Anti-Western policy of the Soviet-Turkish relations during the Greek-Turkish War

Abstract

A number of recent comparative works have drawn attention to parallels and simi-larities between the Soviet Union and the early Turkish Republic. In this article, I take a firmly transnational approach to Soviet-Turkish interactions in the 1920s to demon-strate that the similarities were not merely circumstantial. The manifest ideological con-flict between nationalist Turks and internationalist Bolsheviks has led many historians to dismiss Soviet-Turkish cooperation as a necessary response to geopolitics, a pragmatic alliance against the west. This article makes that opposition to the western-dictated inter-national order was a coherent element in Soviet-Turkish exchanges that stretched beyond diplomacy into the economic and cultural spheres. The anti-western elements of Soviet-Turkish relations suggest that convergence was more than a case of homologous respons-es to similar conditions; it was part of a broader narrative that, in the Soviet case at least, continued to shape international relations beyond World War II.