The Last Peasant War: how the countryside shaped Central and Eastern Europe
Peasants have long been sidelined in history books. Jakub Beneš, Associate Professor at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, seeks to restore them to the historical narrative, focusing on the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his new book, he reveals the overlooked peasant movements and revolutions that shaped the politics of the first half of the 20th century. In an interview with Radio Prague International, he explains why this underrepresented perspective is so compelling and draws possible parallels with the present.
Until 1918, the Czech lands formed part of the Habsburg Monarchy, ruled from Vienna. They entered the First World War as part of Austro-Hungary, became independent Czechoslovakia after the war, and were occupied by Nazi Germany beginning in 1938. Amid these upheavals, one social group has remained relatively overlooked: peasants.
Beneš, whose family is Czech but who grew up in California, focuses on a “largely forgotten peasant revolution” that swept Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War and shaped interwar politics and even developments during the Second World War. As he puts it:
“I’m looking at a social group or class that has been neglected for the entirety of the modern era, mostly because they didn’t leave many records behind. And yet I saw, when I was looking at the period of the First World War in East-Central Europe, that they were incredibly important and that there was a lot of unrest and interesting political activities in rural areas that hadn’t been studied.“
‘The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe,’ published in 2025 by Princeton University Press, brings together Beneš’s findings and is a truly compelling read.
The First World War and the rise of rural resistance
During the First World War, the Vienna-based imperial state expanded rapidly to meet the demands of total war, imposing new restrictions on agriculture and rural life. These measures, Beneš argues, alienated peasants, who had traditionally been loyal to the empire. By the middle of the War, resentment grew and resistance to imperial authority became more widespread. This increasingly took violent forms, including riots, disturbances and mass desertion from the Austro-Hungarian army. Many conscripted peasant soldiers simply remained in their home villages after periods of leave, often taking their weapons with them.
“This is one of the most interesting parts of the story that I’m telling in this book. This mysterious movement of army deserters who call themselves Green Guards or Green Cadres. And they pop up all over the monarchy, especially in the Slavic regions, including the Czech lands, particularly in southern and south-east Moravia.”
Yet, as Beneš stresses, the often violent and chaotic peasant movements at the end of the war were not driven solely by revenge against those who had suppressed them. They also reflected attempts to “implement their vision of what society should look like:”
“This results in the creation in a lot of places of small-scale peasant republics, sometimes no more than a village, but sometimes a whole region. And sometimes they last for much longer than one would expect.”
The inter-war years and the rise of agrarian parties
This impulse for peasants to influence the post-war reconstruction of Europe continued into the interwar period most notably in the form of so-called agrarian parties. Across Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, such parties became far more influential than ever before or ever again since. In newly formed Czechoslovakia, for instance, the Agrarian Party was a central pillar of the political system and a key participant in almost every governing coalition, Beneš stresses.
The Czech agrarians also played an international role, overseeing a federation of agrarian parties known as the “Green International”, based in Prague. This network brought together agrarian parties ranging from the radical left to more right wing and was “good at bringing these various agrarian groups to the same table and formulating policy and supporting each other.”
By the 1930s, however, authoritarianism spread across much of the region of former Austro-Hungary, weakening agrarian parties and often subjecting them to persecution. As parliamentary systems collapsed – though not in Czechoslovakia – some peasants drifted towards fascism and communism, particularly in Hungary and Romania. These shifts reflected a deeper crisis in peasant life, as economic hardship intensified during the Great Depression.
The Second World War and continued peasant resistance
During the Second World War, as occupation deepened – especially in the Czech lands, Poland and Yugoslavia – conditions became worse, and peasants increasingly supported active or passive resistance. Here, Beneš emphasises continuity between the two wars:
“The remarkable thing is that peasants, whose visons were often very local, could take part in something so large and ambitious during the First World War, and then, in some cases, the same individuals were involved in resistance movements during the Second World War. I’ve found some fascinating personal stories of people who fought in unofficial resistance groups in both wars.”
The book draws on individual stories from both central and local archives across Central and Eastern Europe.
The Last Peasant War and echoes into today
The title, The Last Peasant War, is no accident. Beneš argues that after the Second World War, rapid urbanisation – and, in some cases, the collectivisation of agriculture, such as in Czechoslovakia after the Communist Party came to power – effectively destroyed the traditional peasant world. By around 1960, he contends, the countryside as it had existed in the first half of the twentieth century had largely disappeared in Czechoslovakia.
With few peasants left, major uprisings and revolutions were no longer on the cards. There were, however, a few acts of resistance to collectivisation, which ultimately led to nothing – except in Yugoslavia, where, as Beneš highlights, peasant resistance did succeed in prompting the abandonment of collectivisation.
Beneš also notes striking parallels between the historical peasant dynamics described in the book and contemporary society, which he discusses briefly in the epilogue. When asked about them, he said:
“I think the common denominator here is a sort of anti-urban populism that the peasant parties of the first half of the 20th century were quite big on, and which was shared by both more radical left-wing and more conservative ones. They all believed that life in the countryside was somehow superior to life in the city. Some of them were quite aggressive about it."
“And so, I think that animus toward the cities is now resurgent in politics across Europe, arguably the West, because you see it as a common theme among a lot of the right-wing populist parties of today. You hear that the city is not authentically national, that it's distorting our politics, and that it's leading to decisions that could result in the destruction of our societies, and so on and so forth.”
For the full interview with more in-depth analysis and examples listen to the audio.
Jakub Beneš is Associate Professor of Central European History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017), examined the culture of workers’ movements and received multiple awards. The Last Peasant War is his second book. Born in California to Czech parents, Beneš has lived and worked in the UK since 2012.
