REDS AND WHITES IN ETHIOPIA

BEFORE the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 and 1936

J. Calvitt Clarke III

Jacksonville University

State interests, communist ideology, and legacies of earlier Italo-Russian confrontation in Northeast Africa whipsawed Soviet policy toward Ethiopia between the two world wars. Russia’s imperial efforts in the region had fallen within the pale of European power politics, and the Soviets suckled the milk of tsarist experience. Opportunism, vigorous opposition to British colonial power, recognition of the disruptive potential of indigenous nationalism, and exploitation of racial discontent flowed in post-revolutionary, Bolshevik policies. Marxist-Leninist ideology became the instrumental handmaiden that legitimized realpolitik and reassured Soviet leaders that in pursuing state interests, they also were marching in step with history’s inevitable tune. The messianic faiths of Slavophilism and Communism justified Russia’s expanding influence into Africa and its role in awakening the colonial world.

In approaching Ethiopia, the Soviets had to deal with the White Russian community there. In the fifty or so years before the First World War, many Russian adventurers—scoundrels and saints—explored Ethiopia and often formed close relationships with the country’s rulers. Steeled by this tradition, following their defeat at Bolshevik hands between 1917 and 1922, White Russian émigrés, including doctors, engineers, lawyers, and military men, began arriving in Addis Ababa. Fearing Bolshevik agents, Ethiopian authorities initially refused entry to many, but, with time allowed more and more exiles a new home in the capital.[1]

In 1919, the last imperial Russian chargé d’affaires, realizing he would have no successor, mortgaged his legation to raise the funds necessary for him to leave Ethiopia. The Ethiopians rented the well-appointed house and fifty acres, which remained officially Russian property, to the local Belgian representative and set aside the income to help local Russians. The French legation protected some of the Russians émigrés and a few became Ethiopian subjects. The Ethiopian government employed many Russian engineers and doctors, at modest salaries. Some rose to relatively high positions, but most got humdrum jobs unconnected with their old professions and many lived and died in penury.[2]

The Anglo-Italian explorer and journalist, Lewis Mariano Nesbitt, thought the Russians were all “of good social antecedents” and the most interesting foreigners in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopians, who had long-seen the Russians as friends, preferred these exiles when appointing foreigners to governmental positions. They had lost all ties with their own country and aroused no suspicions of harboring imperialist motives in flocking to Ethiopia. The government paid these Russians, despite their high-sounding titles, “barely enough to enable its officials to subsist.” Their agreed-on salaries shrank while “passing through the various hands” before reaching them, and their homes were “the shabbiest, barely furnished with that which is absolutely essential for civilized people.” Some Russians who could see the “contrast between their own life and that of universally indigent natives” sometimes felt “a glimmer of contentment. The others endure.” Nesbitt finished, “Abyssinia then is not a promised land even for her friendly Muscovites.”[3]

The Church of St. Nicholas served as their center. It existed for a decade between 1928 and 1939 under an ex-cavalry chaplain.[4]

Aleksander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke of Russia was among those who admired Ethiopia. He spent six months in June 1925 in Ethiopia as the guest of Ras Tefari, the future Emperor Hayle Sellase. The imperial train met Aleksander in Djibouti and had to stop each night of its travels for fear of desert bandits. Alexander arrived at the Addis Ababa station to honors, an old, Russian military band, and a group of about seventy-five Russians. Tefari extolled the virtues of the Russo-Ethiopian connection, and the two discussed at length the political moves and errors of the last tsar and his family. The grand duke later testified that Tefari's native wisdom had impressed him, and “. . . it dawned on me that we should have put an Abyssinian at the head of our Imperial Council.”[5]

For their part, the new Bolshevik rulers of Russia developed an early and definable interest in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the writings of the All-Russian Association for Research on the East reflected concern for the region’s peoples and politics. Many of the contributors to its monthly periodical, Novyi vostok [New East], solidly based their work on tsarist scholarship and experience.[6]

In 1922, Novyi vostok published, without comment, a 1913 report on Ethiopia by a tsarist official sent to Addis Ababa to establish diplomatic ties and to explore trade possibilities. The report stressed that Ethiopia considered itself to be an Orthodox nation and Russia’s co-religionist, both equally fearful of Roman Catholic missionaries. For the Russians, Ethiopia’s political role was clear: to create an empire as a bulwark against Egypt and the unification of the British colonies in Africa. The report extolled Ethiopia’s agricultural riches and stressed its proximity for trade.[7]

The Soviets began introducing themselves to the Ethiopians in the early 1920s. The Third Communist International (Comintern) and the Foreign Affairs Commissariat in 1922 detailed I. A. Zalkind to tour parts of Africa, including Ethiopia. He was to ascertain how Communist Russia might conduct propaganda to incite local populations against whites on racial, political, and economic grounds, and he was to study their culture, customs, and conditions of life and labor. He was also to investigate possibilities for establishing regular relations between Ethiopia and Soviet Russia. He traveled to Jerusalem to meet Ethiopia’s representatives and then to Addis Ababa, where he stayed two months. Zalkind returned to Moscow in the first half of 1923 having concluded that Ethiopia held little political or economic interest for the USSR and provided but sterile ground for communist propaganda. He thought the Soviets, however, should try to set up a mission in Ethiopia to enable contact with local and neighboring revolutionary organizations in black Africa. The Comintern and the foreign commissariat adopted these conclusions.[8]

Zalkind returned to Ethiopia in December 1925. The foreign commissariat had directed him to begin negotiations leading to a political rapprochement with Ethiopia. If successful, the commissariat would send a delegation to Ethiopia to keep an eye on nationalist tendencies throughout Northeast Africa. Planning to take at least six months, he was to go to Alexandria and then up the Nile to Ethiopia.[9]

Following Zalkind’s visits, in 1927 Moscow sent the “learned Soviet professor,” N. I. Vavilov, to study agricultural possibilities in Ethiopia. After visiting Addis Ababa, he spent some time in the interior. On his return, Dr. Vavilov’s report praised Ethiopia’s potential for agricultural development.[10]

These approaches left the Ethiopians unimpressed. Two years after Vavilov’s visit, they tried “to work up” a Bolshevik scare. They deported three, resident White Russians for spreading Bolshevik propaganda, and rumors suggested that the Ethiopians were planning more expulsions. Because Ethiopia had no laws or regulations on the admission, deportation, or regulation of communist propaganda, expelling Russians suspected of communist propaganda required an imperial command.[11]

Addison Southard, America’s lead representative in Addis Ababa, explained the first expulsion, that of the Russian merchant and French protégé, Vadime Yonow. His small import-export business had worked through connections in France and earned him a modest living. A few months before his expulsion, the Ethiopians had caught him trying to smuggle in a small quantity of arms and ammunition from Djibouti. A commercial venture, those who could run the arms blockade from Djibouti made large profits.[12]

Another incident provoked the charge of Bolshevism. The Ethiopians had caught Yonow smuggling in phosphorus and other ingredients for illicitly making matches, which upset highly-placed Ethiopians who profited from the match monopoly. Further, he had recently given up most of his French commercial contacts for American and German connections, which the French Legation called a heinous attack on “the good relations existing between France and Ethiopia.” Hence his expulsion as a Bolshevik agent, the order signed by the French minister and an Ethiopian official. The American legation concluded that, although Yonow was not “a strictly law abiding citizen,” it did “seem peculiar” that the Ethiopians had ascribed a political character to his acts.[13]

On the expulsion of the second White Russian as a Bolshevik agent, Southard noted an inspired article in the influential Amharic newspaper, Berhanena Salam [Light and Peace]. Clearly displaying court attitudes toward the Soviet Union, the article claimed that all Ethiopians looked favorably on foreigners. However, some had come with evil intentions and would return to their countries and publish calumnies against Ethiopia. “Enlightened people do not believe such propaganda,” the article told its readers, but most, “including women, accept as truth anything that is printed.”[14]

In Russia, Berhanena Salam charged, “vagrants, crooks, adventurers, thieves and vagabonds” had overthrown the Russian government. Now, “blood flowed like water in Russia.” Some Bolsheviks “also travelled in foreign countries in the guise of exiles, for the purpose of making trouble.” Nonetheless, those Russians who had come to Ethiopia with an aptitude for work had received employment. Ethiopia had taken in other Russians, even those with no profession, with kindness and had given them financial relief. The leaders and priests of the Ethiopian Church had joined with the Russians in Ethiopia to pray for the soul of Russia’s last emperor. The Ethiopians, however, had discovered one, Dr. Gavrilov, to be a Bolshevik partisan through his speech and actions. First, he had publicly carried off the wife of one of his own countrymen and had driven him to attempt suicide. Next, he had advised his patients not to use doctors of other nationalities by stressing he was a Russian and an Orthodox Christian like themselves. “He thus caused much harm by preventing the sick form consulting other doctors.” Last, the article charged that Gavrilov had treated another physician “with such haste and imprudence that it caused his sudden death.” When the municipality discovered these facts, it dismissed Gavrilov. He then maneuvered against Ethiopia’s interests and spread dissatisfaction and pernicious propaganda to his patients, who reported him to the authorities.[15]

The authorities then sent agents, whom Gavrilov took to be Bolshevik partisans, and he began to confide his secrets to them. He next wrote one of his friends in Sofia, Bulgaria, asking for explosives to assassinate the empress and other notables. He showed this letter a police agent. Three months later, Gavrilov received the reply to this letter, stating that the explosives and other materials were ready for forwarding. The letter then fell into the hands of the Chief of Police. The authorities found Gavrilov guilty of spreading propaganda to destroy the government. The police then arrested him on May 17, 1929 and placed him and his wife on a train leaving Addis Ababa that same day.[16]

Addison Southard, doubted the truth of the allegations. Southard believed the vengeful husband had written the letter as a hoax. Both Yonow and Gavrilov had offended the French legation that had protected them. Both probably were also victims of the zeal of an Armenian, also a French protégée, who headed Ethiopia’s secret police. Southard further explained that the Ethiopians were fanatically religious, instinctively anti-foreign, and thoroughly committed to feudalism. Poor material for the Bolshevik experiment, he described Ethiopia as “the last country in the world” that Bolshevik propaganda would likely tempt. Southard believed the arrests laid in personal enmities and motives of revenge and obsession that Bolshevism might plant itself in Ethiopia.[17]

Southard elaborated. A man of considerable culture, education, and personality, Gavrilov for years had served as the physician to Empress Taytu and enjoyed her confidence. About 1927, he began his fall from grace. He incurred enmity from the Greek who had succeeded him as palace physician. After his ouster from the palace, Gavrilov received an appointment as doctor of the Addis Ababa municipality. However, the machinations of the Greek and weakness for palace intrigue and gossip, which had offended the French legation, had caused him to lose that billet too. Further, Gavrilov a few years before had seduced and “taken possession” of the wife of one of his local compatriots. The outraged husband, still employed by the Ethiopian government, had boasted that he had gotten Gavrilov deported. But, Southard noted that, given the “flexible” nature of Ethiopian mores, no one other than the husband was upset at the “transfer of affection.”[18]

The Ethiopians deported a third Russian émigré and French protégée, Niccolas Voronovsky, for “relations with the Bolshevists,” based on French information allegedly gotten from the Soviet embassy in Paris. A French colleague told Southard that Voronovsky had sent Moscow complete plans and a report on the project for building a dam at Lake Tana.[19]

Southard was skeptical about the French information. He presumed Voronovsky, an engineer, had gotten the plans in 1926, when he was a member of an official Ethiopian party surveying the proposed site. Voronovsky had visited Southard’s office and had asked him to tell White Engineering, an American corporation, about his materials. He claimed his plans were much simpler and easier than were those of the British engineering commission which also had surveyed the dam site. Southard rhetorically wondered why Voronovsky would send his maps and plans to Moscow and why the Soviets would want them. “It is not apparent here what real interest Moscow could have in such documents,” he wrote. Southard thought the incident unimportant.[20]

A year later, the mayor of Addis Ababa feared that communists might try to disrupt Hayla Sellase’s coronation in November 1930. Then, in 1931, the Ethiopians allegedly discovered that communist cells, directed by Russian immigrants. Weapons had arrived in Ethiopia and authorities arrested an Ethiopian. Another alleged Ethiopian member of the Communist community was Bajerond Takle-Hawaryat, an Ethiopian trained in a tsarist military school and lead author of Ethiopia’s constitution of 1931.[21]

Most White Russian émigrés never fell under the pall of suspicion. Most notably, Colonel Feodor Evgenii Konovalov, worked in the Ethiopian Office of Public Works. He became an import adviser to Hayle Sellase during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 and 1936.[22]

Undeterred by the scandal of expulsions, the Soviets in 1931 signed a contract with the Société Ethiopienne de Commerce et d’Industrie to sell Russian petroleum products in Ethiopia. This contract, a de facto monopoly, was a private agreement and included Ethiopia’s emperor as a silent partner. To push Soviet oil products in Ethiopia the Ethiopians ironically put in charge of Société Ethiopienne a White Russian, who had no national, political, or social prejudice except his anti-Bolshevism. Wracked by leakage from poor packing, inferior quality, and Société Ethiopienne’s inexperience in the oil business, a substantial loss fell on the emperor’s private purse. The Ethiopians thereafter proved chary of dabbling further in the oil business.[23]

The Soviets, however, did not give up without a struggle. Seeking further commitments through Société Ethiopienne, another Soviet representative arrived in Addis Ababa in 1933. The Soviets and Ethiopians signed a new contract that tried to correct the problems with the old one. For sale on consignment, they added other Russian commodities, including sugar, flour, and cotton goods. Sales did not go well, however, and Moscow soon decided that it would export nothing more to Ethiopia without suitable diplomatic and juridical support.[24]

In October 1934, Moscow sent Ivan Kondrashev to Addis Ababa to negotiate a treaty of commerce and friendship that would provide the recognition Hayle Sellase had told Southard the year before he would never grant. In describing Kondrashev’s visit, Southard noted that the royal family and older feudal chieftains still harbored sentimental memories of the tsarist regime as did the two hundred or so White Russian émigrés living in Ethiopia. Because Kondrashev fell ill, the negotiations did not go well.[25]

Two months later, on January 4, 1935, Ethiopia’s foreign minister wrote Moscow asking to establish diplomatic relations. On February 16, Soviet Foreign Commissar Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov responded that he would gladly do so, and he suggested that their representatives should meet in Paris. The two sides may have begun their negotiations in Paris and Moscow in the Spring of 1936, just before Ethiopia’s military collapse. Without providing documentation, the editors of the Soviet Union’s published foreign relations documents say that the negotiations did begin. The American legation in Addis Ababa, on the other hand, was skeptical. The legation reported that the minister who occupied the old tsarist legation had heard rumors but nothing definite on Soviet recognition of Ethiopia. He had an arrangement with Ethiopia’s government whereby he was to receive at least three months’ notice in event the Soviets wanted the legation. As it turned out, the USSR and Ethiopia did not establish relations until April 21, 1943—only a year before Moscow reestablished relations with post-Fascist Italy.[26]

By the beginning of 1935, clearly Benito Mussolini’s Italy’s was rushing toward war with Ethiopia, which he launched in October. The Soviet Union publicly offered warm support to Ethiopia facing an imperialist threat.[27] The reality was, however, that the Soviets now had to choose between its ideological, anti-colonial imperatives and realpolitik. Italy was crucial to the incipient collective security system the Kremlin was raising against German expansion, and the Soviets even had a role for Italy against Japan. Few at the time appreciated how willingly the Kremlin, seduced by security concerns, was willing to cuckold the central tenets of its most sacred beliefs. Moscow had had a celebrated fling with Addis Ababa, but its true passion was Rome. That the Latin liaison failed after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in May 1936, was not from lack of courting by the Soviet Union.[28]

---

[1] Carlo Zaghi, I russi in Etiopia, 2 vols. (Naples: Guida, 1972); Patrick Joseph Rollins, “Russia’s Ethiopian Adventure, 1888-1905” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1967); Czesław Jeśman, The Russians in Ethiopia: An Essay in Futility (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975).

[2] Sergius Yakobson, “Russia and Africa,” in Ivo J. Lederer, Russian Foreign Policy: Essays in Historical Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 453-87; Sergius Yakobson, “The Soviet Union and Ethiopia: A Case of Traditional Behavior,” Review of Politics 25 (July 1963): 329-42; Alemé Esheté, “Ethiopia and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1935,” Africa 32 (1977): 1-27; A. V. Krenkhov, “Ropssiiskaia diaspora v Efiopii,” in A. B. Letnev, ed., Rossiiskaia diaspora v Afrike 20-50-e gody: sbornik statei (Moscow: “Vostochnaia literatura,” 2001), 91-108.

[3] Lewis Mariano Nesbitt, Hell-Hole of Creation: The Exploration of Abyssinian Danakil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 25-26.

[4] Jeśman, Russians, 147.

[5] Aleksander Mikhailovich Romanov, Always a Grand Duke (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 174. His story of the visit can be found in 163-75. In his Once a Grand Duke (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. Farrar & Rinehart, 1932), 337, Alexander gives 1927 as the date of this trip.

[6] The Soviets, e.g., republished, and published posthumously, some of the works of Boris Aleksandrovich Turaev. See, e.g. his work first published in 1913, Istoriia drevnego vostoka, 2 vols. (Leningrad: Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1935). See the articles in Novyi vostok: Mikhail Pavlovich, “Zadachi Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi assotsiatsii vostokovedeniia,” l (1922): 3-15; K. M. Troianovskii, “Novyi peredel Afriki posle versal’skogo mira,” 1 (1922): 86-93; S. Vel’tman, “Kolonial’nye romany,” 4 (1923): 474-81; V. Khudadov, “Zheleznye dorogi Afriki,” 5 (1924): 165-84; V. Kaisarov, “Zheleznye dorogi v Afriki,” 6 (1924): 184-90; B. Bogaevskii, “Negr i novye problemy afrikanistiki,” 6 (1924): 376-91; and V. Gurko-Kriazhin, “Velikie puti v mirovoi istorii,” 8-9 (1925): 254-76. Also see Orel Eran, Mezhdunarodniki: An Assessment of Professional Expertise in the Making of Soviet Foreign Policy (Ramat Gan, Israel: Turtledove, 1979), 17-25; Nina Alekseevna Kuznetsova and Liudmila Mikhailovna Kulagina, Iz istorii sovetskogo vostokovedeniia, 1917-1967, (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1970), 3-102; Milene Charles, The Soviet Union and Africa: The History of the Involvement, Jo Fisher ed. and trans. (Boston: University Press of America, 1980), 6-9.

[7] A. I. Kokhanovskii, “Abissiniia: Doklad ministru inostrannykh del’ S. Sazonovu A. Kokhanovskogo, byvshego vracha pri imperatorskoi rossiiskoi missii v Abissinii, i iiunia 1913 goda),” Novyi vostok 1 (1922): 316-33; Charles, Soviet Union, 170-72; Edward Thomas Wilson, Russia and Black Africa Before World War II (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1974), 88, 99, 269, 274. Cf. Roger Edwards Kanet, “The Soviet Union and Sub-Saharan Africa: Communist Policy Toward Africa, 1917-1965,” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1966).

[8] I. A. Zalkind [pseudo. I. Vanin], “Abissiniia,” Novyi vostok 2 (1922): 525-42; M. Alsel’rod, “U vrat Abissiniia. Prazdnik ‘Maskal’ (Pis’mo iz Dzheddy),” Novyi vostok 16-17 (1925): 329-33.

[9] Coleman, Oct. 22, 1925: National Archives Microfilm Publications, Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), 1910-29 (Washington DC: The National Archives. National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1962), Microcopy 411, Roll 1 [hereafter cited as NARA Microcopy 411, Roll 1]; Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, “Sovetsko-efiopskie aviazi,” Narody azii i afriki (1980): 6-7; Charles, Soviet Union, 9-10.

[10] Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, Five Continents, (Rome: International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, 1997), 95-107; Charles Fernand Rey, In the Country of the Blue Nile (London: Duckworth, 1927): 193.

[11] Southard June 17, 1929: NARA, Microcopy 411, Roll 1; Southard, Oct. 10,1930: United States, National Archives (College Park, MD), Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal Files [hereafter cited as NARA] 884.55/unclear.

[12] Southard, June 17, 1929: NARA Microcopy No. 411, Roll 1.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Southard, July 27, 1929: NARA Microcopy 411, Roll 1.

[20] Ibid; Japan Times, Feb. 13, 1935.

[21] Alberto Sbacchi, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941 (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1996), 40, 51 n. 34; Teobaldo Filesi, Comunismo e Nazionalismo in Africa (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa, 1958), 125-31; Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: James Curry, 2002), 109-10; Taura Masanori, “Nihon-Echiopia kankei ni miru 1930 nen tsusho gaiko no iso,” Seifu to Minkan Kindai Nihon Kenkyu, 17 (1995): 148; Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974 (London: J. Currey, 1991), 92, 110.

[22] Fedor Eugenievich Konovalov, “The Konovaloff Manuscript,” (Hoover Institution. Stanford University, Stanford, CA), 246-48; Col. Th. Konovaloff, Con Le Armate Del Negus (Un Bianco fra i neri) (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1938); J. Calvitt Clarke III, “Feodor Konovalov and the Italo-Ethiopian War (Part I),” World War II Quarterly 5 (Win. 2008): 4- 37 and (Part II),” World War II Quarterly 6 (Spr. 2008): 23-49.

[23] In NARA 884.6363 Société Ethiopienne see: Southard, Oct. 22, 1931: /1; Nov. 18, 1931: /2; Jan. 16, 1932: /3; Dept. of State, Feb. 26, 1932: /4; Mar. 7, 1932: /7; Mar. 8, 1932: /12; Mar. 14, 1932: /13; Mar. 28, 1932: /14; Apr. 16,1932: /15; May 3, 1932: /16; May 18, 1932: /17; May 28, 1932: /19; June 23, 1932: /21; July 18, 1932: /23; Aug. 6, 1932: /24; Murray, Mar. 5, 1932: /6; June 23, 1932: /18; Alling, Mar. 14, 1932: /10; Henry, Mar. 9, 1932: /9; Mar. 17, 1932: /11; July 20, 1932: /22; To Ethiopia, Mar. 10, 1932: /8; Walmsley, June 13, 1932: /20; and Name unclear, Feb. 26, 1932: /4. Also in NARA, see Southard, Mar. 7, 1932: 884.602/32.

[24] In NARA 884.6363 Société Ethiopienne, see: Southard, Jan. 19, 1933: /25; Feb. 7, 1933: /26; Feb. 16, 1933: /27; Sept. 21, 1933: /28; Oct. 24,1933: /29. Also see the untitled short note in World Petroleum 3 (June 1932): 260.

[25] Southard, Oct. 8, 1934: NARA 761.84/1; Southard, Oct. 24, 1933: NARA 884.6363 Société Ethiopienne /29.

[26] Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Ministerstvo Inostrannykh del SSSR, Dokumenty vneshniaia politika SSSR, Vol. 18: 1 ianvaria-31 dekabria 1935 g. (Moscow: Politicheskoi literatury, 1973): nos. 59, 64, n. 35; Bullitt, Mar. 19, 1936: NARA 761.84/2; Engert, NARA Mar. 26, 1936: 761.84/3.

[27] See the articles in Revoliutsionnyi vostok, esp. Boris Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov, “Abissiniia,” 9 (1935): 138-51; M. Dzahallon, “Italo-Abissinskii konflikt (Novaia faza bor’by za peredel’ Afriki),” 9 (1935): 174-88; Aleksander Z. Zusmanovich, “Italo-Abissinskaia voina i ped”em natsional’nogo osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniia,” 9 (1935): 43-54; and Andrea Marabini, “Kolonial’naia politika fashistskoi Italii,” 10 (1936): 233-45. Finally, see Wilson, Russia and Black Africa, 84-89, 94-129, 154-56, 206-29, 263-79 and Charles, The Soviet Union, 4-12, 36-39.

[28] See the works by J. Calvitt Clarke III: Russia and Italy Against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement of the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991); “Italo-Soviet Military Cooperation in the 1930s,” in Girding for Battle: Arms Sales in a Global Perspective, 1800-1950, Donald J. Stoker and Jonathan A. Grant, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 177-99; “Periphery and Crossroads: Ethiopia and World Diplomacy, 1934-36,” in Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, 3 vols.. K. E. Fukui and M. Shigeta, eds. (Kyoto: Shokado Book Sellers, 1997), 1: 699-712; and “Soviet Appeasement, Collective Security, and the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 and 1936, Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians 4 (Dec. 1996): 115-32. Also see Rosaria Quartararo, Italia-URSS, 1917-1941: I rapporti politici (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1997), 107-08, 167-74.