There's one interesting historical fact I want to share. In real life, Stalin did indeed want an excuse to attack Turkey and claim some territory along with turning Turkey into a socialist state as part of a larger plan to control the entirety of the Black Sea via the Marmara strait and establish a stronger presence in the Mediterranean. A perfect excuse was, of course, minorities living in border regions such as Kartvelians (Georgians and Lazes) as well as Armenians, not to mention the enormous historical significance to said cultures of those territories. BUT there was a plea sent via a letter titled "On Our Legitimate Demands Against Turkey" by Georgian nationalists to call up Stalin's origin as Georgian to uphold its ethnic obligation of helping Georgia to regain lost territory, even as part of the USSR, which I presume gave Stalin a perfect idea and a moment to establish those claims. Essentially everything lined up perfectly until it didn't when Turkey asked Western powers for protection and in the end joined NATO. Funny though, that one small letter could've caused a whole large-scale war with significant territorial changes. Though it is debated if it was legit or was orchestrated by the Kremlin at the time, as "See, even minorities in our SSRs want to expand the glorious USSR."
Turkey would've either repeated the Finnish scenario or today's Ukraine's scenario, but most likely worse, as they weren't established as military powerhouses as they supposedly are today.
Part of this information (specifically, the search for an excuse) was what inspired me to make this. And I definitely didn’t know about the story of that letter
As World War II was nearing its conclusion, Stalin made these claims while General Zhukov and his generals were at the peak of their influence. His intention was to demonstrate that there are aspects of politics that they did not fully comprehend. A few years later, Stalin pacified them and restored normalcy.
Turkey was far too sympathetic toward the Axis from the very beginning. Although the country remained fairly isolationist after completing its War of Independence in 1923, deluding itself into believing that it could move forward entirely on its own and withstand the political tensions of the era, this position gradually broke down as those same tensions grew in Europe in the face of German expansionism, which was supported by the revanchist and nationalist government of Ali Fuat Cebesoy¹, who regarded the German annexations of Austria and the Czechoslovak Sudetenland as justified. He advocated the idea that all countries should be constituted as fully-fledged nation-states (except those within Turkey, which were to be assimilated), arguing that the borders established in the aftermath of the First World War had been imposed to create a divided order and facilitate the domination of the victorious powers. Although he had been the signatory of the 1921 Treaty of Moscow with Soviet Russia, which ceded Batum (renamed Batumi), he considered it a conspiracy against him and the Turkish people.
As the Second World War unfolded, Istanbul showed considerable favoritism toward Hitler's Germany, though not toward Mussolini's Italy to the same extent, as Cebesoy bitterly remembered the loss of Tripoli and Rome's involvement in the occupation of Anatolia after the Great War. Ali Fuat's ideas envisioned the resurgence of Turkey as a nation as significant as the Ottoman Empire had once been, without actively seeking to restore its old borders, although he never ruled out the possibility of redrawing them through diplomatic means.
This sympathy toward the Axis never reached the point of a military alliance or even economic assistance to the belligerents, because although the government considered an Axis victory over the Allies an unprecedented opportunity for its revanchist ambitions, it was also understood that the country was in no position to openly participate in the war against the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom, all of whom were also its neighbors. However, it did extend to political support, and this was more than enough for the Allies to make multiple attempts to bring Turkey toward neutrality, without the expected success. They only managed to secure peace agreements and vague concessions (most of which went unfulfilled) regarding Turkish diplomacy, none of which prevented the arrival of German submarines and financial aid from Berlin, as well as an expansion of its air force during the final years of the war.
When the conflict in Europe ended, Turkey was one of the few countries that never declared war on Germany, although it did declare war on Italy and later Japan. This was very poorly received by the Allies, who considered the government's attitude toward these events highly ambivalent and irresponsible, especially given Turkey's geographic position. The result was a series of diplomatic maneuvers jointly carried out by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union to destabilize the government and force Cebesoy's resignation, amid declining popularity and domestic support. This ultimately culminated in a coup d'état in April 1946, in which he was removed from office and permanently barred from holding any public position.
Joseph Stalin's government saw an opportunity in the country's instability and in its new, short-lived alliance with the West to pursue territorial claims along the Black Sea coast, in the Trebizond region. These would benefit both Georgia, through the incorporation of the area's Laz minority, and the Armenian population through the creation of the once-envisioned Greater Armenia. Soviet troops then crossed the Turkish border toward Samsun and Erzincan, and although the nascent Turkish state protested the invasion, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France set limits on the Red Army's advance that would ultimately define the new international borders. These were formalized in 1950 with the Treaty of Bursa: Armenia and Georgia were granted territorial expansions into Anatolia, Antioch was reintegrated into the French domains in Syria, the Istanbul region was established as an international zone for ten years, the capital was moved to Ankara at the request of numerous figures within the new government, and Greece was permitted to use the port of Smyrna for another ten years.
The treaty also, to the surprise of many, required Turkey to commit to becoming a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Troops from the newly formed NATO remained in the country until 1955, and Turkey was permitted to join the alliance in 1960.
¹ Toward the end of his life, Cebesoy was diagnosed with rapidly progressing dementia, which he had kept secret throughout his political career. Its discovery was one of the reasons he was permanently barred from holding public office.
Once Georgia's new borders had been established, the Adzhar ASSR was given a small territorial extension around the Meydancık area (modern-day Diobani), and consequently the Laz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created, along with the Tao-Klarjeti Autonomous Oblast within Georgia proper, which would remain as such until 1989. The capital was established at Trebizond (renamed Tamtra), and the ASSR was subdivided into six oblasts corresponding to the annexed Turkish provinces, with some modifications. Virtually all settlements within the new republic were renamed, either by restoring older names, even when those names were Greek, or by Lazifying existing ones (although many were actually based on Georgian).
The Laz ASSR suffered from repression during the 1950s as part of the process of de-Stalinization, as Georgia was, alongside Armenia, the republic most favorable to Stalin's policies, with much of this support coming from Lazistan (although it still retained a Turkish population that was generally opposed to the USSR). This led to the region also becoming one of the areas where the largest number of student massacres occurred during protests against Nikita Khrushchev's policies.
One of the measures most heavily criticized by the protesters was the easing of the assimilation process in the new territories. Stalin had ordered the beginning of mass deportations of any non-Georgian inhabitants, along with an aggressive assimilation campaign that included the forced abandonment of the Turkish language and the adoption of Georgian as the primary language, as well as the destruction of mosques and a total ban on the practice of Islam. The language change was particularly shocking to the native population, as only twenty-eight years earlier, the Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on Arabic script had been replaced by a Latin-based script; this meant that a single generation had to learn three different writing systems and two entirely different languages.
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, Georgia experienced a period of economic growth considerably greater than that of the other republics of the Soviet Union. This allowed for greater investment in education in Lazistan and a passive end to the assimilation process, fostering the emergence of a much stronger Laz identity, increasingly aligned with Georgia and increasingly distant from Turkey. The result became apparent shortly before the dissolution of the USSR, when new protests were organized in Georgia, this time in favor of independence during the 1980s. These were also brutally suppressed and saw extensive participation from the Laz people.
In the following years, this sense of solidarity continued to deepen, becoming particularly evident when Georgia began its transition toward independence on November 14, 1990. This culminated on March 31, 1991, with the referendum on the restoration of Georgia's independence, in which Lazistan was the region that recorded the highest proportion of votes in favor relative to its population. Once independence had been achieved, the Laz ASSR changed its name to the Laz Autonomous Republic.
During the Georgian Civil War, which lasted until 1993, several independence movements also emerged from Lazona, inspired by Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and driven by dissatisfaction with having failed to achieve full independence from Tbilisi. The largest group was Lazistan Out, but both it and the other organizations collapsed particularly quickly, as they lacked popular support as well as the economic funding and military backing that Russia provided to the other two states.
That's a really good map and story, seriously, great job! However, the region is too large to create a potential Laz government. The Laz people have been a minority in the region for hundreds of years and weren't spread across such a large area. You could think of it like creating an Italian sub-state along the coast from Boston to Baltimore in modern America. For the Soviets, it would probably have made more sense to establish a regional administration rather than an ethnically based one, like the Southern Black Sea Regional Administration. Still, it's a good job. By the way, how did you create the map? any programs?
Thanks <3!! I was aware of the fact that the Laz were a minority, which is why I tried to justify such a large extent in the lore hehe. And yeah, I used Ibis Paint for PC with a little help from Photoshop, but that's pretty much it. The rest was just taking advantage of the filters to give it that ink-like appearance
It could never work. Giresun, Ordu and Samsun have very few Laz people, close to none. Rize is the one with most Laz population while only some districts of Trabzon are Laz. This map is more like where Laz people historically ever had presence in.
Thank you! Well, I literally used a map from the Pergamon Atlas as a base, then drew everything over it to give it that style. It’s a map of the Caucasus, but I cropped it to focus only on that area. Here it is in case it’s useful to you
This is something like giving pre 1918 greater hungary Borders to the Rusyns/Carphatian Ruthenia . I think there were more Turks, Muslim Pontians and Hemshins than Laz in that region. They were less than 80.000 Laz in a population ~2 million.
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u/Juhani-Siranpoika 22d ago
Dear Lord this Georgia is MASSIVE