Page 55 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Czech- and German-speaking colonists. Urban demographics looked quite different. The character of

larger towns (miasta) was shaped predominantly by the high percentage of Jews and ethnic Russians

(including former imperial officials), even if they were also home to Polish-speaking minorities;

small towns (miasteczka in Polish or shtetlekh in Yiddish) had an even higher percentage of Jews,

mainly small traders and artisans. In short, the Guard’s activists, who formally valorized democracy

and rejected all things imperial, had to contend with the confusing and complex intersections

between national, class, and economic distinctions in these various localities.

As might be expected, the anti-imperialism of the Guard’s leaders meant that they perceived

the region’s ethnic Russians as deeply problematic. Not only were these people the symbols of hated

imperialism, but their presence also implied that Polish rule was not permanent and that the empire

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might return as soon as the Poles defeated the Bolsheviks. And yet because class and nation did not
always overlap in neat ways in the borderlands, competitions also occurred between people who

identified as Polish but who had played different roles during the period of late imperial rule. In

particular, the Guard’s activists criticized Polish landowners whom they believed had functioned

relatively comfortably in the Russian empire and had little interest in operating according to the

Guard’s new vision of democracy. Many Polish-speaking Roman Catholic landowners had, indeed,

retained a significant amount of land and economic power in spite of Russification policies and had

come into increased conflict not only with the majority Ukrainian-speaking peasant population but

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also with the Polish-speaking petty nobility (drobna szlachta). In the eyes of Guard activists, these

once “sincerely Polish” landowners had, in fact, lost their Polishness under the conditions of

59 They believed, for instance, that when Polish authorities communicated in the Russian language with railroad
personnel, they simply encouraged the popular assumption that Poland was fighting against Bolshevism in order to
give up the liberated land to Russia. See Joanna Gierowska-Kałłaur, Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich (19 lutego
1919-9 września 1920) (Warsaw, 2003), 337.
60 Statistics published in 1905 indicated that almost 48% of the Volhynian governorate’s private land was in Polish
hands, as opposed to the 45% that was owned by Russians. Weeks, Nation and State, 87. On intra-Polish
competitions over land, see Daniel Beauvois, La Bataille de la Terre en Ukraine, 1863-1914: Les Polonais et Les
Conflits Socio-Ethniques (Lille, 1993), 149-241.

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