Page 205 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

At their heart, these were undoubtedly questions about power. Even as they operated beyond

the formal structures of the political administration, a range of second-tier actors showed how

participation in the internal civilizing mission was always a political act. Of course, their work was

necessarily conditioned by more formal political changes in Warsaw’s governing circles, where

Sanacja officials increasingly emphasized that the right kind of modernization would rid the village

of the damaging business of electoral politics. But in the ways that they framed their interactions with

the largely Ukrainian-speaking populations of Volhynia, these men and women also claimed an

instrumental role in guiding the transition from the “backward” structures of imperial rule to the

model of the modern, economically prosperous, and geopolitically secure village. If the Sanacja

defanged party-politics in Warsaw’s parliament and moved the country toward a more authoritarian

style of rule, the view from the rural periphery suggests a simultaneous widening in what constituted

a political act. By attempting to alter the locus of rural authority, it was these people—as much as

anyone else—who shaped what state power came to mean on the ground by the 1930s.

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