152 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
ten years.”⁹³Even before this political comedy took place, on 16 January 1937 Japan’s
ambassador to Great Britain, Shigeru Yoshida, visited Soviet ambassador Ivan Maiskii
and frankly regretted Japan’s pact with Germany, stating that he did not belong to the
“aggressive school” of Japanese political thought. Criticizing the conduct of Japan’s
army and navy, he told Maiskii that the Japanese people would pay dearly for the army
and navy’s “stupidities” and that he hoped the pact with Germany would be the last
“stupidity” of his government.⁹⁴
In November 1937 Italy joined the pact, thus laying the foundation for the sub-
sequent grouping of Axis powers. In July 1934, after Austrian Nazis assassinated
the chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, Italian-German relations had become
strained under Benito Mussolini. Fearing territorial dispute with an expansionist Nazi
Germany, Mussolini openly protected Austria from Hitler’s possible takeover attempt.
Yet Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia and his international isolation eventually drew the two
dictators closer, ultimately leading Italy to join the pact. Japan, too, did not consider
Italy particularly friendly. In Italy’s war in Ethiopia, for example, Japan’s uno cial
sentiments were with the Africans ghting against the white European power,⁹⁵al-
though the Japanese government refused to assist Haile Selassie’s empire. (According
to a French source, in 1935 Japan placed Italy, along with Britain and the United
States, as being hostile toward Japan.)⁹⁶But in the end, like Germany, Japan came to
recognize Italy’s possession of Abyssinia in return for Italy’s approval of Manchukuo.
In both cases, Moscow had a strategic interest in keeping Italy pitted against both
Germany and Japan, but its “rapprochement with fascism” failed,⁹⁷paving the way
for Italy to join the pact. Both Italy and Germany intervened militarily in the Spanish
Civil War (which began in July 1936) to support the nationalist rebels led by General
Francisco Franco. Fearing the expansion of anti-Communist forces to other parts of
Europe, especially to France, Moscow intervened on the side of the Republicans.
The Anti-Comintern Pact, as the name implied, was aimed explicitly at the
Moscow-based Comintern (Third International). Its general content – the public treaty
with its supplementary protocol and the secret supplementary treaty – is well known.
The actual content of these documents, however, is not. The public treaty’s supple-
mentary protocol, also signed on 25 November 1936, stipulated:
93 Japan Chronicle, 12 March 1937, 5. The minister added that French “Foreign Minister Delbos and
ex-Premier Laval have given assurance that the French-Soviet Pact applied only to Europe and not to
the Far East.”
94 Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii,Dnevnik diplomata. London. 1934–1943vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 2006),
155.
95 See J. Calvitt Clarke III,Alliance of the Colored Peoples: Ethiopia and Japan before World War II
(Woodbridge, Suolk: James Currey Ltd, 2011).
96 See AMAE, CPC 1914–1940. Z. Dossier Japon 1930-1940, no. 142, fol. 239.
97 See Calvitt Clarke III,Russia and Italy against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement of the
1930s(New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).