Page 260 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

In fact, he went on, the opposite process needed to occur—some of the other districts (gminy) in

northern Volhynia should be disconnected from that province and included in Polesie instead. A

1926 letter from the Polesian provincial office stated that the populations in the gmina of Górniki in

41
Kowel county possessed a “Polesian”—rather than a “Ukrainian-Volhynian”—character.
While these arguments occurred among Polish state officials, attempts to highlight the not-

yet-national characteristics of local populations naturally irked Ukrainian nationalists who had long

claimed that these people were members of their fully developed (and sovereign) Ukrainian nation.

Indeed, for them, the Polish language of national indeterminacy and the emphasis on local

characteristics were effectively part of a broader process of denationalization. In response to the

Polish state’s decision to move Sarny county from the Polesian to the Volhynian province in 1930, an

article in the Lwów-based Ukrainian-language journal The Deed (Dilo) argued that the southern part

of Polesie was populated by nothing less than “a purely Ukrainian type” who lived according to

42
Ukrainian customs and spoke in a northern dialect of the Ukrainian language. Indicating the more
general importance of using academic studies to support national claims, the article’s author cited

research completed by a former Warsaw University professor of Belarusian heritage, Yefim Karskiy

(known in Polish as Jauchim Karski), who had argued that the area inhabited by a Belarusian nation

stretched far to the north of Pińsk and that the people to the south must therefore be of Ukrainian

43
stock.

By the beginning of the 1930s, then, there had already been a history of arguments, both

among Poles and between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists, over the region’s national, ethnic,

geographical, and civilizational characteristics that were rarely divorced from battles over its political

41 Letterr from Polesian provincial office to the Ministry of the Interior (April 27, 1926), AAN MSW (Part 1) 175
t.1/112.
42 “Podil Polissia,” Dilo, January 23, 1931, 1.
43 At a Polish academic conference on Polesie in 1936, scholars also referred to the fact that Ukrainian academics
claimed areas that stretched all the way up to the so-called Karski line. See I Zjazd Naukowy Poświęcony Ziemiom
Wschodnim w Warszawie 20 i 21 września 1936r. Polesie, 63.

260