Drawing on ethnographic and archival materials, this paper examines the ethnic politics of the Second Polish Republic by taking into account the experiences of the Lemko-Rusyn population, a minority East Slavic group inhabiting the peripheral mountainous area in southern Poland. It illustrates the changing policies towards Lemko-Rusyns and discusses the different responses of the local population to these policies, demonstrating the inadequacy of categories imposed from above as well as manifold motivations behind people's political views, choices of national identification, and religious conversions. In so doing, the article has three main objectives. First, in line with recent critical scholarship on nationalism in the Second Polish Republic, it attempts to problematize the – frequently exaggerated – difference between ‘federational’ and ‘assimilationist’ conceptions, exposing the discriminatory nature of interwar minority politics, as experienced locally. Second, moving beyond the interwar period, the article presents the long-term consequences of the interwar policies and the events of the Second World War, including a series of ethnic cleansings that took place in the aftermath of the war as well as present-day discourses on and policies towards ethnic and national minorities. And third, in discussing state actors' agency in the domain of minority policies, it calls for a more thorough recognition of the agency of the people who are the target of those policies. The article considers all these issues by presenting a history of a Lemko-Rusyn locality and its inhabitants, as recorded in school records, state reports, and oral histories.

本文利用民族志和档案材料，结合居住在波兰南部外围山区的东斯拉夫少数民族 Lemko-Rusyn 人口的经历，考察了波兰第二共和国的民族政治。它说明了针对 Lemko-Rusyns 的政策变化，并讨论了当地居民对这些政策的不同反应，展示了自上而下强加的类别的不足以及人们政治观点、民族认同选择和宗教皈依背后的多种动机。为此，本文具有三个主要目标。首先，根据最近关于波兰第二共和国民族主义的批判性学术研究，它试图对“联邦”和“同化”概念之间的——经常被夸大的——差异进行问题化，揭示在当地经历的两次世界大战期间少数族裔政治的歧视性本质。其次，超越两次世界大战期间，文章介绍了两次世界大战期间政策和第二次世界大战事件的长期后果，包括战争结束后以及当今发生的一系列种族清洗。关于少数民族和少数民族的话语和政策。第三，在讨论少数群体政策领域的国家行为者代理时，它要求更彻底地承认作为这些政策目标的人民的代理。这篇文章通过介绍 Lemko-Rusyn 地区及其居民的历史来考虑所有这些问题，