With a PoD anywhere between 1900 and 1918, how can enough of the right strings be pulled so that the Ottoman Empire, not Russia (or maybe also them), becomes the stage of a socialist revolution in the early 20th century? One condition must be that this new "Ottoman USSR" holds on to Kurdistan, Iraq, and all of Syria at least. Holding Rumelia and Arabia is optional, but encouraged.
Could increased political dominance by conservative islamic forces (mostly supporting the sultan Abdul Hamid II), such as a successful counter-revolution in 1909, push the underground Young Turk movement sufficiently to the left as to make them more-or-less similar to the Russian bolsheviks?
 
It's... quite frankly not plausible. While universal literacy is not a requirement for a Socialist revolution, it strongly helps as the nature of socialist/communist propaganda requires at least a basic amount of education to grasp properly. The Ottoman Empire had frankly horrible literacy rates, even towards the end of its lifespan. Furthermore, there aren't any industrial heartlands in the Ottoman Empire, as they had to import almost all their heavy industry, and prior to the success of Mao's communist movement, the core of a Communist state was deemed best among the working class of an industrial society. The USSR was still a mostly agrarian state, but there was enough workers and a large enough industrial base to form the basis for the October Revolution.

Education among the subjects of the Empire was quite frankly rather appalling; education was limited, and most of it was either religion or language, perhaps with a few simple maths and scientific subjects if they were lucky. You'd have to be aware of Marxism to begin with, and I doubt most people in the Ottoman Empire would have heard of him, much less understand his philosophy.

Quite frankly, you need a PoD of _before_ 1900 to make this work. Or at least to make a Socialist Revolution possible before the Empire dissolves.
 

Germaniac

Donor
There were some very early socialist organizations centered around Salonika and Macedonia, but outside of Rumelia there was almost nothing.

So you could probably pull it off, but I really doubt they could hold anything in Asia.
 
According to the Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire the first socialist party in the Ottoman Empire wasn't founded until 1909--and it was in Salonika which was hardly demographically typical of the empire. (It had the largest industrial work force in the Ottoman Empire, and was 40 percent Jewish, with "Jewish workers [who] were drawn to radical politics that stressed class differences...") https://books.google.com/books?id=QjzYdCxumFcC&pg=PA504 (If there were any earlier socialist parties in the Empire I suspect that they were simply extensions of the Bulgarian or Serbian socialist parties.) There is no way the Turks themselves were ready for socialist revolution.
 
According to the Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire the first socialist party in the Ottoman Empire wasn't founded until 1909--and it was in Salonika which was hardly demographically typical of the empire. (It had the largest industrial work force in the Ottoman Empire, and was 40 percent Jewish, with "Jewish workers [who] were drawn to radical politics that stressed class differences...") https://books.google.com/books?id=QjzYdCxumFcC&pg=PA504 (If there were any earlier socialist parties in the Empire I suspect that they were simply extensions of the Bulgarian or Serbian socialist parties.) There is no way the Turks themselves were ready for socialist revolution.
Let alone the Arabs, Kurds, and other groups under the Empire's rule. There was a reason the Ottoman Empire was know as "the Sick Man of Europe"; they were so far behind the rest of Europe without a chance to catch up with the other major powers.
 
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