Page 45 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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under occupation expanded even further to the east (Figure 1.1). In January 1920, by which point
the Civil Administration’s territory had ballooned to an area of 350,000 square kilometers, Volhynia

even received its own administration (Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wołynia i Frontu Podolskiego) with a

separate Commissioner General. Working beyond the authority of the newly elected Polish

parliament, the leaders of the Civil Administration attempted to govern the borderlands in ways that

would prove Poland’s competence as a state to both international and local audiences. Not everyone

supported the effort. Members of the Endecja criticized the vaguely federalist line, arguing that the

Civil Administration undermined Polish national interests and unfairly benefited non-Polish

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populations at the expense of native Poles.

[INSERT FIGURE 1.1]

Figure 1.1: Map of Shifting Dynamics in the Borderland Wars, 1919-1920.

At the very moment when the precise contours of state power were emerging, the Civil

Administration also funded the work of the Borderland Guard, a group that had been set up in

February 1918 in protest against plans for the annexation of what they considered to be the Polish

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region of Chełm to the fledgling Ukrainian Republic. Although those connected with the Guard did

not espouse a single viewpoint, their public pronouncements stressed the importance of defending

and strengthening the Polishness of the kresy, while simultaneously cooperating with other

nationalities based on a valorization of the multiethnic Commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, anti-

imperialism formed a key part of the official message that was disseminated through Melchior

Wańkowicz’s press department in Warsaw. In the first issue of its nationwide journal Eastern Poland

28 Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20 (New York, 1972), 58.
29 One particular damning article in which the Commissioner was accused of undermining Poland’s historical
mission in the east came from the anti-Semite and right-wing nationalist Andrzej Niemojewski. See Niemojewski,
“Komisarz Osmołowski a Litwa,” Myśl Niepodległa, July 26, 1919, 498-503.
30 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 71.

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