Page 114 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

By the early 1920s, the leaders of the Soviet Union had already begun to experiment with

their own utopian schemes for transforming the lands and peoples of the former Russian empire,

including those in the ethnically heterogeneous western borderlands. The creation of the Ukrainian

Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, as well as the Marchlevsk Autonomous Polish Region within that

republic just three years later, formed part of the wider policy of so-called indigenization

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(korenizatsiia) by which local cadres were promoted and national cultures fostered. But if
representatives of Poland and the Soviet Union believed that they were creating very different types

of state, the methods that they used—and the metrics with which they measured modernity—actually

had much in common. As Kate Brown has shown in her study of the kresy on the Soviet side of the

border, Bolshevik revolutionary power was exerted through efforts to transform the conditions of

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everyday life. While this process was called Sovietization in Ukraine—as it was in other areas of
the Soviet Union, including far-flung regions like Siberia—the Soviets undertook a civilizing mission

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that overlapped with that of their Polish adversaries. In the early 1920s, advocates for both states
were drawing on pan-European ideas in order to transform their own citizens from an irrational

peasantry into a modern productive agricultural workforce that (among other things) paid its taxes on

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time.

The local Polish press hoped that towns along the border could become showcases for

Western civilization, although they were often disappointed with the results. According to a

Volhynian Review report, the historical town of Ostróg, which was so close to the border that its hill-

top Byzantine church afforded a good view of a Soviet blockhouse, suffered from high levels of

39 Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005);
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca,
2001).
40 Brown, A Biography of No Place.
41 David Shearer, “Modernity and Backwardness on the Soviet Frontier: Western Siberia in the 1930s,” in Donald J.
Raleigh (ed.) Provincial Landscapes (Pittsburgh, 2001), 194-216. More generally, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist
Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca, 2003).
42 On taxes, see Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 94.

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