Page 139 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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(miasteczka)—with often quite unclear results. In the early 1920s, officials at the National Statistics
Office in Warsaw noted that considerable confusion still reigned over the legal status of urban

settlements in the formerly Russian provinces, and they undertook the task of classifying towns based

on data from the 1921 census. Under the broad heading of “towns” they separated out actual “towns”

from “small towns”—the former being defined as localities that had possessed municipal rights

(ustrój miejski) in the Russian empire and were home to over 4,000 inhabitants, the latter covering

settlements of a “small town character” (o charakterze miasteczkowym) that had a population of

between 2,000 and 4,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, a settlement could be classed as either a miasto or

a miasteczko if the temporary Civil Administration that had ruled Volhynia prior to the area’s official

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integration into the state had extended an individual decree granting it municipal law. To make
matters even more confusing, settlements of less than 2,000 people could be listed as having the

characteristics of a miasteczko, even though they formally came under the authority of a rural

administrative unit (gmina wiejska). This meant that a village (wieś) could boast a larger population

than a miasteczko.

While the official classification of towns described above was important, in the broader

Polish discussions on which this chapter focuses, a settlement’s “urban-ness” was based on neither its

sheer population size nor its precise legal status, but rather on more quotidian characteristics: its

historical and contemporary economic roles, physical layout, and demographic composition. In the

post-imperial moment, representatives of the new state sought to expunge what they saw as artificial

and damaging Russian influences from these urban landscapes, to peel back the layers of “foreign”

rule, and to reveal the Polishness that lay buried underneath. If the renaming of streets was one way

to do this, guidebooks, postcards, and geographical texts that were published throughout the interwar

9 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton,
2014), 13-21; Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “The Shtetl: An Ethnic Town in the Russian Empire,” Cahiers du monde russe 41,
no. 4 (2000): 497-498.
10 Skorowidz miejscowości Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej: Tom IX: Województwo wołyńskie (Warsaw, 1923), vi.

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