Turkey and the Soviet Union During World War II

Diplomacy, Discord and International Relations

Onur Isci

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788317818
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World War II

Based on newly accessible Turkish archival documents, Onur Isci's study details the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Soviet Union during World War II. Turkish-Russian relations have a long history of conflict. Under Ataturk relations improved – he was a master 'balancer' of the great powers. During the Second World War, however, relations between Turkey and the Soviet Union plunged to several degrees below zero, as Ottoman-era Russophobia began to take hold in Turkish elite circles. For the Russians, hostility was based on long-term apathy stemming from the enormous German investment in the Ottoman Empire; for the Turks, on the fear of Russian territorial ambitions. This book offers a new interpretation of how Russian foreign policy drove Turkey into a peculiar neutrality in the Second World War, and eventually into NATO. Onur Isci argues that this was a great reversal of Ataturk-era policies, and that it was the burden of history, not realpolitik, that caused the move to the west during the Second World War.

1

Things Thus Standing

Like a prism that scatters rays of light, the Ankara Central railway station reveals a wide range of issues regarding Turkey’s recent past. Commissioned in 1935, it replaced a dilapidated eastern terminal of the Anatolian Railway. On the outside, the building sports an art deco clock tower and a window-covered façade with neoclassical columns that reflect the revolutionary dreams and great expectations of early Kemalism. By contrast, its aging marble floors and gloomy stone walls still echo with the bitter quarrels of Ankara’s political leaders who followed Mustafa Kemal after his death in 1938. More than 10,000 tons of concrete and sandstone were brought from nearby quarries to complete the project between 1935 and 1937.¹ Its chief architect, Şekip Akalın, was a 25-year-old desk officer at the Ministry of Public Works. He was sent to Europe for an inspiration tour in 1934 and was asked to produce something that would mirror the achievements of the bourgeoning republic. Akalın’s moment of revelation, perhaps unsurprisingly, arrived in the Third Reich, and he returned home to imitate the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof. When Ankara’s new station was finally inaugurated in October 1937, it stood thirty-two metres high, extended 150 metres wide, and quickly became an iconic monument of the country’s new capital.

A fortnight after his election to the office, it was Prime Minister Celal Bayar who attended a carefully timed ribbon cutting ceremony, which took place on the fourteenth anniversary of the republic’s foundation.² For Bayar, two decades after the loss of the Hejaz railway to Syria, Ankara’s new terminal came to symbolize the proud creation of a modern state, moving Turkey’s heart closer to its margins and beyond. Connecting 2,800 kilometres of new railway tracks laid since 1923, Ankara Central station was the perfect foil to display the modernity of an otherwise poor and small Anatolian town.³ Compared to the staggering beauty of the imperial capital in İstanbul, Ankara was less charming and more isolated from its western neighbours, metaphorically as much as physically. Until the 1930s, many European states maintained their embassies in İstanbul, feeding Turkey’s conviction that Ankara was being boycotted by the West. Equally marginalized after the Great War, Germany played a key role in crafting Turkey’s new face, including the first city blueprints for Ankara and numerous early-republican buildings.⁴ But distancing the nascent republic from the Ottoman political order also meant a separation from Germany in the international sphere. This underlying motive is crucial for understanding Turkey’s priorities during the interwar period and why Ankara turned to Moscow as an alternate source of support.

When Turkey’s new leaders looked at their truncated country and the world around it, they did so with hope but also with restraint. In 1938, Ambassador Percy Loraine captured this tension when he said of Ankara: ‘the Sick Man … has left behind a number of lusty children, who were acutely aware of their limitations.’⁵ Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Turkish diplomats preoccupied themselves with issues that were left unresolved on the table at the Lausanne Conference in 1922–3. At the outset, Turkey had problems with all of its neighbours, from the Balkans to the Middle East, and, as a balancing act, relied almost exclusively on its friendship with the Soviet Union. In turn, Moscow courted Ankara as an ally against Western imperialism and British efforts to isolate the Soviet Union behind a cordon sanitaire of anti-communist states. The two defeated countries, which were really revolutionized after the Great War – Turkey and the Soviet Union – became what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘forces for stability’ in the 1920s and 30s.⁶ With the advent of fascism and the ensuing surge of revisionism in Europe, Ankara and Moscow were destined to mend fences with Western powers but, all the way up to the outbreak of World War II, they tried to maintain a close partnership that transcended diplomatic routines.

By the time Ankara’s new train station was inaugurated in 1937, the Soviets were not the only pebble on the Turkish beach; several European states relocated their diplomatic missions to the new capital, reinstituting friendly relations with the Kemalists. The Turkish popular press, including state-sponsored papers, employed editorial lines that were at once favourable to the Soviet Union and pro-Western. On the eve of World War II, the Turkish government seemed to enjoy its new image as a ‘bridge between the East and the West, safeguarding peace and harmony in its region’.⁷ Among the architectural metaphors that define Turkish leaders’ imagining of their country’s diplomacy, ‘bridge’ has probably been the most prevalent. Yet, in Turkish journalists’ aphorism, peace and harmony were not merely linguistic ornaments but a direct adaptation of one of Atatürk’s many dictums that became popular in the 1930s. During a campaign speech for the 1931 elections, Mustafa Kemal had succinctly laid out his party’s agenda as ‘Peace at Home, Peace in the World’ (Yurtta Sulh, Cihanda Sulh) – a phrase that was later adopted by the constitution as ‘the core principle on which Turkish diplomacy shall operate’.⁸

Looking at early republican monuments and official statements of Kemalist apparatchiks, historians have long held that, under the surface of Atatürk’s pacifist rhetoric throughout the latter half of the 1930s, what guided the Turkish state and diplomacy was a quest to maintain domestic and regional status quo. It is often argued that through curbing adventurism and revisionism – common goals in most successor states to the Great War’s crumbled empires – Atatürk sought to eliminate any military or diplomatic undertaking that could easily destabilize the budding republic. As a corollary to this argument, scholars frequently looked at the conflict-prone European periphery, where revisionist powers were establishing their own spheres of influence, and suggested that Turks successfully isolated themselves from their past, thereby anchoring their state firmly in the Western order. Consequently, the status quo has become the defining framework for the Kemalist period, both in foreign and domestic affairs, and the term has been mistakenly conflated with a pacifist agenda.⁹

In reality, however, Turkish diplomacy went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the second half of the 1930s, adopting a highly revisionist spin. Behind Ankara’s changing motives and attempts to reformulate its regional diplomacy anew, the Italian threat played the greatest role. With Benito Mussolini’s menacing attitude towards Turkey and aggressive militarization of the Dodecanese islands – only a few miles off the Aegean coastline – Turkey began to change its own conceptions of Great Britain and established closer relations with London to remilitarize the Straits in 1936. After long hours of heated debates at the international conference summoned in Montreux, the new convention replaced the Lausanne regime and reinstated ‘Turkey’s full sovereignty over the Straits in times of war and when she feels an imminent possibility of war’.¹⁰ This became a source of apprehension for the Soviet Union since the sovereignty clause included Turkey’s freedom to remilitarize the Dardanelles and to close or open the Straits to the free passage of warships of all sizes whenever and to whomever it thought necessary.¹¹ But, even then, Turkey did not turn from friend to foe; the Soviet government tried to keep things in perspective and continued to work with the Kemalists.

A second development in the latter half of the 1930s was a surge in Syria’s support of Kurdish provocations in Alexandretta, bordering Turkey’s southernmost frontier. The provisional French mandate, which had been governing Alexandretta as part of Syria since the 1921 Franco-Turkish Armistice Treaty, expired in 1935.¹² Between 1936 and 1939, the Syrian administration in Alexandretta failed to check, and at times directly sponsored, regional Kurdish tribes who had their strong disagreements with Turkey – some lingering from past imperial conflicts, some pertaining to the new regime’s strong centralism. Kurdish chieftains, along with local Armenian community leaders, stirred up incipient rebellions in Turkey’s southern provinces through Syria during the course of 1920s and 30s. Thus Turkey’s annexation of Alexandretta, which occurred in stages between 1937–9, paved the way for an equally striking rapprochement between Turkey and France.

As Great Power rivalry intensified in Europe after Nazi Germany’s repudiation of its Locarno liabilities, Turkey’s disputes with Italy and Syria became two merging tectonic plates, creating a fault line stretching out from the Middle East looming over the Mediterranean. Wedged between two security considerations – with Italy on the one hand and Syria on the other – Turkey adopted a strategy of revisionism, effectively changing the status of the Straits and Alexandretta to its advantage after 1936. But, establishing a proper defence structure of such magnitude was a bigger undertaking than what Turkey could manage on its own and required a broader security agreement. From this perspective, Mustafa Kemal’s frequently cited dictum – Peace at Home, Peace in the World – should not be taken as a pacifist policy but, rather as a guarantee extended by the Turkish state to its new-found partners in the West, signalling a phase of revisionism that would run parallel to British and French interests. The Soviets were less vocal about Turkey’s alignment with the French, but Ankara’s attempts to improve relations with Britain came at the expense of a predictable anxiety in Moscow.

The ambivalence of the 1936–9 period was on display during Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s visit to the Soviet embassy’s celebrations of the thirteenth anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic.¹³ On 29 October 1936, just three months after the Montreux Convention had been signed, Atatürk arrived at the Soviet embassy on his state’s most important holiday. In some sense, his visit was not particularly unusual. During the peak of Soviet–Turkish collaboration, the Soviet embassy was a mecca for Ankara’s new leaders, and one of the regular participants recalled that ‘rather unlimited amounts of vodka and caviar were served over politics’.¹⁴ For the 1936 celebrations, Ambassador Lev Karakhan had as usual secured the attendance of Turkey’s political elite, including Prime Minister İsmet İnönü and Foreign Minister Tevfik Rüştü Aras. Atatürk was not an expected guest; he turned up at half past two in the morning, already in high spirits. With relations as they were, the nocturnal conversations proved awkward.

Atatürk’s behaviour suggested that he was frustrated with his Sov...