Following centuries of military confrontation between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, Soviet Russia and Kemalist Türkiye became bound by remarkably close commercial and financial ties.
In the 1920s, Soviet Russia contributed nearly eight tonnes of gold from its imperial reserves to Türkiye—amounting to the entire annual budget of the nascent Turkish Republic and double its military expenditure. During the war against the Allied interventionists, Mustafa Kemal Pasha received from the Bolsheviks more than half of the cartridges used in military operations, a quarter of the rifles and artillery pieces, and a third of the shell supplies. Lenin’s government provided Türkiye with the equipment and raw materials required to construct two powder mills, transferred its own military hardware—including two destroyers—and facilitated the duty-free delivery of armaments purchased in Germany via Russian territory.
The Turkish Five-Year Plan and Sümerbank
During the Great Depression, the Foreign Trade Bank of the USSR (now VTB) extended half a million roubles (equivalent to roughly 4 to 5 million USD at the time, or hundreds of millions in modern economic value) to support the stabilization of the Turkish lira, while Soviet foreign trade entities advanced an additional 3 million roubles (roughly 25 to 30 million USD in 1930s value, translating to billions in today’s relative economic terms) for the procurement of Turkish goods.
Between 1934 and 1938, Türkiye instituted its own First Five-Year Industrial Plan (Birinci Beş Yıllık Sanayi Planı, BBYSP). The second was swiftly abandoned with the onset of WWII, rendering this inaugural blueprint the first and last of its kind. Not merely the concept of a five-year industrialisation plan, but the requisite funds for its implementation were supplied to Atatürk by the USSR, which offered industrial loans at the lowest interest rates in the world.
These funds were channelled into newly established state-owned banks tasked with building specific sectors from the ground up. For instance, 8.5 million liras were borrowed from the USSR to develop the textile industry, prompting the creation of Sümerbank—Atatürk being intensely fond of linking his young state to the ancient civilisations of Anatolia, allocating textiles to the Sumerians and electrification to the Hittites.
From Power Looms to Cultural Spaces: The Legacy of Merinos
I stumbled upon these historical intricacies quite by accident when, whilst visiting Bursa, we found ourselves within the Textile Industry Museum. It occupies some former halls of the Merinos weaving mill, erected as part of that very First Five-Year Industrial Plan. Alas, Türkiye’s textile sector has seen better days, and the Bursa factory closed in the early 2000s as the new owners of Sümerbank set about shedding unprofitable assets. Yet, rather than yet another soulless residential development in the city centre, the site now hosts a handsome park complete with exhibition and convention spaces—surely a rather civilised example of urban renewal.
Symbols of Abundance and Soviet Style
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