6. LUD: The Rise of the Common People
Sceptics might well dispute whether modern Polish society is a valid subject for
scientific study. In an era when, as often as not, Poland did not exist, when most
Polish institutions had been destroyed; when the descendants of pre-Partition
society were merged into the societies of the partitioning states; and when large
sectors of the population denied any sense of Polish identity, it is difficult to iso-
late sociological phenomena relating exclusively to the Polish population. One
can describe the condition of the Polish-speaking element within the social
structures of Prussia, Russia, and Austria, but, not it seems, an organic social
process which is specifically Polish. This does not mean that there is a shortage
of Polish social historians. In this regard, one is reminded of Conan Doyle's
famous Red-headed League, where, at the instigation of some unseen red-
headed patron, droves of red-headed investigators gather at the British Museum
to copy down facts about red-headedness from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The exercise can be undertaken; but its findings are of limited value - except to
red-heads.
Certainly, repeated and drastic alterations to the social base of the Polish
lands between 1772. and 1945, are bound to fragment the subject to an unusual
degree. The continual partitions, annexations, and frontier changes; the mass
mortality, deportations, and population transfers; the ephemeral nature of
states which appear and disappear, all ensure that 'Polish society' has never
encompassed the same collection of people at any two successive moments in
time. Even if the historian does accept that Polish society did exist as a coherent
organism, he must concede that it was composed of numerous separate cells,
which divide and coalesce, reunite, drift apart, and come together again in no
simple pattern. The threads of discontinuity are no less evident than those of
continuity. External interventions have exerted greater pressure for change than
have the autonomous, internal forces of the native social process. In this part of
the world, history has acted over the last two centuries like a vast social minc-
ing-machine, grinding its hapless human contents into new assortments and
combinations without regard to their inherent wishes or predilections. The
Polish society which finally emerged in 1945 bore little resemblance to the five
estates of the 'noble democracy' which had been fed into the mincer in the late
eighteenth century. The essential changes which occurred during this period -
the destruction of the old estates, the rise of new social classes, and most