Most eastern Europeans are Slavs, an ethnic group thought to have originated in Asia and first settled along the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. From before the Christian era and through the Dark Ages, Slavic tribes migrated westward and settled in different parts of Europe. The western Slavs--Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles--dispersed into the east central plain of Europe.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most eastern Europeans were peasants, serfs. Serfs were a landlord's property. They worked their lord's fields for him. Sometimes they had to pay the landlord a tax, either in money or in crops. They were not free to leave their estates. But their lords could sell them to other landowners. They were locked into an appressive system.
The Russian assault on Polish culture was thorough. Georg Brandes, a Danish historian and literary critic, who visited Poland in 1885, detailed how Russia tried to stamp out the Polish language:
The Polish language is absolutely forbidden in the University. All lectures, no matter whether delivered by men of Russian or Polish birth, must be in Russian. Not even the history of Polish literature may be taught in the language of the country. Nay, even in the corridors of the University the students are forbidden to speak Polish with each other....So strict is the prohibition...that a boy twelve years of age was recently shut up for twenty-four hours in the dark because comint out of school, he said to a comrade in polish: "Let us go home together."
Polish and Ukranian serfs were worked hard, and were subject utterly to the will and whim of their masters. The condition of many was hardly distinguishable from slavery. A small number of peasants managed to flee their masters to the unsettled areas of the Ukraine. There they formed military communes. These peasant-soldiers were called cossacks, an adaptation of the Turkish word kazak, meaning "adventurer".
In 1648, the cossacks rebelled against Polish rule. Their rising grew into a national revolt of the Ukranian people. But in taking on Poland, they were challenging a mighty state, so the cossacks turned to Russia for military aid. Poland lost the conflict with Russia that followed, but so did the Ukraine. The cossacks had hoped to set up an independent state, but as a result of the Polish-cossack-Russian war, Russia annexed the eastern Ukraine.
In 1794, independent Poland rose up against Russia. Russia smashed the smaller Polish force, and in 1795, with Prussia and Austria, carved up what was left of Poland. Pland disappeared from the map of Europe.
(information is taken from the book Immigrants from Coming to America: Immigrants from Eastern Europe written by Shirley Blumenthal)
