Page 266 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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be solved through external emigration. These doubts persisted into the 1930s. As the geographer
and proponent of Polish colonies Stanisław Pawłowski stated in 1936, while there was space for

between four and five million people in the eastern borderlands, the fact that the natural growth rate

in Poland was 400-500,000 people per year meant that the state would be forced to find a new

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solution in ten years’ time anyway. Similarly, the following year, an article by Ludwik Grodzicki in

the TRZW’s yearbook argued that settlement policies would work in Polesie only if huge land

drainage programs were carried out so that agricultural areas became usable (and, even then, hopes

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for the region’s ability to absorb populations from further west were “greatly exaggerated.”) In step

with his times, Grodzicki used language that betrayed little sentimentality about the populations

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involved. For him, they were little more than the “population surplus of Poland.”
Such pessimism did not mean that all schemes for internal colonization were abandoned. In

fact, by the mid-1930s, the idea that vast numbers of people could be moved eastward from their

homes in western and central Poland to areas in the kresy was again making the rounds in policy

circles. Importantly, when they researched the possibilities for these schemes, policy-makers relied

on an idea that was becoming widespread—levels of national consciousness were related to the

potential levels of “resistance” to Polonization among eastern populations. Again, the transitional

borderland space of Polesian Volhynia—or Volhynian Polesie—proved central to such discussions.

When the author of one paper, written at the Ministry of the Interior in 1935, carved out various

“zones” that he deemed useful for the future development of the state, he singled out Volhynia’s

northern counties, where not-yet-national populations would be less likely to resist colonization and

more likely to need civilizing. In arguing that these people did not have a developed national

54 “Słowo wstępne,” Kwartalnik Instytutu Naukowego do Badań Emigracji i Kolonizacji, Rok 1, no, 1 (December
1926).
55 Kowalski, Dyskurs kolonialny w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej, 143.
56 Ludwik Grodzicki, “Kilka słów o możliwościach kolonizacyjnych Polesia obecnie i po przeprowadzeniu
melioracji” Rocznik Ziem Wschodnich (1937), 182.
57 Ibid., 177.

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