Page 73 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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primitive of conditions.” But the shortage of housing was just one of a whole host of problems that
did little to entice people to Volhynia. At a conference of the provincial governors of the eastern

borderlands, which was held in Warsaw in the summer of 1922, the Volhynian governor enumerated

what he saw as the reasons for the lamentable dearth in personnel—low salaries for state officials,

along with poor working and living conditions, he stated, meant that the best people chose to go

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elsewhere. Other politicians made similar observations about the poor quality of state
representatives at a local level. During a trip to the kresy in the early 1920s, the Peasant Party leader

Wincenty Witos noted with disappointment that teachers had been drawn from a poor pool of

candidates, lacked dedication to their work, and were disliked by the local population. “A great many

of them came because they were not able to stay in their place of origin due to a lack of academic

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qualifications—and sometimes moral qualifications,” Witos later recalled in his memoirs.
Polish observers also complained that the remnants of Russian rule threatened the smooth

process of integrating the province into the new state. In their eyes, even ostensible symptoms of

modernity, like the railroad tracks that cut through the landscape and the stations that were often

situated far away from the towns that bore their names, had been configured to serve the empire’s

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economic and military needs, rather than those of modern Poland. More challenging still were the

human legacies of the empire, which appeared at every turn and suggested to local populations that

Poles might simply be overseeing another temporary occupation in this perennial borderland.

Although the number of ethnic Russians within the borders of the Polish state was far lower than it

15 “Protokół spisany z przebiegu pierwszego perjodycznego zebrania Naczelników władz II-instacji na obszarze
Województwa Wołyńskiego, odbytego w Wołyńskim Urzędzie Wojewódzkim w dniu 27 kwietnia 1925 roku,”
AAN MSW (Part 1) 69/10.
16 “Posiedzenie popułudniowe Zjazdu Wojewodów Kresów Wschodnich z dn. 13 Czerwca 1922 r.” MSW (dopływ)
1001.
17 Wincenty Witos, Moje wspomnienia (Warsaw, 2010), 168.
18 On his travels around Russia during the nineteenth century, Francis H.E. Palmer stated that Russian railways
“were laid down without much regard for the towns, and thus it often happens that the station is situated several
miles—sometimes as many as ten or twelve—from the town whose name it bears.” See Palmer, Russian Life in
Town and Country (New York and London, 1901), 130.

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