The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, Jakub S. Beneš, Princeton University Press, £35.

As the First World War got underway, the small Galician village of Dzików watched a merry Austro-Hungarian army march past on its way to the Eastern Front. Just a few weeks later it was fleeing in panic in the other direction, chased by a hail of Russian artillery. Soon the Austro-Hungarians were back again; then gone just as quickly. By late 1915, the increasingly desperate villagers had seen nine armies come and go. Crops were trampled, grain stores emptied, livestock taken, and roads destroyed.

It was a microcosm of the kind of rural misery that would soon become familiar across Austria-Hungary as the devastating war dragged on. Even far away from the front, the peasant masses that represented a majority of the country’s population were bearing much of the war’s onerous burden. Hundreds of thousands of men were whisked by the army, leaving farms with a shortage of labour made worse by the requisitioning of draft animals. This and the lack of artificial fertilisers due to the British blockade sent crop yields plummeting.

Farmers were then forced to sell their reduced grain yields to the government at fixed low prices, while starving city-dwellers accused them of hoarding food. Some even resorted to theft to correct this disequilibrium. Adding insult to injury, the authorities also confiscated metal goods to feed the military machine. In the summer of 1916, villagers were stunned to find that its rapacious hunger would even consume their church bells.

Against a backdrop of increasing rural discontent, the number of desertions from the Austro-Hungarian army soared in 1918. Men destined for the trenches disappeared into the hills, forests, and mountains, where rumour had it that a mysterious force was gaining strength: the Green Cadres.

By the final year of the war, talk of these armed bands of peasant deserters was spreading across the monarchy, but the authorities had no idea what to make of them. Investigations yielded few clues as to who exactly the Green Cadres were, how many men they had, and if any kind of organisation existed at all. It was, one report concluded, little more than shorthand for leading ‘a free life, poaching game, hanging around in the forests, etc’.

Condemned by the grand sweep of history to ‘historiographical oblivion’, the Green Cadres usually appear as an ephemeral, transitory phenomenon in a wider story of national revolutions that swept across Europe’s east as the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov empires crumbled and found themselves replaced by an array of new nation-states. But as Jakub Beneš argues in his new book The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, there was much more to them than this.

The Green Cadres were indeed small, usually disorganised bands of a few dozen men apiece. They appeared mostly in Slavic areas of Austria-Hungary where there were strong concentrations of smallholders, although deserters of many nationalities often joined. But their true significance is to be gleaned from the support they enjoyed from the peasant masses. Though apparently passive, they in fact resisted the wartime regime through their support for their outlaw compatriots.

It was a manifestation of a unique type of political consciousness that does not fit easily into any of the 20th-century’s main ideological trends. That of the proud peasant who sees his or her way of life not as something to be overcome by urbanisation and industrialisation, but rather to be preserved and supported. The requisitioning officials, the scorned ‘gentlemen’ with their frock coats, the oppressive estate owners, the merchants and middlemen; these were the enemies familiar to peasants across Europe’s east who only seemed to bring hardship and ruin to families and their farms.

As diffuse of a phenomenon as they may have been, the Green Cadres represented the wartime crystallisation of a peasant consciousness that became a major political factor across the successor states to Austria-Hungary. Taking advantage of vastly expanded franchises, peasant parties representing rural majorities in places like Romania, Poland, or Croatia (subsumed in a wider Yugoslavia) became wildly successful in the 1920s.

Beneš’ focus is on the impact of this ‘peasant war’ on Austria-Hungary and its successor states, but he also touches on similar developments further afield. In Ukraine, for example, the dissolution of the Russian empire and subsequent civil war opened up space for armed warlords (atamans) who ‘saw themselves as the defenders of the peasantry against the rapacity of towns’ to take control of vast swathes of countryside.

The most fascinating episode was undoubtedly in Bulgaria, which witnessed the only instance of a peasant leader taking control of a whole country. Under the charismatic leadership of Aleksandar Stamboliyski, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union was able to pursue a true agrarian revolution from 1920 to 1923. Land was redistributed, education reoriented to emphasise practical knowledge, the Bulgarian language reformed to make it easier to learn for the peasantry, and military service replaced with compulsory labour service. Stamboliyski’s regime shocked the Bulgarian elites, who struck back with a brutal coup in 1923.

Throughout the interwar years, a strong tension between the politicised peasant masses and the ‘bourgeois’ regimes they lived under revealed itself. The peasantry entertained vague ideas of social revolution to alleviate their pressing material hardships, but the nationalist politicians of the prewar world clung to a kind of legalistic parliamentarism that only seemed to delay if not totally hamper these peasant ambitions.

Matters were only made worse by the Great Depression, which paved the way for the triumph of radical right parties that seemed to offer a break with the past. An even more brutal world war shortly followed, during which peasant resistance seemed even more futile than in the first. Many nonetheless flocked to anti-Axis partisan units, some far more organised and politicised than the Green Cadres had ever been.

The Allied victory did not mean the triumph of peasant politics in Eastern Europe, however, but that of communism. An ideology based on social theories antithetical to the preservation of the rural world so cherished by peasant parties. Though peasant resistance managed to force the Yugoslav and Polish governments to abandon collectivisation in the 1950s, thus preserving a smallholding agricultural class, it was a pyrrhic victory. With the communists free to ‘pursue their urban-centred, industrialised visions of the future’ the dreams of former ‘peasant radicals and rural resistance fighters’ faded from view, Beneš concludes. In the two and a half decades following the end of the Second World War, as much as half of the agricultural labour force in Central and Eastern Europe moved into the cities.

Eastern Europe’s 20th century was defined by an epic march of peasants into the cities. And yet the world they left behind, and the organised resistance put up by millions to its slow obliteration, remains enigmatic. Beneš’ fascinating study on the course of peasant politics in Austria-Hungary and its successor states is a welcome attempt to address this yawning gap in the literature of 20th-century European history.