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the pendulum toward the right-wing nationalism of the early-to-mid-1920s, the story is, in fact, much

more complicated. As this chapter will show, the shift emerged in concert with a deeper combination

of factors, which included anxieties about the weaknesses of Polish demographic power in an

increasingly unstable international system, a broader pan-European emphasis on state-led “solutions”

to demographic “problems,” and the Sanacja’s own long-standing reliance on technocratic

approaches to national diversity. All of these factors predated 1935.

When seeking out the actors who effected change in Volhynia, we must once again cast our

net beyond political decision-makers in Warsaw and toward those second-tier actors whose work

undid many of the epistemological bases of Józewski’s political vision of the nation. Most

importantly, scholars and academics constituted key players in the development of a new type of

eastern civilizing mission, one that dispensed with a faith in gradual progress and cooperation

between national groups at a regional level. While never simply government stooges, these men were

part of a broader professional class across Europe that provided the basis for the “rationalization and

3
standardization of diversity.” By reconstructing knowledge about spaces and peoples—and, more
specifically, by creating and circulating conceptual categories that were becoming normalized by the

late 1930s—these men reimagined the kresy in ways that had far-reaching consequences for

Volhynia’s non-Polish populations.

Put simply, the mid-to-late 1930s witnessed the unfolding of two parallel processes: the

unfixing of the kind of Ukrainian identity that had been cultivated by Józewski’s supporters and the

fixing of previously more fluid and ambiguous versions of Jewishness. These ostensibly opposite

developments operated in concert with one another. By denying the complexity of local identities,

they provided scientific fuel for increasingly illiberal, authoritarian, and discriminatory policies. As

the idea that people could simultaneously become useful citizens of the modern state and assert their

3 “From the Editors,” Ab Imperio (2016) no. 2, 13.

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