organize Kurdish tribal opposition to the congress. The demand, presented in the form of a telegraphic ultimatum to the palace and supported by the practical reality of national resistance control over the central Anatolian provinces, was successful: Damat Ferid resigned on the second of October 1919, and a new cabinet under Ali R?za Pasha, more sympathetic to the national movement, took office in his place.

The Elections of December 1919 and the National Pact

The new cabinet at Constantinople agreed in October 1919 to hold elections for a new Ottoman parliament, the assembly that would constitute the fourth session of the parliamentary system established by the constitution of 1876. The elections, conducted in the closing weeks of 1919 in the territories under Ottoman administration, produced a parliament dominated by deputies sympathetic to the national resistance movement, and the new parliament, when it convened in Constantinople in mid-January 1920, adopted as its principal political statement the document known as the National Pact, the Misak-? Millî, drafted in consultation with Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues in Ankara and presented as the formal political program of the Turkish nation. The National Pact, which would remain the foundational document of Turkish republican foreign policy throughout the twentieth century, defined the territorial claims of the Turkish nation as the area inhabited by a Turkish Muslim majority within the armistice lines of October 1918, with provisions for the eventual disposition by referendum of certain disputed territories including Western Thrace and the three eastern provinces of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum. The pact rejected any form of foreign intervention in Turkish domestic affairs, demanded the abolition of the capitulations, the legal privileges enjoyed by foreign nationals in the Ottoman state, and asserted the right of the Turkish nation to determine its own constitutional and administrative arrangements.

The adoption of the National Pact by the Ottoman parliament constituted an open political defiance of the Allied authorities and provoked a corresponding response. The British high commissioner, alarmed at the growing nationalist orientation of the parliament and at the evident coordination between the deputies in Constantinople and the resistance leadership at Ankara, persuaded the Allied governments in March 1920 to take direct measures against the parliament. On the sixteenth of March 1920, British forces formally occupied the city of Constantinople, arrested a number of the most prominent nationalist deputies, exiled them to the island of Malta, and effectively suppressed the parliamentary session. The remaining deputies, recognizing that the parliament could no longer function as a free political body, escaped from Constantinople and made their way by various routes to Ankara, where they joined the national resistance organization in the central Anatolian capital.

The Grand National Assembly at Ankara

The Grand National Assembly of Turkey, convened by Mustafa Kemal at Ankara on the twenty-third of April 1920 as the response to the suppression of the parliament at Constantinople, was the constitutional foundation of the new Turkish state. The assembly, which consisted of approximately two hundred and fifty deputies including both the escaped members of the suppressed Ottoman parliament and the newly elected representatives of the various provinces under national resistance control, elected Mustafa Kemal as its president on the twenty-fourth of April, established at Ankara the seat of a parallel national government in opposition to the sultan's administration at Constantinople, and assumed in the constitutional theory of the movement the full sovereign authority of the Turkish nation. The provisional constitution adopted by the assembly in January 1921, the so-called Law of Fundamental Organization, formally declared that sovereignty belonged without restriction to the nation, that the administration would rest upon the principle that the people directed their own destinies, and that the Grand National Assembly was the sole legitimate representative of the nation.

The position of the assembly in the spring and summer of 1920 was extraordinarily precarious. The territory under its control consisted principally of the central Anatolian plateau and the eastern provinces, with a population of perhaps twelve million people, an army of approximately fifty thousand poorly equipped troops, and a treasury essentially without resources. It faced the hostility of the Allied occupying forces in Constantinople and along the Mediterranean coast; the active military operations of the Greek army, which had been expanding its zone of occupation in western Anatolia since the previous May; the threat of a French advance from the Cilician territories that had been allotted to French control under the wartime agreements; the menace of Armenian forces in the east, supported by Russian and Allied diplomatic backing; and the open opposition of the sultan's government in Constantinople, which had pronounced a fatwa declaring the leaders of the national movement to be rebels against legitimate authority and had organized irregular armed forces in central Anatolia for the suppression of the resistance.

The Treaty of Sèvres and the Summer Crisis of 1920

The Allied governments, having determined to impose by treaty the partition of the Ottoman territories that they had been organizing through military occupation, summoned the Constantinople government in the spring of 1920 to the suburban town of Sèvres outside Paris for the formal signature of the peace settlement. The treaty, drafted by the Allied foreign ministers in consultation with representatives of Greece, Armenia, and various other interested parties, and presented to the Ottoman delegation in May 1920 for signature, was an instrument of comprehensive partition. Its principal provisions included: the cession of eastern Thrace to Greece; the establishment of a permanent Greek occupation of the Smyrna region with a referendum to be held after five years to determine its eventual incorporation into Greece; the creation of an independent Armenian state in eastern Anatolia of substantial territorial extent; the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region in the southeastern provinces with the possibility of subsequent independence; the placement of Constantinople and the straits under an international commission with extensive powers; the surrender to Italian, French, and British control of various Mediterranean and southern Anatolian territories; and the imposition of severe restrictions on Ottoman military forces, finances, and administrative autonomy. The treaty was signed on the tenth of August 1920 by representatives of the Constantinople government acting on the explicit instructions of the sultan, and was rejected the same day by the Grand National Assembly at Ankara as an instrument without binding force on the Turkish nation.

The summer of 1920 was the period of greatest external pressure on the national resistance movement. The Greek army, having been encouraged by the Allied governments to undertake an expanded offensive in support of the territorial provisions of the proposed treaty, conducted a substantial offensive in June and July 1920 that pushed the Greek lines deep into western Anatolia, captured the principal city of Bursa, and threatened to advance toward Ankara itself. The Armenian forces conducted parallel operations in the east in cooperation with the Greek advance. The internal opposition organized by the sultan's government, in the form of the so-called Caliphate Army and various Circassian and other irregular bands, engaged the national resistance in a series of skirmishes throughout central Anatolia. The position of the Grand National Assembly was so desperate by the late summer that even the most committed supporters of Mustafa Kemal began to entertain doubts about the prospects of survival of the movement.

The Eastern Campaign and the Defeat of Armenia

The first significant military success of the national resistance came in the autumn of 1920 with the campaign against the Armenian Republic in eastern Anatolia. The Armenian forces, which had been pressing along the Russian frontier since the summer and which had been supported by Allied diplomatic recognition and material assistance, were attacked in late September by the army of the eastern front under the command of Kâz?m Karabekir Pasha, the commander of the Fifteenth Army Corps at Erzurum. Karabekir's offensive, conducted with a force of approximately fifty thousand troops against an Armenian army of comparable size but inferior equipment and morale, achieved a series of rapid successes, captured the major fortress city of Kars on the thirtieth of October 1920, and advanced to the suburbs of Yerevan before the Armenian government sued for peace. The Treaty of Alexandropol, signed on the second of December 1920, ceded to the Turkish national movement the entire territory of the eastern provinces that had been allotted to Armenia under the Treaty of Sèvres, and the Armenian state itself was overthrown shortly afterward by a Soviet-supported insurrection and incorporated into the new Soviet Union as a constituent republic. The frontier negotiated at Alexandropol was reconfirmed at the Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Russian government in March 1921 and at the Treaty of Kars in October 1921, and constituted from that point the definitive eastern frontier of the Turkish state.

The Greek Invasion and the Western Front

The principal military theater of the Turkish War of Independence, however, was the western front, where the Greek army pursued throughout 1921 a sustained offensive intended to crush the national resistance and to establish Greek control over the western Anatolian provinces. The Greek offensive of January 1921 was halted by the Turkish forces at the First Battle of ?nönü, fought between the sixth and the eleventh of January at a position in the upper Sakarya valley, in an engagement that was a defensive success for the Turkish forces under ?smet Pasha, who commanded the western front, and that gave its name to him as the senior commander of the campaign, the name ?nönü being adopted by him as his surname in 1934 when the surname law required all Turkish citizens to choose family names. The Second Battle of ?nönü, fought between the twenty-third of March and the first of April 1921, was a more substantial engagement in which the Greek forces, with a force of approximately seventy thousand men supported by considerable artillery and the first significant air component employed in the war, attempted a more determined offensive that was again halted, with substantial casualties on both sides, by the Turkish defensive position in the upper Sakarya.

The Greek offensive of July and August 1921, undertaken with a force of more than a hundred thousand men under the personal direction of the Greek king Constantine I, who had taken the field with his army in pursuit of the megali idea, the great idea of the restoration of Byzantine Greek sovereignty over the territories of western Anatolia, achieved more substantial results. The Turkish forces, outnumbered and outequipped, were obliged to abandon successive defensive lines through July and into early August, and the Greek army advanced to within fifty miles of Ankara before being halted at the line of the Sakarya river.

The Battle of Sakarya

The Battle of Sakarya, fought between the twenty-third of August and the thirteenth of September 1921 along a front of more than sixty miles east of the Sakarya river, was the decisive military engagement of the Turkish War of Independence. The Grand National Assembly had on the fifth of August conferred on Mustafa Kemal the title of commander-in-chief with full executive authority over the conduct of the war, and he took the field in person at the army headquarters near the village of Alagöz to direct the defensive battle. The battle was the largest pitched engagement of the war, involving approximately a hundred thousand troops on each side and conducted along a front so extensive that the engagement consisted essentially of a series of simultaneous local battles coordinated under the unified strategic direction of the Turkish high command. Mustafa Kemal's tactical concept, formulated in the famous order that he issued at the height of the engagement, abandoned the conventional concept of a continuous defensive line in favor of a more flexible system of locally defended positions whose loss would not necessarily entail the loss of the whole position: there is no line of defense, there is a surface of defense. That surface is the whole of the country. Not an inch of the country can be abandoned until it has been drenched with the blood of its citizens.

The battle was a Turkish defensive victory of decisive proportions. The Greek army, having exhausted its offensive capabilities in three weeks of intense fighting, was unable to break through the Turkish positions, suffered casualties of approximately twenty thousand killed and wounded, and was obliged on the thirteenth of September 1921 to begin a general retreat to defensive positions further west. The Turkish forces, exhausted by the engagement and unable to mount an immediate pursuit, established themselves along the lines from which they had repelled the offensive and began the long process of preparing for the eventual counter-offensive that would expel the Greek army from Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal was promoted by the Grand National Assembly to the rank of mare?al, marshal, and was awarded the honorific title of gazi, victor in a holy war against the unbeliever, a title carrying significant religious connotation that he would retain and would be known by in much of his correspondence and his public appearances thereafter.

The Great Offensive and the Liberation of Smyrna

The year that followed the Battle of Sakarya was occupied by the careful preparation for the counter-offensive. The Turkish army was reorganized, reequipped with material acquired through the new diplomatic agreements with Soviet Russia and through clandestine purchases in Europe, and trained for the mobile warfare that the counter-offensive would require. Mustafa Kemal supervised personally the strategic planning of the operation, conducting in the spring and summer of 1922 a series of inspections and consultations with his commanders that produced the final operational plan known as the Great Offensive, the Büyük Taarruz.

The offensive opened on the morning of the twenty-sixth of August 1922 with a concentrated artillery bombardment and a massed infantry assault on the Greek positions south of Afyon Karahisar. The plan, which had been developed by Mustafa Kemal and his chief of staff Fevzi Çakmak Pasha in conditions of strict secrecy, called for the concentration of the principal Turkish striking force in the southern sector of the front, where the Greek defensive line was thinnest, and for the rapid exploitation of any breakthrough by mobile cavalry forces under the command of Fahrettin Altay Pasha, with the intention of cutting the Greek lines of communication and forcing the surrender or destruction of the principal Greek field armies. The plan was executed with remarkable precision. The breakthrough in the southern sector was achieved on the first day of the offensive; the Greek lines were rolled up northward in the days that followed; the principal Greek field army was surrounded and defeated in the engagement of Dumlup?nar on the thirtieth of August 1922, in which the commander of the Greek expeditionary force, General Trikoupis, was captured along with most of his staff; and the disorganized remnants of the Greek army began a precipitate retreat toward the coast, pursued by the Turkish cavalry. The pursuit reached the port of Smyrna on the ninth of September 1922, on which date Mustafa Kemal entered the city in person at the head of his troops, and the war in Anatolia was effectively over.

The recapture of Smyrna, which had been the symbolic center of the Greek occupation since 1919 and the principal commercial and cultural city of western Anatolia, was the culmination of the military campaign. It was accompanied, however, by a series of catastrophic events whose responsibility has been a subject of historical controversy ever since. A great fire broke out in the city on the thirteenth of September 1922, four days after the Turkish entry, which destroyed in the course of several days the Greek, Armenian, and European quarters of Smyrna and which has been variously attributed to deliberate Turkish arson, to retaliatory violence by local Greek and Armenian inhabitants, and to the cumulative chaos of the military occupation. The fire was accompanied by massacres of the Greek and Armenian civilian population at the hands of Turkish irregulars, and the surviving Christian population was driven to the harbor, where they were eventually evacuated by the Allied fleets to Greece and other destinations. The exchange of populations that was later formalized at Lausanne had effectively begun in the chaos of the Smyrna fire, and a great Christian civilization on the western coast of Anatolia that had endured for nearly three thousand years was brought to an effective end in those weeks of September 1922.

The Chanak Crisis and the Armistice of Mudanya

The defeat of the Greek army and the recovery of western Anatolia by the Turkish forces brought the conflict to the verge of expansion into a renewed war with the British Empire. The Turkish forces, having reached the coast, turned northward toward the Dardanelles and the small British garrison at Chanak, present-day Çanakkale, which held the eastern shore of the straits under the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres. The British government, under Prime Minister Lloyd George, threatened a renewed war if the Turkish forces crossed into the neutral zone, and the British public opinion, which had not been prepared for the renewed military commitment in the Near East, was strongly opposed to such an undertaking. The crisis, which became known as the Chanak Affair, was eventually resolved in early October 1922 through diplomatic negotiations conducted at the small town of Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara, where the British and French representatives met with the Turkish commander ?smet Pasha and concluded on the eleventh of October 1922 an armistice that recognized Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and eastern Thrace, provided for the withdrawal of Greek forces from eastern Thrace within thirty days, and established the terms for the eventual general peace conference at Lausanne. The political consequences in Britain were considerable: the Lloyd George coalition government, weakened by the inconclusive outcome of the crisis, fell on the nineteenth of October 1922 and was replaced by a Conservative government under Bonar Law, the only such case in British constitutional history in which a prime ministership was lost over a Near Eastern policy crisis.

The Abolition of the Sultanate

The Armistice of Mudanya brought to the forefront the constitutional question of the relationship between the Grand National Assembly at Ankara and the sultan's government at Constantinople, which had continued throughout the war to maintain a notional existence under Allied protection. The Lausanne Conference, which had been called for late November 1922 to settle the peace, would clearly be unable to function if two separate Ottoman delegations presented themselves with conflicting claims to represent the Turkish state. The decision of the Grand National Assembly, taken on the first of November 1922 on a motion presented by Mustafa Kemal himself and after vigorous parliamentary debate, was to abolish the Ottoman sultanate altogether while preserving for the time being the institution of the caliphate, which was conferred upon Abdülmecid Efendi, a cousin of the deposed sultan, in a strictly religious and symbolic capacity stripped of all temporal authority. Sultan Mehmed VI Vahdettin, observing the imminent collapse of his position, fled Constantinople on the morning of the seventeenth of November 1922 aboard the British warship Malaya, and the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman sultanate came to an end.

The Treaty of Lausanne

The Lausanne Conference, which convened on the twentieth of November 1922 in the Swiss city of the same name with the participation of the Allied powers, Greece, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and various other interested parties, was the formal peace conference that settled the eastern question after the First World War. The Turkish delegation, headed by ?smet ?nönü under the strict instructions of Mustafa Kemal at Ankara, conducted itself through eight months of negotiations with a tenacity and a refusal to compromise on the principal national objectives that surprised the Allied delegations and that produced, after the suspension of the conference in February 1923 and its eventual reconvening, a settlement substantially more favorable to Turkish interests than had been expected. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on the twenty-fourth of July 1923, recognized the full sovereignty of Turkey within the boundaries claimed in the National Pact, abolished the capitulations and other extraterritorial privileges, established a regime for the straits that left them under Turkish sovereignty subject to international supervision of military passage, provided for an obligatory exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece on the basis of religious identity, and settled various financial and administrative questions arising from the dissolution of the Ottoman state. The treaty constituted the international recognition of the new Turkish state and the foundation of its place in the postwar international system.

The Proclamation of the Republic

The constitutional reorganization of the new state, which had been deferred during the war and during the peace negotiations, was undertaken in the autumn of 1923. On the thirteenth of October 1923, the Grand National Assembly designated Ankara, rather than Constantinople, as the capital of the new state, a decision of profound symbolic and practical importance that severed the new Turkey definitively from the Ottoman past and that established the seat of national authority in the heartland of the Turkish-speaking population. On the twenty-ninth of October 1923, on a motion drafted by Mustafa Kemal himself and presented in the assembly after a careful parliamentary preparation by his close collaborators, the Grand National Assembly formally proclaimed the Republic of Turkey and elected Mustafa Kemal as the first president of the republic. The proclamation, which transformed the Turkish state from a constitutional system retaining the formal trappings of monarchy under the caliphate into an unambiguous republic, was a moment of profound political and ideological consequence. It was greeted with elaborate national celebrations in Ankara and across the country, and the anniversary of the twenty-ninth of October has been observed ever since as the national day of the Turkish Republic.

The Abolition of the Caliphate

The institution of the caliphate, which had been preserved in March 1922 as a religious dignity disconnected from temporal authority, proved increasingly incompatible with the secular republican character of the new state. The position of Caliph Abdülmecid Efendi, who had been held to a strict ceremonial role since his accession in November 1922, was nonetheless attracting the attention of Muslim political movements throughout the Islamic world, who saw in the caliphate a symbol of pan-Islamic identity and who were beginning to organize, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, political initiatives intended to maintain the caliphate as a focus of religious authority. The continued existence of the caliphate, in the view of Mustafa Kemal and his closest political collaborators, presented an obstacle to the construction of a secular national identity and a potential rallying point for conservative opposition to the reform program of the republic. The decision was therefore taken in late February 1924 to abolish the caliphate altogether, and on the third of March 1924 the Grand National Assembly enacted a law that abolished the caliphate, deposed and exiled Abdülmecid Efendi together with the entire remaining members of the Ottoman dynasty, abolished the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Pious Foundations, transferred religious affairs to a new Directorate of Religious Affairs under direct state control, abolished the religious medreses, and brought all educational establishments under the unified authority of the Ministry of Education. The abolition of the caliphate was the most consequential of the early republican reforms and the one that most clearly defined the secular character of the new state.

The Early Republican Reforms and the Program of Modernization

The years from 1924 to 1934 constituted the period of intensive Kemalist reform, in which the principal institutional, legal, cultural, and symbolic transformations of the new state were carried through. The program, which Mustafa Kemal directed in person with a combination of legislative initiative, executive determination, and personal political authority unparalleled in the modern history of constitutional reform, addressed every principal dimension of Turkish public life. The hat law of November 1925 abolished the fez, the brimless red felt cap that had been the universal headwear of Ottoman Muslim men since its introduction by Sultan Mahmud II in 1829, and required all male citizens to adopt the brimmed European hat in its place. The closure of the dervish lodges and the abolition of the dervish orders in December 1925 brought to an end the network of Sufi religious establishments that had been one of the principal institutions of Ottoman religious life. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar in December 1925 ended the use of the Islamic hijri calendar for civil purposes. The civil code adopted in February 1926, based on the Swiss civil code of 1907 and adapted to Turkish conditions, replaced the Islamic family and personal law with a unified civil code that established monogamy, abolished religious marriage as a legally binding institution, granted women equal rights in matters of divorce, inheritance, and child custody, and brought Turkish civil law into substantial conformity with contemporary European practice. The criminal code of 1926, based on the Italian penal code, and the commercial code of 1926, based on the German commercial code, completed the legal modernization.

The Language Reform and the New Alphabet

The most distinctive and consequential of the cultural reforms was the language reform, which transformed the written and to a substantial degree the spoken language of the country in the course of approximately a decade. The Arabic script in which Ottoman Turkish had been written since the eleventh century was replaced in November 1928 by a modified Latin alphabet of twenty-nine letters, specifically designed to represent the sounds of Turkish more accurately than the Arabic script had done. The transition was undertaken with the kind of concentrated executive energy that characterized all the major Kemalist reforms. Mustafa Kemal traveled personally throughout the country in the autumn of 1928 with a small portable blackboard, conducted public demonstrations of the new alphabet in town squares and village halls, and personally instructed officials, teachers, and ordinary citizens in the elements of the new script. The deadline for the universal adoption of the new alphabet was set with extraordinary brevity: from the first of January 1929, all official publications, all newspaper printing, all signage, and all elementary instruction was to be conducted in the Latin alphabet, with the old Arabic script prohibited in all but private religious uses.

The language reform was extended in the following years to a systematic effort at the purification of the Turkish vocabulary itself. The Turkish Language Society, established in 1932 under Mustafa Kemal's personal patronage, undertook a comprehensive program of linguistic reconstruction intended to replace the Arabic, Persian, and other foreign loanwords with new words drawn from old Turkish, Central Asian Turkic languages, or the dialects of the Anatolian countryside, and to reform the grammar and syntax of Turkish in accordance with what were thought to be its essential Turkic characteristics. The reform produced in its early phases a degree of linguistic chaos, as new vocabulary was introduced more rapidly than it could be assimilated and as the language of the press and the administration changed from month to month under the impact of new lexicographical decisions; but it ultimately produced a transformed Turkish language, separated by a substantial linguistic distance from its Ottoman predecessor and rendering the literature of the Ottoman period inaccessible to the modern reader without specialized training.

The Surname Law and the Name Atatürk

The surname law of June 1934 required all Turkish citizens to adopt a family name, a practice which had not previously been universal in Turkish society, where many citizens had been known by their personal names alone, supplemented by the names of their fathers or by occupational designations. The deadline for the registration of a family name was set for the first of January 1935. The names chosen were required to be Turkish in form, were prohibited from including foreign elements or honorific designations such as Pasha or Bey, and were to be transmitted in the patrilineal line in accordance with the new civil code. The Grand National Assembly itself conferred on Mustafa Kemal, by a special law of the twenty-fourth of November 1934, the surname Atatürk, meaning Father of the Turks, with a clause forbidding the adoption of the surname by any other Turkish citizen. The name was henceforth his official designation, and the form Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the standard mode of reference to his person in the documents of the republic and in the historiography of his life. His closest collaborator ?smet Pasha adopted on the same occasion the surname ?nönü, in commemoration of the two defensive battles on the western front in 1921 in which he had commanded.

The Status of Women and Political Rights

The transformation of the legal and political status of women constituted one of the most distinctive features of the Kemalist program. The civil code of 1926 had abolished the religious marriage and divorce regime and had established formal equality between men and women in family law. A series of subsequent legislative initiatives extended this principle to public life: women acquired the right to vote and stand in municipal elections in 1930; the right to vote and stand in elections to provincial councils in 1933; and the right to vote and stand in parliamentary elections in December 1934, eleven years before the same right was extended to women in France and approximately a decade before the corresponding extension in Italy. The Turkish parliament that convened after the elections of February 1935 included eighteen women deputies, the highest proportional representation of women in any national legislature of the period, and the participation of women in the public life of the republic became one of the principal symbolic markers of the new political order. The reform was not, however, without limitations and contradictions. The participation of women in public life was concentrated in the urban professional and bureaucratic class and made limited inroads into the rural and traditional sectors of Turkish society, where the customary regime of veiling, segregation, and patriarchal authority over family affairs continued essentially unchanged. The reforms were also implemented under conditions of single-party authoritarian rule in which the formal extension of political rights was not accompanied by the establishment of competitive political institutions through which those rights could be effectively exercised.

Economic Policy and Etatism

The economic policy of the Kemalist regime evolved through two distinct phases. The first phase, from 1923 to approximately 1930, was characterized by a relatively liberal economic policy emphasizing private enterprise, the development of indigenous capitalist industry under modest tariff protection, and the conclusion of foreign loans and concessions for infrastructure development. The results of this phase were disappointing, in part because the destruction of the war years had left the Turkish economy without significant private capital, in part because the principal commercial classes of the Ottoman empire had been the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish populations that had been displaced or eliminated in the events of the war and the population exchange. The onset of the world economic depression in 1929, which produced a catastrophic fall in the prices of the agricultural commodities on which the Turkish export economy depended, brought the liberal phase of Kemalist economic policy to a definitive end. The second phase, from 1930 to the death of Atatürk in 1938, was characterized by a policy of etatism, in which the state assumed direct responsibility for the development of basic industries, established state banks and state economic enterprises in textiles, mining, iron and steel, paper, cement, and chemicals, and implemented through successive five-year plans a program of centrally directed industrial development that drew explicitly on the contemporary Soviet experience while preserving the formal framework of a market economy and respect for private property in the agricultural and consumer sectors. The etatist policy produced, by the time of Atatürk's death, the foundations of a modern industrial sector that the new Turkey had previously lacked, though at the cost of relatively slow growth in agricultural productivity and a substantial accumulation of inefficient state enterprises whose problems would persist into the second half of the twentieth century.

The Kurdish and Armenian Questions Under the Republic

The treatment of ethnic minorities under the new republic was a question of considerable difficulty and was resolved in ways that have been the subject of subsequent historical criticism. The Armenian population, whose communities had been substantially destroyed by the deportations of 1915 and whose survivors had been included in the exchange of populations with Greece or had emigrated abroad, ceased after 1923 to constitute a significant element of the Turkish population, with the surviving community concentrated in Istanbul under the protection of the Treaty of Lausanne minority provisions. The Kurdish population of the eastern provinces, which had been more substantially integrated into the original Ottoman state than had any other ethnic minority and which had been an important constituency of the national resistance movement during the War of Independence, proved more difficult to incorporate into the new Turkish national identity defined in linguistic and territorial terms. The Kemalist government denied the existence of a Kurdish identity distinct from the Turkish, treated the Kurdish-speaking population as Mountain Turks who had simply forgotten their original Turkic linguistic heritage, suppressed the public use of the Kurdish language in education and administration, and reacted to the periodic Kurdish uprisings of the period, most notably the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925, the Mount Ararat rising of 1930, and the Dersim rebellion of 1937-38, with substantial military force. The suppression of the Dersim rebellion in particular, conducted by the Turkish army with significant civilian casualties, has been the subject of considerable historical reassessment in the early twenty-first century and represents the darkest aspect of the Kemalist treatment of the minority question.

The People's Party and One-Party Rule

The political organization through which Atatürk governed the republic was the Republican People's Party, the Cumhuriyet Halk F?rkas?, which had been formally established in September 1923 from the Society for the Defense of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia of the resistance period and which served throughout his presidency as the sole legitimate political party of the country. The party was governed through a strict hierarchy of authority with Atatürk at its head, was identified with the state apparatus to a degree that made the distinction between party and government substantially formal, and embodied in its program the six principles known as the Six Arrows: republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and revolutionism, which were incorporated into the constitution of the republic in 1937 and which constituted the ideological orthodoxy of the regime. Two attempts were made during the period to introduce a measure of multiparty competition: the Progressive Republican Party of 1924-25, organized by Kâz?m Karabekir, Hüseyin Rauf, and other senior figures of the early resistance who had become alienated from the increasingly autocratic style of Atatürk's leadership, was suppressed in June 1925 in the aftermath of the Sheikh Said rebellion; and the Free Republican Party of 1930, organized by Ali Fethi Okyar at Atatürk's own request as a controlled opposition, was dissolved within months of its founding when the response of the public proved more enthusiastic than the regime had anticipated. The one-party system was thereafter maintained without further serious challenge until the introduction of competitive elections in 1946 under Atatürk's successor ?smet ?nönü.

Personal Life: Latife, Adopted Children, and the Household

The personal life of Atatürk in the years of the republic was conducted with a certain reserve, a calculated mystery, and a deliberate disconnection from the conventional forms of family and domestic existence that he had imposed upon his subjects. He married in January 1923, shortly before the proclamation of the republic, a young woman named Latife U??aki, the daughter of a wealthy Smyrnan merchant family, whom he had met at the time of the recovery of Smyrna in September 1922. Latife Han?m was twenty-four at the time of the marriage and was, by the standards of late Ottoman Muslim womanhood, unusually educated: she had studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris, spoke French, English, and German, and represented in her person the kind of modern, educated, professionally accomplished womanhood that the Kemalist program intended to promote. The marriage was conducted without religious ceremony, in a brief civil procedure that was itself an early statement of the secular character of the new state, and Latife Han?m accompanied her husband on his official tours through Anatolia in the early years of the republic, appearing unveiled in public meetings and addressing audiences in her own person in a manner that was unprecedented in Muslim public life.

The marriage was not, however, a personal success. The differences in age and temperament between the partners, the unwillingness of Atatürk to subordinate his public life and private habits to the discipline of a conventional marriage, the strain of conducting the most consequential public role of any Turkish statesman of the century in conjunction with the demands of an emotionally exacting wife, all combined to produce within two years a marriage in deep crisis. The couple separated in the summer of 1925 and were divorced on the fifth of August of that year under the new civil code that the marriage itself had been intended to symbolize. Atatürk remained unmarried for the remainder of his life, conducted his domestic existence at his presidential residence at Çankaya in Ankara and at his country house at Florya near Istanbul through a household staff of servants and personal attendants, and developed in the years after the divorce the pattern of late-night working dinners with his political collaborators and selected guests that became the characteristic form of his social existence.

In the absence of biological children, Atatürk adopted in the course of the 1920s and 1930s a small number of children, mostly girls, to whom he provided education, financial support, and the kind of public visibility that constituted, in the symbolic economy of his life, the foundation of a model Turkish family. The most prominent of his adopted children was Sabiha Gökçen, an orphan whom he had adopted as a young girl and who became under his sponsorship the first female military pilot in Turkey and one of the first in the world, completing her aviation training in 1936 and flying combat missions during the Dersim operation of 1937. The others included Afet, who became a professional historian and a senior member of the Turkish Historical Society; Sabiha, Zehra, Ülkü, Nebile, and Rukiye, all of whom received in turn the education and the public exposure that confirmed the symbolic intentions of his adoption practice. The adopted daughters were not the equivalent of a family in the conventional emotional sense, and Atatürk's relations with them were characterized by the affectionate but rather distant patronage that constituted the warmest form of personal relationship he was willing or able to undertake.

Habits, Appearance, and Personality

The Atatürk of the years of the republic was, in his outward appearance and his personal habits, a complex and not always consistent figure. He was a man of medium height, slim and erect in bearing, with the strikingly pale complexion, the high forehead, the prominent jaw, and the piercing blue eyes that became, through the millions of photographs and portraits in which his image was disseminated, among the most recognized features of the twentieth century. He was meticulous in his dress, preferring the dark European business suits and white shirts with stiff collars that were the standard apparel of the European professional class of the period and that he had imposed upon Turkish men through the hat law and the various subsequent regulations of public dress. He smoked heavily throughout his adult life, consuming approximately fifty cigarettes a day, and drank to excess in his later years, with a particular preference for the anise-flavored Turkish spirit called rak?, which he consumed at the late-night dinners that were his characteristic form of social entertainment. He worked through the night and slept during the morning hours, conducting his government business in long evening sessions at Çankaya that often extended past midnight and that gave to his administrative style a curiously irregular character that those who were obliged to attend his sessions found exhausting.

His personality combined a number of characteristics that did not always sit comfortably together. He was capable of personal charm of an exceptional kind, particularly with foreign visitors and with those whom he wished to win to his political program, and his conversation in such circumstances was witty, learned, and seductive. He was equally capable of icy contempt and of public rage when provoked or contradicted, and his collaborators learned through hard experience the limits beyond which they could not press their disagreements with his judgments. He was extraordinarily well-read for a man of his professional background, with an active interest in Turkish history, in European political theory, in linguistics, in economics, and in the natural sciences, and his library at Çankaya contained at his death approximately four thousand volumes in Turkish, French, German, and English, many of them annotated in his own hand. He was an exceptionally able public speaker, capable of holding the attention of audiences for hours at a time, and his great six-day oration to the congress of the Republican People's Party in October 1927, the Nutuk, in which he set out the official history of the Turkish War of Independence and the founding of the republic, remains one of the longest and most consequential political speeches in modern history.

Illness and Death at Dolmabahçe

The cumulative effects of the heavy smoking, the heavy drinking, and the irregular schedule of his later years began to produce serious health consequences from the mid-1930s. The diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that would eventually kill him, was made in the autumn of 1937 by his personal physician Nihat Re?at Belger, and was confirmed by consultations with foreign specialists in the following months. The treatment regimen prescribed, which involved abstinence from alcohol and from heavy smoking, was followed by him only partially and intermittently, and the disease progressed steadily through 1937 and 1938. The final illness developed during the spring and summer of 1938, in the course of which he was obliged to abandon active participation in the administration of the republic, to delegate his official duties to his prime minister Celal Bayar and to his successor as president ?smet ?nönü, and to take up residence at the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, the former Ottoman imperial palace on the European shore of the Bosphorus, which had been preserved as a museum and presidential residence and where he had spent considerable periods of time in the years of the republic.

The final weeks at Dolmabahçe were a period of slow decline. He retained consciousness and the capacity for limited official business until almost the end, was visited by the principal political and military figures of the republic, conducted what he understood to be his political testament with ?smet ?nönü, who had been formally designated as his successor in the presidency, and prepared in his characteristic way for the public ceremony of his death. He fell into coma on the eighth of November 1938 and died at five minutes past nine in the morning of the tenth of November 1938, at the age of fifty-seven, in a small room of the Dolmabahçe Palace overlooking the Bosphorus. The clocks of the palace and of public buildings throughout Turkey were stopped at the hour of his death and have been preserved in that position ever since as a national memorial of the moment of his passing.

The State Funeral and the Anitkabir Mausoleum

The state funeral of Atatürk, conducted in stages between the eleventh and the twenty-first of November 1938, was one of the most elaborate ceremonial events in the modern history of Turkey. The body lay in state in the great ceremonial hall of the Dolmabahçe Palace for nine days, where hundreds of thousands of citizens passed before the coffin in lines that extended through the streets of Istanbul. It was transported by warship from the Dolmabahçe quay to ?zmit on the nineteenth of November, transferred to a special railway train for the journey across Anatolia to Ankara, was met at the Ankara station by a guard of honor and was carried in procession through the streets of the capital to a temporary resting place at the Ethnographic Museum, where it remained until the completion of the permanent mausoleum that was to be constructed in his memory. Foreign delegations attended from seventeen countries, including the heads of state or principal representatives of Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the principal Middle Eastern and Balkan states, and the ceremonies were broadcast by radio throughout the country and to international audiences. The succession to the presidency was carried out without difficulty: ?smet ?nönü was elected on the eleventh of November 1938 by the unanimous vote of the Grand National Assembly as the second president of the Republic of Turkey, taking office on the same day.

The permanent mausoleum, the An?tkabir, was designed in the years following his death by the Turkish architects Emin Onat and Orhan Arda, was constructed on the elevated terrain known as Rasattepe in the western part of Ankara, and was completed in 1953, fifteen years after his death. The body was transferred from the Ethnographic Museum to the An?tkabir on the tenth of November 1953, the fifteenth anniversary of his death, in a ceremony of the most elaborate kind. The An?tkabir consists of a long ceremonial road of approximately a quarter of a mile lined with carved stone lion statues, opening into a great ceremonial plaza flanked by colonnaded buildings devoted to the various aspects of his life and work, and culminating in the great hall of the mausoleum itself, an austere rectangular structure of cream-colored limestone above the sarcophagus chamber where his body is interred. The An?tkabir has been since its completion the principal site of national memorial in Turkey, the destination of state funerals, of military ceremonies, and of the formal visits of foreign heads of state, and the focal point of the elaborate civic religion that has grown up around the memory of the founder of the republic.

The Kemalist Legacy and the Six Arrows

The political doctrine known as Kemalism, codified in the constitutional and statutory framework of the republic and embodied in the six principles known as the Six Arrows, has remained the ideological foundation of the Turkish state through every subsequent political transformation. The Six Arrows, formally adopted as the program of the Republican People's Party in 1931 and incorporated into the constitution in 1937, are: cumhuriyetçilik, republicanism, the commitment to the republican form of government as the only legitimate political dispensation; milliyetçilik, nationalism, the conception of the Turkish nation as a community defined by territorial citizenship, linguistic unity, and shared political loyalty; halkç?l?k, populism, the principle of national sovereignty exercised through the elected institutions of the state and the rejection of class privilege; devletçilik, statism, the principle of state direction of economic development; laiklik, secularism, the strict separation of religious institutions from the apparatus of the state and the removal of religious doctrine from the conduct of public affairs; and ink?lapç?l?k, revolutionism, the principle of continuous modernizing transformation of social and cultural institutions. The Six Arrows have been the subject of considerable interpretive variation in the decades since Atatürk's death, with each generation of Kemalist political leadership emphasizing one or another of the principles in accordance with the political needs of the moment, but they have continued to function as the ideological framework within which Turkish political debate has been conducted.

Posthumous Reputation and the Law of 1951

The posthumous cult of Atatürk has been one of the most distinctive features of Turkish public life since his death and has been institutionalized through a series of legal and administrative measures designed to protect his memory and to ensure the continued centrality of his image in the public culture of the country. The Law on Crimes Committed Against Atatürk, enacted in July 1951 in the political circumstances of the early years of multiparty competition and the consolidation of the new Democratic Party government, criminalized the public denigration of his memory, the destruction of monuments and images associated with his person, and the publication of writings considered insulting to him. The law has remained in force ever since, has been used in occasional prosecutions throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and has constituted one of the principal legal foundations of the special status of his memory in Turkish public life. His portrait is displayed by law in all public buildings, schools, and offices of the republic; his image appears on all denominations of Turkish currency; his statue stands in the principal public squares of every Turkish city, town, and village; and his name has been given to airports, universities, stadiums, bridges, dams, and innumerable streets and avenues throughout the country.

Historiographical Debates

The historiography of Atatürk has been the subject of considerable evolution in the decades since his death. The early period, from his death through the 1950s, was dominated by official Kemalist historiography, which presented his life and work as the definitive narrative of Turkish national redemption and which permitted little serious critical analysis of either his policies or his methods. The opening of multi-party politics in 1946 and the political competition of the subsequent decades produced a gradual diversification of the historiography. The conservative Democratic Party and its successors, while formally honoring the founder of the republic, developed in their political practice a more accommodating attitude toward religious institutions and traditional forms of public expression that constituted an implicit critique of the more aggressive secularist policies of the Kemalist period. The left and the various socialist movements developed in the 1960s and 1970s a more critical analysis of the social class basis of Kemalist nationalism and of the limits of the social reforms of the early republican period. The Islamic political movements that emerged from the late 1970s and that have dominated Turkish politics in the early twenty-first century have produced a more extensive critique of the secularist orientation of the Kemalist program and of the methods by which it was imposed. The Kurdish national movement that has developed since the 1980s has produced a substantial critical literature on the Kemalist treatment of the Kurdish question and on the suppression of Kurdish identity under the early republican regime. The historiography in English and other foreign languages has produced a number of major biographical works, of which Lord Kinross's biography of 1964, Andrew Mango's biography of 1999, and the more recent studies of M. ?ükrü Hanio?lu have constituted the principal authoritative treatments in non-Turkish scholarship.

Influence on Decolonization and the Modernizing State

The influence of Atatürk's example on subsequent processes of national independence and modernization in the Islamic world and in the developing world generally has been substantial. The Turkish War of Independence of 1919-22 was the first successful military resistance to the European partition projects of the post-Versailles period, and it provided a model and an inspiration for subsequent anti-colonial struggles from Indonesia to Algeria. The program of secular modernization undertaken by the Kemalist regime provided a model for the modernizing autocracies of the inter-war and early post-war periods, with Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, King Amanullah of Afghanistan, and the early leaders of the Arab nationalist movements drawing in varying degrees on the Turkish example. The model of state-led industrial development under a single-party regime committed to ideological modernization was widely emulated in the decolonizing world of the 1950s and 1960s, with Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, and various other Arab nationalist leaders explicitly modeling their political programs on the Atatürk precedent. The contemporary debate over the relationship between Islam, secularism, and political modernity continues to be conducted in terms substantially shaped by the example of the Turkish case, and Atatürk himself has remained, more than three quarters of a century after his death, one of the most cited reference points in the political imagination of the Islamic and developing worlds.

Conclusion: the Meaning of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

It remains, at the end of this long account of his life, to attempt some final estimate of the significance of his career and of the historical meaning of his person. He was, in the simplest characterization, the founder of a state, and the state he founded has continued to function as a constitutional republic for nearly a century since his death, has resisted successfully the political and territorial pressures that destroyed many of the comparable polities established in the same period, has integrated itself into the European and the North Atlantic international systems through its membership in the Council of Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and has remained one of the principal regional powers of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Turkish state of the twenty-first century is recognizably the state that he constructed in the years between 1923 and 1938, with the territorial boundaries he established at Lausanne, the constitutional framework he inaugurated in the proclamation of the republic, the legal codes he caused to be adopted in 1926, the alphabet he imposed in 1928, the secular separation of religious institutions from public life that he completed in 1924, the integration of women into public life that he initiated in the 1920s and 1930s, and the broad ideological orientation toward European modernity that he asserted as the fundamental commitment of the new state.

He was also, in a more controversial sense, the maker of a national identity, the proponent of a particular conception of what it meant to be a Turk in the modern world, and the architect of a cultural transformation that severed the new Turkey from the Ottoman past, from the Islamic religious traditions that had defined the public culture of the empire, and from the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character that had been the principal feature of the imperial state. The cultural transformation was carried through with a degree of coercion and a degree of disregard for the autonomy of religious and traditional communities that has been the subject of legitimate historical criticism, and the long-term consequences of the cultural revolution have remained, throughout the subsequent century, a source of continued political contestation within Turkish society. The Islamic political movements that have come to dominate Turkish public life in the early twenty-first century have undertaken a partial reassessment of the Kemalist heritage, restoring to public visibility religious practices and symbols that had been suppressed under the early republican regime, while preserving in their essentials the territorial, constitutional, and institutional foundations of the state that Atatürk created.

He was, in his own person, a figure of extraordinary historical capacity and of evident personal limitation. His professional gifts as a soldier were of the highest order, his political and administrative abilities were of the first rank, his understanding of the broad historical situation in which he operated was unusually clear, his capacity to inspire and direct the energies of his collaborators was remarkable, and his personal courage in the moments of greatest danger was beyond question. He was also, in less attractive aspects of his character, a man of considerable personal vanity, of a controlling and at times vindictive temperament, of a marked inability to sustain intimate personal relationships, and of a self-destructive personal regime in his later years that brought him to an early death at an age when his powers might have continued for another fifteen or twenty years. He embodied, in his own person, the contradictions and the costs of the project to which he had devoted his life, and the assessment of his historical significance has been from the moment of his death and will probably remain for as long as his memory endures a matter of deep and irreducible controversy.

What is beyond serious dispute is the magnitude of his achievement, the consequences of which continue to shape the political life of one of the principal states of the eastern Mediterranean and through that state the broader history of the contemporary Islamic and developing worlds. The Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who emerged from the catastrophes of the late Ottoman state to construct in fifteen years a modern republic of nearly twenty million inhabitants, equipped with the legal, educational, and cultural institutions of a European national state and integrated as a sovereign actor into the international order, accomplished, by any measure, one of the most consequential political transformations of the twentieth century. The republic he founded has been the principal vehicle of his historical memory, the principal institutional embodiment of his ideological legacy, and the principal evidence of the magnitude and the durability of what he achieved. He remains, nearly nine decades after his death, one of the few political figures of the twentieth century who created the state he led and whose state has outlasted him, who imposed upon his country a program of cultural and institutional reform of breathtaking ambition and whose program has endured in its essentials through every subsequent political transformation, and who fashioned for his nation an image and an identity that have continued to define its place in the world.