Book Talk: “Kızıl Yıldız: Sovyetler Birliği Tarihi”
Date and Time: March 6, 2026, 12:30
Venue: A130 Seminar Room, FEASS
Speakers: Onur İşçi and Samuel J. Hirst.
Book Abstract: Kızıl Yıldız (Kronik Kitap, 2025) offers a novel Turkish-language history of the Soviet Union. İşçi and Hirst move beyond Cold War narratives that cast the USSR as a radical ideological experiment, one that resulted in a fundamentally different version of modernity from what was found in capitalist societies. Instead, the authors write the history of the Soviet Union as a history of development, unquestionably shaped by Marxist-Leninist ideology but nevertheless situated in the broader story of twentieth-century global capitalism. Each chapter of Kızıl Yıldız begins and ends with a cultural figure (from poets to novelists to ballerinas to rock stars), as this is an all-encompassing survey that shows how the Bolsheviks’ attempt to transform an agricultural society into an industrialized superpower touched all aspects of Soviet society. İşçi and Hirst draw on their own research on Soviet-Turkish interactions to create a geographic frame of reference that differs from standard accounts which emphasize Soviet-US comparisons.
Onur İşçi is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University.
Sam Hirst is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University.