The Kremlin’s mid-1970s “diplomatic” manoeuvre:

The rewritten history of the demands for territory and bases in the Straits

In last week’s blog post, Crashing into the hard truth while trying to turn history on its head, I briefly addressed the question of whether the Soviet Union did, in fact, make territorial demands of Turkey and seek bases in the Straits in 1945. At the centre of that discussion stood the well-known claim advanced by Yalçın Küçük in Theses on Turkey 2 (Türkiye Üzerine Tezler 2) -a claim that, for half a century, has been embraced and repeatedly echoed by many Stalinist circles in Turkey: namely, the assertion that the entire episode is nothing more than a “Cold War fairy tale”.

I would now like to examine the issue through a text produced within official Soviet historiography during the Brezhnev era, in the first half of the 1970s.

History of Soviet Foreign Policy, Volume II (1945–1970) [*], published in Moscow in 1974 by Progress Publishers, is an official study prepared by the ideologues of the Stalinist bureaucracy to present Soviet foreign policy to a Western readership. (To the best of my knowledge, neither volume has been translated into Turkish.) The book includes the following passage concerning the Soviet Union’s 1945 demands for territory and bases in the Straits:

The Soviet Government took a series of steps to improve relations with the USSR’s southern neighbours -Turkey and Iran. On behalf of the Soviet Government the following statement was made to the Turkish Ambassador on May 30, 1953: 

“In order to preserve good-neighbourly relations and strengthen peace and security the governments of Armenia and Georgia have found it possible to renounce their territorial claims on Turkey. As regards the question of the Straits, the Soviet Government has reconsidered its view and feels that the USSR’s security can be ensured from the direction of the Straits on terms equally acceptable to the USSR and Turkey. The Soviet Government therefore places it on record that the Soviet Union has no territorial claims on Turkey.”* This statement helped to clear the way for a gradual improvement of relations between the Soviet Union and Turkey. (pp. 279-280)

 The footnote indicated by an asterisk reads as follows:

Pravda, July 19, 1953. In December 1945 the Soviet press carried letters by two Georgian scientists, who wrote that Turkey should return to Georgia some border regions that she had acquired under the Treaty of 1921. These letters were used by Western propaganda to stir up anti-Soviet feeling in Turkey. (p. 280)

In this passage, the use of a “conciliatory” diplomatic tone is immediately apparent. Yet a more attentive reading makes it no less clear that we are confronted with a narrative containing significant admissions on the issue.

The authors make two admissions in this passage:

1) There were demands between 1945 and 1953

This is the clearest acknowledgement in the text. A demand “withdrawn” in 1953 can only be withdrawn if it previously existed. The passage therefore concedes -without ever mentioning Stalin by name- that the demands first raised in 1945 remained in force until his death, and that any retreat occurred only in the post-Stalin period.

2) There was a “previous position” on the Straits

The text states that the Soviet Union “re-examined its earlier position” on the question of the Straits. This deliberately vague formulation -carefully avoiding the word “bases”- indirectly confirms that the USSR had advanced concrete demands regarding the Straits regime in 1945, and that Turkey had deemed these demands unacceptable.

The fact that these demands were maintained for eight years while Stalin remained in power, and were withdrawn immediately after his death, demonstrates that they were neither local nor incidental, nor the initiative of particular Soviet republics. On the contrary, they were the product of a centralised foreign-policy line specific to the Stalin era. The authors of the text acknowledge this -albeit implicitly.

The distortion in the text: “Individual republics made the demand”

By contrast, there is nothing remotely credible about attributing the territorial demands to “the governments of Armenia and Georgia”. In 1945, foreign policy in the Soviet Union was entirely centralised, and in matters of this magnitude the ultimate decision-maker was Stalin. It is inconceivable that the Union republics could have developed autonomous and audacious diplomatic initiatives on an issue as sensitive as demanding territory from Turkey.

What is taking place here is not an attempt to clarify a historical reality, but to diffuse responsibility through a diplomatic manoeuvre. In other words, at this point the Stalinist bureaucracy is fabricating a “fairy tale” of its own.

The additional contradiction created by the footnote

The footnote, far from reinforcing the argument, in fact weakens it further.

While the main text asserts that the official demands originated with the republics, the footnote reduces the supposed “problem” to two letters written by Georgian scholars and published in the Soviet press. Yet any text published in the Soviet press in 1945 -whatever the outlet- had, in practice, passed through state approval; it is scarcely possible to imagine otherwise.

Moreover, for those forces in Turkey seeking to generate tension with the Soviet Union, the real propaganda material would not have been the letters of two academics, but official state demands. Indeed, that is precisely what occurred in practice.

For a reader familiar with the workings of the Soviet system, the footnote therefore functions less as a convincing clarification than as a revealing slip.

* * *

Yalçın Küçük

As I bring this piece to a close, I wish to draw attention to the following point: in Türkiye Üzerine Tezler 2 (1979), where Yalçın Küçük characterises the claim that the Soviet Union made territorial demands of Turkey and sought bases in the Straits in 1945 as a “Cold War fairy tale”, he makes no reference whatsoever to this official Soviet study, published five years earlier in 1974, which deals directly with the issue.

Of course, we cannot say with certainty whether this omission was the result of a deliberate choice or of some other reason. What is clear, however, is this: despite all its euphemisms and distortions, the official Soviet publication of 1974 is markedly less denialist than Küçük’s 1979 “fairy tale” thesis.

[*] History of Soviet Foreign Policy 1945–1970 (Vol. II), ed., B. Ponomaryov, A. Gromyko and V. Khvostov, trans. David Skvirsky, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974.