Page 74 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

had been during the imperial period, these people continued to play a disproportionately significant

role in community life, particularly in the early postwar years. A full 400,000 hectares of land,

situated mainly in the swampier counties of northern Volhynia and in Krzemieniec in the southeast,

remained in Russian hands, while a relatively large group of Russians found themselves employed by

19
the state administration, the Orthodox Church, and in some private schools. Within the judiciary

too, Russian personnel continued to fulfill their prewar roles, since the ongoing validity of Russian

20
laws meant that the professional knowledge of imperial jurists constituted a practical necessity. Nor
did the Russian language disappear entirely in the 1920s. When the politician Leon Wasilewski

visited the province in 1927, he found that the Russian gymnasium in Łuck, which taught in both the

Polish and the Russian languages, continued to use textbooks that dated from the imperial period.

Similarly, the 380 students at the Russian school in Równe learned several subjects, including

21
religion and nature, in Russian.

There were other ways to think about integration, namely those that added a prefix to the

term and relied on a similar narrative to that proposed by the Borderland Guard—reintegration. In

the province, the renaming of places provided one way in which Poles could assert the historical

continuities with an older form of Polish state power and argue that signs of Russian influence were

little more than skin-deep. The very name of the interwar province—województwo wołyńskie—

referred back to its namesake in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while Łuck,

which had been the capital of that first Polish województwo, regained its privileged status in the early

1920s, replacing the capital of the Russian imperial governorate Zytomyr, which now lay to the east

of the border. The larger return of Volhynia to its “rightful” place within Polish state borders also

found echoes in efforts to formally change the names of town streets, which lost their previous

19 Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 185.
20 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 75-6.
21 “Sprawozdanie z objazdu Kresów Wschodnich, 4.I.-30/I.1927r,” AAN ALW 77/47-9. All other subjects were
taught in Polish.

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