To market! to market! the Polish peasantry in the era of the Stolypin reforms

Slavic Review

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 406-425

  Blobaum, Robert E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 49549106951     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2697059     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. Stefan Kieniewicz, The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry (Chicago, 1969), 221-22.
2. For example, Jürgen Nötzold's economic history of late imperial Russia, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypin (Berlin, 1966), contains impressive quantitative data related to the Stolypin reforms but omits Congress Poland from its analysis.
3. Similarly, George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, 1982), notes only the legislation of June 1912 which set up a separate organization to oversee the reform in Poland.
4. Richard Hennessy, The Agrarian Question in Russia, 1901-1907 (Giessen, 1977), does not extend his analysis of the activities of the Peasant Land Bank beyond the western provinces. Recent Russian literature on the Stolypin reforms, inspired in part by the challenges of transforming Soviet and post-Soviet agriculture, are similarly focused on the empire's central provinces;
5. see A. I. Avrekh, P. A. Stolypin i sud' by reform v Rossii (Moscow, 1991 ),
6. L. I. Zaitseva, ed., Agrarnaia reforma P. A. Stolypina v dokumentakh i publikatsiiakh kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1993),
7. and A. P. Korelin and K. F. Shatsillo, "P. A. Stolypin: Popytka modernizatsii sel'skogo khoziaistva Rossii," in Derevnia v nachale veku: Revoliutsiia i reforma (Moscow, 1995), 6-42.
8. More general studies of government and politics during the Stolypin era, including Mary Schaeffer Conroy, Peter Arkad'evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Boulder, Colo., 1976),
9. George Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of Three Major Issues (Washington, D.C., 1981),
10. and Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (DeKalb, 1998), discuss Poland and Poles only in reference to Stolypin's nationality policies. For a sophisticated analysis of the latter within a larger context,
11. see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1866-1914 (DeKalb, 1996).
12. Representative of the Marxist approach to the period, adopted from Soviet historiography, are the introduction and selected documents contained in Herman Rappaport, ed., Reakcja stołypinowska w Królestwie Polskim, 1906-1910 (Warsaw, 1974).
13. Rappaport, in criticizing Polish "patriotic" historiography for its concentration on the struggle for national independence during the "Stolypin reaction," argues that the period is really "about the crisis, about the poverty and hunger, about the difficult position of the working masses, about their struggle [against] political and economic terror waged against the entire Polish people" (7-9). Meanwhile, studies of the Polish peasantry during the late imperial period, while they may contain valuable information, generally focus on peasant "consciousness" (social, political, national) or on the agrarian programs, organizations, and agitation of contemporary Polish political parties. See Krzysztof Groniowski, Kwestia agrarna w Królestwie Polskim, 1871-1914 (Warsaw, 1966),
14. Jan Borkowski, Chłopi polscy w dobie kapitalizmu (Warsaw, 1981),
15. Helena Brodowska, Chłopi o sobie i Polsce: Rozwój świadomości społczno-narodowej (Warsaw, 1984),
16. Wiesław Pia̧tkowski, Idee agrarne ugrupowań politycznych w Królestwie Polskim, 1892-1918 (Łódź, 1992),
17. as well as Pia̧tkowski's earlier work, Dzieje ruchu zaraniankiego (Warsaw, 1956).
18. On the other hand, peasant owners in the Kingdom paid a land tax following the emancipation, the revenues from which were designed to reimburse the government for the bonds issued former serfowners as compensation for lost land, labor, and rents. This tax remained in effect after 1906 when redemption payments were abolished in European Russia, which the Polish delegation to the Russian State Duma claimed was discriminatory; see Gazeta Świa̧ teczna, no. 1622 (3 March 1912): 1.
19. Nevertheless, evidence of the relatively generous terms of the emancipation in the Kingdom is most apparent when the size and proportion of smallholdings are compared with those prevailing in Poznania under Prussian rule and Galicja under Austrian rule. In 1909, the smallholders' share of all landed property in Poznania was 30 percent and in Galicja 53.5 percent, compared to 62.4 percent in the Kingdom. Moreover, the average size of a smallholder's farm in the Kingdom was more than double the prevailing norm in Galicja, and 1.8 times larger than that in Poznania. See Rocznik Statystyczny Królestwa Polskiego. Rok 1913 (Warsaw, 1914), 83-84,
20. and Rocznik Statystyczny Królestwa Polskiego. Rok 1915 (Warsaw, 1916), 70. Much of the quantitative data contained in this article is derived from official government reports published in these annual statistical yearbooks for the years 1913-1915, hereafter cited as RSKP.
21. On the evolution of official Russian stereotypes of Poles, including that of the "loyal peasant," see Weeks, Nation and State, 54-59.
22. This image was shaken, but not destroyed, by peasant unrest during the revolution of 1905; see Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1907 (Ithaca, 1995), 115-56.
23. The emancipation foresaw the gradual, negotiated "liquidation" of peasant grazing, timber, and gathering rights on private estates. Such negotiations also had to take into account the many instances in which the servitude rights of one village overlapped and conflicted with those of another. In the fifty years following the emancipation, the majority of these private servitudes were converted, as villages, rather than individual peasants, were compensated with land in varying amounts. On the other hand, the emancipation immediately eliminated easement rights on state and crown land, for the use of which village communities were now assessed fees. The most intractable conflicts, in relation to both private and public property, involved easement rights and assessments in forests, especially as their products became increasingly profitable toward the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1912, the number of homesteads with servitudes included in the original liquidation tables had been reduced to 28 percent; RSKP, 1914, 77.
24. See also Groniowski, Kwestia agrarna, 128-53.
25. For a detailed discussion of this transformation in the system of peasant cultivation following emancipation, especially as it related to grain production, see the chapter "Polowa produkcja roślinna," in J. Leskiewiczowa, ed., Zarys historii gospodarstwa wiejskiego w Polsce (Warsaw, 1964), 2:318-455.
26. At the time of the emancipation, approximately one-half of all peasant land consisted of consolidated individual holdings. Most of this consolidation had occurred in the 1840s and 1850s in connection with the conversion of labor dues to rents. After emancipation, however, the state's requirement that peasant assemblies be unanimous in supporting the consolidation of individual properties brought the movement to a standstill. Indeed, the process was reversed by subsequent peasant subdivision so that by the early twentieth century, only one-third of peasant land remained in consolidated plots; RSKP, 1913, 87.
27. For an analysis of the worldwide depression of grain prices and its impact on Polish agriculture, see Juliusz Łukasiewicz, Kryzys agrarna na ziemiach polskich w końcu XIX wieku (Warsaw, 1968).
28. Consequently, peasant landownership increased by only 8.1 percent between 1864 and 1890 and resulted mainly from the conversion of servitudes rather than from peasant purchases of estate land; RSKP, 1913, 84-85.
29. See also Groniowski, Kwestia agrarna, 76-77.
30. Blobaum, Rewolucja, 11-13.
31. Although the number of peasant holdings increased, the average size of the holdings declined. On the eve of the Stolypin reforms, almost 90 percent of all peasant landowners possessed holdings of less than 12.4 acres; Kieniewicz, Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry, 189.
32. Even so, 18.7 percent of all smallholdings consisted of properties of less than 3 morgs as late as 1904; RSKP, 1913, 84-85.
33. Krzysztof Groniowski, Robotnicy rolni w Królestwie Polskim, 1871-1914 (Warsaw, 1977), 29, 48.
34. To some extent, the Polish countryside served as a model for what Russia's agrarian reformers hoped to accomplish in the central Russian provinces in the early stages of the reform through legislation permitting heads of households to leave the commune and claim their allotments as private property. Similarly, the evidence of the Polish nobility rubbing elbows with the peasantry on the basis of equality in the all-class gmina proved to Russian reformers that the nobility could survive without the aid of a soslovie-based system of administration isolating the peasantry from other classes. Moreover, a number of key figures involved in the conceptualization and implementation of the Stolypin reforms, especially V. I. Gurko and A. V. Krivoshein, had considerable experience in Poland as commissars of peasant affairs; see David A. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb, 1987), 46-47, 83, 153, 317.
35. Russian language requirements and higher taxes, however, were not the only causes of peasant resistance to the schools. Especially in the first decades following the emancipation, some peasants tended to equate all that was new, including schools, with plans to restore serfdom. Moreover, during the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and 1890s, peasants saw no direct economic benefit to be derived from education. Instead, the loss of child and adolescent labor was viewed as a distinct disadvantage, an attitude promoted by the dispersion of peasant plots in checkerboards and the need to tend livestock in distant pastures. The connection between the progress of education in the village and the consolidation of peasant plots did not escape the Polish populist press; see particularly Zaranie, no. 26 (29 June 1911): 571.
36. See also Józef Chałasiński, Młode pokolenie chłopów: Procesy i zagadnienia kształtowania siȩ warstwy chłopskiej w Polsce, 4 vols. (Warsaw, 1938). Although only a small fraction of the 1,544 biographical sketches that formed the basis of Chałasiński's work were written by authors born before 1907, the required tending of livestock was often cited as a main reason for their incomplete or insufficient education and one of many causes of generational conflict in the villages.
37. In 1901 a special commission appointed by the Warsaw governor-general reported that one-third of the rural population had received or was receiving "secret instruction" in the Polish language; Helena Brodowska, Ruch chłopski po uwłaszczeniu w Królestwie Polskim, 1864-1904 (Warsaw, 1967), 255.
38. On the state's educational policies and their deleterious impact on peasant literacy before the revolution, see Edmund Staszyński, Polityka oświatowa caratu w Królestwie Polskim od powstania styczniowego do I wojny światowej (Warsaw, 1968), 88, 95-96.
39. For more on the Society for National Education, the nationalist organization responsible for establishing and politicizing secret schools in the years immediately preceding the revolution of 1905, see Tadeusz Wolski, "Towarzystwo Oświaty Narodowej, 1899-1905," Kwartalnik Historyczny 89, no. 2 (1987): 71-96.
40. On the exclusion of the Chełm region from these and other concessions of the revolutionary period, see Robert Blobaum, "Toleration and Ethno-Religious Strife: The Struggle between Catholics and Orthodox Christians in the Chełm Region of Russian Poland, 1904-1906," The Polish Review 35, no. 2 (1990): 123-24.
41. For a discussion of educational issues during the revolution, see Blobaum, Rewolucja, 157-87.
42. Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD, Main Archive of Old Documents), Pomocnik General-Gubernatora Warszawskiego (PomGGW, Special Deputy to the Warsaw Governor-General for Police Affairs Collection) 165, chief of the Warsaw Provincial Gendarmes to the special deputy to the Warsaw Governor-General for Police Affairs (SDPA), 2(15) April 1908, chief of the Kalisz Provincial Gendarmes to the SDPA, 9(22) April 1908, chief of the Piotrków Provincial Gendarmes to the SDPA, 26 April (9 May) 1908, and chief of the Radom Provincial Gendarmes to the SDPA, 16(29) July 1908.
43. These courses were attended primarily by adults attempting to acquire basic literacy. Provincial authorities apparently tolerated this practice for a time. In May 1908, George Skalon, the Warsaw governor-general, recognizing that the goal of secret instruction was to acquire and improve literacy, called upon provincial governors to cease punishing such activity by administrative means. Rather than trying to eliminate such activity, he argued, the state should seek to regulate it. Consequently, in Radom province in the fall of 1908, such courses were being offered at twenty primary schools and the authorities were receiving peasant petitions for more; AGAD, Kancelaria General-Gubernatora Warszawskiego (KGGW, Chancery of the Warsaw Governor-General Collection) 3607, circular of the Warsaw governor-general (WGG) to provincial governors and the acting Warsaw superintendent of police, 14(27) May 1908, and AGAD KGGW 7741, Radom governor to the WGG, 11 (24) October 1908.
44. AGAD KGGW 6472, governor's report on conditions in Kalisz province in 1910, AGAD KGGW 6483, governor's report on conditions in Radom province in 1910, AGAD KGGW 6513, governor's report on conditions in Lomza province in 1910, and AGAD KGGW 6541, governor's report on conditions in Warsaw province in 1910.
45. By 1913 the government had committed itself to pay half of the construction costs for new schools and to finance up to 80 percent of the total cost of new construction through low-interest loans with installment payments stretching over forty years. To further lessen the burden on rural communities, the government permitted gminy to use timber from state forests without charge to construct the schools and granted the free use of state-owned land for building sites. Upon the building of each new school, the government also became responsible for providing 360 rubles annually for the teacher's salary and 30 rubles annually for a priest to teach religion, with the gmina responsible for an outlay of 160 rubles annually to maintain the school. The gmina's contribution could come from its own interest-bearing savings and loan funds. Yet given the dire shortage of schools in the Kingdom, most rural communities had to double and triple their school assessments voluntarily if universal primary education was to become a reality within a decade. In Płock province, for example, fifty-nine gminy resolved to create 480 new schools and to increase their annual contribution from 41,334 to 130,146 rubles; Zorza, no. 9 (26 February 1914): 138.
46. On the government's subsidies and incentives, see Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1684 (11 May 1913): 2-3 .
47. On the peasantry's response, see Zenon Kmiecik, Ruch oświatowy na wsi: Królestwo Polskie, 1905-1914 (Warsaw, 1963), 95.
48. Zorza, no. 7 (12 February 1914): 106,
49. and Zaranie, no. 8 (19 February 1914): 195.
50. The following is based on an analysis of assessed property damages resulting from fires in seven of the Kingdom's ten provinces during the first half of 1907, contained in the bimonthly reports on "events" compiled by provincial chanceries and contained in AGAD KGGW 512 (Warsaw province), 634 (Lublin province), 635 (Warsaw province), 636 (Kielce province), 637 (Łomża province), 638 (Suwałki province), 639 (Lublin province), 640 (Radom province), and 642 (Płock province). I would also like to thank Katya Nizharadze who, as my research assistant under a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, helped sift through and organize the available data on insured and uninsured damages caused by fires.
51. For every thousand cases of insured real estate, there was an annual average of 4.57 fires in the first decade of the twentieth century, RSKP, 1913, 195-96.
52. This does not mean that insurance against fires was not promoted by Polish rural activists, especially in the press aimed at the countryside. However, the emphasis was more on expanding insurance coverage from immovable to movable property and to landless renters whom state-owned insurance agencies refused to cover. Rural activists also encouraged the formation of volunteer fire departments, supplementing state-provided insurance with private coverage, and constructing buildings using fire-resistant materials on newly consolidated plots, especially after 1910; see, for example, Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1596 (3 September 1911): 1-2,
53. and Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1747 (26 July 1914): 2;
54. Zaranie, no. 11 (13 March 1913): 275-78;
55. Zorza, no. 25 (22 June 1911): 485-86,
56. and Zorza, no. 44 (2 November 1911): 866.
57. On the movement to form volunteer fire departments, which peaked during these years, see Józef Ryszard Szaflik, Dzieje ochotniczych straży pożarnych (Warsaw, 1985).
58. In other words, a peasant with dwellings and outbuildings valued at less than 100 rubles was as likely to insure them against fire as a peasant with such property valued at over 1,000 rubles (which frequently rivaled the value of insured noble properly). The average value of peasant real estate in 1912 was 516 rubles; RSKP, 1914, 212.
59. High taxes rather than low prices discouraged livestock production for the market; RSKP, 1913, 121.
60. Determination of the causes of fires by state officials and insurance adjusters left much to be desired. In this period, the majority of fires were lumped into the category of "unknown causes" (56.3 percent of all fires from 1905-1909, 55.8 percent in 1911, and 51.5 percent in 1912; RSKP, 1913, 203,
61. and RSKP, 1914, 221). One assumes that in the absence of more sophisticated methods of investigation, the criminal risk associated with this "modern" form of arson was calculated and often considered worth taking.
62. Initially, peasants were suspicious of the agricultural exhibits and demonstrations, which were completely new to the Polish experience, equating them with new taxes and even the restoration of serfdom. This opposition was based in part on the high proportion of noble landowners who served as chairs of the agrarian circles that sponsored the exhibits and in part on the Russian state's involvement in subsidizing many of the exhibits. Nonetheless, by 1910 such opposition was rapidly disappearing. In Warsaw province, for example, exhibits in Radzymin and Mińsk Mazowiecki attracted large peasant audiences; AGAD KGGW 6514, governor's report on the state of Warsaw province in 1910, Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1562 (8 January 1911): 1;
63. and Zorza, no. 25 (19 June 1913): 413-14.
64. For example, in Płock province the number of small credit cooperatives increased from 9 in 1908 to 30 in 1909, by which time they had 22,383 members and were making loans totaling 3,470,800 rubles; AGAD KGGW 6473, governor's report on the state of Płock province in 1909.
65. By the end of 1910 there were 167 educational associations and their branches registered in Warsaw province alone, a figure that does not include such associations registered in the city of Warsaw; Archiwum Państwowe m.st. Warszawy (APW-State Archive in Warsaw), Warszawski Gubernialny Zarza̧d Żandarmerii (WGZŻ-Office of the Warsaw Provincial Gendarmes Collection) 3332, list of educational associations and their branches in Warsaw province in 1910, compiled in early 1911.
66. Hennessy, Agrarian Question in Russia, 142-45.
67. AGAD KGGW 6472, governor's reports on the state of Kalisz province in 1908, 1910, and 1911. This corresponds to long-term lending trends reported by the Peasant Land Bank for the period 1888-1910 during which time two-thirds of all parcelized land in the Kingdom was purchased without the help of the bank; RSKP, 1913, 87.
68. AGAD KGGW 6483, governor's reports on the state of Radom province in 1909 and 1910.
69. RSKP, 1913, 65.
70. Zaranie, no. 34 (21 August 1913): 743.
71. In 1911, wage rates paid to Polish seasonal farmworkers in Prussia were double those prevailing in the Kingdom, this despite a substantial increase in the latter; RSKP, 1913, 65.
72. In 1908 in Kalisz province alone, 118,407 individuals left for work outside the Kingdom's borders in 1908 (over 90 percent of these went to Prussia as seasonal farmworkers); this figure continued to rise in subsequent years; AGAD KGGW 6472, governor's report on the state of Kalisz province in 1908. The attitudes of Polish rural activists toward emigration, whether seasonal or permanent, were mainly negative. Conservative populists believed that emigration corrupted village youth (most of the wage emigrants, especially to Prussia, were young) while creating a labor shortage at home; Gazeta Świa̧ teczna, no. 1519 (13 March 1910): 1,
73. and Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1729 (22 March 1914): 1.
74. Nationalists bewailed what they viewed as cultural contamination resulting from extensive periods of separation from the Polish community and its institutions. They also claimed that Polish seasonal workers in Prussian agriculture were victims of "German exploitation" whose labor supported the anti-Polish policies of the Prussian and imperial German governments; Zorza, no. 14 (7 April 1910): 211-12,
75. and Zorza, no. 10 (6 March 1913): 146-47.
76. Liberal and radical populists, although they regretted the reality of emigration, nevertheless expressed greater understanding for its economic impulses; Zaranie, no. 13 (31 March 1910): 262-63,
77. and Zaranie, no. 17 (28 April 1910): 344.
78. AGAD KGGW 6513, governor's report on the state of Łomża province in 1912.
79. In 1910, gmina kasy (treasuries), whose officers were now elected and which were permitted to act as cooperative lending agencies, provided loans to peasants totaling over 38 million rubles; RSKP, 1915, 267, 269, 277.
80. The bank's increasing insistence on operating as a bank rather than as an agency of agrarian reform apparently disappointed Stolypin, who expected the bank to become a major instrument of land consolidation; see Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 287.
81. See especially Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1561 (1 January 1911): 2;
82. Zaranie, no. 51 (22 December 1910): 1046-1048;
83. and Zorza, no. 43 (26 October 1911): 857.
84. These discriminatory policies, however, backfired as the resulting inflation priced the presumed Orthodox beneficiaries of state nationality policies out of the market for land in the Kingdom's eastern counties. In a period of three years, from mid-1910 to mid-1913, the bank spent over 2 million rubles to purchase estates in Lublin province, although only 7.5 percent of its loans went to Orthodox peasant borrowers in the region, evidence that Orthodox applicants for assistance in purchasing bank land were few. Over the same period, the bank also continued to make loans of 1,925,710 rubles (that is, roughly equal to the amount spent to purchase estates for resale to the Orthodox population) to Catholic peasants outside the Chełm region to assist in their own purchases of manorial land; Zaranie, no. 27 (3 July 1913): 703.
85. RSKP, 1914, 64.
86. The problem with the Peasant Land Bank was not its lending rates, which were reduced to a range of 3.4 to 4.3 percent in October 1906, depending on the length of the loan. Rather, it was the bank's tendency to purchase estate land well over its market value, which it then sought to resell to peasants at the inflated purchase price. Even in Poland, the bank's activities led to considerable speculation and inflation, especially after 1910 (see table 6), when it purchased and parcelized entailed estates that it then resold to borrowers at low interest rates. This led to a land rush of massive proportions, resulting in illegal speculative transactions and class action suits in the courts; see AGAD, Prokurator Warszawskiej Izby Sa̧dowej (PWIS-Prosecutor of the Warsaw District Court Collection), 7073, parcelization of entailed estates on the basis of the law of 21 October(3 November) 1906.
87. Zaranie, no. 52 (29 December 1910): 1074.
88. In Warsaw province, for example, bank loans to individuals accounted for over 75 percent of the total in 1909; AGAD KGGW 6514, governor's report on the state of Warsaw province in 1909.
89. Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 358-65. According to Yaney, the modification of government policies in response to its interaction with peasants marked the triumphant entry of peasant initiative into the reform in Great Russia proper.
90. See Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1542 (21 August 1910): 2;
91. Zorza, no. 35 (1 September 1910): 546-48;
92. and Zaranie, no. 33 (18 August 1910): 656.
93. Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 156n.
94. Zorza, no. 37 (15 September 1910): 585;
95. Zaranie, no. 41 (13 October 1910): 813;
96. and Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1585 (18 June 1911): 3.
97. Early assembly resolutions failed to specify what it was that peasants actually wished to consolidate, whether simply their fields or also common meadows and pastures. They also did not inform commissars whether residential and other buildings were to be moved to newly consolidated plots or remain in the old village settlements. Final confirmation of a village's decision to consolidate, following completion of the survey work as approved by a simple majority of the assembly, rested with the Land Section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1585 (18 June 1911): 3.
98. Peasants were particularly confused about the issue of government assistance with survey work and whether they could proceed with consolidation using private rather than government surveyors, prompting a public explanation from Duma envoy Władysław Grabski published in Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1575 (19 April 1911): 1.
99. The small szlachta was originally excluded from the June 1910 legislation. Although small szlachta landownership comprised only 10 percent of all smallholdings, it was quite significant in a number of counties of Łomża and Siedlce provinces. On average, small szlachta holdings were double the size of those of their peasant counterparts, but as a rule small szlachta properties were even more carved up and scattered in "checkerboards" than those of the peasantry; RSKP, 1913, 84, 87-88.
100. AGAD KGGW 6474, governor's report on the state of Piotrków province in 1912, and AGAD KGGW 6513, governor's report on the state of Lomza province in 1912.
101. The government's willingness to absorb the entire cost of survey work for consolidation did not apply to small szlachta villages until 1914; Zorza, no. 13 (26 March 1914): 202;
102. and Zaranie, no. 26 (25 June 1914): 657.
103. The governors' requests for increased appropriations were based on data provided by the Provincial Departments for Peasant Affairs through 1912, of which the following were accessible for research: AGAD KGGW 9115, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Kielce province; AGAD KGGW 9123, journal of the Siedlce Provincial Department for Peasant Affairs; AGAD KGGW 9125, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Lomza province; AGAD KGGW 9126, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Kalisz province; AGAD KGGW 9128, minutes of the Radom Provincial Department for Peasant Affairs; AGAD KGGW 9130, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Płock province; and AGAD KGGW 9133, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Piotrków province. See also Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1650 (24 November 1912): 3.
104. Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1633 (15 December 1912): 2.
105. AGAD KGGW 9125, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Łomża province, 30 March(12 April) 1913, and AGAD KGGW 9133, summary of the course of peasant affairs in Piotrków province (undated draft, most likely spring 1913).
106. Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1713 (30 November 1913): 3;
107. Zaranie, no. 48 (27 November 1913): 1238;
108. and Zorza, no. 13 (26 March 1914): 202.
109. According to Zaranie, the Kingdom's provincial governors had originally asked for 726,000 rubles in loans to peasants to rebuild on consolidated farms and a much larger increase in the overall number of surveyors employed in the Kingdom. Although the 1914 budget foresaw the employment of 152 surveyors (up from 93 in 1913), the failure of survey work to keep pace with peasant petitions for consolidation reportedly led the governors to request a tripling in the number of surveyors per province in early 1914, which would have brought the total for the Kingdom to between four and five hundred; Zaranie, no. 12 (19 March 1914): 301-2.
110. Zaranie, no. 6 (9 February 1911): 121.
111. Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1589 (16 July 1911): 3.
112. Gazeta Świa̧teczna, no. 1732 (12 April 1914): 1-2;
113. and Zorza, no. 27 (2 July 1914): 421.
114. AGAD KGGW 6473, governor's reports on the state of Płock province in 1908 and 1909, AGAD KGGW 6474, governor's report on the state of Piotrków province in 1912, AGAD KGGW 6483, governor's report on the state of Radom province in 1910, and AGAD KGGW 6514, governor's reports on the state of Warsaw province in 1908, 1909, and 1910.
115. Kieniewicz, Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry, 223.
116. RSKP, 1913, 84;
117. Zaranie, no. 34 (21 August 1913): 892-93.
118. Consequently, an even narrower stratum constituted the principal clientele of the Peasant Land Bank. In 1913 the average size of holdings belonging to farmers indebted to the bank had risen to 55 morgs; RSKP, 1915, 74.
119. Zorza, no. 16 (16 April 1914): 251.