7 War and Dénouement
The events leading up to the beginning of World War II in Europe are well known,
and yet much remains to be uncovered and analyzed. Japan’s clandestine activity in
Europe and the Caucasus is one example. Another is the conduct of the Soviet intelli-
gence and counterintelligence network. These and other subjects remain to be eluci-
dated precisely because the materials on them were either destroyed or are still held
in con dence from researchers. Nevertheless, certain outlines of the hidden world of
intelligence do emerge from the sources available to us. War had heightened expecta-
tions for the liberation of the Caucasus from Soviet domination. Ultimately, however,
the vicissitudes of the times shattered those dreams. Signi cantly, the war also ended
Japan’s long relationship with Caucasian émigré leaders.7.1 The Realignment of Forces
The rise of rightist groups (particularly the Caucasus group) caused a serious cri-
sis among other émigré Caucasian political groups. Most importantly, the Polish-
sponsored Promethean movement, based on a liberal-democratic notion of national
liberation to which the Georgian Social Democrats, among others, subscribed, found
itself in a serious crisis in face of the ascendant rightists. In 1937, the Caucasus group,
nancially supported by Japan (and Germany), became the envy of other groups. As
discussed in chapter 6, the group did not subscribe to the racist ideology of Nazism
and was not dependent on it, nor did it subscribe to narrowly nationalistic ideolo-
gies (such as Georgian, Azerbaijani, or Northern Caucasian nationalism). Instead it
advocated the common regional and federalist interests of the Caucasus. It is not
clear whether the Promethean movement understood this important yet subtle point.
Bammat himself had long criticized the Promethean movement, both in his writings
directly to its Polish sponsor and in his own journal, for relying on, among others,
the Georgian Social Democrats, whom he characterized, somewhat unfairly, as “un-
patriotic” and “pro-Russian.”¹By 1937, however, the Poles had come to recognize the
advantages of the Caucasus group and the disadvantages of the Promethean move-
ment. They recommended that émigré youth be detached from the Bammat group
to make them “spiritually independent of Nazism and fascism” and to direct them
toward a nationalism in the style of Józef Piłsudski (by which was meant Piłsudski’s
“realist” diplomacy and federalism).²Clearly, however, the Promethean movement1 See Sergiusz Mikulicz,Prometeizm w polityce II Rzeczypospolitej(Warsaw, Książka i Wiedza, 1971),
180–83 and Andrzej Grzywacz and Grzegorz Mazur, “Ruch Prometejski w Polsce.”Zeszyty historyczne,
v. 110 (1994), 83.
2 Cited in Lev Sotskov,Neizvestnyi separatizm na sluzhbe SD i Abvera. Iz sekretnykh dos’e razvedki
(Moscow: RIPOL KLASSIK, 2003), 313–14.©2016 Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.