Italy, Relations with

ITALY, RELATIONS WITH

From the time of Italy's unification in the mid-nineteenth century through the post-Soviet era, schizophrenic collaboration and competition in the Balkans and Danubian Europe has marked Italo-Russian relations, with national interests consistently trumping shifting ideologies in both countries.

The schizophrenia was there from the beginning. Although Tsar Alexander II, for example, objected to Italy's unification, the wars fought to that end could not have been arranged and contained without the Tsar's complicity. By the late 1870s liberal Italy was becoming enmeshed in the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany. Although it was primarily directed against France, the Italians hoped the alliance would also blunt autocratic Russia's penetration of the Balkans. Later, Russia's defeat at Japanese hands in 1905 removed the counterbalance to Austria's influence in the Balkans, and Italy became every bit as aggrieved as Russia by Austria's conduct during the First Bosnian Crisis (1908–1909). The result was the Italo-Russian Racconigi Agreement (1909). Of the European powers, only Italy supported Russia on the Straits Question. Although Rome promised several times to stand by its obligations taken at Racconigi, Russia proved unable to use the Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912) as an excuse to reexamine the Straits Question.

During World War I, both Rome and Petrograd feared Austro-German advances into the Balkans. Rome, however, was no more eager to see Germanic dominance replaced by Russian-led Panslavism than Russia was to see it replaced by Italian influence. The complex, multilateral negotiations that brought Italy into the war (1915) required the uneasy compromise of Russian and Italian ambitions in the Balkans. These compromises seriously eroded Russia's political situation and betrayed Serbia, Russia's ally and caucasus belli. After the war, Italy generally refrained from supporting the anti-Bolshevik White armies during Russia's civil war, although Rome did provide small contingents to the Allied intervention in Vladivostok and briefly planned to intervene in Georgia.

Thereafter, Italo-Soviet relations fell into the old grooves of Realpolitik. Even Benito Mussolini's rise to power (1922) had little effect on diplomatic directions. Despite the presumed ideological antipathies dividing communist Russia and fascist Italy, the Duce exploited Italy's position between the Allies and the Soviets to reintroduce Russia into Europe and to arbitrate among the great powers. Although commercial aspirations motivated Italy's recognition of the Soviets (1924), the fascists and soviets also drew together in common hostility to responsible parliamentary systems of government. By 1930, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany were tending to ally against France and its allies.

With Hitler's rise to power (1933), Moscow and Rome sought ways to contain the threat of a resurgent Germany. Through extensive cooperation, both began to support the status quo to block German expansion, especially in the Balkans. Russia's nonaggression pact with Italy (1933) marked a significant step in its Collective Security policy directed against Germany. Italy's successful defense of Austria (1934)—the one successful example of Collective Security before World War II—seemed to vindicate Soviet policy.

Good relations, despite Moscow's extraordinary efforts at appeasement, collapsed during the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Afterward the Italo-Soviet economic agreements (February 1939) began a rapprochement and presaged the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August. Even after World War II began, Moscow continued to hope to split the Italo-German alliance and to use Italy to block German penetration into the Balkans: for example, by encouraging Italy's plan for a bloc of Balkan neutrals in the Fall and Winter of 1939. These plans came to naught when Germany and then Italy attacked Russia in June 1941. The Italian expeditionary army on the Eastern Front met horrific disaster in 1943.

The Allies signed an armistice with Italy in 1943, and the following year the USSR recognized the new Italy. In 1947, the two signed a peace treaty. Italo-Russian relations were again subsumed in the struggles between larger alliance systems, this time with Italy playing a crucial role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which stood against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Particularly interesting was the rise of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). After the brutal crushing of the Hungarian Revolt (1956), however, the PCI began to distance itself from the USSR and to promote an "Italian Road to Socialism." In March 1978, the PCI entered a governmental majority for the first time. Stung by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the PCI increasingly promoted Eurocommunism, which ultimately played a large role in delegitimizing Soviet Russia's imperial satellite system in Eastern Europe. After the collapse of Communism in Russia in the early 1990s, the main point of cooperation and conflict between Russia and Italy remained focused in the Balkans and Danubian regions.

See also: balkan wars; world war i; world war ii

bibliography

Clarke, J. Calvitt. (1991). Russia and Italy against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement of the 1930s. New York: Greenwood Press.

Corti, Eugenio. (1997). Few Returned: Twenty-Eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942–1943, tr. Peter Edward Levy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Nobile, Umberto. (1987). My Five Years with Soviet Airships, tr. Frances Fleetwood. Akron, OH: Lighter-Than-Air Society.

Toscano, Mario. (1970). Designs in Diplomacy: Pages from European Diplomatic History in the Twentieth Century. Translated and edited by George A. Carbone. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Urban, Joan Barth. (1986). Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

J. Calvitt Clarke III