Prometheism

This article is about the early 20th century political project. For the environmentalist term, see Prometheanism. For the 2020 political essay, see Jason Jorjani § The Prometheist Manifesto.

Prometheism or Prometheanism (Polish: Prometeizm) was a political project initiated by Józef Piłsudski, a principal statesman of the Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1935. Its aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union.

Between the World Wars, Prometheism and Piłsudski's other concept, that of an "Intermarium federation", constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and for some of his political heirs.

Sources of Prometheism

Prometheus, by Gustave Moreau, tortured on Mount Caucasus

Piłsudski's elaboration of Prometheism had been aided by an intimate knowledge of the Russian Empire gained while he was exiled by its government to eastern Siberia. The term "Prometheism" was suggested by the Greek myth of Prometheus, whose gift of fire to mankind, in defiance of Zeus, came to symbolize enlightenment and resistance to despotic authority.

A brief history of Poland's Promethean endeavor was set down on February 12, 1940, by Edmund Charaszkiewicz, a Polish military intelligence officer whose responsibilities from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939 had included the coordination of Poland's Promethean program. Charaszkiewicz wrote his paper in Paris after escaping from a Poland overrun by Nazi Germany.

Józef Piłsudski—father of the Promethean strategy

The creator and soul of the Promethean concept [wrote Charaszkiewicz] was Marshal Piłsudski, who as early as 1904, in a memorandum to the Japanese government, pointed out the need to employ, in the struggle against Russia, the numerous non-Russian nations that inhabited the basins of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas, and emphasized that the Polish nation, by virtue of its history, love of freedom, and uncompromising stance toward [the three empires that had partitioned Poland out of political existence at the end of the 18th century] would, in that struggle, doubtless take a leading place and help work the emancipation of other nations oppressed by Russia.

A key excerpt from Piłsudski's 1904 memorandum declared:

Poland's strength and importance among the constituent parts of the Russian state embolden us to set ourselves the political goal of breaking up the Russian state into its main constituents and emancipating the countries that have been forcibly incorporated into that empire. We regard this not only as the fulfilment of our country's cultural strivings for independent existence, but also as a guarantee of that existence, since a Russia divested of her conquests will be sufficiently weakened that she will cease to be a formidable and dangerous neighbor.

The Promethean movement, according to Charaszkiewicz, took its genesis from a national renaissance that began in the late 19th century among many peoples of the Russian Empire. That renaissance stemmed from a social process that led in Russia to revolution. Nearly all the socialist parties created in the ethnically non-Russian communities assumed a national character and placed independence at the tops of their agendas: this was so in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia and Azerbaijan. These socialist parties would take the lead in their respective peoples' independence movements. While all these countries harbored organizations of a purely national character that likewise championed independence, the socialist parties, precisely because they associated the fulfilment of their strivings for independence with the social movement in Russia, showed the greater dynamism. Ultimately the peoples of the Baltic Sea basin—Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—won and, until World War II, all kept their independence. The peoples of the Black and Caspian Sea basins—Ukraine, Don Cossacks, Kuban, Crimea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Northern Caucasus—emancipated themselves politically in 1919–1921 but then lost their independence to Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War.

In 1917–1921, according to Charaszkiewicz, as the nations of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Sea basins were freeing themselves from Russia's tutelage, Poland was the only country that worked actively together with those peoples. In these efforts, Poland met with opposition from the western coalition; the latter backed the (anticommunist) White Russians in their endeavor to rebuild the erstwhile Russian Empire. At the same time, according to Charaszkiewicz, Germany, with her occupation forces, strengthened her influences in Lithuania and Latvia, manipulated Ukraine's Lt. Gen. Pavlo Skoropadsky toward Ukrainian federation with a possible future non-Bolshevik Russia, and attempted a German hegemony in the Caucasus against the political interests of Germany's ally, Turkey. According to Charaszkiewicz, Germany's true intentions were at last made manifest in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, concluded with the Bolsheviks in 1918.

However, the secret organisation Aufbau established in Munich in 1920 by a section of the white Russian émigrés in Germany developed far-ranging plans that had similar aims to the Promethean movement, only aligned with the economic interests of Germany in the east. Aufbau's chief political allies were Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler as the leaders of the incipient Nazi movement. Aufbau sought to overthrow the Bolshevik government through military intervention and to break up Bolshevik Russia into a number of National Socialist successor states, including the Ukraine-led Black Sea League, similar entities in the Baltic and Siberia, and a rump Russia. The Ukrainian representative in Aufbau was Ivan Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia, former chancellor of the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian State, head of the Ukrainian National Cossack Organization. In 1921 Aufbau secured two million marks of funding for Vasyl Vyshyvanyi's army in return for trading and industrial concessions to Germany in the future Ukrainian state and recruitment began, while Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia joined Vyshyvanyi's Supreme Council in Vienna. An offensive in Ukraine was to be combined with a new undertaking in the Baltics along the lines of the 1919 Latvian Intervention by the West Russian Volunteer Army of Pavel Bermondt-Avalov. A Russian nationalist coup against the "Jews" (i.e. the Bolsheviks) to establish a "Russian national farmers' dictatorship" was planned for the summer of 1923 under the leadership of Vasily Biskupsky and Pyotr Krasnov. By 1923, the Munich leader of the Military Organization of Eastern Galicia, Bohdan Hustevych, was receiving military training from Ernst Röhm, and Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia proclaimed that the "time of a productive National Socialist revolution ... has drawn near". The plans were thwarted financially by the internal divisions within the White Russian emigration, as the Supreme Monarchical Council of Nikolai Markov favoured a Great Russian restoration with French backing, and refused to work with either Bermondt-Avalov or Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia. Further development of the Aufbau plans was delayed by Hitler's failure to seize power in Germany in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, but in 1933 Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia moved to Berlin at Hitler's invitation and his collaboration with Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg intensified again. He supported Rosenberg's plans for a semi-colonial Ukrainian satellite state and pledged the German-trained Ukrainian Cossack forces fully to the Nazi project. Rosenberg himself was in charge of aiding the Ukrainian independence movement in Soviet Ukraine in its propaganda and terrorist activities.

The German support for the right-wing Ukrainian aspirations for national independence stood in direct opposition to the Polish Promethean plans, as it entailed the creation of a German–Ukrainian border through the destruction of the Polish state. In Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia's words, the cause of Ukrainian freedom was bound to eastward German expansion and directed "against [Soviet] Russia, against Poland, and against France". His activities were monitored closely by French and Polish military intelligence.

Charaszkiewicz argues that Germany's approach departed from the basic ideological tenets of Prometheism as it constituted "an elastic, opportunistic platform for diversion, amenable to exploitation for current German political purposes in any direction". He emphasizes that in this field there were never any organizational or ideological ties between Poland and Germany. The legitimate national representatives of the Promethean émigrés allied with Poland showed a marked political loyalty to Poland.