Stalin looking at the map:

“I don’t like our border right here.”

Stalin examining Soviet borders on a map: a 1949 Soviet propaganda poster.

In several posts I have published on my blog over the past week, I have examined the Soviet Union’s 1945 demands for territory and bases in the Straits, drawing on a range of Soviet sources. [*] As those pieces show, sources ranging from official Soviet publications to Molotov’s interviews and Khrushchev’s memoirs make it clear that these demands were not, as various Stalinist writers in Turkey - Yalçın Küçük foremost among them - have occasionally claimed, a “Cold War fairy tale”. The brief anecdote recounted below adds a small but significant detail to this picture.

This anecdote appears near the beginning of Molotov Remembers, a volume consisting of 140 interviews conducted by the Soviet journalist and writer Feliks Chuyev with Molotov between 1969 and 1986.

The book’s first subsection is titled “International Affairs.” On the opening page of that subsection, Chuyev inserts the following striking note:

. . . I recall a story told by A. Mgeladze (first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Georgia during the last years of Stalin’s life), supplemented by Molotov. It’s about a map with new borders of the USSR that was brought after the war to Stalin’s dacha. The map was very small-like those for school textbooks. Stalin pinned it to the wall: “Let’s see what we have here.... Everything is all right to the north. Finland has offended us, so we moved the border from Leningrad. Baltic states-that’s age-old Russian land!-and they’re ours again. All Belorussians live together now, Ukrainians together, Moldavians together. It’s okay to the west.” And he turned suddenly to the eastern borders. “What do we have there?... The Kuril Islands belong to us now, Sakhalin is completely ours-you see, good! And Port Arthur’s ours, and Dairen is ours”-Stalin moved his pipe across China-“and the Chinese Eastern railway is ours. China, Mongolia-everything is in order. But I don’t like our border right here!” Stalin said and pointed south of the Caucasus. (Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, ed. Albert Resis, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1993, pp. 28-29.)

Chuyev explains that he heard this anecdote from Akaki Mgeladze, and that Molotov not only confirmed the story but also added a few details of his own.

Following this anecdote, Molotov offers the following comment:

In this matter we admittedly went a bit too far, but something has been brewing in the south. You have to understand that there are limits to everything, otherwise you can choke. (ibid., p. 29)

Akaki Mgeladze

We can be confident that this account - endorsed by three fanatical Stalinists (Chuyev, Mgeladze and Molotov) - was not concocted in order to smear Stalin.

When Stalin says, “I don’t like our border right here,” he is pointing to Turkey’s north-eastern provinces and Iranian Azerbaijan, and suggesting that the borders in these regions ought to be “secured” - that is, that some territory should be incorporated into the Soviet Union.

This anecdote is highly valuable for understanding the geopolitical approach Stalin pursued in the post-war period. Stalin, who had led the bureaucratic counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, conducted foreign policy on a far broader scale than most of the Russian tsars. He was prepared to take far greater risks than the tsars would ever have contemplated in their own time in order to expand the borders of the Soviet Union. He was determined, under his own leadership, to realise the geopolitical objectives that the tsars had pursued but, in Stalin’s narrow-minded reading of history, had failed to achieve - whether through weakness or inadequacy.

Foremost among these objectives were the “Straits” - Istanbul and the Dardanelles, the waterways linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean - one of the long-standing dreams of Tsarist Russian foreign policy. Stalin regarded these straits not only as a strategic matter but also as a geopolitical gateway providing direct access to Europe.

Stalin’s refusal of Hitler’s 1940 proposal to partition Turkey, and his subsequent demand in 1945 for bases in the Straits, were both linked to this long-term strategic objective.

[*] See:

What do Khrushchev’s memoirs tell us? The question of the Soviet territorial demands on Turkey

The Kremlin’s mid-1970s “diplomatic” manoeuvre: The rewritten history of the demands for territory and bases in the Straits

Molotov Anlatıyor [Molotov Speaks]: territorial and Straits base demands on Turkey in 1945 - A comparison of the first and expanded second editions

Crashing into the hard truth while trying to turn history on its head

 [**] Akaki Mgeladze (1912–1980): A Stalinist Georgian politician. During Stalin’s final years he served as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia and was known as one of Stalin’s closest party leaders in Georgia.