Children of Trans-Empire: Nâzım Hikmet and the First Generation of Turkish Students at Moscow's Communist University of the East

This article looks at the stories surrounding the arrival in Moscow of the Turkish writer Nâzım Hikmet, his traveling companions, and a broader population of Turkish communists in Moscow in the early 1920s. Drawing upon previously untapped archival sources from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow and other materials, this article focuses upon three issues in particular. First of all, it provides a context for Nâzım Hikmet's early years in Moscow that previously has not been offered in biographical studies of Nâzım's life. Secondly, this article shines a light on the activities of Turkish communists living in the USSR in the 1920s, a long-neglected story that engages scholarly literature relating to both the Turkish Communist Party and international communists living in the USSR more generally. Thirdly and most importantly, this article relates to a new and exciting historiography examining trans-imperial mobility between the Russian and Ottoman empires. While this historiography has typically focused upon the late imperial era and ends with the First World War, this article demonstrates that these practices were revived in the aftermath of the war. Trans-imperial mobility continued into the post-imperial era.