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waned and new schemes of state-led demographic transformation gained traction. But this bird’s eye

view must be balanced with a sure-footed grounding in a finite physical place, a position that can be

achieved only by an immersion in local archives. Before we meet the people who translated global

concepts into a dizzying array of local situations, let us journey into the multiethnic, nationally

contested, and “backward” eastern province of Volhynia. It was here, after all, that the journalist

penned his civilizational lament in 1936.

PLACES: RELATIVIZING CIVILIZATION IN VOLHYNIA

Like all regions, the interwar province of Volhynia (województwo wołyńskie) was both a real

physical place, made up of people, animals, landscapes, and buildings, and an imagined space that

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conjured up certain narratives, connotations, and tropes. Covering just over 30,000 square
kilometers, the province was home to one-and-a-half million people, according to the 1921 census.

Geographically, it was sandwiched between the swamplands of Polesie, better known as the Pripet

Marshes, to the north and the hillier lands of Podolia to the south. Its landscape reflected this physical

transition, with virtually every account of Volhynia’s geography from the interwar years describing

an internally divided region. In the south was “Volhynia proper” (Wołyń właściwy), a country of

gentle hills and fertile soils that was positioned on the Volhynian-Podolian plateau at around 200

meters above sea level. In contrast, the northern region shared many of its characteristics with the

southern part of Polesie, leading to the unofficial name “Volhynian Polesie” (Polesie wołyńskie).

Here the land was marshy, low-lying, and frequently covered in thick forests, with flooding and

poorer soils making conditions unfavorable for the kind of agriculture that flourished further south.

11 As the scholar Alexander Murphy reminds us, the problem with some regional studies is that they use the region
as the backdrop, “with little consideration given to why the region came to be a socially significant spatial unit in the
first place, how the region is understood and viewed by its inhabitants, or how and why that understanding has
changed over time.” Cited in Celia Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-
National Places in Modern Times,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1181.

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