@misc{Ablamsʹkij_Pavel_The_2017,
 author={Ablamsʹkij, Pavel},
 editor={Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences},
 copyright={Creative Commons Attribution BY-ND 4.0 license},
 address={Warsaw},
 howpublished={online},
 year={2017},
 language={eng},
 abstract={The territory of Polesia in the interwar period was an area of competition between the national movements of Belarusian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian communities. In the Polesia Province, the scope of activity and intensification of national factors were not the same. An influence of the Belarusian movement was seen only in the north of the province, in the districts of Kosava and Pruzhany. The more active in Polesia Ukrainian movement was the strongest in southern, and south-western districts: of Brest on the Bug, Kobryn, and Kamin-Kashyrskyi. Russians were the most successful in the cities of Brest and Pinsk, and in the eastern part of the region, in the neighbourhood of the towns of Luninets and Davyd-Haradok, where influences of the Belarusian and Ukrainian movements were minimal. But the idea of “the great Russian nation” was gradually becoming an anachronism within the borders of the Second Republic of Poland.Poland was an active player in the arena of national affairs in Polesia, as it sought to gain thesupport of local people through a unification policy of the state apparatus. The apogee of the Polonization action was in 1932–1939, after the office of Polesia voivode was taken by Col. Wacław Kostka-Biernacki. Activists of various national movements in Polesia were actively fought against by the State authorities. The voivodeship administration hampered all non-Polish national agitation among inhabitants of the region. The government of the Second Polish Republic did not succeed in combating civilisational backwardness in Polesia. An average inhabitant of the region was, in the first place, a member of his local rural community and often had no idea that for the State administration he was a Pole, for an Orthodox priest he was a Russian, and for a radical rural intellectual – a Belarusian or Ukrainian. A passive attitude of the majority of local people towards the question of nationality was still common at the end of the interwar period.},
 type={Text},
 title={The Nationality Issue on the Peripheries of Central and Eastern Europe : the Case of Polesie in the Interwar Period},
 URL={http://rcin.org.pl/ihpan/Content/64780/PDF/WA303_84184_A453-SzDR-52-2-SI_Ablamski.pdf},
 volume={52},
 number={2, Special Issue},
 journal={Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej},
 publisher={Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences},
 keywords={Poland - social conditions - history - 1918-1945, Polesie - ethnic relations, national project, Belarussians - ethnic identity, Poles - ethnic identity - 20th c., Russians - ethnic identity, Ukrainians - ethnic identity - 20th c.},
}