Kemalist historiography in the context of "Kemal Atatürk"

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (c. 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and statesman who was the founder of the Republic of Turkey —after the fall of its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire— and served as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He led sweeping reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and socio-political theories became known as Kemalism. Atatürk's personality cult and the Kemalist historiography developed around it have had significant and ongoing influences on Turkey's political culture and historical narrative.

Born in Salonica in the Ottoman Empire, his early military career saw him involved in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars. As a member of the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks, he played an important part in political events of the late Ottoman Empire, such as the Young Turk Revolution and the 31 March Incident. He rose to prominence with his role in the Defence of Gallipoli during World War I. Following the defeat of the empire after the war, he led the Turkish National Movement, which resisted the empire's partition among the victorious Allied powers. Establishing the provisional "Ankara government", he defeated the forces sent by the Allies, thus emerging victorious from the Turkish War of Independence. During and after the war, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia outside of Istanbul, including the Kars region invaded by the Kemalist armies, was largely completed via large-scale massacres, flight, expulsions, and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. His government subsequently proceeded to abolish the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in its place in 1923.

Rıza Nur (30 August 1879 – 8 September 1942) was a Turkish surgeon, politician and writer. He was prominent in the years immediately after the First World War, where he served as a cabinet minister but was subsequently marginalised, and became a critic of Atatürk. His acclaimed autobiography Hayat ve Hatıratım was written from exile in France and Egypt as an alternative narrative to Atatürk's famous speech Nutuk that has dominated the historiography of Turkey. Like Halide Edib and Rauf Orbay, Rıza Nur's work is part of a body of early Republican literature that sought plurality in the increasingly authoritarian Turkish Republic.