Page 12 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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retreated. A political entity called Volhynia could be traced back to the early medieval Kingdom of
Kievan Rus’, which existed between the late ninth and mid-thirteenth centuries. Following the

disintegration of the Kingdom, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania moved southward, claiming Volhynia

and only ceding control to Poland in 1569 as part of the Union of Lublin, which created a sprawling,

decentralized polity known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As the Commonwealth

weakened during the second half of the eighteenth century, the neighboring states of Prussia, Russia,

and Austria saw an opportunity to increase their territories and went about dividing up the Polish-

Lithuanian state through a series of three partitions. As part of the final two partitions, in 1793 and,

more particularly, in 1795, the province of Volhynia was ceded to the Russian empire, which created

a new administrative entity called the Volhynian governorate (guberniia) with a territory that

stretched even further east than its Polish predecessor. From the 1860s onward, the western

borderlands of the Russian empire, including Volhynia, underwent policies of Russification that

attempted to limit the development of Polish, as well as fledgling Ukrainian, nationalism. In the

Polish case, official restrictions were placed on both the Polish language and the Roman Catholic

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Church.

[INSERT FIGURE 0.2]

Figure 0.2: The Provinces of Interwar Poland. Source: Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent
Poland 1921-1939: The Crisis of Constitutional Government (Oxford, 1972), 47. Note the alternative
Anglicized spelling of Volhynia (Volynia).

These historical layers of rule mattered twice over. As well as affecting the development of

institutions, mentalities, and social structures, they enabled Polish nationalists during the nineteenth

13 For a selection of maps depicting the region’s historical borders over time, see Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical
Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle, 2002), particularly maps 4, 5, 6, 7a, 10, 14, 18, 19a, 21, 22a, 24, 36, 37, 38, and
40b.
14 Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western
Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, 2008).

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