Page 164 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER FIVE:
CIVILIZING SITES IN THE VILLAGE

As Louise Boyd noted on her visit in 1934, the countryside of eastern Poland was quite beautiful—in

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a primitive kind of a way. Here, peasants engaged in handicrafts that had long disappeared in more
“modern” countries, dressed in traditional clothes, and used the same methods to plough their fields

and catch fish as their ancestors had done many generations back. But while foreign observers could

admire such picturesque scenes, Polish state officials saw something else in rural spaces—

backwardness. In Volhynia, where rural populations were among the most “backward” in the state

and where the dilemmas of modernization intersected with a complex series of geopolitical, national,

and local conflicts, Sanacja officials asked a question that predated 1926: What were the best

mechanism by which a mainly Ukrainian-speaking population could be ushered safely into the

modern world?

In many ways, representatives of the Sanacja approached rural challenges in the same way

that they approached the problems of urban life—they declared that the thoughtful application of the

right kinds of modernizing techniques would help to quell anti-state attitudes and transform men and

women who had lived under the partitions into loyal Polish citizens. This approach was not

altogether new, but instead spoke to a post-imperial consensus about the importance of fulfilling

people’s basic economic needs. The National Democrat Władysław Grabski, who led the Polish

government between 1923 and 1925, had already suggested that satisfying quotidian demands among

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populations in the kresy would help the state to win them over politically. Building on this
consensus, Piłsudski and his supporters also emphasized the idea that satisfying everyday material

needs would aid state stability and shelter people from the divisive and petty electioneering that had

dominated the first half of the 1920s. As the Volhynian provincial governor Władysław Mech put it

1 Boyd, Polish Countrysides.
2 Bruski, Between Prometheism and Realpolitik, 53.

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