Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (82 page)

Galician society was formally feudal until the mid-nineteenth century, and remained traditional and pre-modern until the end of its existence. Most of the landed estates, where serfdom remained in force until 1848, belonged to a score of powerful Polish magnates. The free peasantry was largely confined to pastoral communities in the southern highlands. The middle classes were undeveloped, the commercial and professional sectors often being in Jewish hands. Religious practices were strong. Churches and synagogues usually provided the most substantial buildings.

A small number of the grandest Galician landowners could boast some of the largest fortunes in Europe. Each of them governed scores of scattered districts from their
klucz
or ‘home estate’ – the Branickis at Sucha, the Czartoryskis at Sieniawa, the Potockis at Łancut and Rymanów, the Sapiehas at Krasiczyn, the Dzieduszyckis at Jezupol and the Lubomirskis at Czerwonogród. These families attended court in Vienna and assumed Austrian titles. Their extravagant lifestyle, filled with balls, banquets, foreign tours and international gatherings, was vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. Though they prospered as a class, individual families rose and fell like football clubs in a premiership league table.
¹⁵

The peasantry, in contrast, were as indigent as their masters were affluent. Men, women and children toiled in the fields from dawn to dusk. They had a few basic implements, an ox-team or possibly a horse, but before the twentieth century little or no machinery. Until 1848 the men were obliged to work for several days a week on the lord’s demesne, leaving their wives and offspring to cultivate the family plot. They attempted to survive outside the money economy, suspicious of the Jews who ran it, fearful of debt, and only going to market to sell a pig or to buy a fork or a foal. Like the aristocrats, they watched their family fortunes rise and fall in response to the vicissitudes of health, weather, fertility and the birth of sons, but the tenor of their communal life was remarkably constant. Peasant speech, peasant customs and peasant dancing were all peculiar to their particular social estate. Even after the abolition of serfdom, partly thanks to illiteracy and the scarcity of alternative employment, the peasantry stayed firmly tied to the land. Polish and Ruthenian peasants in Galicia had much more in common with each other than with the rest of society.

Debates over serfdom multiplied after the Congress of Vienna, but the issue did not come to a head in Galicia until 1846, when disastrous floods coincided with a political upheaval in the Republic of Kraków. Some Austrian officials, it seems, actively encouraged serfs to rebel against their masters in order to nip the Cracovian conspiracy in the bud. A peasant called Jakub Szela from the village of Smarzowy near Tarnów assembled a gang of men intent on violence against the local nobility. When the authorities failed to intervene, bands of rebel serfs toured the countryside, beating, burning and butchering noblemen and their families. Bounties were paid for severed noble heads. At least 1,500 murders were perpetrated, and none was punished. When the military finally moved in, Szela was exiled to Bukovina, and the emperor was eventually forced to sign the decree of abolition. This
Rabacja
or ‘Peasant Rising’ of 1846 (otherwise known as the ‘Galician Slaughter’) sent ripples of horror round Europe.
¹⁶
Everyone who had thought that the social order was God-given and immutable was obliged to think again.

The abolition of serfdom brought only partial relief for the peasants. The strong conservative lobby in Vienna was able to insist that the state compensation payable to the landowners for the loss of their serfs be financed from long-term mortgage payments imposed on the ex-serfs. The supposed beneficiaries of abolition were indeed freed from bondage and were theoretically free to leave their villages, yet they were not given anywhere to go, and, if they stayed on to work the land which they still regarded as ‘theirs’, they moved at a stroke from serfdom to deeply indebted tenancies, typically condemned to pay off their mortgage over thirty or forty years. To make things worse, all sorts of traditional practices, such as the right to graze cattle on common land or to collect firewood in the forest, were thrown into dispute, where the advantage belonged to the landowner and his lawyers. Serfdom had provided security of tenure in exchange for bondage. Now, both bondage and security had ended.
¹⁷

Nonetheless, over the decades, new horizons opened up for the former serfs, who were forced to take responsibility for their own destiny. They could buy and sell their produce more effectively, and exploit crafts for monetary gain. They looked forward to educating their children, and began to campaign for village schools. With some delay, they took to various new forms of collective activity, organizing both economic co-operatives and political parties.

All the textbooks state that in the second half of the nineteenth century Galicia’s economy remained seriously retarded. Certainly it did not possess the dynamism either of its neighbour, Prussian-ruled Silesia, or of Austrian-ruled Bohemia. Yet it did not stand still either. After 1848 a wider railway network was built; export businesses increased, especially of timber, paper, sugar and tobacco; and several mechanized industries were launched.

Oil, however, supplied the only resource to promise industrial development of more than provincial importance. Discovered in the 1850s in the district of Borysław-Drohobycz, it grew explosively into a wild oil-rush area of near-unregulated drilling and exploration. Foreign investment, mainly French and German, poured in. Borysław and nearby Tustanowice saw hundreds of oil shafts spring up in the muddy fields alongside the district’s only paved road, and 100 trains a day left the state refinery at Drohobycz. In 1908 the Galician oilfield claimed to be the third largest in the world after those of Texas and Persia.
¹⁸

Even so, the deep-seated problems of Galicia’s rural economy deteriorated. After devastating floods in the early 1880s, rural poverty reached catastrophic proportions. Famine stalked both the villages and the Jewish
shtetln
that lived from the peasants’ trade. A study published in 1887, which historians now consider exaggerated, purported to show that Galicia had become Europe’s poorest province.
¹⁹
Paradoxically, the population had more than doubled in less than a century, while agricultural productivity lagged far behind. Galicia appeared to be falling victim to the Malthusian nightmare which most of Europe had avoided. Overpopulation underlay all other socio-economic ills. Food production had fallen well below rates in neighbouring countries in every crop except potatoes. The birth rate soared to 44/1,000 per annum. The death rate was dropping. The total population was heading for 9 million. Galicia could no longer feed its sons and daughters.

Mass migration was the result. Migrant workers no longer returned home after a seasonal spell in Germany or in Western Europe, but went further and further afield. The coal mines of Ostrava or of Upper Silesia were a frequent destination, but once the railways were built, it was a relatively simple matter to take a train to Bremen or Hamburg and to sail for America. The station at Oświe˛cim provided the main point of departure. Special barracks were built to house the crowds of paupers who thronged the platforms, and fourth-class wagons were laid on to transport them to the north German ports. The exodus gathered momentum in the last decades before 1914. The annual outflow was counted in hundreds of thousands, and the total ran into millions.
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Most of them would never see Galicia again. The Poles usually headed for the new industrial towns of the American Midwest like Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland, Ohio. The Ruthenians preferred the prairie provinces of Canada. The Jews made for Vienna, and then for New York.

Though many emigrants would not have known how to read and write, some did; and the letters sent back home constitute an eloquent source of information on their experiences.
²¹
The pains of emigration also form the subject of Galicia’s best-loved popular song:

Góralu, czy ci nie z˙al

Odchodić od stron ojczystych
,

świerkowych lasów i hal

I tych potoków srebrzystych
?

Góralu, czy ci nie z˙al?

Góralu, wracaj do hal!

(‘Oh, Gooral, are you not weeping / to walk from your own native land, / from the pine trees, mountains and pastures, / from the silver torrent’s bright strand / Oh, Gooral, are you not weeping? / Oh, Gooral, come back to home!’)
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In the nature of things, Galicia’s cities were untypical. The urban population never exceeded 20 per cent of the country. Yet its importance should not be underestimated: the cities were the focal point of administrative, commercial and cultural activities that kept the kingdom functioning. Lemberg, though a Polish city in the eyes of its Polish majority, strongly exuded the flavours of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Its Jewish community, increasingly assimilated, represented perhaps a third of its population, while the other minorities – Ruthenian, German, Czech and Armenian – created a variegated ethnic patchwork.

A large number of imposing public buildings in the grandiose Viennese style sprang up round the older, historic centre. The university, refounded in 1817, the renowned
Politechnika
(1877) and the building of the Galician
Sejm
or Diet were all examples of modern neo-Gothic design. The three cathedrals – Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Armenian – set the tone of religious plurality, and the erection of a full range of theatres, opera house, art galleries and museums attested to the city’s cultural vitality. The late nineteenth century saw the arrival of railway stations, municipal waterworks, tramways, parks, prisons and sports clubs. Lemberg was famed for its lively café life. Numerous monuments and institutions dedicated to King John (Jan) Sobieski, the ‘Saviour of Vienna’ (see p.
282
), the district’s most illustrious son, were entirely appropriate.

For the first 100 years, the Austrian authorities in Lemberg pursued a policy of steady linguistic Germanization. But from 1870, the introduction of municipal autonomy led to re-Polonization. Streets, like Sapieha Boulevard, the main thoroughfare, were given Polish names. A statue to Poland’s national bard, Adam Mickiewicz (who never visited), was placed in the Mariacki Square. And the amazing Panorama Racławicka, a theatrical battle-scene presented ‘in the round’, was opened on the centenary of Kościuszko’s famous victory over the Russians at Racławice in 1794 (see p.
289
). The city’s motto, ‘
Semper Fidelis
’, which had distinct Roman Catholic overtones, was now taken to refer unambiguously to the memory of Poland’s tragic past.
²³

By the late nineteenth century Lemberg had found its way into the leading European tourist guides:

LEMBERG – Population, c 160,000 Hotels. Hot. George, R from 3K, B.90h; Imperial, Grand, Metropole, de L’Europe, de France. Restaurants. At the hotels, also Stadtmuller, Krakowska Str; Rail Restaurant at the chief station. Cafes. Theatre Café, Ferdinands Platz; Vienna Café, Heilige-Geist Platz. Electric Tramway from the chief station to the Wały Hetmanskie, and thence to the Kilinski Park and to the Cemetery of Łyczaków. Horse cars also traverse the town. British Vice-Consul: Prof. R. Zaliecki…
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Unlike Lemberg, nineteenth-century Kraków was struggling to recover from a long period of decay. When Galicia was first formed, grass had been growing through the cobbles of its magnificent medieval square, the
Rynek
. More recently, the successive collapse of New Galicia, of the Duchy of Warsaw and of the Republic of Kraków all dashed the city’s hopes of regaining its former status. Kraków was smaller than Lemberg, and returned to Galicia in 1846 as a distinctly poor and battered relation. To disarm the city, the medieval walls were razed and replaced by a municipal garden, the
Planty
, encircling the central area.

Nonetheless, in the last quarter of the century Kraków’s ancient splendour started to revive. The Jagiellonian University, re-Polonized and rehoused, became a powerhouse of modern Polish culture. Art, science and learning flourished as never before. And Kraków’s Polishness, radiating from the most Polish part of Galicia, heralded further changes to come:

Gdy chcesz wiedzieć,
co to chowa

Nasza przeszłość
w swojém łonie
,

Jako stara sława płonie:

To jedź bracie do Krakowa.

(‘If you want to see what here is bred / our heritage in its very womb / like an ancient flame that catches fire: / ride, brothers! Go to Krakow!’)
²⁵

Galicia’s linguistic kaleidoscope exuded both charm and complications. The main secular tongues of German, Polish, Ruthenian and Yiddish were accompanied by the sacred languages of Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Old Armenian and Hebrew.