Page 88 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

newspaper report claimed that Russian and Polish landowners were putting up a “united front”

61
against the settlers, thereby prioritizing class interests above those of Polish national solidarity. At

the same time, they continued to highlight their role as civilizers in the east by drawing on idealized

narratives of peaceful Polish settlement. Using the ubiquitous language of integration, a military

settler in Krzemieniec county in 1926 argued that settlers constituted “the cement joining the eastern

lands to the Republic,” since Poland had always been in control of “the spirit of Western civilization”

62
here.
There was, then, another way to think about foreignness. Rather than identifying the danger

in the fact that settlers constituted foreigners in the east, some Polish commentators began to argue

that it was the kresy’s foreign environment that threatened to undermine the Polishness of the settlers.

As was the case in colonial settings across the world, sexual and romantic relationships between

63
settlers and local women became a particular cause for anxiety. In a report from 1924, the Polish

politician Konstanty Srokowski argued that, as a consequence of their agricultural ignorance, military

settlers ended up marrying the daughters of local peasants who helped them with the task of farming

their plots of land. According to Srokowski, settlers were therefore becoming assimilated into the

local non-Polish population in ways that had serious political consequences for the new state—they

even voted for non-Polish candidates in general elections so as not to drive a wedge between

64
themselves and the populations among whom they lived. Other commentators similarly noted the

dangers of Polish settlers marrying Orthodox women. A delegate at the Ministry of Religion and

Public Education filed a report in 1922 in which he stated that the decision to marry local women and

61 Report from the Ministry of Military Affairs to the Head of the Department for Soldier Settlements (April 12,
1922), CAW I/300/1/652/352; “W sprawie osadnictwa wojskowego słów kilka,” Przegląd Wołyński, December 17,
1924, 2. For more on the conflicts between settlers and landowners, see Janina Stobniak-Smogorzewska, Kresowe
osadnictwo wojskowe, 1920-1945 (Warsaw, 2003), 43-45.
62 “Zadanie i cele osadnictwa na ziemiach wschodnich,” Życie Wołynia, July 31, 1926, 3.
63 For more on the imperial fear of moral decline in an unfamiliar physical environment, see Maurus Reinkowski
and Gregor Thum, “Helpless Imperialists: Introduction,” in Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear and
Radicalization, edited by Reinkowski and Thum (Göttingen, 2013), particularly 10-11.
64 Konstanty Srokowski, Sprawa narodowościowa na kresach wschodnich (Kraków 1924), 38.

88