Page 48 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

outdated autocratic principles of the Russian empire and the contemporary anarchy of Bolshevism,

which threatened to engulf Volhynia as part of an emerging civil war in the formerly imperial

borderlands. The fact that their claims relied on a rather cartoonish and static characterization of

empire underlined both the legacy of Polish underground politics in the Russian empire and the

rhetorical power of the imperial-democratic dichotomy at the Wilsonian moment.

At meetings with local populations in the summer and fall of 1919, Guard activists

articulated what they claimed were the local benefits of imperial-to-democratic transition. In Łuck

county in July 1919, Stefan Kapuściński explained that a system based on legal equality was in

everyone’s best interests. “What does it mean that the law is universal?” Kapuściński asked

rhetorically, “It means that every citizen, after coming of age, regardless of sex, has the right to

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vote.” Even a Polish woman could go to the ballot box, Kapuściński went on, although his focus on
her value as a mother who “brought up and maintained the seedbed of Polish rebellion in the souls of

her sons” betrayed the ways in which revolutionary appeals to civic equality remained entwined with

traditional gender norms. The distinction between the political heads of the two systems was also

made clear. Poland’s head of state, Józef Piłsudski, “is not a tsar” who represented a single social

class, Kapuściński insisted, but was instead “a man chosen by the whole nation” (a claim that was, in

fact, not strictly true, since Piłsudski had never been directly elected by the population at large). At

another meeting that September, Antoni Zalewski echoed Kapuściński’s message, claiming that

democratically decreed laws, as opposed to those created through a system of autocracy, benefited

the inhabitants of Volhynia who had long suffered under imperial rule. If the Russian system had

been based on the law of the tsar “who, with just a stroke of the pen, settled the fate of millions and

didn’t consider if the law was good or bad for ordinary people (lud),” Zalewski argued that Polish

40 “Protokuł zjazdu delegatów ludności polskiej powiatu Łuckiego dnia 27 lipca 1919 roku,” AAN TSK 239/18.

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