Prometheism, or the dream of dismembering Russia
The war in Ukraine has given rise to new projects aimed at "decolonising" Russia. Supported by the United States, they are nothing more than the latest incarnation of a doctrine called "Prometheism".
22 November 2007, Tbilisi. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his Polish and Lithuanian counterparts are fully aware of the symbolic significance of the gesture they have just made. Behind them, a statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan punished by the gods for having transmitted divine knowledge (the sacred fire of Olympus) to human beings, defies them from all its height. The inauguration of this statue of Prometheus by the three heads of state is an event of high symbolic value[1].
According to the American analyst Paul Globe, a lecturer at the Institute of World Politics in Washington: "This statue is a penetrating reminder not only of the Polish approach to Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, but also of the ways in which it has been revived and justified since 1989".[2] This strategic approach is known today as "Prometheism". It is rarely mentioned by Western analysts, yet it provides a better understanding of the soil in which the war in Ukraine is taking root today.
The origins of "Prometheism
At the beginning of the 20th century, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, the first leader of the Second Republic of Poland (1918-1939), devised a strategy to dismember Russia. In his view, it was possible to weaken the Tsarist empire by supporting the aspirations of its ethnic minorities, encouraging them to claim their independence on the basis of the right to self-determination promoted by American President Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War. This is how the concept of "prometheism" took shape. "The fundamental idea of the Promethean movement is solidarity between its national components, directed not only against the Bolshevik enemy and oppressor, but against the Russian enemy in general, whether red or white: it is thanks to the existence of this common enemy that the movement will be able to maintain cohesion between such disparate nationalities. It was a Promethean front, defined above all by opposition to the Russians", explains French historian Étienne Copeaux, a research associate at the CNRS's Groupe de recherches et d'études sur la Méditerranée et le Moyen-Orient[1] .
It was in Poland, in Pilsudski's entourage, that the heart of the Promethean front beat during the inter-war period. Warsaw supported the recognition of the governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan and directly or indirectly subsidised more than a hundred periodicals and propaganda newspapers dealing with subjects related to Prometheism[2] .
In 1925, a conference bringing together members of various exiled governments and national committees scattered between Paris, Warsaw, Bucharest, Istanbul, Helsinki and Prague gave birth to the Promethean League of Nations Enslaved by Moscow. It set up its headquarters in the Polish capital. At the same time, the Polish state also organised clandestine operations under false flags in the USSR. These targeted ethnic minorities such as Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Cossacks and Tatars in order to incite them against the Russian enemy.
Secret financing
Until 1934, when the USSR was admitted to the League of Nations (League), the Prometheans had "immoderate confidence in Western governments... and in Wilson's principles", notes Étienne Copeaux. The movement also had some support in the countries of Western Europe. According to historian and political scientist Jonathan Levy, who wrote a doctoral thesis in 2006 on the development of federalism in Eastern Europe, the Promethean League was financed by the British, German and French secret services[3] . Officially, the Great Powers were rather reticent about the Promethean movement: they wanted to see the consolidation of a unified Russia favourable to the Entente[4] . But they supported it underhand, in order to play several games at the same time.
Hitler's rise to power in Germany and Russia's entry into the League of Nations led to the relative failure of Prometheism during Pilsudski's lifetime. From 1932, after the signing of the non-aggression pact with Moscow, the Polish government gradually ceased its support for Prometheism. After the German army invaded Poland in 1939, several Promethean groups were incorporated into the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German General Staff, or simply suppressed. The movement, however, rose from the ashes after the war.
Stepan Bandera and his criminal organisation
The Promethean League was reconstituted on 20 April 1946 at a congress held in The Hague. A manifesto was also published. Étienne Copeaux emphasised that confidence in the United States was now complete, "and the League took the name 'Promethean League of the Atlantic Charter'. It (...) urged Americans to continue the fight to liberate oppressed nations, called for the USSR to be banned from entering the UN and offered the services of Prometheans to "unmask Stalin's agents". Thus the movement was to become, in another form, an instrument of the Cold War in the hands of the Americans". Due to a lack of funds, the League itself quickly (around 1949) joined the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, whose operational centre was in Munich.
The origins of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations date back to 1943. At the time, it served as cover for a faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) controlled by the Ukrainian Stepan Bandera and his insurrectionary army. Bandera is a sulphurous figure who remains popular to this day in Ukraine, where he is officially regarded as a national hero. His faction (OUN-B) was recognised as nationalist, anti-Semitic (Bandera collaborated with the Nazi occupiers) and anti-American. It was also involved in criminal activities and espionage operations. Between 1943 and 1944, the OUN-B and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army alone massacred more than 90,000 Poles and several thousand Jews as part of "ethnic cleansing". Members of the OUN also assisted the German SS in the massacre of around 200,000 Jews in Volhynia (a region in the north-west of today's Ukraine)[5] .
After the end of the war, a large number of OUN-B cadres took refuge in the camps for displaced persons set up in Bavaria by the American occupiers, where they reorganised with the help of the occupying authorities[6] . They also used the connections of Theodor Oberländer, a former Abwehr officer who became Konrad Adenauer's minister for refugees (!) and who played a central role in the official founding of the ABN in 1946 and its takeover by former Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera's first deputy in the OUN, led the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations from its creation in 1943 until his death in 1986.
In its struggle against the Soviet Union (and ultimately for the self-determination of the nations of the region), the ABN did not hesitate to use armed confrontation and to accuse European federalists of collaborating with the enemy. Its ambition was not only "to put an end to Soviet domination, but also to dismantle the Russian Federation into a dozen mini-states based on an extreme conception of the right of peoples to self-determination", explains Jonathan Levy. A desire similar to that of the Prometheans.
Because of its bellicose character, more effective in the short term in opposing the Soviets, Bandera's organisation gradually (around 1948) gained the upper hand over the other competing anti-communist formations. "The rise of the ABN also coincided with its increased dependence on foreign funding. Funded first by the British via Vatican networks in 1948, then by the CIA, the ABN became indebted to intelligence agencies (...)", notes Jonathan Levy.
Initially hesitant, American officials softened their stance towards the ABN despite the organisation's known links with Bandera and the presence in the ranks of the OUN-B of a former Ustachi general, former SS officers and numerous war criminals[7]. During its existence, the ABN was in fact "the largest and most important umbrella organisation for former Nazi collaborators"[8] .
Despite the dubious past of its directors, the ABN has unprecedented access to the Reagan administration. When she was employed at the White House as a liaison officer, one of the tasks of Catherine Chumachenko - who in 1998 married Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine between 2005 and 2010 - was to coordinate affairs linked to the ABN. In this context, it is not surprising that a cohort of Central and Eastern European exiles with dubious pasts, including former members of the Iron Guard, the Ustasha and the OUN, have received official support from the United States and the West since the Cold War (and still do).
Zbignew Brzezinski and the dismantling of Russia
This overview of Prometheism would be incomplete without mentioning the work of Zbigniew Brzezinski. This famous American strategist of Polish origin has been a lifelong advocate of an American foreign policy based on the principles and aims of Prometheism. From the 1960s onwards, he spread the ideas of the movement in American power circles responsible for foreign policy. His influence was particularly strong during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, for whom he was National Security Advisor. According to former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, Brzezinski sought to "exploit to his advantage the problem posed by the various Soviet nationalities. He wanted to pursue clandestine actions to this end"[9] . This eventually came to fruition, says Gates: "With Carter's support, Brzezinski set in motion an ambitious agenda of clandestine operations aimed at fomenting unrest within the USSR... there was a significant increase in the number of dissidents, as well as Western information and literature being smuggled into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union."
To coordinate the CIA's actions in Eastern Europe, the United States relied in particular, as we have seen, on the clandestine networks of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc (ABN). This strategy of destabilisation, applied throughout the Cold War, was maintained in the 1990s. Even as the USSR had just collapsed, Dick Cheney, then US Defence Secretary, dreamt of seeing "the dismantling not just of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire, but of Russia itself, so that it could never again pose a threat to the rest of the world"[10] . During this decade, Brzezinski also envisaged, in the magazine Foreign Affairs, the partition of Russia into three republics (see map below)[11] .
Decolonising Russia
In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the old Promethean dream has resurfaced in the media. A new project to "decolonise Russia" has been launched in Europe under the aegis of the United States. Even more radical than the plan drawn up by Brzezinski in the 1990s, it aims to dismember Russia into 19, 34 or even 41 independent states (depending on the model), made up of the different ethnic minorities currently cohabiting on Russian national territory (see below). Several "Post-Russia Free Nations Forums" have been held since May 2022[12] to discuss this "transition". The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a US government agency made up of members of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Departments of Defence, State and Commerce, has declared that the decolonisation of Russia should be a "moral and strategic objective"[13] .
The American strategy of "divide and conquer" is manipulating the nationalist aspirations of the peoples of Eastern Europe to fulfil its hegemonic ambitions. The integration of a "decolonised" Russia into a "vast transcontinental system of cooperation" under the aegis of the United States would mean the end for Moscow of any possibility of establishing sovereign and independent bilateral relations with its Central European neighbours, starting with Germany. This scenario, supported by several leading Western strategists, would resolve the existential threat evoked by the British geographer Halford Mackinder at the beginning of the 20th century. According to Mackinder, the hegemony of the maritime powers (whose strength was based on economic and military control of the oceans), Great Britain and the United States, could only be maintained by preventing the emergence of an alliance between the land powers, Germany and Russia, which would enable the latter to control the Eurasian continent and lay claim to world domination. To avoid this, the Anglo-Saxon powers need to exert a degree of influence on the European continent, in order to steer it in the direction they want. Prometheism and support for Eastern European nationalism fit into this geostrategic framework. In 1919, Mackinder was already envisaging the break-up of Russia into a number of states organised into a kind of "loose federation"[14] .
By bringing together the Western-oriented states of Eastern Europe, the Promethean movement today fulfils two important functions: to help these countries in their efforts to integrate into Western institutions, and to get the West more involved in protecting these countries from Russia. On the ground, history is repeating itself. The current project to "decolonise Russia" is supported by far-right nationalist groups whose Russophobic positions play into the hands of the West. This new Promethean sleight of hand could well backfire on European countries. By arming and financing them, the war in Ukraine is giving impetus to factions seeking to go beyond the dismemberment of Russia and establish their own brand of racist imperialism in Europe[15] . Whatever the outcome of the armed conflict, this support is likely to shake (for the worse) European societies, and in turn its institutions and the international order over which the United States still exerts a dominant influence. History teaches us that no one breathes on the embers of ethnic dissension and national aspirations with impunity.
[1] Copeaux Étienne, "Le mouvement "prométhéen"". In: CEMOTI, n°16, 1993. Istanbul - Oulan Bator: autonomisation, identity movements and the construction of politics. p. 12.
[2] Richard Woytak, "The Promethean Movement in Interwar Poland", East European Quarterly, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (September 1984), pp. 273-78.
[3] Jonathan Levy, The Intermarium, Wilson, Madison & East Central European Federalism, Dissertation.com, 2006, p. 170.
[4] Richard Woytak, "The Promethean Movement in Interwar Poland," East European Quarterly, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (September 1984), p. 273.
[5] Marlène Laruelle and Ellen Rivera, "Imagined Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe: The Concept of Intermarium", IERES Occasional Papers, The George Washington University, March 2019: https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/laruelle-rivera-ieres_papers_march_2019_1.pdf
[6] Per Anders Rudling, "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in Manufacture of Historical Myth", The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2107 (2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164
[7] Richard L. Rashke, Useful Enemies: America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, New York: Delphinium Books, 2015.
[8] Marlène Laruelle and Ellen Rivera, "Imagined Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe: The Concept of Intermarium", IERES Occasional Papers, The George Washington University, March 2019.
[9] Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, 1996, p.93
[10] Robert Gates, quoted in Casey Michel, "Decolonize Russia", The Atlantic, 27 May 2022.
[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, "A Geostrategy for Eurasia", Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997.
[12] https://www.freenationsrf.org/?3b613aa4_page=2
[13] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration/
[14] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 150.
[15] Jean-Christophe Emmenegger, "L'impérialisme ukrainien, ça existe", Bon Pour La Tête, 1er July 2022. Url: https://bonpourlatete.com/analyse/l-imperialisme-ukrainien-ca-existe
[1] https://neweasterneurope.eu/2014/03/03/why-ukraine-matters-to-georgia/
[2] Paul Globe, 2013: http://www.justicefornorthcaucasus.com/jfnc_message_boards/analysis_opinion.php?entry_id=1387308920