Most of us have peasant roots, and yet we are mainly interested in the history of the noble minority. Today, historians are trying to restore the right proportions in the story of the history of the Polish nation.
When the peasants of Jakub Szela murdered "masters" during the Galician raid, they did not spare them cruelty. "The tools of violence were peasants' tools - poles, pitchforks, flails, clubs - which also had a symbolic meaning. Peasants pierced their victims with pitchforks, tore their bellies open, and when they beat them with flails, they said:'let's thresh, because they always said to wash grains'.
We know from history lessons that the Galician raid had its source in the policy of the Austrian partitioners, who incited the peasants to fight the "masters", which in turn paralyzed the insurgent plans. So how can we not condemn the unpatriotic peasants who murdered more than 2,000 people and burned about 150 manors? And yet the manor house is a mainstay of Polishness ...
History told anew
For years, Poland was dominated by the story that the history of our country is the history of the Polish nobility (let's skip the discussions here as to whether today's Poland is a simple continuation of the previous Commonwealth and what the Polish nation actually meant, since many of its representatives had Lithuanian or Ruthenian roots). Even the times of the People's Republic of Poland did not change much here - after all, the most important paintings perpetuating this narrative (such as the screen adaptations of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel) - were created in this period. Rather, everyone wanted to be like Mr. Wołodyjowski or like brave and handsome, though sometimes reckless, Kmicic.
These stories about great knights, "lords of heirs" or already in the 20th century lancers who always had before their eyes their homeland and maybe the Mother of God , they are comforting and pleasant to the ear, but this is not the whole truth about our country's history. The vast majority of Polish society were the lower classes - peasants, Jews, townspeople, and later - from the 19th century - workers. They have received less attention so far.
Adam Leszczyński's "People's History of Poland" is the history of Poland written from the perspective of ordinary inhabitants of our country.
Adam Leszczyński in his book "People's history of Poland" tries to look at the thousand-year history of our country from the perspective of those less born. It shows precisely the process of incapacitating peasants, gaining, step by step, domination by the nobility and the nobility, and then the phenomenon of social exploitation - both in farms as part of serfdom and later in factories - for example in textile factories in Łódź.
The desire for profit and the exploitation of the weaker are of course not something extraordinary in the history of the world, but Leszczyński shows that in Poland these phenomena had quite considerable proportions. He also presents examples of the ideological justification of this state of affairs - the nobility looked for arguments that the peasants were to serve them in the Bible. Peasants are descendants of the Old Testament Ham . Another argument was the legend of the conquest of the people living on the Vistula River by the ancestors of the nobility. The conquerors were once the legendary Sarmatians, other times the Slavs.
One way or another, the nobility and the peasants were different nations. The eighteenth-century author, Franciszek Salezy Jezierski, otherwise a democrat, wrote "in my homeland, heirs of the land from one nation, and the farmer working on this land from the other must have root beginnings".
"Whip is your law"
The nobility, taking advantage of the weakness of royal power and cities, gained a dominant position from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Initially, this domination was not interrupted even by the partitions, until the invaders gradually began to endure serfdom. This undermined the material foundations of the nobility, although the traces of those social relations have remained to this day. Leszczyński writes:"even in the first half of the 20th century, the legacy of servitude played a key role in Polish politics and social life." Not only that, also in the People's Republic of Poland and the Third Republic of Poland, contempt for peasants, villagers or work was and is doing well.
The nobility understood perfectly well that without the serfdom work of the peasants, her well-being would collapse. It shows well that the "gentlemen heirs" were not such great hosts. Therefore, even the crisis and the collapse of the Republic of Poland did not affect de facto for a change in attitude towards the peasant. The resistance to any social change was enormous. Even during the November Uprising, a stormy discussion took place in the Sejm on the issue of the enfranchisement of peasants - it did not bring results. The landowners were against.
Harvest, painting by Adam Ciemniewski.
Therefore, in the nineteenth century, peasants were whipped and mistreated. Leszczyński quotes the figures after Daniel Beavois, who in the years 1837–1840 recreated a list of 22 cases of killing peasants in only one Kiev province. The "lord heir" was not necessarily the one who used violence - the treasurer did it for him. However, there were such nobles who personally beat peasants, such as the unremarkable Czartkowski, who, while whipping the peasant, said: "Scoundrel boy, a whip is your right, and your privilege and complaint will make you stick your ass and chop it with a whip" . It also happened that when a nobleman bought a village, he would tell the peasants that he had bought them "with body and soul" and he scared that if they did not follow his orders:"I will have you beat and I will murder all of you".
Is it any wonder then at the cruelty of the peasants who murder the nobles during the robbery? Probably what is shocking about the robbery today is not the brutality of the rebellious peasants, but the incomprehensible even now that they dared to use violence on an equal footing with the masters.
Regaining independence by Poland in 1918 formally changed a lot - there were already new times and new ideas, including socialism, broke through to consciousness. De facto however, even after 1918, as Leszczyński writes, the peasant could “feel like a second-class citizen. The Second Republic of Poland did not live up to the promises it made to the workers ” . When it was necessary to fight for borders and repel the Bolsheviks, the government made various declarations - with the reforms of the Moraczewski government and the subsequent land reform in the first place. But then everything was back "to normal".
The fate of the workers was also not enviable. Worker's rights were repeatedly violated, and children under 15, although illegal, were employed en masse. "The standards of occupational health and safety in industry in Poland were notoriously broken, and at least there were constant complaints about it - from the 19th century to the 3rd Republic of Poland."
According to Leszczyński, neither the Polish People's Republic, in which, despite the propaganda slogans about the emancipation of the people, after all, workers were shot at, nor the Third Republic of Poland, which was won by the workers of "Solidarity", did not constitute a qualitative change here. After 1989, workers had a feeling of being abandoned by the elite, in the eyes of whom "the people are invariably ungrateful, lazy, demanding, untrustworthy." Leszczyński adds that countries that functioned centuries ago thanks to slavery, or such as serfdom Poland "even many centuries after the abolition of the system of slavery, have a lower level of economic development and a higher level of social inequality".
"The fact that the Third Republic of Poland did not fulfill the emancipatory promises of the elites forming" Solidarity "is therefore no exception. On the contrary:it was a historical norm in our history, ”writes Leszczyński at the end.
This shows that we have a lot to do, not only in telling about the past, but also in healing the social relationships we live in.
Adam Leszczyński's "People's History of Poland" is the history of Poland written from the perspective of ordinary inhabitants of our country.