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cases of illegal border crossings in both directions. Considering the poor quality of border
protection, we can assume that the actual number of people engaged in such acts was much higher.

The legality—or rather the illegality—of these actions was, however, always in the eye of the

beholder. Indeed, it is worth remembering that acts referred to as “smuggling” in archival documents

may not have been considered criminal acts by people who were simply continuing to use networks

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of trade that had existed prior to the creation of the new border. As the political scientist Andrea
Chandler has shown in her study of exchanges across the Polish-Soviet border during this period,

“state-building and the designation of new borders ‘created’ smuggling out of what was previously

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quite legitimate economic activity.” While such acts necessarily challenged the state because they

violated the law and undermined the authority of the border, the available statistics provide little

evidence as to how (if at all) local people viewed the broader political significance of their own

activities.

LOCAL IGNORANCE AS AN EXPLANATORY DEVICE

If the sources remain somewhat opaque on the significance of criminal acts in the eyes of the people

who carried them out, a close reading of the official documents does reveal how the Polish police

interpreted local behavior. In February 1924, for example, the police faced problems when Soviet

commemorations were held at the border to mark the sixth anniversary of the formation of the Red

Army, as well as the recent death of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. In Krzemieniec county,

state police compiled a report about one “typical” incident that occurred in the Soviet border village

of Zinki on February 27. On that day, they recorded that a small parade of around twenty Soviet

civilians and fifteen Soviet soldiers, armed with rifles and accompanied by an orchestra, moved

57 “Sprawozdanie miesięczne […] za m. sierpień 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/7/335.
58 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 105.
59 Chandler, Institutions of Isolation, 44.

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