Page 103 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER THREE:
THE MANY MEANINGS OF THE BORDER

In October 1924, a correspondent with the London Times reported on events along Poland’s border

with the Soviet Union. “The most remarkable phenomenon in Poland just now,” he wrote, “is the

guerilla warfare on her Eastern frontier.” Rather than mere internal “banditry,” the attacks that had

occurred against “towns, villages, country houses, passenger trains, [and] police posts” had been

prompted by the proximity of the border where cartridges were allegedly being supplied to the

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perpetrators. While the news of Poland’s problems had made its way onto the pages of the famous

English broadsheet by the fall of 1924, in Poland such havoc had been well publicized since the

official creation of the border in 1921. Indeed, the kresy’s location next to the Soviet Union meant

that it had become a site where bandits crossed the border in both directions, Bolsheviks and

Ukrainian nationalists agitated among local populations, and unruly peasants engaged in illegal

activities. The unclear legal landscape of the early 1920s was compounded by the sense of general

lawlessness that had been fostered during and in the aftermath of the war, when undisciplined

soldiers made their way back and forth across the region. This ideologically charged border was a

place of high drama.

In the eyes of many Polish elites, contemporary drama drew on historical drama. Like their

counterparts across eastern Europe, Poles had frequently spoken of their nation as the representative

of Western civilization in the east at moments when lofty rhetoric had proved politically expedient.

During the nineteenth century, national activists had emphasized Poland’s historical role as a

defender against the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks, and the Cossacks, while members of the Roman

Catholic Church mobilized the older myth of the Antemurale Christianitatis—the bulwark of

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Christendom. Unsurprisingly, such stories resurfaced at the end of the Great War. The Polish-Soviet

1 “On The Russian Border,” Times (London), October 3, 1924, 13.
2 Brian Porter, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (New York, 2011), 330

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