Page 278 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Some local people certainly used the stories of Polish national awakening instrumentally in

order to push for their own interests. Indeed, their actions may well have been informed by the

history of instrumental religious conversions in this region, rather than by a deep conviction about

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their family origins. During the 1920s, the Uniate church, a kind of half-way house between Roman
Catholicism and Orthodoxy, had already provided one institutional option for populations dissatisfied

with those Orthodox clergymen who had come to be associated with ignorance and drunkenness,

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neglect at fulfilling their religious obligations, and economic disputes with the populations. In order
to protest against the moral abuses of the clergy and the financial charges they made for weddings

and other services, certain parishes had converted to the Uniate rite, often temporarily, during the

period immediately after the Great War. What is clear is that by the late 1930s, village leaders used

the language of religious return in ways that echoed the state. The audience at the Lidawka

conversion included the heads of other villages in the vicinity, who, according to Polish reports,

“came with the aim of acquainting themselves with the execution of Catholic action in order to carry

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it out in their area.” In the after-service feast, leaders from other local villages declared that the
“spontaneous return to the old religion by the inhabitants of the colony of Lidawka is a valuable

example for other Ruthenized inhabitants to imitate” and promised to “carry out the same action in

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their villages.” In short, the political concept of the “Ruthenized inhabitant”—a figure who had
been subjected to processes of Ruthenization, but was not actually a Ruthenian—had made its way,

however cynically, onto the tongues of local village leaders.

None of these “positive” responses, however, could disguise the fact that plans to reconfigure

the religious and national identities of the populations near the border took place under the threat of

92 The region’s experiences in the 1920s, when officials pushed for the conversion of Orthodox populations to the
Uniate Church, suggested that local attitudes such as the contempt in which parishioners held the Orthodox priest,
played a more practical role in the decision-making process. Kramar, “Problem neounii,” 148.
93 Letter from the Volhynian Provincial Office (1927), DARO 30/18/488/41.
94 “Posterunek Policji Państwowej w Majkowie […],” DARO 86/2/756/60-60od.
95 “Miesięczne sprawozdanie […] za m-c luty 1938r […]” (March 14, 1938), DARO 448/1/1/73od.

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