Page 112 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

loyalties over the authority of incoming state personnel. Summing up the problem in 1924, the police

reported that “the local population is ill-disposed toward our statehood and willingly favors all

criminal elements who, according to the opinion of the population, undermine the authority of our

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administration.”
In the early 1920s, politicians in Warsaw debated how they might get populations in the

peripheral eastern regions to behave themselves. In his speech to parliament in February 1922, the

Minister of the Interior, Stanisław Downarowicz, who had had a brief stint as the provincial governor

of Volhynia in August and September of the previous year, emphasized that policies at the border

needed to promote more than mere technical expertise and should encourage members of local

society to support and work alongside the security services. There was, Downarowicz regretted, “no

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material cooperation with, or help for, the government.” At the meeting of the provincial governors
of the eastern borderlands in Warsaw that June, the Director of Public Safety echoed this concern,

stating that the Ministry of the Interior was not only responsible for defending the border, but should

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also take care of the “mood of the population.” While policies included reprisals against bandits,
they also aimed at preventing local people from coming into contact with dangerous influences that

moved back and forth across the border. After all, even in 1924 that border still had only one guard

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for every two kilometers.
Local police units certainly attempted domestic intelligence work in the hope that they could

become better acquainted with this largely unchartered terrain. Already in September 1922, the state

police in Ostróg county issued instructions to all police stations about how to compile reports on the

behavior of local populations that took into account the incidences of crime, activities of political,

social, educational, industrial, and agricultural organizations, and the mood of the populace.

33 “Sprawozdanie sytuacyjne za II-gi kwartał 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/9/83od.
34 Sprawozdanie stenograficzne z posiedzenia 288 Sejmu Ustawodaczego z dnia 24 lutego, 1922, 73.
35 “Posiedzenie popołudniowe zjazdu…13 czerwca 1922,” AAN MSW (dopływ) 1001/15od.
36 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 105.

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