The Cold War Read Free Page A

months after the end of World War II, the tensions between Moscow and Washington had reached a breaking point. In Iran, the Soviets, who had occupied the northern part of the country during World War II, had refused to withdraw their forces six months after the end of the war (the length of time they had agreed to in 1943). They bowed to U.S. pressure only in the spring of 1946. In Greece, Stalin was supporting the Greek Communist bands who were fast bringing the country to the brink of civil war. With Soviet-controlled governments in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Communist parties active throughout Europe, it seemed to Western leaders that Soviet expansion had to be countered.
    As early as December 1945, Soviet troops were massing on the Russo-Turkish border. Meanwhile, at least two hundred Soviet tanks crossed the Iranian border, and about a third of these mobilized along the frontier between Iran and Turkey. By the summer of 1946, the United States decided to risk the end of the wartime alliance in a naval show of force—one that signaled a virtual end to American effortsto accommodate the demands of the Soviet Union. Relations between the two powers would never be the same again.
    Even during the halcyon days of the wartime alliance, Stalin was insisting on a Russian military presence in the Dardanelles and Bosporus (together known as the Straits), the vital gateway in and out of the Black Sea for the Russian fleet headquartered at Sebastopol. At the Yalta summit in February 1945, Stalin declared that the Montreux Convention—which the great powers had signed in the 1930s, giving Turkey the right to defend the Straits—must be revised. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed. But then Stalin spoke in more threatening tones, asserting that he found it “impossible to accept a situation in which Turkey had a hand on Russia's throat.”
    Stalin's demands escalated after the war in Europe, and in June 1945 he insisted that the Kars and Ardahan districts of eastern Turkey, ceded by Moscow to Turkey in 1921, would have to be returned to the Soviet Union. In addition, he demanded that the Turks consent to Soviet bases in the Straits.
    A month later, meeting with Truman and Churchill at Potsdam outside the ruined city of Berlin, Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, declared that the bases were not enough: Turkey and Russia should become joint custodians of the Straits. Neither Truman nor Churchill thought much of that idea.
    Stalin's desire to acquire the lost territories in eastern Turkey may well have been inspired by Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police and, like Stalin, a Georgian. According to Khrushchev's memoirs, at one of those “interminable” suppers with Stalin, Beria “started harping on how certain territories, now part of Turkey, used to belong to Georgia.” He then convinced Stalin that “now was the time to get those territories back. He argued that Turkey was weakened by World War II and wouldn't be able to resist.”
    As Soviet demands intensified, Washington took a hard line. By the time Secretary of State James F. Byrnes returned from the Moscow Conference in December 1945, Truman was complaining to him: “There isn't a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they under-stand—‘How many divisions have you?’”
    The Turks also had no intention of satisfying Soviet demands. In the weeks after Potsdam, the Turkish foreign office believed a Soviet invasion was likely, but, they said, “We would rather die on Turkish soil than be deported toSiberia.” The American ambassador in Ankara was convinced that Moscow wanted to convert Turkey into a Soviet satellite, and, from Moscow, George F. Kennan warned that no concessions would satisfy the Soviet Union, whose aim may have been to establish, as