Peasant Communities in Interwar Poland’s Eastern Borderlands: Polish Historiography and the Local Story

Abstract

The nationality issues of interwar Poland’s eastern borderlands ( Kresy ) have been a popular theme in post-war Polish historiography. A considerable part of this historiography has continued the debates of interwar experts and political activists, which revolved around the two interwar censuses and the question of ethnic identity. For this reason, scholars have given priority to statistical evidence in order to determine the national belonging and categorize the inhabitants of the eastern borderlands into particular ethnic and national groups. What is more, they have drawn their conclusions on the assumption that identity is objectively definable by blood ties. I argue that peasant identity in these borderlands was driven by ‘localness’, that is, a specific symbolic universe, set of values and conventions typical of peasant culture. Thus, identity cannot be comprehensively described through ethnic categories alone. In the article, I explore some practices of localness such as the malleable roles people ascribed to others in everyday life. For large groups of peasants, they were of vital importance in the reception of nationbuilding projects.