Methods of collectivization of agriculture in the Lublin region in the years 1950–1951 in the exemplification of the Włodawa district

Abstract

In the Lublin region, just as in the entire People’s Republic of Poland, between 1948 and 1956 the campaign of forced collectivization of individual agriculture was carried out. Its main advocates and organizers: Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc and Roman Zambrowski. The main purpose of this undertaking was to incapacitate and nationalize the peasant class, prior to Poland’s joining the structure of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The campaign to make farmers form production cooperatives was conducted by means of terror and belligerence. Farmers, who refused to join production cooperatives were intimidated in different ways; they were put under arrest or to prison. Finally, the campaign of forced collectivization of the Polish countryside by the emissaries from Moscow failed in October 1956 after Władysław Gomułka came into power. The number of farmers’ cooperatives in Poland organized and maintained between 1949 and 1956 under, in fact, economic and physical compulsion, dropped from 9,975 in June 1956 to 1,534 in December in the
same year, and in the Lublin region from 440 to 140.