Page 124 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

A “LIVING BORDER POST”

As the London Times article with which this chapter began indicated, the summer of 1924 marked

something of a state crisis at the eastern border. This crisis did not occur overnight, but was instead

anticipated by the increasing incidences of desertion among those who had been charged with

protecting the border. Between the end of October 1923 and the middle of January 1924, thirteen

border guards in Volhynia had gone over to the Soviet side, having been subjected to “direct

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agitation and prompting by Soviet border guard functionaries.” Much to the chagrin of state
officials, they had often taken their military gear with them, while others allegedly engaged in the

very acts of smuggling that they were charged with eradicating, removing horses and carriages into

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the Soviet Union. Reports of “bandit” attacks, which were allegedly orchestrated by people who
came across the border, were also on the rise. Just as they had done during the Polish-Soviet war a

few years earlier, the perpetrators made the most of the natural environment, hiding out in the forests

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of Włodzimierz county in order to evade capture.
It was, however, the high-profile attacks of the summer of 1924 that forced the government

in Warsaw to come up with a different plan to protect the eastern border. In their eyes, this was not

simply a military issue, but was rather a problem of the Polish administration’s weak political

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authority in the kresy more generally. At the Ministry of Military Affairs, Władysław Sikorski
enumerated the matrix of problems faced by the state in an August 1924 memorandum. “The weak,

relatively poor administration, the demoralized police, whose members drink a lot of alcohol and go

to Soviet Russia with their families, the complete lack of state authority among local people, the

77 “Sprawozdanie miesięczne […] za m. styczeń 1924r.,” AAN UWW 4/27.
78 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 106.
79 “Sprawozdanie sytuacyjne za II-gi kwartał 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/9/82od.
80 As Jerzy Prochwicz has suggested, new policies were based on the fact that the border divided two distinct socio-
political systems, and that the borderland had an ethnic structure that was unfavorable for the Polish state. See
Prochwicz, “Polskie Formacje Graniczne na Wołyniu,” 115. Timothy Snyder discusses raids by the Soviets in the
1920s. See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New
Haven, 2003), 148.

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