The Many Meanings of the Border

Abstract

Abstract In the 1920s, Polish state officials saw the newly established and poorly guarded Polish-Soviet border as a site of both anxiety and opportunity. As refugees and remigrants from the First World War and subsequent borderland conflicts moved westward, politicians raised fears about humanitarian crises, epidemic diseases, and anti-Polish ideological infiltration. At a local level, however, border guards and state policemen were more concerned with peasant criminality, including smuggling, horse theft, and illegal distilling, that ran along and across national lines. Since such behavior, when combined with communist agitation, appeared to threaten the state’s territorial sovereignty, the government created a new border guard corps in 1924 to militarize the border and “civilize” local people. But although border guards appeared in Polish propaganda as heroes in a hostile physical and human environment, they feared the effects of daily contact with the Soviet Union—and with civilians on the Polish side.