[LINK] On the formation of the Polish minority in Ukraine

[rfmcdonald]

I thought my readers would be interested in Language Hat's three posts drawn from Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place regarding the formation of Ukraine's Polish minority. At one point, after Poland's restoration following the First World War, it was advantageous for Ukrainian-speakers to identify themselves as Poles. Later, not so much.

One.

Once Saulevich and his inspectors arrived in the villages, they encountered an even greater problem: they could not see nationality. Because of the distances and the difficulty in traveling, the lack of communications, and an incoherent consumer economy, villagers lived in isolated subcultures that eluded standardizing taxonomies. Investigators sent ambiguous reports back to Saulevich: "There is no one picture of the border region. There are many; the picture is diffuse." Or investigators found that people supposedly belonging to different nationalities were indiscernible: "Ukrainians and Poles hardly differ from one another in their material existence beyond their conversational language—however, language too is problematic because the local Polish sounds very much like the local Ukrainian." Another investigator stated the problem a different way: "The issue of gathering conclusive evidence on the Polish population is hindered by the fact that people, especially the rural population, are bilingual." Language, dress, religion, the social and ethnic composition of the populations, changed from village to village, which made it difficult to fix nationality in place, as the definition of what it meant to be Polish shimmered about in a haze of vernacular. And yet Saulevich and his staff set out to encircle and chart nationality, such as "Polishness," assuming that it existed in some definite, invariable form. Perhaps Saulevich was thinking he would find a peasant version of the secular, aristocratic Polish culture into which he was born on his family's country estate in the northern reaches of the kresy....

Eventually the Marchlevsk Autonomous Polish Region "was founded in the borderlands, a place considered the most backward, poor, and un-revolutionary part of Ukraine," centered on the town now called Dovbysh:

Although the official statistics listed the population of Poles in the Marchlevsk territory as 70 percent of the total population, less than half of that number actually spoke Polish; fewer than half of those spoke it well and used it daily, and only a tiny percentage read in Polish or knew Polish literature, culture, and history. Rather, a majority of the people described in the census as Polish spoke a number of dialects of Ukrainian influenced by Polish, and — except for the fact that they were Catholic — lived in economic and material circumstances largely indistinguishable from the surrounding population of Ukrainian peasants. In short, after the aristocrats and the educated people had left, it was hard to tell the difference between Poles and Ukrainians because both were simply peasant.

Two.

At the Commission for National Minority Affairs they wrote memos back and forth, smiling over the simplicity of villagers who could not identify their nationality and were ignorant of their own language. But who was ignorant of what? The peasants too thought the "bureaucrats" were ridiculous, ineffectual, and ignorant of "our village ways." One peasant complained, "They send out an inspector who speaks in a boss's tone of voice. He drives up, pulls out his notebook. [...] We still don't know what he wanted, he didn't give us any advice." It was not inborn ignorance on the peasant side or callousness on the side of the bureaucrats that drove this conflict, but rather a colliding discourse over identity. When asked who they were, villagers answered in a way that incorporated the complexities of the hybrid culture in which they lived. For them, identities were local, rooted in the soil of a particular river bed, forest, or valley. Identity represented a dynamic relationship that depended on whom one was identifying oneself against, whether it was landowners, workers, Jews, Russians, Germans, or educated urbanites. [Rest of paragraph, beginning "When asked who they were...," quoted in previous post.]

In other words, to call the villagers in the borderlands Ukrainian or Polish is beside the point. They were, as they often described themselves, simply "local." They made up a continuum of cultures that stood literally and figuratively on the border between Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, in a place where mass media had not yet standardized vernaculars or made boilerplates of ritual and tradition. The communists who came to rule the large tracts of land sought to systematize vernacular identities and languages, fix them in space, translate that space onto a map, and with that map gaze out from their underheated offices in Kharkov or Moscow and see all of the kingdom laid out before them, a modern crystal ball.


...Many villagers who voted for Polish schools and village councils said they wanted to learn Polish because it was the language of the Catholic Church. In fact, before Soviet power was established in the kresy, locals had organized their own underground Polish schools in order to teach catechism to their own children. The Polish language also signified culture and status; learning Polish was a way for some to lift themselves above the mass of (Ukrainian-speaking) peasants in a language-driven form of social mobility.

Three.

In 1938, the NKVD decreed that individuals could not change their nationality. In the postwar period, however, it was possible, especially for women, to change their nationality through marriage. More than fifty percent of ethnic Poles in Kazakhstan married non-Poles. In fact, rates of assimilation among Poles and Germans were some of the highest in the country. Poles, Germans, Tatars, Chechens, among others in exile in Kazakhstan, started to identify themselves in the census as "Russian." Their identities began gradually to fuse into Soviet identities as they assimilated into Russian-Soviet culture. [Footnote: Deported groups generally did not assimilate into Kazakh culture. In 1990, only sixteen out of 60,000 Poles of Kazakhstan claimed to know the Kazakh language.] They began to speak Soviet-Russian in the same intonations broadcast over the radios, which began appearing in the settlements in the fifties, repeating the same phrases about the "friendship of nations" enunciated by teachers in the classrooms which started to multiply across the steppe after the lean years of war. Perhaps deported persons from the borderlands were drawn to new simplified Soviet identities (in one language and monoculture rather than numerous local cultures and dialects) because their lives no longer contained the social and economic breadth of their former lives in the kresy. [...] The streamlined nature of the new Soviet identity fit the standardized, economic simplicity of life in Kazakhstan.