Page 85 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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villagers “were friendly through permanent mutual contacts.” It is unlikely, however, that tensions
had been erased quite so easily, considering the settlers’ ongoing threat of physical violence toward

the surrounding population.

In light of the overlap between nationality and social class in Volhynia, it was easy for

Ukrainian nationalist groups to argue that Polish settlers were nothing more than chauvinistic foreign

interlopers who occupied land that rightly belonged to local, mainly Ukrainian-speaking,

populations. In the international appeals of émigré Ukrainian nationalists in the United States, Polish

settlement policies were portrayed as part of a broader scheme to disenfranchise peasants and

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illegally grab their land. Similarly, members of parliament who looked to mobilize Ukrainian

nationalism within the Volhynian countryside drew on the idea that military settlers were nothing

more than external occupiers. In August 1924, one parliamentarian who addressed crowds in a

number of Volhynian villages emphasized the problems caused by Polish military settlement, stating

that settlers were “Poles from far away,” rather than “native people,” and that they had unjustly

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received land from the government, “which is Ukrainian property.” Elsewhere, he claimed that
there was one set of laws for the settlers and another for local people: when a settler had shot at a

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peasant, it was the peasant that had been investigated for allegedly raping the settler’s wife. British

Foreign Office personnel who visited the region in the early 1920s gave credence to the idea that

Poles and Ukrainians clashed over the presence of settlers. After the issue of schools, one report

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stated, settlements had become “the main grievance” of the Ukrainian peasant.

While the settlement issue naturally exacerbated national tensions, however, the arrival of

settlers as the putative human links between an underdeveloped Volhynia and the more civilized

51 Ibid., 127.
52 Western Ukraine under Polish yoke: Polonization, colonization, pacification (New York, 1931), 12.
53 “Sprawozdanie miesięczne z ruchu zawodowego, społecznego i politycznego na terenie Województwa
Wołyńskiego za m. sierpień 1924r.,” DARO 33/4/7/320.
54 Ibid., DARO 33/4/7/321.
55 “Report on a Visit to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia,” NAL FO 417/16/83.

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