Russia Beyond
By Boris Egorov
Oct. 11, 2021
[The Soviet Union’s diplomatic onslaught on Turkey brought nothing but
Ankara's accession to NATO.]
In June 1945, the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power: Nazi
Germany had been defeated, the whole of Eastern Europe was firmly
inside Moscow's sphere of influence, and the Red Army, the strongest
in the world at the time, was preparing to enter the war against Japan
and deliver a decisive blow.
In these circumstances, the Soviet leadership believed it was high
time to exert diplomatic pressure on Turkey, with which it had a
number of important military, political and territorial disputes. The
Soviets’ newfound authority and enormous influence, as well as the
fact that the Western allies desperately needed Soviet help in the war
against the Japanese, convinced Stalin that dealing with Ankara would
be like taking candy from a baby. Subsequent events proved otherwise.
Rough neighborhood
Turkey's policy during WWII had provoked highly contradictory feelings
in the Kremlin. On the one hand, Anakra’s proclaimed neutrality and
refusal to let the Wehrmacht through its territory were welcomed by
Moscow in every conceivable way.
On the other hand, in the darkest days of the Soviet-German
confrontation, the Turks maintained a large grouping of troops on the
USSR’s southern border. In the fall of 1941, at the invitation of
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Turkish Army Generals Ali Fuad Erden
and Hüseyin Hüsnü Emir Erkilet visited the occupied Soviet
territories.
The Kremlin believed that in the event of the defeat of the Red Army,
and the fall of Moscow and Stalingrad, the Turks might invade the
Soviet Caucasus. “In mid-1942, no one could guarantee that [Turkey]
would not side with Germany,” wrote General Semyon Shtemenko in his
memoirs. To repel a possible attack required forces that were urgently
needed elsewhere.
Moreover, the USSR was convinced that Ankara had repeatedly violated
the 1936 Montreux Convention regarding the status of the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles, turning a blind eye to Kriegsmarine auxiliary warships
entering the straits under the guise of merchant vessels. The question
of Turkish sovereignty over the straits had vexed Stalin even before
the war; now in 1945 he had the opportunity to address it.
Soviet onslaught
Moscow was readying itself for a diplomatic conflict with Turkey,
which the latter’s joining the anti-Hitler coalition on Feb. 23, 1945,
did nothing to avert. In March of that same year, the USSR denounced
the Soviet-Turkish Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality of 1925, and on
June 7 the Turkish ambassador to the USSR, Selim Sarper, was summoned
to a meeting with People’s Commissar (Minister) of Foreign Affairs
Vyacheslav Molotov.The Turkish side was notified that, since Ankara
was unable to exercise proper control over the straits, henceforth
they would be overseen jointly with the Soviet Union, whose navy would
be provided with several bases in the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
In addition, the USSR insisted on revising the Treaty of Moscow of
1921, by which the Bolsheviks had transferred to Turkey the cities of
Kars, Ardahan and Artvin, plus the extensive surrounding territories,
which had previously belonged to the Russian Empire. Since the
governments of Lenin and Kemal Ataturk had been on friendly terms and
jointly opposed the Entente, this concession was then regarded in
Moscow as an important and timely step toward building a strong,
long-term alliance.
In the late 1940s, however, the USSR viewed the situation through a
very different lens. The Soviet press wrote about the “treachery of
the Turks,” who had taken advantage of the weakness of Soviet Russia
and the Soviet Caucasian republics, about the “forced removal” of
small indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, and about the
need to reunite Soviet Armenians and Georgians with their brothers on
the other side of the border. “There are no reasonable arguments
against the return of these territories to their rightful owners, the
Armenian and Georgian peoples,” stated the People’s Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs in a report for the country’s leadership in August
1945.
Counteraction
Moscow’s pressure provoked a sharp rise in anti-Soviet sentiment in
Turkish society. Stalin was branded the “heir of the Russian tsars,”
who for centuries had sought to seize the Black Sea straits. “The
leaders of the Red order are the continuation of the Romanovs,”
declared the Mejlis, the Turkish legislature.
The question of the return of “territories legally belonging to the
Soviet Union” and the revision of the status of the Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles was raised by the USSR in negotiations with the Western
powers, too. “The Montreux Convention is directed squarely against
Russia... Turkey has been granted the right to close the straits to
our shipping, not only in the case of war, but also when Turkey
considers there to be a threat of war, which Turkey itself
defines...,” Stalin stated at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945: “It
turns out that a small state supported by Britain can hold a large
state by the throat and not let it pass... The issue concerns the free
passage of our ships through the Black Sea and back. But since Turkey
is weak [...] we must have some kind of guarantee that this freedom of
passage will be ensured.”
Whilst verbally agreeing on the need to review the agreement on the
straits, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President
Harry Truman diplomatically rejected all of the USSR’s demands for
bases and claims to Turkish territories. Nor, as it turned out, was
the Montreux Convention revised.
After the defeat of the Japanese and the end of WWII, relations
between the former allies deteriorated rapidly, with the Turkish
question acting as one of the catalysts of the incipient Cold War.
Churchill made a point of raising the issue in his famous Iron Curtain
speech in Fulton on March 5, 1946, which effectively marked the
beginning of the great standoff.
Its diplomatic pressure on Ankara brought no dividends to the Soviet
Union. On the contrary, it expedited Turkey’s rapprochement with the
U.S. and Britain. As early as 1952, it joined the North Atlantic
Alliance.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, “in the name of preserving good
neighborly relations and strengthening peace and security,” Moscow
finally withdrew its claims on Turkey. Years later, one of the main
players in those events, Molotov himself, described it as an
“untimely, impracticable undertaking.”
“Stalin I consider to be a wonderful politician, but he made
mistakes,” noted the former People’s Commissar.
In 1957, the new Soviet head of state, Nikita Khrushchev, gave an
emotional assessment of the Stalinist policy: “We had defeated the
Germans. It was head-spinning. Turks, comrades, friends. Let’s write a
note, and they’ll immediately hand over the Dardanelles. No one is
that foolish. The Dardanelles are not Turkey, it’s a nexus of states.
We terminated the friendship treaty and spat in their faces... It was
stupid. We ended up losing friendly Turkey and now have U.S. bases in
the south, with our southern flank in the crosshairs...”