S. N. UTURGAURI, N. Y. ULCHENKO. TURGUT OZAL-PRIME MINISTER AND PRESIDENT OF TURKEY, MOSCOW: Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2009, 128 p. (Vostok: Historical Portraits)

Russian historical science has traditionally focused mainly on the study of the" objective " course of the historical process. Specific historical figures directly involved in this process rarely became the object of special attention. This was also the case in Oriental studies. Relatively recently, scientists have begun to move away from the established tradition: they have come to realize that the nature of social development largely depends on who is at the helm of state and political power. This explains the increased attention to historical figures who have played a special role in the history of various countries, including the East.

This new trend is reflected in a peer-reviewed monograph. It is symptomatic that it opens the series of works of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences "East: historical Portraits". In the preface to the book, V. V. Naumkin, Director of the Institute and Chairman of the Editorial Board of the new series, writes: "Public interest in major figures of Russian and world history has been steadily growing in recent years... At the same time, if the works devoted to the largest state, political and religious figures in the history of Russia and Western countries are now numbered in the hundreds, then studies on the leaders of Eastern countries are not numerous. This gap is what our series is designed to fill" (p. 8).

The hero of the book by S. N. Uturgauri and N. Y. Ulchenko is the Prime Minister and President of Turkey Turgut Ozal, whose importance for modern Turkey is very great. He entered it, according to many, as the second most important statesman after Kemal Ataturk.1
1 See about Ataturk in Russian: Rozaliev Yu. N. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ocherk zhizni i deyatel'nosti [Essay on Life and Activity], Moscow: Vostochnaya litra, 1995; Zhevakhov A. Ataturk, Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2008 (ZhZL).

page 200
T. Ozal led the country for almost 10 years, from December 1983 to April 1993, first as Prime Minister, after winning the first parliamentary elections of the Fatherland Party headed by him after the end of military rule, and then from the end of 1989 as president, elected indirectly in Turkey. Before becoming Prime Minister, he spent about two years developing the Turkish government's economic program. Ozal would have remained president until 1996, but for a heart attack that suddenly shortened his life.

During the decade in power, as follows from the book, he managed to do a lot. Having his own view on the socio-political and economic development of Turkish society in the last three decades of the XX century, as well as his concept of its reform in accordance with the needs of the time, Turgut Ozal helped to bring the country out of a deep economic and political crisis, clearly demonstrated the advantages of a liberal economy combined with the movement from an authoritarian regime to democracy. Ozal's reforms were risky and not always popular, but they brought great benefits to Turkey - as a result, it eventually developed a powerful middle class. The book shows that, being a talented tactician in the political struggle, partly "undercover", hidden from the public eye, he clearly saw strategic goals. Ozal certainly contributed to the establishment of democracy and market-based, private-property relations in Turkey. As noted in the book, he left the country a legacy of a multi-vector foreign policy - in addition to traditional ties with Western countries, with the United States and Western Europe, he added strengthening contacts with the Muslim world. After the collapse of the USSR, Turgut Ozal attached particular importance to strengthening ties with the new post-Soviet Turkic-speaking states. However, this aspect of his activity, which did not receive the continuation that he expected in the future, is only mentioned in passing in the book (p. 68). On the other hand, such a really important point of his political program as novelty in the approach to the Kurdish issue is rightly emphasized (pp. 58-61). Ozal's innovations later "sprouted" in Turkey with quite strong shoots.

The book about Ozal consists of three chapters. The first two political biographies ("The Path to Politics "and" At the Top of Olympus") seem to have been written mainly by the literary critic S. N. Uturgauri, while the third chapter," Political Economy in Ozal", was written by the economist N. Y. Ulchenko. The fact that the political science work is carried out by specialists in the field of culture and economics should not be surprising: Oriental studies remains a complex science, and an orientalist, by definition, is called upon to have some degree of knowledge of all spheres of life of the country chosen for his study.

The pages devoted to the biography of Turgut Ozal are read with great interest. Briefly, but succinctly, the book tells about his modest non-metropolitan background, his student years marked by sporadic participation in opposition speeches, regular visits to mosques, obtaining a technical education (electrical engineer), starting a job and interning in the United States. These and subsequent pages give a non-specialist on Turkey a sense of the country's history that is usually not drawn from special academic works. The story of Ozal's later career in public service, as a prominent adviser and economist, and later as a private entrepreneur, one of the founders of two pro - Islamic foundations, and the head of the country's most powerful Employers ' Association, is of great interest.

Thanks to interesting details drawn from Turkish sources, the book recreates the specific political atmosphere that characterized the country at various stages associated with the involvement of the hero of the book. Ozal, again, was not a professional politician and came to it as a technocrat economist after several years of not only public service, but also successful business activities.

Ozal's connection to Turkish economic policy began in 1979, when he became an economic adviser to the Prime Minister and developed a liberal program of commodity-market regulation based on close interaction with the world market. This program can probably be considered an early analogue of many liberal models that have been tried in a large number of countries, including Russia. However, the political climate is not always favorable for the implementation of such programs. The book tells about a dramatic episode related to T. Ozal's agreement to join the government created by the military after the coup of September 12, 1980, and the ambivalent reaction to this step

page 201
on the part of his former boss, dismissed and temporarily arrested Prime Minister Suleiman Demirel.

Equally interesting, especially in the light of the further development of the country's political history, is the attitude of the Turkish generals to Ozal's pro-Islamic views and "inclinations". One of the new parties admitted by the military to the November 1983 elections was the Fatherland Party, which he created at the last moment. The military, led by the country's President, General Kenan Evren, sought to strictly follow the six principles of Kemalism, including laicism (secularism). However, Islam has already begun its ascent as a political factor in Turkey. Traditionally, the positions of Sufi orders (tariqas) were strong in it. Turgut Ozal secretly belonged to one of them, the Naqshbandiyah order, 2 he performed five prayers and visited Mecca. As noted in the book, after his death, former President Evren wrote that if he had known about Ozal's membership in the tariqa, he would not have allowed him to participate in the elections. S. N. Uturgauri believes that the retired general-president is lying and the authorities actually knew about Ozal's "sins", but helped, by some accounts, Americans who found his liberal views on Turkey's economic evolution more important than religious feelings and affiliations.

In the third chapter of the book, the most important directions of Ozal's economic policy are analyzed in great detail. Ulchenko focuses on the dilemma between the implementation of the liberal model and the need to get its support from the broad masses of the population, because liberalism in the economy often causes stress (recall our "shock therapy"), misunderstanding, and leads to real losses for ordinary citizens.

Important and interesting are the author's arguments that by the time of market reforms, a stable type of populism had developed in Turkey, behind which a "state-centered matrix" of socio-economic or "societal" development was hidden (p.74). Within the framework of this populist tradition, which developed mainly after 1950, the liberal reformer Ozal was forced to act. The analysis undertaken in the book, which is quite complex in its presentation, is therefore not narrowly economic in nature, but is projected onto political tasks related to the economy.

According to N. Y. Ulchenko, the specifics of the course pursued by T. Ozal lie in the deep populist subtext. This means that he was forced to shape his essentially unpopular economic policy as populist, "focused on meeting the economic aspirations of the most significant electoral groups" (p.74). Moreover, this would not have been necessary if it had not been for the return to a multi-party system in 1983, caused by domestic political reasons and pressure from Turkey's Western allies. The implementation of a fairly consistent and strict liberal course for Turkish conditions was confronted with such phenomena as growing property differentiation in society and stable paternalistic expectations of the electorate, which counted not on aggravating, but on smoothing social stratification. In this perspective, Ozal's economic policy, according to N. Y. Ulchenko, ceases to look contradictory, but its internal logic opens up as a policy that combined inevitable concessions to public opinion with measures for deep structural restructuring of the economy based on the principles of the market and openness to the outside world.

The contradictions raised in the book on the path of liberal market reforms are certainly not unique to Turkey. It is a pity that the authors avoid drawing analogies with the corresponding policies in Russia and other socialist states. Apparently, the main principles of socialism as a real policy were precisely the priority of the public sector and populism, focusing on the dependent, paternalistic sentiments of the masses. And this kind of policy was carried out not only in the countries of the socialist camp, but also in those states of Asia belonging to the opposite bloc, where the private sector was inferior to the state in key, economically most important areas, and state regulation was focused on creating a system of ineffective, but quite "populist" subsidies and subsidies.

This shortcoming of the book is more than covered by the fact that in the domestic literature on the Turkish economy, the issue of the ideological and propaganda component is discussed

2 The appendix to the book contains a short essay by A. D. Knysh "Baha al-din Naqshband and Naqshbandiya". In itself, it is certainly interesting, although it does little to explain Ozal's personality and the role that belonging to the Order played in his views and actions.

page 202
As far as I know, this is almost the first time that Ozal's film has been staged. The process of studying its reforms and transformations was mainly at the empirical stage, that is, at the stage of collecting facts about the country's economic development during Ozal's tenure as Prime Minister and president. Even the task of identifying the principles of its economic policy was not fully solved.

Given this circumstance, N. Y. Ulchenko's assessment of the methods and results of the Ozala policy is of interest. The ambitious nature of the tasks explains the forced choice of "fiscal authoritarianism" as one of the main means of rapid economic reform. This, in particular, refers to the rapid development of extra-budgetary funds as a tool for subordinating directly to the Government (i.e., the Prime Minister) a significant part of state revenues. Starting the reform ahead of the "international schedule", in 1984 - 1985 the government" jerkily " abolished the monopoly of the public sector on a number of sectors of the economy, opening them up to local and foreign companies. Together with the liberalization of investment activities, there was a liberalization of imports, export promotion, etc.All this rather typical set of liberal measures in Turkey looked so impressive, apparently due to the fact that statism has long taken deep and strong roots there. Yes, and Ozal's commitment to semi-authoritarian management methods (Yeltsin and Gaidar in one person?) it was probably a consequence of the same traditions. At the same time, the author's conclusion is quite justified that the contradictory results achieved by Turkey under Ozal do not negate the fact that the time of today's dynamic Turkey is counted from the period of his reforms.

The third chapter of the book under review is perhaps somewhat beyond the scope of a series of historical portraits. Some of its provisions are theoretical in nature and need serious special analysis. At the same time, small repetitions in the second and third chapters are also noticeable.

All this does not reduce the interest in the reviewed book. It is worth noting the novelty of its genre itself: a successful attempt is made to combine a story about the life of an outstanding Turkish politician and economist with an analysis of his theoretical views and practical steps. It is possible to count on the fact that the books of the new series of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences will find their readers both among specialists and in wider circles.

Permanent link to this publication: