Page 109 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

international circles, Poland’s attempts to deal with the epidemic were praised, allowing Polish

officials to assert their state’s importance within European medical and political circles, even as its

status as a Western civilized nation remained in some doubt. The author of a League of Red Cross

Societies report from October 1919 had already contrasted Poland—“a nation which possesses

already organized civil and military sanitary departments”—with Russia—“a vast area without any

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civilized form of government or health organization.”
Perceptions of a person’s nationality certainly played an important role when it came to

deciding who should be allowed in and who should be kept out of emerging state borders. Polish

local authorities in the kresy became increasingly suspicious of people whom they categorized as

ethnically non-Polish populations and who attempted to claim Polish citizenship. Such efforts to

exclude non-titular populations in the wake of the war and during a period of shifting state borders

were not limited to Poland, since (as Peter Gatrell reminds us) the new successor states of eastern

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Europe “often defined themselves by excluding minority national groups from membership.” Seen
within this light, Poland certainly had a problem. The majority of the people who flowed across the

eastern border during the winter of 1921-22 did not register as Poles (the percentage of Poles stood at

only 15-20%, with around 65% categorized as Ukrainians and Belarusians), a fact that was

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highlighted, with increasing alarm, by the Warsaw press.
For many observers on the political right, the dire circumstances of the new state were the

fault of non-Polish populations, particularly Jews, who continued to flow across the new border. In a

Polish parliamentary session in February 1922, one National Democratic deputy drew a connection

between the “Jewishness” of these eastern territories and the dangers of Bolshevism, arguing that the

21 “Bulletin of the League of the Red Cross Societies” (Geneva, Switzerland, October 1919) located in HIA LRCS,
Box 2, Folder 32, page 11.
22 Gatrell, A Whole Empire, 9-10.
23 Kumaniecki, “Repatriacja Polaków,” 145.

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