Page 173 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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the benefits of the new system of farming.” Three years later, a special issue of the same
newspaper, which was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Polish state rule in Volhynia, made

similar claims about local appreciation for the post-1926 efforts to improve rural life. One of the

articles—written by a pro-Sanacja Ukrainian activist and tellingly published in both the Polish and

the Ukrainian languages—described how the “artificially fabricated partitions” between Poles and

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Ukrainians were fading away as a consequence of the state’s efforts. Mixed cooperatives, “in which
people of various nations, languages, and religions find the possibilities of cooperative work,” he

went on, also constituted evidence of “the healthy impetus of the Volhynian village toward self-

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help.” But if Sanacja attempts to transform physical environments and social relations in the

countryside were cast as evidence of a common cause between the benevolent state and an

enthusiastic and grateful peasantry, a second narrative suggested the darker side of the Sanacja’s

civilizing mission toward the Ukrainian-speaking masses.

Mud constituted a particular obsession for state officials who perceived a destructively

cyclical relationship between physical environments and peasants. There was certainly a surfeit of

the stuff. In a province where a mere 38% of land was used for agriculture in 1926, Sanacja

personnel made efforts to transform what they saw as muddy wasteland into places that could sustain

crops, and, in 1927, county-level authorities organized drainage projects (melioracja), for which they

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gained funds from the Ministry for Public Works in Warsaw and local government authorities.

None of this was easy work, particularly in the province’s marshy northern regions. As one engineer

who investigated the issue in Kostopol county reported, the river watersheds were much larger here

than they were elsewhere in Poland, meaning that a successful program of melioracja required the

30 Ibid., 2.
31 “Gdy dzwony dzwonią,” Przegląd Wołyński, June 16, 1929, 4-5.
32 “Zdrowe Objawy,” Wołyń, June 4, 1933, 2.
33 According to an article in Volhynia Life, 25% was meadow and pastures, 24% forests, and 13% lakes, wastelands,
and marshes. “Rolnictwo a samorząd na Wołyniu,” Życie Wołynia, February 21, 1926, 8-9; “Sprawy melioracyjne
na Wołyniu,” Życie Wołynia, April 10, 1927, 4.

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