90 JERZY TOMASZEWSKI Were Inferior
Acta Poloniae Historica Jerzy Tomaszewski 19, 1968 THE NATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORKING CLASS IN THE SOUTH-EASTERN PART OF POLAND (1918-1939) Ascertainment of the real size of the national minorities within Poland's pre-1939 frontiers is a problem hedged with many difficulties. When the 1921 census was carried out, the migratory movement had not yet ceased, so that the reliability of the data is somewhat dubious.1 When the next census was carried out, in 1931, the objective circumstances were more auspicious, but the data were falsified by the administrative authorities, 2 so that subsidiary data have to be used to correct the bias. In the south-eastern part of Poland, comprising the then provinces of Lublin, Cracow, Lwów, Tarnopol, Stanisławów and Wołyń, which were largely inhabited by Ukrainians, questions of nationality were extremely complicated. Apart from Ukrainians, these areas contained Poles, Jews, small colonies of Czechs and Germans, and in the province of Polesie lived Byelorussians and Ukrainians. In some counties, the people still had little feeling of nationality. Polish nationalists sometimes denied the existence of the Ukrainians as a nation, or declared they 1 J. Tomaszewski, Z dziejów Polesia 1921-1939. Zarys stosunków spoleczno-ekonomicz~ nych [The History of Polesie, 1921 - 1939. Outline of Socio-Economic Conditions], Warszawa 1963, pp. 20-22. Vide also A. Krysiński, Liczba i rozmieszczenie Ukraińców w Polsce [Number and Distribution of Ukrainians in Poland]. Warszawa 1929, passim. * According to E. Szturm de Sztrem, officials of the political departments in the District Offices went over the filled-in census forms and in the column marked "mother tongue" scored out some of the replies and wrote "Polish" Sometimes they actcd similarly with regard to the column marked "religion," in which case they wrote "Roman Catholic;" but this happened rare- ly.
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