Page 72 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Warsaw from the eastern provinces continued to focus on violence and unrest. Joachim

Bartoszewicz, the National Democrat who had headed the eastern borderlands commission in Paris,

complained in 1924 that lurid stories depicted the kresy as little more than a place of banditry, while

the former Borderland Guard activist Antoni Zalewski argued that any interest expressed by Poles

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toward the kresy had a “flavor of sensationalism.” In Warsaw, a group of students who hailed from

the eastern borderlands and organized social events, including tea evenings and so-called kresy balls,

lamented that “the reason why there is a failure of Polish policy is the lack of social consciousness

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about the significance of the eastern borderlands for Poland.” Both of Volhynia’s weekly

newspapers—the Volhynian Review (Przegląd Wołyński), which favored Piłsudski’s approach, and

the right-wing Volhynia Life (Życie Wołynia)—also complained that the various governments in

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Warsaw failed to devise a concrete plan for the region’s integration into the state as a whole. As
Zalewski went on sarcastically, the inhabitants of “these exotic provinces of our Republic” could

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comfort themselves with the fact that the rest of Poland simply ignored them.
As bad news—or, indeed, no news—flowed from the Volhynian borderlands to other areas of

the new state, only insufficient and inadequate people seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.

State officials during the early 1920s certainly struggled to find recruits who would fill posts—as

teachers, policemen, or administrators—in Volhynia’s war-weary and bombed-out towns. The so-

called housing hunger (głód mieszkaniowy) was a particular issue in Równe, where a quickly

growing population could not find adequate accommodation, and in the transportation hub of Kowel,

where two hundred railroad employees found themselves living in railroad cars in “the most

11 Joachim Bartoszewicz, Znaczenie polityczne kresów wschodnich dla Polski (Warsaw, 1924), 37; Antoni Zalewski,
“Województwa wschodnie,” Przegląd Lubelsko-Kresowy, December 24, 1924, 14. Similar ideas can also be found
in “O konsekwentną politykę kresową,” Przegląd Wołyński, September 17, 1924, 1.
12 Witold Bronowski, “Nasze Zadanie,” Jednodniówka polskiej młodzieży akademickiej z Kresów Wschodnich
(Warsaw, 1925), 5.
13 “W sprawie kresów,” Życie Wołynia, February 17 1924, 3-4; “Pierwszy etap walki skonczony” Życie Wołynia,
December 14, 1924, 3.
14 Zalewski, “Województwa wschodnie,” 14.

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