Thinking Technocratically

Although Polish politics moved to the right after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, demographic anxieties about Volhynia had already been expressed by academics who supported the Sanacja’s technocratic program in the province. Focusing most particularly on geographical Polesie (which covered the northern part of the province of Volhynia), some scholars fostered the concept of national uncertainty in order to support more aggressive measures of Polonization. By dispensing with the regionalists’ patience for the provincial framework and in line with broader political radicalization across Europe, Polish officials increasingly used scholarly conclusions to advocate for redrawing internal borders and launching internal colonization. By the late 1930s, the army and border guards carried out forced religious conversions (“revindications”) of Orthodox Christian, Ukrainian-speaking populations to Roman Catholicism, based on the idea that these people were descended from Polish Catholics. Their concurrent support for policies of Jewish emigration was based on the opposite assumption—that Jews could never be considered Polish.

Regionalism, or the Limits of Inclusion

Between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s, the Volhynian authorities drew on broader ideas of European regionalism in an attempt to attach the province’s multiethnic populations to the Polish state project. The message put forward at museums and provincial fairs and in regionalist journals focused on national inclusivity. But the elite-led fetishizing of local folklore by regionalists like Jakub Hoffman naturally led to other types of exclusion—or, at least, to conditional inclusion. Ukrainian-speaking populations were permitted only as vestiges of premodern diversity, while a focus on synagogues and the tiny Jewish sect of the Karaites allowed regionalists to write Jews into narratives of rootedness that always emphasized Polish tolerance. Supporters of tourism, which offered another way of navigating the relationship between Volhynia and Poland, undertook the tricky balancing act of claiming the province’s status in the modern world and simultaneously repackaging backwardness as a series of desirable characteristics, such as primitiveness and exoticism.

Democracy as Civilizing Mission

As the First World War ended, new borderland conflicts erupted in Volhynia. At the Paris Peace Conference, Polish statesmen tapped into broader global ideas of civilization in order to show that the Polish nation had the right to rule Volhynia’s “backward” populations, particularly its Ukrainian-speaking majority. At the same time, Polish nationalist activists in the Borderland Guard (Straż Kresowa) attempted to implement their vision of anti-imperial democracy on the ground. This chapter explores how the Borderland Guard’s activists reconfigured “civilization” in Volhynia’s war-torn, resource-starved, and fractured local communities, where conflict played out along national, social, and economic lines. The contention that there were civilizational hierarchies both between Poles and non-Poles and within the ranks of “Poles” coexisted with rhetoric about national inclusivity. Indeed, hierarchy and exclusion directly emerged from attempts to import a Polish version of democracy into the borderlands.

Conclusion

The dual invasions of the Second World War—by the Soviet Union in September 1939 and by Nazi Germany in June 1941—led to mass violence against and between Volhynia’s populations. The nature of local participation in the Holocaust and Polish-Ukrainian atrocities suggests both the significance and the limited explanatory power of the interwar period. When Volhynia was absorbed into the Soviet Union after the war, old tropes found echoes in debates about the establishment of communism and postwar migrations. Although obfuscations surrounded official communist history of the eastern borderlands, many Poles repackaged interwar diversity within the politically useful framework of “inclusive” European multiculturalism in the period after 1989, a process that relied on further hierarchies and exclusions. By reemphasizing how Poles became embroiled in prevailing global debates about imperialism, nationalism, sovereignty, and civilization along the state’s fringes, the conclusion suggests that interwar Volhynia is best understood in concretely historical, rather than nostalgic or teleological, terms.

The Many Meanings of the Border

In the 1920s, Polish state officials saw the newly established and poorly guarded Polish-Soviet border as a site of both anxiety and opportunity. As refugees and remigrants from the First World War and subsequent borderland conflicts moved westward, politicians raised fears about humanitarian crises, epidemic diseases, and anti-Polish ideological infiltration. At a local level, however, border guards and state policemen were more concerned with peasant criminality, including smuggling, horse theft, and illegal distilling, that ran along and across national lines. Since such behavior, when combined with communist agitation, appeared to threaten the state’s territorial sovereignty, the government created a new border guard corps in 1924 to militarize the border and “civilize” local people. But although border guards appeared in Polish propaganda as heroes in a hostile physical and human environment, they feared the effects of daily contact with the Soviet Union—and with civilians on the Polish side.

The Integration Myth

When Polish elites utilized the language of state integration during the early-to-mid-1920s, they highlighted their own centrality in competitive civilizing projects in Volhynia. At the moment when the post-imperial state was itself being constituted, these actors crafted myths about who was foreign, based on civilizational hierarchies between—and even within—the zones of the former partitions. If the right-wing Endecja relied on the antisemitic trope that Jews were eternal foreigners in Volhynia, Polish military settlers also faced accusations of national and social foreignness from Volhynia’s Ukrainian-speaking peasants and Polish-speaking landowners alike. Moreover, in locations beyond Warsaw, notably Poznań and Lublin, urban elites fashioned their cities as civilizational leaders by offering to usher Volhynia’s Poles, particularly those in the provincial capital of Łuck, toward modernity.

Depoliticizing the Volhynian Village

In the Volhynian countryside, Józewski and his supporters launched an apolitical civilizing mission. Their efforts were based on the idea that land reform, the removal of feudal practices, modifications to natural and built environments, and improved sanitation would lead to pro-state attitudes among the peasantry. Believing that Volhynia was experiencing modernization in a piecemeal and sometimes dangerous way, they sought to use rural sites, including elementary schools, military settlements, border guard outposts, and healthcare centers, to teach peasants how to become civilized citizens. Rural apoliticism, however, was itself characterized by political conflict. Power struggles occurred at the level of the village—for instance, between parents and schoolteachers and between Roman Catholic priests and more secular-minded officials. Moreover, elite women drew on traditional gender roles concerning domesticity, sanitation, and childcare in order to promote their role in a state that remained dominated by male-led institutions.

Introduction

The story of interwar Poland has traditionally been told within the historiographical framework of national minority policies in the post-1918 eastern European states. And yet, as this introductory chapter argues, it can be understood only within the context of prevailing global discussions about how notions of civilization justified claims to sovereignty. With its Polish minority, Ukrainian majority, and large Jewish population, the borderland province of Volhynia became a testing ground for various attempts to both civilize and nationalize a “backward” region. This chapter offers an introduction to Volhynia’s geography and pre-1918 history, an exploration of the second-tier actors who claimed to be importing Western civilization, and a discussion of the book’s major historiographical interventions. The case of Volhynia allows scholars to reconsider the dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, to reimagine ideas of national indifference, and to trace how Poles engaged with concepts of imperialism and European nationalism.

Polish Towns? Jewish Towns?

With their Jewish majorities, towns became the focus of Polish attempts to simultaneously Polonize and civilize Volhynia. While Endecja discussions focused on the antisemitic trope that Jews were anti-modern Russian stooges who resisted European civilization, Sanacja authorities who entered the region after Józef Piłsudski’s 1926 coup d’état promoted a more inclusive vision of Polish-Jewish cooperation. At the same time, however, the technocrats who dominated the provincial government under the new governor Henryk Józewski used urban planning, including the construction of colonies for state officials and demographic reshuffling on town councils, to reduce what they saw as detrimental “Jewish” influence. In the provincial capital Łuck, as across many towns, projects to absorb urban hinterlands utilized Christian populations—Poles and non-Poles alike—in an attempt to make the town less Jewish. And yet even by the early 1930s, officials remained frustrated that Polish urban populations did not culturally and spiritually invest in towns.