Page 84 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

From the very beginning, the settler program was based on the idea that native rural

populations would benefit from having Western-minded civilizers in their midst. In a Polish

parliamentary session dedicated to the issue in October 1920, the politician Jan Dębski argued that

local Ruthenian peasants would not object to the land being given to soldiers who had protected them

from the Bolsheviks, particularly since those peasants lacked the ability to till effectively the land

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that was lying fallow. Of course, for land-hungry peasants, such appeals to Polish history, along
with claims that the settlers constituted positive conduits of modern agricultural practices, appeared

to be little more than a smokescreen for an illegitimate land grab. By May 1921, locals were already

lodging complaints against settlers who threw them off their rented land.

Anecdotes about early interactions between settlers and local Ukrainian-speaking peasants

indicated that tensions over land were exacerbated by the settlers’ proclivity for putting themselves

above the law, meting out their own brand of justice, and behaving in ways that were reminiscent of

none other than the Polish pany. In 1921, for instance, the leader of the Volhynian settlement of

Krechowiecka, Bolesław Podhorski, decided to deal in his own direct way with local peasants who

had, according to his daughter’s memoir, become “envenomed by the nearby eastern border” and saw

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“the settlers as the usurpers of ‘abandoned’ land, which should belong to the ‘locals’.” After

multiple night thefts and anonymous threats, Podhorski sent a messenger to the nearby village of

Koźlin to inform its inhabitants that a meeting would be held after the church service. When he

arrived in the village, Podhorski told the assembled crowd that the settlers wanted to live in harmony

with the villagers, but that if their neighbors continued to threaten and damage the settlements, “they

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would not report it or bother the courts, but would mete out justice themselves.” According to his
daughter, “from this day on, the stealing and the threats ceased” and relations between settlers and

48 Sprawozdanie stenograficzne z posiedzenia 198 Sejmu Ustawodawczego z dnia 17 grudnia 1920 r., 28.
49 Bolesławowa Elżbieta Podhorska, “Osada Krechowiecka,” Zeszyty Historyczne 69 (1984): 126.
50 Ibid., 127.

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