There was something ominous in the announcement made in the
B.B.C. news services on Sunday that Armenians living in certain Turkish areas adjacent to the Soviet Union had petitioned the Big Three at Potsdam to agree to their transference to Russian sovereignty, and that the Moscow wireless had chosen this moment to make a general attack on Turkish policy. This is a familiar and not very agreeable Russian technique. It was practised unsuccess- fully in the case of Finland and successfully in the case of the Baltic States in 1939. But it is by no means a new technique. Lord Malmesbury wrote in i86o, in his Memoirs of an ex-Minister, of
Swiss fears of the designs of Napoleon III, and quoted someone as saying that
" Napoleon is now intriguing with the Catholic Party at Geneva to get them to ask to be annexed to France, and if half-a- dozen rascals can le found to do it, he will call that ' the voice of the people' and seize Geneva at once."
These requests for annexation usually call for rather searching scrutiny.
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