Page 176 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

the state had to play in severing the overwhelmingly non-Polish peasantry from ongoing feudal

practices that did not befit the conditions of the modern world. By increasing the productivity of

Volhynia’s agricultural land, or so the argument went, the state—and only the state—could raise the

standards of local life and lift peasants out of the misery in which they had been trapped for

centuries, whether or not those peasants willingly participated.

Polish elites debated how far coercive schemes undermined an adherence to democracy. With

the Second Republic’s elections having become a sham by the early 1930s, it is significant that

officials thought about democracy less in terms of the formal structures and institutions of liberalism

and more as a process that would lead to the “common good” of local communities. This attitude

toward democracy was nothing new. The Borderland Guard officials whom we met in Chapter 1, as

well as the provincial authorities who dissolved the democratically elected (“Jewish”) town councils

in the late 1920s, all thought flexibly about the version of democracy that should be applied in the

kresy. In the countryside, debates focused around the use of obligatory labor (szarwark), a feudal

method that was ostensibly anathema in a liberal democracy, but one that proved economically useful

in a poor periphery like Volhynia. In fact, between 1928 and 1935, a period during which Poland felt

the effects of the worldwide Great Depression, two-thirds of the state’s melioracja work here was

42
carried out by obligatory labor, despite the lack of legislation on this issue.
Polish concerns about how their version of democracy might be balanced with economic and

political expediency forced one engineer writing in the local press to justify why using obligatory

labor should not be seen in the same framework as its feudal antecedent (or, presumably, in a

43
contemporaneous extra-European context like that of French West Africa). In a 1931 article for the
Volhynian Review, Józef Sienkiewicz, an engineer who had trained in Moscow prior to 1918, argued

42 “Inwestycje na Wołyniu: Melioracje (ciąg dalszy),” Wołyń, November 15, 1936, 5.
43 In French colonial West Africa, forced labor continued until after the Second World War. See Alice L. Conklin,
“Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914,”
American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 437-440.

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