This article examines Turkey's wartime diplomacy between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Hitler's unleashing of Operation Barbarossa. Rather than a survey of Turkish foreign policy as a whole, it takes a critical episode from July 1940 as a case study that – when put in context – reveals how fear of Nazi power and even greater fear of the Soviet Union created in Turkey a complex view of a desired outcome from the Second World War. Juxtaposing archival materials in Turkish, Russian, German, and English, I draw heavily on the hitherto untapped holdings of the Turkish Diplomatic Archives (TDA). Overall, this article demonstrates both the breadth and limits of Nazi Germany's sweeping efforts to orchestrate anti-Soviet propaganda in Turkey; efforts that helped end interwar Soviet-Turkish cooperation. Against previously established notions in historiography that depict Soviet-Turkish relations as naturally hostile and inherently destabilizing, this article documents how the Nazi–Soviet Pact played a key role in their worsening bilateral affairs between 1939 and 1941. The argument, then, is in keeping with newer literature on the Second World War that has begun to compensate for earlier accounts that overlooked neutral powers.

The proliferation of popular newspapers during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 transformed the boundaries of public debate in Russia and brought the people into close contact with each other as well as with the outer world. Printing and the press had a parallel effect on the fin-de-siècle Ottoman public sphere. Newspapers of the Sublime Porte utilized defeats against Russia to juxtapose – if not depose – the Sultan’s cult as the sole symbol of unity with a nationalist one. “Wartime Propaganda and the Legacies of Defeat” is a comparative study of the two major newspapers – Golos and Basiret – during this period. I examine the major commonalities between these papers: such as perceived images of the enemy, the war’s aims and purposes, as well as the behavior of the troops portrayed by the war correspondents. My primary purpose is to shed light on the Turkish popular press, which weighed in on the issues of nationalism, defeat and political campaigning just as its Russian counterparts did. Ultimately, this article argues that the emergence of a critically debating public sphere in Russia and Turkey demonstrates how both empires experienced modernity in the sense that most Europeans understood it.

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