Page 133 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

of circumstances, and they did so in various ways—maintaining preexisting economic and familial

relationships that now spanned an international border, trading with Soviet citizens on the other side,

using the border to evade capture for theft, and spreading news that originated in the Soviet Union.

While they may or may not have conceived of their actions as politically charged statements against

the state, those who passed over the border illegally, or benefited from its presence in ways that

proved destabilizing to the Polish authorities, were inevitably engaging with state power.

As this chapter has shown, in addition to fighting such problems with draconian military and

policing efforts, Polish state officials attempted to control the behavior of the largely non-Polish local

populations and convince them that their interests were best served by obeying the laws of the land

and resisting agitation that came from the Soviet Union. From the point of view of many state

officials at this local level, the actions of these people were not simply connected to their nationality

(although this mattered, of course), but also reflected their quotidian needs, local economic

dynamics, and political ignorance. Based on the idea that Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists

preyed upon the impressionable and immature locals, state officials tended to argue that they were

simply “protecting” people from damaging agitation. This approach relied on the deeply rooted idea

that a civilizational scale ran through the Polish state—and that the Volhynian natives festered at, or

very near, the bottom.

In practice, however, the civilizing mission was never simply a process of imposing the will

of a “civilized” state on its “backward” eastern borderlands. While plans to transform border towns

into physical showcases of Poland’s superior civilization were certainly touted in the press, elites

continued to worry about whether incoming personnel were robust enough to transform the local

environments near the border and to resist both Soviet and local forces that threatened their mission.

Even as the 1920s persisted, and despite KOP’s best efforts, the border remained a place of anxiety,

not only because of the presence of so many people who were not considered to be ethnically Polish,

but also because incoming representatives of the Polish state did not always seem worthy of the

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