Page 172 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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merging and consolidating lands, known in Polish as komasacja. Similarly, the push to abolish
servitudes, a relic of feudalism that allowed peasants to use private estate land, usually meadows,

pastures, and forests, on which their cows could roam and where they could collect firewood, go

fishing, and gather berries and mushrooms, also became a priority. Peasants did not always favor

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such moves—in northern Volhynia, in particular, they saw the servitudes as a helpful resource. But

since Sanacja officials believed that the servitudes created one of the main obstacles to liberating

peasants from their dependence on the landowners, the years between 1926 and 1930 witnessed the

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highest rates in their liquidation across Poland. In Volhynia, the servitudes issue had been settled in

174 villages by the beginning of June 1930 and had been almost completed (with the exception of the

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northern counties) by 1933.
By the late 1920s, two interrelated narratives about the responses of local peasants had

emerged, each of which reflected elite assumptions about the proper path toward rural modernity.

The first centered on the enthusiastic participation of the predominantly non-Polish populations who

embraced the state’s apparently benevolent efforts to improve their everyday lives. Reporting on a

visit to Volhynia by the Minister of Farming Reform in November 1926, the Volhynian Review

described how the minister witnessed “the spontaneous intensification” of the merging of lands,

commenting that people of all ethnicities understood the benefits that it brought to their native

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villages. In Wielka-Horodnica in Dubno county, the minister was even greeted with traditional

bread and salt by grateful representatives of six “Ruthenian” villages in which chessboard lands had

been recently merged, an action that, the article stated, “underlined what had been achieved through

25 “Sprawozdanie z podróży służbowej do województwa wołyńskiego 9.X.1926r.,” BUW Manuscript Collection
1549/5.
26 Józef Obrębski, “The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe,” in The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe,
edited by Joel and Barbara Halpern (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 43. A report from Kostopol county in 1929 stated that
local people felt unhappy about the abolition of servitudes. “Sprawozdanie Powiatowego Urzędu Ziemskiego w
Kostopolu za 1928 r.”, DARO 213/1/120/61. See also Mędrzecki, Województwo wołyńskie, 49; 82-83.
27 Roszkowski, Land Reforms in East Central Europe, 132
28 “Rola Izby Rolniczej w rozwoju rolnictwa na Wołyniu,” Wołyń, November 12, 1933, 10-11.
29 “Z podróży ministra reform rolnych na Wołyniu,” Przegląd Wołyński, November 14, 1926, 2.

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