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highly dangerous. In a March 1924 report, it was stated that “the rural population, peasants who are

generally quite indifferent, sometimes as a result of their ignorance yield to these prompts and even

commit offenses,” as was the case in Równe county where “crowds of peasants pounced on several

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police stations and forest protection authorities and disarmed police functionaries.”
This focus on the mass of ignorant peasants did not mean that the kinds of national tensions

that were discussed so obsessively in the Warsaw press and the nation’s parliament were absent from

police documents. Most obviously, reports at a local level drew upon longer traditions of suspicions

against Jews, commenting that these populations in Volhynia generally looked after their own

interests, rather than those of the state as a whole, and that they discouraged peasants from paying

taxes by telling them that if a whole village refused to pay a tax then the state treasury could not

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collect that tax at all. Jews who lived in towns along the border were also accused of crossing to the
other side in order to trade—and it is likely that many of them did so, considering the fact that the

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border now cut across traditional trading networks. Local reports similarly suggested that some
Ukrainian elites—including Orthodox priests, teachers, members of parliament, and Prosvita

activists—spread ideas about “Polish oppression in the kresy” and protested against state policies that

included collecting taxes and putting the Orthodox calendar in line with that of the Roman Catholic

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Church. Outside influences were said to be doing most of the damage. When Ukrainian
parliamentary deputies traveled around the Volhynian countryside in 1924 to speak to thousands of

peasants about the injustices of Polish rule, they were accused of “exerting negative influences

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among the dark mass of the Ukrainian peasantry, leaving it ill-disposed toward the Polish state.” In
some border localities, this kind of work seemed to be paying off, with Ukrainian populations said to

67 Ibid., 1.
68 “Sprawozdanie miesięczne […] za miesiąc czerwiec 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/9/114.
69 Ibid., 114.
70 On the spreading of anti-Polish ideas, see “Sprawozdanie sytuacyjne za II-gi kwartał 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/9/84od.
71 “Sprawozdanie miesięczne […] za m. sierpień 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/7/339.

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