This book presents the ups and downs of the Soviet-Turkish relations during World War II and immediately after it. Hasanli draws on declassified archive documents from the United States, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan to recreate a truepicture of the time when the "Turkish crisis" of the Cold War broke out. It explains why and how the friendly relations between the USSR and Turkey escalated into enmity, led to the increased confrontation between these two countries, and ended up with Turkey's entry into NATO. Hasanli uses recently-released Soviet archive documents to shed light on some dark points of the Cold War era and the relations between the Soviets and the West. Apart from bringing in an original point of view regarding starting of the Cold War, the book reveals some secret sides of the Soviet domestic and foreign policies. The book convincingly demonstrates how Soviet political technologists led by Josef Stalin distorted the picture of a friendly and peaceful country—Turkey—intothe image of an enemy in the minds of millions of Soviet citizens.

Immediately after the Allied WW2 victory in Europe, claims were made by the Soviet Union over the eastern regions of Turkey, to secure direct control over the Bosporus, Dardanelles, and Turkish Straits. The detailed study of the international components of these events, featuring the veiled complexities of Stalin’s anti-Turkish diplomacy, provides a key to understanding crucial aspects of these Soviet territorial claims. Iranian Azerbaijan became another hotspot of post-war confrontation between the western Allies and the USSR: Soviet policy towards Iran manifested in the desire to access their oil resources. A further direction emerging within Soviet post-war strategy was the Kurdish issue in the Near and Middle East. At the conjunction of Turkish and Iranian events, Soviet secret service bodies and diplomatic institutions exploited their strengths and toyed with Kurdish minorities in the region. Their decisions placed the bordering regions of China, Turkey, and Iran squarely in the shadowy reaches of Moscow’s policy. This research uses newly discovered archive material to illustrate the underlying intrigue behind Soviet ambition and intimately tracks how the Soviet Union was defeated in the first Cold War confrontation over its southern borders. It also links events of this period with the critical issue of Uyghur assimilation, and further contemporary developments highlighting Putin’s policies, making it invaluable for both academic and general readers.

Drawing on recently declassified Soviet archival sources, this book sheds new light on how the division of Europe came about in the aftermath of World War II. The book contravenes the notion that a neutral zone of states, including Germany, could have been set up between East and West. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was determined to preserve control over its own sphere of German territory. By tracing Stalin's attitude toward neutrality in international politics, the book provides important insights into the origins of the Cold War.

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

This book presents an academic perspective on Turkey’s reaction to the postwar Soviet demands on the Straits and Eastern Anatolia by studying hitherto untapped Turkish archive materials and press articles of the time. It argues that the Turkish elite perceived Soviet demands as an existential threat to Turkey, the first step in the establishment of a pro-Soviet government in Ankara. The postwar Soviet demands completed a paradigmatic shift in Turkish foreign policy, leading to the disintegration of twenty years of Soviet-Turkish alliance and transformed Turkey into an unconditional Western ally. As such, this book strengthens the idea in early Cold War historiography that Turkey was one of the main testing grounds for the Cold War and makes it more cogent. It concludes by discussing the implications of the findingsfor the matrix of current American-Russian-Turkish relations.

This volume examines the cultural and ideological dimensions of the Cold War in Turkey. Departing from the conventional focus on diplomacy and military, the collection focuses on Cold War's impact on Turkish society and intellectuals. It includes chapters on media and propaganda, literature, sports, as well as foreign aid and assistance.

This volume includes historiographical surveys of American foreign relations since 1941 by some of the country's leading historians. Some of the essays offer sweeping overviews of the major trends in the field of foreign/international relations history. Others survey the literature on US relations with particular regions of the world or on the foreign policies of presidential administrations. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the historical literature on US foreign policy that highlights recent developments in the field.

Now in its fifth edition, Origins of the Cold War 1941–1949 covers the formative years of the momentous struggle that developed between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. This accessible text explains how the Cold War originated and developed between 1941 and 1949 and involved the entire globe, with proxy wars being fought much to the detriment of the developing world. The fifth edition is revised, updated and expanded to include new material on topics such as the efforts of the Soviet Union, the UK and France to prevent the outbreak of World War II; the reasons behind the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; atomic diplomacy and the role played by Soviet spies in the West; the culture wars and propaganda; Churchill’s efforts to entice the US into the war against Germany; the role of Hollywood in promoting intervention; the US’s insouciance concerning the danger of a Japanese attack; the astonishing success of the Soviet Union in recruiting high level American officials to provide invaluable information on politics, science, engineering and avionics; and more. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, Martin McCauley provides students with an invaluable introduction to a fascinating period that shaped today's world. The book is an important staple for courses on modern global history and international affairs.

The unexpected end of the protracted conflict has been a sobering experience for scholars. No theory had anticipated how the Cold War would be terminated, and none should also be relied upon to explicate its legacy. But instead of relying on preconceived formulas to project past developments, taking a historical perspective to explain their causes and consequences allows one to better understand trends and their long-term significance. The present book takes such perspective, focusing on the evolution of security, its substance as well as its perception, the concurrent development of alliances and other cooperative structures for security, and their effectiveness in managing conflicts. In The Legacy of the Cold War Vojtech Mastny and Zhu Liqun bring together scholars to examine the worldwide effects of the Cold War on international security. Focusing on regions where the Cold War made the most enduring impact―the Euro-Atlantic area and East Asia―historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars explore alliances and other security measures during the Cold War and how they carry over into the twenty-first century.

The theme of this book is the interplay between Realism and Human Rights in the formulation of US policy towards Greece and Turkey with respect to the Cyprus and the Aegean disputes and the domestic politics of the two countries from the Truman to the Carter administration. The policies of successive administrations, and those of Johnson and Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s, were formulated upon the requirements of containment as this was conceived in 1946-47 by the Truman administration. Realpolitik dominated the agenda and issues related to values and norms were secondary although not unimportant. Whenever a choice had to be made between realpolitik and human rights the former was the main consideration of American policy-makers. Although committed to the recalibration of US foreign policy toward human rights, the Carter administration did not depart from these premises in the formulation of its policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.