2 HIKMET KIVILCIMLI’S “HISTORY THESIS” AND THE NATION-FORM National revolutionaries as modern barbarians? 1 İlker Cörüt This chapter concerns the original theses of Hikmet Kıvı lcı ml ı (1902, Pristine–1971, Belgrade), who spent more than 20 years in Turkish prisons and exile, mostly during the period of the Kemalist One-Party State (1925–1945). A monumental figure of the Turkish socialist movement, he played leading roles both as a politician and theorist from the 1920s until his death. During the 1920s he was among the leading cadres of the illegal Communist Party of Turkey (TKP); in the 1950s he led the socialist Homeland Party ( Vatan Partisi ); in the last decade of his life he tried to give direction to the rising revolutionary movements with his lectures and writings. For an active Marxist-Leninist leader who was constantly jailed and policed, he managed to write an unexpected number of books, articles, pamphlets and Turkish translations of Marxist classics, and he greatly contributed to the cir- culation of Marxist ideas among Turkish youth, working class, and intellectual circles. (For instance, Kıvı lcı ml ı was one of the first translators of Capital into Turkish, having published many sections of Capital in Turkish prior to his arrest and 15-year jail sentence in 1938). His intellectual life, however, was not limited to his incredible productivity under the harsh political conditions of anti-com- munist Turkey in the Cold War years. He was the only Turkish Marxist thinker among all generations of Turkish Marxists of his era and after who went far beyond merely adapting Marxist ideas to the national context of Turkey. Despite his life-long respect for the USSR, and unlike most Turkish socialists, Kıvı lcı ml ı never willed to be a local representative of revolutionary models imported from Moscow, Beijing, Tirana, or Havana. He was very attentive to what he called the “originality of Turkey”, and his search for better explanations for the originalities of Turkey resulted in the cornerstone of his thought: his “History Thesis” (Tarih Tezi ). Inspired mainly by Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society ([1877] 1964), Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State ([1884]