120 Ë Renewal
While striving to divide émigré communities, Moscow also applied considerable
pressure to Turkey to expel their leaders and activists. Thus in 1928, Simon Mdi-
vani, the Georgian government’s representative in Turkey, and his close collaborators
(some of whom tried to penetrate the Soviet-Turkish borders for clandestine work in
the Soviet Caucasus) were expelled from Turkey.⁵⁰In 1929 the ats of both Shamil and
Rasulzade were searched by the Turkish police and many documents con scated.
Soon the Committee for the Independence of the Caucasus in Istanbul disintegrated
after the Georgians withdrew because Turkish authorities had paralyzed their activ-
ity.⁵¹Even before then, Bammat, Chermoev, Vachnadze, Kantemir, Sultanov, and other
rightists had left the committee and sought to create a movement distinct from the
Promethean group. Some rightist Georgians, such as Mikheil Kedia came under the in-
uence of Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini. The legendary and charismatic gure
of the Georgian émigré Leo Kereselidze supported the patriotic youth group Thethri
Giorgi, sympathetic toward Italian fascism. In 1929 Bammat, who had distanced him-
self from the Promethean movement soon after its inception, and other confederalists
began publishing in Paris a Russian-language journal,Nezavisimyi Kavkaz(the same
title originally planned in 1926 for the organ of the Committee for the Independence of
the Caucasus, which, however, adoptedProméthéein the end). They planned to issue
the journal in French as well, but the journal ceased existence in 1930 after only three
issues owing to nancial di culties. Nonetheless in that same year the Committee
for the Independence of the Caucasus reconstituted itself in Warsaw, with just a small
o ce left in Istanbul.⁵²
The reinforcement of the Promethean movement and the spread of the commit-
tee’s lea ets smuggled into the Caucasus alarmed the Kremlin because of the region’s
deep destabilization by Stalin’s forced collectivization. The lea ets called on Cau-
casians to unite their forces in a common struggle against Red imperialism. Moscow’s
stance toward the Caucasian émigré activists now hardened, even to the point of ter-
rorism. For example, Noe Ramishvili, one of the Georgian Social Democratic leaders
and the main champion for reconstituting the Committee for the Independence of the
Caucasus, was assassinated by Parmeni Chanukvadze, an OGPU agent in Paris, in
1930.⁵³
50 Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 123–24. Earlier the Soviet government
had hatched a plan to assassinate Mdivani but did not carry it out (p. 104). The “North Caucasian
publications in exile, without making any dierence among them, were forbidden to enter Turkey by
government decrees.” See Çelikpala, “The North Caucasian Émigrés between the World Wars.” 295.
51 Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 125–26.
52 Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 111–13, 128–29.
53 For the OGPU involvement, see K. Bylinin, A.A. Zdanovich, and V.I. Korotaev, “Organizatsiia ‘Prom-
etei’ i ‘prometeiskoe’ dvizhenie v planakh pol’skoi razvedki po razvalu Rossii/SSSR,” inTrudy Ob-
shchsetva izucheniia istorii otechestvennykh spetssluzhbv. 3 (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2007), 392. On
Chanukvadze, see Józef Piłsudski Institute of America Archive, New York, Papers of Edmund Cha-
raszkiewicz, sygnatura 3-1, fol. 25.