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and shaping the region’s populations in ways that were beneficial for the state. It transformed

backwardness from a purely negative characteristic into something else—opportunity.

The political debates of the mid-to-late 1930s thus revolved around this question: to what

extent had people’s national identity already become fixed as Ukrainian? For supporters of Józewski,

Ukrainians had indeed moved beyond the stage of “indifferent ethnic material” and instead

constituted a “tight-knit mass, conscious of their national separateness,” a development that needed

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to be accepted so that policies toward these populations could be carried out effectively. In this
context, language mattered, with Józewski’s supporters—both Polish and Ukrainian—pushing for the

use of the term “Ukrainian” over “Ruthenian,” which was preferred by the Endeks. If, in 1937,

Ukrainian parliamentary representatives from Volhynia admitted that Ukrainian populations in

Volhynia were characterized by “ignorance, backwardness, and illiteracy,” they still argued that these

people were Ukrainian at the most basic level, and they lodged complaints about the ongoing use of

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the term “Ruthenian” in school textbooks. For those on the Polish right, however, the
recategorization of Józewski’s “Ukrainians” as nationally indeterminate populations justified

simultaneous policies of Polonization and modernization. When a 1938 article in the National

Democratic journal National Thought claimed that the more liberal policies of the period after

Piłsudski’s coup had caused an underground battle of “the so-called Ukrainian elements with

Polishness,” the inclusion of the phrase “so-called” indicated their ongoing dismissal of Ukrainian as

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a genuine national identity in the first place.

While the National Democrats had long resisted the idea that the vast majority of Volhynia’s

inhabitants were Ukrainians, research commissioned by the Sanacja government increasingly relied

on arguments about national indeterminacy too. The historian, politician, and supporter of Piłsudski,

26 Wołoszynowski, Nasz Wołyń, 15.
27 See “Memorjał Ukraińskiej Parlamentarnej Reprezentacji Wołynia” (1937), DARO 478/1/3/13.
28 “Na polskim Wołyniu,” Myśl Narodowa, September 25, 1938, 639.

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