Page 49 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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democracy provided an attractive alternative. By virtue of the fact that elections were held by secret
ballot, he stressed, neither the factory owner nor the landowner could dictate how their employees

voted.

Borderland Guard representatives recognized, however, that these proclamations about the

shift from a fundamentally hierarchical political system to one based on the democratic values of

equality and citizenship might not make a strong enough case in the minds of local people. As such,

Guard activists used their local Volhynian newspaper, The Borderland Pole (Polak Kresowy), in

order to present the current moment as nothing less than a return to an erroneously interrupted—and

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democratic—Polish historical trajectory. In rejecting the Russian empire, they argued that its

counterpoint could be found not simply in the contemporary Wilsonian nation-state, but also in an

older version of a native Polish state—the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—of which Volhynia

had been part prior to the late eighteenth century. The fact that this early modern “nobles’

democracy” bore little resemblance to the emerging system of Polish parliamentary politics, with its

universal franchise and fledgling liberal institutions, mattered less than the political value that lay in

propagating myths of democratic continuity.

Patriotic celebrations constituted one way of underlining the historical legitimacy of the new

democratic Polish state. In June 1919, the Guard’s leadership in Volhynia seized the opportunity to

th
commemorate the 350 anniversary of the Union of Lublin, the political agreement through which

Volhynia had become part of the newly formed Commonwealth, and to highlight the continuities

between the historic and present-day “unions” of Poland and Volhynia. After referring to the Union

of Lublin’s foundation, the destruction of the Commonwealth through the “perversity and cunning of

its neighbors,” and the common pains suffered by Volhynia and Poland under Russian imperial

41 “Protokuł zjazdu delegatów połnocnych części powiatów Łuckiego i Rówieńskiego dnia 28 września 1919 r. w
Sarnach,” AAN TSK 239/114.
42 Like many of the Guard’s local newspapers across the occupied regions, Polak Kresowy appealed to a rural
readership. Zielińska, Towarzystwo Straży Kresowej, 160.

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