of rye per hectare. Permanent economical difficulties of the newly-re-established state and strong opposition to the idea of creation of soldier settlements along the eastern border of Poland caused the action to be halted in 1923. It was equally opposed by local major landowners and peasantry. The former feared that their own property might also be nationalised and distributed among the settlers, and the latter was enraged by the fact that the redistributed land had often been rented to them by the previous owners, but the deals were made null and void by the Russian state's disappearance and the nationalisation. By 1923, out of the 99,153 applicants, only 7,345 actually received the parcels. Out of the hundreds of planned villages in the Wołyń Voivodeship only three were ever actually created, with 51 inhabitants all together. The pace of the action was equally slow in other parts of the area. Altogether, the land granted to the demobilized soldiers amounted to 1,331.46 km². Out of the 8,732 plots of land allotted to demobilised soldiers, only 5,557 had actually been settled by January 1, 1923. Some state-owned land parcels were also sold to civilians, which established civilian or mixed settlements. Although after the May Coup d'État of 1926 the action was restarted, it never gained significant momentum and then came to a complete halt between 1929 and 1933. Altogether, the osadnik families received over 6000 km² of land. The government tried to revive the project once more after 1935, with little success. Because of the Great Depression, the prices of basic food products dropped, and all settler farms were losing money, with the average debt reaching 458 złoty per every hectare of land (that is between 800 and 1700 modern euros, depending on the conversion method). Most of the military and civilian settlers were members of the Settlers' Union (). The organisation, founded as early as March 1922, promoted self-sufficienr osadnik communities, provided them with cheap credits, scholarships at various universities of agriculture and founded a number of schools. Soviet repression After the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, Belarusian communists murdered a number of osadniks such as in Trzeciaki, Budowla and Lerypol of the Grodno County (1919–1939). After the incorporation of Kresy into the Soviet Union, the term osadnik became one of the categories of crimes in a Soviet penal system. Initially branded as kulaks, from the first days, they became a target