A biography of the Polessian "boggy land"

The Pripet Marshes in 1890 on a painting by Ivan Shishkin.

Superlatives do not suffice to praise this elegantly crafted, expertly argued, and eminently readable “biography of the boggy land” known in Polish as Polesie (Polessia), in international parlance most often referred to as the Pripet Marshes (p. 11). A riveting environmental history of the enormous, two-million-hectare wetlands that lay along the Second Polish Republic’s border with the Soviet Union, Pinsk Marshlands has already garnered—at last count—five major Polish distinctions and awards. It is an extraordinary work about an extraordinary ecosystem that unfortunately met its demise not long after the period under consideration in the book. 

The Pripet Marshes were a true blank spot in the middle of the European continent, a near invisible, magical, otherworldly region, where the waterlogged, amphibious lifestyle of its indigenous inhabitants—mainly rural people who identified as being “from here” (tutejsi) (read: East Slavic/Belarusian), although Jews predominated in the towns—confounded outsiders. In a period when land reclamation was the slogan—witness Mussolini’s reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and of course the ever-present example of the Netherlands—the Poles, too, thought to reclaim the Pripet Marshes and transform them into arable pastureland and fields on which they could settle ethnic Polish peasants. That this did not happen under Poland’s watch was the result not of conservationist policies (unheard of at the time) but rather of inaction borne of competing interests and limited knowledge of what wetlands were and how best to deal with them.  

Pinsk Marshlands is the first environmental history of interwar Poland’s trying to come to terms with this unique ecosystem on its eastern border. Although environmental history is still a young discipline in Poland, one could not tell that from this book: the tour-de-force introduction demonstrates Łotysz’s command of environmental history and intimate knowledge of wetlands, today valued for their unique contribution to the ecosphere but in the early twentieth century unappreciated and largely ununderstood. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Networks Theory is utilized to great effect in the ten substantive and thematically organized chapters, where the author teases out various strands of action and interaction on the part of the inanimate as well as animate protagonists of his story.

Chapter 1 asks whether the marshes were for the Poles “a problem or an opportunity” (the title of the chapter). Were the Pripet Marches that the new Polish state acquired in the 1921 Treaty of Riga to be a new Holland, as the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, had hoped back in the eighteenth century? If its extensive marshes and bogs were transformed into productive pastureland and farmland in interwar Poland, Polessia could become a destination for land-hungry Polish peasants who otherwise might emigrate to Brazil. This seeming “no-man’s land” in the multiethnic borderlands thus might additionally function as a wedge separating the nationally indifferent Belarusian population to the north from the more nationally committed Ukrainians to the south. Nevertheless, as the book shows, for various reasons the interwar period witnessed no definitive answer to this question.        

The peculiar coexistence of “man and marshes” is the subject of chapter 2.  Łotysz discusses the various mosquito- and water-borne diseases (not all of which were understood at the time), as well as their impact on the superstitious Polessians. The latter were plagued by, among other things, the phenomenon of the plica polonica, or matted hair—the result of a lack of proper hygiene, not some ailment, as had been thought. Overall, the amphibious lifeworld and premodern psyche of the Polessian were incomprehensible to outsiders, who persisted in wanting to remake both people and place in their own dryland image.

A revelatory chapter 3 explains how the “amphibian economy” functioned.  Polessia was a land where roads were passable only in the dry summer (in the winter, sleighs were the main means of travel and transport) and many a shallow river navigable only when the waters rose during the spring. Although the new interwar Polish state perceived the region as backwards and impoverished, in the nineteenth century these lands had been perceived as rich, their inhabitants living a good life. Polessians had sufficient rye and hay, fish and honey; they even brewed beer. Located on the crossroads of Europe, the region exported cattle. Native Polessians could intuit how fast the waters of the region’s shallow rivers were rising during the spring floods and act accordingly. Still, this was no harmonious equilibrium between man and marshland: the Polessians’ traditional slash-and-burn agriculture–as well as the reckless felling of the region’s forests, including the alders (the “Polish mahogany”) —did not bode well for the ecosystem. Various experiments designed to transform both land and people are shown to have been less than successful.

Chapter 4, “The Institutionalization of the Wetlands,” focuses on the institutional morass that led to a lack of progress. Three separate ministries were responsible for aspects of the land reclamation project, resulting in both inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Turf wars also plagued the project. Even the creation in 1928 of a special Project Bureau of Polessian Land Reclamation (Biuro projektu melioracji Polesia), while advancing knowledge of the wetlands, did not advance their drainage. Funding for the land reclamation was sought abroad, especially from Great Britain; but dreams of foreign investment remained unrealized.

The next chapter, “Terra incognita,” delves deeply into the study of the region by scientists, as they tried to grasp what made the wetlands what they were in the first place. There was much to be discovered in what was considered by some to be the birthplace of the Slavs. Ultimately the conclusion that the reclaimed land would not be able to support as many farmers as the Polish authorities had hoped led to the abandonment of the land reclamation project:  there would be no “Polessian wedge” of Polish settlers keeping the Belarusians and Ukrainians apart (p. 222). Chapter 6, by contrast, looks at the role played by engineers, those “soldiers of science” needed to carry out any land reclamation project (p. 255). They had to function without the benefit of full scientific knowledge, which scientists were still in the process of amassing. The very design of a land reclamation project, which one way or another would have an effect on water transport, was complicated by the fact that the Pripet River flowed into the Soviet Union. And the fact that many of Polessia’s few engineers were Ukrainians meant they were kept under surveillance.

“Unavoidable Catastrophe?” is the title of a fascinating and compelling chapter 7, which deals with the ecological consequences of action and inaction in the Pripet Marshes.  Scientists and conservationists concluded that there was need for at least a Polessian Nature Park (never realized) that would contain patches of the various types of peat bogs, marshes, alder forests, and sand dunes where the native flora and fauna of the region—some relics of the Pleistocene era—could flourish. Yet their advocacy for the preservation of this unique but barely understood ecosystem was timid at best, as they feared being labeled unprogressive or unpatriotic. Still, while the specter of land reclamation remained just that—a specter—the local population continued with its traditional, merciless exploitation of the wetlands:  felling or burning down forests, overfishing, hunting rare and endangered species, stealing birds’ eggs, and washing their flax and hemp in the open waters. The myth of Polessia as a virgin land was indeed a myth.  Still, that Polessia was not developed as had been hoped was in part due to Poland’s military, the subject of chapter 8, “Natural Fortress.” Since Napoleonic times the mud that made troop advancement difficult had been labeled the fifth element (after earth, air, fire, and water). Those who would develop the region had to contend with Poland’s powerful military authorities, who still saw the Pripet Marshes as an obstacle to potential invaders and tightened their control over the region. Yet one could not count on this defense in seasons that were increasingly dry. 

The title of chapter 9, “Polessia not for Jews,” neatly sums up the conclusion drawn by the government of Poland. The American diplomat Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who visited Poland early on, came up with the idea of settling Jews in the Pripet Marshes. The Polish government toyed with the idea; but there were fears—especially on the part of Polish nationalists–that Polessia’s becoming Jewish would make it Bolshevik.  And of course, the country had high hopes of settling ethnic Polish farmers there. At the same time, Polish Zionists were taking a real interest in farming, establishing agricultural schools and model farms; those who emigrated to Palestine proved adept at reclaiming wetlands there.  Might Jews not have done the same in Polessia? But they were not given that chance.

The final chapter, “At the Mercy of the Superpowers,” deals with the fate of the region after the invasion of Poland in 1939. The Soviet occupiers wanted to drain the bogs, while Hitler, whose Nazi forces occupied the territory in 1941, wanted to keep the region undeveloped for the same military reasons as had the Poles.  At the same time, Nazi Germany engaged in a ruse of resettling Jews there—which actually meant exterminating them. The epilogue chronicles the postwar denouement. At the Yalta conference, this as yet undeveloped land was taken from Poland and given to a superpower hell-bent on land reclamation:  the USSR. By 1967 one could speak of an ecological catastrophe:  the Soviets had dug the rivers too deep, with devastating consequences for the environment. The wetlands ceased to exist as such. Yet, as the reader of this book will come to understand, it was truly an accident of history that this devastation was brought about by the Soviets, and not the Poles, who—had they regained control over Polessia after the war—might well have behaved in similar fashion.  In other words, it was an accident of history that the Pripet Marshes persisted for as long as they did into the twentieth century.

While Pinsk Marshlands is undeniably an important scholarly work, the book is written with such panache that it is hard to put down — doubtless one of the reasons why this environmental history has won so many accolades. It is also timely. The natural environment is shown to have had an impact of all kinds of processes:  social and cultural, economic and political. Ultimately, however, the consequences of man’s actions proved too great for this incredible ecosystem to survive to the present day.  

Care has been taken by the author to make the unfamiliar subject matter clear:  excellent color maps help the reader to imagine the layout of the terrain, while numerous well-captioned black-and-white photographs bring to life a bygone world. An over forty-page bibliography demonstrates the lengths to which Łotysz went to collect materials and the numerous languages his sources came in (this reviewer counted thirteen). An English-language edition is reportedly in the works. This first-rate environmental history is an invaluable addition to the still small shelf of environmental historical works on Poland and Eastern Europe proper.  Pinsk Marshlands can profitably be read in environmental history courses of various kinds, where, given its strong contextualization, it will help flesh out European environmental history for the interwar period.