The Italo-Soviet pact of friendship

On 2 September 1933 a pact of friendship, non-aggression and neutrality between the Kingdom of Italy and the Soviet Union was signed in Rome. It was signed on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III by the head of government, who was also foreign minister, Benito Mussolini, and on behalf of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR by the ambassador in Rome, Vladimir Potemkin. At first sight it was a surprising agreement: the country that had been the first in Europe to build a Fascist state on the slogan of fighting Bolshevism and the homeland of world communism were assuring each other of their friendship. In reality the pact grew out of ten years of cool but correct cooperation, and out of the new anxiety that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany had caused in both capitals.

Fascism and Bolshevism at one table

Ideology never stood in the way of Mussolini’s dealings with Moscow. Italy signed its first trade agreement with Soviet Russia in December 1921, even before the March on Rome. As prime minister, Mussolini recognised the USSR de jure on 7 February 1924, a week after Britain had done so, and concluded a commercial treaty with it. Italian industry needed Soviet oil, coal and grain, while the Soviet Union, embarking on its first Five-Year Plan, was looking abroad for machinery, ships, aircraft and specialists. The Italian authorities persecuted communists at home, and Italian communist émigrés in the USSR were a constant source of friction, but both sides treated these as internal matters. In 1930–1933 relations steadily improved, helped by the Italian ambassador in Moscow, Bernardo Attolico. On 6 May 1933 a new economic agreement was signed, opening the way to larger Soviet orders in Italy.

Politically, it was 1933 that brought the two sides together. To Mussolini, Hitler was an ideological imitator but also a potential rival: Nazi Germany openly sought to annex Austria, which Rome regarded as its sphere of influence and as a buffer protecting South Tyrol, acquired in 1919. In Moscow, for their part, there were fears that Hitler, the author of a programme to conquer “living space” in the east, would break off the cooperation begun at Rapallo and confirmed by the Treaty of Berlin of 1926. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, was trying to lead the USSR out of isolation by concluding non-aggression pacts with its neighbours, among them Poland in 1932, and by drawing closer to France. An agreement with Italy, a great power and a member of the League of Nations Council, fitted this policy. In the summer of 1933 Mussolini was also pushing a Four-Power Pact of the Western powers with Germany, which aroused mistrust in Warsaw and Moscow. The agreement with the USSR allowed him to show that Italy pursued an independent policy and had friends in the east as well.

The terms of the pact

The pact consisted of seven articles. Both parties undertook that in no case, either alone or together with other states, would they resort to war or aggression against each other on land, at sea or in the air, and that they would respect the inviolability of each other’s territory. If one of them were attacked by a third state, the other was to remain neutral for the whole duration of the conflict. If, however, one of the parties itself attacked another state, the other could denounce the pact without notice. The parties promised not to conclude political or economic agreements directed against each other and not to join commercial or financial boycotts aimed at the partner. Disputes that could not be settled through ordinary diplomatic channels were to be referred to conciliation proceedings. Both states’ earlier obligations remained in force, and each declared that it was not bound by any agreement requiring it to take part in aggression by a third state.

The pact was to remain in force indefinitely, but could be denounced only after five years, with a year’s notice. The USSR ratified it on 7 October 1933 and Italy on 19 October, and the instruments of ratification were exchanged in Moscow on 15 December. Its model was largely the Soviet–German Treaty of Berlin, which likewise combined non-aggression with a promise of neutrality. The Italian pact thus differed from the usual Soviet non-aggression pacts with neighbours: it contained an explicit commitment to neutrality and fairly broadly worded economic guarantees. At the beginning of December 1933, on his way back from the United States, Litvinov stopped in Rome and talked with Mussolini, which the press of both countries presented as proof of good relations.

Warships, turbines and military missions

The pact opened the best period in Italo-Soviet relations. As early as September 1933 a Soviet military mission arrived in Italy, and later Italian army and naval officers toured the Soviet Union. An Italian submarine visited Batumi, and Soviet warships called at Naples. Courtesies were followed by orders. The Soviet navy, which after the revolution had lost the ability to design large warships on its own, relied on Italian models. The firm of Ansaldo helped design the Project 26 cruisers, modelled on the Italian cruiser Raimondo Montecuccoli, and the turbines for the first of them, Kirov, came from Italy. The Project 7 destroyers were also built with Italian help, and the OTO yard at Livorno built the destroyer leader Tashkent for the USSR, handed over in May 1939. The Soviet fleet that later fought the Germans in the Baltic and the Black Sea was thus to a large extent of Italian descent.

A friendship that did not last

The political hopes attached to the pact soon faded. In July 1934, after the murder of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by Austrian Nazis, Mussolini sent divisions to the Brenner Pass to show that he would not allow Hitler to take Austria. In the autumn of 1935, however, Italy invaded Ethiopia. The Soviet Union, a member of the League of Nations since 1934, supported sanctions, although in practice its trade with Italy fell only slightly. The real blow came in 1936: in the Spanish Civil War Italy sent tens of thousands of soldiers to help General Francisco Franco, while the USSR supported the Republic. Trade between the two states almost dried up, and in November 1937 Italy joined Germany and Japan’s Anti-Comintern Pact, directed against the Comintern and the USSR. Formally the 1933 pact remained in force. During the Winter War Italy sent Finland aircraft and rifles, although Germany, by then bound by its pact with Moscow, held up most of these deliveries. The agreement finally ceased to exist on 22 June 1941, when Italy declared war on the USSR and joined Operation Barbarossa.

Significance

The Italo-Soviet pact was one element of the anxious restructuring of Europe after 30 January 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor. It showed that for a few years Mussolini and Joseph Stalin saw Germany as a threat and were prepared, for the sake of security, to cooperate across ideological divides. In 1934–1935 Italy, together with France and Britain, still stood guard over Austrian independence, while the USSR joined the League of Nations and concluded a mutual assistance treaty with France. Had this front held, Hitler would have had far less room for manoeuvre.

The wars in Ethiopia and Spain, however, pushed Mussolini towards Berlin: in 1936 the Rome–Berlin Axis was formed, in 1937 Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, and in 1939 it concluded the Pact of Steel with Germany. The Soviet Union, disappointed with the Western democracies and abandoned by Italy, came to terms with Hitler itself in August 1939. The 1933 pact remained a testament to a brief period in which the dictatorships sought guarantees of mutual security – and a lasting legacy in the form of warships built with Italian help, which in 1941 fought against Germany and its Italian allies.