Page 248 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

research and political expediency at a time when ministerial bureaucrats were becoming increasingly

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convinced that minority questions constituted a “social-technological” problem. This crossover

between state power and academic knowledge was demonstrated most starkly by the fact that men in

the upper echelons of the military played key roles in directing research initiatives. Tadeusz

Kasprzycki, a general who had been a member of Piłsudski’s legions and went on to hold the

position of Minister for Military Affairs between 1935 and 1939, headed the KNBZW, injecting

much of its work with an emphasis on geopolitical security. In addition, the Society for the

Development of the Eastern Lands (TRZW), the state-supported Warsaw-based organization that

launched tourism initiatives in the kresy, created a new body of knowledge that reduced the region’s

complexity to maps, tables, and graphs.

The statistical version of Volhynia suggested a demographic situation that was far from

encouraging, particularly when it came to the proportion of people who were classified as Poles. By

the mid-1930s, worrying reports about Volhynia were coming in from various quarters. An unnamed

official at the Ministry of the Interior, who penned a 1935 internal report there, compared statistics

from the 1921 and 1931 censuses and recorded “losses” within the Polish national group. While

some counties in Volhynia experienced only a small decrease in the percentage of Poles, he reported,

others were of greater concern— in Luboml county, a dramatic loss of 14.3% had allegedly occurred,

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with the percentage falling from 27.6% to 13.3%. Military reports similarly emphasized that Polish

Roman Catholics (and Jews, for that matter) were becoming a proportionally weaker segment of the

population, losing ground to their Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox counterparts whose birthrates were

considerably higher. In 1935, the army’s Lublin Field Command, under whose jurisdiction Volhynia

7 Aleksander Wysocki, “Regionalizm funkcjonalny w działaniu (na Huculszczyźnie) w świetle dokumentów
Centralnego Archiwum Wojskowego,” Rocznik Archiwalno-Historyczny Centralnego Archiwum Wojskowego 2/31
(2009), 78. The Commission was initiated by the government’s Committee for Nationality Affairs (Komitet do
Spraw Narodowościowych). On the state’s overall approach, see Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 239.
8 “Zagadnienie Ziem Wschodnich w świetle bezpośrednej obserwacji terenu,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 946/7.

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