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  Selected Secret Documents from Soviet Foreign Policy Documents Archives - 1919 to 1941

 

Concentrated on 1st and  2nd WW Correspondence and Meetings related to Turkey, Balkans and Iran, with some additions from Afghanistan and India.

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Recording of the talks between the USSR peopleʹs commissar for foreign affairs and the Turkish foreign minister Aras. July 15‐17, 1937 July 15‐17, 1937

Aras began his first conversation with me by announcing Yugoslaviaʹs response to our request, transmitted through Turkey, regarding the loan office [1]. The answer, very unsatisfactory, is set out in a letter from Yugoslavia addressed to Turkey.

Aras considered it necessary to mention the middle east pact concluded in Tehran, informing that the chairman of the council of the new entente, the Persian minister, had allegedly been instructed to address me regarding the pact with a special telegram. To my remark that I had not received such a telegram, Aras replied that she was probably still on the way (until today ‐ august 2 ‐ the telegram had not arrived).

Recalling our conversations in Geneva regarding a broad pact of mutual assistance, about which Aras undertook to clarify the positions of Yugoslavia and Romania, Aras said that the first promised to talk to him on this topic at the next meeting, and Romania wants to clarify the position of Poland. I reminded Aras that in Geneva, to my direct question whether Romania would join the pact without Poland, Antonescu replied to me that she would go along with the lesser and Balkan entente, even without Poland. Aras threw up his hands, wanting to say by this: you, they say, know Antonescu.

Then we talked about various trifles, and, saying goodbye at the first meeting, Aras said that he expects to talk with me about the general international situation. We, however, did not return to such a conversation in the future, and I did not look for it, without attaching special value to such conversations with Aras. When an hour before the departure of the Turkish ministers I coordinated a communiqué for the press with them, Aras tried to remove from the draft an indication of the aggressive tendencies that have recently appeared in international life. He did not hide his fears of somehow offending Germany, and especially Italy. I had to tell him that the upcoming visit of the Turkish squadron to Italy will smooth over the alleged insult to Italy. It is curious, however, that Aras was essentially trying to deny the appearance of aggressive tendencies in recent years, arguing that aggression, they say, has existed since the time of the peace treaties. Aras did not hesitate to openly embark on the path of defending revisionism for the first time and to develop views that Hitler and Goebbels would have willingly made their own.

M. Litvinov

[1] we are talking about the values of the Petrograd state loan office, taken in 1920 by the Wrangelites to Yugoslavia. At the end of 1936, the peopleʹs commissariat for foreign affairs of the USSR instructed the plenipotentiary of the USSR in Turkey, l.m.