140 LUD
And each man lived in his own way, as he thought fit, as was most convenient and
sociable for him and for others, as the Lord God ordained.
Whether people lived in want, in need or in troubles, whether they lived roisterously,
clanking their glasses with their friends, strutting about and bullying their neighbours
and chasing after the girls, or whether in their feebleness they leaned against the warmth
of the stove waiting for the priest's last comfort - whether happy or depressed or neither
- they all lived lustily, with all their strength, with all their soul.^6
As always, the peasants were distinguished by their profound attachment to
the land, which was the source of their security and the sole repository of their
ambitions. According to Leninist analysts, this link was weaker among the
poorer peasants, who, unable to compete with the kulaks, were thought certain
to increase in numbers and to provide sound revolutionary material. In the view
of other observers, the distinction between rich, middle, and poor peasants was
a false one. Rich peasants did not aim to become large-scale, gentlemen-farmers
in imitation of the nobility; they clung to the old ways, hired a few labourers to
ease their old age, and in the event of sickness, or a surplus of daughters, were
resigned to the inevitable decline of their family fortunes. The poor peasants
aimed for little more in life than to produce healthy sons, to marry them well, to
escape from debt, and to buy a stronger horse. The 'middle peasant' was not a
species condemned to extinction, but could be variously described as a declin-
ing rich peasant or a rising poor one. Over three or four generations, every peas-
ant family expected to experience alternating periods of prosperity and
adversity. All accepted the old routine of subsistence farming as a way of life.
All looked on the world, like the weather, with a fatalism born from centuries
of serfdom. All saw themselves as a race apart, as different from the squire and
the government inspector as from the factory-slave or the landless agricultural
labourer. Nowadays, more than ten decades after Emancipation, they can still
be seen across the length and breadth of Poland.
All the indications are, therefore, that the Polish peasants were not just the
members of a socio-economic class. Like their Russian counterparts, whom
until the mid-nineteenth century they closely resembled, they were the bearers
of a separate civilization, as distinct and as ancient as that of their noble mas-
ters. Their very name of cblopi was derived from that of the Kholopy - the
slaves of old Slavonic society. Widely dispersed in isolated villages, they had lit-
tle scope for concerted social action; but their powers of passive resistance were
proverbial. Their imperviousness to the modern concepts of law and property:
their inveterate addiction to pilfering, arson, and random violence; the inim-
itable rhythm of their work, where periods of back-breaking toil were inter-
spersed with prolonged displays of idleness and drunkenness; their ambivalent
relationships with their lord, the pan, whom they hated and loved by turns; their
incurable beliefs in fairies, folk-magic, incantations, rituals, potions, faith-heal-
ing, and all manner of so-called superstitions; and above all their ineradicable
conviction that the land was theirs, irrespective of the technical details of its
legal ownership; all these things made for an ultra-conservative culture, whose'
