Word: saracoglu
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Dates: during 1939-1939
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Ambassador Stoica had just conferred in Ankara with Turkish Foreign Minister Shokru Saracoglu, who in turn had just returned from nearly a month of desultory negotiations in Moscow with Foreign Commissar Viacheslav M. Molotov, negotiations which finally collapsed. When he went to Moscow, Mr. Saracoglu was believed to be acting not only for Turkey but also as "honest broker" for Rumania in the touchy question of Bessarabia, the rich province which Rumania seized from Russia in 1918. Last week, after King Carol had received full particulars of what Ambassador Stoica had been able to learn from the Turkish Foreign Minister...
More complicating and difficult was Soviet Russia, with whom Turkey had enjoyed 20 years of uninterrupted friendship. For three weeks before the alliance was finally signed Turkish Foreign Minister Shokru Saracoglu had been in Moscow. In between visits to the Soviet Agricultural Exposition and the ballet, he had talked with Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov, who was just then also heavily engaged in conversations with various Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, Letts...
What Comrade Molotov demanded of M. Saracoglu was kept veiled in Oriental secrecy. A good guess was that the Soviet Union wanted Turkey to: 1) close and keep closed the Dardanelles to belligerent warships-an action which would prevent Allied aid to Rumania; 2) give active assent to Russia's snipping Bessarabia and Bulgaria's snipping Dobruja off Rumania...
...Saracoglu refused all demands, and at length departed, with Soviet and Turkish flags decorating the Moscow station, a band alternating between the Internationale and the Turkish national anthem and a courteous Soviet communique announcing that the two countries still retained their friendship. Later, however, the Moscow newsorgan Izvestia ominously hinted that Turkish-Russian relations had soured. At the same time in Ankara, German Ambassador Franz von Papen entrained for Berlin, there to explain to Fiihrer Hitler why he had failed to win the Turks away from the Allies...
...Turks were still hesitating at latest reports but Russians considered it significant that Foreign Minister Saracoglu did something in Moscow which no foreign statesman has ever done before: he laid a wreath on the blood-red marble tomb of Nikolai Lenin in the Red Square...