SOCIO-POLITICAL SYSTEM OF POLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Separated in 1569 from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and annexed into the Polish state, the Ukrainian Dnieper Valley (central) lands were united with the western Ukrainian regions which were incorporated into the Polish state in the middle of the four­teenth century.

The governmental system of Poland was that of an elective mo­narchy.

The limitation of royal prerogatives at a time of absolutism in other European countries was a special feature of the Polish state. This aspect of the Polish system bode ill for it, however, because to the east the power of the strong and strictly organized Muscovite state was increasing.

In Poland the large groups of shliakhta were proud of their political system, which assigned to the Diet and the Senate the most decisive roles and powers. The Senate was an assembly of the higher officials of the Polish state and the bishops of the Catholic Church; it functioned early as a standing royal council and, at the same time, acquired the position of the upper parliamentary chamber. Members of the Diet were elected at the district (county) assemblies of the shliakhta.

Because the members of the Diet were elected only by the shliakhta (if one disregards the presence of several Roman Catholic clergymen and the representatives of the capital city) the Diet was the representative organ of one social estate. In most European countries of this period the parliamentary organs, however, usually included the representatives of several social classes.

The influential position of the Diet was not used to consolidate its great power. The extreme privileges of its members indeed made this organ very weak. The right of veto of the individual members, i. e. the later requirement that the Diet’s decisions had to be una­nimous, led to frequent paralysis. The right of veto was a logical mani­festation of the ’’golden liberty” of the Shliakhta estate but at the same time it resulted in the weakening of its own representative body.

The shliakhta’s prerogative of almost exclusive participation in government was related to its exaggerated socio-economic privileges and rights. The most important was the bondage of the peasants. The edicts of 1493, 1501, 1506, and 1511 limited the peasant’s rights to leave a manorial estate and move to the estate of another landow­ner. In 1573 this right was completely abrogated. Unpaid labour of serfs became the principal form of socio-economic relations between the Shliakhta and the peasantry. In some regions this labour extended to six days in every week.

Somewhat better was the lot of townspeople as their life was regulated by the German-originated Magdeburg Law, granted to the larger Polish (and Ukrainian) towns. However, it did not pre­vent their continual decline. This law, which granted to the towns the right of self-government and put the townspeople into the po­sition of a hereditary social group, played a positive role in the development of many German cities. But when it was transferred to Poland and Ukraine where commerce and trade were developed to a far lesser extent, it was clearly too advanced for the weak in­stitutions of the Polish and Ukrainian cities and towns.

In this increasingly s∕ιliαkhtα-dominated state were included after the late fourteenth century the regions of the Western Ukraine which later became the Ruthenian, Podolian and Belzian (the city of Belz as its centre) provinces. Into this state were also incorpora­ted, in 1569, the central and eastern regions of Ukraine which later became the provinces of Bratslav, Volhynia, Kiev, and later, Chernihiv.

These last provinces were supposed to be ordinary provin­ces, without any special status, of the Polish state. Large groups of the upper class in these Ukrainian lands favoured this situation. They were influenced by the facts that in Poland the shliakhta’s privileges were broader and more developed than they were in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that the nobility’s land tenure in Poland had much earlier acquired a stable character, and that the shliakhta’s political position was more influential than it was in Lithuania. The Ukrainian shliakhta thus became an integral and powerful part of Polish society, and this led to its cultural ’’Polonization”, and in large part, its conversion to Roman Catholicism.

But there were still some traces of Ukrainian national feeling and consciousness. The very fact that Poland incorporated the Ukrai­nian regions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a united territorial complex — which was now separated from the other non-Lithuanian regions of the Grand Duchy (i. e. Belorussian lands) — indicated that they still were at least in a cultural sense a unified national territory.

Opposition to the denationalization process was most clearly shown in the struggle of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Ukraine against Catholicism. Some families of the Ukrainian shliakhta pre­served the faith of their ancestors and this helped them to withstand the ’’Polonization.” But the actual status of the Ukrainian central regions and the process of their national consolidation was most clearly expressed in the organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries.