Turkey at a Crossroads: The Soviet Threat and Postwar Realignment, 1945–1946

Ankara at the end of World War II was a grim palimpsest—the remains of an Ottoman provincial city peeked through the republic’s modernist dreams, and upon them both had accumulated new layers of migrant poverty and coal smoke. Turkey had not been bombed or devastated by mass slaughter and war, but it was poorly armed, plagued with inflation, and diplomatically isolated. Now, the fear of Soviet aggression, which had kept the country on the fence throughout World War II, was compounded by the fear of being left out of the new international order. Turkey—and we must be cautious in our assumptions about countries that would later become NATO members—was alone. When the Big Three met at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, the Ankara government had yet to sign the Declaration by the United Nations, was excluded from the Bretton Woods conference, and, most strikingly, was still debating whether to declare war on Nazi Germany and Japan. Along with a handful of other equally isolated neutrals, Turkey was hesitant. The Turkish government’s eventual war declaration—two weeks after Yalta—was a desperate attempt to secure a seat at the San Francisco Conference. With large areas of Eastern Europe falling under Soviet control, the moment was hardly propitious for the Turks to convince British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that their fears about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s designs over the Turkish Straits and Eastern Anatolia were warranted. Looking at developments in neighboring countries, the pessimists in Turkey’s leadership had reason to anticipate Western connivance in Soviet demands for security guarantees on the Straits. The absence of any countervailing voices against Stalin meant that the Turks had to resolve their geopolitical disputes through exclusive negotiations in Moscow on Soviet terms—and the costs were high because of their prolonged neutrality.

This was the context for Turkish Ambassador Selim Sarper’s meeting with Vyacheslav Molotov at the Kremlin Palace on March 19, 1945, when the Soviet foreign minister communicated Moscow’s decision to terminate the 1925 Friendship Treaty with Turkey.¹ In their ensuing negotiations, Molotov made menacing references to Poland as the kind of fate that might befall Turkey if Ankara failed to meet two Soviet conditions for good neighborly relations: (1) the granting of naval bases to the Soviet Union for mutual defense of the Straits; and (2) border rectifications in Eastern Anatolia, which included two significant Turkish cities that had once belonged to the Russian Empire.² At Potsdam, as the Soviets haggled over terms, Turkish diplomats implored the Allies not to appease Stalin, but they had little hope.³ The main problem for the Turkish leadership was that, since Soviet and Western positions at Potsdam were incompatible, the only prudent postwar solution was a clear delineation of zones of power. And it was unclear where Turkey would fall in this new scheme. Between July 1945 and April 1946, President İsmet İnönü and his cabinet were haunted by a dreadful uncertainty. And this explains the jubilation with which Turkey’s leaders greeted the U.S.S. Missouri in the spring of 1946, when the U.S. Navy finally decided to dock its flagship in the Bosphorus, confronting the Soviet fleet in the Black Sea. For the next decade, İnönü and his successors swore enthusiastic fealty to the United States and sought to establish their country as an outpost of containment.

The war of nerves between Ankara and Moscow, which ultimately pushed the former into NATO in 1952, marks one of the most important watersheds in Turkey’s recent past.⁴ Years later, in a series of interviews with the writer Feliks Chuev, Molotov ruefully admitted that the attempt to coerce Turkey in 1945 was a mistake. When asked about the Straits, Molotov became animated and, in a stutter, proclaimed that “it was an untimely and unfeasible undertaking,” but that “he had to do what he was instructed to do.” Absolving himself of the blunder, Molotov claimed that Stalin was “a wonderful politician” but that he became “arrogant” in his last years and brushed off Molotov’s counsel.⁵ Reading between the lines of Molotov’s later disavowal of the Soviet demands, a different historian might rightly see in Stalin’s actions much bluff and bluster, but we should remember that the Turks had no way of knowing that. It was not until two months after Stalin’s death in 1953 that the new Soviet government delivered an official note to the Turkish ambassador in Moscow, repudiating their earlier demands and calling for normalization of bilateral relations.⁶ By that point, however, Ankara’s unqualified allegiance to Washington was so strong that one Soviet diplomat, Aleksei Voronin, pointed to Turkey’s over-zealous role in NATO, and remarked that the Turks were “acting more royalist than the king.”⁷

Nor would some Turks have disagreed with Voronin. Despite the geopolitical vicissitudes, the Soviet Union retained allies within the Turkish foreign ministry. Many had witnessed or played an active role in the interwar friendship between the two states. Chief among them was Tevfik Rüştü Aras—the country’s longest serving foreign minister (1925–1938)—who urged the İnönü administration to keep equidistance between the two Cold War blocs.⁸ Although the Soviets were never convinced of his proclivities, Aras developed a reputation at home as a socialist and a friend of Moscow. After his retirement in 1942, his disparagement of Turkey’s anti-Soviet diplomacy became more pronounced. In a series of newspaper columns, he pushed for a balancing act between Russia and the West. And, when later Turkish governments clashed with their U.S. ally, Aras’s position became more common. For instance, Mahmut Dikerdem, a professed Marxist and a career diplomat, embraced Aras’s position and blamed the government for alienating the Soviet Union and fabricating a threat in 1945 that had not really existed. He claimed that it was not possible to find a single document in the foreign ministerial archives that proved Stalin’s demands in 1945.⁹ Although a diplomat, Dikerdem had no personal knowledge of the Soviet-Turkish negotiations at the time since he spent the war years first in the Turkish army, then in a sanatorium in Geneva, and later at the Turkish embassy in Bern. As Turkish relations with the West have fallen from their Cold War peak, Dikerdem’s account has come to play an increasingly important role in historical scholarship.

One reason to return now to this formative moment in 1945 is that, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars have raised an increasing number of critical questions about the motives behind Turkey’s Cold War diplomacy. Challenging the conventional depiction of Turkey as the object of Soviet aggression, a group of historians have accused Turkey’s postwar leaders of fabricating a Soviet threat in order to cement an alliance with the Transatlantic camp. The crux of their argument was that the two conditions Molotov relayed to Sarper in 1945 were deliberately misconstrued as demands by the Turkish government, to orchestrate anti-communism and cash in on postwar U.S. aid. They maintained, instead, that the Soviet terms were simply counter-proposals to renew the 1925 Soviet-Turkish Treaty following a request that actually came from the Turkish side. Since the Soviet and Turkish archives were both closed at the time, this unusual counter-narrative often came from the vantage point of ideologues, who almost exclusively relied on apocryphal Turkish sources, labeling the Soviet threat as “a fairy tale.”¹⁰

Historians of the Soviet Union have long differed over whether Moscow’s policy at the end of World War II was truly expansionist or exaggerated by the United States.¹¹ Since the opening of Soviet archives, a number of influential books have demonstrated that the Soviet Union was in fact not that aggressive or hostile, at least not in the sense that George F. Kennan and the old guard of the Cold War origins debate had once claimed. Melvyn Leffler is among them, and his arguments have influenced speculation about the Turkish government’s motives. When he argued that U.S. policymakers did not believe that Soviet leaders intended to use force to achieve their goals vis-à-vis Turkey, this could be interpreted to support the critics of Turkey’s official narrative. Leffler made a convincing case that even hard-liners in the U.S. administration thought that Stalin acted with restraint. With the absence of Turkish archival records, however, Leffler relied exclusively on U.S. diplomatic sources, and while they tell us much about U.S. perspectives they do not show us the Turkish leadership’s state of panic vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

The limitations imposed by understanding Turkish policy from a U.S. perspective are readily apparent if we expand the focus to include how economic concerns exacerbated fears of a Soviet threat. Looking at U.S. diplomatic correspondence, Leffler claimed that “Turkey was not experiencing dire economic conditions, nor was it facing financial stringencies… . Hence, the most effective argument that could be made in public was that the Turkish military establishment constituted a serious burden on the Turkish economy; that burden had to be eased to ensure that the Turks would not acquiesce to Soviet demands.”¹² This last point deserves attention not only because it is wrong but also because of a certain irony. If not out of economic necessity, then why exaggerate the Soviet menace? The same Turkish scholars who criticize the official narrative about the Soviet threat actually emphasize the country’s economic problems in explaining the İnönü government’s ostensible fabrication. And the latter argument has reason. Keeping an army on a war footing cost Turkey 184 million liras in 1939, 220 million in 1940, 280 million in 1941, 313 million in 1942, 400 million in 1943, and more than 500 million in 1944. After the outbreak of war in Europe, there had been a steady increase in Turkish prices of basic commodities—by late 1944, ordinary living costs were 400 to 500 percent above their 1939 level.¹³ Neutrality had not shielded Turkey’s economy mainly because cutting off trade and diplomatic relations with Germany—the country’s largest trading partner —took its toll and the lira was devalued in 1946. Strong currency had been the guiding macroeconomic policy for the Kemalist elite from the establishment of the Republic in 1923, and the devaluation was an extraordinary measure for extraordinary times.¹⁴

A fuller grasp of Turkey’s postwar economic state has significant implications for our understanding of Ankara’s diplomatic pivot towards the United States. If it were true that Turkey was “not experiencing dire economic conditions,” then we would expect Turkey’s realignment with the United States to have been the result of calculated compromise and the convergence of purely strategic interests. If, however, we recognize that the combination of Soviet demands and abject poverty created an almost existential crisis in the minds of Turkish policy makers, we can appreciate the contingent nature of Ankara’s realignment at this crossroads. In his classic account of this period, Kemal Karpat rightly points out that at no other point in the country’s history “has there been such intense political activity and debate.”¹⁵ The noise that Karpat describes was something obvious to U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, who easily recognized that the “fear of a seizure by Russia of the Straits was deeply rooted in consciousness of all classes in Turkey.”¹⁶

Washington’s acquisition of a new ally depended less on crafted arguments about the nature of Turkey’s military expenditures than it did on the Turkish elite’s desperation and panic.¹⁷ It is true that Turkey’s defense accounted for 43% of the annual budget in 1939, 53% in 1940, and remained over 55% in the next three years. Of the overall defense budget, itemized extraordinary expenses constituted 46% in 1939, 73% in 1940, and remained as high as 79% until 1945.¹⁸ But this was not merely a question of World War II and unforeseen expenses. Turkey’s economic crisis was broad and, coupled with what it perceived to be Soviet encroachment, marked the beginning of an exceptional period when Ankara was closer to the United States than at any other point in its history. Awareness of the magnitude of Turkey’s postwar plight helps us understand the later fraying of the Turkish-U.S. alliance in a different light, less dependent on Ankara’s and Washington’s missteps than on the dissipation of the Russian threat in Turkish politicians’ minds.

While Cold War historians have distanced themselves from the idea of a hegemony-driven Soviet leadership as the sole culprit for the bipolar world order, the opening of the Moscow archives after 1991 has revealed a complex Soviet foreign policy, one that included Stalin’s designs in his immediate neighborhood.¹⁹ And yet, as Turkish scholars are beginning to return to the subject with new Turkish diplomatic records, the idea that the Soviet threat was a government-orchestrated myth continues to hold sway.²⁰ The current article, which draws heavily on recently declassified Turkish diplomatic records and juxtaposes them with Soviet and U.S. sources, shows that, as seen from Ankara, the Soviet threat not only seemed very real but was also the culmination of a deterioration in relations with Moscow that had begun in 1939. Valid questions can certainly be raised about how quickly Turkey’s perception of an imminent Soviet threat dissipated, but it is crucial to establish that it existed in dramatic form in the minds of Turkey’s policy makers in 1945.

Without awareness of the drama of Soviet demands for territorial adjustment it is impossible to understand the caution with which later Turkish diplomats approached their northern neighbor, even as relations improved in the 1960s. The present work is not concerned with actual Soviet intentions but rather how Soviet foreign policy was perceived in Turkey. While we might recognize now that there was more bluster than genuine menace in Stalin’s postwar diplomacy, in Ankara there was a real sense of trepidation. The trick is to recognize that, while Turkish politicians did not forge Stalin’s demands, they later did amplify their fear, especially as the benefits of membership in the U.S.-led crusade became increasingly apparent. In other words, critics of the Turkish official narrative are not entirely wrong in their assumptions regarding the Turkish government’s desire to receive foreign aid, particularly after the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine. But this is not the same as inventing demands.

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In 1945, the Turkish diplomatic mission in Moscow was located in the historic Balin residence on Bolshaia Nikitskaia, within walking distance from both the Kremlin Palace and the Soviet foreign commissariat on Kuznetskii Most. Despite the proximity of the chancellery to the upper echelons of Soviet power, Ambassador Selim Sarper was not one to send prompt reports to his superiors in Ankara. Even when he returned on time from important meetings with Vyacheslav Molotov or Sergey Kavtaradze, most of his telegrams to Ankara were postmarked a few days late. On June 7, 1945, he made an exception. After a long and tense meeting with Molotov at the Kremlin, which ended at 9 p.m., Sarper rushed back to the embassy and worked on a detailed report. He transmitted the message to Ankara just after midnight.²¹ There was nothing coincidental in Sarper’s alacrity; the Soviet-Turkish diplomatic crisis, which had been brewing since the outbreak of World War II, metastasized after that meeting.

Only three months earlier, on March 18, 1945, after a similar meeting with Molotov in the Kremlin, Sarper had been much less flustered. Already in March, Sarper was told that the 1925 Soviet-Turkish Friendship Treaty, which was to expire soon, had become inoperable due to a fundamental change of circumstances during the war. And yet, Sarper seemed unperturbed. As usual, he took his time to report the details to Ankara. A few days later, after he had finally completed his analysis, he wrote to Ankara that the Soviet position was neither unforeseen nor complex, and that their decision to terminate the treaty was solely strategic. The Turkish ambassador was convinced that Moscow would use the non-aggression treaty as a trump card to revise the 1936 Montreux Straits regime in terms more favorable for the Soviet Union. Without question, he claimed, what Stalin actually wanted was an exclusive treaty with Turkey, focused on the Straits and negotiated without Western intrusions. Pointing to his earlier reports (dated January 27 and February 25) on the same subject, he said that “there is nothing to be surprised about this.”²²

If Sarper was not shocked to hear about Stalin’s discontent with the existing Straits regime and was aware of the Soviet position, what changed in between his two meetings with Molotov that turned his mood from calm to trepidation? Sarper was no foreigner to Moscow politics and was well versed in the country’s history. He had spent much of his diplomatic career in the Soviet Union, beginning in Odessa in 1928, before he was appointed as third secretary to the Moscow Embassy, and then back to Odessa in 1935 as consul general. During World War II, he was in charge of government propaganda at the foreign ministry until 1944, at which point he returned to Moscow, this time as ambassador.²³ He knew Russian and even published a book in the Soviet Union.²⁴ Precisely because he had first-hand experience of Moscow’s relations with Ankara, he knew that the whole point of his meeting with Molotov in March was about testing waters. Each side understood what the other’s real intentions were, but, two months short of Victory Day in Europe, the timing was, to cite Molotov, “premature.”²⁵

Although the Allies conceded in principle to Stalin’s plea at Yalta to change the Straits regime, the Soviet Union had other priorities. Molotov realized that Sarper was fishing for clues about Soviet intentions regarding the Straits, not least because the Turkish ambassador asked what the reference to a “fundamental change of circumstances” meant.²⁶ Molotov’s evasive answers had to do with the ongoing Silesian and Vienna offensives. The impending final advance of the Red Army on Berlin had several strategic goals, the most important of which was to strengthen Stalin’s hand in other geopolitical issues, in particular those left unresolved with the Allies at Yalta. As Sarper suspected, after the occupation of Berlin in May, the Soviet side became much more assertive. While the Red Army marched into successive victories in April-May, the Turkish ambassador was back in Ankara for a series of protracted consultations with his government and the Soviet ambassador.²⁷ He quickly realized that Molotov would address the Straits in their next meeting and that what the Soviets meant by “fundamental change in circumstances” had more to do with deteriorating relations—from an interwar partnership against imperialism to postwar enmity—rather than a change in the geopolitical importance of the Straits for Moscow.

The Soviet Union’s position on the Straits, and indeed on Black Sea security more broadly, was constant. Whether in the Treaty of Moscow in 1921, at the Lausanne Conference in 1922–23, during the heated Montreux negotiations in 1936, or even in 1945 in Moscow, Soviet policy had not shifted in the slightest. Molotov’s predecessors at the foreign commissariat, Georgy Chicherin and Maksim Litvinov, vigorously opposed the inclusion of any non-littoral power in any negotiation about the fate of the Straits. The Soviet foreign commissariat, much like the Russian Imperial ministry before it, had long held that the Black Sea constituted a Mare Clausum and that the only gateway into it—the Turkish Straits—differed from internationalized waterways like the Suez and Panama Canals.²⁸

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks sought a return to the nineteenth-century practice that closed the Straits to all foreign warships. In 1922, a special Politburo commission composed of prominent Bolsheviks, including Georgy Chicherin, Karl Radek, and Leon Trotsky, unequivocally supported the imperial formula.²⁹ But they sparred over whether control over the Straits should be given to the Turks or the League of Nations. Litvinov and Chicherin, for instance, differed on the best tactical outcome; with Litvinov objecting that “Kemalists cannot be trusted” and Chicherin arguing that to give control to the League of Nations would mean “to let a goat into the vegetable garden—Britain into the Straits.”³⁰ Ultimately, they agreed to support the Turkish position and frame it in ideological terms as a defense of Turkey’s independence and sovereignty. Much to their dismay, at the Lausanne Conference of 1923, the Turks threw in the towel too soon, and until 1936, an international commission kept the Straits demilitarized. Foreign newspapers at the time caricatured Chicherin with an Ottoman headgear (fez) on his head, arguing that he was more Turkish than the Turks themselves.³¹

Thirteen years later, at the 1936 Montreux Conference, with a position strengthened by post-war recovery and building on the revisionist moment in Europe, Turkey asserted its sovereignty over the Straits and took control of passage into its own hands. In 1936, as in 1923, the Soviet Union insisted on a closed Straits regime and sought to block non-littoral powers’ access to the Black Sea, thus offering protection to the Soviet coastline in Ukraine, Southern Russia, and Georgia. Moscow had pushed harder for Turkish sovereignty at Lausanne than Turkey itself but was nonetheless disappointed by the negotiations at Montreux.³² The crux of the Soviet-Turkish disagreement at Montreux lay in the relationship of each side with Western powers.³³ Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov viewed his Turkish counterpart’s (Turkish foreign minister Tevfik Rüştü Aras) repeated attempts to satisfy England with revulsion. At Montreux, Aras was apparently junketing between British and Soviet delegations, and, “being impelled by his desire to curry favor with the British,” deceived the Soviet side. Litvinov was so incensed that the Soviet delegation was prepared to leave the conference. But they stayed and signed the new agreement—not despite but because of Aras’s “pointless Anglophilism,” which some in Moscow thought might not be fully representative of the official Turkish position.³⁴

Just a few months after Montreux, the Turkish ambassador in Moscow began probing the possibility of a bilateral Soviet-Turkish agreement for joint defense of the Straits. In theory, this was supposed to be a supplementary agreement—one that would soothe Moscow’s bitterness about Montreux and put the relationship back on a friendly footing. Litvinov, however, took the opportunity to propose a more binding military pact that would replace Chicherin’s vaguely worded and outdated 1925 Soviet-Turkish Treaty of Friendship.³⁵ Litvinov, of all people, should have understood that the Ankara government was categorically against committing itself to a binding alliance on the eve of World War II. Almost tellingly, a Western journalist observed that Litvinov “time and again comforted outworn ambassadors who tried in vain to penetrate Chicherin’s attitude on a difficult question by suddenly exposing the point of view of the Soviet government in unmistakable terms.”³⁶ Given his reputation as “a consummate artist in negotiation,” it is difficult to explain Litvinov’s intransigence over Ankara’s categorical refusal of pacts that require joint action in potential conflicts against great powers. Another observer praised Litvinov’s success at the 1932 Disarmament Conference and noted that the Soviet commissar came up with the most precise definition of the term aggressor, “as any state that invaded or otherwise attacked another state with or without a declaration of war.”³⁷ And yet, in 1936, when the perturbed Turkish ambassador asked him to specify exactly whom the new Soviet-Turkish Pact would be against, Litvinov failed to demonstrate his most esteemed qualities—“brutal frankness” and “persuasion.”³⁸ Instead, he told the ambassador that Turkey had “definitely adopted a new orientation,” one in which he saw “nothing positive.”³⁹ After the failure of repeated attempts to find middle-ground, Litvinov sent a snappy telegram to Ambassador Karakhan in Ankara and told him “not to talk to the Turks anymore about pacts.”⁴⁰

With the outbreak of World War II, Turkey and the Soviet Union could no longer see each other as partners within a common Black Sea framework, and the 1925 Treaty, despite having initially been signed with a tenure that would have left it in force for another six years, became obsolete. Hence, Selim Sarper’s appeal to renew the treaty in March 1945 was little more than an empty gesture. When Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu received Sarper’s telegram about Molotov’s termination of the treaty, he seemed equally unmoved. This is because he had been in Sarper’s shoes when he personally tried to negotiate a new treaty in Moscow in 1939, soon after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. During the three long and stressful weeks Saraçoğlu spent in the Soviet Union, Molotov kept him busy with cultural trivialities and wore his patience down. On the rare occasions he was able to meet with Molotov, Saraçoğlu was vexed by the Soviet Commissar’s impudence on the Straits question and by his ominous references to occupied Poland (presumably made in a tone similar to the one that he used six years later during the meeting with Sarper).⁴¹

1939, and more precisely the failure of the Saraçoğlu-Molotov talks in Moscow, decisively put an end to the interwar friendship between Ankara and Moscow, as the former began to look at their northern neighbor through the lens of history and respond in terms of an older realpolitik. A mirror image of their earlier friendliness, the Soviet-Turkish disagreement in 1939 was mainly about the relationship of each side with the West. With the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Turkey felt wedged between two colossi and desperately needed allies because rapprochement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which had previously been at each other’s throats, made it difficult to play one against the other. Indeed, Moscow’s discontent with the Straits regime and the absence of a functioning bilateral non-aggression pact was what led Turkey to seek supporters who might check Soviet aggression—first the Anglo-French bloc in 1939, then Nazi Germany in 1941, and later the United States in 1945. In turn, the Soviet leadership alleged that Turkey had become a pawn of first British, then Nazi, and later U.S. imperialism. Nevertheless, until Sarper’s meeting with Molotov in 1945, the Turks did not hear such recriminations directly from the Soviet leadership but through Russian translators going through daily Soviet newspapers at the Turkish Embassy in Moscow. The meeting between Sarper and Molotov on June 7 was crucial not only because it marked the downswing of a relationship that had begun to deteriorate since Saraçoğlu’s failed negotiations in Moscow in 1939 but also because this was the first time Molotov explicitly brought up their irreconcilable differences in a bilateral meeting.

Prevalent in later reinterpretations of the 1945 Soviet-Turkish crisis is Ambassador Sarper’s role as the main culprit who deliberately twisted Molotov’s words and misconstrued what some claim were merely “proposals” as “demands.” Some have even claimed that, after seeing Molotov on June 7, Sarper met with Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, before sharing details with his government in Ankara, adding U.S. connivance to the plot.⁴² Recently declassified Turkish records demonstrate that this last claim is patently false and the broader allegations against Sarper unfounded. The timing of Sarper’s meeting and his telegram indicate that he prepared his report soon after seeing Molotov. More to the point, upon receiving Prime Minister Saraçoğlu’s gloomy response and instructions, Sarper told him to first get his dates right and said: “please note that I sent you my report about the meeting on June 8th not the 9th.”⁴³ The main cause of distress had of course more to do with the content of his meeting with Molotov. During the two months that Sarper was in Ankara, he had worked with Saraçoğlu on the best strategy to respond to Molotov and was open to discussing ways to revise the Straits convention. He was not, however, prepared to hear Molotov’s demand for naval bases on the Straits and a Soviet claim to much of eastern Anatolia.

From the onset of their meeting, Sarper sensed a manifest sullenness in Molotov’s mood, as the latter hastily shelved Turkey’s proposal for an alliance. Molotov said that the Soviet Union had a number of serious geopolitical concerns that needed to be addressed before Soviet-Turkish relations could be cemented with such an arrangement. Molotov continued by arguing that the 1921 Moscow Treaty, which ceded the greater Kars region back to Turkey, “was signed at a time when the Soviet Union was weak.” Sarper was caught off guard and asked if Molotov meant that the Soviet-Turkish frontier should be redrawn. Calmly, Molotov replied, “Yes, look at Poland, for instance,” as if he had rehearsed this example, “we signed an unfavorable treaty with Poland, also in 1921, and have just revised it to attain a long-lasting friendship.” Appalled by Molotov’s ultimatum-like tone, Sarper scoffed that his government was not prepared to reopen those clauses in the 1921 treaty, which they regarded as freely negotiated.⁴⁴

Although Sarper begged Molotov to understand that “the 1921 Treaty was not imposed upon the Soviets,” and that “on the contrary, Lenin personally advocated its enactment,” Molotov responded that they could not “get anywhere by ignoring the subject.”⁴⁵ The Soviet Union had long blamed the Turkish government for turning a blind eye on pro-Nazi groups, mainly among pan-Turkist circles. The breadth of Nazi propaganda in Turkey was no secret. Only two weeks earlier, while Sarper was still in Ankara, Soviet Ambassador Vinogradov had broached the subject and the two discussed at length the nuances between pan-Turkism and Kemalist nationalism. They agreed that “nationalism” in the official Kemalist context was used in ways similar to the term “patriotism” in the Soviet Union. Sarper seemed confident that he had convinced Vinogradov about the Turkish government’s categorical refusal of pan-Turkism, and he pointed to the famous pan-Turanian trials of 1944.⁴⁶ Yet Soviet newspapers rightly mocked these as show-trials for the Turkish government to acquit itself from the sin of a wartime alliance with the Nazis. They pointed to prominent insiders of President İnönü’s cabinet, such as Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, who continued to fan anti-Sovietism in Turkey, labeling them “poor clowns” and “despicable mongers.”⁴⁷

While the demands for eastern Anatolia were a reprisal for Turkey’s connections to the Soviet Union’s adversaries during the war, the request for naval bases was the product of Moscow’s conclusions about the need for absolute security. Molotov told Sarper that “the safety of 200 million Soviet citizens cannot rely on the good-will of Turkey,” and that the Ankara government left Moscow in doubt throughout the war, mainly because Turkey, as the sole custodian of the Straits, lacked the means for a proper defense of the Black Sea. What Molotov implied here was that the Soviet Union could “help Turkey” and provide military assistance through a nearby naval base in case an aggressor breached the gates of the Dardanelles and advanced on the Bosphorus. Mutual defense of the Straits by Turkey and the Soviet Union had previously been a subject of repeated negotiations before the Montreux Convention. In 1934, for instance, there had even been discussion of stationing a Soviet fleet on the Aegean near the port of İzmir.⁴⁸ But circumstances were different back then. With Italy’s rearmament of the Dodecanese and the demilitarized status of the Straits, Turkey entertained this scenario. They aborted any such conversation after the signing of the Montreux Convention had reestablished Turkish sovereignty over the waterway. When Litvinov lobbied with Aras for a more binding treaty in 1936, or when Molotov pressured Saraçoğlu in 1939, what the Soviet leadership sought was a return to the 1833 Treaty of Hünkar İskelesi, which gave the Russian Empire the right to ask the Ottomans to close the Dardanelles to any foreign warship if the Tsar felt threatened. In 1945, they finally saw a chance to achieve this goal and even more—a military port near the Bosphorus—and this would have robbed the Turkish government of the fruits of its victory at Montreux.

We should remember that a Russian naval base on the Straits was not an ad hoc idea. Spurred by a surge of disconcerting cables from the Balkans in the summer of 1940, Stalin feared that the Soviet Union was headed for a serious squabble with Nazi Germany over Romania and Bulgaria. In November 1940, he sent Molotov to Berlin to resolve the problem and negotiate terms with Hitler for the Soviet Union’s accession to what would have been the Four Power Pact, along with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Historians have debated to what extent Stalin actually desired to join the Axis, but they more or less agree that the Hitler-Molotov talks in Berlin were a crucial turning point. Minutes of a series of heated sessions on November 12–13 show that Molotov would not accept Hitler’s insistence on Turkish neutrality and pushed for Soviet access to the Straits.⁴⁹ When the Politburo received and revised the draft treaty of Soviet accession to the Axis two weeks later, Molotov presented the German Ambassador Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg with five conditions, two of which had to do with Turkey’s fate. The first condition was the establishment of a military base for the land and air forces of the Soviet Union near the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The second condition was that the lands south of Batumi, the region stretching from Eastern Anatolia to Baku and from there to the Persian Gulf, were recognized as the “center of gravity of Soviet aspirations (tsentrom tyazhesti aspiratsiy SSSR).”⁵⁰ The German Ambassador in Moscow who conveyed Molotov’s demands to Berlin noted the fury the Soviet counter-proposal prompted. As tensions mounted in the spring of 1941, Ambassador Schulenburg informed Molotov on June 21 that Nazi Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union. One of the six items that Hitler counted as grounds for the war cited Molotov’s request for a naval base in the Soviet counter-proposal.⁵¹

But, equally, Soviet pressure for military bases on the Straits should not distract us from Molotov’s second demand about territorial revisions in eastern Anatolia. Many contemporary diplomats and historians alike have argued that the Soviet Union brought up the issue of border rectifications on the Turkish frontier as a bargaining chip for their main strategic objective—naval bases. Yet here, too, the metaphor the Politburo’s 1940 language that emphasized the importance of Southern Caucasia as the “center of gravity of Soviet aspirations” in 1940 tells us that Turkey’s concerns were not misplaced. Counter-mobilization and the fortification of the Soviet-Turkish frontier after the outbreak of war, provide us with clear evidence of how the late-imperial geopolitical struggle over the borderlands resurfaced as early as 1940, and not merely as a bargaining chip in 1945.⁵² Ever since the publication of a series of classified French cables by Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB) on July 5, 1940, which implied Turkish connivance in an Allied aerial operation against the oil fields of Baku, Moscow was suspicious. In the wake of DNB’s publications, the Soviets moved their troops from Nakhchivan and Sokhumi to the Kars-Ardahan frontier.⁵³ Stalin could have treated the scandal as a hyperbolic Allied fantasy or as Hitlerite propaganda, if only the cables DNB allegedly acquired in a wrecked train wagon in occupied France had not matched Soviet intelligence reports from a few months earlier.

Turkish mobilization on the eastern frontier was a major source of Soviet discontent, which Moscow later used to justify postwar territorial revisions. According to various Soviet cables, beginning in March 1940, when the French were planning to launch an aerial bombardment of Baku, Turkey systematically moved its troops to frontier garrisons in Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin.⁵⁴ A Soviet report from May 16, 1940, for instance, alerted Moscow that “Turkey—in alliance with the Anglo-French bloc—built new border posts in the Hopa-Kağızman direction, dug trenches, repaired highways, and systematically transferred troops in small groups in the middle of the night.”⁵⁵ Another Soviet report indicated that, after Barbarossa, Turkey continued to fortify the Eastern Anatolian border, and by 1942 most of the troops in nearby Anatolian provinces, such as Bitlis and Sarıkamış, were deployed around Kars.⁵⁶ The Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, argued that almost all of Turkey’s chief of staff were men of the old Prussian order, and a Soviet-Turkish conflict was inevitable as a result of increasing border violations. Bearing in mind the widespread Nazi propaganda in Turkey (even if we accept that the Soviet reports about Ankara’s pro-Nazi sympathies were somewhat exaggerated) and the build-up on Turkey's eastern border during the Nazi-Soviet war, it is easier to understand Moscow’s suspicions about Turkey. There were moments, like when the Turkish army shot down a Soviet plane on the Kars frontier in March 1943, that chances of a Soviet-Turkish war seemed likely.⁵⁷

The Soviet Union thus had little reason to be satisfied with a minor revision of the Montreux settlement, which, although restricting the passage of non-littoral navies, also hampered Russian warships. The war had shown that control of the Straits increasingly relied on aerial power in adjacent areas. As the Soviet Union extended its influence over Romania and Bulgaria, whose borders are only 200 and 100 miles away from the Bosphorus respectively, the Turkish government had every reason to fear a stronger bid from the Soviet side to acquire a port on this vital waterway. The war of nerves between Ankara and Moscow exacerbated in 1945 with rumors of an impending Soviet attack. The British Embassy, for instance, noted that when receiving news of large concentrations of armored Soviet troops on the Bulgarian border, the Turkish government took special precautions, laid a boom on the Bosphorus, and put frontier garrisons on alert for nearly three weeks.⁵⁸ It turns out these were just rumors, which had no basis, and a general atmosphere of rumor and fear only partly explain Turkey’s prevalent Russophobia in 1945. A fuller grasp of Turkey’s chronic mistrust of Soviet Russia begs the question whether the Ankara government had any real evidence that convinced them of impending Soviet encroachment.

At one critical juncture, the answer is a resounding yes. When the Hitler-Molotov negotiations in Berlin failed, Stalin backtracked and delivered a written statement to the Turkish government in March 1941, asserting Moscow’s respect for Turkish neutrality and territorial integrity. When Hitler found out about this, he invited the Turkish ambassador in Berlin and told him how Nazi-Soviet negotiations had failed after Molotov’s demands for a naval base on the Straits. Almost mockingly, Hitler was pointing to Stalin’s grasps at straws.⁵⁹ Hitler’s fanning of Turkey’s Russophobia proved to be effective, and the two states signed a non-aggression treaty three days before Operation Barbarossa. In what was surely a sign of the degree to which the Soviet threat had preoccupied him, Şükrü Saraçoğlu is rumored to have celebrated news of the Nazi-Soviet war with unbridled joy. Another piece of evidence came on August 11, 1941, when von Weizsäcker advised Ribbentrop to disclose Molotov’s conditions in writing “as irrefutable proof of Russian designs” on Turkey.⁶⁰ Capitalizing on Turkey’s historic fear, Ribbentrop followed the advice and shared Molotov’s written demands with the Turkish ambassador in Berlin on August 25, 1941.⁶¹ A fortnight after Ribbentrop disclosed the written text of Molotov’s demands on the Straits, Great Britain and the Soviet Union set out to invade Iran. For Turkey, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of a neutral neighbor was painfully reminiscent of the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. Mindful of the strong parallels between their country and Reza Shah’s Iran, first and foremost with regards to the Nazi connection, Ankara’s leadership could be rightfully concerned. At a time when Great Britain was not in a position to render any tangible support, İnönü was struggling to maintain a neutral stance in the face of what Ribbentrop correctly described as “an assumed German and an actual Russian threat.”⁶² In the end, the Third Reich failed to bring about the sort of pro-Axis neutrality that existed in Spain. But in fanning the flames of Ankara’s apprehension, Hitler accomplished his main objective of keeping Turkey as a nonbelligerent power malevolently disposed to Moscow—a position that outlived World War II.

This was so much the case that Great Britain, despite all its efforts, failed to mollify the Turks’ deep insecurities. Throughout 1943, Churchill made it a personal mission to cajole Turkey to join the war, while foreign minister Anthony Eden was at pains to rid the Turkish leadership of their chronic skepticism. Eden disclosed to Molotov that he had broached the issue of Turkey’s entrance into war with the undersecretary of the Turkish foreign ministry during the Cairo Conference. He told his Soviet counterpart that the Turkish side was asking for “written guarantees from Moscow so that they could convince their citizens in eastern Anatolia and in Thrace that Soviet Russia would not invade their lands.”⁶³ Eden also told Molotov that the Turkish government was convinced that Soviet Russia would not leave the Balkans for at least twenty to twenty-five years, if somehow they managed to enter Romania and Bulgaria. Molotov denied these accusations as nonsensical rumors but told Eden that the Soviet Union could obviously not give such a written guarantee. Tired of the Turkish government’s heel dragging, Churchill turned to Stalin during the Tehran Conference in late 1943 and said: “Turkey is our ally, but if it refuses to comply with our demands, we will say that Britain will not be interested in solving the Straits problem.” Churchill seemed to give Moscow a blank check, “Regarding the Straits regime, we will say that the British will settle for the kind of regime the Soviet Union wants and will not defend the Turks. We will treat them coldly and declare that they must settle their business with the Soviet Union.”⁶⁴

Churchill’s reaction in Tehran and Turkey’s continued reluctance to declare war on the Axis until February 1945 explains Ankara’s isolation when Sarper met with Molotov in March 1945. At Potsdam, the stage was set for Stalin to make his bid for the Straits and territorial alterations. But this was also when geopolitical disputes amongst the Allies became more pronounced. Attesting to the emerging disagreement on Turkey, U.S. President Harry Truman reminded Stalin that even if they agreed to a revision of the existing Straits regime, they would still consider it an international waterway. Stalin was terse in his response, claiming that the Montreux Straits Convention was a hostile treaty directed against Russia, not only in times of war but also during peace as the Turks could shut it whenever they felt threatened. Churchill reversed his earlier position and spoke even more sternly, “It is absolutely impossible for us to accept the offer to establish a Russian military base near the Straits, I am sure that the Turks will not accept it either.” Infuriated, Stalin closed the session on an unpleasant note, “If you are not going to provide a base for our navy near the Straits, then give us a base somewhere else, so that we can repair our ships and defend our country’s national interests … but leaving the issue unresolved in this way is absurd.”⁶⁵ Stalin then turned to the issue of eastern Anatolia and said, “Retrocession of Kars and Ardahan is a completely different issue … . Before the First World War, the city of Kars belonged to the Armenians and Ardahan to the Georgians … we want to establish friendly relations with Turkey, but we believe that this border arrangement is wrong … if Turkey wants to sign an agreement with us to establish good neighborly relations, they have to return these lands. If there is no retrocession, there is no agreement.”⁶⁶

By the end of the conference in August, there were few glimmers of hope for Turkey, since neither the United States nor the United Kingdom were prepared to fully challenge the Soviet Union’s treatment of the Straits as an exclusively Black Sea affair—a position that Russians had held since Catherine the Great. As for border rectifications in eastern Anatolia, regardless of whether Stalin was bluffing in his game with the West, he set in motion events that drove home the possible ramifications of new borders. Armenian diasporas around the world pinned real hope on the Kremlin’s policies. Armenian organizations, including the wealthiest ones in the United States, appealed to Stalin to organize mass repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia—with the hope that the Soviet Union would give them the lands “reclaimed” from Turkey. As historians Jamil Hasanlı and Vladislav Zubok concluded, Stalin also tapped into nationalist ambitions in Georgia, and his efforts were met with a serious protest from the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. By the same token, Armenia’s sudden prominence in Stalin’s plans vexed the officials of Georgia. They nurtured their own national project, according to which the disputed Turkish provinces were part of Georgian ancestral lands. Ominous reports of Red Army movements, coupled with Georgian and Armenian claims, fueled nationalist demonstrations around Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. Turning the tables, the Soviet ambassador, S.A. Vinogradov, asked Moscow whether the recent nationalist backlash in Turkey should be presented to the Americans as evidence of a fascist threat. He also suggested that they could be a good pretext for severing diplomatic relations with Turkey and for taking measures to ensure Soviet security, which was, of course, a euphemism for military preparations.⁶⁷

The U.S. Ambassador in Ankara, Laurance Steinhardt, astutely observed that the Turkish government’s pugnacious reaction to excessive Soviet demands was similar to Finland’s uncompromising resistance to Stalin. Steinhardt argued—with reason—that Turkey’s meekness towards Nazi Germany throughout the war and reluctance to sever trade relations with Berlin was mainly to preserve its strength for a scenario in which the Soviet Union emerged triumphant out of the war, and that Ankara did not overlook the differences between Finland’s position and that of Poland. For Steinhardt, the main problem was that Turkey had a population to feed that was five times greater than Finland’s, only two cities of importance, little industry, a largely peasant population, and a mountainous country with extensive areas suitable for guerilla warfare.⁶⁸ Indeed, Turkey’s desperate need and persistent demand for foreign military assistance against the Soviet Union contradicts the notion of its allegedly crafty diplomacy. Turkey stumbled into the Cold War with a broken economy in response to the abrupt worsening of longstanding tensions with the Soviet Union over both the Straits and the Eastern Anatolian border.

The bleak outlook of the economy was on display during parliamentary discussions in December 1945. Above all, it was the Ministry of National Defense that continued to soak up government revenues. The Chief of Staff was livid when he saw that only 150 million liras were allotted for the armed forces’ ordinary budget. This figure amounted to roughly one sixth of the country’s overall anticipated GDP for the upcoming year—a significant drop compared to previous years, when the military accounted for at least one half of the GDP. In fact, an additional 115 million liras was secured in an emergency budget for wartime expenses, which meant that the army would ultimately receive one third of the available 875 million liras.⁶⁹ But, now that the war was over, some generals feared further cuts. Kazım Karabekir, commander of the eastern front against Russian forces during World War I, took the stand and pleaded to keep the emergency budget in place, pointing to the continued Soviet peril.⁷⁰

Karabekir’s remark about the country’s “inadequate defense budget in the face of an imminent Soviet aggression” is a telling one, and it helps explain why postwar Turkish foreign policy should be read against the backdrop of the country’s economic desolation. Before the war, the poor, nascent, and truncated Turkish Republic had mixed economic successes. On the one hand, the country had not faced a serious balance of payments crisis before 1939 due to net balance and clearing agreements; on the other, it had become gradually dependent on Nazi Germany in foreign trade.⁷¹ Economic relations with Moscow hardly balanced Nazi Germany’s near monopoly in Turkish markets, but the Soviet-Turkish cooperation lessened Turkey’s dependence on Britain and France, and it therefore served as a foil for the Western-dictated international order. With the outbreak of war, this fragile equilibrium broke down and Turkey began facing budget deficits.⁷² As Ankara and Moscow drifted further apart, bilateral trade dropped to zero, while Germany (including Nazi-occupied states) absorbed more than half of Turkey’s trade volume. This explains Turkey’s prolonged refusal to declare war on Germany, which would have meant the loss of the country’s vital trading partner.⁷³ We should remember that the Soviet-Turkish negotiations in 1945 were happening at a time when Turkey was bereft economically and had no idea what the way forward was. The only remedy for the geopolitical and economic downswing in 1945 was improved relations with Western powers, who were reluctant to give foreign aid to the Ankara government. The result was total chaos, to cite a prominent journalist at the time, “which favored the cunning, offered opportunities for illicit practices, and checked only honest people.”⁷⁴ The effects of this sort of an existential crisis hardly gets written out in people’s minds.

More than anything else, the Turkish leadership’s predicament in 1945 arose from the gravity of what they perceived as an imminent Soviet threat. The growing opposition in Turkey blamed the İnönü administration not for fabricating a threat but for not fully communicating the magnitude of the crisis, which may be true. But mishaps in British and U.S. diplomatic correspondence were equally problematic. U.S. Ambassador Edwin Wilson, who replaced Steinhardt in April 1945, protested that he had the pleasure of learning his own government’s position on the Straits from the British ambassador not once, but twice in the span of three months and he pointed to his embarrassment in Ankara.⁷⁵ On the question of whether the Soviet threat was real or a bluff, remarkably different actors in Turkey and the United States had various answers. What was clear, was that the longer history of deteriorating Soviet-Turkish relations led Turkish politicians to find Moscow’s policy menacing. The country’s economic plight and diplomatic isolation after wartime neutrality gave the crisis its existential quality.

Beyond the Straits, Turkish diplomats were concerned about Eastern Anatolia, given their Russian counterparts’ ominous allusions to the Soviet-Turkish frontier. In a long meeting with the U.S. ambassador on February 2, for instance, Soviet Ambassador Vinogradov remarked that “Kars and Ardahan were very important to the USSR,” and, recalling the conversation between Molotov and Sarper in June 1945, he argued that “this territorial question would have to be settled.”⁷⁶ When asked about the August 1941 Anglo-Soviet joint communique regarding each side’s respect for Turkey’s territorial integrity, Vinogradov backpedaled and said that it was made at a time when the British and the Soviets were about to invade Iran and did not want to frighten the Turks. Vinogradov certainly touched a sensitive spot when he told Wilson that they “waited a long time regarding territorial arrangements with Poland and finally got it,” and that they could “also wait regarding Turkey.”⁷⁷ Ambassador Wilson communicated his conversation to the Turkish side and indicated that the Soviets stood pat on territories and bases.

Even if one assumes that the Soviet ambassador was bluffing about Kars and bases on the Straits, the information received from the United States regarding heavy Soviet troop movements by rail from Bessarabia to Dobruja and thence into northeastern Bulgaria might have given Ankara the impression that Moscow was serious. In Iran as well, reports of Soviet troop movements toward the Turkish frontier were promptly communicated to the Ankara government, which convinced the Turkish leadership that “the Soviet Union would soon be in a position to strike Turkey.” This information, coupled with news of dozens of Soviet fighter planes relocated from Costanta to Plovdiv (150 kilometers from the Turkish border in Thrace) gave the impression that Moscow intended to close the “Turkish gap in Soviet security belt from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”⁷⁸ As Bruce Kuniholm has argued, what seemed to be a British green light for the Soviet occupation of Bulgaria created concern in Ankara that Turkey could be next.⁷⁹

The war of nerves regarding Turkey’s fate escalated during the first several months of 1946; ultimately in March, the U.S.S. Missouri sailed from New York to İstanbul with full honors, returning the remains of the Turkish Ambassador in Washington, Münir Ertegün, who died in November 1944. According to Ambassador Wilson, Turkey’s greeting of the Missouri in the Bosphorus in April 1946 was an unprecedented demonstration of friendliness from any foreign country toward the U.S. Navy. This was because both Turkey and the United States seemed convinced that, if the Soviet Union were allowed to break the current Ankara government and set up a Soviet-friendly leadership there, “nothing would then prevent Soviets from ascending to Suez.”⁸⁰ By the time the Soviet Union delivered its first official statement of demands to the Turkish government regarding their demands in August 1946 (roughly seventeen months after Molotov and Sarper had met the first time at the Kremlin in March 1945) the Turkish government had received full support of the U.S. government against the Soviet Union.

Weighing in on U.S. support to Turkey against the first Soviet note, U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson argued that political assistance must be accompanied by evidence of good faith and that the first action in this regard should be to assist Turkey “in obtaining non-military materials and supplies, which would improve her economy and thereby strengthen the capabilities of her armed forces.”⁸¹ The Soviet Union did not forward a copy of their note to the U.S. government, which obtained it from the Turkish side and held it under close scrutiny. The U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes agreed with Patterson that the Turks should refrain from getting in direct (bilateral) talks with Moscow, which was trying to sidetrack the negotiations.⁸² Once the U.S. support was guaranteed, the Turkish government categorically rejected the first Soviet note, including the long-held Soviet assertion that the Black Sea is a closed sea. Turkey told the Soviet Union that it was prepared and willing to participate in an international conference to update the Montreux Convention, but only if the conference was held under the auspices of the United Nations and not just Black Sea littoral powers.⁸³

In October 1946, the Turkish government received a second, final note from the Kremlin regarding Soviet demands. Under mounting pressure from Moscow during the stressful two months between the first and second Soviet notes, the Turkish government tried to gain time by forwarding minutes of previous bilateral Soviet-Turkish negotiations, where Moscow was openly “condemning practices of the now deceased Tsarist Empire.”⁸⁴ When this did not work, they tossed relevant pages from Lenin’s corpus at the Soviet Union, in which the founder of the Soviet Union expressed respect for Turkey’s sovereignty.⁸⁵ As a result, the Soviet attitude became milder in September, when Soviet Ambassador Vinogradov claimed that the Soviet Union was prepared to drop territorial claims (contrary to his earlier statements) to achieve a settlement of the Straits question.⁸⁶ Despite the continued war of nerves in September, it became more or less clear that the second Russian note (delivered in October) would be couched in moderate language. Given the mild tone of the second note, the British Ambassador disagreed with the Turks who were drafting “a very prompt and tart response,” arguing that this would put the Ankara government in the wrong. But U.S. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson thought that if Moscow was testing waters and sought to see whether the United States was bluffing in their support of Turkey, then “a tart response would indeed be beneficial.”⁸⁷

Ultimately, the Turkish response to the second Soviet note turned out to be 5,000 words long, about one third of which was devoted to a refutation of Soviet charges regarding Turkey’s violation of the Montreux Convention during the war. The Turkish government agreed with Moscow that the Soviet Union had a long Black Sea coastline to defend but responded that (1) the Turks also had a long coastline, and (2) unlike previous Soviet foreign commissars (Chicherin and Litvinov), Molotov was disregarding Turkish sovereignty. The Soviet press published the full text of the Turkish response to the second note, labeling the Turkish attempts to curry favor with the Anglo-Saxons as “pathetic,” arguing that they had heard of “dollar-diplomacy” and of “dollar-democracy,” but they were just learning what dollar-geography was through the Turkish government’s enthusiastic submissiveness.⁸⁸ As a response, İnönü and his entourage mobilized the press and propagated a vehemently anti-Soviet policy, and this trend outlived their fall from power in the country’s first democratic elections in 1950. The chief editor of the party newspaper Ulus, Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, for instance, adhered to a hyperbolic anti-Soviet editorial line in his columns to such an extent that both U.S. and Soviet diplomats found his Russophobia “hysterical,” and labeled him sometimes “a despicable clown,” other times “a sensationalist.”⁸⁹ Yalçın’s writing and Turkey’s government-sponsored press more broadly, may be one of the few things that the Americans and the Soviets were in agreement about Turkey. Nevertheless, Turkey’s efforts to amplify the imminence of Soviet aggression ultimately came to fruition in 1948 when the “Turkish Commission for American Credits” was established to coordinate loan applications.⁹⁰ That year Turkey received 50 million dollars from the Marshall Plan.⁹¹

***

There is no doubt that postwar Turkey was at a crossroads, and the choice was harder than at any other point since the proclamation of the Republic. By 1947, however, the Soviet threat had disappeared so abruptly that historians later began to doubt if it had existed in the first place, or whether it was some holy pretense of U.S. anti-communism. Rather than finding clues about U.S. or Soviet intentions, the purpose of this study has been to use Turkish archival records to show that there was a source of genuine trepidation in Turkey with regards to the Soviet Union throughout 1945 and the first half of 1946. When the Soviet Union finally delivered two official notes to Turkey (in August and October 1946), they asked for a revision of the 1936 Straits Convention but made no mention of either naval bases or repatriation of Eastern Anatolian cities. The absence of these two demands, which had been the crux of earlier Soviet-Turkish exchanges, could be taken to suggest that Stalin had been bluffing from the onset. But the content and tone of those exchanges demonstrate that Turkish politicians did not perceive Stalin’s bluster as bluff.

Turkey’s diplomatic archives tell us about Turkey’s path into the Cold War and NATO, and they also tell us more. Scholars like Eduard Mark have drawn on the episode examined in this article to address broader issues of brinksmanship and the possibility of an armed conflict between the two superpowers. Mark stirred a great deal of interest among Cold War historians with his 1997 article published in Diplomatic History, in which he argued that what occurred in 1946 was not an imaginary crisis but an impending war situation.⁹² Looking at existing scholarship, Mark provided compelling reasons why the U.S. president and his advisers feared that Soviet pressure on Turkey might take the form of armed aggression. But, as Melyvn Leffler put it in his introduction to an earlier essay by Mark “not everyone was convinced by his evidence.”⁹³ The crux of Mark’s argument was about U.S. brinksmanship and the belief that “the only thing which will deter the Russians will be the conviction that the United States is prepared, if necessary, to meet aggression with force of arms.”⁹⁴ Was Stalin really determined to go to war over Turkey? Perhaps he was, perhaps he was not. As Mark rightly put it, “whether Washington’s fears of a Soviet invasion of Turkey were an over-reaction, as has so often been charged, depends on the frame of reference.”⁹⁵

Remarkably, within less than a year after Potsdam, Washington’s policy regarding Soviet demands from Turkey moved from “accepting certain revisions to the Montreux Convention” to “resisting Soviet aggression with all means at our disposal.”⁹⁶ Of course, this change had much to do with the war scare in 1946 and escalating U.S.-Soviet conflict, which Eduard Mark and others have recounted in their explanations. But Turkey did its best to embellish Soviet aggression with hopes of securing U.S. aid, particularly after the arrival of the U.S.S. Missouri.⁹⁷ The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 is when Turkey realized how it might sustain its utility for the United States—as a crucial military base for attacking the Soviet Union if need be, by protecting U.S. air bases in the region, and by safeguarding oil resources in the Middle East. By 1947, the Soviet threat was quiescent and the Turkish government was undertaking aggressive actions to play up the drama of the Cold War. But to recognize all of this does not mean that in 1945 the threat was engineered by the United States or exaggerated by the Turks. As this article has demonstrated, Turkey genuinely felt exposed and isolated. This was so much the case that, two decades later, when economic cooperation between the Soviet Union and NATO-allied Ankara overtook earlier tensions, Turkish diplomats in Moscow still insisted that Turkey’s position would not have changed had it not been for “Molotov’s demands who pushed (them) into the Americans’ arms.”⁹⁸ Nevertheless, the build-up of tensions leading to the 1945 crisis was strongly influenced by Turkish perceptions of the Soviet threat.

Throughout the 1950s, Turkey’s foreign policy exclusively relied on the country’s alliance with the West. In geopolitical terms, Turkey was closer to the Transatlantic community than at any other point in its history. To adapt Aleksei Voronin’s remark, it might be said that, during this period Ankara acted more Catholic than the pope. And yet, when Ankara and Moscow agreed to return to normalcy and reinstated economic cooperation in the 1960s and 70s, Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin found reason to mock Turkey’s continued underdevelopment after nearly three decades of U.S. aid.⁹⁹ Soviet-Turkish convergence in the 1960s and 70s might seem typical of Moscow’s broader interactions with the Global South, if we disregard the fact that Turkey was a NATO ally.

For many in the Third World, the balancing act that Turkey pursued in the interwar period and after the 1960s was typical. And that broader pattern begs the question of how the country became a NATO ally in the first place. It invites us to consider the combined geopolitical and economic crisis that drove Turkish politics in the immediate post-war years. At a time when historians were more interested in making a point about the Cold War’s origins and the main culprit, Melvyn Leffler, Eduard Mark, and others focused on Washington’s policy towards Turkey and the role the U.S.-Turkish relationship played in the heating phase of the Cold War. Shifting the perspective to diplomatically isolated Ankara, where clouds of coal smoke hung over the destitute rural migrants who were increasingly visible in the Turkish capital, this article has shown that in 1945 the perception of a Soviet threat was not merely a strategic question but also a key factor contributing to a sense of existential crisis. Turkey’s decision to capitalize on the Soviet threat to receive Western economic aid in the late 1940s and 50s may be the product of a global competition between Moscow and Washington D.C., but that decision should not distract us from an exceptionally tense relationship with Moscow in 1945.

Author Biography

Onur Isci is Associate Professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University's History Department with distinction in 2014. Dr. Isci is the author of two books that deal with Russian-Turkish relations and several articles that appeared in leading academic journals.

Footnotes