Our Affair and (Not) Yours: On Gentry and Peasant Narratives of Agricultural Reform

Abstract

This text contains a comparative analysis of gentry and peasant narratives about the agricultural reform conducted in Poland on the basis of the Polish Committee of National Liberation’s decree of September 6, 1944. The author sought these narratives in personal documents such as diaries, memoirs, works sent to memoir competitions, and oral history interviews. An analysis of the documents revealed, above all, an asymmetry between the narratives of the gentry and the peasants. For the former, the reform was a key biographical event, while in most of the peasant narratives it was marginal, particularly in the context of other elements of the experience of war and occupation. The points of convergence, in terms of what members of the peasantry and gentry write or say about the reform, are few. Moreover, while the peasants always appear in the narratives of the gentry, the gentry appear much more rarely in the narratives of the peasants. The narratives of the gentry are fairly cohesive and it would seem that they have become the basis for the creation of a collective memory of the gentry as a group. The peasant narratives are quite diverse. Their shape is the outcome of factors such as the narrator’s social and economic status before the war; the fact of being, or not being, a beneficiary of the reform; the narrator’s political engagement; the narrator’s party affiliation at the time of the reform; and the period of Poland’s postwar history when the narrative was written or spoken. The author’s findings reveal what image of the agricultural reform has been preserved in Poles’ memory.