A peasant resolution in Telekhany

The peasants of the village of Telekhany, Kosava county, have adopted the following resolution about their intolerable situation (the resolution was printed in the Polish periodical "Wyzwolenie Ludu"):

"Our voice is the voice of people perishing from the misery which has flooded our homesteads in a broad wave; let it not be 'the voice of one crying in the wilderness'.

"Let the whole Rzeczpospolita know that we are perishing from lack of land, work and bread; that we are perishing in barbarous darkness from lack of schools; that we are perishing from unheard-of state tax burdens, and most of all from the inhuman oppression by the local landlords and speculators, who have strained all their strength to suck the last juices out of us. They are taking from us even the trifle that we had in Russian times; we no longer have any rights to our servitudes, and they have taken from us even the arable land which we used from 1870 and for which we paid, and are ready to go on paying, a third of the yearly harvest.

"And there is no counting such acts of violence, and there is no rescue from them, for the courts and the police and the various authorities all stand on the side of our enemies.

"It is as if everything had conspired to ruin and destroy us utterly. And all who protest against these abuses are arrested and accused of Bolshevism, and afterwards are inhumanly tortured at the police stations, thrown into prisons, or ruined by heavy fines. And the charge of Bolshevism, with all its consequences, often falls on people merely because you did not bow in time, or low enough, to the lord of the manor, or to the commandant of the state police, or to a secret agent.

"To all this we, the inhabitants, grown fast to our mother earth, cry: Give us land and a school! Away with the landlords and their lackeys!

"This we desire as free and equal citizens of the Rzeczpospolita."

Representatives of the inhabitants of the village of Telekhany: