Page 63 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

civilizational gradient. One Guard report suggested, for instance, that the creation of a prosperous

class of Polish peasants from both incoming colonists and local manorial estate workers (known in

Polish as służba folwarczna) who were “mostly an element with a considerable national

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consciousness” would result in the “assimilation” of local Ruthenians. While it was not clear what
that process would look like in practice—would assimilated Ruthenians speak Polish, convert to

Roman Catholicism, or shed other characteristics that marked them out as different from their Polish

neighbors?—the Guard activists did little to suggest that the process would be a difficult one.

Moreover, the historic presence of Polish-speaking populations in Volhynia, along with the

mixing of groups over time, allowed some Guard activists to suggest that Ruthenians were not

simply a sub-national group that could be assimilated into the Polish nation, but were rather Poles in

Ruthenian clothing. In one Guard report, the author stated that local people had “Ruthenized quickly

[rutenizowali się szybko],” suggesting that Ruthenization was a process that Poles had undergone

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during the imperial period and one that could therefore be reversed. In fact, such arguments about
the potential for bringing people back into the national fold—which naturally disqualified claims that

they fundamentally belonged to a separate Ukrainian nation—were not uncommon in the Guard’s

internal reports as they sought to reimagine demographically the local populations with whom they

came into contact. The author of another report, which was sent to the Civil Administration in 1920,

justified a scheme by which Polish colonists from further west would settle in Volhynia by arguing

that incoming Poles would simply be reviving the Polishness of people who had been crammed into a

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“foreign” environment and “gradually lost the characteristics and feelings of Polish nationality.”
Just like his or her equivalent in liminal borderland spaces on the fringes of states across Europe—

the “Germanized Italian” of South Tyrol or the “Magyarized Romanian” of Transylvania—the fictive

82 “Wyciągi z raportów kierownika Straży Kresowej pow. Łuckiego za rok 1919 dotyczące stosunków rolnych,”
AAN TSK 201/101.
83 “Raport o sytuacji na Wołyniu,” AAN TSK 215/40.
84 “Do Zarząd Cywilnego Ziem Wschodnich,” AAN TSK 147/18.

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