Page 273 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Poland (Komitet Spraw Szlachty Zagrodowej na Wschodzie Polski) was founded in Warsaw in

February 1938 as an autonomous unit within the TRZW. In Volhynia, a regional committee of the

Petty Nobles Union had also organized 127 circles with around 5,000 members in total by January

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1939.
Religious conversion from Orthodox Christianity or Greek Catholicism to Roman

Catholicism offered one method of “reawakening” the national identities of the petty nobles (based

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on the idea that only Roman Catholics could be true Poles). Such conversion schemes had not
always attracted Polish state authorities. Pope Pius XI’s attempts to create a new eastern rite church

that would allow Orthodox populations to carry on as usual, while introducing celibacy among

members of the clergy and requiring clergymen to report to Latin rite bishops, had met a lukewarm

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reception in the mid-1920s. But a decade later, representatives of the Polish state, particularly the
military, began to utilize similar methods in their own interests. By December 1936, under the

direction of the district commander in Lublin, a coordinating committee was tasked with liquidating

Orthodox churches and chapels in the strip around the Bug river in Volhynia, as well as carrying out

what became known as religious revindications.

In some ways, the supporters of revindications and the proponents of Volhynian regionalism

shared a common assumption—they each believed that the Russian empire had taken the region’s

history along a defective path and they each claimed that they were simply returning Volhynia to its

pre-partition traditions. Like the regionalists who openly used the language of reviving Polish

national traditions of diversity in Volhynia, those who supported the revindications argued that the

75 Stawecki, Następcy komendanta, 185.
76 The Polish Army’s idea that only Roman Catholics could be true “Poles” found expression in the Lublin Field
Command’s policies in the Chełm area of Lublin county to the west of Volhynia where churches were demolished
and people forced to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1938. See Stawecki, Następcy komendanta, 188-201.
77 Dennis J. Dunn, The Catholic Church and Soviet Russia, 1917-39 (Oxford, 2017): 65-67; Jurij Kramar, “Problem
neounii na Wołyniu w okresie międzywojennym,” in Polacy i kościół rzymskokatolicki na Wołyniu w latach 1918-
1997: materiały z międzynarodowej sesji naukowej zorganizowanej w Lublinie w dniach 9-10 grudnia 1997 r.,
edited by Leon Popek (Lublin, 1999), 143-153. On the history of Uniates, see also Weeks, Nation and State, 172-
189.

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