Page 58 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

interrogated. Just as Guard activists tore down old imperial hierarchies and constructed a vision of

the Polish nation that challenged the authority of local landowners, they also created new hierarchies

in the name of democracy. In their eyes, a certain type of Pole was the sole bearer of democratic

values and institutions for the predominantly non-Polish populations to the east of ethnographic

Poland. We should therefore read the Guard’s copious unpublished reports less as reflections of the

attitudes of clear-cut national groups in the borderlands toward the Polish state project—an easy trap

to fall into, since these documents were often arranged with that purported aim—and more as

indications of how activists constructed these groups within the context of their own political project.

Since Guard activists both included and excluded non-Polish populations in different ways, it is

necessary to question not only the neat place of the Guard within the inclusionary camp of Polish

nationalism, but also the very existence of a dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion.

Depictions of Volhynia’s Jews certainly suggest that praise for democracy as a more civilized

and Western-oriented political system in the erstwhile imperial borderlands was not automatically

synonymous with national inclusivity and civic equality. As developments in the prewar Russian-

ruled Congress Kingdom had already indicated, experiments with democratization (or even semi-

democratization) could lead to increased, rather than diminished, levels of anti-Semitism. Following

the 1905 revolution in Warsaw, the Endecja’s engagement with electoral politics had encouraged

Polish economic and political competition with the city’s Jews, including calls for economic

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boycotts. But the dynamics that operated in occupied Volhynia in 1919 and 1920 revolved less

around competitions over the control of electoral politics and more around arguments about whose

behavior benefited the democratizing project as a whole. If, on the one hand, the myth of the

Commonwealth opened up a discursive space for Jews within the new Polish state, those on the

supposedly more inclusive wing of Polish politics believed that Jews, like Russians and the Polish-

68 Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford,
2012), particularly 214-260.

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