Author claims that peasant character of Polish pre-war society (1918-1939) was preserved throughout the Second World War and turbulent immediate post-war years, and until the 1980s had been a major factor accounting for economic and social development of Polish society. Peasants, and more general rural dwellers, were the only class of Polish pre-war society which did not disintegrated in result of the World War Two, and became a recruitment base of a new working class and a new intelligentsia. They transferred their peasant-rooted value systems and their mentality shaped by a permanent poverty of Polish rural areas into their new environments, mostly urban and industrial, and in this way contributed to the
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