People

(from L. populum, the group of inhabitants of a place, region or country). 1) The entire population of a country. 2) Various forms of historical communities (tribe, nation, etc.). Since ancient times, efforts have been made to limit the concept of p., giving it an ethnocentrism or classist interpretation. For example, in the Greek polis, slaves, sailors, skilled craftsperson and immigrants from other Greek cities were excluded from the category of the p. The same occurred with the lower castes in India, and in ancient and medieval Japan even as late as the Second World War. During the Middle Ages in Europe serfs were excluded from the designation p. In the Russian Empire, a person without parents of Russian origin was labeled “inodorous” (a person of foreign descent) and, along with those who did not profess the official religion even when they practiced some form of the traditional Eastern Christian rite, were deprived of civil rights and not officially considered part of the Russian p. Since the English revolution, the aristocracy has been excluded from the concept of the p. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has been included, as well as the aristocracy, in European revolutionary literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Soviet literature, intellectuals and dissidents were not considered part of the p., even when they came from the worker and peasant classes.