Page 178 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

RURAL DISORGANIZATION

Whether they did so with bread and salt in their outstretched hands or with their feet dragging along

the muddy ground beneath them, Volhynian villagers—or so Sanacja officials believed—would

ultimately yield to modernization. But even as they pushed for their version of modernity,

representatives of the state were engaged in a related project to control what they believed to be

defective forms of modernity that had already begun to corrupt village life. Most importantly, their

diagnosis that the Orthodox village suffered from the phenomenon of “disorganization” spoke to a

greater anxiety about the failure of peasant populations to cope with the disorienting experiences that

accompanied rapid exposure to modern life, whether as emigrants in the industrialized cities of the

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United States or as citizens within the eastern borderlands of the Second Republic.
In Volhynia, Polish observers argued that disorganization—marked here by immoral family

relations, a decline in religiosity, and a loss of bonds among members of rural communities—could

partly be blamed on the declining moral authority of Orthodox priests who weren’t “viewed with

gravity by local people” and were “more concerned with fighting among themselves” than they were

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with pastoral duties. Foreign observers echoed Polish suggestions that rural populations in the

eastern borderlands had little respect for Orthodox priests. These men, one British official who

visited the region in 1930 wrote, “for six days in the week, live the same lives as themselves [the

local peasants], work in the fields as they do and, not infrequently, quarrel with them about a strayed

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cow or a displaced boundary stone.” This alleged decline in moral and spiritual leadership meant

that non-Orthodox religious sects had come to exercise a pernicious influence on local peasants. By

the mid-1920s, Polish newspapers reported that the waning authority of Orthodox priests was leading

48 Obrębski, “The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe,” 38. In their study of Polish immigrants in the United
States, Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas utilized the term “disorganization.” See Znaniecki and Thomas,
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group (Boston, 1918-1920).
49 Niezbrzycki, Polesie: opis wojskowo-geograficzny, 297.
50 “Report on the Eastern Marches of Poland” (Mr Savery, July 1930), NAL FO 417/27/84.

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