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interests above those of the town (and the state), they argued simultaneously that the physical and

cultural isolation of peasants from the modern world made them prone toward irrational behavior.

Networks for spreading news were certainly less prevalent here than they were further west. In 1929,

the province had just one postal-telegraph office or postal agency for every 870 square kilometers of

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territory and 15,420 people. Not that most peasants could have read letters, in any case. In 1927,

when the province still had the second highest illiteracy rates in the entire Polish state, a staggering

78.1% of rural inhabitants in Volhynia were said to be illiterate, while the figure for urban

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populations was much lower (38.3%). News from the rest of Poland, or indeed from the rest of the

world, was frequently communicated by word of mouth, resulting in the circulation of what elites

described as “fantastical” stories and allowing conmen to dupe peasants into believing all kinds of

nonsense. One old man, it was reported, even roamed around the Volhynian countryside, showing a

picture of the Russian tsar to thousands of peasants and leading them to believe not only that the tsar

was back on the throne but also that the old man was himself the notorious—and long-dead—monk

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Rasputin. In his evaluation of the villages in the eastern borderlands, the Polish geographer
Ludomir Sawicki stated that a lack of transportation led to high levels of provinciality and meant that

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people’s narrow horizons resembled those of non-European populations.

In all of these ways, the historian Jim Handy’s argument that elites have traditionally

depicted peasants as “a threat not just to economic development but to modernity and its companion,

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the modern state” seems to hold true for Volhynia. For Polish state officials, however, the issue was

not simply that peasants were mired in eternal backwardness, but rather that Volhynia’s men,

women, and children were in the process of becoming affected by the inroads of modern life and all

13 Wołoszynowski, Województwo wołyńskie w świetle liczb i faktów, 33.
14 Kornecki, “Stan kultury Polski w świetle cyfr,” 88.
15 Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 83. On “fantastical” stories, see “Potrzebny kulturalne wsi wołyńskiej,” 5.
16 Sawicki, Eskapada samochodowa, 22.
17 Jim Handy, “‘Almost idiotic wretchedness’: a long history of blaming peasants,” Journal of Peasant Studies 36,
no. 2 (2009): 342.

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