118 Ë Renewal
Fig. 5.2.Georgian o cers in the Polish Army in the 1920s, Warsaw.
ant neighbor.⁴⁶Japan was thus familiar, to an extent, with the Promethean movement.
As will be discussed, Japan sought to create a competing movement while also seeking
to bene t from the Promethean movement by working with Poland.
At the time, Germany’s Weimar Republic also took note of the Caucasian émigrés.
The republic maintained at least super cially amicable relations with the Soviet Union
(which was not a party to the Versailles Treaty) by signing the Rapallo Treaty in 1922
(implicitly directed against Poland). As is well known, the two countries even engaged
in secret military cooperation in the 1920s. The German establishment, however, was
not united in its policy toward the Soviet Union, and in 1925 Germany achieved a rap-
prochement with Western powers (Britain and France in particular) by signing the
Locarno Treaty.
Moreover, those Germans disposed in favor of European democracies carried out
political plans against the Soviet Union using anti-Soviet émigré forces, including
those from the Caucasus.
The best-known case is that of the “counterfeit chervonets” (the Soviet currency
of the time), an operation to unsettle the Soviet economy by massively infusing it
with counterfeit money. This was to be followed by military operations in the Soviet-
46 See Hiroaki Kuromiya and Andrzej Pepłoński,Między Warszawą a Tokio: Polsko-Japońska współ-
praca wywiadowcza 1904–1944(Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2009).