We, the people?

The term “People's History” has had quite a career in recent years in Poland. In 2020, Michał Rauszer inaugurated the series “The People's History of Poland” (PHP) and additional books have been published since.Footnote ¹ The series editor, Przemysław Wielgosz coordinated a series of seminars under the same title more than two years. Adam Leszczyński hurried to finish his magnum opus under the very title “PHP,” and Kacper Pobłocki was finishing “Chamstwo,” which was supposed to have “PHP” as a subtitle (ultimately, published without any). Since then, a few dozen reviews, podcasts, and debates have reshaped the current state of the arts not only in academia, but also in public discourse. What's more, even more books were published, which had certainly been prepared years earlier.Footnote ² We face the people's turn in Poland.Footnote ³

In the discussions that followed, the genealogy of the “people's turn” (or “turns”) can be drawn as far back as the early 2000s.Footnote ⁴ I would rather frame earlier publications as a revisionist approach toward a hegemonic narrative so as not to lose the specificity of the current people's turn. No doubt an interest in the people, mainly peasants, has been rising with special issues of academic or popular journals, music, and literature in recent years—all this happening under the dominant right-wing paradigm promoting the martyrology and heroism of the Polish nation.

The field of history experienced the people's turn the strongest. Polish historiography remains one of the least internationalized disciplines, faithful to its methodology and skeptical of novelties from other disciplines. If that evaluation seems uncharitable, please consider the reception of the discussed books, criticized by some as “pseudo-books.”

In a way, it is understandable that many critical voices pointed to the fact that focusing on the common people or peasantry is by no means innovative. This argument is true only for some academic fields, but one can easily fall into the trap of structural blindness. Public discourse, educational programs, and memory politics after 1989 did gravitate heavily towards a history of the nobility and intelligentsia, glorifying The First and The Second Republics of Poland, with their imagined wealth, welfare, and tolerance. It can be partly understood as a reaction against the focus on the working class during the People's Republic of Poland. However, as Pobłocki and many others noted, it was already in the 1960s when noble heritage was used to build national community. Indeed, all the authors under discussion are part of a younger generation of scholars, rewriting the existing paradigm. Michał Rauszer says his book “comes from anger and frustration” (7); Kacper Pobłocki recalls his formative years in the working-class city of Bydgoszcz—and both authors state openly that they could not find their family stories and reflections in official Polish history.

Drawing on similar sources like court cases and testaments, letters of complaint, correspondence, and memoirs, all three authors want to reclaim Polish history for the majority of Polish society, those under- or un-represented. All three books discussed here try to include people's voices and perspectives and rewrite the history of the Polish nation from a more egalitarian angle. All authors also aim to speak to wider audiences: Rauszer decided to publish two separate books;Footnote ⁵ while Leszczyński and Pobłocki decided to construct a multi-layered narrative that would interest the general reader and try to satisfy the academic public (both add methodological appendixes). All focus mainly on serfdom, peasants, and power. Even from a brief visual analysis of the covers, we can predict it will not be an optimistic story.

The People's Resistance

Rauszer's book Bękarty pańszczyzny (Bastards of Serfdom) discusses different forms of peasant resistance. He wishes to escape paternalistic martyrology to focus rather on the resistance of the subordinated: “how peasants reacted to violence” and built their own culture (9), providing a sense of dignity against the hegemonic system. The time span is the exacerbation of serfdom during the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until its abolition in the nineteenth century.

Rauszer briefly explains how serfdom was introduced and practiced to argue that serfdom was similar to slavery. His subalterns almost totally overlap with the peasantry. In subsequent chapters, he guides us through the tactics of everyday resistance from a general strategy of feigning stupidity—efficient not only for slowing down the labor regime but also skirting potential punishment—as well as poaching, manipulating attempts to measure the harvest, sizes of fields, or the condition of tools and cattle (Chapter 2). More radical steps included migration (mostly not allowed by law), seeking better living conditions under another landlord's rule, or leaving Poland altogether, hoping to find pockets of freedom, for example, in Ukraine's eastern territories.

He also examines folklore (Chapter 3)—songs, tales, prophecies and jokes—while trying to include the voices of the people, he traces their understanding of social and economic processes. What we lack is insight into research materials: when, where, and how broadly were certain songs, stories, or sayings used? How and by whom were those gathered and archived? Sometimes Rauszer's conclusions about peasant world views seem too broadly drawn and overgeneralized.

In Chapter 4, titled “Women, Witchcraft and Class Conflict,” Rauszer focuses on sexual oppression and female resistance: from active participation in peasant rebellions to witchcraft and shamanism. Magic, a feminine domain, served as a powerful tool to regain control over one's fate, but also—as we know from court records—it was a source of fear and respect among peasants as well as nobles.

In Chapter 5, the anatomy of peasant rebellions is discussed: the need for and role of authority in rural communities. Rauszer tries to define the favorable circumstances for an open confrontation with lords, such as the role of a leader.

In Chapter 6, he portrays a vast panorama of resistance strategies, with special attention to robbers, while avoiding the trap of Robin Hood-ish romanticization. Three subsequent chapters move gradually up the scale of violence as Rauszer discusses open acts of aggression: rebellions, revolts, or—shall we rename this derogatory language—uprisings and peasant wars. The extensive and rich overview makes us realize how widespread those actions were and how often they are marginalized both in the Polish education system and public discourse. The most well-known are Khmel΄nyts΄kyi's Cossack uprising in 1648–54, along with the Haidamaka rebellion Koliivshchyna in 1768, or the fights in Szaweɫ in 1769.Footnote ⁶ The murderous Galician uprising (1846), as well as the enhanced role of nationalism and class conflict are discussed in a separate chapter and lead to concluding reflections on the abolition of serfdom.

The historical process behind the issues discussed is the colonization of peasants by nobles during the primitive accumulation of wealth in the sixteenth century; however, such wealth did not serve investment or progress but rather lavish lifestyles (11). Rauszer aims to see Polish serfdom from a global perspective (42), something that is not consistently visible throughout the book but is worth noting as a general postulate. The book is written with as few footnotes as possible, a feature that can cause confusion.

The People's History

Leszczyński evinces the greatest ambition, both in the time span (additionally proposing his own periodization), and scope of interest. He also leverages Howard Zinn's title, proclaiming the book's significance as well as a sense of entitlement. His book is a bold act of power both in academia and the capitalist realities of the publishing market.Footnote ⁷

Leszczyński writes a historical synthesis—dialectically desired and hated by historians—since he wants to cover Polish history as a whole and trace the evolution of the “institution of extraction” that served elites to exploit the people's resources. He promises to focus on three issues: 1) the history of the mechanism of exploitation: how and thanks to what institutions elites extracted added value from peasants’ labor; 2) the historical discourses of the ideology of power: justifications for rule and how they evolved; 3) resistance towards the powerful and social order (14–15).

Chapter 1 is also dedicated to reconstructing the aforementioned ideologies of power used by the nobility: the curse of Ham, the “invasion theories,” and the “Sarmatians’ myth,” which like the Hamitic hypothesis was supposed to explain racial differences between peasants and nobility.Footnote ⁸ Leszczyński shows how early historiography itself became a tool of power. Throughout the book, historical reconstruction intertwines with analysis of historical discourses about the periods under discussion.

Chapter 2 begins the chronological overview, focusing on the pre-fourteenth century period to reconstruct the earliest Polish statehood, which was already based on exploitation and rising social and economic stratification. Chapter 3 covers the period from the fourteenth century to 1520, a year when obligatory serfdom was established. However, this “Malioratione Terre” was a time of German colonization, and relative welfare and freedom for the population thanks to, as Leszczyński argues, a breakdown of state structures.

Chapter 4, the longest, covers the years 1520–1768, a time of “turning the screw.” It presents the rise and tightening of serfdom as a rational, somewhat modern and effective economic system (effective from the elite's point of view) to gain as many resources as possible and take over the greatest share of other's work and production. Descriptions of idyllic rural life alternate with those of brutal punishments and widespread violence. Resistance—from slowing down work, writing suppliants, or simply fugacity to open confrontation and revolts—is well described, but Leszczyński's focus is mostly on the “folwark” economy.Footnote ⁹ Peasants were treated as part of the inventory: not exactly like slaves, but almost. Leszczyński's dark depiction of peasant life has been criticized as too pessimistic, but it seems that the sources leave room for his interpretation.Footnote ¹⁰ A subsection of this chapter is also devoted to growing cities and Jewish communities, helpfully shifting the book's focus beyond the peasantry.

The latter becomes a prominent theme in Chapter 5, discussing a step-by-step disassembly of serfdom between 1768 and 1864. In 1768, the nobility's powers were limited by state reform, which provoked the formation of the Bar Confederation and in consequence, the Koliivshchyna.Footnote ¹¹ The Enlightenment had a limited impact on Polish political thought and western travelers compared the situation of Polish peasants to slaves, not without reason. Debates about serfdom and its potential reforms are carefully reconstructed, yet as Leszczyński notes, rhetoric was strong but political impact limited. Partitioning governments, Napoleonic reforms, and rising democratic movements slowly reshaped the political landscape of the Polish territories. Changes affected everyday practices more gradually. Again, a separate subchapter is dedicated to the Jewish population as well as to the early industrialization and its specifics under the serfdom economy.

Chapter 6 covers the period of “peripheral capitalism,” 1864–1944, that is, from the latest abolition of serfdom in the former First Polish Republic to the end of WWII. It traces rapid industrialization, with weak labor protections and the migration of peasants to growing urban centers. Relations between factory owners and workers were a continuation of age-old exploitation. Rising labor movements and the Revolution of 1905 shaped the local political scene, in particular the rise of national democracy and socialist movements. In 1918, the newly independent Second Republic of Poland became a state of the bureaucratic and military intelligentsia, not the people, to whom it promised a land reform. Both world wars seem almost absent from the narrative.

The last chapter, 7, “PRL: Exploitation in the Name of the Party, 1944–1989,” discusses in fifty pages the long-anticipated land reform and nationalization of large enterprises, and further developments during the People's Republic of Poland.Footnote ¹² Still, Leszczyński sees postwar Poland just as a continuation of the previous exploitation, this time not by the landlords, but by the Party. Apparently, elites always stay the same despite their social background, program, or reform focus. Leszczyński's voice, even if his consistent emphasis is on mechanisms of power, does not differ much from the dominant totalitarian interpretations in contemporary Polish historiography: centered on political oppression, ideology and propaganda. Despite widely available sources and broad access to actual people's voices, Leszczyński focuses on political decisions and investments. Discussing historical discourses of the time, he disparages them as “flawed and anachronistic.” I find this part the least convincing and insensitive to many profound changes in social practices, political recognition, or simply state-socialist welfare (healthcare, education, unprecedented upward mobility).

The author's conclusions underline the continuity of power and resistance mechanisms, and even their cyclical nature in modern times (528–29): the elites (nobility, interwar socialists, postwar communists, and later III RP) promise emancipation to the people in exchange for social support. The promises are easily abandoned, and the elites consume the benefits of power. It is not clear if any alternative to this circular trajectory is possible, nor if this vicious circle is a somehow Polish curse.

The last part, a methodological essay titled boldly “How is writing the people's history of Poland Needed?” is partly a reckoning with Polish historiography, partly an overview of methodological inspirations (Freidrich Nietzsche, Hayden White, Michel Foucault), and partly a manifesto on how to write history in a critically-revised Zinnian style. The people's history should be a history of the lower 90%, defined flexibly as subjects of power and domination (569), and should be available for the widest possible readership. This part stirred up most of the polemic voices, especially among historians accused of painting a too positive and nation-centric vision of Polish history.

The People of Ham

“Chamstwo” was a long-awaited addition to the first wave of the turn to the Polish people.Footnote ¹³ The book focuses on serfdom and the lower 90% of society but is written from an anthropological, perspective: sensitive to social meanings, practices, carnality, and language. The author states repeatedly that his book is mainly about violence; however, Pobłocki's focus also includes patriarchy as the social bond that allowed violence to be maintained. Therefore, the book also does justice to women's history and their role in the process, subjects that are indistinct in Leszczyński's book. Pobłocki is sensitive to intersections of class and gender, as well as integral stratifications, mobility, and differences among peasants.

The book helps shape contemporary discourse not only with its theme, but also because it is a carefully designed and performed project. At the level of sources its content is purely academic, featuring archival research, references, and a review process, but the form is a manifesto: all protagonists mentioned by name are witnesses to history, while academics fall under general labels like “historian”—inverting recognition. A voice is truly given to the people.

The book consists of four parts divided into twelve chapters. The first, “Faceless People,” examines serfdom as a system based on violence. It might be difficult for sensitive readers, with its descriptions of violence, beatings, and corporal punishments. A body disciplined by power, with all the arbitrariness and cruelty, shaped the superficial apathy of the peasants that helped them to survive. The violence penetrating a person's humanity is a bracket for people's history, and it shaped people's lives differently than those of elites, making mutual empathy almost impossible. Amidst endless violence one could beat or be beaten, and the higher up on the social ladder, the less exposure one had to the risk of violence and wider the freedom of using it. A serf had two souls: one public—passive and submissive; one private, which preserved what remained of dignity and humanity.

For Pobłocki, serfdom is a part of the colonial world and its power relations, where “Polshcha” was a land of violence from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth, when industrialization and violence as a basis for the economic system split. However, the latter is preserved in different forms than economic order (37). This is the most global analysis among the three books, yet the most modest about stating so. Serfdom is seen as a kind of slavery, while in the rest of the world violence developed into penitentiary or plantation slavery. Treating humans as inventory is an argument for seeing serfdom as slavery, but Pobłocki sees that free and unfree labor are not in opposition, but are complements and intermingle.

The second part, “Patriarchy,” complicates the dual picture of power relations and social structure. The distinction of nobility and peasants is misleading, and social divisions created problematic patterns of serfdom and dependence: class position intersected with resources, gender, or age (inheritance). Patriarchy gave male peasants their serfs, children, and wives.

The third part, “Statelessness,” examines senses of citizenship, homeland, and inevitably, the nation. Pobłocki sees class solidarity as blind for states, a core of identity on which other components are built. Only nobles were represented in the state and therefore had citizenship, while peasants remained stateless, or even cosmopolitan in the sense of deeper community with other lower classes—geography and language were less important than the common experience of violence and hatred of elites. Pobłocki obliterates the myth of Poland as the granary of Europe (189) as well as the image of Polish noblemen as successful entrepreneurs. Instead, nobles were mainly focused on preserving a luxurious life and privilege.

There were therefore two states, two homelands: one for the elite and one for the repressed, the “whispered state.”Footnote ¹⁴ The borders of “Polshcha” were fluid and stateless “pockets of freedom” from serfdom moved like in the case of the Cossacks. Pobłocki also traces the geographical limitations of the state: the wetlands, mountains, deep forests or deserted eastern steppes of Ukraine. Informal migration broadened the margins of freedom, while roads or rivers enabled transport as well as the execution of power. People's utopian thinking hardly went beyond fulfilment of basic needs: freedom from hunger, labor and cold, visions that could meet the power of the state and nobility. Religious sects could stretch the limits of freedom, like Arianism. During the seventeenth century, those pockets of freedom rapidly shrank.

The book's fourth part, “Magic Realism,” focuses on popular beliefs and visions of the world. The people's theory of exploitation, which were also examined by Rauszer, is based on magical thinking to make sense of the arbitrary violence, terror, and lack of agency in people's lives: it was not irrational but helped to cope with liminal experiences (232). Thus, magic was the weapon of the defenseless. Interpreting folk tales, Pobłocki sees the cruelty embedded in these tales as a preparatory exercise for children to face an even more cruel reality.

Inside the story telling practices, Pobłocki traces gender stratification. “Women's talk” was pushed to the margins of peasant culture, but indeed the people's history is women's history. The history of the nobility is also the history of peasant resistance, while the people's history is not valiant acts, but rather “everything else that is happening around” (247). In this sense, everyone can take the non-valiant path of care and patience, the only way to escape the vicious circle of violence and patriarchy. Other forms of relief for traumatized bodies were music, drugs, but also psychosomatic dieses, for example a “Polish plait,” a hair formation that served in traditional medicine as a catch for illness leaving the body.

For Pobłocki, 1000 years of “Polshcha” amounts to a millennial class war of daily practices like gossip or spells—largely unnoticed because the popular classes were not seen as an entity legitimized by the state. If one continues this argument, then petitions, brigandage, or any military actions were part of valiant male resistance, and therefore the margins and center reverse: those masculine practices are moved to the edge that matters in the people's history.

The nineteenth century escalated the confrontation of national aspirations with class interests. As a result, the society of contemporary Poland was built on an in-between class alliance, the alliance of fathers: the house holders from the nobility, intelligentsia, and peasants. Structural class violence took the form of paternal violence—the bridge between the old and new patriarchy (303). The long durée of power is transferred not by the elites and the state, like Leszczyński suggests, but by patriarchy. Despite a seemingly hopeless marathon of violence that structures people's lives through the centuries, Pobłocki searches for hope also. He carefully traces stateless moments of freedom and efforts to think of an alternative social bond to patriarchy: care, empathy, solidarity.

Who are the people?

During recent debates about the people's turn, one of the most problematic issues has been defining who the people actually are. Rauszer focuses vaguely on 90% of society—“the remainder” that did not belong to the nobility—however, his attention is mostly on the serfdom and peasantry. Leszczyński also discusses the folwark economy, which results in a strong focus on peasants, although he adds separate subchapters on the situation of Jews and urban dwellers. The Jewish community serves as a bridge between the elites and the rest of society. Rauszer mentions Jews in the context of the tavern business and pogroms. The readers learn little about the ethnic, religious or national context, however, especially in the later periods when the rise of nation states and nationalism became an issue. Pobłocki is explicit that he is interested in Hamites,Footnote ¹⁵ mainly the serfs—thus the ethnic, religious, or national boundaries seem less important than the patriarchy. But minorities on Polish lands, like Jews or Romani, remain outside of the picture of disadvantaged intersections. Violence as a bond of society is an important theme for all three books and defines the people as those who are subjected to violence.

The books are about Poland, but is not clear what exactly Poland is: neither the language used by the people nor the geography seem to be of much help. Clear definitions would be extremely difficult here: Pobłocki introduces “Polshcha” to solve this puzzle. All the books cover the changing boundaries of the Polish-Lithuanian state during its existence and later partitions, but the scope of interest and attention given to certain parts is uneven.

Synthesis, like Leszczyński's, is also a work of selection and unavoidably includes omissions and generalizations, two of note. The first is the representation of people's voices: “The author of this book always stands on the side of the weak and tries to give them voice” (15). Leszczyński's efforts to include the voices of people are perhaps more impressive, if it were not for the other books. The sources are indeed limited, but Pobłocki and Rauszer manage to build a narrative on them and avoid giving too much voice to the privileged 10%. To offer just two examples, an Endecja entrepreneur gives voice to the revolution of 1905, and the postwar land reform is commented upon by a declassed noblewoman.Footnote ¹⁶ The second omission is the lack of women. Rauszer and Pobłocki write about witchcraft, maids, and sexual violence, but Leszczyński seems to assume that what is about men includes women. The author explained later that he did not want to intrude upon the herstories field and was not entitled to write more extensively about women. As a result, herstories once again disappear from history—this time even from the people's history. In contrast, Pobłocki shows that patriarchy oppresses everyone regardless of sex or gender, including himself as an author.

Despite a broad literature focused on women and written by women, the debate around the people's turn has been strongly dominated by male researchers. Just recently, a leftist journal published an interview titled “Ludowa historia Polki” (The People's History of Polish Women, 2022) as if a separate turn is needed, and perhaps it is.Footnote ¹⁷ The conversation was with a historian, Alicja Urbanik-Kopeć, author of three monographs very much on “people's history” themes: prostitution, the working class, and servants.Footnote ¹⁸ And the field is much broader and, interestingly highly represented by female authors, for example, working on servants and maidsFootnote ¹⁹, peasant women,Footnote ²⁰ and female industrial workers and women's history under state-socialism.Footnote ²¹ D. Kałwa stated that the people's turn was supposed to come out from women's history, but it did not.

A similar omission in debates around the people's turn concerns historians of serfdom and peasantry in general. Historians have produced an expansive literature on most of the topics discussed here. However, those books were academic, sometimes with lengthy or esoteric titles, monographs perhaps too narrowly focused (even if the conclusions were fascinating and archival materials impressive), or simply too low a circulation to reach anyone outside their sub-discipline. As a result, years of work and dozens of titles are practically invisible.

So what is the future of the people's turn? Certainly, there is a significant gap considering the period of the People's Republic of Poland and the transition period after 1989 (especially considering a strong totalitarian paradigm of domination in Polish historiography affecting the first, and a transparent neoliberal perspective considering the latter). To what extent does the people's history become just another counter-narrative? Can it claim a hegemonic position in public discourse or public education programs? Doubtless it has already been a painful lesson for academia on how to reach a wider audience and shape social reality.