Turkish Straits crisis

• 1. Introduction

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  The Turkish Straits crisis began in the summer of 1946 when the Soviet Union handed Turkey a note demanding that the rules governing the narrow waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean be torn up and rewritten. Two thin strips of water, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, had sat at the center of Russian foreign policy ambitions for centuries. Whoever held them held a lock on every warship trying to enter or exit the Black Sea. Now, with World War Two barely over and the rubble still warm, the Soviet government was pressing its claim with warships and massed troops.

  Turkey had spent the war carefully neutral, watching from the sidelines as empires collapsed around it. That neutrality had bought time, but it had also stored up a reckoning. The questions this documentary will explore are simple but consequential: why did control of two narrow straits bring the United States and the Soviet Union to the edge of open confrontation? How did a centuries-old waterway dispute give birth to the Truman Doctrine? And how did a country that had refused to take sides end up anchored permanently to one?

• 2. The Lock on Two Seas

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  Two sequential gateways, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, form the only passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Without them, Black Sea ports are landlocked for all practical purposes. For Russia, and then for the Soviet Union, this was an old wound. The value of their Black Sea harbors depended entirely on the freedom to push ships through those narrows, and that freedom belonged to whoever held the gates. Historians trace most of the Russo-Turkish wars to this single geographic frustration.

  The same waterways mattered enormously for trade. Turkey, the USSR, Romania, and Bulgaria all relied on the straits to move goods to ports around the world. But it was the military dimension that kept foreign ministries awake. A power that controlled the straits could let its own fleets slide through at will while keeping rival warships out. That asymmetry made the straits one of the most consequential pieces of geography in the eastern Mediterranean.

• 3. A Friendship Cools

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  Vladimir Lenin sent two million gold Imperial rubles, sixty thousand rifles, and one hundred artillery pieces to the Turkish National Movement in the summer of 1920. That aid came at the personal request of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose forces were fighting to overthrow the Ottoman monarchy and push out Western occupiers. Before either government had even formally constituted itself, the Turkish Grand National Assembly and the Russian Bolsheviks recognized each other through the 1921 Treaty of Moscow and pledged cooperation.

  The settlement on the straits itself was left to a later conference. That conference, at Lausanne, produced an agreement signed on the 24th of July 1923 by the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Turkey. The Lausanne settlement demilitarized the Straits Zone and put an international commission in charge. The Soviets were never satisfied with this outcome.

  A 1925 treaty of friendship and neutrality committed both countries to stay out of alliances directed against each other. That treaty was extended in 1935 for a ten-year term, with renewal intervals of two years scheduled to begin in 1945. But by 1934, Soviet diplomats were already secretly pressing Turkey to accept Soviet bases on the straits, a demand the British Ambassador Percy Loraine credited with drawing Turkey closer to the United Kingdom.

• 4. Montreux and Its Discontents

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  Twelve governments gathered in 1936 under what became the Montreux Convention to write new rules for the Turkish Straits. Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Romania, the Soviet Union, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia all sent representatives. The convention was called partly because Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had been rattling the region, and partly because of worry that Bulgaria might remilitarize the straits on its own.

  The treaty signed on the 20th of July 1936 handed Turkey sole authority over the straits. Its rules were deliberately stricter than what international law normally requires. Any warship had to give Turkey prior notice before transiting. The size, number, and type of warships permitted into the Black Sea were all capped. Merchant ships faced mandatory sanitation inspections, and Turkey was given discretion to levy fees on non-stopover voyages.

  Joseph Stalin was unhappy from the start. As early as 1939, he was pushing for an alternative arrangement and proposed joint Soviet-Turkish control. When Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, he told his German counterparts of Soviet intentions to forcibly seize the straits and establish a military base nearby. In September 1939, shortly after the invasion of Poland began, Turkish Foreign Minister Sukru Saracoglu traveled to Moscow, where Stalin snubbed him and Kremlin officials pressed him to agree to a Soviet military installation on the straits.

• 5. The Crisis Breaks

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  On the 7th of August 1946, the Soviet government handed the Turkish Foreign Ministry a note with a pointed accusation: Turkey was no longer managing the straits in a way that served the security interests of other Black Sea nations. The note pointed to episodes in which Italian and German warships had passed through without obstruction. It noted, with telling precision, that Turkey had only detained German ships once it finally declared war on Germany on the 23rd of February 1945. The conclusion was blunt: the Montreux Treaty should be scrapped and replaced at a new international conference.

  The 6th of April 1946 visit of the American battleship USS Missouri had already inflamed the atmosphere. The United States said the ship was in the region to deliver the mortuary urn of the late Turkish Ambassador. The Soviets dismissed this explanation as a convenient cover story. Throughout that summer and autumn, Soviet naval vessels ran maneuvers close to Turkish shores while a substantial number of ground troops were moved into the Balkans.

  Turkey buckled within days and appealed to the United States for help. President Harry S. Truman, who at Potsdam had initially said the straits question was a bilateral matter for Turkey and the Soviet Union to resolve, had by then settled on a harder position. He was not willing to see the straits fall under Soviet control and sent a naval task force to Turkey. On the 20th of August 1946, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson briefed fifteen journalists on the urgency of the American stance.

• 6. The American Commitment

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  On the 9th of October 1946, the United States and the United Kingdom jointly reaffirmed their support for Turkey. Seventeen days later, the Soviet Union withdrew its specific demand for a new summit on the straits, though it held onto its underlying position. Most of the intimidatory military forces were pulled back from the region shortly afterward.

  The episode had clarified something for Washington. Turkey accepted one hundred million US dollars in economic and defense aid in 1947 under the Truman Doctrine, the framework designed explicitly to halt Soviet influence from spreading into Turkey and Greece. The Greek Civil War had been running alongside the Straits crisis as a parallel pressure point, and together the two crises pushed the Truman administration toward a formal policy of containment. Both Turkey and Greece joined NATO in 1952.

  The Soviet Union also pressed a territorial grievance alongside its straits demands. Deputy Premier Lavrentiy Beria argued to Stalin that a strip of Turkish-controlled land stretching southwest from Georgia to Giresun, including the area known as Lazistan, had been taken from Georgians by the Ottomans. In 1945, Moscow declined to extend the 1925 non-aggression treaty, conditioning any renewal on talks about that disputed border territory.

• 7. Aftermath and Settlement

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  After Turkey appealed to the United States, the Turkish government appointed Faik Akdur as its new ambassador to Moscow in November 1946. President Inonü's instructions to Akdur were specific: work on improving bilateral relations, but do not enter into any discussions about the straits.

  Sergei Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador to Turkey for the first year and a half of the crisis, was replaced by the Soviet Politburo in 1948. His successor, Aleksandr Lavrishev, arrived carrying a document from the Soviet Foreign Ministry that would turn out to be the last major Soviet statement on the straits question.

  The matter was effectively settled when Joseph Stalin died. On the 30th of May 1953, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov formally dropped Russia's claims over the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and abandoned the associated border disputes along the Turkish-Armenian-Georgian frontier. The Montreux Convention of 1936, revised but intact, still governs passage through the Turkish Straits between Turkey and the successor states of the Soviet Union today.