Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 by Jamil Hasanli (review)

The 1940s, like today, were a period of vertiginous diplomatic flux in Turkish-Russian relations. Those who wish to make sense of the tangled history of these relations will be pleased by the recent English translation of a monograph by historian Jamil Hasanli. Hasanli's Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War is a detailed dissection of how Turkish-Soviet relations turned from one of friendly engagement in the 1930s to one of opposition by the 1950s. Hasanli has made exhaustive use of several former Soviet archives in a way that allows the reader to follow every change of tactical language employed during the early years of the Cold War. This insider view of how Soviet, and to some extent Turkish, diplomats operated constitutes the major contribution of Hasanli's book.

The "Turkish Crisis" in the title refers to the Soviet Union's attempt to secure significant territorial and diplomatic concessions from Turkey after World War II. Specifically, the Soviet Union demanded more control over the administration of the Straits, including the operation of a Soviet military base there. As one of its conditions for a renewal of the two countries' treaty of friendship, it also sought the annexation of the districts of Kars and Ardahan, which had previously been administered by the Russian Empire for forty years. In Hasanli's account, the "Turkish Crisis" was closely tied to a similar Soviet attempt to acquire territory from Iranian Azerbaijan during the same period.

Hasanli's book proceeds chronologically through the relevant archival materials. It begins by discussing how World War II planted the seeds for postwar Allied competition over the Near East. Next, Hasanli provides a blow-by-blow account of the political wrangling between 1945 and 1947, when the question of Turkish territorial and diplomatic concessions was at its most heated. The discussion of these three years, stretched out between chapters 2 and 7, occupies the overwhelming bulk of the book. A final chapter focuses on Turkish entry into NATO, while a conclusion highlights key events in Turkish-Soviet relations through the end of the Cold War. Aside from the Turkish Crisis, Hasanli makes a number of detours to discuss Soviet claims on Iranian Azerbaijan or intra-Caucasian politics during the early Cold War. Because they cover topics not fully covered in other sources, these excursuses are worth noting even if they are not always directly related to the titular topic of the book.

Hasanli clearly articulates two main arguments. First, he argues, it is "Eurocentric" to date the start of the Cold War several years after World War II, either the launch of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 or the Berlin Blockade in 1948. Rather, it was the Soviet demands in the Near East that paved the way for the Cold War (pp. viii, xi). One could easily quibble with the unequivocalness with which Hasanli makes this claim—after all, dating the start of the Cold War depends on how one defines the Cold War, and the Allies faced a great variety of disputes by the end of the war—but his call not to overlook the Near Eastern dimensions of the postwar intra-Allied standoff is well taken. A more strongly worded version of this argument appears later on, where Hasanli writes, "It was the Soviets and their blackmail and threats that compelled Turkey to become a strategic ally of the United States" (pp. 382). Here, such claims might be tempered by the recent research of Onur İşçi, for example, who demonstrates that leading members of the Turkish administration were enthusiastic about pursuing a strategic alliance with the United States as early as 1943–44.¹

A second argument locates Stalin as "the main architect of the 'Turkish Crisis.'" Implicitly rejecting geopolitical reasons for postwar Soviet expansionism, Hasanli writes that Soviet foreign policy "served the interests of Stalin's personal...