Page 192 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

By 1931, military settlers were an entrenched population in Volhynia, possessing just over

3,400 plots of land, which encompassed a total of 57,000 hectares. 100 Governor Józewski, himself a

military settler, argued that this group would both cement ties between local people and the state and

avoid the dirty world of party-politics that supporters of the Sanacja so despised. 101 At a meeting in

1932, he affirmed that settlers should constitute a key rural authority that commanded respect from

the entire population, regardless of ethnic or national makeup. While the valorization of these men as

more civilized elements often grated on local people—Orthodox and Roman Catholic alike—military

settlers argued that their civilizational work benefitted a native population that lacked the ability to

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create the conditions of modern rural life on its own.

Many of the memoirs written by military settlers reflected their obsession with material

progress, order, and cleanliness. Writing about the settlement of Krechowiecka in Równe county, the

daughter of one settler recounted not only that the settlers had built a health center but also that the

building had been constructed in an aesthetically pleasing, yet practical, manner. It was, she wrote, in

a stylish building with a shingle-covered roof and featured an apartment for the community nurse.

The settlers had also created additional modern conveniences: they had laid down a tree-lined road,

which allowed for bus connections and increased the tempo of life, installed telephones so that they

could communicate with people within and beyond the settlement, and constructed a Roman Catholic

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church. Other memoirists stated that they could easily pick out the houses that belonged to settlers.

Recalling his impressions of the settlement of Wola Rycerska in Krzemieniec county, one man wrote

that “they were not rich homesteads, but they were neat and artfully set up,” and he described the

100 Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe, 144.
101 Christhardt Henschel, “Frontline Soldiers into Farmers: Military Colonization in Poland after World War I and
World War II,” in Property in East Central Europe Notions, Institutions, and Practices of Landownership in the
Twentieth Century, edited by Hannes Siegrist and Dietmar Müller (New York, 2015), 147.
102 One Polish memoirist recalled that settlers demonstrated disdainful and patronizing attitudes toward local people
and had little experience of agriculture. See Antoni Górski, Pamiętniki lat mego życia (1922-2006) (Kraków, 2007),
62; 144.
103 Podhorska, “Osada Krechowiecka,” 135.

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