History /
Polish historical myths - to break or not to break them? [257]
Excuse me, but I don`t discuss things at length with unregistered users. Waste of time.
Register first, then I will answer you.
In another thread I read this:
Poles love freedom while Russian are used to being servants of their rulers rather than citizens.
Excuse me, MyMom, that I am using your post. :):):) I hope you don`t mind. After all, I am immortalising you, in a way, as Sokrates said.
Isn`t it a great historical myth that Poles love freedom?
What about in the past?
Polish peasants were enslaved by their szlachta masters. Serfdom in Poland lasted from 1520 to 1864, one of the longest in Europe.
With weak towns and their underpriviliged residents , it seems that only the gentry and aristocrats were really free. About 10% of the Polish population in the past.
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~atpc/heritage/history/h-life/peasant.html
This favourable evolution was not shared by the peasants of eastern Europe. Peasant conditions there in the 14th century do not seem to have been worse than those of the west, and in some ways they were better, because the colonization of forestlands in eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary had led to the establishment of many free-peasant communities. But a combination of political and economic circumstances reversed these developments. The chief reason was that the wars that devastated eastern Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to increase the power of the nobility at the expense of the central governments.
britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/535485/serfdom
Peasants in Poland were like slaves, completely dependent on their masters and troubled with incredible poverty.
No wonder that when serfdom was abolished in Russian partition zone by the Russian tsar`s decree in 1864, Polish peasants erected many gratitude memorials in their villages:
This one used to have a small statue of the Russian tsar instead of the cross.