- LUD
recently, the manufacture of the classless society — were achieved in a piecemeal,
disconnected fashion. Yet the net result is clear. The multinational, multi-
lingual, multistratified society of the old Republic, ruled by its noble Polish
narod, or nation, has been transformed over five or six generations into a far
more homogeneous society where the lud, the common people of workers and
peasants, have risen to a position of apparent supremacy.^1
Polish demography is blighted by the same weakness that confronts Polish
social history in general. Statistics have to be collected from five or six different
regional sources, and re-marshalled into categories which are blatantly unhis-
torical. Territorial anachronisms are rampant. Modern Polish demographers
often assume that the eastern lands beyond the Bug lie beyond their proper
historical concern, whilst treating the population of the 'Western Territories' of
the People's Republic as if they had always been part of Polish society. One can
rarely be sure that like is being compared with like, nor, if it is, whether the
findings have any historical validity. By constructing coherent, unified categor-
ies for their researches, without which admittedly all their statistical informa-
tion would be valueless, the demographers belie the most important fact of
modern Polish society, namely that for much of the time it did not form a unified
whole. Scientific accuracy is in direct conflict with historical reality.
The growth of population in the Polish lands since the Partitions is not easily
computed.^2 In 1772, at the First Partition, the Republic of Poland-Lithuania
counted about 14 million inhabitants. In 1795, at the Third Partition, on much
reduced territory, it counted barely 6 million. In the nineteenth century, the popu-
lation of the three central partitions - the Congress Kingdom, the Grand Duchy of
Posen, and Galicia - rose from 8.3 million in 182.0 to 23.7 million in 1914.
Calculations based on the territory of the Second Republic reveal a drop of 4.6
million, from 30.9 million to 26.3 million between 1914 and 1919; a rise of 9 mil-
lion to 35 million in the course of the inter-war period; and another loss of over 6
million by 1945. In the People's Republic, the population has risen from 23.9 mil-
lion in 1946 to 32.8 million in 1976. In so far as figures from different sources are
compatible, some surprising conclusions can be made. Firstly, notwithstanding the
Jewish Holocaust of 1941-4, losses among the native population during the First
World War from death and deportations (14.9 per cent) were not far short of those
inflicted during the Second World War (17.4 per cent). Secondly, war losses of
almost 11 million during the twentieth century did not far exceed the natural
increase of just twenty-one years between the wars. Thirdly, despite the losses, the
natural increase of the Polish-speaking element of the population, which in the two
centuries since the First Partition has grown from perhaps 8 million in 1772 to
nearly 39 million in the 1990s has kept pace with the European average.
Population density presents equally tricky problems. In the old Republic in
1772, it stood at 19.1 km^2. In the nineteenth century, it rose in the Duchy of