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Polish nation itself. “There are only two Polish associations in Poland,” claimed National Democrat
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Member of Parliament Jan Zamorski in 1923, “Polish Poles and the enemies of Poland.” If they

were seen to be supporting the national minorities, ethnic Poles could be legitimately considered as

foreigners themselves.

One way in which right-wing Poles in both Warsaw and Volhynia argued that only “Polish

Poles” could erase foreign influences, integrate Volhynia into the ethnographically Polish areas to the

west, and spread European civilization among the backward eastern populations was through the

creation of Polish-language elementary schools. Their approach clearly differed from the liberal-

democratic tenets laid down in the Minority Treaty of 1919, Article 9 of which stipulated that the

state would have to provide schooling in the children’s native tongue in those areas where a

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“considerable proportion” of the population spoke that language. While this article was based on
the idea that state integration was not the same as national assimilation, right-wing nationalists, in

Poland as elsewhere, saw multiethnic borderlands as prime arenas for national battles over education

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in which the Polish minority found itself on the defensive against foreign influences.
In Volhynia, such anxieties were not built on a numerical threat to schools that used Polish as

the language of instruction, since, as one might expect, Ukrainian schools did not multiple at

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anywhere near the rate of their Polish counterparts during the early 1920s. Indeed, with the

32 Patrice Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (Dekalb, 2014), 366. On this topic, see also Brykczynski,
Primed for Violence.
33 Jan Zamorski, “Aktywizm działa,” Myśl Narodowa, August 25, 1923, 6.
34 “Minorities Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan
and the United States) and Poland, signed at Versailles, 28 June 1919,” accessed online: http://ungarisches-
institut.de/dokumente/pdf/19190628-3.pdf. On school policies, see Stanisław Mauersberg, “The Educational System
and Democratisation of Society in Poland (1918-1939),” Acta Poloniae Historica 55 (1987): 133-158.
35 As Tara Zahra pointed out in her study of a multilinguistic area in the Austro-Hungarian empire and the
Czechoslovak successor state, anxieties of denationalization provided a key justification for the aggressive work of
educational societies and schools. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls. There are parallels with the French state’s attempts to
reintroduce the French language through schools in Alsace, a region where the majority of people did not speak
French in 1918. See Stephen L. Harp, Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and
Lorraine, 1850-1940 (DeKalb, 1998), 196-201.
36 In 1922, when the Volhynian school board was created, there were 395 Polish schools and 233 Ukrainian schools.
In the 1923-24 school year, there were 672 Polish schools and 289 Ukrainian schools. Mędrzecki, Województwo
wołyńskie, 31.

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