Page 174 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

cooperation of multiple counties. Further problems were caused by the fact that the vast network of

marshlands in eastern Poland, which did not map easily onto arbitrary political borders, extended

34
deep into Soviet Ukraine.
The obsession with mud transcended traditional political divisions. Channeling wider

Enlightenment ideas about the deleterious effects of marshlands on people’s mentalities (and the

deleterious effects of those mentalities on the physical environment, in turn), one journalist writing in

the newspaper Volhynia Life in 1926 stated that “the mud negatively affects the health of the

inhabitants, the possibilities for transportation within the province and with other areas, the lowering

of the yield from the fields, meadows, forests, and livestock, and the possibility for transporting

35
natural resources and importing products that have been created elsewhere.” Quite simply, he went
36
on, the mud “completely slows down the development of life in this part of Volhynia.” But if
Volhynia Life had a right-wing political agenda, articles on the inability or unwillingness of local

people to do anything about managing muddy environments also took up a considerable amount of

column space in the pro-Sanacja Volhynian Review. On its pages too, villagers were depicted as

literally stuck in the mud. They “do not want to manage this evil at all,” one observer wrote

despairingly, despite the fact that “not only horses and cattle, but even children” were sinking into

37
the morass. Engineers whom local authorities commissioned to go into marshland areas in order to
investigate conditions drew similarly depressing, if not quite so poetically phrased, conclusions about

the apathetic behavior of the mainly Ukrainian-speaking peasantry. In Kostopol county, where 50%

of the land was not being used for agriculture, the engineer wrote that one of the largest obstacles to

34 Letter to the department of the regional assembly in Kostopol county (April 28, 1928), DARO 26/1/57/25od.
35 “Rolnictwo a samorząd na Wołyniu,” Życie Wołynia, February 28, 1926, 7. On the role of marshlands for
Enlightenment thinkers, see SueEllen Campbell, The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture
(Berkeley, 2011), 175.
36 “Rolnictwo a samorząd na Wołyniu,” 7.
37 “List ze wsi pow. Dubieńskiego,” Przegląd Wołyński, March 1, 1931, 3.

174