The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

116 Ë Renewal

in Kobe, Japan, and based in Istanbul, was hired out to other businesses, the Nitta

company often failed to pay its debts on time and had also had some trouble in the

Black Sea regions. Ocially this led to its detention in Sukhumi, although the boat

and its crew were released in the end. What exactly the commercial boat was doing in

this region is not clear. Moscow certainly suspected more than commercial interests

in the operation of a Japanese boat in the Black Sea.³⁷In Turkey, with which Tokyo

opened ocial diplomatic relations in 1924, the rst Japanese ambassador, Sadazuchi

Uchida, who had been stationed in Turkey since 1920, maintained close relations with

the envoy of the Paris-based Georgian Social Democratic Government in Turkey Kon-

stantin Gvardzhaladze. Japan appears to have maintained contact with other émigré

Caucasian groups as well throughout the 1920s.³⁸From Istanbul, Odesa (after 1925),

and elsewhere, Japan followed Caucasian aairs, both political and economic; for ex-

ample, Tokyo was aware of the 1924 rebellions in Georgia. According to Tokyo, even

part of the Red Army (i.e., Georgian units in the Red Army) joined the Georgian rebels.³⁹

At the time, Poland was far more committed to the Caucasus than was Japan, for

the obvious reason that the Caucasus was much closer to Poland than to Japan. In-

deed, Poland maintained a consulate in Tiis until 1937. After Józef Piłsudski, a for-

mer leader of the Polish Socialist Party, took power through a coup, Warsaw made

renewed eorts to strengthen ties with the Caucasian groups, with clear preference

for Georgian Social Democrats and Musavats over Georgian National Democrats and

other rightists. In the summer of 1926, Warsaw helped found the Committee for the In-

dependence of the Caucasus in Istanbul, its aim being to “prepare the peoples of the

Caucasus for the battle of restoring the independence of their republics and for their

unication on a federalist base.” The committee was represented by three presidents,

Ramishvili (for Georgia), Mammad Amin Rasulzade (a Musavat, for Azerbaijan), and

Said Shamil (for the Northern Caucasus).⁴⁰

This was the beginning of the movement known as Prometheanism, which Timo-

thy Snyder has called an “anticommunist international, designed to destroy the Soviet

Union and to create independent states from its republics.” Accordingly, it “brought

together grand strategists of Warsaw and exiled patriots [Ukrainians, Georgians, Az-

eris, and others] whose attempts to found independent states had been thwarted

37 See JACAR, reference code: B11092836400.
38 This is based on documents and photographs of the residence of the exiled Georgian Social Demo-
cratic government in Leuville-sur-Orge (France).
39 See JACAR, reference codes: B03051163700 and A03023720600.
40 G. Targalski, “Les plans polonais concernant l’éclatement de l’URSS, le mouvement ‘Prométhée’
et le Caucase.”Bulletin de l’Observatoire de l’Asie centrale et du Caucase1997, no. 3, 11, and Mamoulia,
ed.,Kavkazskaia Konfederatsiia, 11-14, 67-68. On Rasulzade, see Aidyn Balaev,Mamed Emin Rasulzade.
Na chuzhikh beregakh 1922–1943(Moscow: Maska, 2013).