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certainly proved appealing to those who wished to question Ukrainian nationalist claims to these

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populations. But looking beyond the mountainous regions of the south, the Commission also

concentrated on the supposedly proto-national populations of Polesie, a landscape as picturesque as

that of the Carpathians, but one characterized by another geographical impediment to modernity—

marshlands.

The Polesian province (województwo poleskie) was the poorest province in the state (even

poorer than its southern neighbor, Volhynia) and was inhabited by what many academics believed

were “Polesians” (poleszucy), an ethnic group that had been only minimally touched by the forces of

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modern nationalism. The engineering of categories on the 1931 census had already downplayed the

idea that these populations possessed a national consciousness as either Belarusians or Ukrainians.

Offered the option to identify as “locals” (tutejsi) when it came to their native tongue, 62% of

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Polesie’s population had categorized themselves as such. Critically, however, the Commission was

not simply interested in Polesie as an administrative province, but instead funded research into the

region of geographical Polesie, which included vast swaths of the northern part of the Volhynian

administrative province. In fact, Volhynia had long been imagined as divided into two parts, with the

northern areas featuring a marshier landscape, lower population densities, and poorer arable land than

those in the south.

The administrative territories of northern Volhynia and southern Polesie had thus frequently

been seen—by Poles and non-Poles alike—as a space of human and geographical transition, one that

30 Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto, 1996), 638. See also Chojnowski, Koncepcje polityki
narodowościowej, 198-200.
31 Polesie had lower population density, fewer paved roads, higher illiteracy rates, and a larger proportion of land
deemed unsuitable for agriculture than Volhynia. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Z dziejów Polesia, 1921-1939 (Warsaw,
1963), particularly Chapter 6.
32 The commission’s first congress dedicated to the eastern lands, which was held in Warsaw in September 1936,
focused on Polesie. The commission’s president, Leon Wasilewski, stated that linguistic research might be
particularly interesting if it were to focus on the awakening of ethnic consciousness. I Zjazd Naukowy Poświęcony
Ziemiom Wschodnim w Warszawie 20 i 21 września 1936r. Polesie (Sprawozdanie i dyskusje) (Warsaw, 1938), 35.

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