Conclusion

Civile bellum; genus hominum; quod liceret libere facere, et sequi quod vellet.

Civil war; human race; what is allowed is to act freely and follow what one wishes.¹

Gaius Julius Caesar, 40s bc

The love the Poles cultivate for the land of their fathers arose only from the struggle for independence, from historical memories, and from calamity. Today, it still flares as fervently as in the days of Tadeusz Kościuszko, maybe even more. Almost to the point of ridicule, the Poles now honor everything that is patriotic. Like a dying man struggling in despair against death, their mind is outraged and rebels against the idea of the annihilation of their nationality. This twitch of the dying Polish national body is a terrible sight! But all the peoples of Europe and of the whole earth will have to survive this death-struggle, so that from death may arise life, from pagan nationality Christian fraternity.²

Heinrich Heine, On Poland, 1823

In the Central European Civil War, the Second Polish Republic self-confidently used any scope of action to secure for itself a border as far east and west as feasible, with as many human (Poles), geographical (access to the sea), and material (an industrial area) assets as possible. It may be remembered here that this was a state which had had to fight for survival since its conception. A war that Poles were not responsible for had devastated their country, which their two most powerful neighbors—occupants there for over a century—had been forced to leave, turning them into mortal enemies of Poland, waiting only for an opportunity to strike back. Poland had to recover from its massive material and human wartime losses, and at the same time it had to hold its ground in the postwar race of nationalities for statehood in Central Europe. The Second Republic’s objectives in the border wars of 1918–21 were ambitious. Here was a state which once had been brutally wiped from the face of the earth, and whose leadership was convinced that it had not only the right, but the obligation to re-erect it again as a viable entity and was determined to do so, without cloying sentimentality.

As might have become clear, the battles for the Central and Eastern European postwar order, mockingly labelled by Winston Churchill as “quarrels of the pygmies,”³ in reality turned into merciless carnages that affected mostly civilians of every age and gender. While the Polish government followed an agenda of conquering and nationalizing territories where a Polish-speaking population lived, it was only partly in control of the military and paramilitary formations it sent out to complete the mission. On all sides, armed men engaged in battle as well as in atrocities. This would severely affect both the inner constitution and the foreign relations of the interwar Polish state.

Historians have estimated that in the course of the battles of the Central European Civil War in which the Polish Army was involved between 1918 and 1920, about 180,000 soldiers were killed immediately in open combat or did not survive their injuries. Roughly 100,000 Poles did not return from the battlefields of eastern Galicia, the Vilnius area, Cieszyn Silesia, and the Polish–Soviet War.⁴ On the other side of the front, approximately 60,000 Russians, 15,000 Ukrainians, 50 Czechs, and a few Lithuanians died in battle or shortly afterward.⁵ Many more were wounded or got lost.

Nobody has ever counted the number of people who died other than in open combat in the course of the Central European Civil War. To complicate matters, due to the paramilitary nature even of the “official” encounters of national armies, it is almost impossible to draw a clear line between casualties and victims of atrocities on all battlefields. Therefore, such a calculation would necessitate a major effort to gather and evaluate all available data on the issue—compiled by the military, the police, civilian authorities, fact-finding missions, interest groups of all color, and the press—in Ukrainian, Russian, Latvian, German, and Czech archives, and thus surely keep a multi-member and multinational expert team busy for years with evaluating and separating the facts from fable. This does not mean that such an endeavor would not be worth the effort, but it certainly exceeds the scope of this book.

Given the intensity of the respective conflicts, their impact on the population, and the prevailing living conditions as reflected in available books and files, it is safe to assume that in Cieszyn Silesia and the Vilnius area respectively, the collateral damage of the conflict amounted to some hundred lives—of civilians, soldiers, and paramilitaries—on both sides; some thousand on both sides in Upper Silesia and in Greater Poland respectively; and some ten thousand on both sides in Ukraine. The explanation for the remarkable geographical differences is simple: Cieszyn Silesia and Vilnius had seen temporarily and geographically rather limited conflicts, and in the Polish–German contact zone the presence of Allied forces prevented the situation going way out of hand, whereas in the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands no such restrictions existed. Since the more than 50,000 Jews killed in the course of pogroms in Ukraine in 1919–20 belong to a different theatre of war, they were not immediately linked to the Central European Civil War, whereas the murder of up to 1,000 Jews by the hands of Polish soldiers and peasants certainly was.

It is important to note, though, that the majority of the victims beyond the battlefields listed in the preceding paragraph died not by immediate application of force, but from malnutrition and lack of hygiene in detention camps. About 20,000 of 100,000 Ukrainians—soldiers and civilians—and 20,000 of 110,000 Red Army soldiers died in Polish camps. On the other hand, of about 40,000 Polish POWs, roughly 25,000 returned alive from Russia.⁶ These human losses must be considered mainly as the deplorable results of the disastrous living conditions in embattled Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, all countries which at that time were hardly able to care for their own people. For sure, in neither of these cases were genocidal state policies involved. But the respective governments did not show a strong interest in the preservation of the lives of people regarded as members of an “enemy nation” either. They hazarded these bitter consequences by engaging in the Central European Civil War in 1918–21, and all in all, it cost the lives of more than a quarter of a million people.

The violence displayed on the local level was often the result of a total lack of demobilization and of ethnic conflict in the borderlands after the Great War. Here, the world war transitioned almost seamlessly into civil war, only that the actors had changed their assignments and agendas. Many soldiers kept their arms after the armistices of 1918, not only because they were used to violence and alienated from postwar civilian life, but also because with the Russian and Central Powers’ loss of territories and control post-1917, national independence came into reach. Violence after the Great War in Eastern Europe was used not to extend the war, but to end it in a fashion more favorable to the parties involved.

What added to the violent outbreaks was the impairment of state control for months or even years in these areas, which was not totally absent, but had to be negotiated by force of arms between the military and paramilitary formations sent to the embattled borderlands. What these units actually did on the spot was often beyond the immediate reach of their respective governments. As Piotr Wróbel has put it, “between 1918–20 when states did not exist or had only recently been formed and a power vacuum existed in Central and Eastern Europe, most fighters and victims were civilians or former soldiers operating outside of government control and convinced that their cruel behaviour was necessary and served a good cause.”⁷ While in the case of considerable-sized armed forces violence against civilians can often be traced back to a fatal mixture of a lack of discipline and supplies, smaller groups additionally relied on violence as a technique of establishing authority and group coherence. Apart from marauding soldiers and mercenaries, nomadic deserters and displaced persons added to the overall insecurity. Between the collapse of the empires and their replacement by nation states, the borderlands were the most dangerous tracts of land in Europe in which to live. As Alexander Victor Prusin has put it, “the ‘cost of violence’—previously controlled by the imperial governments—declined and multiple protagonists were able to make their own rules of warfare.”⁸

Such forms of locally confined micro-violence have rarely been interpreted in the context of the Great War in the east,⁹ let alone of its after-battles. What we learn by studying them is that violence is often triggered by a combination of situational and motivational factors—presence of victims who match the perpetrators’ target group, assumed impunity, worldview, expectations and behavior of comrades and superiors—which together determines the sequence and outcome of events. The foundations for further studies in this rather new field have been laid by the sophisticated studies on violence perpetrated during the Second World War.¹⁰ Anthropologists and ritual experts have added to our understanding by pointing out the symbolic meaning of this kind of violence which often marks periods of societal upheaval, calling it “liminal” violence (as, for example, pogroms).¹¹

Various explanations have been offered to explain the violence accompanying the process of aggressive nation building on the passage from war to peace in our region. Joshua Sanborn has argued that the Great War was the first war of “de-colonization” which propelled the emancipation of the Central and Eastern European people from imperial rule. But while this interpretation applies in the Asian and Caucasian parts of former imperial Russia, it does not in the Polish Kresy, where the “de-colonized” Polish heirs of the vanished empires used practices of colonial rule to control and subdue their ethno-national rivals. This was the tragic result of the transition of Polish nationalism from inclusive to exclusive which had occurred in the nineteenth century, when, with the words of Brian Porter, it “began to hate.”¹² In 1823, German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine prophetically depicted the bitter consequences for those who would be counted “out,” by calling it a turn from the concept of “Christian fraternity” to “pagan nationality” (see the epigraph at the start of this Conclusion). As Rogers Brubaker and Kathryn Ciancia have aptly shown, in the early 1920s a core (prevailingly Catholic-Polish) nation attempted to build and dominate a state. This core regarded as legitimate all means that served this goal, including the use of violence and of a restrictive legislation against the state’s minorities.¹³

This work agrees with this line of thought, but argues that the process of combative nation building—by all sides involved—set in a few years earlier, when the battles for national independence were actually fought with a vengeance, and not after they were settled. The first to bring a colonial attitude to the Kresy following independence were not civil institutions, but the ideologized armies from France and Greater Poland, and the spin-off groups led by radicalized commanders such as Abraham, Jaworski, and Bułak-Bałachowicz. Although in line with the National Democratic circles within the Polish government, they thus antagonized the policy of Józef Piłsudski and the civil administration he installed in the Kresy in order to win over instead of losing its non-Polish population for the project of Polish nation-state building. The ethnically mixed Kresy was the most fiercely embattled turf of Central Europe in the twentieth century, and in this regard probably most comparable to Southeastern Europe’s Kosovo.

New structures evolving from the chaos which Central and Eastern Europe had been plunged into by war and revolution needed time to crystallize. Since the armies of the new states were born within this chaos, coordination and control of the large-scale violence entered the scene only at the beginning of the 1920s. But the eastern borderlands did not come to a rest. The new frontier in the Kresy, suddenly dividing territories that had been bound together for centuries, created a whole new profession: bands of smugglers populated the borderlands hither and thither, sometimes clashing in the woods and marshlands with bands of bandits composed of former soldiers and impoverished peasants or with Polish or Bolshevik frontier guards. A young man living in this area could be a carpenter during the day, a smuggler at night, speak Polish with his family, sympathize with the communists, and still visit, like his forefathers, the Orthodox church, just because it might be the only one in walking distance and had long been so. Nationality was not a major category in which these people arranged their world. The remoteness of the territory, which lacked almost all infrastructures characterizing a modern state such as railways or paved roads, largely hampered state projects of modernization and ethnicization until the mid-1920s. It is a strange world, a “Wild East,” brilliantly depicted in the novels of former contrabandist Sergiusz Piasecki.¹⁴

As has been shown, despite one century of industrious political engineering, the unification of the Polish nation had not been achieved by 1918, and the ensuing fight for the borders did not unite it either, not even when, in 1920, the Polish–Soviet War threatened the country’s mere existence. Instead, the character and course of the national struggle widened the gaps between the different ethnic and political factions of Polish postwar society. The Polish military did not even provide for inter-ethnic solidarity within its own ranks. In December 1919, Lieutenant Colonel Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz, by that time Deputy Inspector General of the Infantry, stated in an internal report that according to him, Jews—who were serving in the Polish Legions from August 1914, and from November 1918 onwards also in the Polish armed forces—as “foreigners” should not be accepted into the Polish Army. If they were, he went on, they would have to sign a separate contract with the Polish government.¹⁵ In August 1920, War Minister Kazimierz Sosnkowski had thousands of Jewish soldiers, who were summarily suspected of siding with the Bolsheviks, interned in a special section of the prisoner-of-war camp in the Warsaw suburb Jabłonna.¹⁶ Even the diverse veterans’ organizations of the interwar period were divided not only between those who had served in one of the imperial armies and those who had served in genuine Polish formations up to 1918, but even more along ethnic lines.¹⁷

In other words: The violent military and paramilitary potential of the Second Polish Republic was domesticized, institutionalized, and instrumentalized in the service of the state. From 1921 onwards, with improving living conditions and the reconstruction of the devastated country, criminality ebbed away, and marauding soldiers and paramilitaries vanished from the territories of the Second Polish Republic. A crucial factor of this demobilization process was the fact that Poland had—apart from its setback in Cieszyn Silesia—emerged victorious from the Central European Civil War. In contrast for example to Weimar Germany, its paramilitary groups had no reason to be disappointed and harbor resentments against their own state. The goals they had set out to fight for in the first place—the erection of a nation state—had been by and large achieved. Only Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz had to cope with the fact that it was not a Belarusian, but a Polish nation state he found himself in after civil war’s end. Given his rather pragmatic attitude towards ethnicity, this probably cost him little effort.

Its armed forces tamed, the country nevertheless did not come to a rest. The inner political strife between right and left and the disputed relations of the Polish titular nation towards its minorities were a constant source of trouble. They even culminated in the political assassination of Poland’s first democratically elected head of state, Gabriel Narutowicz, on December 16, 1922. The moderate politician had been Piłsudski’s candidate of choice, replacing his provisionary political leadership during the troubled years of war and paramilitary violence since independence. The preceding week, violent riots had shaken the streets of the capital, since the votes of delegates from the minorities’ block (and of the peasant parties, but that did not incite the public uproar) had tipped the scale for his presidency. The National Democratic Party’s electorate foamed with rage.¹⁸ But the assassination had been carried out by a lone perpetrator, a radicalized painter who sympathized with the National Democracy. It was no staged overthrow of the current Polish government with the support of a military or paramilitary force. Nevertheless, further developments proved that the demobilization process had not been completed, and could even be reversed when parts of the armed forces fell out with the legal government.

The former legionnaires, although temporarily pacified, were not completely won over for the rules of parliamentary democracy either. Their armed participation in the First World War and the ensuing civil war created amongst the men who had fought together under Piłsudski’s command an elitist consciousness. It was not national, since it failed to bind the nation together. It was undemocratic, since it was not directed towards the “Commander” as a state representative, but as a person, and it does not take a crystal ball to see where this led: The constant governmental crisis, paired with the Endecja’s supremacy in the Sejm, had repelled Piłsudski in 1923 and urged him to retreat to his suburban manor in Sulejów. Later, in May 1926, he returned to the political scene with a vengeance and took state power by a military coup.¹⁹

In a way, this was just a repetition of the seizure of Vilnius a few years before, when he had taken by force what he could not take by legal means. His aura did not build the nation, it created an authoritarian military regime, led by him and implemented by his disciples, which lasted until his death in 1935. His regime did not represent the Polish nation.²⁰ Joseph Rothschild stated what was to be expected: While preparing his coup d’état, Piłsudski “had anticipated that the entire army would rally to him, its creator and victorious former chief, and that this cohesion of the military would morally oblige the politicians to yield without fighting. Instead, the army had split between those units, usually commanded by his fellow Legion veterans, that followed him and those that, from political or legal motives, remained loyal to the constitutional Right-Center government … That he, the restorer of the Polish state, the father of its army, the protagonist of a strong presidency, should lead a revolt against the state authorities, sunder the unity of the army, and overthrow a constitutional president—for [President Stanisław] Wojciechowski refused to legitimate the coup by remaining in office—were facts that would haunt Piłsudski for the remaining nine years of his life.”²¹ Timothy Snyder once wrote that “Piłsudski’s camp won the war against the Bolsheviks, and lost the peace to the National Democrats.”²² That was prior to 1926. One might wonder if for him, the Machiavellian man of action, parliamentarianism had not just been a concept in which he very well believed, but which he would rid himself of if it did not produce the expected result: one Polish state for one united Polish nation. He had done so with socialism; he had done so with federalism; now he had done so with democracy. Although he did not hold office between 1926 and 1935, the Second Republic was so dependent on him that one might have called it no longer the Second, but the Third Republic.²³ Many of the independent fighters of 1918–21 ended up in its prisons in the 1930s, the most prominent probably being Wojciech Korfanty, leader of the third Upper Silesian “uprising” and mentor of Upper Silesian autonomy.²⁴

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Second Republic exhibited a colonial attitude towards its minorities. In propagating a “civilizing mission,” border guards, teachers, policemen, national activists, military settlers, bureaucrats, scouts, and ethnographers were sent from Warsaw to the eastern borderlands.²⁵ The German minority in the west also faced a repressive policy steered from the center.²⁶ “Nationalization tendencies,” as Christhardt Henschel and Stephan Stach have concluded, in the institutions of the Second Polish Republic were “far more effective than purely pragmatic thinking, geared towards the well-being of the state and all its citizens … The basic assumption, typical of a nationalizing state, that at the end ethnic Poles owned the state and legitimately could decide on its constitution, was generally left untouched.”²⁷

Although the First World War was the cradle of the Central and Eastern European nation states, its violent outcome, accompanied by material destruction, inward revolution, and outward border clashes, hampered the development of a harmonic postwar order. Just as the land empires fragmented into numerous successor states, these very states were not able to overcome their multifarious difficulties and differences. To the contrary: starting as democracies, literally all of them—including moderate Czechoslovakia—until the end of the interwar period had mutated into virtual one-party states under an authoritarian or at least pseudo-authoritarian leadership. Furthermore, the fights over the new state boundaries had turned the new neighbors into fierce enemies from the start, thus preventing the formation of a Central and Eastern European federation tied together by mutual assistance pacts. International treaties in this area before the Second World War were characteristically aimed against, not towards, local cooperation, seeking outside assistance from the Western powers or Russia rather than from adjacent states. These developments also slowed economic development at least as much as the severance of former trade and transportation lines by war destruction and hermetic frontiers.

It would simply be unfair to blame the interwar states of Central and Eastern Europe alone for this development. On the one hand, much of this outcome was, as has been shown, an immediate result of a disastrous world war these countries’ inhabitants had never pledged for, but under which they had suffered the most. The primacy of the principle of national self-determination, applied by the West to a region which for centuries had been a supranational melting pot, was not a splendid idea either and conflicted with the principles of religious and cultural freedom and minority rights uttered in the same breath.²⁸ Thus, the young democracies of interwar Central and Eastern Europe were precarious entities with an inbound tendency to falter and fragment and an outward tendency to isolate. Under the new assault of the Second World War, it was everyone for themselves again. And the outcome this time was not so much decided by the struggling nation states themselves, but by the world’s Super Powers, which—with devastating consequences for the people affected—agreed to divide the center of the continent once again along new lines and to ensure with expulsions, deportations, and the movement of population that this time, these very lines coincided more with the national demarcations carved out more perceptibly in the fires of combat, occupation, and ethnic cleansing less than a quarter of a century before.

¹ Ayelet Peer, Julius Caesar’s Bellum Civile and the Composition of a New Reality (New York: Routledge, 2016), 106.

² Heinrich Heine, Über Polen, edited by Karl-Maria Guth (Berlin: Contumax, 2014) (first pub. 1823), 11. On Heine’s essay see Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 87–9; William W. Hagen, “Von ‘heidnischer Nazionalität’ zu ‘christlicher Fraternität’ und ‘allgemeiner Völkerliebe’: Heines Überlegungen zur polnischen Frage und zum europäischen Nationalismus,” in Aufklärung und Skepsis: Internationaler Heine-Kongreß zum 200. Geburtstag, edited by Joseph A. Kruse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999).

³ According to Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 21, Churchill commented to Lloyd George on the night of the armistice: “The war of the giants has ended; the quarrels of the pygmies have begun,” but Davies gives no evidence, and the episode is presumably apocryphal. It originates probably from Winston Churchill, “Britain’s Foreign Policy,” Weekly Dispatch, June 22, 1919, 6, where the cheap and often quoted witticism reads: “The war of the giants is over; the wars of the pygmies have begun.”

⁴ Czubiński, Walka Józefa Piłsudskiego, 415, gives 103,000 Polish privates and officers fallen in battle against Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Russians. According to Stanisław Alexandrowicz and Zbigniew Karpus (eds), Zwycie̜zcy za drutami: Jeńcy polscy w niewoli (1919–1922). Dokumenty i materiały (Toruń: Marszałek, 1995), VII, half of them were missing in action, but can be presumed to be dead. The ninety-three Polish casualties from the war against Czechoslovakia in late January 1919 do not really influence this statistic; see Jaroslav Valenta, Česko–polské vztahy v letech 1918–1920 a Těšínské Slezsko (Ostrava: Krajské nakladatelství, 1961), 356.

⁵ Ukrainian figures: Michał Klimecki, “Wojna Polski z Zachodnioukrainską Republiką Ludową (1918–1919),” in Odrodzona Polska wśród sąsiadów, 1918–1921, edited by Andrzej Koryn (Warsaw: IH PAN, 1999), 88–105, here: 105; Lithuanian figures: Piotr Łossowski, Konflikt polsko–litewski, 1918–1920 (Warsaw: Ksia̜żka i Wiedza, 1996), 179–85; Russian figures: Rudolph J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 50, 55, referring to Melvin Small and Joel David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980 (London: Sage, 1982), 89; Czech figures: Valenta, Česko-polské vztahy v letech 1918–1920 a Těšínské Slezsko, 356.

⁶ Wróbel, “The Seeds of Violence”; Danuta Hanak, “Jeńcy sowieccy w obozach polskich 1919–1921,” Biuletyn Wojskowej Służby Archiwalnej 18 (1995); Alexandrowicz and Karpus (eds), Zwycie̜zcy za drutami; Tadeusz Wawrzyński, “Jeńcy polscy w niewoli sowieckiej 1919–1921,” Biuletyn Wojskowej Służby Archiwalnej 18 (1995).

⁷ Wróbel, “The Revival of Poland and Paramilitary Violence,” 282.

⁸ Prusin, The Lands Between, 73.

⁹ For German atrocities at the Western Front see the elaborate study by John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

¹⁰ The foundation has been laid with the seminal work of Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), on the combination of motivational and situational factors as a trigger of violent behavior, and has found many followers since then, e.g. Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006). How such approaches can be made fruitful for our period has been recently demonstrated by Lewicki, “Przestępczość w Wojsku Polskim podczas wojny polsko–bolszewickiej,” Borzęcki, “German Anti-Semitism à la Polonaise,” and Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Popular Violence.”

¹¹ Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

¹² Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate.

¹³ Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the old ‘New Europe’—and the new,” in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, edited by Rogers Brubaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79–106, here: 84–103; Ciancia, “Poland’s Wild East.”

¹⁴ Sergiusz Piasecki, Lover of the Great Bear (London: Routledge & Sons, 1938); Sergiusz Piasecki, Piąty etap: [powieść o polskim wywiadzie, pogranicze polsko–sowieckie, lata dwudzieste] (Warsaw: LTW, 2001) (first pub. 1938); Sergiusz Piasecki, Jabłuszko (Warsaw: LTW, 2002) (first pub. 1946); Sergiusz Piasecki, Nikt nie da nam zbawienia (Warsaw: LTW, 2009) (first pub. 1947).

¹⁵ Inspectorate General of the Infantry, protocol of the briefing of staff inspection officers of the general districts and the training inspectors at the front commands, Warsaw, December 22, 1919, CAW, I.300.24.17 (not paginated, 11–12 of the document).

¹⁶ Christhardt Henschel, “Jabłonna als Erinnerungsikone: Juden in den polnischen Streitkräften 1918–1939,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 9 (2010): 545–71.

¹⁷ Eichenberg, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge, 144–69.

¹⁸ Paul Brykczynski, Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).

¹⁹ Antoni Czubiński, Przewrót majowy 1926 roku (Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989); Andrzej Garlicki, Przewrót majowy (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1987).

²⁰ Hein, Der Piłsudski-Kult, 51–4.

²¹ Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 55.

²² Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 12.

²³ Peter Oliver Löw, “Zwillinge zwischen Endecja und Sanacja: Die neue polnische Rechtsregierung und ihre historischen Wurzeln,” Osteuropa 55, no. 11 (2005): 9–20.

²⁴ Lewandowski, Wojciech Korfanty, 171.

²⁵ Wojciech Śleszyński, Andrzej Smolarczyk, and Anna Włodarczyk (eds), Wychować lojalnych obywateli: Polityka oświatowa państwa polskiego na Polesiu (Cracow: Avalon, 2016); Ciancia, “Poland’s Wild East”; Janina Stobniak-Smogorzewska, “Osadnictwo na Wołyniu 1921–1940,” Niepodległość i Pamięć 15, no. 1 (2008): 153–76; Włodzimierz Mędrzecki, “Polacy i ich Wołyń 1921–1939,” ibid.: 125–51; Wojciech Śleszyński, “Wojsko a bezpieczeństwo wewnętrzne na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej,” Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości 42 (2005): 211–31; Szczepański, Społeczeństwo Polski w walce z najazdem bolszewickim, 453–69.

²⁶ Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

²⁷ Christhardt Henschel and Stephan Stach, “Nationalisierung und Pragmatismus. Staatliche Institutionen und Minderheiten in Polen 1918–1939,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 62, no. 2 (2013): 164–86, quote: 186.

²⁸ For a critical assessment of Wilsonianism and the implementation of the principle of self-determination in the wake of the Great War, see most recently Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).