Russia and the Middle East 267

aggressive designs nor any demands to formulate in regard to the
Straits, and pledging themselves to respect the territorial integrity
of Turkey. As long as the Russians were on the defensive against
the Germans, Russian leaders hinted at rewarding Turkey with
territorial acquisitions at the expense of Bulgaria, Greece, and
Syria.1 Public opinion in Turkey, however, had not been sorry to
see the Germans invade the U.S.S.R. It had come to regard both
the German and, after the invasion of Finland, the Russian armies as
potential threats to the integrity of Turkey, and was gratified to
see them destroying each other; as a popular slogan put it, 'The
Germans in the hospital and the Russians in the grave\ The Pan-
Turanian irredentists, who dreamed of forming a confederation
under the leadership of the Turkish Republic of all the Turkish
peoples of Russian and Chinese Turkestan, 'regarded as inevitable
the defeat and disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and were confident
that the liberation of Russian Turkestan was at hand. When, how-
ever, it was the Germans, and not the Russians, who suffered defeat,
the Turkish authorities appear to have decided that it would be
politic to suppress the pan-Turanians, thinking no doubt that the
denunciation of the movement and the arrest and trial of its leaders
would gain them good marks in Moscow. The proceedings in
1944 received the greatest possible publicity. Moscow, however,
was far from being impressed. In fact the Russians regarded the
whole affair as so much eyewash, and did not hesitate to say so in
their press and radio.'2 They began to assail the Turks for the
economic aid they had given to the Germans—concessions which,
in fact, the Turkish government had felt constrained to make in
order to maintain its precarious neutrality, with the German troops
occupying the line of the Maritza only 130 miles from Istanbul. In
March 1945 the Soviet government denounced the twenty-year-
old Turco-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality.

(6) The Post-War Period
It appears that when in June 1945, one month after the close of
the war in Europe, the Turks approached the Soviet government
1 Times correspondent in Turkey, 3 April 1947.
2 A. C. Edwards in International Affairs, July 1946, 398.