Financial Times
Norman Stone
High-level gossip in Ankara has it that there is a personal element to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Back in the days when Syria and Turkey had close relations, the Assads went on holiday with the Erdogans. It is said that afterwards, Mr Assad’s wife, Asma, sent an email to her husband pleading never to be asked to do that again: this was a couple with no languages, she is alleged to have said — he a thug who has read only one book, she a frump interested only in shopping. The email came to the attention of Turkish intelligence, and the rest is history.
However, Mr Assad has survived, thanks to the Russians. And, in November, the Turks shot down a Russian plane for violating their airspace for all of 17 seconds. President Vladimir Putin is also not a man to forget grievances. He has read more than one book, and speaks more than one language; he thinks things through.
Russia’s revenge so far has meant a steep decline in Turkish exports. And the absence of Russian tourists means that more than 400 hotels in the resort of Antalya alone, a favoured destination, are up for sale. It probably also means the recovery of the city of Aleppo by Mr Assad, and maybe also Russia’s encouragement of a Kurdish state which would have a frontier on the Tigris, well inside Turkey. This might cause commentators to recall the Russo-Turkish wars of the19th century, and various other episodes in the Caucasus or the Balkans. In modern times, however, relations between Russia and Turkey have been at the very least correct, and often warm.
It is true that Tsarist statesmen were required to claim Constantinople (“Tsargrad”) as theirs. But when they saw the problems that would follow, they drew back: better a weak Turkey, controlled by them through an autonomous Armenia, or perhaps even Kurdistan, than a troublesome colony or an English-managed Greek imposition. In 1833 Russian troops stopped an Egyptian-Syrian army from taking Istanbul. And when, in 1920, the Ottoman Empire was finally collapsing, and the British were promoting the Greek and Armenian causes, the Russians came to the Turks’ rescue. Indeed, you have to wonder if Turkey would even exist without the help it received from Moscow then.
On the National Monument in Taksim Square in Istanbul there are four identifiable figures: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, is the most obvious. Most surprising, perhaps, is Semyon Aralov, the first Soviet ambassador to Turkey. He co-operated with the Turkish nationalists who had opened up for business on a small scale in Ankara in 1919, resisting the western allies’ plans for Anatolia. In the summer of 1920, representatives of Sultan Mehmed VI signed the treaty of Sèvres, creating a Greater Armenia, a Greater Greece and perhaps Kurdistan. The Sultan would have become ruler of a quaint emirate.
Resistance to the treaty gathered and won Soviet support. Just as it was being signed, there was a meeting in Moscow between Georgy Chicherin, Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, and Ali Fuat Pasha, who represented Ankara. They agreed that the Soviets would give up Armenia and the Turks would forget about Azerbaijan. Money and weapons then helped the Turks to defeat their enemies. Each side mistrusted the west. Each also acted against the wilder manifestations of Islam. Atatürk (in his cups, not in public) considered it “a corpse draped round our necks”. His wife corresponded with the sister of Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar for enlightenment, on how Turkish peasants could be made literate.
In 1929 Stalin expelled Trotsky, and could find no country willing to take him until the Turks obliged. Trotsky lived there for four years (his first visitor was a Belgian journalist by the name of Georges Simenon — he discovered Trotsky reading Céline).
This all went wrong in 1945, when Stalin blew the dust off old Tsarist dossiers. He took up the Armenian cause and demanded the return of three provinces in eastern Turkey. In 1947, Turkey got Marshall aid and later joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and Nato. And that has worked out to its profit. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, recognised what a mistake the Soviet policy had been, but it was too late for a reversal of alliances. Nevertheless, Soviet-Turkish relations were never particularly bad after that. And after Suleyman Demirel became prime minister of Turkey in 1965, there was intelligent co-operation. Certainly, no planes were shot down. The justification for the fighter-downing in November so far has been formal. But Turkish aircraft frequently violate Greek airspace, without mortal consequences.