Cross-Border Movement in Interwar Polesie as a Manifestation of the Local Population's Indifference towards the State

Abstract

Abstract The present article addresses how the local population of the Polesie Voivodeship perceived the establishment of the Soviet–Polish state border that separated them into two nations. This article focuses on their co-existence, through the prism of the evolution of the reason for cross-border movements. It aims to show that national indifference is not based on the same attitude towards a modern institution as a result of only a vague knowledge of modern society, but is, very often, the result of a conscious choice in the conditions of the need to live and co-exist with ‘alien’ institutions of power. This article, contributing to a growing literature on how ‘ordinary’ people living near state frontiers both resist and appropriate these demarcations of state sovereignty, is largely based on cross-referencing local state archival material with oral testimony from residents of the time and their descendants.