Page 113 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Questions included: What is the attitude of the local people toward the police? Do they help the

police in trying to eradicate crime (or the opposite)? Which regions are the most dangerous, and what

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are the reasons for this? But the battle to find out what was really going on in these communities
persisted, with state officials also noting that the police struggled to locate illegal firearms that

peasants had allegedly stashed in hay, in their roofs, and even underground. According to a circular

issued by the Volhynian provincial authorities in October 1924, efforts made by the security services

and the army had been largely unsuccessful and local people needed to be recruited to point police

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toward the weapons that lay hidden in their midst. Even after several years of rule by the Polish

state, then, the behavior of people in borderland communities continued to frustrate politicians in

Warsaw and local officials alike.

CIVILIZATION THROUGH THE SOVIET LOOKING GLASS

Quotidian borderland problems were exacerbated by the fact that this was not a border with another

democratic nation-state. Instead, on the other side of Volhynia’s border posts lay a state that was

launching its own revolutionary social experiment and with which the Second Republic had only

very recently been at war. The official military conflict was over—at least for now. But the

Bolsheviks, having won the civil war and declared the creation of the Soviet Union at the end of

1922, continued to threaten the Polish state through political agitation across the porous border. They

also offered something else: an alternative version of modernity for local people. Indeed, the close

proximity of the Soviet Union was a permanent reminder that the prewar imperial governorate of

Volhynia had been divided into two and that a Soviet version—a kind of Volhynia through the

looking glass—was being developed on the other side.

37 Letter from the County Police Commander in Ostróg to all state police stations in the county (September 28,
1922), DARO 147/1/5/63.
38 Letter from the County Police Commander in Ostróg to all state police stations in the county (December 9, 1923),
DARO 147/1/11/3-4.

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