Turkey drifting from the West towards Russia?
By Andrei Isaev
In the years of the Cold War, Turkey positioned itself at the vanguard of the free, i.e. Western world, confronting the so-called “evil empire”. Many Turks, especially in the hinterland, truly believed that the words “communism” and “terrorism” meant the same, while newspapers wrote about the “oppressed” status of millions of Turks in the USSR. But everything changed at the end of the 20th century. The 1990s became a period of unprecedented growth in bilateral trade, as Turkish contractors rushed to tap into Russian expanses by erecting a variety of buildings of disputable architectural value. The collapse of the USSR gave rise to expectations of the arrival of a “Turkic century” and a “Turkic world from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China.” According to many in Turkey, the Turkic-speaking people living in Russia were to occupy a place in this world too.
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