Page 242 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

alienated certain populations by clamping down on school plebiscites, ending the work of

109
cooperatives, and using violence against agitators. For their part, the leadership of the Galician-

based Ukrainian nationalist party UNDO had already warned its supporters in the late 1920s about

the pernicious development of Polish-controlled regional identities. In their eyes, attempts to create

“Volhynians” in the formerly Russian areas (as well as to categorize people as Lemkos, Boikos, and

Hutsuls in the Carpathian mountains) were little more than thinly veiled attempts to denationalize the

Ukrainian masses. 110

Regardless of whether or not people felt Volhynian, a close study of the attempts to create a

regional identity reveals the precise contours of the nominally more inclusive version of Polish

nationalism on the state’s fringes. At the same time as they drew on myths of national plurality,

regionalists necessarily created their own sets of exclusions by purging, or simply ignoring, elements

that did not fit with their view of Polish history. If the Commonwealth remained the model of

diversity in the age of the nation-state, it would always imply that a Pole (and a certain class of Pole,

at that) would decide where the borders of inclusion ended. Just as Wiktor Ormicki had coaxed

people to speak in the dialect that he believed to be authentic, regionalists heard—and amplified—

local voices that fit with their project and marginalized those that did not. There was space in this

vision for Ukrainians through appeals to folkloric tradition and references to Orthodox churches, but

this did not mean that Ukrainians were considered to be civilizationally equal to Poles. Similarly,

regionalists sought to embrace Jews, but they did so by focusing on architectural monuments and

minority ethnographic groups, both of which allowed them to fit the Jewish story into a narrative of

Polish tolerance. If we think back to the image of Łuck’s inhabitants peeping through the cracks in

109 By 1933, Józewski had already stopped school plebiscites from being carried out, arguing that Ukrainian
nationalists used them as a way to carry out anti-state agitation. Kęsik, Zaufany komendanta, 81.
110 Ryszard Tomczyk, Ukraińskie zjednoczenie narodowo-demokratyczne: 1925-1939 (Szczecin, 2006), 98. On the
reaction of Ukrainian natioanalists from eastern Galicia, see Teofil Piotrkiewicz, Kwestia ukraińska w Polsce w
koncepcjach piłsudczyzny 1926-1930 (Warsaw, 1981), 41.

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