Page 37 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Following the two Russian revolutions of 1917, a dizzying array of new political groupings—

including Bolsheviks and their White opponents, supporters of the fledgling Ukrainian People’s

Republic under the leadership of Symon Petliura, and a German-backed Ukrainian Hetmanate under

Pavlo Skoropadskyi—came into conflict, both with one another and with the new Polish state. The

situation was as confusing as it was violent.

Long after the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front, and as the basis for political

sovereignty shifted under people’s feet in eastern Europe, Volhynia thus remained the subject of a

much broader set of military and diplomatic competitions, with all sides seeking to convince

international opinion that Volhynia rightly belonged within their state borders. While Polish

statisticians and politicians admitted that ethnic Poles did not constitute a demographic majority in

those areas of the former Russian governorate that they occupied in 1919 and 1920, few were willing

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to give up Poland’s territorial claims to the region. In appeals and pamphlets created for

international audiences, Ukrainian nationalists, like their Lithuanian and Belarusian counterparts in

the more northerly regions of the kresy, challenged Polish claims, drawing on the prevailing

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Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination in an effort to build their own case for national statehood.

As Poles weighed up questions about where the state’s eastern border should be placed, the

traditional camps of Polish nationalism offered alternative answers. Those who supported the new

head of state, Józef Piłsudski, drew on the history of the supposedly tolerant Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth and proposed a Polish-led federation of nations that would act as a buffer against

6 Edward Maliszewski, “Żywioł polski na Wołyniu,” Ziemia, December 31, 1919, 620.
7 S. Shelukhim, Ukraine, Poland and Russia and The Right of the Free Disposition of the Peoples (Washington, DC,
1919). Maps provided by the Ukrainian delegation depicted the whole of the Russian governorate of Volhynia, as
well as some areas further west, as part of Ukraine. See Mémoire sur l'indépendance de l'Ukraine présenté à la
Conférence de la paix par la délégation de la république ukrainienne (Paris, 1919). The Ukrainian geographer
Stefan Rudnyts’kyi’s ethnographic map of Ukraine, which included Volhynia, relied on the idea that Ukrainians
formed a demographic majority. Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of
Empire (Chicago, 2012), 256-7.

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