Between Empire and Nation-State
Albanians played a far larger role than Jews.^145 Just as Marxists praised the
Jewish role in promoting progress culminating in the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion, CUP members praised the Dönme role in 1908.
The overrepresentation of Jews among Bolsheviks allowed people to as-
sume that the Bolshevik revolution was the work of Jews and to equate
Bolshevism and Judaism. Later, as Jews continued to fill prominent roles
in the early Soviet state, their enemies considered the USSR to be run by a
Jewish government, or to be a communist-Jewish regime.^146 The overrep-
resentation of Dönme in the CUP allowed people to believe the revolution
of 1908 was a Dönme plot, and later to equate Kemalism with Dönme re-
ligion, even though most of the new Kemalist elite were not Dönme and
most Dönme were not members of the Kemalist elite. Although there is
no evidence that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had any Jewish ancestors, he was
considered to have launched a state on behalf of secret Jews. Both Lenin’s
and Atatürk’s genealogies were suppressed. Revolutionaries who were as-
sumed to have Jewish backgrounds but did not consider themselves Jewish
played down their origins.