The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in East Central Europe, 1917-1945

A history of the largely forgotten peasant revolution that swept central and eastern Europe after World War I--and how it changed the course of interwar politics and World War II

As the First World War ended, villages across central and eastern Europe rose in revolt. Led in many places by a shadowy movement of army deserters, peasants attacked those whom they blamed for wartime abuses and long years of exploitation--large estate owners, officials, and merchants, who were often Jewish. At the same time, peasants tried to realize their rural visions of a reborn society, establishing local self-government or attempting to influence the new states that were being built atop the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. In The Last Peasant War, Jakub Benes presents the first comprehensive history of this dramatic and largely forgotten revolution and traces its impact on interwar politics and the course of the Second World War.

Sweeping large portions of the countryside between the Alps and the Urals from 1917 to 1921, this peasant revolution had momentous aftereffects, especially among Slavic peoples in the former lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It enabled an unprecedented expansion of agrarian politics in the interwar period and provided a script for rural resistance that was later revived to resist Nazi occupation and to challenge Communist rule in east central Europe.

By shifting historical focus from well-studied cities to the often-neglected countryside, The Last Peasant War reveals how the movements and ambitions of peasant villagers profoundly shaped Europe’s most calamitous decades.

Jakub Benes is associate professor of central European history at University College London. He is the author of the prize-winning Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918.