by Charles King
By the mid-1920 s, this complicated milieu had become rather clearer, often with tragic results. Ukraine, with Crimea, was absorbed into the new Soviet state, after the desperate flight of White Russian soldiers and ordinary civilians from Novorossiisk, Odessa, and other ports aboard British and American warships. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were conquered by the Bolshevik army, their national governments exiled and their briefly independent countries erased from history. Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey fared rather better, but even in these new states, Soviet agents were active in the capitals and the borderlands, attempting to foment revolution or to dislodge peripheral regions under the guise of liberation for national minorities.
In this environment, several of the leading political figures in each of the anti-Bolshevik states banded together to form a movement which represented the first modern attempt to think about the Black Sea as a distinct political unit. Their aim was to create a community of small states across the Near East, a community that would ensure stable borders and real independence against any attempt to exert complete control on or around the sea.
The Promethean project—or Prométhée, as it was known, after the journal around which it centered—has largely been forgotten by historians, but in its time, the 1920 s and 1930 s, it was a carefully crafted plan for creating an alliance of Black Sea states. Consisting originally of a group of émigrés from the former Russian empire, settled in Paris, the Prometheans were dedicated not only to the liberation of the captive peoples of the Soviet Union, but also to their cooperation against the Soviets as a regional hegemon. There was no shortage of such groups in the interwar years, of course; politicians dissatisfied by the postwar peace treaties, romantic nationalists, and many others worked either to break apart the countries that had been constructed at Versailles or to resurrect the lost empires on whose rubble they had been built. But the uniqueness of the Promethean project lay in the array of countries and peoples among whom it originated, and their conception of the importance of the sea in the international relations of the wider southeast Europe.
Many people would later lay claim to the Promethean idea, in particular Polish patriots who saw it as an emanation of the anti-Soviet foreign policy conducted by the interwar Polish leader, Józef Piłsudski. The Polish government clearly played a major role, contributing money to propaganda campaigns and recruiting non-Russian émigrés from the Soviet Union into the Polish military and intelligence services.51 The expectation among Poles was that an alliance of small states on the Soviet periphery would hem in Russian expansionism and, in the end, strengthen Poland’s own defenses against its eastern neighbor. But the Prometheans were an eclectic group. They included the most illustrious names in anti-Bolshevik circles from Ukraine, the Caucasus, and beyond, now in exile in western Europe or Turkey, as well as their supporters in the Balkans and elsewhere: Mehmet Emin Resulzade and Noe Zhordania, the former premiers of the briefly independent Azerbaijan and Georgia; Cafer Seydahmet, foreign minister of the fleeting Republic of Crimea; Ayaz Ishaki, one of the leaders of the Tatars of the Volga region, who had also proclaimed independence when the Russian empire collapsed; as well as a bevy of leading west European politicians, professors, and writers on east European affairs. All were united in their goal of seeing the liberation of the small nations of eastern Europe and their defense against the revisionism of both Germans and Russians.52
The first issue of Prométhée appeared in Paris in November 1926, edited by the Georgian expatriate Georges Gvazawa and subtitled “the organ for the national defense of the peoples of the Caucasus and Ukraine.” “We are animated,” wrote Gvazawa in the first issue, “by the sole desire to serve peace and international justice” and to strengthen the Caucasus and Ukraine as “avant-postes” against the Bolshevik conquest of the rest of the Near East.53 By the late 1930 s, Prométhée had broadened its mandate to include not only the Caucasus and Ukraine, but all the subjugated peoples of the Soviet Union.54 Through their journal, the Prometheans lobbied foreign governments and attempted to expose the injustice of the absorption of Ukraine and the Caucasus states into the new Soviet Union. The editors sponsored lectures and symposia, initiated letter-writing campaigns to heads of state, held artistic festivals centered around the cultures of the “captive peoples,” and organized other public events to highlight their cause. They were, somewhat before their time, a think-tank of former politicians and diplomats, biding their time before an eventual return to office in countries that now no longer appeared on any map.
The Black Sea lay at the center of the Prometheans’ attention. From the earliest issues of Prométhée, contributing writers had argued that free commerce on the sea—one of the mainstays of European policy since the 1770 s—would be impossible without an equal European commitment to free states around it.55 That goal, they argued, would only be reached with the break-up of the Soviet state and the reemergence of the small republics that had burst into being with the collapse of the Russian empire. By the 1930 s, some Prometheans had even begun to call for the creation of a political and economic alliance of Black Sea states, including Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as a future independent Ukraine and Georgia. For one Ukrainian contributor to the journal, the strategic value of such an alliance was clear: “With its left wing touching on Poland, passing by the friendly lands of the Cossacks of the Don, Kuban, and Urals, and with its right wing reaching out to the oppressed peoples of Asia, Turkestan, and other areas, this bloc of states will stop once and for all the imperialist tendencies of Russia, whether of the Red or White variety….”56 The Black Sea question, for the Prometheans, was the essence of the Eastern Question as a whole.
The Promethean project ultimately failed, of course, at least for the better part of the twentieth century. The Caucasus republics remained firmly inside the Soviet Union. Romania’s borders were changed by force, to the advantage of the Soviets, during the Second World War. After the war, Turkey became a member of NATO and lost its links with the states of the Balkans, now communist. Yet the Promethean idea remained alive within émigré communities in London, Paris, and elsewhere. In 1949 former Promethean activists living in western Europe organized a conference in Munich with the goal of reigniting the movement. At the conference, members resolved to restart their activities and to move the headquarters to the United States, now the leader of the global struggle against the Soviet Union. The leadership was given to Roman Smal-Stocky, a history professor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.57 In 1951 Edmund Charaszkiewicz, an old Polish Promethean, sent out a general letter to the former leaders, urging them to revive the organization and again take up the banner of liberating the sea and its coasts from the communists. But as he complained nearly twenty years later, “life and new circumstances” conspired to hinder the initiative.58 After that, the idea of a Black Sea community would become little more than a quixotic project of émigré cold warriors—but one that would receive a new lease on life once the cold war came to an end.
Development and Decline
The new circumstances that frustrated Charaszkiewicz and his associates were the changed strategic relationships around the sea created by the Second World War. In June 1941 Romania joined Nazi Germany in the attack on the Soviet Union. The previous summer, Stalin had ordered the seizure of the eastern Romanian province of Bessarabia, an event that automatically gave the Romanian government and populace a reason for welcoming the Nazi invasion—and an event that also accelerated the emergence of Romania’s homegrown fascist government. Bulgaria’s relations with Germany had long been cordial. The country fought with the Central Powers in the First World War and shared in the defeat as a result; the promise of regaining lost lands, perhaps even of creating the greater Bulgaria that had been promised in the San Stefano treaty many decades earlier, proved too powerful to resist. In the early stages of the war, Bulgaria was even able to regain the territory of southern Dobrudja at the expense of its neighbor, and now ally, Romania. Turkey remained formally neutral for al
most the entire war, joining on the Allied side in the final days and thereby ensuring its status as a victor power.
As during the First World War, naval operations on the Black Sea were only a complement to the far more important land operations on the eastern front, a rapid push to the east by German, Romanian, and other Axis forces that would eventually be reversed at Stalingrad. Rather early in the war, the Soviet Union lost the use of the major ports to the German army and Axis navies. Odessa, Novorossiisk, Nikolaev, and Sevastopol fell in succession, the last one leveled by bombardment, as it had been almost a century before, and finally succumbing after a siege that lasted the better part of a year. But from the lesser ports such as Poti and Batumi, the Soviet navy was able to run interference operations on the high sea. German ships spent much of the war immobilized in the Romanian and Bulgarian ports, fearful of venturing out because of Soviet destroyers and British vessels on patrol. Soviet naval aviators also launched repeated raids on Constanţa, Novorossiisk, Galaţi, and other cities held by the Germans and their allies. After Stalingrad, the ports were quickly retaken by the revived Soviet army. German and Romanian forces were driven from Novorossiisk in September 1943; Nikolaev fell the following March and Odessa in April. It was only a matter of time before the Soviet fleet was able to reestablish supremacy and secure one port after another along the western and eastern coasts.
During the war, policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide were energetically pursued by both the Axis and the Soviets. While German and Romanian forces occupied the northwest littoral, including the city of Odessa, hundreds of thousands of Jews were removed from Romania, parts of occupied Ukraine, and Odessa to the region east of the Dnestr river, the notorious killing fields of Transnistria. Some Jews managed to escape by chartering ships from the Black Sea ports and heading for Palestine. Even then, however, the restrictive immigration policies of the British mandate government often kept them out. On the water ships packed with refugees had to steer clear of both Allied and Axis war vessels, which would sometimes target the civilian ships as belligerents. The Soviet navy eventually adopted a policy of firing on even neutral ships, as a way of cutting off supplies to Axis forces. In the most infamous incident, the passenger ship Struma, carrying nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Constanţa en route to Palestine, was sunk by a Soviet submarine off the entrance to the Bosphorus in the winter of 1942. Turkish fishermen pulled only a single survivor from the icy water.59
Other groups suffered from the same policy of deportation experienced on the southern coast decades earlier. Toward the end of the war, the Crimean Tatars were accused by the Soviet government of supporting the Nazi invasion force. (Some Tatar elites had no doubt welcomed German troops as liberators, perhaps as the first step toward realizing the Promethean goal of a Crimean republic—even though Nazi planners had concocted a project to turn Crimea into the province of “Gothia,” to be colonized by Germans from South Tyrol.) In May 1944, some 189,000 Tatars were loaded onto sealed boxcars and deported to central Asia; perhaps 45 percent of those deported died along the way or shortly after arriving at their destinations in the east. Other groups in Crimea and along the eastern coast—15,000 Greeks, 13,000 Bulgarians, 10,000 Armenians—were also removed by the Soviets as “enemy nations,” now defined solely in terms of the collective guilt as “collaborators” which they were held to bear.60 Earlier in the year, a similar calamity had already been visited upon other punished peoples—over half a million Chechens and Ingush in the northeast Caucasus, Turkic-speakers such as the Balkars, Karachai, and Kumyks of the north Caucasus, ethnic Germans along the Volga river—all of whom were likewise sent to central Asia in inhuman conditions. Many of these groups were officially rehabilitated after the death of Stalin, and some were even allowed to return to their ancestral lands. Large-scale returns of Tatars to Crimea would not begin until the 1990 s, however.
The turmoil of war gave way to an uneasy peace, one that in many ways replicated the strategic contest between the northern and southern coasts that had lasted for more than two centuries. It was perhaps fitting that a body of water that had long been considered vital by Europe’s great powers would host the conference that determined the postwar fate of all of eastern Europe. At the resort of Yalta in February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin made plans for reorganizing the political map of the region, carving out what would soon become spheres of influence for the Soviet Union and the West.
The result around the sea was the integration of politics, culture, and economics from the Balkans to the Caucasus on a scale that had never before been seen. Romania and Bulgaria became “people’s democracies” and were soon linked with the Soviet Union in a defensive military alliance and common economic bloc. Trade, agriculture, and industry were carried on within the confines of state-regulated plans, which were in turn coordinated with the production targets and needs of the Soviet Union. The southern coast remained outside this scheme, of course. Turkey was taken under the defensive umbrella of the West, joining NATO in 1951, and for most of the second half of the twentieth century, the cold war produced a period of peace, of sorts, on the sea. The vanguard of the capitalist West looked out at a horseshoe coastline of the communist East—or, from the Turkish perspective, the communist North. The Soviets repeatedly attempted to revise the terms of the old Montreux convention, with the aim of restricting passage through the Straits only to the ships of littoral states, a change that in practice would have made the sea very nearly a Soviet lake. But throughout the cold war, Turkey and the United States insisted on maintaining the sea’s status as an international waterway open to both commercial and naval vessels, a point underscored by the routine dispatch of U.S. warships through the Straits under the terms of Montreux.61
For all the differences between the two social systems that now encircled the Black Sea—Soviet-style communism and the state-led nationalism of the Turkish Republic—both shared an ideology of revolutionary change that targeted the sea and its coastline. The half century after the end of the Second World War saw the development of the coastal regions at an unprecedented pace. The riches of the sea, particularly its fish stocks, were no longer simply the purview of individual coastal communities, nor were they items to be guarded or taxed by emperors at a distance. They were now the property of four states, each firmly committed to rapid development—three of them driven by the desire to challenge the capitalist model of economic success, the fourth conscious of the economic backwardness that had doomed its imperial predecessor. All were engaged in a contest to catch up with the rest of Europe and break through to modernity, and all would soon suffer the unintended consequences which that contest produced.
Serious environmental change around the Black Sea is not new. The grasslands in the north and west began to disappear in the late eighteenth century, broken by ox-drawn plows. Wooded northern riverbanks were clear-cut at the same time, as were dense forests in the upland Caucasus. The forests of the Balkan foothills disappeared even earlier. Yet, in the latter half of the twentieth century, the combination of mechanized agriculture, industrialization, urban growth, and new energy technologies accelerated change along the coastline. The appearance of tractors, combines, and other agricultural machines made what was left of the steppe into some of the world’s most fertile farmland. The black-earth region had already produced a boom in grain production in the middle of the nineteenth century, a boom fed by the introduction of more efficient tilling techniques, improved wheat varieties, and the expansion of rail transport; but the agricultural revolution of the 1960 s, including the introduction of chemical fertilizers, made the fields of Ukraine and southern Russia the pride of the Soviet Union.
Industrial concerns expanded right to the water’s edge. The foundation for the petroleum extraction and refining industries had already been put in place in the very late nineteenth century, but in Romania and the Soviet Union, these industries grew rapidly after the Second World War. Pipelines carried oil from Baku and other Caspian oilfields
to Novorossiisk; tankers took it through the Bosphorus to the rest of the world. Oil refineries sprouted up along the Romanian coast, with state planners often placing them right next to pristine beaches—the pride of communist industry easily visible from the workers’ resorts that now punctuated the coast.
Changes to the physical environment accompanied industrialization. The Dnepr rapids, a natural obstacle to fishermen and traders for millennia, vanished in 1932. The Dneprostroi hydroelectric power station on the lower river, considered one of the finest industrial achievements of the Stalin era, raised the water level to cover them. Although destroyed by the withdrawing German army during the Second World War, the dam was rebuilt in the late 1940 s; the new facility raised the river level some 40 m and once again buried the famous Dnepr cataracts. Farther to the east, a Volga–Don canal was completed by the Soviets in 1952, the realization of a vision for connecting the Caspian and Black Seas that both an Ottoman sultan and Peter the Great had abandoned as unworkable. What had once required overland portage between the two rivers could now be accomplished on the water. Another canal that linked the Danube to the seacoast—bypassing the delta, which had always been a problem for shipping because of silting and shifting channels—was finished in Romania in 1984. With the opening of the German Main–Danube canal in the early 1990 s, a ship could go all the way from the North Sea to the Caspian—nothing novel, of course, to the Norse traders of the Middle Ages, but now a route that could be completed by large seagoing vessels. All along the coast, new highways and rail links allowed goods and people to be transported as easily by land as by sea, while air travel connected international hubs with one another and provincial cities with national capitals.