Office of the Historian

767.68119/3–945: Telegram

The Ambassador in Turkey (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State

Ankara, March 9, 1945—7 p.m.
[Received 11:45 p.m.]

331. The Yugoslav Ambassador1 informed me today that he had learned from a reliable source that subsequent to the Yalta Conference,2 Molotov3 had informed the Turkish Ambassador in Moscow4 that the Soviet Government would desire soon to discuss with the Turkish Government a revision of the Montreux Convention.5 The Turkish Ambassador is said to have replied that the Montreux Convention “was an international matter”.

Sent Department, repeated to Moscow as No. 12.

Steinhardt
  1. Iliya Shumenkovich.↩
  2. The Yalta Conference between President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill, and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union Stalin met February 4–February 11, 1945; see Foreign Relations, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945.↩
  3. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union.↩
  4. Selim Sarper.↩
  5. Signed July 20, 1936, League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. clxxiii, p. 213; for documentation on the interest of the United States in the Montreux Conference regarding the regime of the Straits, June 22–July 20, 1936, see Foreign Relations, 1936, vol. iii, pp. 503 ff.; for documentation concerning discussion of the Montreux Convention at Yalta, see Conferences at Malta and Yalta, pp. 328–329, 903–904, and 982.↩