Land reform implementation decree

On the first day after the Polish Committee for National Liberation (PKWN) was established, the PKWN Manifesto was broadcast on Moscow radio, calling all the Polish people to fight the German occupants and highlighting the role of the Soviet Red Army in liberating Poland. PKWN announced itself as the only legitimate government of Poland; the underground Polish government based in London was deemed a usurping government.

In its Manifesto, PKWN pledged to ‘materialize forthwith a broad land reform on the liberated lands’, in order to ‘boost the reconstruction of the state and to satisfy an eternal striving of Polish peasants for land’.Footnote ²⁵

The Manifesto was a harbinger of land reforms, which were materialised in a legislative form by the PKWN Decree of 6^th September 1944 concerning land reform implementation.Footnote ²⁶ The first sentence of the Decree underlined the importance of land reform for the Polish state and presented its assumptions. ‘Land reform in Poland is a necessity for the state and for the economy …. The agricultural system is going to be based on strong, healthy and viable farms able to deliver, which are going to belong to their owners.’

Such a generally defined objective of the reform was elaborated upon further in detail. The most important were two specific objectives: to ensure the subsistence of the existing farms the size of which was below five hectares of utilised agricultural area, and to establish new individual farms to be owned by the landless, fornals, farmworkers and by small leaseholders.

The land stock which was to undergo subdivision by PKWN included property owned by state, land owned by the German Reich citizens and German nationals who were Polish citizens, as well as the land belonging to ‘traitors of the nation’, who included those convicted chiefly for treason and providing assistance to the German occupants to the detriment of the Polish state or local community. However, the biggest share of the land stock was expected from the so-called ‘kulaks’ (from Russia), that is, landowners whose farms exceeded one hundred hectares in general area, or fifty hectares of utilised agricultural area, and in Poznań, Pomerania and Silesia provinces – one hundred hectares in general size, regardless of the amount of utilised agricultural land within that area.

The land that was confiscated from landowners was to be taken over by the state without any compensation, so in reality the land was to be appropriated instead of being subject to a contract of conveyance.

The size of new farms and of the expanded ones could not exceed five hectares of medium quality soil; in case of horticultural and vegetable farms and lots dedicated for craftsmen it could not exceed two hectares, and in case of lots dedicated to workers, the figure was a quarter-hectare.

During the ‘transaction’ of land acquisition from landowners no money was involved, but the acquisitions of land by peasants and workers involved money. The price of land, as set in the Decree, was equivalent to the value of an average annual yield from a given area. Buyers were offered buyer-friendly and convenient payment conditions: they were to pay only 10 per cent of the purchase price in cash or in kind. Payment of the remainder was to be made in installments within ten years in the case of smallholders and within ten years for the landless. The landless people were privileged as they could be granted a postponement of payment of the first installment for up to three years.

Farm owners who, due to lack of a sufficient stock of land, could not enlarge their farms to five hectares, had the right to change a farm to a bigger one, situated on the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’.Footnote ²⁷ The landless could also benefit from this privilege.

The Decee provided that the landowners, expropriated owners or co-owners of agricultural estate may receive individual farms that were situated outside the expropriated property or they could choose to receive a monthly remuneration, the amount of which corresponded to the remuneration of a Category 6 civil servant.

The start of the land reform

Efforts to implement the land reforms were undertaken immediately. The Proclamation of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) of 3^rd October 1944 read: ‘No more landowners’ attempts at sabotaging and hindering the reform!’ and it called for: ‘Any attempt at postponing, sabotaging or distorting the land reform is to be broken! Any landowners’ resistance or terror attempted by the foul land possessors is to be nipped in the bud!’Footnote ²⁸

The Instruction of the PPR’s Central Committee dated 10^th October 1944 announced the establishment of special brigades to collaborate in organising propaganda actions: ‘The task of the campaigning brigades is to revolutionize the greatest possible peasant masses to implement the land reform, to break the resistance of landowners, to extend and reinforce the social foundation for the new democratic regime of Poland reborn.’Footnote ²⁹

Effecting such a revolution was not an easy task for the reformers. What did they have to face? We can realise it when reading Dzieje polskiej reformy rolnej 1944–1948 [The History of Polish Land Reform 1944–1948] written in a lively way, albeit for propaganda purposes, by Henryk Słabek.Footnote ³⁰

A typical problem for rural areas situated ‘east of the Vistula River’ was hunger for land and an insufficient stock of land to satisfy that hunger. For example, the land stock to the need for land ratio in the Cracow province (Lesser Poland) was a mere 8.3 per cent, while in Greater Poland it reached 76.5 per cent (thanks to the post-German land stock contribution).Footnote ³¹ Thus, in the former region the amount of land provided was limited, as a result of which the statutory five hectares could not be reached, while in the latter region the amount of land provided was above the norm.Footnote ³²

In the eastern part of Poland, for example, in Lubelskie province, the stock of agricultural land taken over was sufficient to award a mere 15 per cent of beneficiaries, and in Rzeszów province – only 8–9 per cent.Footnote ³³ Commotion was not infrequent among fornalsFootnote ³⁴ who wanted more land and refused to accept the lots of two to three hectares, which were too small to ensure subsistence. On the other hand, in Greater Poland there was a surplus of land in relation to the number of those authorised to receive it: 25 per cent of land remained in stock because nobody claimed it.Footnote ³⁵ Also, the problem in Greater Poland was that fornals were very unwilling to purchase land because they preferred to work on a state farm.

A problem that was shared by all the regions of Poland and which hindered the implementation of the land reform was the fact that the Polish government in London, headed by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, was still active. Słabek writes that the Mikołajczyk’s people called the authorities implementing the reform ‘a foreign element’, ‘foreign agents’, and they regarded the land reform as ‘wild restructuring’. The London government wanted to frustrate the PKWN’s intentions by trying to discourage peasants from participating in the reform.Footnote ³⁶

Another factor, which was visible in central Poland and which caused much concern among peasants and fornals were attempts at reprivatisation and restitution. As approximately two hundred agricultural estates were subdivided into lots contrary to the PKWN Decree (the size of those estates was smaller than fifty hectares), complaints were lodged. In July and August 1944 a few former landowners were issued documents certifying that the subdivision of their estates was null and void and the land – subdividing authorities were told to return the titles to land to those landowners and to leave the subdivided lots.Footnote ³⁷

Problems faced by the beneficiaries of the lots resulting from subdivision were a lack of funds, especially to pay the first installment for the land purchased, as a result of which a phenomenon of title waivers was more and more common – in particular in Greater Poland – and it prevailed chiefly among fornals.

A number of problems to be faced by the reformers were solved by means of the socalled ‘workers’ brigades’. It was in October 1944 that 150 workers were for the first time dispatched to the eastern rural areas to campaign for land reform and to subdivide huge estates into lots (the scale of the campaign for land reform is well shown by the fact that during the two weeks of October 1944, three hundred rallies and village meetings were organised in Rzeszów province itself). Approximately 1,500 individuals were working as campaigners in the liberated areas in 1944. Troops were also engaged to serve for the brigades: between October 1944 till the end of that year, six hundred officers and enlisted soldiers were sent to work as campaigners.Footnote ³⁸ ‘Guidelines for workers’ brigades handling estate subdivision’ issued on 20^th March 1945 ordered drastic and decisive steps against the landowners who were to be ‘absolutely removed within three days from the county area, while being allowed to take only personal belongings’.Footnote ³⁹ In the majority of cases peasants did not dare subdivide and accept land in the presence of their landlords; this was done only after the landlords were ‘removed’ from their estates. Some peasants, however, felt sorry for the ousted landowners, so it sometimes happened that following peasants’ intervention landowners were set free from jail.

Estate subdivision was frequently carried out in an atmosphere of general euphoria, which is well illustrated, for example, by a fiesta following the subdivision of the estate of count Alfred Potocki, the biggest agricultural estate in Rzeszów province: ‘Approximately 500 peasants gathered in front of the Łańcut palace. A government representative climbed a ladder to a Pilawa coat of arms which had been hanging for 150 years above the palace gate. Using a hammer, he knocked off one of the oldest Polish coats of arms, which since the 13^th century had served as the emblem for twenty generations of noblemen and magnates. This was the Szczęsny-Potocki’s coat of arms.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Statistical results of the land reform

A large number of new peasant farms were established on the lands taken away from landowners on the originally Polish territories (so-called ‘Former Territories’),Footnote ⁴¹ as well as on the territories taken away from the Germans and assigned to Poland following the Second World War (the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’),Footnote ⁴² which were taken account of in Polish statistical records.

The principal period of carrying out land reform involved the first years after the PKWN Decree was issued in 1944. While in the Former Territories, from among the general amount of land subject to subdivision, 1,155,400 hectares of landFootnote ⁴³ was subdivided by 1^st December 1946, by 1^st January 1949 the amount increased to a total of 1,210,900 hectares.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hence, the subdivision was chiefly (95.4 per cent of land) carried out during the first two years of the reform.

Quite impressive were the results of land reform achieved in the first three-and-a-half months of the PKWN Decree’s coming into force. By 1944 the state took over 1,741 estates, the area of which amounted to 320,678 hectares. A portion of that area was dedicated to the development of agricultural culture and was subject to various types of exclusions, and the total of 212,084 hectares were subdivided among 109,899 families.Footnote ⁴⁵

As far as the Former Territories were concerned, up to 1949, as many as 9,707 agricultural estates (3,485,600 hectares) were taken over for land reform. Nearly two-thirds of the total area was intended as exclusions, namely land that was not farming land (forests, public water sources) and which was to be used for other purposes, such as State Agricultural Farms, production cooperatives, state forests, vocational training facilities, etc. The other portion of land was subdivided.Footnote ⁴⁶ The area taken over under the PKWN Decree in the Recovered Territories amounted to 9,437,600 hectares. 42.4 per cent of that area was subdivided under land reform, and the remaining part was excluded as non-farming land and land dedicated to other purposes.Footnote ⁴⁷

As a result of the reform the area of 1,201,900 hectares located in the Former Territories was subdivided for the sake of 407,500 farms, those to be extended as well as those newly established (the biggest area was assigned to the manor workers (fornals) – 47.3 per cent, followed by small farmers at 19.6 per cent, and the landless at 17.8 per cent).Footnote ⁴⁸ This area was accompanied by the former German land in the Former Territories, which was subdivided among 90,457 new farms with a total area of 736,235 hectares (an additional 42,756 hectares were intended for extension of the existing farms).Footnote ⁴⁹ As far as the Recovered Territories are concerned, 483,300 farms were established, the total area of which amounted to 4,004,900 hectares.Footnote ⁵⁰

When compared to the results of the land reform carried out in Poland in the interwar period,Footnote ⁵¹ the results of the land reform carried out in People’s Poland (PKWN reform) show that the PKWN reform was more effective in terms of statistics. While the area of land subdivided among farms amounted to 6,070,100 hectaresFootnote ⁵² (2.38 million hectares in the Former Territories and 3.69 million hectares in the Recovered Territories), the area of land subject to the reform during the Second Polish Republic amounted to a ‘mere’ 2,654,800 hectares, which accounted for 43.7 per cent of the former amount. As it relates to the number of farms provided with land as a result of reform, the number was also bigger in the case of the PKWN reform, namely 1,068,400 (601,500 in the Former Territories and 466,900 in the Recovered Territories) as opposed to 734,100 in the interwar period. The PKWN reform was also more efficient in terms of average size of the resulting farm: 5.7 hectares as opposed to 3.6 hectares.Footnote ⁵³ When comparing the percentage of ‘peasant farms’, which came into being as a result of both reforms, the PKWN reform was also more effective. Depending on region, the percentage ranged between 20.6 per cent and 72.2 per cent farms. For comparison, in 1939 it ranged from 1.5 per cent to 19.7 per cent.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, in terms of statistics, one can talk about a significantly greater ‘success’ of the PKWN reform, additionally having regard to the length of time in which those reforms were carried out: five years (PKWN reform) as opposed to twenty years (interwar period reform).

Higher statistics for the PKWN reforms are a result of a different approach to the implementing of the reform; it was carried out using force and sanctions, including capital punishment.Footnote ⁵⁵

Land reform as seen by the First Secretary of Central Committee of Polish Workers’ Party

Let me now refer to the memoires of Władysław Gomułka – First Secretary of the Central Committee of Polish Workers’ PartyFootnote ⁵⁶ – who, after stepping down, described what the land reform looked like from the point of view of a member of the ruling regime. What is even more important, he pointed out, was that the decisive role in the reform development was Josef Stalin, although the latter was not always entirely aware of the political situation in Poland, as is very well demonstrated by his opinions on the land reform.

Gomułka describesFootnote ⁵⁷ a meeting of a delegation of Polish communists with the representatives of the USSR government, which was held on 28^th September 1944 in Moscow. The meeting focused on economic matters, and especially on providing assistance for reconstruction of Poland. On the following day Josef Stalin threw a dinner in his private residence near Moscow. After the dinner, after midnight, ‘when the guests left the table after drinking champagne from rams’ horns and proceeded in three different groups to various corners of the dining room, Stalin and Molotov held a “rugatelnyj razgawor” with Bolesław Bierut’Footnote ⁵⁸ [a Polish top communist activist].Footnote ⁵⁹

Stalin changed his hitherto friendly attitude and attacked Bierut with offensive words. According to Bierut’s account to Gomułka, Stalin started from a question: ‘Czto ty, … [taboo words here] diełajesz w Polsze? Kakoj z tiebia komunist, ty … [taboo words] [What are you … doing in Poland? What kind of a communist are you, you …].’ Bierut thought at first, that Stalin was joking, but he was disabused by Molotov who said: ‘Czto ty durak ułybajeszsia? Zdieś nie szutki, a deło serioznyje [What are you smiling at, idiot? We’re not joking here, we’re being very serious.]’Footnote ⁶⁰ Gomułka commented that Stalin and Molotov’s verbal aggression towards Bierut was not a personal attack, but it was a manifestation of criticism of political operations of the Polish communists ruling the liberated Poland, ‘especially the criticism of our attitude towards landowners which, according to Stalin – as he repeated it also later on various occasions – was liberal and “Tolstoy-like”’.Footnote ⁶¹

Stalin meant that following the announcement of the Land Reform Implementation Decree ‘we should vanquish the landowners forthwith, by putting some of them to jails and ousting the rest from their houses’. And you – Stalin accused Bierut – ‘left them in their mansions and palaces which they occupied before the reform’.Footnote ⁶²

As a consequence of the conversation, the management of Polish Peoples’ Party decided to veer away from the hitherto implementation of the reform according to the law and take a revolutionary course. As Gomułka has written: ‘Due to reasons which were well understood, the real causes of this change of course could not be disclosed. They were known only to a narrow circle of top management party officials.’Footnote ⁶³

However, the shift did not contribute to peasants becoming more trustful towards the PKWN, ‘and it may have changed their attitudes to hostile’. ‘Stalin was wrong when he thought that the revolutionary approach to the reform and applying repressions towards landowners will enjoy mass support of peasants and will reinforce our position in the rural areas.’Footnote ⁶⁴

The October change of direction was a signal to the London underground to pursue armed struggle on a broader scale (attacks on prisons, treacherous assassinations), as a result of which the communist authorities toughened repressions towards the underground by issuing a KRN’sFootnote ⁶⁵ State Security Decree, which provided for severe prison-time penalties, including capital punishment, for crimes of this kind. Meanwhile, the London-based underground movement increased ‘propaganda’ in order to raise concerns among peasants about participating in the reform. Leaflets and handouts said that ‘accepting land from the Polish Peoples’ Party is tantamount to reinforcing anti-Polish elements and opening a way for collectivization of agriculture’.Footnote ⁶⁶

What did Josef Stalin say to that? He addressed PPR as follows: ‘You want everything to be roses, you want peasants to sell their souls and bodies to you. What you grasped in the peasant masses before the land reforms is already a lot. That peasants are reluctant in delivering quotas, is understandable. Peasants want to receive, not to deliver … Peasants are greedy, and you want them to kiss you. Years will pass until peasants start believing that there is no trick in their being given land by you … You should not be anxious about peasant discontent. I have no doubts that in their hearts peasants are grateful to you. And in a year it is going to be even better when they see that nobody takes land away from them.’Footnote ⁶⁷

‘This land belongs to us’ – land reform in peasants’ diaries

Polish peasants were grateful indeed, as can be read in diaries issued on the twentieth anniversary of land reform.Footnote ⁶⁸ However a valuable source of information this can be, one should bear in mind that it was meant as propaganda.

The diaries show happiness of their authors because of being given land, and hope for a better future. One diarist recalls: ‘I could not believe we would have our own piece of land, our own little cottage, that we will be independent. Everything seemed to be a dream, we thought it was not happening. … But it did happen. The land belongs to us’ (p. 42). Those who were given land treated it with great fondness: ‘All day long I would help the land-surveyor in field work. Each lot assigned was simply kissed by him, he circled its borders many times a day and he was devoted to People’s Poland with his whole heart’ (p. 141).

For fornals, the prospect of working on their own land was perceived as liberation. They explained: ‘The exploitation of landowners has come to an end and my sons will not be fornals working for a lord’ (p. 51). Or as follows: ‘After the hard prewar days, after a disastrous German occupation, came bright days in New Poland. From a landless farm worker I turned into a normal citizen of our country, given equal rights. … It happened so suddenly that all of us were thunderstruck with the avalanche of changes’ (p. 93).

After the first wave of joy felt because of the land received, the diarists wrote about the feeling of concern that somebody will take the land away from them or that the reform will be revoked. It was difficult for peasants to believe that they were given the land forever. Those they feared were the former owners – lords in the Former Territories and the Germans in the Recovered Territories. One diarist writes that [peasants] ‘were prejudiced against everything related with communism and to everything that was coming from the “Bolsheviks”. They believed that the situation was only temporary and that the lords would come back’ (p. 93). Another one writes that [peasants] ‘simply did not want to accompany the land-surveyor to the field’. Others would say: ‘Well, when they call us, let’s go, but there’s no use to go because when the lord comes back, he will take the land away from us anyway’ (p. 126).

Fears related with settling down on the Recovered Territories are described by one diarist as follows: ‘The most horrible stories were told – how people are murdered over there in the West, that the Germans throw away the Poles, that a Third World War is about to begin, as a result of which the Germans will come back to their estates’ (pp. 263–4).

Peasants were not only afraid that the lords and former owners would come back, they also feared for their own lives: ‘How much we feared when one had to go and collect hay from the field, as notices were stuck on fences and trees, on which somebody has written that the one who dares collect the hay will be shot’ (p. 102). Somebody mentioned that a coffin and a cross were drawn on a land plot, which was a result of the subdivision, with a notice attached to the cross: ‘He who ploughs the subdivided land must make a coffin ready for himself first’ (p. 48).

Some diarists wrote that the subdivision caused misunderstandings among people who were to receive the plots: everybody wanted to have as much as possible for himself. One of the peasants described irregularities taking place during subdivision; he was given one hectare of subdivided land, but other peasants, who already owned five and more hectares ‘received land for vodka, sausages and other bribes. Nobody could do anything about it. Those who did not want a little, receive nothing’ (p. 87).

Difficulties related to settling down were a common theme described in the diaries. Peasants, and especially fornals, were short of animals and agricultural tools, but everybody was determined to farm their fields trusting that their willingness and hands ready for work were enough: ‘when it came to starting work, everybody became sad thinking how to plough the field. The first days, months, years, were blood and tears. … The authorities gave us that piece of land so longed for but what should we do with it? We can only go to the field and cry. But a proverb says: “A man bears more than a horse” and so it was. … My brother and I … harnessed ourselves to the plough instead of horses, and sometimes we harnessed a cow’ (pp. 141–2).

The difficult situation for settlers was more specific in the Recovered Territories. The first difficulty encountered was the mere relocation and transport, especially from the easternmost territories of interwar Poland, which were assigned to the USSR as of 1945. One of the settlers describes the arduous transportation of migrants for several weeks from the eastern territories to the western ones as ‘The journey which lasted forever’ (p. 270). He describes how there was less and less food, for people and for animals; and when the train stopped somewhere in the field, agricultural crops were destroyed completely. Sometimes during a train stop, women tried to cook some warm food on two bricks, but they rarely succeeded, because a train whistle called them to get in the train again.

After surviving the arduous transportation they had to face the challenge of finding a house and a piece of land, which was not an easy task. One diarist describes how he arrived in the Recovered Territories with a group of migrants ‘with light bundles on our back, wearing shoes made of tarpaulin with holes in the soles, with two little children and a wife’ (p. 223). He took possession of an abandoned little house with an orchard and one hectare of land next to it, and to mark that the house was occupied he hung the Polish flag. While describing the difficult beginning of work in the field, he mentioned state as well as international aid, a ‘post-German’ cow he received from the Border Office and a horse from UNRRA,Footnote ⁶⁹ as well as a few tonnes of grain from the Polish state (p. 225).

Another problem, often described in diaries, included looting in the Recovered Territories. ‘Looters took machinery, furniture and what not and took it to central Poland’ (p. 264). One of the settlers wrote: ‘The beginnings of our living there were very difficult. A settler lived in every other house, there was no village leader, or any shop, looters were everywhere’ (p. 279). He continues to talk about people organising, choosing a village head, and taking turns in guarding their estates, about harvesting rye and potatoes with wheelbarrows because there were no other means of transport, and about a shortage of horses and cattle: ‘After potatoes I sew rye while dragging harrow by myself. I sew one-and-a-half hectares of field in this way’ (ibid.). The author was chosen to work as an escort to bring horses from UNRRA, which he remembered for a long time: ‘I can’t forget the moment my boys walked a long way from home to meet me. There was so much joy that there is a horse and the fieldwork will proceed’ (p. 280).

I have already mentioned that diaries were used for conveying a propaganda message; a praise of communism is not difficult to find, as in such sentences as ‘Communists keep building a new life. Poland of which no one has ever dreamt is emerging from poverty and debris’ (p. 152).

Recollections gathered from PKWN reform beneficiaries more than thirty years later, thanks to a study of the team headed by Barbara Perepeczko,Footnote ⁷⁰ paint a rather different picture of peasants’ attitudes. Interviews conducted during the study proved that some peasants did not show any enthusiasm whatsoever when they were offered land, and they refused to take it. Some of them did it for political reasons: ‘My understanding was that if the reform is conducted by a communist government, let communists participate in the reform and benefit from it. And I was not a communist’ (p. 197). Others wanted to stay loyal towards landowners who were deprived of their estates for the sake of peasants.

However, a refusal of land offered required courage, as coercion was not infrequent, and some peasants who refused to take the land were even arrested. According to one respondent, when his father did not want to take the land, ‘they chased him away from the yard and they said he had to take the land or he would have no job here. Other people who did not want to take land, were arrested’ (ibid.). The respondent’s father finally accepted the land under duress.

The taking over of the landowners’ land prompted ethical equivocation in peasants. For some of them it was wrong: ‘To me it is a common theft …’, or: ‘One cannot take away somebody else’s property, the Seventh Commandments says Thou shalt not steal’ (p. 198). Others neutralised their feeling of guilt by justifying their behaviour: ‘it was unjust that the lord led a rich and comfortable life and the major part of peasants did not have any prospects for development and improvement of their lives’.

Subdivision under the reform involved the land of well-to-do landowners, as well as the land of those politically ‘unstable’, despite the fact that their farms did not exceed the fifty hectares prescribed by the PKWN Decree. ‘The size of the subdivided estate was 10 hectares because the owner was convicted of being an opponent of the communist regime.’ ‘Someone ratted on X that he belonged to AK,Footnote ⁷¹ so he was taken away to Siberia, and the 48 hectares of his estate was subdivided’ (p. 199).

The respondents very often had reservations as to the operation of the Subdivision Committees that were deemed to show bias and as very political or simply unfair. ‘Land went to those who were friends with the commissar or the communist authorities’, ‘those took land who held power, belonged to the UBFootnote ⁷² or NKVDFootnote ⁷³ ’ (ibid.).

The atmosphere surrounding the land reform was different depending on the presence of the landowner. This was less frequent in the eastern territories, because landowner families were taken away deep into the USSR. According to one of the respondents, ‘In 1945 the majority of estates were cleared of landowners because during the times of the first Soviets they were deported or simply disappeared’ (p. 201).

These statements distort the collective and unanimous enthusiasm manifested in the previously discussed diaries and show complexity of the reform process, which, as it turns out, was carried out on various levels, including mental and moral level.

‘The end of the world’ – land reform in landowners’ reminiscences

In the process of an ongoing land reform, landowners were on the other side of the ‘barricade’ because it was their estates that were subject to forced subdivision. Land reform did not, however, mean only a loss of property in a material sense; its all-embracing nature was to destroy this social class.Footnote ⁷⁴ The destruction of landowners was called bluntly by Stanisław Lem as ‘extermination’,Footnote ⁷⁵ while Franciszek Starowieyski called it the ‘atrocity’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The memories of the landowners are precious evidence, which makes it possible to reconstruct how their destruction felt. The accounts often started with a moment of encounter with the Red Army. The interviewers remembered the experience of Soviet soldiers as a shock; the opinion shared by all of the interviewers was that of aliens, cultural cataclysm and barbarian conduct. Franciszek StarowieyskiFootnote ⁷⁷ remembered that he was not afraid of the Germans, ‘but I was afraid of the Bolsheviks. I was simply afraid of Asia. The Germans fought against us, but this was something like a cruel gameplay within the same civilization. And suddenly you have people of an alien civilization, whose intention is to impose that civilization on us and destroy us.’

A reminiscence of looting landowners’ property, by Soviet soldiers or by Polish communists, or by local communities, is present in all the accounts. Iza and Jan Kochanowski remember trucks loaded with the Soviet soldiers equipped with rifles: ‘Amidst screaming and beating, furniture, carpets, personal belongings of the Kochanowskis, including pictures together with hooks ripped off from the walls, were loaded through open doors and windows onto the trucks. Books, which were of no use for them, were trampled into the dirt.’Footnote ⁷⁸ The head of the family was arrested along with his brother, the remaining members of the family left the mansion with a few personal belongings in one cart. Other accounts are similar: ‘In October 1944 a truck arrived in front of his house, from which people dressed in civil and military clothes jumped out. My father was arrested on site and the search started of the house and the outbuildings. During the search they stole valuables while my mother was looking, they said we would not need them anymore. … Looting and burglary lasted till dusk.’Footnote ⁷⁹ The father’s family went to jail and mother was displaced; she was allowed to take only personal belongings, and she was forbidden to settle down within the country borders.

The accounts tell about local inhabitants being bestowed with the manor’s equipment and land. As a rule, peasants, despite initial hesitation, accepted gifts offered to them by the new political regime, however, it does not mean that they did not have moral dilemmas. Tadeusz Grodzicki remembers

Peasants who hesitated to take somebody else’s property were sometimes intimidated. Maria Baehr, née Tyszkiewicz remembers that

Also, the estates whose owners were absent were looted by local peasants or workers. As remembered by Tadeusz Czaplicki:

Not all the landowners’ accounts describe peasants and fornals as thieves or opponents of landowners: ‘We were living at the coachman’s, he was kind to us. You know how it is with people, some are very kind, caring, and the others are even hostile. … Which ones dominated? I remember that the village people in general were kind to us.’Footnote ⁸³ In some of the landowners’ accounts one can perceive a certain solidarity among the lords about to go and their servants; it was not infrequent that the property was distributed among the grounds staff by landowners themselves before the estate was taken over by official subdivision committees. It was often the servants’ initiative. ‘Fornals were concerned about the cows. “Lord – they said – those manor cows … can be taken away by the Bolsheviks. It will be better if they are distributed.”’Footnote ⁸⁴

The accounts mentioned arrests, which were ‘a standard’ during the time of the reform implementation. Remarks about arrests can be found in almost all the accounts, although not all of those reminiscing were arrested, as in the case of this one:

But the last stage of the reform – leaving the estate, was the most painful to all the expropriated landowners. Maria Walewska’s account:

How did the landowners manage in exile, without land, without a house and an estate taken away from them without a penny of compensation in return?Footnote ⁸⁹ In the reality of People’s Poland, they were indeed sentenced to social non-existence. They had an extremely difficult time, because they still used ‘that name of theirs’. But while reading the landowners’ accounts one cannot see many complaints or moaning, but often fortitude and valiance, pride and power not to give up, and a wish to organise their lives despite the circumstances, still with dignity and the class they represented before the war. ‘All of us were in dire straits’, remembers humbly Anna Branicka-Wolska,Footnote ⁹⁰ when in 1944 her family were leaving the palace of Wilanów. Before they left, her mother had gathered everyone in the palace corridor: ‘She said not to think about petty things.’ At first the Branickis occupied two classrooms of the school in Nieborów, and after a few weeks they moved to Zygmuntowo, to three unoccupied chambers, each one in a different hut. They started to organise their lives: ‘They arranged for a wood stove, in which they burnt cones. It was freezing cold outside, and there was no WC in here. One had to go behind the barn. – Mother recommended to build a privy. And this is at least what was left of us there.’Footnote ⁹¹ The head of the family was detained by the Russians who afterwards made him change prisons all over Poland, all the way to Brest, and then to Lubianka,Footnote ⁹² and to the Krasnogorsk internment camp. He spent three years there, among prisoners of war, and soon after coming back from the camps he died.Footnote ⁹³

Anna Branicka-Wolska writes that they survived thanks to memories and something else: ‘We wanted to prove that without palaces and estates we will still be ourselves. That we will survive.’Footnote ⁹⁴ In the time when they had no home, Anna tells that she started moving from friends to other friends. She remembers how, together with her sister, they used to dine in soup kitchens open for the poorest, and how she knitted caps for a cooperative, to earn some money, and how she enrolled to sociology classes ‘Here [in Warsaw], not like in Cracov, her fellow students were afraid of her name. So she was sitting on her own, nobody approached her, and after lectures she went home also alone.’Footnote ⁹⁵

Jan Zamoyski, sixteenth owner-in-fee-tail of the city of Zamość, remembers his difficult predicament after the reform, when he was arrested by political police (UB).Footnote ⁹⁶ Together with his brother and uncle, they stayed in prisons in Olkusz and Kielce: ‘for boycotting the land reform’, that is, for UB’s belief that Zamoyski surely boycotted it. He was sentenced to ten years of prison for ‘anti-national operations’, ‘for a hostile attitude towards People’s Poland.’ He changed prisons, starting in the basement of Mokotowska and Rakowiecka edifices,Footnote ⁹⁷ through a forced labour camp in Piechcin. He remembers being penalised one day for reciting Mickiewicz and SłowackiFootnote ⁹⁸ with other prisoners: ‘Four days in a cooler – five feet by five feet. … Twenty-four hours standing, naked. In the morning a piece of bread was kicked inside, and some liquid which they called coffee. You were standing ankle-deep in faeces.’Footnote ⁹⁹ After the amnesty in 1956 Jan Zamoyski was looking for a job. A graduate from the Institut Supérieur de Commèrce in Nancy and the Warsaw School of Economics, fluent in English, French and German, he could not find any employment for a long time. Various institutions were looking for employees featuring such excellent qualifications, but ‘when they hear your name, it turns out that the position has already been taken’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Anna Radziwiłł, a senator and a former Deputy Minister for Education, living in a modest one-bedroom apartment inherited from her parents, when asked how she coped with such a radical change of her social position and financial situation, answered: ‘I will tell you with aristocratic pride that I’m fond of: very easy – for an aristocrat that I am.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ The pride and composure with which many landowners accepted their and their children’s fate as decreed on them by communism, is quite striking.