Where Is Poland? | The Promised Land

Chapter 9

The Promised Land

The world was changing at an unprecedented pace, and so too was Poland. Perhaps the most vivid example of these changes was Łódź – an industrial city that rose out of nothing to quickly become one of the largest industrial centres, serving the whole Russian Empire. It was also the cradle of an emerging labourmovement.

A view of the city of Łódź, 1900. Source: Polona.pl

Promised land, or city of evil?

Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont wrote:

From many a remote plain, from uplands and from decaying villages, from the great metropolis and from the tiniest townships; from straw-thatched cottages and from lordly mansions [...], men were coming in an endless procession to the Promised Land.

Łódź was a phenomenon not only on the Polish scale, but also on the European scale. Within just a few decades, what had been a tiny village became an industrial giant. In the 1830s, when the decision to establish a factory settlement was made, merely 800 people lived there, while on the eve of World War I there were already over half a million inhabitants. Between 1850 and 1900, the city’s population surged by over 2000% (for comparison, the population of Manchester, a city with similar origins, increased by ‘merely’ 500% over the same half-century). The city became the largest textiles manufacturer in the Russian Empire. Fabrics made in Łódź found their way to China and Alaska. Łódź was a kind of microcosm bringing into sharp focus all the processes of modernisation then underway, both good and bad.

The desire to earn a better living knows no national boundaries, hence Łódź was built up through the joint efforts of Poles, Jews, Germans, and Russians. Incoming new inhabitants of the city included peasants recently liberated from serfdom, and engineers from Western Europe. The term Lodzermensch – a person from Łódź – was coined to try to capture this mosaic. It was an imprecise notion, for some meaning a person able to take matters into his own hands and cope well with the challenges of the modern world, while for others it designated a ruthless capitalist or a suspicious cosmopolitan, who abandoned his own tradition to worship the golden calf.

The perception of the city itself was similarly ambiguous – some were pleased at the great leap forward that was being made, others called it a ‘city of evil’, a den of misery and corruption. Both were right in their own way. Reymont on the one hand called it the ‘promised land’, but in the very same book likened it to a monstrous ‘octopus of a town’, a polyp which ‘sucked everything up into itself, [...] giving to some a heap of useless millions, and to the many, arduous work and starvation wages’ .

You've got to fight for your rights!

A Polish labour movement first started to emerge in the most industrialised partition: in the Prussian-held lands (especially among miners in Upper Silesia). It was here that the first labour unions were formed and where more and more strikes were staged -- all of it despite the fact the labour movement was opposed by the authorities, especially under the rule of Otto von Bismarck. At the turn of the twentieth century, Prussia introduced some of the social demands into its legal system, including a social security mechanism and the right to strike and organise. There were no such regulations in the Russian-held Kingdom of Poland, which was just entering a period of rapid industrialisation, hence the industrial centres in these lands soon witnessed mass labour demonstrations.

Workers made up 80% of the inhabitants of Łódź. This is how the life of the workers was described by one of them, Aleksander Rżewski, who became the first mayor of Łódź after Poland regained its independence:

I worked in one of the spinning mills in Łódź starting from when I was 12 and I have first-hand experience of the capitalist system’s problems: low salaries, a 12-hour work day, being overworked, poverty at home, cramped quarters where eight people had to fit; in a word – the life of an ordinary proletarian from Łódź, generating millions for the cotton moguls.

The legislation of Congress Poland made strikes illegal, so they ended in police and military interventions and were often bloodily suppressed. Despite that, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, there were 50 strikes per year on average. The largest was the Łódź mutiny of 1892, in which 60,000 workers took part – almost half of the city’s population. The governor-general in Warsaw wrote in an instruction to his subordinates: ‘Do not spare any bullets’. But the workers’ demonstration was not in vain – the strike sowed panic among the factory owners and the working conditions improved slightly, although they were still far from ideal (for example, the working day was shortened from 12 to 10 hours).

The Łódź Rebellion of 1892 led to the establishment of the Polish Socialist Party. Other political groups were also set up around the same time: both left-wing parties such as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and the Jewish party Bund, as well as right-wing parties like the National Democrats (ND) and the National Workers' Union. Each of them promoted its own political agenda among the workers and presented its own solution to their problems.

In those days, the Polish left wing was divided into two main strands. The first, represented by the Polish Socialist Party, combined socialist slogans with the fight for Polish independence. The second, internationalist strand, in turn, objected to the very idea of nation states. The ND and the associated National Workers' Union promoted national solidarity, instead of a class struggle.