Page 81 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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the fatherland, [and] complete moral neglect and physical infirmity.” They finished their note by
asking the government for money and resources in order to correct the heinous situation that they had

laid out. Scouting leaders were not alone in making a case for the importance of Western influences

at the expense of foreign remnants. Poles also marked out the Orthodox Christian Church as a foreign

influence that continued to taint the dynamics of local life by resisting Volhynia’s return into the

Western civilized world. Members of the local Roman Catholic hierarchy were certainly quick to

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repossess—and, in their eyes, “return”—church buildings to the Catholic denomination.
If these groups worked hard to label Jews and the Orthodox Church as foreign influences,

others engaged in ongoing intra-Polish battles over what foreignness meant within a post-imperial

context—and whether or not local Poles could themselves be conceived as foreigners. As had been

the case during the occupation of 1919 and 1920, some Polish-speaking populations accused their

compatriots in Volhynia—most notably, landowners and a large part of the Polish intelligentsia who

had been educated as lawyers or doctors in the imperial cities of Kiev and Moscow—of being too

closely associated with the power structures of the Russian empire. These apparent imperial

remnants, however, attempted to resist accusations of disloyalty to the Polish national cause, arguing

instead that the successful integration of the borderland into the new political center further west

itself necessitated a degree of administrative and linguistic continuity with the empire. In the local

National Democratic weekly Volhynia Life, a reprint of an article that had been previously published

in the Warsaw Courier drew on a paternalistic idea that peasants had got to know their social

superiors and would be more receptive to continuity than change. The “simple Volhynian peasants,”

the article’s author wrote, needed to be governed by the type of person “to whom they had become

40 Ibid., AAN ZHP 689.
41 Between 1918 and 1924, the Roman Catholic Church repossessed between 280 and 315 Orthodox churches across
the eastern borderlands, which they claimed had previously been Roman Catholic or Uniate. See Maciej Mróz,
Katolicyzm na pograniczu: Kościół Katolicki wobec kwestii ukraińskiej i białoruskiej w Polsce w latach 1918-1925
(Toruń, 2003), 212.

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