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convert to Orthodoxy made settlers vulnerable to denationalization. Because they lost their

“Catholicness,” which the report’s author assumed was an important part of their Polish identity, the

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men “must be considered lost for Polishness.”
While such anxieties may well have been exaggerated—one memoirist recalled that of the

forty settlers whom he knew, only two had married local Ukrainian girls—they revealed the extent to

which the Volhynian borderlands could be conceived as an internal foreign environment, one where

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Polish men might fall into the trap of denationalization if they were not on their guard. In fact, the
settlers’ dilemma points to what Ann Laura Stoler has argued is one of the central tensions of

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imperialism, “a form of rule simultaneously predicated on incorporation and distancing.” If the

fixation on religion, rather than race, indicated that Poles did not frame their anxieties in precisely the

same ways as Europeans who feared miscegenation in formal overseas colonies, they did worry

about the question of who, precisely, was integrating whom within the borders of their nation-state.

The problem with marital unions in Volhynia was that Polish settlers were being assimilated into the

local population, rather than the other way around.

A TALE OF FOUR CITIES: POZNAŃ, WARSAW, ŁUCK, LUBLIN

Debates about who was foreign did not take place in the province alone. Instead, elites in cities far

beyond Volhynia’s administrative borders competed with one another, each vying to take a leading

role in the new state’s integrating project. As the capital city, Warsaw inevitably became a byword

for the political and national center—it was, after all, in Warsaw that Poland’s parliament,

government, and state ministries had their homes. But if we seek to understand the complex

65 “Delegat Ministra Wyznań Religijnych i Oświecenia Publicznego na okręg Wołyński. Przedmiot: przechodzenie
osadników żołnierzy na prawosławie” (Łuck, May 5, 1922), CAW I/300/1/652/101.
66 Antoni Górski, Pamiętniki lat mego życia (1922-2006) (Kraków, 2007), 149.
67 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley,
2002), 83.

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