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local demands were frequently sidelined. In the northern part of Volhynia, where the rivers that

marked the border often ran through the properties of villages or farmsteads, some settlements were

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found on one side of the river while the arable land owned by their inhabitants was on the other.
This meant that land belonging to villagers who lived on the Polish side suddenly became the

property of the Soviet state, creating situations that could not easily be resolved in ways favorable to

the peasant. In some cases, Polish-speaking populations who found their land on the “wrong” side of

the final border sent petitions to the authorities, as was the case in June 1922 when eighteen families

from a border village in Równe county stated that “as Poles” they were connected with Poland and

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did not want their land to remain “in Russia [sic].” Such problems also affected the location of

livestock. Even by the mid-1920s, there were cases in which horses or cows—sometimes the only

provider for a whole family—remained stranded on the Soviet side of the border, with local people

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having to wait several weeks for intervention.

If many local people remained frustrated with the location of such an unorthodox border,

others made the most of the opportunities that its presence invited. As Michiel Baud and Willem van

Schendel have pointed out, people take advantage of the borders that exist in their midst and are

therefore able to, in their words, “challenge the political status quo of which borders are the ultimate

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symbol,” whether they realize it or not. In Volhynia, the state authorities certainly found that some
types of crime developed rapidly as a consequence of the border’s location. During the 1920s, they

reported, Volhynia had the highest figures in the entire Polish state for mugging and murder by

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bandits, both crimes that officials linked to the proximity of the Polish-Soviet border. Local

47 Wasilewski, “Wschodnia Granica Polski,” 131.
48 Letter from Jan Bagiński on behalf of eighteen families (June 6, 1922), AAN MSZ 12668c/77-78. See also a letter
from August 14, 1922 (Równe), AAN ALW 51/25.
49 “Odrutowanie granicy,” reprinted in Beata Czekaj-Wiśniewska et al., eds., Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza:
jednodniówki w zbiorach Centralnej Biblioteki Wojskowej (Warsaw, 2006), 24.
50 Baud and van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” 211.
51 Joachim Wołoszynowski, Województwo wołyńskie w świetle liczb i faktów (Łuck, 1929), 173.

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