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that, since local land offices were strapped for cash and did not have the funds to pay workers, a law

should be passed in order to obligate peasants to work on drainage programs. Acknowledging

anticipated criticisms that such an act was undemocratic—that it may well, in his words, “offend our

feelings of democratic freedom”—Sienkiewicz pointed to other areas in which the democratic state

placed obligations on its citizens. “Is it really worse than forcing children to attend school, obligatory

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military service, tax obligations, and so on?,” Sienkiewicz asked his readers.
Other articles in the local Sanacja press also portrayed the physical work of land

improvement as an important part of the state’s project to craft good citizens, rather than as an act

that undercut their democratic rights. Urban-based journalists insisted that “festivals of work”—

defined as one day a year on which the people of a village or a rural district (gmina) would dedicate

themselves to working for the “common good” by repairing a road or a school playing field—needed

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to be initiated in Volhynia. Indeed, feelings of citizenship could themselves be fostered through

communal labor, as people worked together to improve local conditions. By 1934, the newspaper

Volhynia was reporting that young unemployed people between the ages of 18 and 21 who made up a

labor battalion that worked to regulate a river in Włodzimierz county were not only nourished,

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clothed, and housed, but also benefited from education and lessons in citizenship. And yet, at the

same time as the author argued that people went willingly to work and appreciated the value of

regulating the river, internal reports indicated a somewhat different story: such schemes created anti-

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state attitudes, even acting as a “springboard” for communist agitation.

44 Józef Sienkiewicz, “O sposobach wykonania prac melioracyjnych w Polsce,” Przegląd Wołyński, September 6,
1931, 4.
45 “List ze wsi wołyńskiej,” Przegląd Wołyński, October 17, 1931, 2.
46 Inż. Jankowski “Regulacja rzeki Neretwy,” Wołyń, July 22, 1934, 4.
47 “Sprawy Bezpieczeństwa,” Speech delivered by the head of the Security Department at the Conference of County
Heads in Łuck (August 31, 1934), AAN UWW 86/20.

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