Yet what the Austrian Government had not expected was that the fifteen additional years of redemption payments did not satisfy the Polish nobility.
What these landowners wanted was to preserve serfdom. Even if redemption was inevitable, they had to follow neighboring Prussia's policy—thirty years of redemption payments, with one-third of the serfs' land directly assigned to the landowners.
Thus, throughout the Polish territories newly taken over by Austria, large numbers of nobles marched in protest, even threatening to refuse to pay taxes.
At the same time, the Polish serfs were equally enraged.
The Polish Great Sejm had promised them land free of charge, yet these damned Austrian invaders were making them pay fifteen years of redemption money!
The serfs did not know much about marches and the like, but whenever Polish resistance organizations came to recruit, they eagerly joined—if they drove out the invaders, the Great Sejm's decree could continue to be carried out.
Yes, this was the "great pit" Joseph had left for the invaders of Poland. Such radical serf reform policies would stir up tremendous turmoil wherever they were imposed.
Of course, the occupying forces could decisively declare the Polish Parliament's earlier decree emancipating the serfs null and void. That was exactly what the Russians had done.
And that drove the serfs into a frenzy of rage.
Human beings were like this: if they could only live in a mire for their entire lives, they would numb themselves and carry on. But once they were shown hope, that hope would immediately become everything to them.
Whoever dared snuff out that little spark of hope, they would fight them to the death.
Thus, although the Russian-occupied areas of eastern Poland were all populated by Eastern Orthodox believers, the riots there were far more severe than in the Prussian and