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proactive construction of Ukrainian institutions within the framework of the Polish state. By

questioning the existence of a national Ukrainian identity, various groups opened up new avenues for

pursuing aggressive nationalizing policies toward these populations, while simultaneously arguing

that they were acting peacefully.

Accepting that the construction of national indeterminacy was politically expedient does not

mean denying the fact that national loyalties were amorphous and situational in the kresy. As

historians have pointed out, populations in borderland areas in general, and in the historic

19
borderlands between Poland and Russia in particular, did not always prioritize national identities.

Considering the hundreds of years of settlement by various populations, the range of Russian

nationality politics that had been implemented over the long nineteenth century, and the lack of

“modern” conditions like standardized schooling and high literacy rates, Volhynia’s populations did

not identify in primarily national terms, at least not in the way that modern nationalists thought that

20
they should. Indeed, much of the evidence suggests that the everyday behavior of the area’s
populations profoundly frustrated state officials in the Soviet Union and Poland alike.

On the Soviet side of the border, the authorities found that the population’s diversity—its

myriad dialects, customs, and ways of life—caused problems for state-led attempts to create clear-cut

boundaries, neat categories, and the kinds of homogenous national groups that would form the basis

of their modern vision of administrative and political order. On attempting to take stock of

nationality, for instance, Soviet officials were told that people spoke the “Catholic language,” “in the

21
peasant way,” or “the language of here.” In Poland, officials who attempted to collect statistical
data faced similar frustrations. Leon Wasilewski, one of the co-architects of the Polish-Soviet border

19 On national identities not being clear-cut in the kresy, see Olga Linkiewicz, “Peasant Communities in Interwar
Poland’s Eastern Borderlands: Polish Historiography and the Local Story,” Acta Poloniae Historica 109 (2014), 17–
36.
20 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York,
2006).
21 Brown, A Biography of No Place, 39.

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