POLAND: Land Divided

A fifth partition of Poland began last week—the partition of the soil. Throughout the liberated regions, the Lublin government confiscated all farms (except church lands) of more than 250 acres. Also seized were all lands belonging to the Polish Government in Exile, to German citizens, to Poles convicted in Lublin’s courts of treason or assisting the Germans. Seizure of property belonging to the Catholic Church or to “religious communities” would be decided on later when a Sejm (parliament) was elected.

The confiscated land was to be divided into farms of not more than twelve and a half acres. These would be allotted to peasants who had little or no land, and to former tenant farmers. Priority would be given to veterans of Lublin’s fighting forces, all those who fought for a “democratic Poland.” Former big landowners might also receive twelve and a half acres of land—but not from their own lands. Or they might receive a small monthly allowance “amounting to the salary of a state official of the sixth group.”

Peasants might eventually buy their land. They might pay 10% down and the balance in ten years. Former landless peasants have three years in which to make the down payment, 20 years in which to pay off the balance.

The confiscations amounted to the most important agrarian revolution in Europe since Russia liquidated the kulaks† as a class. On the surface it seemed designed to break up a land economy built around baronial estates, substitute an economy of small farms—firmest foundation of the political Middle Way. But one question remained to be answered: why was the Moscow-sponsored Lublin government carrying out a small-farm land policy which Moscow (after allowing peasants to carve up the big estates in 1917) declared to be wasteful and inefficient when it began to collectivize the peasants in 1929?

†A kulak was a peasant who owned three cows or more.