In 1920, just after the Polish army repelled the Bolshevik invasion, writer Stefan Żeromski cautioned that the young Polish state had to take care of the “giant landless nation” that had defended the homeland.Footnote 1 This article tells the story of those who thought it had failed to do this. I analyze the political entanglements of representatives of the Polish rural strata who chose communism as their path towards radical change, in terms of both social and economic upheaval and their own social status.Footnote 2 They belonged either to the illegal Komunistyczna Partia Polski (KPP, Communist Party of Poland) and its youth organization in the interwar Second Polish Republic, or to the communist underground during the Second World War and German occupation. Although some of them made political careers after the war, when their movement gained power, none of them became top-ranking leaders or ideologues—rather, they were “ordinary communists,” whose entanglements and practices have been overshadowed by the experiences of intellectuals and “professional revolutionaries.”
Keeping in mind the distinction once made by James C. Scott between formal, organized political activity and everyday forms of peasant resistance, I identify my analysis as closer to the former. I take issue with his statement that such practices “even if clandestine and revolutionary, is typically the preserve of the middle class and the intelligentsia; to look for peasant politics in this realm is to look largely in vain.”Footnote 3 In this paper I do not analyze state policies or party programs. I employ a far more bottom-up and micro perspective, focusing precisely on individuals and their biographical experiences, on men and women of rural background who embraced politics and incorporated them into their personal experience within certain “institutions of collective action” that were, in fact, an integral part of the complex history of peasantry in the modern period.”Footnote 4
I do not assume that these actors necessarily had a coherent ideological worldview. A researcher of the Polish countryside during the Great Depression observed that even in the case of local communists, radicalization “has no … doctrinal character… . It is simply an expression of the negative attitude of the peasant masses, excluded from any influence on the fate of the country, towards distant, unknown forces.”Footnote 5 Thus, I consider “personal communisms,” an individual experience of becoming and being a communist, to be dynamic configurations of ideas, emotions, aspirations, practices, and identities rooted in various political, social, and cultural experiences.
Accordingly, I understand the involvement of peasants and other rural strata in the communist movement not only as a choice of a certain ideological offer, but also as a strategy—one among others—employed by the unprivileged to resist political and economic oppression and to search for subjectivity and agency.Footnote 6 On the basis of this assumption I ask questions about the specificity of “personal communisms” in the Polish countryside in the first half of the twentieth century. What paths did rural communists take to political involvement and what were the patterns of radicalization in the countryside? How were relations between political engagement and other rural identities and entanglements shaped? And finally, what were the continuities and tensions between the experience of a struggle in an illegal and repressed movement and that of taking part in exercising state power after 1944–45?
Scope of the Study and Sources
To tackle these questions, I analyze rural “personal communisms” through the experiences of three groups: members of pro-communist, revolutionary peasant parties in the 1920s, activists from the radicalized younger generation of the people’s movement, and rural communists who joined the movement in the interwar period directly, with no previous involvement in any other political circles. In the last section I analyze the challenges these individuals faced after the World War II, when they took part in exercising power within the state and over the countryside.
The protagonists examined in this paper came from the countryside of central Poland, which was predominately “ethnically Polish.” I have chosen not to consider the experiences of communists active in the eastern parts of interwar Poland, among Belarusians and Ukrainians, as this would require a completely different conceptual framework, one able to address the intertwining of social and ethnic conflicts.Footnote 7 On the basis of this ethno-geographical criterion, I analyze the biographies of individuals from the pre-war Warsaw voivodship and its peripheries.Footnote 8 Despite its proximity to the capital, this was a rural and small-town area; in contrast to the western and southern provinces of “ethnic Poland,” the communists had a relatively noticeable presence here, and the people’s movement was also stronger here than in the western provinces—although much weaker than in its Galicia bastion.
Another important choice in this study is to not focus solely on peasants who own their own farms, and therefore individuals “that are existentially involved in cultivation and make autonomous decisions regarding the processes of cultivation.”Footnote 9 I include in my study all villagers engaged in agricultural manual labor: farm laborers. That is why this paper deals not with “peasant” but “rural” communists. Furthermore, I use the term “peasants” instead of “farmers” to emphasize a social status and a sense of identity that goes much deeper than that of simply cultivating the land as an occupation and a position held in market relations.Footnote 10
The source base for my argument are unpublished and published memoirs, and the post-war personal files of political activists and the ego-documents they contain, such as short autobiographies and questionnaires submitted to cadre departments of the Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPR, Polish Workers’ Party) or the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR, Polish United Workers’ Party). Constructing their “file autobiographies,” as Yury Zaretskiy calls them, the authors would make selections and ideological reinterpretations and employed strategies of favorable self-presentation for a vigilant and questioning audience.Footnote 11 They had to maneuver between principled modesty and a need for recognition, between expiating their errors and displaying their merits and resources. Contrary to Zaretskiy’s claim, I assume that one can trace “emotional experiences, reflections, and doubts” of many authors, “revealed” or constructed. This, of course, compels the scholar to stay constantly alert. Notwithstanding this, I consider individuals’ reinterpretations of “what happened” as important cognitively as the “facts” they evoked. In the process of writing and summoning up experiences from their past, the authors were constructing their communist selves.Footnote 12 Moreover, making use of such documents is most often the only way to learn about the experiences of “ordinary communists” from the “traces” or “fragments” they have left.Footnote 13 At the same time I am aware that this source base restricts my reflection to individuals who were politically active in the first years of post-war communist rule, having changed their status from that of a subordinated plebeian to a member of the ruling white-collar strata and holding party and state positions, albeit most often at the local level.
Polish Countryside, Communist Party and People’s Movement
Poland, which regained independence in 1918, was a poor, peripheral, and war-torn country that faced countless obstacles in its modernizing efforts.Footnote 14 At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 70% of its citizens lived in the countryside, and more than 60% made their living from various forms of agricultural labor. More than 60% of farms were less than 5 hectares in size, with no way of meeting basic subsistence needs. In the late 1930s about a quarter of the agrarian population was a surplus population, for whom there was neither land nor work.Footnote 15 The living conditions of the peasant population certainly varied, but the daily reality for millions was structural poverty, malnutrition, dire sanitary conditions, and an educational system that raised the aspirations of rural youth while erecting barriers to advancement.Footnote 16
The Polish countryside was overwhelmed by “land hunger,” and its inhabitants’ primary desire was land reform, that is, the division of large landholdings among peasants. This issue remained unsettled throughout the entire interwar period.Footnote 17 The scope of Polish land reform was moderate, and its execution was sluggish, entangled in nationalism (universal division of land seen as threat to Polish interests in the eastern territories, inhabited by the Belarussian and Ukrainian peasantry), and, after the 1926 coup, an alliance between the sanacja camp and the landed elites.Footnote 18
In eastern Europe the Great Depression of the first half of the 1930s mainly took the form of an agricultural crisis: there was a disastrous fall in the price of agricultural produce, open price scissors between that and industrial goods, and farmers spiraled into debt.Footnote 19 As one economic historian points out: “Poland was hit particularly hard by the Great Depression. Its fall in industrial production was comparable to that of developed countries, and the recession lasted longer, as in rural states.”Footnote 20 In the years 1929–35, the income of farms in Poland fell by 65 percent, and by 1933 market consumption in cities had dropped to 87 percent of its pre-depression levels; by 1934 in villages it had dropped to 43 percent.Footnote 21
At the same time, the rural population of eastern and central Europe experienced profound changes in terms of both culture and consciousness. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the processes of modernization and an end to the isolation of peasant culture had been gaining momentum. Changes were taking place in every field, from the horizon of aspirations to peer relations and leisure activities.Footnote 22 Villagers were now constructing their identities as members of the national community and citizens of the state, while in the late 1910s, amid post-war chaos, collapse of empires, and emergence of nation-states, they often became actors of rebellion and violence.Footnote 23 They aspired—especially the young—to play an active role in the public sphere.Footnote 24 Some of them entered politics: they were learning to think politically and see their personal fates within a broader context; they sought agency and sense of belonging in organized movements.Footnote 25
The communist movement can be seen as a collective reaction of the unprivileged classes to their low status.Footnote 26 At the same time, European communist leaders and ideologues’ attitude to the countryside and peasants was strained, torn between pragmatism and orthodoxy. On the one hand, the prospect of revolution in an overwhelmingly rural society was tenuous if the desires and interests of this group were not addressed. An inspiring point of reference was a strategy of Vladimir Lenin, who in 1917 had emerged as a spokesman for Marxist peasant revolution.Footnote 27 On the other hand, this position was criticized by orthodox proponents for whom the sole revolutionary force was the proletariat. Struggling to find a way out of this agrarian dilemma, communists argued among themselves about the nature of the forthcoming revolution and the role of peasants in it. There was also controversy over whether they should advocate the division of land among the landless only, among the peasant poor, or among peasants in general. These controversies animated particular communist parties, as well as the Comintern and Krestnitern (Communist International and Peasant International), established in 1923.Footnote 28
One contemporary scholar estimates that in central parts of Poland peasants comprised around 30 percent of the movement’s membership.Footnote 29 Even so, the milieu in which those explored in this study operated was small: in central Poland the communist party and its youth organization numbered no more than around twenty thousand.Footnote 30 The communist movement tended to attract the poorer villagers, although middle-ranking peasants were also radicalized, especially during the Great Depression.Footnote 31 As Eric R. Wolf noted, they can be “the prime movers to rebellion. Only they possess the degree of autonomy required to initiate political action and to become viable allies for ‘outside agitators.’”Footnote 32 For the most excluded, the main challenge can be, in turn, the struggle for the most basic survival.Footnote 33
Communists sought to radicalize the rural population and push it into confrontation with the state through, for example, actions against taxes or to fend off bailiffs and debt collectors. Communist-inspired actions were part of a much broader landscape of social upheaval.Footnote 34 According to modern historians who have studied the “disturbances” or “unrest” of the Great Depression period, however, these were mainly local.Footnote 35 As Wiktor Marzec pointed out, “In fact, the internal social conflict was weak, so the push to give land to the peasants to prevent their radicalization withered away just as the war with the Russian Bolsheviks was won.”Footnote 36 Thousands of Polish peasants felt alienated from and harbored distrust towards state representatives. Ferment smoldered in the countryside and abuses of power flourished.Footnote 37 However, even the 1930s brought not so much increasing radicalization as a sine wave of periods of political activity and passivity among Polish peasants.Footnote 38
Eric R. Wolf has also stressed that the “deep sense of injustice” generally harbored by peasants “must be given shape and expression in organization before it can become active on the political scene; and it is obvious that not every callow agitator will find a welcome hearing in village circles traditionally suspicious of outsiders, especially when they come from the city.”Footnote 39 The main political force in the Polish countryside was the people’s movement (ruch ludowy, ludowcy). This emerged in a central and east European configuration that consisted of “preponderantly peasant societies and democratic institutions, the dependent and somewhat stagnant semicolonial character of their economies … and the inexorable pressure of overpopulation on the land,” as well as a “transitional period between agrarian and industrialised societies.”Footnote 40 In this context, mass parties forming throughout the region set themselves the goal of representing the interests of the peasantry.Footnote 41
The first peasant parties on Polish lands were founded in the 1890s.Footnote 42 During the first decade of independence, the most stable and strongest of these were Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe—Wyzwolenie (PSL-Wyzwolenie, the Polish People’s Party-Liberation) and Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe—Piast (PSL-Piast, the Polish People’s Party-Piast). Both supported the integration of peasants into the state, rejected revolution, and advocated parliamentary democracy and land reform. In 1931, together with Stronnictwo Chłopskie (SCh, Peasants’ Party), they merged to form Stronnictwo Ludowe (SL, People’s Party), which by the end of the 1930s had reached about 150 thousand members.Footnote 43 Shaped by the experience of the Great Depression, this party shifted leftwards, toward non-revolutionary anti-capitalism. Furthermore, the mass peasant strikes organized by the SL were among the most significant demonstrations of resistance to the authoritarian sanacja regime.Footnote 44 One historian of the people’s movement has argued that it was the leaders of this movement who radicalized the peasantry in an anti-gentry or anti-capitalist spirit, rather than it representing grassroots radicalism.Footnote 45 The peasant parties “succeeded in fostering widespread, sometimes millenarian belief among millions of villagers in the ideal of a ‘People’s Poland,’” serving rural interests.Footnote 46 For the protagonists of this study, though, it was not enough.
Between Green and Red: Pro-communist Peasants’ Parties
In the Second Republic there were two legal peasant parties that emerged from the radical wings of the people’s movement and were gradually transformed into KPP front organizations, which were to transmit communist influence in rural circles.Footnote 47 These were Niezależna Partia Chłopska (NPCh, Independent Peasant Party, 1924–27) and Zjednoczenie Lewicy Chłopskiej “Samopomoc” (ZLCh, Union of Peasant Left “Self-Help,” 1928–31).Footnote 48
The NPCh was founded in November 1924 by a group of PSL-Wyzwolenie deputies. This party appealed to the interests of the rural poor and called for a worker-peasant government.Footnote 49 Its program was presented to the KPP leadership for approval, and half the members of its top leadership were also members or declared supporters of the communist party.Footnote 50 Eventually, in March 1927, the party was dissolved by the state authorities that deemed it “an unofficial branch (ekspozytura) of the KPP in the countryside.”Footnote 51 For several years it was replaced by the ZLCh “Samopomoc,” established in January 1928, once again by way of a split, this time from the SCh. In the words of one of the new party’s leaders, it was intended to “process… raw peasant material” that would later come under the direct influence of the KPP.Footnote 52 Unsurprisingly, the history of ZLCh ended as did that of NPCh: with a banning in May 1931.
One peasant activist whose radicalism brought him from the people’s movement into the communist orbit was Michał Gwiazdowicz (1889–1962). Born into a poor, middle-ranking peasant family from the Rawa Mazowiecka district, southwest of Warsaw, from the age of nine he was sent to dig potatoes at the local manor.Footnote 53 He grew up at during the “breaking of the multilateral isolation of peasants … from the culture and civilization of the other strata of Polish society.”Footnote 54 As far back as he could remember, he had “some aspiration for something better.”Footnote 55 Before WWI, he graduated from an agricultural school, which opened up his “way towards life” and made him go on “a hard, relentless fight.”Footnote 56 This was one of the first institutions of its kind in Russian Poland, which not only offered the practical skills permitted by the Russian authorities, but also socialized students into believing in the momentous role of peasants and their own role as champions of “enlightenment” in their neck of the woods.Footnote 57
Gwiazdowicz was one of the youths who returned home “in a rebellious mood.”Footnote 58 He modernized the family farm, was active in the cooperatives, and sympathized with the progressive people’s circles. In introducing the village to modernity, he was transgressing traditional hierarchies, as a result of which the local clergy publicly condemned him, and the squires attempted to talk him into coming over onto their side.Footnote 59 He came to understand then “how difficult it was for a class-conscious peasant to live in the atmosphere of the time,” and why the youths who had left the countryside wanted to cut themselves off from their roots.Footnote 60 Nevertheless, for Gwiazdowicz, a peasant identity was of key importance, as we shall see.
In the early months of WWI, he was arrested and exiled deep into Russia. Having seen the revolution at close quarters, he returned to his homeland in 1918, joined the PSL-Wyzwolenie and, when the state structures of independent Poland began to emerge, became starosta (head) of his home district. He recalled with satisfaction that, having a peasant starosta, the local peasants “began to hold their heads up high.”Footnote 61 However, soon after the departure of the leftist government, and in an atmosphere of conflict with the local landowners who deemed him a “Bolshevik,” he lost his post. He carried on as an activist and columnist of his party, and thus, through his political involvement, he advanced socially, gaining the status of a self-taught member of the intelligentsia. Even before this his class habitus had started to change, namely during his stay in Russia, where he would be taken for someone who was merely disguising himself as a peasant.Footnote 62 However, he did not become a full-time political white-collar worker, and did not abandon his class, as, since 1925, he owned a farm. In the mid-1920s he gradually moved in the NPCh direction. The turning point in his biography came in 1927, when he left this party, joined the ZLCh, and became a member of its leadership. He also joined the KPP and spent just under a year in prison.
In his memoirs Gwiazdowicz wrote nothing about what motivated him on his path to the KPP. There is no reference whatsoever to Marxism or even to the formative influence of reading in his narrative. He noted that “there was neither time nor opportunity for this,” but “there was some class instinct in man.”Footnote 63 Indeed, the main axis of his memoirs is hatred of class exploitation and contempt for “lords,” “lordlings,” “young toffs.” Having broken with the PSL-Wyzwolenie, he issued a proclamation in which he called his former colleagues who had gone over to the “lord’s yard” [their side] traitors, and cared only about parliamentary allowances and not about land for the peasants.Footnote 64
It may also be assumed that in Gwiazdowicz’s case, his disillusionment with an independent Poland that had not overthrown social relations of inequality was crucial. In 1922, Poland’s first president, Gabriel Narutowicz, who had been elected with the votes of the people’s parties, socialists, and national minorities, was assassinated amid a nationalist campaign of hatred.Footnote 65 Gwiazdowicz responded radically, calling for landowners to be hanged and manor houses burned down so as to “avenge this murder a thousandfold.” He also said that his Poland, then, had been murdered.Footnote 66
Communist and communist-leaning circles also appealed to the younger generation. Ksawery Karaluch (later Kaliński, 1905–?), was the son of a Warsaw worker who, before WWI, bought a medium-sized farm in the Grójec district, south of Warsaw. As a teenager, Karaluch joined Centralny Związek Młodzieży Wiejskiej (CZWM, the Central Union of Rural Youth), which did not have a precise ideology but aimed at turning peasants into citizens rather than waging a political struggle.Footnote 67 While studying in Warsaw, Karaluch became involved with the academic branch of the NPCh, which in turn sought to instill in students a class-based spirit and an all-out rejection of capitalism.Footnote 68 Having interrupted his studies for financial reasons, this would-be engineer returned to his home district and set up NPCh cells there.Footnote 69
Thus, while he failed in changing his social status through an accumulation of institutionalized cultural capital, he did become an actor in the bilateral relationship between the center and internal periphery. He had arrived in Warsaw with something of a background in public involvement and self-radicalized through his encounter with his fellow students, carriers of a certain political ideology; perhaps the need to belong in an alien, urban environment also came into play. One then sees a subsequent reversal of the vector of ideological influence, along the center-periphery line, with Karaluch then going on to radicalize his fellow countryfolk.Footnote 70 After the NPCh was outlawed, he joined the KPP. He also participated in the communists’ fleeting attempts to further establish legal peasant parties in the 1930s.Footnote 71
Facing Crisis: Radicalization of the Young People’s Activists
During the interwar period, political movements made an enormous appeal to young people’s aspirations and emotions, mobilizing them and opening up a space for their “thirst for action” and “inclination to rebel.” Indeed, such categories ought not to be regarded as “universal” dispositions of the young, but rather be seen within the context of the social conditioning and intergenerational relations of a given time.Footnote 72 And as the sociologist Józef Chałasiński, author of a groundbreaking study on the subject, wrote, Polish rural youth of the 1930s displayed “aspirations that cannot be accommodated in a social organization whose positions are filled by the elderly.”Footnote 73
In the spring of 1928, the CZMW split over attitudes to the sanacja regime. Those who supported it remained in the CZMW, and their organization, called Siew (Sowing, after the title of its weekly), positioned itself on the left wing of the ruling camp.Footnote 74 Siew received government subsidies to carry out activities that appealed to young people, but many of its activists tried to pursue their own agenda, supported anti-capitalist slogans and land reform, and did not necessarily feel any strong association with sanacja.Footnote 75
The other group of the 1928 split, pro-democratic, struggling to maintain their political subjectivity, and openly hostile to sanacja, established the Union of Rural Youth of the Republic of Poland, which was called Wici after a journal title.Footnote 76 From 1931 onwards this became closely linked with the SL, and by the end of the 1930s it had reached about 100,000 members.Footnote 77 The ideology of Wici was based on principles of agrarianism, namely striving to guarantee the peasants a leading role in the state and building a social and economic order based on the private property of land and individual farms, democracy and self-governance.Footnote 78 Wici, and from the mid-1930s the SL as well, represented a rather left-wing current of agrarianism: they called for extensive agrarian reform, the nationalization of large industries, and considered capitalism irreparably compromised; at the same time, however, they renounced the idea of revolution.Footnote 79 One may also say that agrarian ideology was an expression of peasants’ claims for emancipation and agency.Footnote 80 The people’s movement offered an organizational and ideological embodiment of these aspirations.Footnote 81
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the KPP considered the people’s movement its chief enemy in the countryside and, in accordance with the general Comintern line, attacked it as “people’s fascism.” The communists infiltrated people’s organizations and worked to radicalize them or split them. Only in the mid-1930s did the Comintern turn towards anti-fascist popular fronts, however, the communists never gave up trying to play a dominant role in them. For their part, Wici and SL kept a distance from the KPP. Communist proposals for rapprochement were only taken up by some individuals and circles.Footnote 82
The actors in rural politics could be wiciarze (members of Wici) who were becoming communists, communists pretending to be people’s activists, or individuals with hybrid identities and loyalties, undergoing radicalization processes with various dynamics. Many things might divide young wiciarze from the communists, but there was also common ground that could bring some of them together, issues such as anti-capitalism, anti-clericalism, hunger for land and work, a sense of “superfluity,” the oppressive political order, barriers to social advancement, and relationships within local peer groups. One rural memoirist pointed out that the slightest overstep of the “traditional” order as defined local priests, for example, was enough to be branded “a communist.”Footnote 83
Studying categories such as “radicalism,” “radicalization,” or “infiltration” at the micro-scale of “personal communisms,” one comes to see how blurred the boundaries between them may have been. Stanislaw Jurkowski (1909–84) was a peasant son from the Mińsk district, located east of Warsaw. His father supported NPCh and ZLCh.Footnote 84 The son joined Wici before the age of twenty. At its meetings “my thoughts turned … in the direction of changing the face of the village for a better existence.” Police harassment intensified his “hatred of the sanacja regime” and in 1931, the young wiciarz joined Komunistyczny Związek Młodzieży Polski (KZMP, the Communist Union of Youth of Poland). This was no longer about animosity towards one government or another, but rather about “liberation from landlord-capitalist oppression.”Footnote 85 At the same time he belonged to SL and served as its district secretary. He was widely recognized as a subversive: the local parish priest tried to pressure Jurkowski’s parents to stop him from “spoiling” his peers, and the local rosary circle prayed for his soul as a hardened sinner.Footnote 86 Jurkowski was both a radicalized ludowiec and a communist infiltrator.
Wanda Podniesińska (née Tarnowska, 1919–97), wrote much of interest about the dynamics of affiliation and identity in her experience of being a communist. The daughter of middle-ranking peasants who belonged to SL and KPP, she joined Wici at the age of 15, and soon afterwards joined in with her parents’ dual involvement, as she became a member of KZMP. “At first,” she wrote, “I was confused in my head, I had got used to the idyllic-angelic songs of ‘Wici’ and I was sorry to move from the evolutionary path onto the revolutionary one… .”Footnote 87 However, she felt a growing need for radical dissent against, among other things, the educational barriers that blocked the path of rural youth, and the fact that “they were held back politically, economically and culturally.”Footnote 88 It needs be remembered that the interwar period did not witness any serious improvement in rural youth’s access to secondary or even vocational education.Footnote 89 According to communists, such aspirations could only be satisfied by the overturning of the existing order, not by painstakingly improving it. As a young communist still active in Wici, Podniesińska experienced tensions of yet another kind. Political tactics prevented her from revealing that she was a communist, forcing her to disguise herself: “My duplicity constantly troubled me; how I would have liked to show my true heart.”Footnote 90
Podniesińska’s biography offers us a prism through which to look at the gendering of rural communism and the agency of female rural communists. As a political activist she was breaking with the traditionally ascribed roles of the rural woman as “keeper of hearth and home,” and she questioned the dominant discourse of interwar Poland, in which, even for a modern woman, the key identity was still that of wife and mother.Footnote 91 Both the communist and the people’s movements served as a space of emancipation—the Wici milieu was much more feminized than that of the “adult” SL, and by the late 1930s a discourse of women’s empowerment was beginning to make its way into the people’s movement.Footnote 92 This does not mean, however, that women were entirely deprived of agency within the traditional gender order: as one embittered female memoirist wrote: “when a husband and father throws up his hands helplessly and says, I can’t help you anymore … a woman won’t throw up her hands, she will always find a remedy, think of a way not to give in to poverty.”Footnote 93 However, Podniesińska wanted agency that enabled her to transcend these boundaries. It was she who “worked” on her apolitical husband, so that he eventually “allowed [the communists] to call him one of us.”Footnote 94 In 1944 she ended her party autobiography with the words: “I can’t bear not to be active, and as soon as I feel strong and am free from the activities of the average housewife and mother, I roll up my sleeves. After all, in post-revolutionary Russia 50-year-old women were still learning and still did a lot of good for Russia before they died.”Footnote 95 She was in search of personal and social agency and empowerment, especially as a woman.
Yet another pattern of finding one’s place in the communist formation was that of wartime radicalization. Most pre-war members of the SL, Wici or Siew, insofar as they were actively involved in the anti-German conspiracy, joined peasant political organizations that recognized the London-based Polish government-in-exile, as well as Bataliony Chłopskie (the Peasant Battalions), a mass underground armed force numbering thousands. Only a radical minority chose PPR, established in 1942, and its armed organization: Gwardia Ludowa (GL, the People’s Guard).
Mieczyslaw Bodalski (1918–78) came from the Sierpc district.Footnote 96 His parents owned a farm divided into several parcels, but his father, a member of PSL-Wyzwolenie, mainly earned his living as a blacksmith. In his short autobiography submitted to the party in spring 1945, he recalled: “I devoted myself with zeal to social work, because the reality of the countryside of the time and the harsh school of life in which the peasant found himself under the sanacja regime led me to the conviction that, if one wanted to improve one’s living conditions and find oneself in the role of a peasant-activist and citizen of the State, one had to achieve this by persistent work on oneself, by working on one’s mind and character, and by working as a team in an organization and being able to fit into this team. As the son of a farmer, I have come to love my occupation and the peasant class of which I am privileged to be a fellow member.”Footnote 97 He also wrote amateur poems eulogizing the beauty of the countryside.Footnote 98
Deeply attached to his peasant identity, Bodalski gave expression to class pride and individual and collective claims to empowerment. In a slightly later autobiography, he expressed class-rooted desires and claims, writing about a prevalent hatred of the manor, the inequality of educational opportunity between heirs to the manor and peasants (a topic voiced in Podniesińska’s narrative, too), and the younger generation’s prediction that “one day there will be a crackdown on manors.”Footnote 99 At this time Bodalski himself considered that cooperatives were the way for peasants to gain agency and break out of unequal economic relations.
During the war and the occupation, it became clear that neither the agrarianism of Wici nor cooperatives were sufficient, and Bodalski joined the underground PPR. His archive contains a substantial number of wartime memoirs, which, in contrast to the scant material relating to the 1930s, suggests that the war was his key formative experience. As a partisan in GL he carried on with his poetry: “Rise up oppressed from the plow and labor/… To arms Compatriots! For Poland, for freedom and the people!/Down with the power of the manors! We fight so/that we are not trampled by the landlord’s shoe.”Footnote 100 Elsewhere, he recalled that it was the slogan “land for peasants” that led him to the communist movement.Footnote 101 National liberation was thus closely intertwined with social revolution.
Straight to Revolution: Red Families and Rural Proletarians
Not all villagers came to communism via a path that took them through the people’s movement. Indeed, some joined KZMP or KPP directly, sometimes without even leaving the family cottage. I will now present this through the prism of two intersecting experiences: socialization in families of different shades and intensities of red, and membership of the agricultural workers’ stratum.
Agricultural workers were a stratum of the rural proletariat, mostly landless, who lived by undertaking waged labor mainly on landed estates or the farms of wealthy peasants. They formed a substantial group in the Second Republic of Poland, numbering, together with their families, almost 3 million people.Footnote 102 Their status, living conditions and resources varied, ranging from that of skilled craftsmen to seasonal workers. As a whole, however, they constituted the most underprivileged stratum of the rural population. They struggled with challenges such as dismal living conditions, unemployment and unstable employment, the breaching of collective agreements, the fragility of labor protection laws, poor prospects for social advancement, post-feudal and capitalist exploitation and violence by landlords, and the prejudice of peasants who despised them for being landless.Footnote 103 Farm laborers did not belong to the people’s parties, nor did the parties seek to attract them.Footnote 104 The institutional advocate of their interests and the primary space for their public action was Związek Zawodowy Robotników Rolnych (ZZRR, the Trade Union of Agricultural Workers), which was under the influence of the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (PPS, Polish Socialist Party). The communists, likewise, constantly sought to consolidate and increase their influence among this group, albeit—paradoxically—with little success.Footnote 105
The Kiryluks family from the Radzyń district on the borders of Mazovia, Lubelszczyzna, and Podlasie was unquestionably a “red family” of rural proletariat. The local authorities called their home “a hotbed of communism,” and the local KPP, “the Kiryluks’ party.”Footnote 106 The father, Emil (1874–1932), born into a peasant Greek Catholic family, was by trade a baker, but from the early twentieth century he worked mainly on landed estates. He was a veteran of the communist movement from the pre-independence period, and after 1918 was officially a ZZRR activist. All his children, four sons and a daughter, became communists. Using the Kiryluks as an example, one may trace patterns of intergenerational reproduction of political commitment and the everyday life of “ordinary communists,” which consisted of expulsion from the manors, traipsing in search of work, and police harassment, such as the intimidation of the girls with whom the young revolutionaries were seen in public.Footnote 107
One can also observe striking tensions in the “personal communisms” generated by pulls between self-identification, everyday practices, and gender, as well as a dynamism between traditional rural cultural patterns and modern politics. The youngest of the Kiryluks, Stanisław (1909–97) recalled in a party autobiography, written in the 1970s, that his mother, Antonina (1871/2/4–1957?) “although non-partisan, bravely backed up [my] father in the struggle and helped… all her children, revolutionary activists.”Footnote 108 Meanwhile, a fellow communist recalled how the doyen of the red family had said that Antonina was pious and pained over the communist involvement of the children who were successively breaking out from under her guardianship. Emil condescendingly referred to his wife as “almost illiterate,” placing himself, as it were, in an enlightened position. He also noted—but treated leniently—her fear of reprisals that might befall those closest to her, especially her only daughter (whom Stanisław spoke of elsewhere, too).Footnote 109
It might be surmised that Stanisław was inscribing his mother’s experience into a certain narrative frame of revolutionary genealogy, legitimizing her and himself in the process. Perhaps he was looking to combine a political reinterpretation with his intimate memory and feelings for his beloved mother. On the other hand, these narratives need not contradict each other. Antonina probably did not consider herself a communist and felt the tension between her own deeply internalized values and what her husband and children believed in. Yet, at the same time, she occupied a position on the blurred periphery of the communist movement. Her concern for her children, whatever their choices were, created a psychological and emotional safe haven for their political involvement, not in some distant city but in the native commune. With reference to Podniesińska’s earlier-cited argument, it can be maintained that the spectrum of positions held by rural women in the political field was much broader than just the figure of the “revolutionary” and the “average housewife and mother.”
If the Kiryluks were a “red family,” then the biographies of the brothers Stanisław (1917–2000) and Tadeusz (1914–?) Krupiński may be taken as an example of how a rural family “turned red.” The father, Walenty (1874–1922 or later) was a ZZRR activist, a position that strongly influenced the formation of both boys’ views. In his early teens Stanisław distributed PPS (legal) electoral leaflets, for which he was locked up at the police station. Years later, he recalled this experience as a turning point in his life: “Once the arrest doors closed, after spasms and screams, in my childish mind, I began to reflect on why I had been locked up. The answer was one fight, which I did not yet understand very well… .”Footnote 110 Both brothers were already familiar with economic oppression, and then Stanisław encountered the violence of authoritarian state power in the form of local abuse.Footnote 111 For Tadeusz, on the other hand, an important moment was his encounter with city workers, who made him aware of what parties and trade unions were.Footnote 112 Thus, family environment, everyday life in the Polish countryside, and external urban influences intertwined in their political socialization. Initially, both young men had followed in their father’s footsteps, as farm laborers and trade union members, but later went a step further and joined the KPP.
Janina Treywasz (née Czarnek, 1921–?) was slightly younger than the Krupińskis and only one of her nine siblings was communist. Prior to 1939, Janina did not belong to any organization, and during the war, although she did not “officially” join the underground PPR, she remained in its circle and supported its activities. In a party autobiography written in the early 1950s, she remembered her childhood in a family of agriculture workers in a district southwest of Warsaw as “extremely sad, miserable and devoid of any joy.” Footnote 113 She also recalled how estate owners and the police would organize roundups of people collecting brushwood in private forests. Using the word łapanka, which is associated with the manhunts organized by the Germans during occupation, she clearly expressed the emotional resonance of this practice.Footnote 114
The young Janina tried to understand the logic of the social relations that she observed and that affected her: “When I asked her [my mother] why we were so poor and couldn’t buy as much kerosene as we needed, she turned away from me without giving any answer.” Her eldest brother, a communist, had more to say. He acquainted her with KPP publications, although he revealed his powerlessness to elaborate on them further. However, it was he “who got me to look through the window of the manor, where the abundant lighting could be seen from a distance, and, clenching his hands in anger, said—it is him, this bourgeois, who is taking our work, it is he who is hurting us.’Footnote 115 This image showing the contrast between an illuminated mansion and a gloomy cottage may have been narratively dramatized, but it does capture a genuine social experience—at the time, the price of kerosene made it practically inaccessible to the poorer part of the rural population.Footnote 116
After the War: From Cottages to Offices
The ambition of teenager Janina Treywasz was to become an agronomist; someone educated and respectable, but still strongly connected to the countryside.Footnote 117 In the 1940s and 50s, she and many others became activists of PPR and after, from December 1948, of PZPR. Some held managerial positions in the party and state apparatus at the district, provincial, and sometimes central levels, thus embarking on a path of social advancement through political involvement, becoming political white-collar workers. At the same time, some of them changed their social status through education, too: Wanda Podniesińska worked in the party and cooperative apparatus at the provincial level, and in the 1960s enrolled in an agricultural technical school for adults.
The new status not only gave communists social and material advancement and the opportunity to enjoy privileges, but also a sense of power and agency, both personal and historical.Footnote 118 Many of them were still very young: Mieczysław Bodalski was 27 years old when he was entrusted with the management of the land reform of the whole voivodship. Unfortunately, the protagonists of this paper have not left narratives that address the issue of the emotions these changes generated, but one assumes that this exaltation was accompanied as much by excitement as by a sense of uncertainty about their own status and competence that must have been felt by the many representatives of the underprivileged strata who had entered the world of politics and ideology.
Social and political advancement to the status of political white-collar workers and physical mobility to urban districts or provincial centers did not, of course, mean that in each case there had to be a complete break with the rural past; relatives, for example, could still be a link. Some activists retained particularly strong links to the countryside and to agriculture, both in terms of political and professional assignments and their own everyday experience.
In the first months of the new government, Mieczysław Bodalski was overthrowing “the power of the manors” as the provincial plenipotentiary for land reform, which for him was the fulfilment of “his dreams and longings from childhood.”Footnote 119 One looks in vain for any reflection in Bodalski’s memoirs on how the reform was implemented. The parcelization of large property announced in September 1944 was criticized for the small size of the land allotments, which meant that the new or enlarged farms could still not provide a stable livelihood. For the Communist Party the main objective was to gain social legitimacy as quickly as possible.Footnote 120 For many of the landless and small landholders, however, even this was experienced as a great change of fortune.
Bodalski’s account needs to be seen as doing far more than simply tallying with and echoing official discourse. The emotional temperature of his memoirs indicates that he regarded the change in socio-economic relations in the Polish countryside as the great work of his movement and of himself personally. Before the war, he wrote, he could not have imagined that “only a few years later, it would be up to me, the son of a village blacksmith, to decide that this village granary [on the estate where his father once worked] should be turned into a school.”Footnote 121 The communist movement gave the blacksmith’s son a sense of historical agency and opened a path to a career. Towards the end of his life he stated that his few months working on land reform meant more to him than a quarter of a century of his career.Footnote 122
Stanisław Kiryluk also held the position of government plenipotentiary for land reform. In his memoirs, written in the mid-1980s, he spoke of how he had made his father’s dreams come true. Unlike Bodalski, however, he located the most beautiful years of his life elsewhere: in his time as Ambassador of the People’s Republic of Poland in Beijing.Footnote 123 However, the memory of pre-war rural poverty still lingered in him: many years later, during a trip with his grandson he remarked that things were better in Poland, because all the peasants they saw had shoes.Footnote 124
Some of the rural communists carried on combining the role of farmer, who still owned and worked on their farm, and politician. Such was a case of Ksawery Karaluch, briefly PPR first secretary of his district, and Michał Gwiazdowicz, voivode, parliament deputy, and SL leadership member. SL was officially reconstituted in 1944 by crypto-communists and people’s activists ready to cooperate with the communists, and which became increasingly subordinated to them.Footnote 125 From the late 1940s onwards, the rift between this uncompromising peasant activist, who wrote of himself that his “character was unsuitable for a servant” and the party leadership deepened.Footnote 126 He was unable to come to terms with the turn towards agricultural collectivization that started in 1948.Footnote 127 He felt powerless and embittered that peasants considered him to be the representative of this policy, and at the same time he was hurt—as a rural radical—by accusations from his party colleagues of being reactionary and supporting the “kulaks.” After his wife had died in 1953, when he was already an old, tired and bitter man, he decided to incorporate his beloved farm into one of the cooperatives created as part of collectivization, the consequence of which was that the farm fell into decline.Footnote 128
Gwiazdowicz’s reflections on the post-war period were not included in the 1974 edition of his memoirs. In a typescript, he mentioned the abuses carried out by local PPR activists, the way he had been branded a “kulak,” and his countless parliamentary interventions on behalf of peasants interests.Footnote 129 At the same time, what shines through in these memoirs is a consistent aversion to “reaction,” and an approval of the direction of post-war changes. One will probably never know, therefore, what Michał Gwiazdowicz, who had fought all through the interwar period to improve the plight of the peasantry and to satisfy their “land hunger,” really thought of post-war repressive policy, which stood in stark contrast to these basic peasant desires.
A different kind of experience of collectivization befell the Jurkowski family. After the war Stanisław joined SL and was appointed mayor of Mińsk; later he was a member of parliament and a state administration worker. In 1950, his father joined an agricultural cooperative, which led to him being pressured by neighbors opposed to collectivization. His nerves could not bear this and he eventually hurt himself with an axe.Footnote 130 As in the case of the post-war struggle against the underground, the communists might have had the tools of state terror at their disposal, but in reality—“at ground level”—forces and resources were sometimes distributed among various actors in a far more complicated way.
Communists in the countryside of interwar central Poland belonged to a political minority with a radical agenda that sought a general upheaval of social and economic relations. This would involve them transgressing a great many norms and barriers. Communists had “radical imagination”: “the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be and to not only dream of the future, but to act for the change in the present.”Footnote 131 This imagination went beyond the horizon of expectations and habits of most members of rural society in Poland and indeed of central and eastern Europe as a whole, which was defined by traditional cultural forms, religion, distrust of external, “alien” influences, fear of engaging in illegal activities, and tendency to seek more moderate political solutions. Even if attachment to the Polish state was not as strong among the rural population as it was among the intelligentsia, the ongoing processes of consciousness transformation also meant that the communists’ association with the Soviets worked against them; there were also tensions between small town revolutionaries, often of Jewish descent, reluctant to work in the countryside, and their possible rural supporters, who nursed antisemitic prejudices. Furthermore, the communists’ attitude toward the most important issue for the peasants, land reform, was vague.
The Communist Party and its youth organization were institutions of collective action to a great extent external to the peasantry. A number of communists from the cities, children of Polish proletarians or Jewish merchants roamed the Polish countryside as secretaries or agitators. However, the communism of the homesteads was not solely an import from Moscow or the nearest town. Its supporters and participants were also insiders, fellow countryfolk. For a certain group of the rural population, communist organizations became the “platforms for breaking the spiral of exploitation”,Footnote 132 offering an appealing answer to the challenges faced by the underprivileged strata of the Polish provinces: poverty, “superfluity,” symbolic and physical violence, narrow channels of social advancement, and hopes unfulfilled by the independent Polish state. This radical minority denounced all the more common answers offered by the peasants’ parties: parliamentary legalism, cooperatives, and even anti-capitalist agrarianism. Communism, in turn, offered the promise not simply of a gradual improvement in but a redefining of the entire unjust and oppressive order. For actors like those presented in this paper, political involvement could bring a sense of emancipation from traditional entanglements, as well as experiencing dignity derived from breaking away from subordination and passivity, and a sense of becoming an agent of history.
In the “personal communisms” of rural revolutionaries, the baggage of the “bottom-up” experiences and imaginaries of the popular strata (material conditioning, class antagonism, a desire for “something better”) encountered the “top-down” ideological scripts of revolutionary Marxism, which allowed them to reinterpret their fate in broader terms. The revolutionary path chosen had varied starting points. Some sought a way of linking peasants’ questions with communist answers in radical, pro-communist peasant parties. Others began their search for belonging and meaning in the youth circles. Another important pattern was the intergenerational reproduction of political involvement in “red families,” but much more often the pattern was rebellion against the environment of early socialization. The ego-documents of communists also show how non-obvious the distinction between radicalization and infiltration might have been; how complex the dilemmas and dynamics were between different identities and political loyalties.
The post-war years brought many rural communists coveted social advancement, the main channel of which was political involvement and the attainment of the status of political white-collar workers; occasionally, they fulfilled their aspirations in the field of general education. However, some of these actors maintained the hybrid status of full-time activists or officials and farmers, as well as retaining a deep attachment to their previous identity. As they gained power, the agency of rural communists took on a much broader scope. They were making their dreams and ambitions come true, taking class reprisals, and overthrowing social hierarchies. On the other hand, the experience of power could involve dissonance, when the values and goals that had brought the individual into the movement conflicted with Stalinist norms and practices.
An analysis of the experiences of “ordinary” rural communists, as presented in this paper, is an indispensable part of a more bottom-up approach to central European communism. It offers an important insight into the experiences of popular agency and its (self-)limitations within modern political movements, as well as into the social background of communist power, whose roots also lay not only in the Moscow-scripted template and direct pressure, but in the internal aspirations, conflicts, and resentments, urban and provincial alike.
Łukasz Bertram, a sociologist and historian, is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests include the communist movement, the agency and subjectivity of individual political actors, and political experiences of the unprivileged strata. He is the author of Bunt, podziemie, władza. Polscy komuniści i ich socjalizacja polityczna do roku 1956 (Warsaw, 2022), and (with Jakub B. Motrenko), Fronty walki i kręgi myśli. Ossowski, komuniści, socjologia (Warsaw, 2026).
