Page 51 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

was a different kind of consent than one achieved through the ballot box. But it was consent

nonetheless.

A narrative of national inclusivity, which also drew on the anti-imperial rhetoric of the

Piłsudskiite left and their valorization of the Commonwealth, was consistently highlighted on the

pages of the newspaper. During the festivities for the Union of Lublin anniversary in June 1919, The

Borderland Pole reported that a group of “Ruthenians” who had traveled from a town over 30

kilometers from Łuck carried signs that read “For your Freedom and Ours” in the Cyrillic script. As

such, the group was shown not only to be recalling a Polish slogan that had been popularized during

the insurrection against the Russian empire under Tsar Nicholas I in 1830-1, but also of doing so in a

way that emphasized the linguistic and national plurality of Poland’s anti-imperial project during the

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nineteenth century. The newspaper’s editors similarly welcomed the civic participation of
Volhynia’s Jews, who made up the majority population in the area’s towns. When an article about

celebrations in Kowel praised the town’s Jewish populations for demonstrating “their connections

with the experiences of the Polish people,” its author drew on Polish Romantic traditions of

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Judeophilia. Failing to mention the internationally condemned pogroms that Polish forces had been

accused of carrying out in the eastern cities of Pińsk, Lwów, and Lida during 1919, its author

conflated prewar pogroms in the Russian empire and those orchestrated more recently by Ukrainian

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and White imperial forces. Volhynia’s Jews, he suggested, would gain protection in a new

democratic state that rejected imperialism in all of its ugly forms.

This idea of decoupling Volhynia from pernicious eastern influences and connecting it back

to an imagined “West” certainly provided local people—both those who were identified as ethnic

Poles and those who were not—with public opportunities to write themselves into the emerging state

47 Ibid., 2.
48 “Obchody narodowe w Kowlu,” Polak Kresowy, July 20, 1919, 4.
49 Ibid., 4.

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