Hikmet Ali Kıvılcımlı (1902, Pristina, Kosovo Vilayet, Ottoman Empire – 1971, Belgrade) was a Turkish communist leader, theoretician, writer, publicist, and translator. He was a founder of the Vatan Partisi (VP). Life and career Kıvılcımlı was born in Kosovo in 1902. His family migrated to Istanbul in 1912 in the aftermath of the Balkan wars. On the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Kıvılcımlı was a medical student at the military academy. It was during this period that he came into contact with communist politics and first became a member of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP). Prior to its closure in 1925, Kıvılcımlı was writing the special worker supplements for the TKP newspaper Aydınlık. He was also involved in labour organising during this period, and was appointed leader of the party's Youth branch in 1925. However, in 1925 the CHP government outlawed the Communist Party and Kıvılcımlı was arrested and imprisoned. Kıvılcımlı was again arrested in 1929 due to his political activity and ongoing links with the now illegal Turkish Communist party and imprisoned in Elaziğ, in Eastern Turkey for 4 years. Between 1925 and 1950 he was arrested frequently and served several jail terms. Kıvılcımli was one of the first translators of Marx’s Capital into Turkish, publishing sections prior to his arrest and subsequent 15-year prison sentence in 1938. Kıvılcımli was one of the few people of his era to be active and influential in several generations of Turkish Communism. He criticized the TKP because of its policy towards the administration of the Democrat Party (DP) in the 1950s. He was founder of the Vatan Partisi (VP) in 1954. The party was closed down in 1957, and Kıvılcımli imprisoned with other party leaders. In 1960 he has already spent more than 20 years in prison. Later he was founder and director of the Tarihsel Maddecilik Yayınları publishing house in 1965, which published many of his works. He also was a co-founder of the İşsizlik ve Pahalılıkla Savaş Derneği (Turkish: Society for Struggle against Unemployment and Cost of Living, İPSD) on 19 May 1968. He wrote a great many articles in Aydinlik, Sosyalist, Türk Solu and Ant between 1965 and 1971, including a critque of theYön publication of the 1960s. In 1970, Kıvılcımli and his supporters were active in the Federation of Revolutionary Youth of Turkey (Turkish: Devrimci Gençlik, DEV-GENÇ), a Marxist-Leninist Organisation founded in 1965. He died at