In early 1919, with no end in sight to warfare in the former western borderlands of the Russian empire, some 5,000 Polish troops moved into the area of the pre-1914 governorate (guberniia) of Volhynia.Footnote 1 The forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic under the command of Symon Petliura, now pushed back toward the east, found that they were not the only group against which the recently assembled Polish army fought. As Russian imperial authority collapsed, Poles clashed with a multitude of military formations that were simultaneously at war with one another, including White Russians under General Anton Denikin and the Red Army of Bolshevik Russia. Volhynia also remained contested diplomatically. Like other areas across eastern Europe, such as Bessarabia, Upper Silesia, eastern Galicia, Transylvania, Dobruja, and Banat, this was a nationally, linguistically, and religiously diverse place that could not easily be situated within the borders of an idealized Wilsonian nation-state.Footnote 2
Two approaches have dominated the historiography of collapse in the Russian empire's former western borderlands, which had been part of the sprawling Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth prior to the late eighteenth century and were known in Polish as kresy. The first takes a geopolitical, diplomatic, or military perspective and considers how elite actors like statesmen, politicians, and generals attempted to ensure that certain contested regions were included within their state's borders.Footnote 3 Analyzing official correspondence between opposing sides, as well as political tracts, treaties, and decrees, such scholarship tends to assume a rather narrow definition of politics and overestimates the degree of control that national elites had over chaotic events in areas under multiple occupations. In response, a more recent approach to east European borderlands, including the kresy, has shown that ongoing warfare cannot simply be understood as a series of battles between clear-cut states. A closer look at groups that were not directly connected to state power, including warlords, paramilitary formations, and peasant cadres, instead suggests that local circumstances, as much as official policy, dictated the nature of violence in the wake of imperial state collapse and as embryonic nation-states were taking shape.Footnote 4
This article traces the dynamics of Poland's drawn-out war in the Volhynian borderlands from a third perspective, combining arguments about the geopolitical importance of shoring up state power with an appreciation of the local dynamics that conditioned what “the state” came to look like on the ground. To do this, I focus on the ways in which a group of Polish nationalist agitators who worked for an organization called Straż Kresowa (Borderland Guard, which I will refer to as “the Guard”) positioned themselves as the unofficial brokers of state power at a time of sustained and multidirectional conflict in Volhynia.Footnote 5 Formed in February 1918 in response to the Central Powers’ decision to allow the fledgling Ukrainian state to annex the contested Chełm (Ukrainian: Kholm) region, the Guard issued propaganda from its press department in Warsaw that sought to raise awareness of the kresy's fundamental Polishness (polsko ść). In spite of its explicitly defensive stance, however, Guard agitators worked aggressively on the ground in Polish-occupied areas that had previously been part of the Russian empire—not only Volhynia, but also the Polesian and Lithuanian areas to the north—in an attempt to persuade local people to support the Polish state. Although the organization received state subsidies and officially worked alongside a temporary civil administration (an arrangement that I will explain below), Guard personnel were never simply the tentacles of a fully-formed centralized state. Rather, and as the term “broker” suggests, they attempted to import their ideological vision into the borderlands in cooperation—and sometimes in conflict—with both rival representatives of “Polishness” and hostile or indifferent local populations.Footnote 6
Despite having been almost completely ignored in the English-language historiography and having received only limited attention in the Polish and German literature, the Guard offers a promising lens through which to view the uneven local processes of (nation-)state formation across eastern Europe in the wake of the First World War.Footnote 7 Indeed, the rich published and archival documents that cover the Guard's work in Polish-occupied Volhynia from the beginning of 1919 until the summer of 1920 can be read in ways that both build upon and move beyond recent studies of elite attempts to nationalize multiethnic borderlands in the face of local apathy toward the nation. Thanks to the creation of a robust literature on the phenomenon of national indifference in eastern and central Europe, historians now tend to approach what were assumed to be conflicts between a priori national groups with a healthy dose of skepticism and are increasingly attuned to what Pieter Judson calls the “war waged by nationalists to consolidate their own followers, their own nation, at the local level.”Footnote 8 While some scholars have assumed that the Guard's reports record the attitudes of various national groups on the ground—most notably Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians (the latter often referred to as Ruthenians)—they can be more fruitfully analyzed as efforts to construct an acceptable national community alongside the concurrent and related processes of state formation.Footnote 9 As we shall see, nationality was anything but flat in Volhynia. Instead, people's national identities (such as they were asserted) intersected with quotidian questions of social class, land ownership, and food economics that emerged from both pre-First World War imperial experiences and the shifting exigencies of military occupation.
Most importantly, the challenge of placing the Guard clearly on one side of an imagined dichotomy of ethnic (“exclusive”) and civic (“inclusive”) nationalism pushes us to consider how the contours of the nation were developed through local interactions. On one level, this approach opens the way for a specific intervention in the historiography of Polish nationalism, which, as I have argued elsewhere, has traditionally relied on the existence of a supposed nationalist chasm that emerged from intellectual currents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 10 On the right was Roman Dmowski's nationally exclusive, racist, and anti-Semitic National Democracy movement (Endecja); on the left, the vision of state assimilation and multiethnic harmony that was espoused by the former legionnaire, head of state (1918–22), and, after 1926, increasingly authoritarian de facto Polish leader, Józef Piłsudski (as well as his acolytes).Footnote 11 Internal divisions within each camp notwithstanding, these two perspectives are generally shown to align with divergent political visions of the kresy: the right's incorporationist model, in which non-Polish Slavs would be assimilated and Jews considered unwelcome foreigners, versus the left's federalist vision, which called for the creation of an eastern buffer zone of friendly post-imperial nation-states against the perennial Russian threat.Footnote 12 While intellectual historians have begun to chip away at the rigid framework of “Dmowski versus Piłsudski,” the Guard's documents indicate the importance of relocating such questions away from the nation's putative political and intellectual centers.Footnote 13 In fact, internal battles over who could be included within the Polish nation—and what “inclusion” actually meant in practice—can be fully understood only if we consider experiences in a multiethnic borderland like Volhynia.
A fine-grained study of the Guard's daily activities, however, also has implications for scholarship on nationalism far beyond Volhynia, and even Poland. As the sociologist Rogers Brubaker has proposed, the unequivocal division between “exclusive” ethnic nationalism and its “inclusive” civic twin is itself flawed. “All understandings of nationhood and all forms of nationalism are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive,” he writes. “What varies is not the fact or even the degree of inclusiveness or exclusiveness, but the bases or criteria of inclusion and exclusion.”Footnote 14 Seen through Brubaker's framework, the Guard, which has generally been associated (and associated itself) with Józef Piłsudski's purportedly more inclusive vision of the nation, illuminates both the situational characteristics of national boundaries and the problem of dividing nationalists into clearly demarcated camps. In a borderland on the very fringes of national space and at a time of ongoing military conflict, attempts to construct a nominally democratic and inclusive state were inextricably bound up with processes of exclusion.
Volhynia as Nationally Contested Space
What did it mean for Volhynia to be on the national fringes? A land bearing that name had certainly long been the object of the kinds of state and dynastic conflicts that modern nationalists would later frame in explicitly national terms. A political entity called the Principality of Volhynia, part of the early medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus΄, could be traced back to the late tenth century. Following the disintegration of a later state called the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania moved south and only ceded control of Volhynia to Poland in 1569, with the creation of the large and decentralized Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the second half of the eighteenth century, leaders in the neighboring states of Prussia, Russia, and Austria saw an opportunity for territorial expansion, and, through the final two of three partitions (in 1793 and 1795), the Russian empire gained the Polish province (województwo) of Volhynia and created a governorate with the same name.
While official statistics are inherently problematic, especially in an area where nationality did not constitute a clear-cut identity, they do provide some sense of Volhynia's diversity, at least through the eyes of the ruling state. According to the First All-Russian General Census of 1897, the governorate, which was home to almost three million people, was inhabited mainly by what imperial authorities called “Little Russians” (70 percent), with smaller percentages of Jews (13.2 percent), Poles (6.2 percent), Germans (5.8 percent), Great Russians (3.6 percent), Czechs (0.9 percent), and other marginal groups.Footnote 15 National, religious, and social identities were entwined here. The countryside was home to Russian (Orthodox Christian) landowners and members of the Polish-speaking (Roman Catholic) landed gentry (Polish: ziemiaństwo), “Little Russian” Orthodox peasants (who Ukrainian nationalists believed were Ukrainians), Polish-speaking Roman Catholic peasants, and Czech- and German-speaking colonists, usually Orthodox and Protestant Christians, respectively, who had settled in the empire's western borderlands during the nineteenth century. Banned from owning land by the Russian authorities, Jews were the majority population in the towns, where they worked mainly as small traders and artisans.Footnote 16
As was the case across the Russian empire's southwestern borderlands more generally, the imperial authorities in Volhynia believed that the “national question” posed an increasing threat. Borrowing from a broader nationalist toolkit, they carried out so-called Russification policies from the 1860s onward, which involved restrictions on both the Polish language and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as attempts to clamp down on an emerging Ukrainian nationalist movement.Footnote 17 While the period immediately after the 1905 Revolution witnessed some concessions to non-Russian nationalities, more aggressive Russian nationalist projects—both imperial and local—only intensified after 1907.Footnote 18 Moreover, as the armies of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German empires passed back and forth across Volhynia during the First World War, fears of national subversion reached fever pitch, with the Russian military deporting and expropriating so-called unreliable elements, especially Poles, Jews, and Germans.Footnote 19 When an independent Wilsonian-inspired Polish nation-state was declared in November 1918, the ongoing mass displacement of people constituted a further obstacle to the creation of a physical border that would map precisely onto an already complex national landscape.Footnote 20
With the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in early 1919, a range of Polish politicians and intellectuals, both at negotiations in the French capital and in pamphlets intended to sway Entente public opinion, put forward their case for including parts of the kresy within Poland's state borders. In terms of dominant national demographics, a criterion at the heart of American president Woodrow Wilson's statement that an independent Poland should be made up of areas with “indisputably Polish populations,” they faced a problem.Footnote 21 While Polish elites protested that the 1897 Russian census grossly underestimated the number of Poles, even their own statistics indicated that their conationals constituted a minority in Volhynia, including in the western and central areas of the former imperial governorate that were increasingly coming under the Polish army's occupation.Footnote 22 Taking a different approach to that of their Ukrainian nationalist counterparts, who argued that they had the better case based on national demographics, Polish elites stated that the minority Poles were the only agents capable of building a viable and civilized state.Footnote 23 In doing so, they drew on both a national narrative—that the kresy constituted a quintessentially Polish space, despite its economic, social, and political backwardness—and the persistent pan-European idea that an intra-continental gradient ran between a civilized “West” and an underdeveloped “East.”Footnote 24 As a civilizationally liminal place, Volhynia simultaneously evoked feelings of anxiety over its underdevelopment and became a focus for claims that the Polish nation alone could rectify aberrant imperial legacies.
The right-wing National Democrats under Roman Dmowski, who constituted the dominant Polish voice in Paris, certainly put forward the case that only the Polish minority could competently import modern statehood. Already in October 1918, Dmowski was demanding the inclusion of what had been the western part of the Russian governorate of Volhynia, justifying his claims in a memorandum to President Wilson by making arguments about the civilizational superiority of Poles.Footnote 25 In Paris, documents about the broader region of Ruthenia, to which Poles claimed Volhynia belonged, similarly emphasized that Poles continued to act as the bearers of order and progress. For example, National Democrat Joachim Bartoszewicz, who headed the commission for the eastern borderlands, insisted that the Polish “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice) had survived the empire's denationalizing policies, with Poles having remained “the factor of progress and of culture.”Footnote 26 Poles depicted rival claimants to these lands as not only cruel and barbaric, but also incapable of successfully administering the territories. In particular, they blamed structural problems, such as the lack of land drainage, the poorly developed infrastructure, and low literacy rates, on both the Russian imperial authorities and the Germans and Ukrainians who had occupied the region more recently. If the Germans had ruthlessly exploited Volhynia for its grain resources, Ukrainians—labeled as “bandits” or “careerists” from the “semi-intelligentsia”—simply could not run a state.Footnote 27
As already intimated, however, the Polish delegation in Paris was not in conflict with Ukrainian nationalists alone, but also battled against a competing Polish vision of the emerging state's relationship with the kresy. In Warsaw, head of state Józef Piłsudski, along with many of his supporters, proposed a rival federalist vision of the east by which Poland would support the creation of nation-states—most importantly, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Lithuania—under Polish auspices. Historians have pointed out that much was unclear about this position, not least the extent to which Piłsudski and his followers were consistently committed to federalism and the myriad internal disagreements about what the term actually meant in practice.Footnote 28 Although Piłsudski initially spoke about a plebiscite in the east, a parliamentary commission that traveled to the region at the end of August 1919, by which point Polish troops had taken all of western Volhynia, suggested that this kind of electoral procedure would not have the desired results in Volhynia.Footnote 29 Yet it is clear that federalists, just like their political foes on the right, believed that the superiority of the Polish civilizing mission outweighed arguments about which nationality constituted the majority.Footnote 30 As the historian and federalist Oskar Halecki stated in a May 1919 document, in Ruthenia, “civilization and the social order find their principal support in the Polish element.”Footnote 31 Indeed, for many observers, Ukrainian and western European alike, the Polish federalist option looked shockingly like poorly disguised imperialism: territorial inclusion without local consent.Footnote 32
Local Narratives of (Conditional) Inclusion
Despite the right's dominance in Paris, it was the Piłsudskiite camp that created the administrative structure for the occupied eastern territories. In February 1919, as the Polish army marched eastward, Piłsudski formed a Civil Administration for the Eastern Lands (Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich; hereafter, the civil administration) in the former western borderlands of the Russian empire that now found themselves under Polish military occupation. While supporters of the Endecja argued that the civil administration undermined Polish national interests by benefiting non-Poles, the area and population under its control continued to grow.Footnote 33 If in June 1919, around half a million people living in the area of the former Russian governorate of Volhynia were nominally under the administration's authority, that number had tripled by September to over one-and-a-half-million.Footnote 34 To accommodate increases in territory and people, new administrative arrangements were made. In September 1919, the Polish government created the Volhynian administrative district (okręg wołyński), made up of various counties (powiaty); the following January, Volhynia received its own administration (Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wołynia i Frontu Podolskiego) with a separate commissioner general.Footnote 35
Officially acting in concert with the civil administration and supported by its financial subsidies, Guard activists—so-called instructors (instruktorzy)—carried out social and political agitation among local populations. Although none of the people who worked for the Guard in Volhynia published memoirs, their collective biographies point to several important commonalities. Originating in central Poland (often in Warsaw), they had frequently participated in pro-Piłsudski conspiratorial student groups like the Union of Polish Youth (Zwią zek Młodzieży Polskiej, better known as Zet) and the Organization of Nationalist Youth (Organizacja Młodzieży Narodowej).Footnote 36 Their relatively young ages—Stefan Kapuściński, the district instructor in Włodzimierz county, was twenty-two at the beginning of 1919, for instance, while his counterpart in Łuck county, Antoni Zalewski, was a year younger still—meant that they had been profoundly shaped by the formative experiences of political and organizational training during the war.Footnote 37 The Guard also constituted an elite group, rather than a mass political movement. In April 1919, a preliminary budget anticipated just ten Guard workers for Volhynia, and even by November of that year, there were only twenty-seven employees operating in the now much-expanded Volhynian occupied territories.Footnote 38 The vast majority of the Guard's workers were men.Footnote 39
Their propaganda celebrated national inclusion by making nostalgic references to Poland's own democratic traditions in the kresy. Indeed, unlike supporters of the Endecja, who saw the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a paragon of political folly and national weakness, Guard activists emphasized the continuities between Volhynia's place in the Commonwealth and its present-day links to the new Polish state. The Guard's local weekly newspaper Polak Kresowy (Borderland Pole) argued that, rather than invading Volhynia as an aggressive force, the Polish army was doing nothing more than reclaiming land that already bore the nation's historical footprint.Footnote 40 In June 1919, the fortuitously timed 350th anniversary of the Union of Lublin, which had integrated Volhynia into the Polish area of the Commonwealth, gave the newspaper's editors a chance to disseminate long-standing myths of interethnic cooperation and local consent for Polish rule. In Łuck, one of the region's largest towns and the former capital of the early modern Polish province, it was reported that a group of “Ruthenians” had traveled from a town over thirty kilometers away to join the festivities.Footnote 41 Holding up signs in the Cyrillic script that read “For your Freedom and Ours”—a Polish slogan popularized during an insurrection against the Russian empire in 1830—these “Ruthenians” supposedly wrote themselves into a narrative of national liberation that was both universal and characteristically Polish. A separate article welcomed the fact that the large Jewish population of Kowel demonstrated its desire for “harmonious coexistence with the Polish population and its unity with the Polish state.”Footnote 42 Conflating acts of prewar anti-Semitic violence in the Russian empire, such as the infamous events in Kishinev in 1903, with those recently orchestrated by Ukrainian forces in the easterly towns of Proskuriv and Fastiv, the author stated that Jews in Poland were legally protected and would not be in physical danger.Footnote 43 In each case, the narrative was clear: non-Poles were already finding their place within the tolerant Polish state.
The minutes of local meetings similarly provide insights into how Guard activists evoked narratives of national inclusion and promoted the idea that they wished to listen to the democratically expressed voice of the nationally diverse “people” (lud). While the occupied populations did not vote in initial nationwide elections to the Polish constituent assembly (Sejm Ustawodawczy) in January 1919, the Guard argued that “democratic mechanisms,” not least of which were “people's councils” (rady ludowe), needed to be imported into the region.Footnote 44 At a July 1919 meeting in Łuck county, which had been set up with the aim of electing individuals to the people's council, Stefan Kapuściński explained to local “delegates” that a system based on legal equality was in everyone's best interests. “What does it mean that the law is universal?” Kapuściński asked the assembled delegates, “It means that every citizen, after coming of age, regardless of sex, has the right to vote.”Footnote 45 Even a Polish woman could vote, Kapuściński went on, although his focus on the fact that she “brought up and preserved the seedbed of Polish rebellion in the souls of her sons” indicated that appeals to civic equality remained bound to the gendered and explicitly religious image of the patriotic Polish mother (Matka Polka).Footnote 46 Most significantly, he drew a stark distinction between the system of (Russian) tsarist autocracy and that of (Polish) modern democracy. Poland's head of state Józef Piłsudski, Kapuściński insisted, “is not a tsar” and did not represent a single social class, but was instead “a man chosen by the whole nation” (cz ł owiek wybrany przez cał y naró d).Footnote 47 Antoni Zalewski echoed this message at another meeting held in the more northerly town of Sarny that September. If the Russian system had been based on the law of the tsar, “who, with just a stroke of the pen, settled the fate of millions and didn't consider if his law was good or bad for the lud,” he stated, Polish democracy provided an attractive alternative because it was legitimized by “the whole nation.”Footnote 48 The following month, the head instructor for Równe county Edmund Strauch opened another meeting by arguing that claims by previous regimes to be listening to the lud had been disingenuous; only today was the voice of the people being heard.Footnote 49
Neither of these sources—propagandistic articles in Polak Kresowy or the minutes of local meetings—provides evidence of genuine mass support for Polish rule. What they do indicate, however, is the importance that activists placed on overt demonstrations of local enthusiasm for Polish state power. To some extent, this approach originated in a deeper intellectual consensus, fostered among Polish elites toward the end of the nineteenth century, that abstract groups like lud (“the people”) or nar ó d (“the nation”) spoke with a single, almost spiritual, voice (as a case in point, while Kapuściński had argued that Piłsudski had been “chosen by the whole nation,” the head of state had not actually been directly elected by the population at large).Footnote 50 But the emphasis on gaining consent also indicated the sense among Guard activists that they needed to prove that Volhynians wanted to be included in the political framework of the Polish state, even if the majority of people did not consider themselves to be members of an ethnically defined Polish nation. As Zalewski pointed out in October 1919, the “current international situation” meant that the incorporation of the kresy could occur only “with the consent (zgod a) of at least the significant part of this population and the absence of opposition openly expressed by the remaining part.”Footnote 51
At local meetings, there was an almost obsessive desire to reach consensus, with Guard leaders consistently emphasizing the unanimity with which resolutions were passed. At one meeting organized by the Guard in the town of Kowel, which was, according to the minutes, attended by 200 Poles, 120 Ruthenians, nine Germans, three Jews, and two Czechs, the Guard's representative Henryk Orłowski stated that a resolution to create closer links between Poland and Volhynia was “unanimously passed, with enthusiastic cheers,” adding that “even the Ruthenians voted for it.”Footnote 52 And yet, the fixation on unanimity was most evident when populations found fault with the rule of the Polish state and thereby appeared to be rejecting ungratefully the type of inclusion that the Polish state was offering—namely, nominal participation in Polish-led democratic political forums. Activists frequently responded to criticisms from “Ruthenians” by arguing that these political apprentices remained mired in backwardness and were not yet ready to function in the modern world without Polish mentorship. At the meeting in Sarny in September 1919, for instance, one man who was identified as a Ruthenian in the minutes accused the Polish administration of distributing money to Polish schools, rather than to their Ruthenian counterparts, and of not inviting more Ruthenians to participate in the meeting.Footnote 53 The response from Henryk Orłowski, who was in charge of proceedings, indicated the conditions of inclusion. “This is a Polish congress to which we invited Ruthenians in order for them to listen to what we have to say here,” Orłowski argued. “If they like it,” he went on, “then they will join in with our resolutions.”Footnote 54 Similar dynamics occurred across the region. Earlier that month, a “Ruthenian” in Kowel had stated that the Guard had not sufficiently publicized that the meeting was open to all nationalities and proposed its postponement until the entire population had been informed. Edmund Strauch's answer was unequivocal: since Ruthenians were invited to the meeting “as guests,” they had to listen to what the Poles advised. Postponing the meeting, he argued, would be “too great a waste of time.”Footnote 55
The simultaneous inclusion of non-Polish populations in the physical space of such meetings and the marginalization that came from being cast in the role of guests highlights how the Guard's local approach both diverged from the Entente's attempts to import the principles of civic equality into post-imperial eastern Europe and echoed British and French developmental logic in emerging mandate territories around the world. In June 1919, just a few months before these meetings, Polish leaders had reluctantly signed a Minority Treaty in Paris, which obligated the new state to uphold the rights of its “racial, religious or linguistic minorities” who were to “enjoy the same treatment and security in law and in fact as the other Polish nationals.”Footnote 56 But while the Guard's vision of democracy similarly highlighted a commitment to equality before the law (as Kapuściński's statements indicated), it emerged less from an assumption about the importance of liberal institution-building and more from a romantic version of the nation's “tolerant” history that celebrated inclusion under benign Polish leadership. Indeed, the conditional inclusion of non-Poles emerged from, rather than in spite of, claims about the superiority of Polish-led democracy as a political system, a position in line with the prevailing civilizational hierarchies that conditioned the international mandate system.Footnote 57 After several “Ruthenians” added their voices to initial concerns at the meeting in Kowel, Antoni Zalewski dismissed them by implying that these people should be grateful for the gift of political equality that had been bestowed upon them by a more advanced nation. “When this was Russia, you were subjects,” he argued; in Poland, where “everyone is equal,” they were citizens.Footnote 58
Nation and Class, Entangled: Russians, Poles, and Jews
While the Guard viewed their “Ruthenian brothers” as redeemable, if inferior co-victims of Russian imperial oppression who could be conditionally integrated into the new state's political apparatus, they saw other populations as dangerous holdouts whose local influence had to be eliminated or at least dramatically reduced.Footnote 59 As might be expected, the continued presence of the region's ethnic Russians was deeply problematic in the eyes of the Guard. Not only were Russians the symbols of hated imperialism, but the fact that some of them were still employed in Volhynia (for instance, as railroad workers) during a period of ongoing conflict apparently gave local people the impression that Poland would return the liberated land to the Russian state after defeating the Bolsheviks.Footnote 60 Much more striking, however, are the ways in which Guard activists perceived some Polish-speaking populations in Volhynia, most notably large landowners, as enemies who undermined the new state's political agenda.Footnote 61 Making Volhynia more Polish, they argued, was necessarily entangled with a mission for profound social and economic transformation—in other words, for remapping national borders within, rather than simply beyond, local groups of Polish-speaking Roman Catholics.
The Guard's activists certainly had good reason to fear that Volhynia's landowners would oppose attempts to upend the social-economic structures that had dominated the late imperial period. In spite of an 1865 ordinance that had banned “individuals of Polish origins” from acquiring landed property in the western borderlands except through inheritance, many landowners who identified as Polish had retained a significant amount of land and economic power, which they were now unwilling to relinquish.Footnote 62 Perceiving land seizures carried out by both the Bolsheviks and Petliura's Ukrainian forces as a physical threat, many large landowners had abandoned their Volhynian holdings, only returning once the Polish army moved in. But the nominal shift in the basis for political sovereignty in the wake of the First World War across eastern Europe—from empire to nation-state democracy—also posed an existential threat to their vision of borderland Polishness. Before the war, they had come into increased conflict not only with the majority Ukrainian-speaking (“Ruthenian” or “Little Russian”) Orthodox peasantry, but also with their supposed conationals among the disenfranchised Polish petty nobility (drobna szlachta).Footnote 63 For the Guard's activists, these persecutors of the lud had thus effectively lost any genuine Polishness that they once possessed.Footnote 64 The landowners, of course, had a different view. The Union of Volhynia's Landowners (Zwią zek Ziemian Woł ynia) claimed that they constituted nothing less than “the mainstay of Polishness,” and, in a nod to the language of democracy, that they completely subordinated their own class concerns “to the interests of the general and whole population.”Footnote 65 In their memoirs, landowners also emphasized their version of Polish civilization in the kresy, epitomized by harmonious relations with the peasants that surrounded the manor house (dw ór).Footnote 66
Guard reports about local society constitute an excellent source for exploring not simply how landowners were behaving, but also (and more importantly for our purposes) the precise criteria by which Guard activists excluded “the landowner” from the political community.Footnote 67 For one, the Guard accused him (or, more rarely, her) of engaging in widescale administrative corruption that sabotaged, instead of bolstered, state authority: preventing the execution of certain decrees from the higher echelons of the civil administration that did not fit with their own local agenda, violently requisitioning goods from the surrounding population, and failing to punish fellow landowners who ordered gendarmes to beat people accused of taking timber from their forests during the war.Footnote 68 Because the landowners came to hold the majority of local leadership positions in the civil administration, most notably that of the county head (starosta), the Guard feared that peasants would see the Polish state as an extension of the rule of the “lords of the manor house,” or what locals called pany. As Antoni Zalewski stated in October 1919, the perception in Łuck county that the administration was made up of the “landowner class” meant that even the local Polish population—the very people whom the state should have most easily won over—treated it “as an occupation.”Footnote 69
Landowners were also accused of hindering the supply of food to ordinary people, thus exacerbating already desperate conditions, especially in northern areas around the marshy Stochód river. By the end of October 1919, the Guard reported, the food supply in Kowel county was in “a deplorable condition,” and there was “a complete deficiency in the provisioning of salt, sugar, fat, flour, and potatoes.”Footnote 70 Western humanitarian observers, one of whom lamented “the shocking conditions” in the same county where women were apparently “picking undigested oats from horse manure as human food,” often argued that the problem of food distribution came down to generic Polish incompetence.Footnote 71 But the Guard saw the situation as a result of local social and economic competitions. Indeed, debates about what could—and should—be done to relieve the situation in Volhynia echoed those that had already erupted during the First World War across much of central and eastern Europe. In addition to putting huge pressures on the combatant states, the inability to provide food for hungry civilian populations led to heated conflicts over scarce resources, as well as heightened levels of distrust, denunciation, and recrimination, which often ran along national lines. If much of the scholarship has focused on societal breakdown in imperial metropoles, including Berlin and Vienna, or large cities under occupation, such as Warsaw, wartime anxieties in largely rural Volhynia were combined with fundamental attempts to replace an imperial economic system.Footnote 72
According to the Guard's activists, the fault lay not only with the greedy and power-hungry Polish landowners, but also with their Jewish economic accomplices. Indeed, while they claimed that younger (and poorer) Jews were ideologically committed supporters of Poland's Bolshevik enemies, much of the Guard's criticism was based on the idea that local Jews selfishly continued to prioritize their “own” economic interests above those of an emerging state that promised to protect them from anti-Semitic violence.Footnote 73 Echoing well-established anti-Semitic tropes, they accused Jews of wartime profiteering by selling grain at maximum prices.Footnote 74 By early October 1919, as the food situation deteriorated, reports from Łuck county stated that “the greater part of the grain finds itself in the hands of profiteers (paskarzy), mainly Jews,” a problem that allegedly persisted the following month when “the supply of food to the towns remain(ed) terrible as a result of the collective sale of grain by the landowners to the Jews.”Footnote 75 Other signs also indicated the Guard's suspicions of Jews, despite calls elsewhere for their inclusion in the Polish national community. The editors of Polak Kresowy hoped, for instance, that signs of Jewish civic participation in Kowel did not turn out to be “artificial and false decoration” that was simply a cover for “their continuously hostile and cunning participation in activity and agitation that is harmful to us.”Footnote 76 Similarly, while he claimed that Poland was a “real mother”—and not a “step-mother,” as Russia was—to Volhynia's non-Poles, Antoni Zalewski accused Jews of sullying Poland's good name on the world stage, presumably a reference to international criticisms of pogroms and mass shootings of Jews across the Polish-occupied east.Footnote 77
Since such attitudes cannot easily be accommodated within the traditional binary of civic and ethnic nationalism, they might best be understood through a situational approach that carefully delineates what Brubaker calls the “bases or criteria of inclusion and exclusion.”Footnote 78 While Guard activists certainly accused some Jews of undermining the Polish state's local authority by supporting Bolshevism, the criticism of Jewish traders as disruptive economic elements suggests the validity of Dan Diner's argument that in modernizing nation-states, Jews were frequently depicted as paragons of anti-, rather than hyper-modernity. In the eyes of the Guard's activists, Volhynia's Jews constituted what Diner refers to more generally as “fragments of former corporate estates in modernity, remnants of Empire, so to speak.”Footnote 79
National Assimilation as Danger—and Opportunity
Many of the Guard's documents suggest that it was an organization on the backfoot, one constantly responding to systemic problems in a war-torn area, which could not possibly be managed by this handful of young men. But while activists lacked both the revolutionary ideological roadmap and the powerful tools of modern statehood that were enjoyed by representatives of the twentieth century's “gardening states,” their mission in the east involved fledgling elements of a classic modernizing impulse: to categorize people and shape society in line with a distinct demographic vision.Footnote 80 Volhynia was no stranger to attempts at ordering its diverse populations. During the First World War, Russian military officials had undertaken, in the words of Eric Lohr, “a massive process of sorting, classifying, and categorizing its population and distilling the complex and multiple identities of its peoples into simpler hierarchies of nationalities.”Footnote 81 The Guard's work continued such processes, albeit through a different ideological framework and by way of far less developed institutional structures. As they sought to reshape local society, even from their position of relative weakness, activists mused over two interrelated questions: who precisely could function as the local anchors of Polish state power and how might the work of these “Poles” most effectively be fostered on the ground.
In Volhynia, they depicted the kind of nationally amorphous and socially diverse borderland population that has proved to be both exasperating and enticing for modernizing officials of various political affiliations.Footnote 82 Despite their belief that Volhynia was quintessentially Polish, Guard officials expressed disappointment—even despair—at what they saw as the indifference of many local Poles who had ceased to feel “Polish” under the conditions of empire and were therefore not actively supporting the new state. In their eyes, the group of Poles-who-had-ceased-to-be-Polish stretched far beyond the large landowners and extended to Volhynia's small Polish-speaking intelligentsia and lower middle class who lived in the ramshackle towns that dotted this largely rural region. In October 1919, the Guard described the Polish intelligentsia in the town of Krzemieniec, a place with a long tradition as a bastion of Polish education and culture, as “very small,” and community life there as “completely broken.”Footnote 83 Things were no better in Dubno where, the Guard reported, the lower middle class was “colorless, broken, [and] little aware, giving almost no sign of life.”Footnote 84
The main explanation for this state of affairs was that local Poles had become assimilated into the surrounding national, or even ethnic, groups. In some contexts, this process meant Russification, as was the case in Dubno county where the Polish population was described in the spring of 1920 as a mainly “Russified” (zrusyfikowany) group, “completely indifferent to the fate of the country” and without “national aspirations.”Footnote 85 In other instances, Polish peasants were said to be supporting the new Polish state's enemies. As early as March 1919, reports from Łuck county highlighted that many poor local “Poles” were Polish only in the sense of their “feelings of belonging” to Roman Catholicism and even supported the land requisitioning policies of the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura.Footnote 86 Other “Polish peasants with local roots” had “quickly Ruthenized (rutenizowali si ę), often losing the language” and, by the eve of the First World War, had been “connected to Polishness in terms of the Roman Catholic religion only.”Footnote 87
Embedded in such pessimistic statements, however, was a sense that local Polishness was largely affective and therefore potentially salvageable. A connection to Polishness could be felt through an attachment to Roman Catholicism, for example, even if peasants had regrettably lost their knowledge of the Polish language (or vice versa), while townspeople's indifference might still be transformed into an interest in the Polish project in Volhynia. There were additional causes for optimism too. If some Poles had supposedly forsaken important aspects of their Polishness, the Guard believed that others had remained stubbornly resistant to the forces of imperial denationalization. Specifically, activists looked to the more prosperous peasants who had either rented land (known in Polish as dzierżawcy) or functioned as manorial estate workers (służba folwarczna) prior to the outbreak of the First World War, as well as to colonists and the drobna szlachta.Footnote 88 These Poles, they argued, were nationally conscious, relatively comfortable in material terms, and organizationally active, not least because they had remained steadfast during waves of persecution from multiple quarters—the Russian imperial authorities, the Bolsheviks (who referred to them as “kulaks”), and the large landowners (who, on returning to the area in 1919, had thrown them off the land).Footnote 89 “Only the prosperous peasant in Volhynia, satisfied with his fate, is the granite core of Polishness in this land,” claimed one report from Łuck county in the summer of 1919, while manorial estate workers were “mostly an element of great national consciousness.”Footnote 90 The twin qualities of an emotional connection to Polishness and relative economic prosperity, rather than the more explicitly “Polish” characteristics of religion and language that the landowners could boast, supposedly made these people likely to support the embryonic state.
Considering such depictions of Volhynia's assimilatory environment allows us once again to tease out precisely what national inclusion meant to the Guard's activists at a local level and to move beyond civic and ethnic nationalism as definitive categories. If assimilation had drawn Poles away from the nation during the imperial period, nationally hard-to-pin-down populations might also provide potential demographic material for assimilation, or rather reassimilation, into the Polish nation. Such ideas certainly circulated in the nationwide journals of the day. In reference to Volhynia, the statistician Edward Maliszewski suggested that some Orthodox Christians who were assumed to be Ukrainians were actually descendants of the drobna szlachta, Poles in Ukrainian clothing who might yet “return to Polishness,” given the proper conditions.Footnote 91
On the ground in Volhynia, Guard activists similarly sought to assimilate groups into the Polish nation. While in some cases this process was framed as the reassimilation of Ruthenized Poles, in others it meant assimilating alternative minority groups whose members could dilute the Ruthenian majority. Indeed, the complex situation that was presented by the existence of multiple national groups meant that (re)assimilation was imagined along various axes and based on a range of criteria. A January 1920 report, for instance, suggested that apolitical Germans and Czechs could be utilized to fulfill the broader demographic aim of “thinning out” Ruthenians.Footnote 92 The small size of these groups allegedly made them ideal candidates for assimilation, since it guaranteed “that they will not long maintain themselves as a distinct element and will quickly yield to Polonization.”Footnote 93 The report depicted Czechs less as a separate national minority whose rights would presumably have to be respected according to Poland's Minority Treaty and more as a group whose positive contributions to the local economy meant that they could easily be Polonized. Populations who might ostensibly be seen as German were deemed to be even further ahead in the process. According to the report, the “German” town of Józefin in Łuck county was “completely Polonized” and its inhabitants “consider themselves to be Poles (uważają się za Polaków),” despite the fact that they were Evangelical Christians.Footnote 94 In short, by asserting the slipperiness of national identities, Guard activists attempted to nationally engineer the borderlands in Poland's favor.
There are two things worth noting about the context of such assimilatory musings, particularly as they relate to the central question of national inclusion. First, in an age of national self-determination in eastern Europe—one in which nationality and sovereignty were theoretically intertwined—emphasizing fluid identities allowed nationalists to delegitimize rival national claims by nominally including large groups of people in their nation. Prior to the war, Russian and Polish nationalists had already downplayed the idea of a genuine Ukrainian nation by using terms like “Little Russian” or “Ruthenian,” while national elites across interwar Europe continued to create categories, such as the “Germanized Italian” of South Tyrol or the “Magyarized Romanian” of Transylvania, in ways that simultaneously included people in the national fold and undercut competing national positions.Footnote 95 In this sense, the Guard's assimilatory schemes were not so different from the Endecja's approach, which denied that there was a nationally developed Ukrainian group and thus a legitimate Ukrainian claim to Volhynia.Footnote 96 In Paris, Joachim Bartoszewicz stated that it was difficult to “untangle” (démêler) the true nationality of the Ruthenian peasant, while his fellow National Democrat Stanisław Grabski declared to the Polish parliament in Warsaw that populations in the east lacked “a distinct national physiognomy” and thought of themselves only as “locals.”Footnote 97 Guard activists' speculation about the potential for national assimilation, coupled with their use of the term “Ruthenian” to refer to populations that Ukrainian nationalists believed were Ukrainian, indicates that their approach cannot be placed in a completely separate category to that of the Polish right.Footnote 98 In fact, the Guard drew simultaneously on two supposedly opposite traditions: state assimilation, which celebrated non-Polish national identities, and national assimilation, which encouraged some people to abandon those very same identities.
An understanding of the Ukrainian-Ruthenian debate in Volhynia also allows us to more fully grasp a second point that has already been explored in the Guard's discussions of Jews: multiple ways of thinking about national inclusion coexisted at different levels during the chaotic period of 1919–20. Even as Guard activists contemplated the national assimilation of Ruthenians in certain localities, the spring of 1920 brought a renewed rhetorical emphasis on the acceptance of Ukrainians, at least those living in what had been the eastern part of the Russian governorate, as a separate and sovereign national group. In April 1920, Polish troops under Piłsudski and those of the Ukrainian People's Republic under Petliura launched a joint invasion of Bolshevik Russia, with the aim of regaining territory for an independent Ukrainian state, while also agreeing that the population of western Volhynia would come within Poland's state borders.Footnote 99 True to its ostensible commitment to Polish cooperation with eastern nations, the Guard began publishing a Ukrainian-language periodical Nash Holos (Our Voice), while from June 1920, Guard personnel in the Łuck region included a new head of “Ukrainian affairs.”Footnote 100 By promoting assimilatory schemes toward Ruthenians alongside policies that accepted certain Ukrainians as members of a separate nation, the Guard redrew national borders according to shifting political and military circumstances.
The Guard's work in Volhynia did not last long. Although the joint Polish-Ukrainian attack on Bolshevik Russia initially seemed to go well, the Red Army swept across Poland in a devastating counter-attack in the summer of 1920, bringing more violence, land seizures, and requisitioning. If the eastward retreat of Bolshevik forces following August's decisive Battle of Warsaw sowed even more chaos, however, the October ceasefire between Poland and Russia saw life in Volhynia gradually settle down. The civil administration was dissolved in September 1920, and the following February, the majority, although not all of the area that the Polish army had occupied in April 1920 became part of a new Polish Volhynian province (województwo wołyńskie). Although some activists continued to file reports on Volhynia during the early 1920s, the Guard's nationwide influence decreased dramatically in peacetime, particularly after the 1922 parliamentary elections.Footnote 101
Despite the Guard's ephemeral institutional lifespan, this article has argued that a close reading of its vision for, and interactions with, Polish-occupied Volhynia in 1919 and 1920 allows historians to question several assumptions about nation- and state-building projects in eastern Europe's borderlands in the aftermath of the First World War. For one, it moves us beyond traditional political accounts of competitions between nation-states or even between different national groups that did not command the formal apparatus of statehood. If such approaches tend to reify the nation, the Guard's documents reveal how the nation functioned as a locally constructed category of practice.Footnote 102 While there is, of course, nothing new in arguing that nationalism cannot be understood without an investigation into how nationalists conceived of borderland populations, studying this set of brokers offers a precise sense of how the contours of the nation were shaped in tandem with the embryonic institutions of statehood.
Second, the somewhat canonical division between civic (“inclusive”) and ethnic (“exclusive”) versions of nationalism faces a challenge if we take an approach that is at once more historically grounded and locally sensitive. When activists constructed an image of Volhynia's Jews in their local press organs, for instance, they seemed to subscribe to civic nationalism, making welcoming statements about Jewish participation and condemning the anti-Semitic image of the nation espoused by the Endecja. At the same time, however, they argued that both “Jewish” Bolshevism and “Jewish” economic behavior kept the region in a state of chaos by depriving local people of food and undermining state authority. While their attitudes toward “Ruthenians” were more paternalistic, Guard personnel also approached them in a dual way, as both potential citizens whose democratic consent needed to be won and political apprentices whose “backward” position on the civilizational gradient meant that their dissenting voices could not be tolerated. In fact, the assimilationist ambitions of some Guard activists, epitomized by their proclivity for talking about “Ruthenians” rather than “Ukrainians,” challenge the idea that they were committed to equality between separate national groups and suggest instead a willingness to experiment with approaches that have been more readily associated with the Polish right. By resisting easy classifications, we might reimagine how dynamics in multiple contested spaces across eastern Europe were both locally conditioned and linked to prevailing global discussions about civilizational hierarchies and the readiness of certain nations to import democracy.
Third, the Guard's proclivity for questioning the Polishness of people who themselves claimed to be Poles also indicates how local constructions of national borders were never simply a matter of clear-cut divisions between Poles, on the one hand, and various non-Poles (whether Jews, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Germans, Czechs, or Russians), on the other. This is not, therefore, a story of “ethnic relations” between preexisting groups. Instead, some kinds of local Polishness, defined in situational terms that included language, religion, affective feelings of belonging, and economic behavior, were deemed to be permissible, while others were not. If this approach confirms the wider ambivalence that national activists frequently felt about nationally indifferent populations in European borderlands, it also suggests a more specific point: as “the state” itself was being formed, the borderland became a place where various self-declared members of the nation asserted divergent models of statehood, economic and class relations, and political power. As such, the ideological categorization of non-Polish populations can be understood only within the context of local, and frequently anxiety-ridden, discussions about what it meant to be truly Polish in a post-imperial space.
Although this article has focused on the period 1919–20, it is worth noting, as a final thought, that the experiences of the Guard activists were no historical anomaly, and to reiterate the now oft-made argument that the divide between Europe's wartime and peacetime societies was not clear.Footnote 103 Indeed, these actors might be usefully analyzed as the first in a long line of people who shaped what “the state” came to mean in Poland's unstable eastern borderlands throughout the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s. In the Guard's wake, an eclectic set of brokers, which included border guards, administrators, town planners, health officials, boy and girl scouts, and academics, made their way into Volhynia's small towns, villages, and marshlands. Each, in their different ways, experienced frustrations about the behavior of local populations, constructed their own sense of what constituted genuine Polishness within this post-imperial borderland, and debated how the borders of the nation might best be calibrated.Footnote 104 Until the eve of the Second World War, they too invoked concepts of inclusion and exclusion, often in ways that elude easy classification, in the service of their idiosyncratic borderland projects.
