History /
Do Polish people in general dislike Russia or Germany more? [369]
Belarussians as well as Ukrainians are former Polish slaves.
This is, of course, a Soviet-inspired manipulation. Generally, all peasants were treated almost like slaves in the Polish Commonwealth until its very end in 1795. But to say they were "Polish slaves" is simply untrue. All peasants were like slaves irrespectively of their nationality and the same fate was shared by ethnicly Polish peasants, too.
Whatever one may say about the condition of a Polish Commonwealth peasant, their fate bacame even more harsh after they came under Russian jurisdiction as it happened as a result of the First Partition of the Commonwealth in 1772. Diplomatic correspondence betwen the court of Catherine II and that of Poland's king Stanislas August is full of cases in which Catherine II demanded the Polish authorities to seize and send back to Russia those Belorussian peasants who were escaping back to the Commonwealth across the newly established border with Russia from those manor farms taken over by the new Russian masters across the territory of the Russian partition.
The first steps to improve the condition of peasants in the Commonwealth (despite efforts made by individual farm owners) was the general declaration in the Third of May Constitution of 1791 that the Polish Commonwealth takes all peasants under its care. But Catherine II (also known as Catherine the Great) has no intention whatsoever to tolerate this liberal Constitution in the semi-independent Poland and ordered her armies to march into Poland in 1792. No such declaration was attempted to be made in the tsarist Russia.
