Page 268 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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with the social and emotional costs of moving individual human beings in such radical ways.
Indeed, even when Ormicki came to doubt that the national structure of the eastern borderlands could

be changed fundamentally through an internal settlement program alone, he did so not based on the

ethical problems with moving people, but rather because of what he saw to be its practical

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limitations. And yet Ormicki’s seemingly puzzling transition is not so strange if we consider that

the Sanacja project had long emphasized the mobilization of populations for the greater good of the

state, advocated for the use of technocratic methods and personnel, and demonstrated an ambivalent

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attitude toward liberal-democratic institutions and practices. If the Ormicki of 1929 and the

Ormicki of 1937 both saw themselves as servants of the state who believed that the kresy constituted

a fundamental part of the Second Republic, their evolving sense of how integration could take place

mirrored the broader political transformations of the intervening decade.

Despite the reanimation of discussions about internal colonization, however, it was becoming

increasingly clear that external colonization offered a more fruitful answer to Poland’s

overpopulation problem. But if people could not be moved to the eastern borderlands to make those

areas more Polish, could internal borders be moved around them? On a local level, this kind of

modification to administrative boundaries had already become part and parcel of life in Volhynia.

Not only had governors squabbled over the administrative borders between their provinces, but

proposals were constantly being discussed about changes on the level of the county (powiat) and

district (gmina) units, which local people resisted or embraced based on their own sense of how such

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changes would affect the patterns of everyday life. Nevertheless, by the late 1930s, the concept of
national indeterminacy in northern Volhynia was coming to form the academic basis for a much

60 Mironowicz, Białorusini i ukraińcy, 232.
61 Grott, Instytut Badań Spraw Narodowościowych i Komisja Naukowych Badań Ziem Wschodnich, 147.
62 Katrin Steffen, “Experts and the Modernization of the Nation: The Arena of Public Health in Poland in the First
Half of the Twentieth Century,” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, 61, no. 4 (2013): 585.
63 See the various documents in AAN MSW (Part 1) 267.

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