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more radical, state-centered scheme that aimed fundamentally to reconfigure the administrative

provinces of the east. The regionalist approach, which focused on gradual change through building

up associational life, sharing knowledge of Volhynia’s traditions and history, and, most profoundly

of all, an acceptance that Volhynia constituted a viable political, cultural, and social unit gave way to

a more explicitly authoritarian approach. Ironically, this new faith in the ability of administrative

changes to transform people’s attitudes and identities echoed schemes that had been pursued in the

Soviet Union, Poland’s foe across the border.

If the idea of creating administrative solutions to political problems in the borderlands was

not entirely new, the task was now being led by those in the upper echelons of the Polish army, an

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institution whose power was in the ascendancy. Their work began not in the east, but rather in the
western part of the state. In 1938, on the basis of a law from the previous year, changes were made to

the provincial borders of Poznań and Pomerania, which allowed Polish authorities to, in their eyes at

least, isolate the “German problem” to the borders of the Pomeranian province and deal with it

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there. Plans to reconfigure internal boundaries in the east, where the threat came not from Nazi
Germany but from the Soviet Union, also allowed the army to increase its levels of political control.

In 1937, the Lublin field command argued that the state’s administrative provinces must be

“completely wedded to military borders” and, at the end of that year, military authorities sent a letter

to the Ministry of the Interior, detailing plans to change the political organization of the kresy so that

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“military demands” would be connected to “the demands of ethnic politics.” Their proposals did

away with the large provinces of Volhynia and Polesie as they currently stood and instead proposed a

new set of small provinces, featuring the kinds of dense administrative networks that would allow for

64 In particular, see Julian Suski, “Zagadnienie podziału RP na Okręgi Wojewódzkie,” Ziemia, March 15, 1928, , 82-
6; Stanisław Arnold, “W sprawie podziału RP na Województwa,” Ziemia, May 1, 1928, 130-33.
65 See Mielcarek, Podzialy terytorialno-administracyjne, 59.
66 Letter from the Military Division to the Ministry of the Interior on the third phase of dividing the administration
(December 13, 1937), AAN MSW (Part 1) 178/18.

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