Poland's wild east [electronic resource] : imagined landscapes and everyday life in the Volhynian Borderlands, 1918-1939
Keywords: History

This dissertation examines the Polish state's attempts to integrate, Polonize, and "civilize" the multiethnic eastern province of Volhynia between 1918 and 1939. While political elites promoted the province's connections to the nation's history, Volhynia's Polish population was drastically outnumbered by a combination of Ukrainians and Jews. Breaking from the traditional historiography, which explores Warsaw's policies towards Poland's ethnic minorities and analyzes interethnic relations between clearly-defined groups, the dissertation considers the "civilizing" mission carried out by a second tier of nationally-conscious political actors who represented the Polish state at the periphery. This group of men (and, more rarely, women) included border guards, teachers, policemen, national activists, military settlers, bureaucrats, scouts, and ethnographers, all of whom brought their own ideas about what Polish civilization meant in the "wild fields" of the East. Since Volhynia was economically, socially, and culturally underdeveloped, lacking many of the basic indicators of "civilization, " and since it lay in a geopolitically volatile region that bordered the Soviet Union, incoming elites attempted to shape the physical environment, material culture, and borderland people into something more Polish, European, and "civilized." Far from being an abstraction, Polishness was manifested in concrete actions, including the imposition of good governance, the maintenance of a secure border, and the creation of well-run towns and productive villages. Drawing inspiration from environmental and spatial histories, the chapters progress chronologically and thematically, each focusing on Polish efforts to regulate, transform, and promote the space of--or spaces within--Volhynia. Although the idea of Polish civilizational superiority suggested a hierarchy of Volhynia's Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, German, Czech, and Russian inhabitants (based on their everyday behavior and levels of material culture), Polishness could not simply be imposed from above. Indeed, physical conditions on the ground created tangible challenges to the "civilizing" mission. Elites found that local Poles were nationally indifferent and frequently put their own interests above those of the nation as a whole, while ill-equipped and under-financed state personnel struggled to deal with the harsh realities of life and the intransigence of peasant populations. Reports and newspaper articles suggested that Volhynia was a place where Polishness might be lost and, by the late 1930s, visions of Polish civilization were replaced with more radical schemes of demographic and spatial transformation. Studying this multiethnic borderland during the twenty years prior to the Second World War suggests how local dynamics contributed to the social and ethnic conflicts that exploded here after 1939. But the dissertation also provides an in-depth analysis of the wider tensions between national ideals and everyday realities, an exploration into the discursive use of "civilization" by East Europeans (who have traditionally been seen as less "civilized" than their Western European counterparts), and a methodological example of how spatial and environmental histories can illuminate the study of modern nationalism.