This is becoming a soviet wank. The part about the modernization of the red army was not only unbelievable but actually impossible (Russia simply did not have the ability to equip the tanks with wireless) and now you have all of Western Europe asleep.
I edited the part about the radios. As to Western Europe sleeping, there going to wake up soon because it's update time once again,.
Chapter XV: The Turkish Straits Crisis, the Second Purge, Thailand and Iran, 1947-1951.
Stalin’s next move took place in the summer of 1947 and the playbook used to cow Finland, Romania and Bulgaria into submission was put into action again. Soviet forces based in Bulgaria were mobilized, as were Red Army divisions stationed in the Caucasus near the Turkish border. Bulgaria and Greece carried out mobilizations of their own, intending to realize their respective territorial claims on East Thrace, the Turkish Straits, Istanbul and Smyrna, temporarily setting aside their differences. Italy half-heartedly sided with them on the matter, but didn’t want war at all and considered anything it would get from the crisis as a bonus. The battle group centred on battleship Sovetskaya Ukraina steamed south and carried out aggressive naval manoeuvres just outside Turkish national waters, less than one hundred kilometres north of Istanbul.
Ismet Inönü, the President of Turkey, realized there was a clear and present danger of a two-pronged attack from east and west by the Soviet Union, Italy, Bulgaria and Greece. He considered giving in if the demands weren’t outrageous to avoid a war he was likely to lose. He knew the Turkish army was mediocre and couldn’t hold off the Red Army. It quickly became clear, however, that Turkey’s enemies wanted much more than the Turks were willing to concede. That pushed them to stand their ground despite knowing that however valiantly they fought, they’d lose. Letting themselves be humiliated this much was unacceptable, and if Turkey caved even greater and more unacceptable concessions would probably be demanded anyway. Given the strategic importance of the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles), there was more than a good chance that the other great powers would become involved.
A delegation composed of the Soviet, Italian, Greek and Bulgarian ambassadors presented their demands to President Inönü on Wednesday June 18th 1947. The Soviet Union demanded the right to establish a naval base in the proximity of the Bosporus. Additionally, the Soviets asserted that a territory stretching southwest from Georgia to Giresun (including Lazistan) had been stolen from Georgia by the Turks under the Ottoman Empire. Based on their “historical” legitimization the Soviets claimed this Turkish land, hoping to expand their influence in the Black Sea and the Middle East. Italy wanted a concession for a naval base in Antalya province, Greece wanted Smyrna and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and Bulgaria wanted East Thrace. Since nobody could agree who ought to control the Bosporus, the Dardanelles and Istanbul (or Constantinople, as the Greeks insisted with their Byzantine revival ambitions), the four powers demanded the area be put under international control with a League of Nations appointed “High Commissioner”.
Turkey’s rejection of these demands, its subsequent mobilization and the threat posed to the balance of power raised the interest of the Anglo-French-German Triple Alliance powers. It was the first test of this alliance, established in 1945, and it seemed to pass its baptism of fire by acting determined and in unison with Britain taking the lead. In line with its historical opposition to a Russian warm water port on the Bosporus, Great Britain was the first to react to the Soviet move firmly. This was a threat to British dominance in the eastern Mediterranean and this would decidedly not be met with appeasement as the foreign office had learned the hard away that that didn’t work on dictators. Attlee’s government declared Britain would respond militarily in the event that anyone attempted to seize control of the Turkish Straits unilaterally through force of arms. France and Germany supported Britain, carrying out partial mobilizations of their armies. France deployed capital ships to the Aegean Sea in support of Royal Navy battle groups and carrier groups while the Imperial German Navy deployed in strength in the Baltic.
Stalin backed down and agreed to negotiate a diplomatic compromise as he was cautious in nature, refusing to risk a war at this time. He didn’t act on his threats toward Turkey when it became clear that doing so would probably lead to a confrontation with the Western great powers he still wasn’t completely sure the USSR was ready for. The negotiations were hosted by Czechoslovakia in Prague. The Triple Alliance was represented by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, German Chancellor Carl Goerdeler and Prime Minister Léon Blum. They sent a strong signal as all three heads of government of the Triple Alliance powers were present. Mussolini was also present, but the paranoid Stalin would rather not leave his country and sent Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov instead (he had replaced Litvinov, who had been made ambassador to China in 1940). Delegations from Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria were also present.
At the opening day of the conference Molotov addressed the grievances the Soviet Union had concerning the “Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.” The convention dating back to 1936 regulated the passage of warships of non-Black Sea states, but also imposed some limitations on the Black Sea powers themselves. One regulation forbade aircraft carriers from passing through the Bosporus. Another regulation was that only Black Sea powers could transit capital ships (other than aircraft carriers) of any tonnage, but with no more than two destroyer escorts. Molotov said that Moscow wanted these two unfair regulations to go and the Soviets saw a naval base on the Bosporus as the guarantee that Turkey wouldn’t frustrate the free transit of Soviet naval ships. Besides that it reiterated the historicity of its claims on Turkish territory, both the Turkish Straits and their claims on the territories bordering Georgia.
Though their historical claims were shoddy at best, Soviet frustrations about being bottled up and desiring unrestricted access to the world seas were at least somewhat understandable to public opinion, even though the Bolsheviks weren’t well liked by the West. Greece and Bulgaria’s claims only really had historical arguments for them, but the territories they wanted were predominantly inhabited by Turks by 1947. Smyrna, called Izmir by Turkey, was predominantly Turkish and so was the region of East Thrace (Bulgaria later moderated its claims to just Edirne, but it didn’t help that there were more ethnic Greeks and even more Turks in the city than ethnic Bulgarians).
After months of negotiations, the Montreux Convention was replaced by the “Prague Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.” It allowed the Soviet Navy to transit capital ships of any size, including aircraft carriers, without any limit to the size of their escort. The Western powers backed Turkey in opposing a Soviet naval base on the Bosporus and rejected international control of the region. Instead they proposed international supervision by a commission in which representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania would take place and which would have little actual power. Furthermore, Turkey would be allowed to fortify the Turkish Straits to defend against aggression by third parties as they saw fit, de facto allowing them to unilaterally close the Straits by force of arms. The Soviets agreed as their diplomatic efforts to get the much desired Bosporus naval base were met with resolute Western opposition. It was a pyrrhic victory for Moscow: the Straits were now open to anyone, as long as the Turks let them pass.
As to Bulgaria, none of its territorial claims were granted and this cemented the alliance with Soviet Russia that it first saw as forced upon it, but came to regard as necessary if it ever wanted to realize a Greater Bulgaria. Sofia accepted the Soviet presence and expected its support in a future conflict against either the Turks or the Greeks, or maybe both. Thusly the country became a loyal partner in the Balkans for Moscow.
As far as Greece was concerned, its neo-Byzantine claims to Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople (Istanbul) were dismissed as they’d end up controlling a large, resentful Turkish minority if they were indeed granted these territories. Nobody really felt like backing Greece up against uprisings and wars against Turkey to defend their regained territories. Athens did regain the majority Greek islands of Imbros and Tenedos thanks to Italian pressure while Italy also promised its military backing in the event of Bulgarian or Turkish aggression.
Italy came out as a winner too, making gains in Greece. To Greece the drawback of Mussolini’s support was that it was conditional as he was an opportunist. In return for Italy’s backing to gain just two islands in the Aegean Sea and a guarantee against either Bulgarian or Turkish aggression, Rome wanted basing rights and got them after enough pressure. Italy was able to push Greece into a corner on account of the fact that it was on the “wrong side” in the Turkish Straits Crisis as far as the Big Three Western powers (Britain, France and Germany) were concerned. Given their dim view of the Greeks, they weren’t planning to act if Mussolini didn’t demand anything that would shift the balance of power significantly in the eastern Mediterranean. Besides that, to the British and the French the move ostensibly seemed to be a part of an apparent Italo-Greek alliance directed against Turkey and Bulgaria rather than something that was forced on the Greeks. Athens had unintentionally alienated its traditional Anglo-French allies for short term gains, who in response to this affront didn’t help. Moreover, they weren’t too worried as they knew Italy wanted to keep the Soviets out of the Mediterranean just as much as they did, so an Italian naval presence in the Aegean wasn’t that bad. It certainly beat the alternative.
Only now did Metaxas realize how Italy and the Soviet Union had secretly and cleverly manoeuvred to isolate his country. This forced his country to agree to what seemed minor concessions, which in reality forced Greece to defer to Rome in its foreign policy as the rest of the world didn’t see the need to do something about it. Italy outright annexed the Ionian Islands to increase Italian control over the access to the Adriatic Sea. Mussolini referred to it as a purchase since Italy paid Greek the equivalent of $10 million for them (roughly $120 million in 2020), but it was not a real sale as Greece had no choice in the matter and accepted to save face. Secondly, Greece had to accept the establishment of an Italian naval base on Salamis Island and a second one at Souda Bay on Crete.
The Western powers were brimming with confidence after the Turkish Straits Crisis had been resolved. After all, they had managed to force Stalin to back down and give up demands for Soviet control of the Bosporus, thereby avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s by confronting a dictator threatening war instead of appeasing him (the nuance was that Stalin had never intended to go to war with the West over the Turkish Straits, while Hitler in 1938 was hell bent on war no matter what they did). With this matter dealt with, Britain, Germany and France continued with their plans to intensify European economic cooperation. In a summit in October 1947, the Frankfurt Union was renamed the European Economic Union and free travel between member states was agreed upon. The Netherlands, Luxembourg as well as Denmark had joined in 1946 and Sweden and Belgium, both observer states, now became full members to be able to export to its neighbours, all of them member states, without facing tariffs. Norway joined in 1948 while Poland and Portugal followed one year later. The European Economic Union was on the verge of becoming the world’s leading economic bloc.
Stalin wanted to prevent an encirclement began orchestrating tensions in Asia in early 1949, two years after the Turkish Straits Crisis, to keep China on his side and because what he had planned was low risk and unlikely to draw as much as attention as his failed Turkish gambit. He pressed ahead in Asia in close cooperation with the President of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who had no love for either the Japanese or the Western colonial powers. Ridding the country completely of colonial influence could only be done with Soviet support. The first step was to send the super dreadnought battleships Sovetskaya Rossiya and Sovetskaya Belorussiya – escorted by two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and a dozen destroyers – on a global tour to make “friendly courtesy visits.” After visits to Cartagena, Naples and Salamis, the Soviet ships went through the Suez Canal and only stopped for fuel until they reached Bangkok.
The Soviet flotilla arrived at a moment that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs T.V. Soong was in the Thai capital to talk to its Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, also colloquially known as Marshal P. He led the country as a nationalist military dictatorship. Thailand, also known as Siam, had lost significant territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the colonial empires of Britain and France surrounding them to the west, south and east. With an impressive symbol of Soviet power floating in the Bay of Bangkok, knowing the USSR backed China, the Thai regime was interested in Chinese proposals. In May 1949, the Sino-Thai Treaty of Friendship was signed that mainly concerned itself with greater economic cooperation, issues of territorial integrity and sovereignty, as well as coordination in foreign policies.
A secret protocol dictated that if China removed colonial rule from Southeast Asia, then Thailand would support it and regain Laos and Cambodia in return. Thailand would also allow Chinese forces to pass through its territory to Burma and Malaya and provide reinforcements. In order for Thailand to deliver a credible military performance, if the time ever came, the Royal Thai Army was beefed up as part of the deal. The obsolete T-26 and BT series tanks had been donated to China to form tank divisions, but after a few years they began license produced version of the T-34 (the older T-26s, BT-5s and BT-7s were mothballed). China sold 300 of them to Thailand to form two tank divisions while license produced Yak-3 fighters and Il-10 ground attack aircraft were sold to replace the obsolete aircraft Thai pilots were flying with. Chinese trainers improved the quality of the Royal Thai Army.
After the deal was done, Stalin’s ships moved to the Formosa Straits and ruffled feathers in Tokyo, though they worried more about long term implications than short term ones as they had five Yamato-class battleships, each one superior to the Sovetsky Soyuz-class (besides that, they had a class in development that would have even bigger guns, 51 cm/20.1 inch guns, but that was still a carefully guarded secret). What became known as the “Great Red Fleet” visited Qingdao in China and then went on the long trip home, rounding Cape Horn and making a few brief stops for fuel before returning to Arkhangelsk.
The Great Red Fleet returned to a country once again gripped by a purge as Stalin felt the need to get rid of people who had, in his view, become too comfortable in their positions as they’d held them for too long, which might in turn encourage them to conspire against him. Longstanding comrades, or rather henchmen, who had loyally carried out his bloody will for years as willing executioners and were knee-deep in blood, suddenly saw themselves falling out of favour with their fervour in the Great Purge being used against them.
In the summer of 1950, the NKVD fabricated a plot called the “Anti-Revolutionary Reactionary Fascist Monarchist all-Russian Restoration League”. The trials dominated the headlines for much of the autumn and winter of 1950 while the purge itself continued until 1952. The goals of this fictional opposition was to assassinate Stalin, overthrow the communist party and restore the monarchy and capitalism under a nationalist Russian fascist regime. Exactly as had happened in the Moscow Trials of the late 30s, the accused confessed to a litany of crimes and begged for the death penalty after psychological pressure and torture. Formerly prominent figures like Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Budyonny, Voroshilov and slightly lesser figures like Khrushchev, Bulganin, Andreyev, Voznesensky and dozens of others were sentenced to death and shot. Budyonny faced his execution with courage as he refused a blindfold and insisted the men of the firing squad looked him in the eyes as they took aim. He recanted his earlier confession, professing his loyalty to Stalin with his last words. Beria, on the other hand, begged and pleaded for his life and resisted so much that taking him out into the courtyard of Lubyanka was too much trouble. He was shot in his cell instead by an officer putting two 7.62x25 mm rounds in his head with his Tokarev pistol. As a sadist Stalin found Beria’s behaviour before death funny and sometimes mockingly mimicked him, illustrating his sometimes macabre sense of humour.
The politburo was almost completely wiped out and staffed with completely new cronies. This purge wasn’t of the same scale as the Great Purge with a quarter of a million executed (rather than 700.000) and a total of half a million deaths resulting from incarceration in the gulag. The officers corps was spared as Stalin remembered the disastrous effect this had had on the Red Army’s performance, but all the Generals and Marshals were tightly monitored by their political officers to make sure none of them had any “Bonapartist tendencies.”
In 1951, Stalin also made his first serious move in the Middle East by cultivating relations with Iran, led by a young, ambitious and progressive Shah. The young Mohammad Reza Shah had no love for communists at all, but he had reasons to resent the British because they exerted so much control over his country’s oil production. After the latest renegotiation in 1933 during the reign of his father Reza Shah, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company still held 260.000 square kilometres and their new concession was to last sixty years. It required AIOC to make payments in lieu of income tax with a minimum of £750.000. These provisions, while appearing favourable, are widely agreed to have represented an unfair deal for the Iranian government. The agreement extended the life of the D'Arcy concession by an additional 32 years, negligently allowed AIOC to select the best 260.000 square kilometres, the minimum guaranteed royalty was far too modest, and in a fit of carelessness the company’s operations were exempted from import or customs duties. Finally, Iran surrendered its right to annul the agreement, and settled on a complex and tediously elaborate arbitration process to settle any disagreements that would arise. Under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah, AIOC had promised to give labourers better pay and more chance for advancement, and build schools, hospitals, roads and telephone lines. AIOC did not fulfil these promises and this caused discontent. After his father died in 1947, aged 69, the angered 28 year-old Shah resolved to undo these mistakes at the earliest opportunity. He appointed a Prime Minister who agreed with him in the shape of Mohammad Mossadegh.
The fairly young Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 42 years old at the time, went to Iran on his first real mission in his new role in November 1951 after rising through the ranks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat (first serving as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s principal European ally, from 1941 to 1949). During his visit to Teheran, Gromyko signed the Soviet-Iranian Treaty of Friendship, which concerned economic cooperation and mutual assurances of each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, reaffirming the 1921 friendship treaty. A secret protocol dictated that Moscow would support Iran’s intention to nationalize its oil. In reality, Iran waited for a major Soviet move to distract the West so it could finally take the oil and drive the British out once and for all. It was unclear if and when that would happen, but Mohammad Reza Shah would take the opportunity if it did.
The young Shah believed he would get his chance very soon, but the British were confident of their dominion over their informal empire in the Middle East. During an arbitration procedure started by the Iranians to demand a higher minimum royalty, the Royal Navy’s Lion-class battleship HMS Conqueror made courtesy visit to Bushehr before continuing its journey toward Singapore. It was a clear message to everyone that the British Empire was more alive than ever and was not to be trifled with, a message that was received with frustration by the Shah and others who wanted to throw off the British yoke. Like it or not, Britain saw Iran as part of a cordon to contain the Soviets. Soon, however, the Empire was to be in peril as the world faced its greatest humanitarian disaster yet.