Page 171 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

land to the peasantry had become a central tenet of the new democracies across eastern Europe, and

in July 1920, the Polish parliament had passed its own land reform bill that parceled out large estates,

20
which would then be sold to peasants or agricultural laborers. While changes in Volhynia did not
happen overnight (in 1921, 623,000 hectares remained in the possession of just 554 landowners),

21
landowning elites found that their political and economic power was significantly weakened. As the

manor house lost its centrality in the Volhynian countryside, representatives of the Sanacja looked to

fill the gap with a new vision of rural life that relied on broader civilizational assumptions. Put

simply, they believed that the province needed to be detached from “Eastern” feudalism, which they

linked to the Russian empire, and connected instead to the more modern agricultural practices and

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land relations of “the West.”
There were various practical ways in which Sanacja officials attempted to accelerate what

they saw as the sluggish work of the pre-1926 authorities. For one, they emphasized the importance

of ridding the country of a system of so-called chessboard lands (szachownica) by which a villager

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owned several small strips of territory that were a considerable distance apart. Prior to 1926, the
implementation of such policies had often been chaotic and ineffective. One memoirist from

Volhynia recalled that there was not a single farmer in his village who had consolidated all of his

land, while in Kowel county, peasants were forced to grow crops or put their cows out to pasture on

24
land that was sometimes more than ten kilometers away from their homes. Governor Józewski

therefore recommended that the new administration concentrate on intensifying the process of

20 Roszkowski, Land Reforms in East Central Europe, 99-103.
21 Kęsik, “Struktura”, 22.
22 On the language of East and West, see “Sprawozdanie z sytuacji na Wołyniu, Wrzesień 1933,” AAN UWW 83/5;
“Przebudowa wsi wołyńskiej,” Wołyń, February 19, 1933, 1.
23 On the “chessboard” lands as a problem across Poland, see Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 14; Witold
Staniewicz, “The Agrarian Problem in Poland between the Two World Wars,” Slavonic and East European Review
43, no. 100 (1964): 23.
24 For the memoir, see KARTA AWII/1462/4; on Kowel county, see Edward Ruhle, “Studjum powiatu
kowelskiego,” Rocznik Wołyński (1936-7), 328-9.

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