Page 267 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

consciousness, the report’s author dismissed the results of the 1931 census, which had stated that

around 70% of the population of Sarny and Kowel counties was Ukrainian and argued instead that

the term “Ukrainian” should not have been offered on the census at all. Unlike the inhabitants of the

administrative province of Polesie to the north, these populations had not been offered the

opportunity to identify as “locals” on the 1931 census. If such a category had been included, he

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insisted, they would not have identified themselves as Ukrainian.
The geographer Wiktor Ormicki, whom we first met in the previous chapter, was a strong

proponent of internal colonization. In a paper he wrote for the Ministry of the Interior in 1937, he

echoed the language of “resistance zones” in order to argue that the state needed to “stabilize the

dominance of the Polish element” through a settlement program. According to Ormicki’s report, the

southern areas of the borderlands that had previously been under Austrian rule would present the

strongest resistance to incoming Polish settlers because of their more developed levels of national

consciousness; Sarny county in the northern part of the Volhynian province, which shared many of

the physical qualities of Polesie, would offer up the least resistance; and the geographically in-

between counties, which included Luboml, Włodzimierz, Kowel, Kostopol, and Łuck, would offer a

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medium amount. Beginning in 1937, Ormicki and the broader Department of Populations and

Migration in the IBSN that he had headed since the previous year, pushed for such programs through

their personal conversations with state officials across a range of Polish ministries.

Ormicki’s proposals for top-down internal colonization schemes stood in sharp contrast to his

support in the late 1920s and early 1930s for the more bottom-up collection of regional knowledge.

As the historian Eugeniusz Mironowicz points out, by the late 1930s Ormicki displayed an attitude

that might more readily be associated with an authoritarian regime, and he seemed little concerned

58 “Zagadnienie Ziem Wschodnich w świetle bezpośredniej obserwacji terenu,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 946/50. The
other zones of colonization on the map, including those of the western Volhynian county of Włodzimierz and the
province of Tarnopol, were based on political and security reasons, rather than on a lack of national consciousness.
59 Wiktor Ormicki, “Perspektywy osadnictwa wewnętrznego,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 955A/5.

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