The article discusses changes in the social structure of rural population in the years 1991–2013. In that period the share of farmers decreased from 46% to 27%, the share of workers increasing from 33% to 45% and the share of middle class – from 15% to 27%. These changes are the result of three overlapping processes: deagrarianisation / depeasantization (the specific, two-phase “end” of the peasants), proletarianization (saturation of rural community by the representatives of social groups classified as blue-collar workers) and gentrification (i.e. the growth of middle class, also called bourgeois). In Poland, those processes took a different course than in the West: they are not only shifted in time, but they also overlap. The article is based on the data from 1991, 2003 and 2013.