Page 244 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER SEVEN:
MAKING VOLHYNIA POLISH (AGAIN)

By the mid-1930s, the political predicament of Poland’s so-called national minorities looked bleaker

than ever. The death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935 resulted in a sharp turn to the right, with the

Marshal’s epigones rejecting the doctrine of state assimilation and instead taking on many of the

programs that had been traditionally associated with the Endecja. As they gazed toward the eastern

borderlands, members of the upper echelons of the Polish army also saw the region’s ethnic, national,

and religious diversity as a security threat, one that became more intense as the fragile European

order began to break down. In Volhynia, where conflicts between the military and Józewski’s

civilian administration had long existed, the army pushed against the governor’s more tolerant

1
policies toward the national minorities. In April 1938, Aleksander Hauke-Nowak, a man whose less
conciliatory approach toward the non-Polish populations was more in step with the right-wing mood

across Europe, replaced a weakened Józewski. Personnel and institutional changes were matched by

an aggressive transformation in language, with a more blatant emphasis on Polish civilizational

2
superiority over the non-Polish Slavs of the kresy replacing slogans of regional brotherhood. The

virulent strains of anti-Semitism that proponents of the Sanacja had openly rejected, including calls

for economic boycotts against Jewish citizens, also gained political traction, even in circles that had

previously supported Piłsudski.

Like the 1926 coup that had brought Piłsudski to power, his death certainly marked a

watershed in the political history of the Second Republic. But, on its own, it cannot explain the

radicalization in approaches toward the state’s minorities. Indeed, while the late 1930s can be read as

the ideological bulldozing of Piłsudski’s civic nationalism or, alternatively, as the swinging back of

1 On the deteriorating relationship between the Polish Army’s Lublin Field Command no. 2 and Józewski, see
Snyder, Sketches, 156-161.
2 Piotr Stawecki, Następcy komendanta: wojsko a polityka wewnętrzna Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1935-
1939 (Warsaw, 1969), 165-168.

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