Reflections of Russia on Turkey’s Road to Unfreedom

Russia pioneered the politics of eternity, where succession was erased and imagination suffocated. Turkey has followed the same path, step by step, into its own road to unfreedom.

The limits of politics are bound to the imagination of a nation’s citizens. When a system is designed to barren imagination, the public stops expecting change, let alone reform.

Our political imagination is withered.

This is the fate of diverse societies under long-ruling authoritarian leaders. Viktor Orbán. Tayyip Erdoğan. And the master of the craft, Vladimir Putin.

Suffocating imagination takes years, blood, and an unending stream of crises, large and small.

As I have written earlier, Turkey’s anxieties rest on two foundations. One is dismemberment by foreign encroachment, rooted in the trauma of the Ottoman collapse and the Treaty of Sèvres. The other is the fear that its secular and modern trajectory might be overturned by “backward” forces, namely Islamists. The first was imprinted by imperial loss. The second by Kemalism, which transformed an empire into a modern republic and cast the military as the guardian of this revolution, defining threats, allies, and enemies.

Yet the last qu…