page_title: Prometheism
section_title: Cossack affairs
hierarchical_section_title: Prometheism / Fourth period (1926–32) / Cossack affairs
caption_attribution_description: Colonel Tadeusz Schaetzel , Polish diplomat and officer of Polish Secret Services before WW II
context_page_description: Prometheism or Prometheanism was a political project initiated by Józef Piłsudski, statesman of the Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1935. Its aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor states, including the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union.
  Between the World Wars, Prometheism and Piłsudski's other concept, of an "Intermarium federation", constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and for some of his political heirs.
context_section_description: A successful campaign was waged that helped stimulate a separatist movement among many Cossack émigré groups. This injected a substantial political diversion into White Russian émigré ranks.
  This Prometheist period also witnessed a development that was independent of the movement, but which would ultimately play a role in regard to it. There was heightened diversionary activity in Poland by the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), supported by both Germany and Czechoslovakia and even by Lithuania. There were many acts of expropriation and sabotage against the Polish community and government by members of OUN combat units in southeastern Poland. This in turn led to "pacification" operations by the Polish authorities against the Polish-Ukrainian community.
  The pacifications, Charaszkiewicz emphasizes, were never discussed in advance with Polish Promethean officials. Those at the Foreign Ministry and at the General Staff were not pleased with these operations, which made Promethean activities that much more difficult.
  A greater shock to the Prometheists, Polish and Ukrainian, however, was the death of Tadeusz Hołówko, murdered by OUN members on August 29, 1931, at Truskawiec.
  Charaszkiewicz is far from blaming all of Poland's difficulties with her minorities, especially the Ukrainians (who in most of southeastern interwar Poland were the majority), on external, especially German, influences. He argues that Poland had "no planned, consistent and constructive internal policy" with regard to her minorities. This lack could not bode well for the Promethean effort, when every fifth Polish citizen (that is, six million people) were Ukrainian.
  Moreover, the Soviet Union sought to an equal degree to exploit Poland's internal disarray — indeed, in 1921–31, to a greater degree than the Germans. Soviet communist propaganda in Poland's Eastern Borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie), combined with a pro-Ukrainian Soviet attitude toward Soviet Ukraine, created strong pro-Soviet sentiment among Polish Ukrainians. This sentiment would persist until the subsequent mass Soviet resettlements, arrests, executions and famines of 1933–38.
  The period 1926–32 was marked by the participation of a large number of Poles in the Promethean endeavor:
  at the Foreign Ministry: Tadeusz Hołówko, Tadeusz Schaetzel, Stanisław Hempel, Adam Tarnowski, Mirosław Arciszewski, Roman Knoll, Juliusz Łukasiewicz, Marian Szumlakowski, Stanisław Zaċwilichowski, Jan Gawroński, Zygmunt Mostowski, Władysław Zaleski, Kazimierz Marian Wyszyński, Karol Dubicz-Penther, Władysław Pelc, Ksawery Zalewski, Władysław Wolski, Piotr Kurnicki, Wacław Knoll;
  at the General Staff: Brig. Gen. Julian Stachiewicz, Col. Tadeusz Schaetzel, Col. Tadeusz Pełczyński, Col. Józef Englicht, Maj. Edmund Charaszkiewicz, Maj. Włodzimierz Dąbrowski, Maj. Stanisław Gliński, Maj. Jerzy Krzymowski, Maj. Karol Krzewski-Lilienfeld, Capt. Stefan Nowaczek, Capt. Jan Rybczyński, Lt. Jan Helcman, Józef Skarżyński, Aleksander Eugeniusz Piwnicki, Stefan Sipa, Lt. Antoni Zaręba;
  at the Ministry of Internal Affairs: Henryk Suchanek-Suchecki, Stanisław Łaniecki, Emil Miśkiewicz;
  at the Ministry of Education: Aleksander Kawałkowski, Franciszek Salezy Potocki, Zdzisław Meyer, Juliusz Znaniecki, Adam Miłobędzki;
  in the socio-political sphere: Senator Stanisław Siedlecki (president of the Eastern Institute), Wacław Sieroszewski, Stanisław Trzeciak, Antoni Wincenty Kwiatkowski, Antoni Około-Kułak, Prof. Olgierd Górka (general secretary and director of the Eastern Institute), Stanisław Korwin-Pawłowski (general secretary of the Eastern Institute), Bolesław Bielawski, Stanisław Józef Paprocki (director of the Institute for Study of National Minority Affairs), Leon Wasilewski, Włodzimierz Bączkowski, Feliks Ibiański-Zahora, Wacław Wincenty Łypacewicz, Władysław Wielhorski (director of the Institute for Study of Eastern Europe, in Vilnius), Marian Świechowski, Prof. Jan Kucharzewski, Prof. Marceli Handelsman, Prof. Stanisław Poniatowski, Prof. Ludwik Kolankowski, Prof. Oskar Halecki, Prof. Stanisław Franciszek Zajączkowski,
caption: Tadeusz Schaetzel
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