TALKING TURKEY

As usual, you have written an interesting article about an interesting book and issue. I shall make it a point to read David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace”--a catchy and, it seems, apt title.

Does Fromkin point out that the term Turk was and still is an ethnic slur and arose from slang usage? A “Turk” is someone from the Steppes who refuses to be, or is incapable of being, absorbed into a “higher” culture.

It wasn’t until Ataturk came along that the term was turned from one of opprobrium into one of national and personal pride. Hence, the legitimization of the term with the birth of Turkey.

How does this affect your argument? You claim that religion rather than nationalism may be the stimulus to the recent Azeri and future Turkic uprisings in the Soviet Union. But that misses the point as to how the religion got to the “Turks.”

It wasn’t by way of missionaries from Mecca, the way most of early northern Christianity branched out from Rome. There was no institutionalized “church” to spread the faith. Instead there was the “court” and its “culture.”

Thus, religion came to the “Turks” as a part of their cultural assimilation, turning many into not just Moslems but also Persians--just as some, as you say, were assimilated into the culture of China. Now, when the Russians took Turkic land from the Persians, the reverse process never occurred. The Russians were not only Christians but had no “language” or “culture” of assimilation.

Pushkin was still a teen-ager. Russia was not--and still isn’t--a culture of assimilation. That is one of the major failures of Bolshevism.

DONALD SHOJAI

SAN DIEGO