The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times.
These observations would apply to Polish peasants at around the same time as well. A good way to summarize this, I’ve found, is that the polish word for peasants—”chłopi”—is likely rooted in the old-slavic word for slaves, which they were, albeit not in the American sense because they could not be bought or sold as individuals. Instead, peasants were assigned to parcels of land, so when land was bought or sold, the peasants were transferred with it.
There were also different sets of laws for peasants and nobles. For example, a peasant hitting a noble would be punished severely, perhaps by cutting of his hand or even executing him. A noble hitting a peasant would commonly not merit any punishment unless he killed the peasant, which may entailed paying a tiny amount of money to the dead peasant’s family (if lucky).
I think it’s also worth adding that peasants were not considered Polish for a very long time, at least until the 19th century by those who we would label as progressive and well into the 20th by those we wouldn’t. Peasants spoke ultra-local dialects (their families usually stuck to a piece of land for centuries and they were completely an oral culture), which made it difficult for them to even communicate with nobles or city-dwellers. This probably contributed to the feeling of Otherness around them and made it easier to be cruel to them.
Poland makes for an interesting case because it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the 18th century remained that way until WW1, so it didn’t exist as a uniform state at that time. How Polish national identity coalesced is a story for another time, but this setup created a sort of natural experiment: the lands belonging to the Prussians and Austrians developed the partitions they ruled over: they build railroads, schools, and functioning bureaucracies that helped usher these parts into modernity similar to what Western Europe looked like. The Russian partition, however, was kept in an almost unchanged state, and was a picture of misery that Semyonova describes.
But Poland’s history is close to Russia’s history because these places and peoples are so close geographically. It would be most interesting to learn how peoples fared in places farther away.
(My source for all of the above is Norman Davies’ “God’s Playground”)
These observations would apply to Polish peasants at around the same time as well. A good way to summarize this, I’ve found, is that the polish word for peasants—”chłopi”—is likely rooted in the old-slavic word for slaves, which they were, albeit not in the American sense because they could not be bought or sold as individuals. Instead, peasants were assigned to parcels of land, so when land was bought or sold, the peasants were transferred with it.
There were also different sets of laws for peasants and nobles. For example, a peasant hitting a noble would be punished severely, perhaps by cutting of his hand or even executing him. A noble hitting a peasant would commonly not merit any punishment unless he killed the peasant, which may entailed paying a tiny amount of money to the dead peasant’s family (if lucky).
I think it’s also worth adding that peasants were not considered Polish for a very long time, at least until the 19th century by those who we would label as progressive and well into the 20th by those we wouldn’t. Peasants spoke ultra-local dialects (their families usually stuck to a piece of land for centuries and they were completely an oral culture), which made it difficult for them to even communicate with nobles or city-dwellers. This probably contributed to the feeling of Otherness around them and made it easier to be cruel to them.
Poland makes for an interesting case because it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the 18th century remained that way until WW1, so it didn’t exist as a uniform state at that time. How Polish national identity coalesced is a story for another time, but this setup created a sort of natural experiment: the lands belonging to the Prussians and Austrians developed the partitions they ruled over: they build railroads, schools, and functioning bureaucracies that helped usher these parts into modernity similar to what Western Europe looked like. The Russian partition, however, was kept in an almost unchanged state, and was a picture of misery that Semyonova describes.
But Poland’s history is close to Russia’s history because these places and peoples are so close geographically. It would be most interesting to learn how peoples fared in places farther away.
(My source for all of the above is Norman Davies’ “God’s Playground”)