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more effective protection along the Polish-Soviet border (see Figure 7.2). Not only was war at the
front of their minds, but the supposedly inviolable borders of the Versailles peace settlement
appeared to be increasingly fluid. While Hitler’s aggressive stance toward eastern Europe offered
new opportunities to redraw borders in Poland’s favor—Germany’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in
the autumn of 1938 had led, for instance, to a Polish annexation of Silesian Cieszyn (Czech: Těšín)—
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they also sparked fears of an imminent invasion.
The conceptual categories that were being increasingly normalized in academic circles
therefore mattered. In particular, and as had been the case with internal colonization schemes,
justifications for the precise locations of the new administrative borders were based on the now
widely accepted idea that the populations of northern Volhynia were proto-national Polesians who
needed to be protected from Ukrainianizing influences—either those coming from the former lands
of eastern Galicia to the south or those that had been fostered by Józewski himself. The military cited
research into national indeterminacy among Volhynia’s populations, which had been carried out by
the Commission for Scientific Research into the Eastern Lands, and argued that the transitional lands
of northern Volhynia needed to be considered as “the most urgent issue” from a military point of
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view. By detaching these areas from Volhynia and moving them to a Polesian province, military
leaders aimed to form an administrative region that would be inhabited by what they believed was a
proto-national “Polesian” population. This, in turn, would create a belt for the penetration of Polish
populations from the west to the east and a partition against Ukrainian expansion from the south.
67 Ibid., 18.
68 Enclosure Nr. 2, with letter from the Ministry of Military Affairs to the Ministry of the Interior (December 13,
1937), AAN MSW (Part 1) 178/19.
69 Letter from the Ministry of Military Affairs to the Ministry of the Interior (May 2, 1938), AAN MSW (Part 1)
178/14.
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