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strengthened the national consciousness of the Ukrainian population. In short, the narrative of re-
Polonization did not convince everyone; for many, it looked like Polonization, pure and simple.

However much the revindications may have appeared to be the repressive actions of the

Polish state, conversions were not simply carried out as a top-down process. Like many of the

civilizing projects in the kresy upon which this book has focused, multiple agents, each with their

own priorities and motivations, participated in these actions. Academic support for the program

certainly went beyond the general conceptualization of national indeterminacy to involve practical

assistance. While there were sometimes few differences between peasants as they went about their

everyday lives, ethnographers argued that the petty nobles stood out in several ways: they were

culturally isolated from the surrounding peasantry, maintained matrimonial and social unions with

one another, built their houses differently, and kept hold of old documents that testified to their noble

history. Since the state lacked the manpower and local knowledge to calculate who precisely was

descended from the old nobility, academics were called in to create lists of possible candidates, with

some 150 scholars making up the scientific section of the Committee for the Affairs of the Petty

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Nobility. Some embraced the project wholeheartedly. By the end of 1938, Stanisław Dworakowski

had become the head of the scientific section. He carried out research into the history of localities,

settlements, and families in the eastern counties of both Polesie and Volhynia, and made an

emotional appeal in a book that he wrote on the subject by depicting those “former Poles” who were

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“waiting today for sincere hands, which help to return them to the fatherland.” Others were less

comfortable with the political implications of this work. The regionalist Jakub Hoffman, for instance,

expressed his opposition to what he saw as forced conversions and even wrote in his unpublished

postwar memoirs that the Volhynian Yearbook was able to resist some of the pressures of

81 “Miesięczne sprawozdanie […] za m-c maj 1938r […].” (June 13, 1938), DARO 448/1/1/173od.
82 Giennadij Matwiejew, “Akcja “rewindykacji” na Wołyniu w końcu lat 30-tych,” Przegląd Wschodni 5, no. 4
(1999): 685; Mironowicz, Białorusini i ukraińcy, 201. See also Stawecki, Następcy komendanta, 183.
83 Jolanta Czajkowska, Stanisław Dworakowski – etnograf (Łomża, 2003), 37.

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