Page 17 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

self-appointed civilizers infused quotidian actions with political meanings far away from Warsaw’s

formal corridors of power. As we follow the stories of this alternative set of political actors, we move

beyond top-down and bottom-up histories and instead craft a narrative about the spaces in between.

While the voices of these men and women were largely omitted from communist

historiography and were instead confined to private spaces, they are not, in fact, too hard to uncover.

As shameless self-promoters, the second-tier actors left copious records: they published their

thoughts and arguments in regional weeklies, magazines, and yearbooks, as well as in national

newspapers, pamphlets, and journals. Many of the groups that this book will trace, including

teachers, government-sponsored research clusters, and health officials, also had their own

professional publications, while the memoirs of settlers and border guards, whose stories were

anathema in communist Poland, began to appear in émigré circles in the 1980s and in Poland after

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the collapse of communism in 1989. A close reading of these textual sources is complemented by

an analysis of a range of published visual materials. Photographs from guidebooks and postcards not

only work on an illustrative level, grounding us in a largely unfamiliar (and now lost) world, but also

indicate—sometimes quite literally—the angles from which Volhynia was depicted to an imagined

set of observers. Similarly, cartoons published in advice books, stylized images of village youth and

Jewish populations, and urban street maps give us a sense of how various groups framed their

idealized versions of the province and its people.

If these published materials allow us to see how our second-tier actors publicly presented

their visions of the province, archival materials get us behind-the-scenes. The dispersed quality of the

archive led me not only to five depositories in Poland, but also to collections in present-day Ukraine,

where the interwar region of Volhynia is now situated. The Polish state archive in Warsaw houses

political reports about, and central plans for, the borderlands, the records of academic research

22 See, for instance, settler memoirs like that of Boleslawowa Elzbieta Podhorska, which was published in Zeszyty
Historyczne in Paris in 1984. Podhorska,“Osada Krechowiecka,” Zeszyty Historyczne, 69 (1984): 122-148.

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