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faced here since the beginning of Polish rule: How could Poles fully impress themselves onto the

local environment without becoming degraded by its uncivilized influences?

USEFUL NON-POLES ON THE URBAN PERIPHERY

After the arrival of governor Józewski in 1928, his supporters also attempted to answer this tricky

question by prioritizing the expansion of town boundaries into surrounding settlements that were

home to mainly non-Jewish populations. It would not be enough, they believed, to concentrate Polish

elites in a particular space within the towns; rather, the towns would have to become Polish in their

own right. In using expansion as a nationalizing technique, they embarked on a process of

administrative standardization that was occurring all over the Polish state. But if towns in the less

ethnically diverse regions of Poland also looked to decrease “Jewish influence” by annexing

settlements inhabited by Polish-speaking Catholics, what is striking about the expansion of Łuck, and

indeed of other towns in Volhynia, is the role that state officials assigned to non-Polish Christians on

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the fringes of urban space.
In the case of Łuck, data from 1926 that was provided by the office of the administrative

unit (gmina) of Poddębce (one of the main areas into which the town would expand) indicated the

mixed nationalities of those who lived on the urban periphery. According to these statistics, which

included both permanent residents and tenants, the village of Jarowica was inhabited by 408

Ruthenians, 230 Poles, and eight Jews, while the village of Dworzec was home to 187 Ruthenians,

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69 Jews, 42 Poles, 28 Czechs, and 24 Germans. By expanding the town’s borders to include this
mixture of populations, Polish elites thus attempted to mobilize Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox

Christians whom they generally considered to be a backward population. This meant that a group

60 In his memoir on the Galician town of Tarnobrzeg, the former mayor described a similar plan to reduce Jewish
“control” by incorporating Christians from surrounding settlements. See Jan Słomka, From Serfdom to Self-
government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842-1927 (London, 1941), 267.
61 Letter to the head of Łuck County (December 16, 1926), AAN MSW (Part 1) 299.

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