Scholarly interest in the Anatolian peasantry under the single-party regime of the interwar years conventionally focused on the state economic policies and agricultural structures. Due to the historians’ emphasis on organized/institutional politics, the absence of massive and organized peasant movements led even critical accounts to portray the peasants as passive observers of the social and political change. Turkish historiography has long assumed that the peasants under the single-party regime did not rebel against the rural exploitation, oppression, and increasing state intervention in their lives, except for a few well-known religious or Kurdish uprisings. Both official-nationalist accounts and critical literature have seen such a few cases as tribal or religious backlash in the face of the modernization process, an outcome of the Kurdish nationalism or the remnants of the chaotic war years. These accounts detected neither the widespread rural crimes that took the forms of theft of crops or livestock, smuggling, violence against government agents and oppressive landowners, small uprisings and banditry plaguing the entire Anatolia nor the local, social and economic dynamics that gave rise to them. The daily rural conflicts that pervaded the countryside during the 1920s and 1930s have remained unknown. Based on the newest archival documents, local newspapers, and theoretically on history from below approach, this paper unveils and examines rural crimes, violence and banditry during the interwar Turkey. First, it explores peasant’s violent attacks on and intimidation tactics towards their exploiters and oppressors such as tax collectors, district governors, gendarme officers, village headman, oppressive landowners and usurers. Second it describes and analyzes peasants’ “anti-property crimes” such as appropriation of public and private lands, fight for scarce resources such as fertile lands, water, forests and salt mines, and smuggling as a resistance to the state monopoly system. Third, and most importantly, it explores the banditry by closely examining from which social background, for what reasons, in which ways and against whom the peasants took up arms. This paper, showing how the peasants’ daily struggles escalated into banditry, argues that the banditry was a last survival method for oppressed peasants and was pervasive in all parts of Anatolia. It argues that the major force fueling the rural conflicts was the social injustice which was common to all parts of the country. It also points out how the peasants’ everyday politics affected the Turkish state-building modernization process and paved the way for the Kurdish resistance of the following decades.