Abstract:

When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was trying to find the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the north of the Black Sea in the 1920s, he headed out with the slogan of ‘Socialism is accounting’. Lenin benefited from the double-entry bookkeeping method to find the socialist regime. While utilizing it, he did not either have time or made an effort to calculate debts or search for an accounting order that was more appropriate for the regime instead of the double-entry bookkeeping method that emerged to carry out the accounting system of debt-receivable relationship and was highly developed in Russia. Throughout the period in which the socialist order was implemented, the double-entry bookkeeping method renewed itself and changed in a way that it could meet the needs. In the books written by the famous accounting historian Yaroslav Sokolov, it is possible to follow socialism’s adventure of benefiting from the double-entry bookkeeping method. This adventure is full of interesting developments and searches. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Mustafa Kemal who was a young Ottoman General and grew up with the Western European culture struggled to establish the Republic of Turkey following the ruling standards of the Western European countries within the framework of secular order in the south of the Black Sea these years. The difficulties he faced were different from those Lenin did. Mustafa Kemal intended to move Turkish society from the Islamic infrastructure to a social structure of modern Western European countries. He was determined to change many old habits within the mixed economy. One of these habits was the tax system implemented within the Islamic rules in the Middle East for centuries. The difficulty thereof was that the accounting records were not taxed in the Middle East until that time. As the taxes were levied over the accounting books kept according to the double-entry bookkeeping method after the reform carried out, the founders of the Republic had to affiliate the accounting unit to the Ministry of Finance, which is the tax law. Thus, the field of accounting had to develop based on taxation. However, the double-entry bookkeeping method was disciplined within commercial law. The founders of the Republic continued binding the accounting unit to the tax law throughout the 20th century and the Turkish accounting thought had to develop within the framework of taxation and tax audit. To sum up, it is understood that both states established in the north and south of the Black Sea in the 1920s had different accounting practices, and not enough examinations thereon were carried out in the history of accounting.

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