Global Depression, Local Tragedies: Rural Life in 1930s Poland
The year is 1934. You step out of your apartment in Warsaw and ride the tram to the train station. Boarding the train, you grab a newspaper, and the locomotive whistle sounds. Plumes of smoke blacken the sky, and the cars lurch forward.
As you exit the urban centre of Poland’s capital, you pass modern factories, crowds of working men, market stalls and automobiles imported from the United States and Germany. But a just a few kilometres farther on, you are transported into what looks like the Middle Ages.
Disembarking the train in a small market town, you search for a taxi, but find none. Instead, you ask a haggard farmer with a one-horse cart for a ride on to the next village. Bumping along the dirt road, you spot the collection of low houses with thatched rooves they call Ciszewo. In the fields, whole families struggle to till the rocky soil with wooden tools, practically unchanged from the ones their mediaeval ancestors used.
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The Great Depression, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
The residents of this hamlet seem unusually short in stature and emaciated. Their skin has an odd pallor, especially considering they spend all day in the sun. You notice a young woman preparing the midday meal and crane your neck to see what’s in the pot. To your dismay, there is nothing but salted water and potatoes. As villagers recite the Lord’s Prayer, the line ‘give us this day our daily bread’ is no humble request, but a pleading cry for comfort. But how can farmers be starving? They’re the ones producing food, aren’t they?
Ciszewo and thousands of villages like it were reeling under the pressure of worldwide economic crisis in the 1930s. The New York stock market crash of 1929 had deep reverberations, even in the most remote locations. Of course, to some degree this state of affairs was the effect of historical conditions – written long into the past – but the Great Depression had a deep effect on Poland’s villagers. In less developed countries, the crisis hit harder, leaving people in more desperate destitute poverty and hopelessness.
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Huts along a road, 1938, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
As the consequences of the economic crisis rippled out into the world, demand for all kinds of goods, including agricultural products, slowed to a halt. As a result, by 1930, prices had started to fall. Individual countries, especially the agricultural powerhouses, put up tariff barriers to protect their own markets, and sell more at home to make up for the losses. This particular move caused prices to spiral down even further, making it impossible to earn a living. To get the same amount of cash required to pay off taxes and debts, farmers had to produce much more than was possible, especially since they did not have money for fertilisers, equipment or seed that could facilitate such a thing. Many small farmers in Poland stopped bringing their produce to market because they could not afford the transportation costs.
Meanwhile, the prices of necessary goods that all people need to purchase, and cannot be brought up from the ground, essentially stayed the same – but they became out of reach for most rural people. This was, again, because of the terribly low prices of agricultural goods. This meant that, prior to the Depression, for farmers to buy 10 kg of salt, they would need to sell around 8 kg of rye – but by 1934, they would need to come up 29 kg of rye to afford that same salt. In relation to prices in 1928, salt became 360% more expensive, matches 475%, coal 385%, and sugar 255%. Likewise with kerosene, 10 litres could be had for 2.5 kg of pork meat, and in 1934, they would need three times as much pork to buy the same fuel used for lamps and cooking. Since so many people could no longer sacrifice the expense, villagers reverted to gathering up peat moss and attaching it to a stick to make torches to light their homes. Unsurprisingly, this led to more than a few tragic fires.
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Horse-powered tractor, 1935, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
Because farmers could no longer sell their produce, many returned to subsistence farming, but this meant that almost no money was changing hands in Poland’s villages. So little cash circulated during the Great Depression that a barter economy returned. In his study of Rzeszów county, Jerzy Michałowski observed farmer-peasants using eggs as currency. Since the eggs could not be sold, it was easier to simply exchange them with neighbours, merchants or at village shops. The ‘exchange’ rate was around 30gr per egg. As Michałowski spent a day observing a village shop, he saw only three customers pay with cash, while every other customer paid in eggs.
‘Pamiętniki Chłopów’ (Peasant Memoirs), photo: public domain A Polish research group, the Institute of Social Economy (IGS), embarked on a project to gather qualitative and quantitative data on the extent of small farmers’ plight. In 1933, IGS publicised cash prizes for the best entries in a contest for personal narratives from Poland’s villages. Around 500 people submitted letters, memoirs or autobiographies, and the group published the most notable ones in two volumes called the Pamiętniki Chłopów (Peasant Memoirs). These stories show the sheer desperation of Poland’s rural population during the Depression.
A highly educated middle-class farmer from east of Warsaw explained in his entry that although they had milk cows, they were forced to sell all the butter and milk produced to buy other things. With the little money they received for the milk and butter, they bought salt, matches and kerosene. The family also struggled to pay off large debts for the purchase of farm equipment.
Another farmer from near Ciechanów claimed they had not eaten any salt since 1930. And though they used to buy coal, they could no longer afford it, because the necessary items for life – salt, kerosene, matches, coal and sugar – had become too expensive, while farm goods were too cheap. To save on heating costs during the winter, the family shared their quarters with cows, horses and donkeys.
One farmer from near Warsaw described the sheer boredom experienced in these difficult times. The groups that used to organise parties, theatres and libraries were no longer functioning. Books were too expensive to be purchased by an individual, so groups needed to pool together funds. This young man pondered the idea of buying a radio for entertainment, but at that time, the monthly subscription fee was 3zł. To put that in perspective, he could buy a sheep for 6zł, so the radio seemed quite expensive.
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Krechowiecka settlement, Wołyń, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
Few of the entries in the Pamiętniki Chłopów collection come from women, but the ones that do are especially painful to read. A farmer’s wife began her testimony declaring that the plight of women on small farms is invisible. She claimed that this was mostly a problem of literacy, so she was writing ‘in the name of silent millions’. Her own educational journey was horrifying, since her father beat her and cut her with scissors. As she learned to write, the textbook was covered in blood.
The worst consequence of the Depression from her perspective was the return of diseases that had long been eradicated. At the heart of the problem was malnutrition. She described in detail what was eaten on the farm over the course of a week:
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For breakfast, groats or wheat porridge with milk; for lunch, borscht, fatback with potatoes, sourdough soup, or sauerkraut. Dinner: a piece of dark bread. Meat, butter, eggs, sugar – no one allows themselves such luxuries.
The meals that she describes seem unusually rich in comparison to contemporaries. But even this was not enough to provide sustenance for hard work. Farmers and their families laboured for as long as there was sunlight, which could mean up to 18 hours during the summer months. During the best months of the year, from August to November, one statistician estimated that rural people consumed 1,800 to 2,200 calories per day; the rest of the year, they could not hope for so much food. Meanwhile urban workers consumed around 2,700 calories on average, and white collar workers let themselves go with a 3,000 calorie diet.
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A moment of rest in the fields, photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl
The young daughter of a farmer from the far east, near Vilnius, wrote in detail about the advancements their farm had made of the past few years. Even though they had adopted modern methods – sodium nitrate artificial fertilisers and special breeds of cattle – none of this lifted them out of poverty. At precisely the time their farm became its most productive, market prices dropped out, and their income was destroyed. Out of this rare positive outcome, she lamented, they could not reap the benefits:
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There is no merriment, only sadness. Melancholy embraces man and won’t let go. The uncertainty of tomorrow, fear of debt collectors and auctioneers, selling off a piece of land because everything already hangs on it, filled with great longing and despondency for any kind of existence.
The memoirs reveal that the struggling rural poor often felt abandoned by the Polish government – forgotten, even though they made up over 70% of the country’s population. A farmer eking out a living on a strip of land near Łódź recalled the conversations he had with his neighbour:
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He comes by every other day and asks me if there won’t be some kind of war or revolution. But not just him, everyone in the village is asking God for there to be a war or something – anything so that things would change.
Another writer from a village around Kielce complained directly about the damage that Warsaw’s neglect had done on their psyche:
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Maybe they would come to us with some help so that people would stop complaining about the Polish Government, when you hear these days what people are saying, that it’d be better if there was a war already and that foreigners would come – even Hitler – that maybe we’d be better off. That’s what you hear around here from people and these people don’t even understand who Hitler is. Others say it’d be better if the Bolsheviks came. Either way, no one is satisfied even though they are free in their own country and use Polish without any restrictions.
Decaying hut, 1931, fot. szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl These snapshots were rich source material for the IGS researchers, but they did not help them to diagnose the key issues of Poland’s small farmers. The village memoirs were, in their opinion, too personal and not substantial enough. Plus, they came from a very small segment of educated and more wealthy people (though not rich by any means). Few country folk were fully literate; others simply could not afford the pens, paper or postage to participate in the competition.
In 1934, IGS decided to launch a new project to gather better information about the rural poor through surveys. They travelled to 53 villages in every corner of the country to collect data about farmers and travelling labourers. All told, the surveys touched 26,814 people.
Photo: szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl IGS published its first analyses of the statistics in 1937, with other works planned that were interrupted by the war. Amongst other things, the study revealed that income per capita in the villages was one-third that of the cities in Poland. The reason why is also borne out in the data. While 75% of respondents said that they could produce more on their farms, the global economic situation weighed too heavily on them. Prices of agricultural products – grains, meat, dairy – were too low, and therefore, they could not afford the tools, seed, hay, fertilisers and transportation to make that production possible.
As Europe barrelled towards the Second World War, the situation of small farmers improved only slightly as prices slowly rose. However, as the war began, poverty and suffering were still widespread – and would never find their resolution in independent Poland.
Written by Zachary Mazur, 16 Nov 2020
Sources: ‘Wieś Nie Ma Pracy: Wywiad Społeczny w Powiecie Rzeszowskim’ by Jerzy Michałowski (Warsaw: Instytut Spraw Społecznych, 1935)
