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years after the region’s formal incorporation into Poland, officials asked if the towns really offered
the key to making Volhynia a fully integrated part of the Polish state. In fact, Volhynia’s towns still
77
presented a worrying paradox; they were nothing less than “towns without townspeople!” With the
“Jewish question” in Volhynia’s towns far from resolved, Sanacja officials asked themselves if
modernization might more effectively be pursued in the countryside where Jews were less common.
What they found, however, was that the Volhynian countryside presented a no less vexing set of
problems, which also brought the difficult issues of nationalism, civilization, and backwardness
together—and which could not be so easily untangled from the urban question, after all.
77 “Czego brak najbardziej miastom Wołyńskim? (Dwie odpowiedzi),” Wołyń, April 23, 1933, 2.
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