Turkish nationalism has become more like its Russian counterpart
Amongst the illiberal “bad guys” who have been on the up-and-up over the past decade, Putin and Erdoğan have earned perhaps the most frequent comparison amongst Western pundits. Their expansionist conceptions of geopolitics, wrapped in the symbolism of the Romanov and Ottoman dynasties, have drawn the two leaders together in spite of conflicting interests in Libya, Syria, and the South Caucasus.
Today’s Russian Federation is the legal successor to the Soviet Union, which itself emerged from the ashes of the Russian Empire. While the Turkish National Movement rose against the Ottoman government, Turkey has arguably the greatest claim to the mantle of the Ottoman state that the republic eclipsed. These imperial legacies remain very much alive in Russia and Turkey today, but in revealingly different ways.
One notable example is the overlapping vocabulary of national belonging in Russian and Turkish. The ethnonym russkii (русский), connoting Slavic Orthodox Russophone identity, is complemented by the more capacious rossiyanin (россиянин), literally a person (in this case, male) of Russia. Likewise, while Türk describes Turkish as an ethnic category, the term Türkiyeli refers to a person of Turkey, regardless of ethnicity. This shared distinction superficially captures the kindred ambiguities of Russia and Turkey today as both nation-states and inheritors of empire. Yet definitions matter far less than words’ patterns of usage. And in this respect, Russia and Turkey have often diverged.
In Russia, the difference between these two words is less controversial. The Russian Federation (Российская Федерация) includes many non-Russian entities, among them the Buddhist republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia, the famously rebellious Republic of Chechnya, and the once influential Republic of Tatarstan. The present-day Russian state celebrates the contributions of non-Russian peoples, though only under the unquestioned leadership of ethnic Russians. While right-wing nationalists in Russia have often targeted non-Russian migrants in Russia’s urban centers, and non-Russians have some limitations on their social mobility, the Russian federal system still operates as a kind of revamped, post-Soviet empire of nations.
The distinction between russkii and rossiyanin is between ethno-national identity and a broader category of civic belonging. Decades after Soviet collapse, this distinction lives on as much in the South Caucasus and Central Asia as it does in Russia itself. On a visit to Baku three and a half years ago, a cab driver asked me “who are you by nationality? (кто вы по национальности?)” My answer that I was an American did not satisfy him. “I am Azerbaijani, but by nationality I am a Turk,” he explained.
Rossiyanye represent official Russian multinationalism. The patriotic singer Oleg Gazmanov, the child of a Belarusian father and Jewish mother, croons:
For Russia and for freedom till the end,
Officers, rossiyanye, let freedom be shining forth.
The Russian Army celebrates this very kind of multinationalism in its military operations in Ukraine. This kind of messaging is an expression of a cosmopolitan notion of belonging to Russia and the state’s wariness of outright Russian ethno-nationalism. The last Russian entry in the Eurovision contest before the country’s banishment in 2022 was the ethnic-Tajik singer Manizha. Her songs, including “Not Slavic Enough” (Недославянка) and Eurovision entry “Russian Woman,” reject the simple binaries between Russian and Tajik ethnic identities. Gazmanov, Manizha, and Putin are often described as rossiyanye, a term that highlights their civic attachment to Russia. Solzhenitsyn and Patriarch Kirill, as well as many figures from the pre-1917 period, might be described as russkiye. Though many in Russia embrace rossiyan identity on their own terms, some European Russians of non-Slavic origin (say, Baltic, Finnish, Jewish, or Tatar) may seek to identify with the ethnic Russian russkii nation. Russian ethno-nationalists’ demand that such people use rossiyan reflects a longer tradition of anti-immigrant sentiment and chauvinistic attachment to Slavic Orthodox identity.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, the term Türkiyeli has been far more contentious. The idea of multinational federation never caught on in the former Ottoman lands as it did in those further north. In fact, federalist politics are most closely associated with the PKK’s theory of democratic confederalism, which calls for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey, or else with American federalism. For decades, various political movements in Turkey have associated Türkiyeli with the Kurdish left, separatism, and a Great Middle East Project (Büyük Ortadoğu Projesi) supposedly pushed by America and Israel. While this kind of thinking was derided as conspiratorial, it successfully marginalized Türkiyeli to leftist and Kurdish discourse. However, the more expansive vision of Turkish power embraced by Erdoğan in recent years has given Türkiyeli a new lease on life and brought about a harmonization of Russian and Turkish nationalist expressions of belonging.
The leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) Devlet Bahçeli, once a vociferous critic of Türkiyeli, has softened his stance. Like many pan-Turkic nationalists, he used to insist that Turkishness was not a racial or ethnic category, but one of loyalty to the state. Now he is dismissive of the Türk–Türkiyeli distinction. In a June 2024 speech, he stated that “we have nothing to say against those in foreign countries who say ‘I am Türkiyeli’ with good intention.” In October of that year, it was Bahçeli who announced the start of a new round of negotiations with the PKK. In his pronouncements on a new constitutional system, Bahçeli called for “two vice presidents, one being Alevi, the other being Kurdish.” While some commentators cheered this as a liberal gesture towards greater inclusion, it implied Sunni Turkish presidential hegemony and a sectarian style of government that some have referred to as “Lebanonification.”
While reflecting an incoherent approach to negotiate an end to the decades-long civil war between the Turkish state and the PKK, it also demonstrates an intriguing development amongst Bahçeli’s pan-Turkic nationalist followers. Since joining a coalition with Erdoğan in 2015, Bahçeli has become a sort of Turkish answer to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the erstwhile Russian chauvinist challenger (himself of mixed Russian-Jewish background) to the Russian separatist leader Boris Yeltsin in 1990. Echoing Bahçeli’s arrangement with Erdoğan, Zhirinovsky brought his (ironically named) Liberal Democratic Party into the ring of systemic opposition parties that (mostly) serve as a democratic façade. As Zhirinovsky, Bahçeli, and their movements entered as junior partners to more ambitious and inclusive right-wing figures, they had to make amends with post-imperial identifications with the Russian and Turkish states that moved beyond mere ethno-nationalism. In the Turkish case, this may make the term Türk, which Bahçeli once allowed to Armenians, Circassians, and others who supported his movement, a more limited and ethnicized category.
Indeed, opposition nationalists have become the most steadfast critics of Türkiyeli. Fenerbahçe, one of Turkey’s most popular football teams, recently came under the ownership of Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and owner of the yoghurt company Chobani. Ulukaya has built his life in the U.S., and described the challenges he faced as a Kurd in Turkey as the reason that he emigrated. Fenerbahçe’s fan base skews to the nationalist right. Its home turf, previously named for the World War II–era prime minister Şükrü Saracoğlu, who sought accommodation with Germany, has been renamed Chobani Stadium. In the new sponsorship signing ceremony, Ulukaya addressed “all Türkiyelis,” provoking the ire of İlber Ortaylı, a nationalist historian and pundit. The nationalist opposition does not have a problem with the more expansive imperial ambitions embraced by the government, but don’t want this new imperial dimension to challenge their conception of Turkishness.
For all of these terms’ defects, the continued state sanction for rossiyanin identity and broadening acceptance for the term Türkiyeli both reflect a positive idea of non-ethnonational attachment to the state. However, the underlying policy of geopolitical expansion in both countries that maintains or drives the use of these terms remains as boundlessly ambitious and rigidly hierarchical as ever. Russia emerged from the Soviet Union as a federal state and has remained so by tradition and necessity. The greater Turkey that is the dream of the current administration in Ankara will necessarily undermine the inflexible, unitary republican system that has governed the country over the past century.
Sam Harshbarger studies Modern European History at Balliol College, Oxford, UK. His current master’s project explores the intersection of Soviet nationalities policy, socialist internationalism, and the oil industry in Azerbaijan in the 1960s and 1970s.
This article first appeared on Kültürkampf.
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