The Clash of Internationalisms: Prometheism, National Communism, and the Fate of the Soviet Borderlands, 1889-1939

Abstract

This dissertation charts an intellectual genealogy of internationalist visions of the reorganization of the imperial Russian space that were frustrated and foreclosed by the emergence of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1922, surviving and continuing to develop in exile communities around the world as well as at the margins of the ethnofederal system assembled by the Bolsheviks. One thread of the dissertation follows the ethnically and ideologically sundry cast of internationally minded national activists from the late imperial Russian borderlands who collaboratively attempted to create a reformed, decentralized multinational state incorporating structures of autonomy and federation following the February Revolution of 1917, turning to secession and fleeing into exile during the civil war years. The dissertation argues that these borderland activists became disillusioned with the failure of their ambitious reformist visions to cohere yet did not abandon their internationalist pursuits, which endured in emigration through the Eurasian network of the Promethean movement, an anti-Soviet organization assembled and sponsored by the Polish military intelligence staff between the mid-1920s and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The dissertation demonstrates that the failure of constitutional, decentralized alternatives to the Soviet Union to emerge from the generalized imperial crisis of 1917 furnished the impetus for a previously unthinkable alliance between the Promethean exiles, who had favored Russia’s renovation up through the October Revolution, and their Polish patrons, who had advocated the dismemberment of the Romanov realm along national lines since the 1890s. Within the Promethean movement, the exiles, based primarily in Paris, strove to devise frameworks for a future post-Soviet order among borderland nation-states, emphasizing the compatibility of their projects, which included federations and confederations, with the liberal internationalism of the League of Nations. Prometheism’s leading Poles, meanwhile, viewed the movement primarily as a means by which to gather friendly elites from the borderlands in the event of a Soviet collapse, which they, from their flagship institutions in Warsaw, sought to accelerate by weaponizing nationalism against the Bolsheviks. The second major thread of this dissertation covers prominent Tatar and Ukrainian national communists from the borderlands who challenged the limits of national autonomy within the Soviet Union during the 1920s. These challenges, the dissertation argues, arose not merely in response to the constraints of the federal system formalized in 1922 but, more profoundly, stemmed from the deeper disillusionment of these national communists with the failure of their expectations of a decentralized, global community of socialist nations to materialize following the October Revolution and the subsequent unrest that shook Eurasia. These dissenting national communists, moreover, creatively appropriated the Leninist principle of the “right of nations to self-determination, up to and including secession,” imagining an order among liberated nations that would individually enjoy far greater independence in their economic, political, and military affairs than what Lenin had intended and the Soviet Union ultimately allowed. The dissertation contends in a broader and more comparative sense that the cases of the Prometheans and the national communists, two cohorts of internationally minded national activists from the borderlands, demonstrate the intellectually generative function of periods of imperial crisis and failures of imperial reform in providing the momentum for searches for alternative internationalisms in different places, within different institutional structures, and with different partners. The dissertation thus illustrates that the collapse of ambitions hopes for the radical reorganization of empire, in the Russian and Soviet situations, did not lead to an insular embrace of the nation-state but instead reinvigorated, and reconfigured, the transnational pursuit of alternatives to the allegedly neo-imperial Bolshevik model of ethnic federalism in which nationalism and internationalism were imagined as mutually constitutive.