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figure of the “Ruthenized Pole” simultaneously opened the gates for people to “return” to the

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national fold and nullified the idea that they belonged to a rival national group.

Guard activists also explored the potentially useful role that might be played by

demographically smaller groups, namely the Czech- and German-speaking populations whose

ancestors had moved to Volhynia from Bohemia and from Russian Poland and Prussia respectively

during the late nineteenth century. Based on the criteria of religion and language, neither of these

populations shared much with the Poles. They spoke their own languages (even if their dialects might

have sounded strange to their nominal co-nationals within the borders of Germany and

Czechoslovakia) and they were not, for the most part, Roman Catholics. But just as Russian imperial

officials had encouraged the settlement of these groups in an attempt to dilute the influence of Polish

nationalism prior to the First World War, Guard activists now considered how they might do

demographic work for the emerging Polish national project.

Tracing the ways in which local Guard activists attempted to include these people in the

Polish nation shows how the borders of national belonging in the eastern borderlands differed from

those devised elsewhere. While historians have generally focused on German-Polish relations in

areas of western Poland, most notably Upper Silesia and the region around Poznań, German-speaking

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populations who had been under Russian imperial rule could be imagined very differently. A 1920
report, which was probably written by the Guard’s deputy leader in Volhynia, Antoni Zalewski,

suggested that the national identities of these groups were not set in stone and that they might

become good Poles, if they had not already been “Polonized” prior to Polish independence. The

85 Russian imperialists had long referred to “Little Russians” as a branch of the greater Russian nation. Weeks,
Nation and State, 64-65. On “Magyarized Romanians,” see Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar
Romania (Pittsburgh, 2002), 145-6. On “Germanized Italians,” see Matthew Frank, Making Minorities History:
Population Transfer in Twentieth-Century Europe (Oxford, 2017), 104.
86 See, for instance, Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Peter Polak-Springer, Recovered Territory: A German-Polish
Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-89 (New York, 2015); Anna Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und
Nation. Die Polonisierung der Stadt Posen nach 1918 und 1945 (Wiesbaden, 2013).

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