The war was still going on and the Red Army was waiting on the forefields of the fighting in Warsaw. In spite of this, the new communist authorities of Poland started to introduce reforms crucial for the shape of the future Republic. One of the inherent slogans of communism was community and collectivisation. Cooperative kolkhozy and state sovhozy had been present in the Soviet Union for many years and were symbols of the Soviet nation. Poles, who gradually fell under the Kremiln’s authority, were afraid that the same fate would befall their own farms. Those who had lived under the Soviet occupation in the years 1939-1941 were particularly afraid. But the Polish communists decided to take a different form of action…

Communistic Divide et impera

The new authorities realized that an attempt to perform quick agrarian collectivisation and to create cooperative farms would meet with resistance from a large part of a community – both peasants and the landed class. That is why they decided to postpone such actions until their rule was in a position to claim even partial support and, more importantly, until it was strong enough. Polish society consisted mostly of peasants, so their favour had to be fought for, particularly in the context of further plans of agrarian reform. What is the best way to gain the sympathy of people who connect their life to the cultivation of land? By giving them land! Such was the opinion of the communists. On September the 6th, 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation issued a decree on implementing agrarian reform, specifically on the acquisition and division of existing farms.

The reform applied to agricultural estates under the following criteria:

• the property of the State Treasury
• the property of the citizens of the III Reich and Polish citizens of German nationality
• the property of people lawfully convicted for high treason, for aiding the occupiers to the detriment of the State or the local population or for other similar crimes
• confiscated for other legal reasons
• owned or co-owned by natural or legal persons if their total area exceeded 100 ha of general land or 50 ha of agricultural land and in the voivodships of Poznan, Pomerania and Silesia, if their general land exceeded a total area of 100 ha, regardless of the size of the area of farmland.

The fate of the estates owned by the Catholic Church or religious communities was to be decided by the Legislative Sejm.

The confiscated areas were to become state property without the need to pay any compensation to their previous owners. Subsequently, they were supposed to be handed over to landless peasants and smallholders. This is how the communist authorities initiated their fight against “capitalistic landownership”. Peasants’ attitudes towards these changes varied – on the one hand they were glad and took advantage of the land given to them by the state, but on the other, they were well aware that this land had frequently belonged to a particular family for generations. Many peasants, who were not used to taking possession of property that did not belong to them, would actually have preferred for the status quo in the countryside to remain unchanged.

What next?

In the communist reality this state of affairs could not be permitted to last indefinitely. At this point in time, Poland was full of individual, though minor landowners. Meanwhile the system assumed a sense of community in almost every aspect of life, including farming. That is why in 1949 the government initiated obligatory collectivisation. More and more farms were joined into State Agricultural Farms (SAF). Those who had received land in the mid-1940s, now were basically forced to forfeit it. 10 000 SAFs had been created by 1956. It was the maximum number that the authorities managed to achieve, though this number was still considered insufficient. It can be argued that collectivisation in Poland was a failure. One of the consequences of the communist actions was the almost complete disappearance of manors, which were characteristic of the interwar period.