Page 126 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

This area was distinct from the “border zone” (strefa nadgraniczna), which ran from between two

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and six kilometers from the border and in which KOP restricted civilian activities.

At the same time, however, KOP was also charged with an explicitly defined civilizing

mission, one by which the organization aimed to alter the everyday behavior of populations toward

the state. At a basic level, such ideas were communicated to local people through the creation of new

physical structures within the landscape. The watchtower (strażnica), which was frequently depicted

in KOP’s propaganda, constituted the first physical line of defense against the eastern enemy.

Situated one kilometer from the Polish-Soviet border—in other words, within the border zone in

which civilian activities were most heavily restricted—the towers allowed KOP soldiers to look out

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onto the surrounding territories and across the border from an elevated position. The watchtower
took on a symbolic meaning too, with both the Polish-language press and KOP’s own propaganda

organs connecting it back to the idea of the kresy as a series of defensive watchtowers against a

threatening, belligerent, and uncivilized East. According to the caption that appeared alongside a

photograph in the Lublin-Kresy Review in 1925, the towers “ascend in the Polish eastern

borderlands—visible symbols of the strength of the Polish state and the unswerving freedom of the

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nation, which with the sacrifice of its blood secured the borders of its fatherland.” Such structures

also implied that the Polish state was here to stay. If the so-called green border of the early 1920s had

symbolized temporariness, the barbed wire that guards erected in certain sections of the border was

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meant to symbolize the state’s permanence.

In contrast to the various units that had attempted to police the border and control borderland

populations prior to 1924, KOP border guards also promoted themselves as almost mythological

84 Paweł Skubisz, Instrukcja służby Korpusu Ochrony Pogranicza (Warsaw, 2010), 12.
85 “1925, Warszawa, Z opracowania Budowa pomieszczeń dla Korpusu Ochrony Pogranicza i domów dla
urzędników państwowych w województwach wschodnich,” in O Niepodległą i Granice, 78.
86 “Budowy Strażnic Kresowych,” Przegląd Lubelsko-Kresowy, June 1925, 5.
87 Ibid., 5

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