Page 83 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

wojskowi) who moved into the eastern borderlands during the early 1920s. Following their stories

allows us to see how they attempted to write themselves into a broader civilizing mission by

appealing to ideas of foreignness and indigeneity that were critical to both interethnic and intra-

Polish political competitions. In Polish propaganda, the culturally superior osadnik promised to

model rational (and self-consciously Western) farming techniques and higher standards of living for

surrounding peasants, while simultaneously continuing the natural and time-honored historical

process of Polish settlement in the east. But since the settlers themselves appeared as foreigners in

the eyes of local peasants and landowners alike, the reality was much more complicated.

The impetus for the settlement program had come from Józef Piłsudski, rather than from

those on the right. Following promises made by the Polish parliament as the Red Army made its way

toward Warsaw in the summer of 1920, Piłsudski, then head of state, declared that soldiers who had

fought for Poland would be entitled to plots of land in the eastern borderlands, many of which had

45
been expropriated from, or abandoned by, local landowners. Legislation was drawn up in
parliament, which passed a series of acts in December 1920 that allocated plots of land at no cost to

both invalids and veterans who had distinguished themselves and allowed other former soldiers to

46
buy plots if they wished to do so. By the beginning of 1921, a department for military settlements

had been established at the Ministry of Military Affairs, and in that year 1,605 individual soldiers

journeyed to Volhynia, along with 1,055 soldiers who arrived as part of so-called workers’

47
columns. Although military settlers moved into the whole of the eastern borderlands, Volhynia

alone received 40% of the total number.

45 Lidia Głowacka and Andrzej Czesław Żak, “Osadnictwo wojskowe na Wołyniu w latach 1921-1939 w świetle
dokumentów centralnego archiwum wojskowego,” Biuletyn Wojskowej Służby Archiwalnej 28 (2006): 141.
Wojciech Roszkowski, Land Reforms in East Central Europe after World War One (Warsaw, 1995), 99-103. For a
complete list of the properties that were owned by Russian, Polish, and German landowners before they were used
for military settlement, see the chart in Jerzy Bonkowicz-Sittauer, “Osadnictwo wojskowe,” Rocznik Wołyński
(1934): 539-550.
46 Jan Jacek Bruski, Between Prometheism and Realpolitik: Poland and Soviet Ukraine 1921-1926 (Kraków, 2017),
53.
47 Głowacka and Żak, “Osadnictwo wojskowe,” 144.

83