As World War I drew to the end in 1918, Europe’s west was wrapping up what many considered to be one of the most difficult and certainly most brutal periods in European history. But in Europe’s east—the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires—the violence and the chaos only escalated during the last stages of the war. The civil war that erupted in these territories after the Bolshevik’s takeover in Russia in 1917 has received abundant attention from historians; so did the eventual Stalinization and Iosif Stalin’s brutal repressions of both the elites and the peasantry in what after 1922 became the Soviet Union. The peasantry in the post-Habsburg space never suffered similarly as their peers in the Soviet Union. These peasants in the post-Habsburg space received almost no attention from the scholars.

In his book The Last Peasant War, Jakub Beneš explains the importance of peasants, peasant movements, and peasant parties in the post-Habsburg space. The fact that these peasants were not decimated economically and not murdered does not mean they were not important. These peasants, Beneš explains, have shaped post-1918 politics and society through the end of WWII—precisely because they were not decimated as were their peers in the Soviet Union.

The first part of the book addresses peasant revolutionaries and the “ferment of peasant violence” in the post-Habsburg space between the last stages of the war and the early 1920s. Peasant riots started off in the Austro-Hungarian empire during the last stages of the war; they shattered the empire’s economy and led to the break-down of relationships between the peasantry and the government. These peasant movements were anti-government, had specific peasant grievances in mind, and might or might not have been irredentist. From Vienna’s perspective, they posed an existential threat to the Habsburg state. These movements did not disperse entirely after 1918. “The bloody anarchy” in the countryside went hand in hand with “urban revolutions” that eventually led to independence. For example, towns in eastern Galicia that became part of Poland after 1918 were subjected to “invasion from the country-side.” These peasant movements became a liability to the new states the way they had been to the now defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

Peasant violence subsided during the 1920s. But peasant politics picked up during that decade. The post-Habsburg space generated a great variety of peasant-based parties: agrarian politics, Beneš explains, had stronger footing in the post-Habsburg eastern space than anywhere else in Europe. The “green international” and grassroots peasant internationalism—formed largely of peasant youth groups—was another symbol of the important role that the peasants played in this part of the world. Both Adolf Hitler and Stalin became pre-occupied with the peasantry in their own way; and their vision of peasantry received some coverage in the literature. But outside of the Soviet Union and Germany, the peasants staged important resistance to local authoritarianism. The 1937 anti-fascist peasant strikes became the largest mass protest movement in Poland; similarly important were the anti-fascist peasant movements in interwar Romania. “The continuities in people and places between the peasant revolutions launched in 1918 and the striving of the 1930s are striking,” write Beneš (262). Peasant resistance moreover continued through WWII: in the post-Habsburg space where peasants had not been decimated they continued to play an active role, including in the resistance, through 1945.

With its broad geographical coverage, rich research drawing on a variety of sources in a multitude of languages, carefully crafted arguments and skillful writing, this is an impressive book that brings to focus a set of very important issues that have remained somewhat marginalized before. Some of the themes that Beneš addresses in his book have been discussed, oftentimes by local historians of specific areas or countries. But many of these accounts might not be accessible to the broader audience because of the languages involved, the publications and circulation of materials; they also oftentimes miss the larger picture: it is the historical and geographical contingency from the Austro-Hungarian empire into the 1930s that rend Beneš’s study so unique and important. The historical and geographical connections between the peasant deserters during the late empire and the agrarian parties in the post-empires and the parallels between these different parties across the post-Habsburg space and the peasant anti-fascist protests in the different states are remarkable here. Very few historians have the skills and the capacity to generate research of a similar scope. Few books are similarly ambitious and novel.