Page 82 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

accustomed and with whom they could communicate,” a situation that made it necessary “to fill the

positions in the kresy with kresy people” who would form “the cement between the local population

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and Polish statehood.” Despite accusations of their own disloyalty, they offered themselves up as
precisely “the cement” that could hold the Polish state and its borderlands together.

When viewed within the context of employment dynamics at a local level, this approach was

largely defensive. As the new province took shape, many of those who took up positions in the

administration came not only from the formerly Russian lands of the more industrialized Congress

Kingdom further west, but also from what had been the Austrian province of Galicia to the south.

The argument that “kresy people” should continue to play pivotal roles in the area’s administration

was accompanied, in particular, by attacks against these incoming Galician Poles who had worked

within the Austrian administration prior to the war. Some of these concerns were framed in practical

terms: if they were unable to use the Russian language, how could the new administrators even read

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legal decrees from the imperial period that still applied to the province? But pragmatic worries
converged with deeper attacks over who was the most loyal representative of the Polish nation on the

state’s fringes. As “nationally indifferent” and “unpatriotic” men, rather than “real Poles,” Austrian

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outsiders could easily be represented as foreigners. Schemes for integration thus relied on a process

of reemphasizing imperial borders between Poles, even several years after those empires had

officially collapsed.

THE OSADNIK: FOREIGN INTERLOPER OR HEROIC CIVILIZER?

The issue of who was foreign—and, more precisely, who got to define what foreignness meant in

these local contexts—was thrown into sharp relief in discussions about the military settlers (osadnicy

42 “O kresach i na kresach” (reprint of article in Kurjer Warszawski), Życie Wołynia, May 18, 1924, 6.
43 Włodzimierz Mędrzecki, Inteligencja polska na Wołyniu w okresie międzywojennym (Warsaw, 2005), 49.
44 Stephen Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and
Bureaucrats, 1917-1922 (Toronto, 2011), 241.

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