Promethean Ideas Can Prevent Reemergence of Muscovite Imperialism, Mamulia Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 10 – The ideas of the pre-World War II Promethean movement which called for the independence of the borderlands of the Soviet Union and a radical shift in power from Moscow to the regions are echoing again as the world considers how best to prevent a post-Putin Russian state returning to imperialism, Georgy Mamulia says. 

            The Georgian diplomat says that the failure of the disintegration of the USSR to eliminate Russian imperialism and aggressiveness is leading ever more scholars and officials to take seriously the arguments that the Promethean movement put forward almost a century ago (kavkazr.com/a/eho-prometeevskogo-dvizheniya-v-sovremennoy-evrompe/32263299.html).

            Mamulia says that not only were the Promethean ideas “correct and rational” in their time, but that they remain important now and in the future. “If we want to democratize that territory which is called the former Russian Empire, the USSR or the Russian Federation, then we must make possible the independence of the regions.”

            “As soon as we achieve this, this will become a ay out for the Russian people as well,” he continues. “Power must be in the regions” as “it is important to deprive the center of the chance to return to totalitarianism” because with every recentralization will come “authoritarianism and despotism.”

            He points out that history  would have been very different if this had happened earlier.  “I remember when Putin came to power and began the Second Chechen War. If representatives of the Caucasian and Muslim republics of Russia then had spoken with one voice and said: ‘Either you stop this war or we will declare our independence,’ Putin might have been stopped.”

            But for that to have happened, Mamulia continues, would have required both courage and the willingness to cooperate with one another. The leaders in the Caucasus might have had both had they been in the possession of Promethean ideas. But the future can be different if they integrate those ideas into their thinking and also into the thinking of Western leaders.

            For background on Prometheanism and its links with the broader ideas of the Intermarium, see magisterial study by Marek Chodakiewicz, Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas (Transaction Publishers, 2012).)