Page 170 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

of the changes—both positive and negative—that this process involved. As newly minted Polish

citizens, Volhynia’s peasants found that they had obligations to the state in the shape of education

and military conscription, which introduced them to lifestyles other than their own and often led to

civilizing effects. One reporter for the London Times stated, for instance, that young conscripts from

the kresy who had lived in the more “civilized” environment of western Poland for a few years had

18
learned about healthy diets, cleanliness, and the techniques of modern agriculture. And yet as fears
about communist infiltration had already suggested in the early 1920s, the modern world brought

dangers, as well as opportunities. Recent experiences of war, occupation, and flight had exposed

these people to novel places, ideas, and political trends, which remained destabilizing during

peacetime, while the modern ideologies of Ukrainian nationalism and communism continued to

infiltrate the region’s villages. In attempting to foster what they saw as the positive qualities of

modernity, while simultaneously preserving desirable premodern characteristics, representatives of

19
the Polish state engaged in a broader pan-European balancing act.

MODERNIZING LAND, MAKING CITIZENS

One of the state’s priorities, particularly after 1926, was the transformation of land use, which itself

had profound implications for the peasant’s relationship with the new state. In imperial Russia’s

western borderlands, where peasants had been liberated from serfdom only in 1861, feudal practices

had continued to shape the ways in which people conceived of their place within the economic,

social, and even cosmic, order. After the First World War, reform policies that sought to redistribute

18 “The Polish Marches,” Times (London), August 1, 1930, 15. In his report on eastern Poland, the British Foreign
Office worker Frank Savery similarly commented that when peasants returned to their “native villages” after doing
their military service, they were “very anxious to put into practice some of the improvements which they have
noticed on the farms and in the cottages of Western Poland.” See “Report on the Eastern Marches of Poland,” NAL
FO 417/27/91.
19 A good example comes from interwar France where elites wrestled with the conundrum that modernity led to
“progress” but had simultaneously destroyed desirable premodern characteristics, including “paternal authority,
work discipline, and a sense of civic duty.” See Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration,
Intimacy, and Embodiment in the early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2009), 39.

170