Page 87 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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in “sad consequences” for local Polish culture. This seemed, in other words, to be a kind of
uncivilizing mission.

The ways in which incoming and local Poles shared the language of civilization, while

simultaneously clashing over how political power should be mapped out, can also be traced in more

direct confrontations between settlers and Polish landowners. As members of the latter group

attempted to minimize the dents made to their local power by a new state that promoted democratic

electoral politics, land reform, and the abolition of aristocratic titles, they also saw settlers as political

and economic usurpers, rather than as national allies. In particular, they sought to prevent settlers

from taking a share of increasingly scarce land resources and accused them instead of being clumsily

unfamiliar with the rhythms of borderland life. In a February 1922 letter addressed to the Inter-

Ministerial Commission for Issues of Military Settlement, Polish landowners highlighted the need to

stabilize state power and warned that settlers might end up as a “powerless class of unsatisfied and

derailed people who do not get along well with local people and conditions, will forsake their plots of

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land, and further increase the number of people who engage in harmful ferment.” Such accusations
pointed to an unlikely common agenda among otherwise opposing groups, with Ukrainian nationalist

politicians and Polish-speaking landowners both arguing that the military settlers constituted

illegitimate foreigners.

For their part, the settlers fervently defended themselves against charges of foreignness and

accused Polish-speaking landowners of engaging in corruption in order to hold on to their land, thus

echoing the kinds of criticisms that Borderland Guard activists had leveled at these very same people

just a few years earlier. In Krzemieniec county, a local landowner allegedly paid off a delegate from

the Ministry of Military Affairs in exchange for not having to give up his land, while a pro-settler

59 Ibid., CAW I/300/1/649/62.
60 Letter from the Eastern Borderlands Union of Landowners to the Inter-Ministerial Commission for Issues of
Military Settlement (Warsaw, February 14, 1922), CAW I/300/1/649/36.

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