Soviet territorial claims against Turkey

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet territorial claims against Turkey represent one of the Cold War's earliest flashpoints, a moment when Moscow pressed Ankara with demands that carried the weight of centuries. In December 1945, central Georgian and Russian newspapers including Pravda and Izvestia published an open letter by academics Simon Janashia and Niko Berdzenishvili, demanding that Turkey return what they called ancient Georgian lands. The letter did not mince words: "This is not only insignificant territorial harassment, but also crime against our people's identity. Crime that has slashed our national body in half."

  Behind the newspaper columns lay a more calculated Soviet strategy. Deputy premier Lavrentiy Beria had pressed Joseph Stalin directly, arguing that territory annexed from Georgians and Armenians during the Turkish war of Independence should come back under Soviet control. The ambitions touched on the Kars Plateau, the Black Sea coast as far west as the town of Terme, and regions tied to the ancestral homeland of the Armenian people before the Ottoman deportations of the Great War.

  Why did the Soviets press this claim in 1945 of all moments? What were they actually asking for? And why did the whole effort collapse so quickly? Those questions lead into one of the most revealing episodes of early Cold War maneuvering.

• 2. The Montreux Grievance

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  The Montreux Convention of 1936 sat at the root of Soviet frustration. Under that agreement, Turkey held sole control over shipping through the Bosphorus strait, the essential waterway for Russian exports to and from the Black Sea. Moscow had long objected to this arrangement, and the expiration of the 1925 Soviet-Turkish Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality in 1945 gave the Soviets an opening.

  Rather than renew the treaty quietly, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov delivered a pointed message to the Turkish side: Georgian and Armenian territorial claims would have to be resolved before any new agreement could be concluded. The contested districts around Kars and Ardahan had a particular history. The Russian Empire had governed that area from 1878 to 1921, when Russia ceded it to Turkey.

  Molotov drew a pointed comparison. The Soviets had normalized their border with Poland after wartime cessions made during a period of Soviet weakness in 1921, he argued. No equivalent renegotiation had ever legitimized the Turkish territorial gains from that same period of weakness. The people of those areas, he noted, now had their own titular Soviet Socialist Republics. Khrushchev's memoirs later confirmed that Beria had pushed the claims specifically because that territory had been annexed from Georgians and Armenians during the Turkish war of Independence.

• 3. What the Academics Demanded

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  Simon Janashia and Niko Berdzenishvili published their letter in the 14 to the 20th of December 1945 editions of Communist, Zarya Vostoka, Pravda, and Izvestia. The text framed the demand in the language of postwar justice. Georgia had given "ultimate sacrifice in a fight against fascism," the letter declared, and had "earned the right to submit its rightful demands."

  The territorial scope ran along the Black Sea coast westward from the Batumi province border to the Termedon River near the town of Terme. This territory, which the letter identified as Lazistan or Chanetia, measured approximately 20,000 square kilometres and took in the capes of Rize, Trabzon, Fici, and Fener. The academics also listed interior regions: the Georgian SSR, they wrote, could lay claim to Parhal, Tortom, and Ispir in the south-west, and both East and Central Chanetia along the Rize and Trebizond coasts.

  The letter closed with a declaration: "Georgian people should receive their homeland back. Land that they never abandoned and cannot abandon." Medieval wars with Byzantium and events of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were woven into the argument, lending the claim a historical depth that stretched well beyond the 1921 treaty.

• 4. Three Plans, One Prize

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  Soviet planners did not operate with a single map. Three distinct plans set out different amounts of territory Turkey might be required to cede, each more ambitious than the last.

  The first plan covered the former Russian Empire oblast of Kars, Batum, and the Surmali uyezd of Erivan Governorate, including the city of Igdir and its surroundings. These had been part of the Russian Empire from 1878 until 1918, then passed through the Republic of Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Georgia before being ceded to Turkey in 1921.

  The second plan added the Georgian SSR's claims along the Choroh river and eastern Lazistan, plus Armenian SSR claims on Alashkert, the city of Bayazet, and additions to the Kars and Surmali areas. The third plan stretched much further: most of Turkey's Black Sea region, covering the Trabzon, Gumushane, and Giresun districts along the Terme River, plus most of the eastern Anatolian interior, taking in Erzurum, Van, Mush, and Bitlis.

  A significant portion of the third plan's territory corresponded to Western Armenia, the ancestral homeland of the Armenian people before the Ottoman forced deportations of the Great War era. Between 1946 and 1948, roughly 150,000 ethnic Armenians from Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and France had already migrated to Soviet Armenia, and the Soviet government had intended to repatriate diaspora Armenians into whatever territories it acquired.

• 5. American Opposition and Collapse

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  The United States moved against the Soviet position on two distinct grounds. Strategically, Washington judged the Kars Plateau necessary for the defence of Turkey itself. Ideologically, parts of the American government read the Soviet territorial claims as expansionist and drew parallels to Nazi irredentism over the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.

  On the question of Armenia specifically, the State Department had concluded by 1934 that whatever support the United States had extended for Armenian aspirations since the Wilson presidency (1913 to 1921) had lapsed with the loss of Armenian independence. That earlier window had closed.

  Firm American opposition to Soviet-backed separatist movements extended beyond Turkey. The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, which had existed from 1946 to 1947, and the Azeri Azerbaijan People's Government, which ran from 1945 to 1946, were both crushed and re-annexed by Persia under American pressure. Turkey itself joined NATO in 1952, anchoring itself firmly in the anti-Soviet alliance. After Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet government formally renounced its territorial claims against Turkey, framing the move as part of an effort to build friendly relations with Ankara and, by extension, with its alliance partner the United States. The claim that Lavrentiy Beria had personally pressed on Stalin quietly disappeared from Soviet diplomacy.