The Soviet Union wished for the Turkish-USSR border within the Eastern Anatolia Region to be normalized in a way beneficial to themselves and the Armenian and Georgian SSRs. Deputy premier Lavrentiy Beria got in Stalin's ear, claiming that Turkish territory to the southwest of Georgia was stolen from the Georgians by the Turks during the Ottoman period. If Beria's purported theory were to be agreed upon by the Turkish, Soviet influence over the Black Sea and Middle East would increase and, in the process, decrease such influence of the British Empire in the latter region.[11] The argument was retracted along with Soviet reservations over the regime of the straits in May 1953.[12]