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absurd situations like that in the border town of Ostróg, where population statistics were allegedly

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incorrect by a margin of 6,000 people. Before the creation of comprehensive state-supported

academic research about the kresy, a topic we will explore in the next chapter, it was the regional

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committees that distributed local information to state officials. In 1929, Volhynia’s committee
published a basic almanac, The Volhynian Province in the Light of Numbers and Facts, and planned

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further monographs on farming and tax policies. But the regionalist project was about much more
than simply collecting information; instead, it spoke to a larger set of questions about how diverse

citizens might become connected to both the state and one another in a post-imperial and

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geopolitically fragile borderland.

If Soviet and Polish officials shared the broader modernizing impulse toward rational

classification, they came up with fundamentally different conclusions about the role of territorial-

administrative units. In the 1920s, Soviet officials went about relinquishing the pre-revolutionary

units of imperial administrative space, which they saw as “an obsolete vestige of premodern spatial

organisation,” and instead rearranged the administrative landscape into a series of complex, often

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nesting, territories, each based on a population’s putative national and ethnic identities. In contrast,

the Polish state eschewed territorial autonomy and instead placed its faith in institutions that built up

10 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 27. On defective methodologies, see the letter from the mayor of
Ostróg to the Ministry of the Interior (Dep. Samorząd Miejski), DARO 239/2/51/41. For a similar situation in
Dubno, see Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 68.
11 “Protokół zebrania naczelników władz i urzędników podlegających bezpośrednio władzom naczelnym, odbytego
w Urzędzie Wojewódzkim Wołyńskim w Łucku w dniu 16 lipca 1929,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 69/90.
12 “Protokół zebrania naczelników władz i urzędników podlegających bezpośrednio władzom naczelnym,” 90.
13 Writing in a special 1925 edition of the journal Ziemia, which was dedicated to the theme, the agricultural
economist Witold Staniewicz, who would later become Piłsudski’s minister for farming reform, argued that
regionalism both emulated the traditions of the Jagiellonian idea and bound people to the modern state. See Witold
Staniewicz, “Zagadnienie regjonalizmu w Polsce,” Ziemia, January 1925, 2-4.
14 The quotation is from Nick Baron. See Baron, “Nature, Nationalism and Revolutionary Regionalism:
Constructing Soviet Karelia, 1920-1923,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 3 (2007): 568. There is a large
literature on the ways in which Soviet officials transformed the administrative organization of the state in order to
emphasize, and even in some cases to create, national groups. See Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Ronald
Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford,
1993); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic
Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 415–52; Khalid, Making Uzbekistan.

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