Page 195 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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moments when they sought moral and financial support. Motifs of domesticity were thus utilized
simultaneously to justify Poland’s right to rule and to criticize the nature of state policies.

KOP’s mission to civilize the countryside through model outposts was also fraught with

contradictions and tensions, as its leaders vacillated between condemning local peasants as

hopelessly backward and arguing that KOP held the civilizational antidote. On the one hand, officials

drew on the idea that local Ukrainian-speaking peasants constituted impediments to modern life and

implied that the processes of modernization would have to be imposed upon them for their own good.

In reports compiled in 1935, KOP’s educational officers depicted Volhynian villages as primitive,

conservative, and unhygienic places, even after ten years of exposure to border guard influence.

Physical and human conditions, epitomized by the marshlands of northern Volhynia and the apathetic

character of the peasantry, seemed to reinforce one another. In his report, an officer stationed in

Kostopol county emphasized not only the deep structural problems that impeded the area’s

development, but also the “primitive” characteristics of the local, non-Polish, population. “These

people, especially the Ruthenians, are characterized by extreme laziness and slovenliness,” he wrote,

“This is a result of their low level of consciousness. Very often one comes across people who live

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with their swine.” Another instructor who described the peasants of Kisorycze in Sarny county,

also in northern Volhynia, was similarly pessimistic. Since people had to work on infertile land and

in an unhealthy climate, they were, he wrote, “characterized by a strange melancholy” and “a

stubbornness and deeply rooted conservatism,” a mindset that was reflected in dirty, disease-prone

huts with small windows and accumulations of bugs, smoke, and foul smells. 112

110 Report for MS Wojsk. Łuck (November 1932), CAW I/300/1/658. When the settlers’ committee in Zdołbunów
wrote to the Krzemieniec Lyceum in November 1934 with a request for a lowering of the price of wood, it
emphasized the fact that while settlers were supposed to play the role of “the carrier of culture in the kresy,” they
found themselves in a far more difficult position than that of the (supposedly less civilized) local peasants. Letter
from the the Union of Settlers in Zdołbunów to Krzemieniec Lyceum (November 7, 1934), DARO 223/1/23/23.
111 “Gmina Ludwipol Powiatu Kostopolskiego,” in Stosunki społeczno-oświatowe w 18 gminach na pograniczu
Litwy, Łotwy i ZSRR w ciągu ostatnich 5 lat (Warsaw, 1935), reprinted in Jan Widacki (ed.), Kresy w oczach
oficerów KOP (Katowice, 2005), 219.
112 “Gmina Kisorycze Powiatu Kostopolskiego,” in Kresy w oczach oficerów KOP, 207, 208, 210.

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