Friendship Without Borders?: Soviet-Turkish Encounters in the Eastern Black Sea Borderlands in the Early 1920s

• In Event: Imperial Collapse and Post-Imperial Transitions in the Black Sea Region, 1917-1926

Abstract

When Bolshevik and Turkish leaders signed the treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921 that established the Soviet-Turkish border, they hailed these accords as the beginning of a new era of peace and cooperation in the long-contested space between the Russian and Ottoman empires. To date, however, there has been scant attention to their interactions on the ground across these borderlands during and after the signing of these landmark treaties. Drawing on official documents and the memoirs of Turkish officials and the records of Soviet diplomatic missions in Batumi and several cities in Eastern Anatolia (Artvin, Kars, Erzurum, and Doğubayazıt) in the early 1920s, I examine encounters between Soviet and Turkish officials and local populations across this contact zone during the formative years of the Soviet-Turkish alliance. During this period, Soviet and Turkish representatives endeavored to cement their alliance through a number of diplomatic initiatives, leading one Turkish official who served on the Soviet-Turkish Border Commission (1925-26) to proclaim that “friendship between the Soviet Union and Turkey has no borders.” Yet, despite the prevailing narrative of friendship and cooperation between Moscow and Ankara, there was an unmistakable undercurrent of mistrust that persisted throughout the 1920s. Alongside mutual pledges of support and cross-border projects, tensions regarding the treatment of minorities, political intrigues, state sovereignty, and border violations strained Soviet-Turkish relations in the borderlands. Although the Bolsheviks and Turkish nationalists praised their shared border as living proof of their alliance’s stability, politics and everyday life along it were far from uneventful or unproblematic. Focusing on interactions across the wider Black Sea hinterland thus reveals both the imagined potential and the fragility of the Soviet-Turkish alliance.

Author

• Harrison King, UC Berkeley