Prometheism, post-Russia, and the future of policy in Eurasia

The year 2026 marks the centennial anniversary of the 1926 May Coup in Poland, when Marshal Józef Piłsudski returned to power in a political environment marked by partisan infighting and conflicting conceptions of the newly independent country’s identity and direction. The subsequent decade would be known as the “Sanatian” period in the interwar Second Polish Republic. Piłsudski proposed two clear visions for the future during this time. The first was that of “Intermarium”, or a federation of nations between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas that would stand as a bulwark against the expansive ambitions of the Soviet Union. The second was that of “Prometheism”, the strategy for achieving an Intermarium. Named after the mythological figure of Prometheus, who defied Zeus by stealing fire for the enlightenment of humankind, the policy aimed to undermine the Soviet Union by promoting national awakenings and secessionist movements throughout the former Russian Empire.

Of course, Piłsudski’s vision was itself undermined by Poland’s partition between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, as well as its subsequent re-emergence as an Eastern Bloc satellite state. While it may seem that the Promethean project was destined to remain a historical hypothesis of a bygone era, Russia’s revisionist foreign policy today alarmingly recalls the geopolitical realities of the previous century and presents an opportunity for a Promethean revival in western academic and foreign policy circles.

In May 2022, just months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum convened for the first time in the Polish capital of Warsaw. Composed of political activists and dissidents representing Russia’s numerous ethnic and national communities, the forum promotes the decolonization of the Russian Federation’s non-Russian regions through the pursuit of independence for the country’s non-Russian peoples. As its goal, the forum proposes to counter Russian imperialism by creating an “Intermarium” alliance of free and democratic nations between the Arctic and Baltic Seas in the north, the Adriatic and Aegean Seas in the south, and the Black and Caspian Seas in the east. Although the proposal has garnered interest among certain academics and policymakers in Central and Eastern Europe, the forum’s calls for international support have largely fallen on deaf ears in Western Europe and the United States. This outreach has even evoked criticism that attempts to decolonize Russia would only lead to the spread of conflict and violence throughout Eurasia.

Promethean movements during the Cold War

Throughout the Cold War, the US supported Promethean movements in Eurasia. During the Second World War, the Promethean project was adopted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who founded the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) in 1943. This group was composed of representatives from Baltic, Balkan, Eastern European, Caucasian, and Central Asian nations either already occupied by the Soviet Union or threatened by the prospect of post-war Soviet expansion. The organization was involved in the armed resistance of the OUN’s military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

During the Cold War, the ABN continued as a clandestine organization, coordinating the activities of anti-communist national movements across the Soviet periphery as well as in the heart of Russia itself. Meanwhile in Paris, the Polish emigrant activist Jerzy Giedroyc published the literary and political magazine Kultura, which was influential in promoting Promethean ideas among Eastern Bloc dissidents in search of a strategy for the liberation of their respective nations from Soviet imperialism. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born national security advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, likewise promoted a Promethean strategy of supporting national movements in Eurasia in pursuit of a common geopolitical objective: the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, it did so along ethnic and national lines. As anticipated by Piłsudski decades earlier, the Soviet Union’s fictitious ideology of proletarian internationalism was ultimately exposed as just another historical manifestation of Russian imperialism. Within a matter of months, the former Soviet Union was succeeded by a multinational Russian Federation surrounded by 14 newly independent nation-states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. With a few isolated exceptions like the civil war in Tajikistan and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the secessionist transitions were overwhelmingly peaceful processes. Where other instances of violence occurred, they did so because of Russian meddling and aggression – as in the cases of Moldova’s region of Transnistria and the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – or Russia’s forceful repression of national movements like those in Chechnya and Dagestan.

Although Russia has tried to preserve its hegemony in the region through the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States and other international organizations in Eurasia, these initiatives have largely lost their legitimacy as many of the post-Soviet populations realized that national consolidation and improved standards of living could be realized more effectively by turning towards Europe and the United States rather than to Russia.

Russian appropriation of the Promethean approach

In the early days of the post-Cold War period, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history”, an optimistic metaphor for the coming peace in the emerging neoliberal international order. This thesis, however, was countered by Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, which predicted that the coming world order would be marked not by the ideological conflicts of the 20th century but by a new era of conflicts over culture and collective identity. Since his ascent to power at the dawn of the 21st century, it appears that Vladimir Putin has taken Huntington’s words to heart, making it a cornerstone of Russia’s foreign policy to exploit ethnic and national divisions wherever they may be to Russia’s strategic advantage.

Today, Russia’s covert soft power strategies are being employed alongside its overt hard power tactics not only in Ukraine but throughout the Eurasian continent and beyond. By pairing its traditional geopolitical militarism with “demopolitical” operations that undermine the cultural and ideational fabric of foreign populations, Russia is effectively spreading its influence further, faster, and more affordably than ever before. However, unlike Piłsudski’s Prometheism, which was intended to free captive nations from Soviet imperialism, Putin’s demopolitics are a cynical perversion of the Promethean approach for the sole purpose of expanding Russia’s imperial interests.

Under the Putin regime, Russia has utilized demography as a weapon in its so-called “near abroad”, using it as a pretence for its 2008 war in Georgia to support pro-Russian separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as its 2014 aggression against Ukraine to annex Crimea and support pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. More alarmingly for western observers, however, Russia has pursued a similar, albeit more subtle, strategy outside its immediate sphere of influence. Carefully attuned to the culture wars that have divided western societies in recent years, Russian propaganda and disinformation have undermined the stability of the European Union by promoting the illiberal narratives of far-right and Eurosceptic parties like Alternative for Germany or France’s National Rally. Perhaps even more consequentially, Russia has supported secessionist movements in member states of the European Union. This was notable in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia during the controversial push for an unconstitutional independence referendum in 2017. Extending its influence even to the United States, Russian agents took advantage of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to deepen social divisions along racial and ethnic lines.  

For a Promethean western policy

The persistence and pervasiveness of Russia’s demopolitical actions against western societies shows the profound understanding that Russian foreign policy experts have of local, regional, and national identities. Meanwhile, their western counterparts, who know much less about the cultures, values, and identities of Russia’s localities and regions, are at an alarming disadvantage. If knowledge is power, as the timeless wisdom informs us it is, then western academics and policymakers concerned with this demopolitical dilemma find themselves in a power deficit compared with their Russian adversaries.

To bridge this gap, western universities and research institutions should prioritize area specialists from disciplines as diverse as philology, history, and political science who study not only Slavic Russia – the traditional focus of western “Sovietologists” or “Kremlinologists” – but also the numerous non-Russian ethnic groups whose national identities have been historically suppressed and subject to policies of Russification. If the wave of national secessions that ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union caught western Sovietologists by surprise, then contemporary scholars of the region should be motivated to pose and pursue the following research question: under what conditions could a new wave of national awakenings in Russia occur? Given the relevance of this research agenda for questions of international security, public grants should be made available to promote such scholarship in Europe and the US.

In the sphere of foreign policy, western diplomats and intelligence personnel should revive the Promethean proposal to provide both moral and material support for the growing Russian decolonization movement. Just as publications like Kultura and broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe challenged the Soviet Union’s monopoly on information and ideas in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, similar initiatives should be established to give dissidents and activists from Russia’s captive regions a platform for organizing and communicating with communities that currently live under Moscow’s strict media censorship.

In addition to the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum that was founded in Poland in 2022, a similar organization of indigenous and ethnic minority groups known as the Free Nations League was established in Estonia that same year. In Ukraine, the Anti-Imperial Block of Nations has succeeded the original ABN, while the Ukrainian military has created several units of volunteers from Russia’s colonized and captive regions: the Bashkort Company and the Siberian Battalion, as well as a new initiative called Nomad that includes Buryats, Kalmyks, Tatars, Yakuts, and other oppressed minority groups from the Russian Federation.

In 2025, the Free Nations of Post-Russia held its annual forum in Washington DC, where it issued the “Washington Declaration” to call for western support for its anti-colonial and pro-democratic project. If the US and other western powers are serious about hitting Putin and the current Russian political establishment where it hurts, then they should answer this call. The world became a more peaceful and prosperous place through the decolonization of the Soviet Union. So too could it become all the more peaceful and prosperous through the decolonization of the Russian Federation.

Kacper Grass is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching associate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on the political processes of ethnic and national identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe.