April 22, 2024 • 50 mins
In part five (can you believe it?), Margaret continues to talk with Mia Wong about at least four Russian revolutions and general strikes, workers councils, and rebellions that tried to keep them on course.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff that you didn't start at part five. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is my
guest Mia Wong.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hello, Amya, how are you well? I can't hear out
of one ear, so things going great. We're about to
see whether you could podcast like this. My guess is yes. However,
if I say anything wrong, that's immediately. My excuse is
that I can't hear and this has destroyed my brain.
So we're doing the caveats beforehand.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, Well, fortunately we've taken our producer, Sophie's audio and
routed it through one part of the stereo channel and
my voice to the other part of the stereo channel.
Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, Hi, My dog just
sneeze seven times? Are you okay? Everyone is having a day?
Is what we have learned before recording.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You see seven times here, Andrew.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
That's so many sneezing.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh most traumatic. I saw her. She went, why am
I doing this so many times? And I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Rentrow has started doing this thing that I'm very excited about.
Where he when I record, he used to hang out
on the futon behind me, but now he hangs out
at my feet. Oh, hi Rentrow, if you can hear me,
you're the best boy. And our audio engineer is Daniel
Hi Danel. Yeah. Our theme musical was written forced by
un woman. We are in deep. This is part five,
(01:28):
our first ever part five on cool people did cool stuff,
which is funny because we will get to a bunch
of cool people did a bunch of really cool stuff
finally this week. But first, either of you ever heard
of a song called roast Chicken?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Okay, So my favorite Soviet era anarchists song, because I
have one of those, is this song called roast Chicken.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit about
it beforehand, and then Sovie's gonna hit play on it
in a little bit. There's a song called roast Chicken.
I first learned about it from a Bulgarian friend of
mine who grew up in Communist Bulgaria, and I was
(02:06):
learning to play accordion, and she was like, oh, you
have to learn how to play this song roast Chicken.
And I actually theoretically know how to play the song
on accordion, but it's been a very long time since
I made playing accordion, so I wouldn't hold it past
me right now, and I was like, hm, this song
seems familiar. It sounds like part of Go Go Bordello's
song Start Wearing Purple, and it is because it's part
(02:28):
of it. There is this song that comes from the
war communism era of the USSR. It's a children's song,
but it's the anarchist children's song. And all throughout the
Soviet era, whenever Soviets made movies about the Civil War
and they wanted to like talk trash about anarchists, the
anarchists would come in as like sailors on a boat
(02:51):
or on an armored train or whatever in the armored
train and be called anarchy or whatever, and they'd be
singing roast Chicken. And this song is amazing because this
the song that is meant to make fun of war communism,
but it became the song to make fun of the
anarchists were making fun of war communism. And I'll tell
you the lyrics after we listen to a little bit,
which we're gonna do now.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
See Polo now.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Shooting me push old panes.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
You, oh my Molly Iris.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So much, must.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
See my shu yan you say yes, Si, I aquitely
give me son.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Okay, So this is my favorite Soviet era anarchist song.
This song is about exactly what you think it would
be about. The lyrics are I'm gonna paraphrase here. So
there's like this roast chicken, this steam chicken, and he's
walking down the street and the cops are like, hey,
you can't be walking down the street. Show me your passport.
(04:20):
Let's see some papers. And the Chicken's like, I don't
have any papers. I'm a fucking chicken. I'm a roast chicken.
Why would I have papers? And so they take the
chicken to jail. You know, that's the song Oh my god.
There's also versions where like the chicken is so scared
it poops its pants. The song rules and so that
(04:42):
particular version was Arcadie Severni, who is a Soviet era
a folk musician from primarily the sixties who got famous
Plaine prison songs, and that was like the way that
he played all of the band's Soviet songs, like he
has these he sings songs about like I'm an anarchist
time and anarchist or whatever, and he gets away with
(05:03):
it because he's like, oh, I'm just playing the prison songs.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So he's like outlaw folk. This is the outlaw folk
or outlaw country the rules of the Soviet Union, And
I don't know, I really like it.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
It's so fun.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, if you ever want to see all, not all,
of most of the clips of this song, in all
the different Soviet things, there's one page that anthologizes them all.
And the way I always find it when I can't
remember as I type into Google roast Chicken Anarchists song,
because this song you've probably never run across this particular problem.
When you leave the Western language set, I forget the
(05:41):
name of the Roman alphabet. It becomes harder to find
things with Google. Yeah, Like, if you like just search
roast chicken song, you're not getting anything useful, But if
you search it in cyrillic, you get what you're looking for. Anyway,
that's my unrelated well what's related, But that's my aside
that I got really excited about. I realized I could
(06:02):
shoehorn into here. I was never good enough to sing it,
but I would play this song while busking a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
That's so cool.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So where we left off, we talked a lot about
the Civil War, last time, and the civil war is
now over. The Whites are defeated, the Whites being the
sort of bizarrest forces or the not the revolution forces.
I think by the end a lot of even more
like moderate socialists started joining the White Army because they
(06:31):
were like the Bolsheviks, they're terrible, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, you get this a lot where it's like you
have these really weird constellations of groups because whose sole
uniting factor is the Bolsheviks. You're trying to kill us all.
And like that's the thing you see like repeated down
through history. You got all these really weird political coalitions
that are like, yeah, the Marxists are killing us all.
So you know, guess we're all in this boat now.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah. Absolutely. And so the Black Army did the defeating
of the Army in Ukraine, but that Black Army has
now also been defeated, as have millions of people trying
to live the promise of the revolution down there. They've
been defeated, not necessarily all killed. That'll come a little later.
We're not going to talk about the famines and stuff
too much. All the while, the Bolsheviks are promising like, hey,
(07:18):
don't worry this war communism thing that's only for a while.
We're at war, and to some degree people believed them,
and that's kind of what they held onto this whole time.
People were like, well, we just got aside with the
Red Army and the grain, you know, them coming by
and stealing all the grain and stuff for so long.
We got to make sacrifices to defend the revolution. Everyone
knows that. And by sacrifices, when we're talking about the
(07:40):
Russian Civil War, we're somewhere in the six million to
twelve million people range of sacrifice, which makes it one
hell of a civil war.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, it's extraordinarily bloody.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, compared to the February Revolution of thirteen hundred people
who don't The anti Bolshevik left continues to grow as
the Bolsheviks keeps showing themselves for what they really are.
Of course, the Bolshevik party itself was also growing because
they were the only game in town and it kept,
you know, killing everyone who didn't join it. Like I've
(08:14):
used several sources for example, throughout that I think I've
talked about where it was people who weren't Bolsheviks and
then suddenly they were Bolsheviks because it was kind of
join or die, and plenty of revolutionaries chose join when
offered join or die, and plenty of revolutionaries chose die
when given that same choice. All throughout the revolution in
the Civil War, revolutionaries are pouring into the country from
(08:36):
exile or being deported back to Russia, since one of
Russia's primary exports for decades at this point had been
hardened revolutionaries of every stripe. And it's honestly hard to
imagine just how great this betrayal must have felt, how
hopeful everyone was when they were turned home only to
find out what was happening. And I'm going to give
a couple examples of that, because they're kind of fun stories,
(09:00):
even if they don't end super great. People who listen
to my podcast are familiar with this arc. Take as
an example, the case of the staff of the newspaper
Golos Truda Russian for the Voice of Labor, because again,
anarchists have only two ideas of how to name newspapers.
(09:20):
It's either labor paper or it's like the blast, you know,
sometimes it's black and then object, Oh that's true, so
you black flag, black wave, black tide. Yeah, which doesn't
work as well as in the American context, but that
never stops people.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
So the Voice of Labor was started at nineteen eleven
in New York City by the Union of Russian Workers
in the United States and Canada. Speaking of how we
choose to name things historically, the Union of Russian Workers
of the United States and Canada, which was an anarchist organization. Yeah,
incredible stuff, guys, No notes, and this is an anarcho
(10:03):
synicalist labor organization started by political exiles who had fled
the nineteen oh five revolution. This union had helped new
exiles integrate into New York. They had set up English
classes for refugees, they'd put out books in Russian and generally,
we're just being cool. They had about ten thousand members
across the US and Canada, and of course a monthly newspaper.
(10:24):
How can you do anything without a newspaper. I swear
to God. The accidental subtext this podcast is just Margaret
talks about tuberculosis and old radical newspapers in nineteen seventeen,
give this general amnesty in Russia. So everyone involved in
the newspapers like, holy shit, here we go. It's the
fucking revolution. Let's get home and transform the entire fucking world.
(10:46):
The largest country in the world is having a revolution
and the anarchists are at the forefront among in a pluralistic,
great cool way. They're very excited. One of them goes
first and is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, come on over,
you know. And their journey itself was kind of epic
and beautiful, like nothing bad happened, but they did all
(11:07):
the anarchy stuff along the cultural stuff along the way.
They boarded a boat from Vancouver to Japan and then
went over to Siberia and then took a train to
Saint Petersburg.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, in many such cases, yeah, now, yeah, the go
literally all the way around the world in order to
do this. And because they're anarchists, they can't go anywhere
without doing cultural events and printing a newspaper. So the
whole time they're on this ship out to Japan, they
organized lectures and put on plays for all the passengers
on board.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And they put out a newspaper while they were on
the boat. Oh my god, it was called the Float.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Rules. I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Did they like bring a printing press like they must?
I don't know enough about it. I get all of
the different time periods around this era, because like what
people would print with kept changing so quickly around this
era that I can't remember exactly what they would have
been using. But yeah, they must have brought a little
hand press or something like that.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Once they made it to Saint Petersburg, they started printing
The Voice of Labor again in Saint Petersburg, and they
tried and of course famously failed, to turn the revolutionary
tide away from authoritarianimism and Bolshevism. This is in between
the February and October revolutions. The most famous member of
this group was this Jewish anarchist guy named Volin. And
(12:34):
when I say famous, I mean in the context of
you and I have heard of Volin and yeah, I've
read his book The Unknown Revolution. Yeah yeah, yeah, famous
gifts context here, Yeah, well known in certain anarchist circles, think, yeah, yeah.
(12:56):
He had fled Russia in nineteen oh five. He was
a Jewish anarchist who fled Russia nineteen oh five and
became an anarchist while in exile. Actually I think he
started off I think in the SRS. And he is
most famous again famous guests quotes as the man that
is behind what is called synthesis anarchism, which is basically
the like, hey, all different kinds of anarchism are valid,
(13:17):
we should figure out how to create a unity and
diversity set of anarchist organizations in which syndicalist communists and
individualists and insurrectionary anarchists can all just coordinate and offer
one another solidarity and mutual daid. This of course made
everyone that oh yeah, no, totally for one hundred years,
but it's not the worst idea. My friend Brian is
(13:39):
always like, one day, Margaret, you're going to unite all
of the anarchist factions because they're all going to unite
in their anger against you for trying to unite them
all and stop all the infighting.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
I think synthesis anarchism is great. It builds on the
anarchists without adjectives that Malatests and all these other people
were putting forward. And anyway, I like his ideas. I
haven't read The Unknown Revolution yet, to be clear. It's
on my shelf and I'm excited about.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
It, but it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Slightly weird.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, that makes sense to me. It turns out there's
an awful lot of books you can read about the
Russian Revolution. Yeah, someone should do a really long podcast
series about the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Like yeah, wrong, cool, micy right sort revolutions. I was
talking to him well, like on Twitter about that show,
and I was like, Okay, you're gonna do the because
so there's like a bunch of other revolutions that happened
around that time, right, there's one in Italy, there's Germany.
There's something we talked about in the show. Its Argentina.
So I was like, okay, are you going to cover
the other ones? And he was like, We're going to
(14:45):
cover a lot of it, and then no, there was
simply too much Russian Revolution to get to any of
the other ones except Germany because Jermany is the one
that like most directly matters for Russia.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Yeah, it's interesting to me because part of learning about
the Russian Revolution, and part of the reason I think
it's important enough to do this, you know, six part
series or whatever about it is how much it influences
everything else we've talked about on this show. You know,
everything is in the context of this until about World
War two, and then everything's in the context of World
(15:16):
War Two. It's still probably the most influential revolution since
like either the French or Haitian realm, there's a lot
of by a lot of I mean, historians who are
talking about this revolution have all said that this is
the most influential event of the twentieth century and like
single event, And I mean, is that a World War two?
(15:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, well, and you know, but the thing with World
War two is you can argue that like World War
two is a direct product of this.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right totally, which yeah, and would have been real different
if our heroes of today had pulled some stuff off.
But yeah, so our guy Volin, he spends a lot,
a lot of time in Ukraine influencing things there, setting
up a synthesis organization called Nabot that's spread throughout Ukraine,
(16:07):
and later he's going to become the chairman of the
Military Revolutionary Council, the machnivist Ukrainian anarchist thing that we
talked about last time. And I think the reason he
ended up the Military Revolutionary Council chairman is because he
was like, he was not a pacifist, but he spent
his whole time doing that trying to curb the excessive
(16:28):
violence of the revolutionaries because there is no army that
is not committing war crimes, and that absolutely included the
anarchist army. You know, there is no ideology so pure
that it will prevent people from abusing power in different circumstances. However,
you can put a lot of work in to curb
(16:50):
that and keep that from happening. And it sounds like
that's why Volin was involved in sense idea. Yeah. Volin
was arrested on his sick bed by the Cheka and
only released basically because the Bolsheviks needed a cozy up
to the anarchists, you know, because we talked about last time.
The Bolsheviks were like, oh, we're resting all the anarchists,
and then all of a sudden they're fighting alongside the anarchists.
(17:10):
So they keep doing this back and forth, depending on
how much they need the anarchists.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
The Bolsheviks actually tried to recruit him. They offered to
make him a commissar in Bolshevik Ukraine, and he was like, no,
that's not going to fucking happen. Yeah, So the Bolsheviks
arrested him again a little bit later. Once again, political
pressure got him released and deported. In nineteen twenty two,
and the anarchists take care of their own even though
(17:35):
a lot of syndicalists didn't like his theories because his
theories were Syndicalism is not the only correct belief structure.
The most prominent German anarchis syndicalist who's come up a
bunch on this show before Rudolph Rocker put him up
in his own house, like gave him the attic room
and took care of him.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Oh that's really sweet.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
I actually didn't know.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
That, I know. And then there's like this also this
whole thing where like Volin helped escape Ukraine, and then
they like got into this huge fight because yeah, there's
no reason that you, dear listener should care about this,
but Makno wanted platformism, which was all anarchists have unity
of theory, where a synthesis anarchism is unity and diversity,
(18:16):
and so they were like arguing about that and then
they Uh, Makno's wife was like, could you just shut
the fuck up and be friends again? And they became
friends again because listen to women.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And it's funny too because I'm pretty sure unknown revolutions
written like in the part where they're feuding, so there's
just like a bunch of random like mackno slander in it.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I believe it. I believe it. There's so much from
this time period of people being like, I don't know
where the Magno is even really anarchists, and I'm like,
I'm not interested in gate keeping that.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
They absolutely feud like anarchists.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So yeah, totally. Uh. Anyway, Volin from exile, he writes history.
He gets into arguments about anarchist theory. He describes Bolshevism
as red fascism, and if anyone would know that firsthand,
it's him. He lived in near poverty in France. He
(19:14):
had to go in hiding once more in nineteen forty
because it was not a good time to be Jewish
in Nazi occupied countries, and friends tried to get him
to go to Mexico and they were like, we'll get
you out, We'll get you to Mexico, and he left Paris,
but he was like, I am fucking staying in France.
We are going to kick out the fucking Nazis and
we're going to have a goddamn anarchist revolution, or I'm
(19:36):
going to cut damn by trine. And he died of
tuberculosis in Paris in nineteen forty five, cool guy Volin
back to his newspaper and the early days of the revolution. Actually,
you know, one of the things that I ran across
sometimes is some of these old papers actually had advertisements
(19:56):
in them. I don't know whether the Voice of Labor
had advertisements or not, but I'm aware that a lot
of radical newspapers throughout time have had advertisements, and keeping
in that tradition, we've decided to one time only allow
sponsors to go and give us money in exchange for
space for them to talk about things for a little while.
(20:19):
So that's what we're going to do, just in the
spirit of historical accuracy, and we're back in the early
days of the revolution. The Voice of Labor accurately saw
(20:40):
the writing on the wall. Immediately after the October Revolution.
They wrote, once their power is consolidated and legalized, the
Bolsheviks will begin to rearrange the life of the country
and of the people by governmental and dictorial methods imposed
by this center. Your soviets and your other local organizations
will become, little by little, simply executive organs of the
(21:01):
will of the central government, in place of healthy, constructive
work by the laboring masses in place of free unification.
From the bottom, we will see the installation of an
authoritarian and status apparatus, which will act from above and
set about wiping out everything that stands in its way
with an iron hand.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, and not even like it wasn't even just like, oh,
they're going to totally be authoritarian. It was like, this
is exactly the way they will do it and how
it will play out. A lot of people are like, oh, early,
people just didn't know how it was going to go.
Some people knew.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
By August nineteen eighteen, the Bolsheviks suppressed the Voice of Labor,
So these editors from New York they put out a
different paper, the Free Voice of Labor, and then they
got arrested again in nineteen twenty one. We'll talk more
about that later, about how the anarchist are crack down
on real hard after.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I'm so excited to do my version of this where
we have to put out free it could happen here,
and then freer it could happen here.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
It might happen here.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Yeah, like the final one is the freest.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
It already happened yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Might happen here. We might pull we might pull out
of a tailspin. So famously, it's not like the USSR
was the only place it was hard to be a
leftist at this time. Well, okay, it's not the USSR.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Russia whatever. Famously, the US was
not exactly tolerant of actual leftists either.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The first Red Scare hit the anarchists particularly hard, especially,
and actually I didn't realize this. The main group as
far as I can tell by numbers that hit was
the Union of Russian Workers, this anarcho syndicalist union that
the newspaper folks have been working with, which kept going
after its newspaper edit. It turns out you can actually
have a movement without a newspaper, I know, shocking.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
But every trotsky I simultaneously running in circles and streaming.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I know. On March twelfth, nineteen nineteen, its headquarters was
raided in New York and one hundred and sixty two
people were arrested. Jeez, and they only managed to get
criminal anarchy charges against two of them. New York still
has criminal anarchy.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
On the books, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
And it's not criminal being an anarchist. It's like criminal
disorderly conduct or whatever. But it's every anarchist I know
he's gotten that charge is a little bit like.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
The news was full of talk about how these Russian
agents were just waiting to throw the US, which is
I mean, well, I guess that's true, Like you know.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by
Russian agent. It's like, right, agent, who is Russian?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Totally? They're not agents of the Bolsheviks. They are Russian
revolutionaries who would also be imprisoned in Russia because that's
what happened to them in Russia. And so this led
to the justification of the Palmer raids in nineteen nineteen,
and this time the Union of Russian Workers was raided again,
and this time is really really violently. People were beaten
with clubs and blackjacks. Just people on the street are like,
(24:22):
why are all these bloody people pouring out of this building?
And on December twenty one, nineteen nineteen, two hundred and
forty nine anarchists were deported to Russia, including friends of
the pod Emma Goldman, the anarchist advocate of birth control
has come up time and time again and her sometimes lover,
Alexander Berkman, who had spent fourteen years in prison for
(24:42):
trying and failing to kill an industrialist during a strike. Unfortunately,
at first, these two are excited Russia was having a revolution.
They knew they were anarchists involved, and that that revolution
that was happening was the hope of the entire leftist world.
Berkman said that that he arrived in Russia was even
better than the day he walked free after fourteen years
(25:04):
in prison. They spent nineteen twenty traveling around the country
trying to put together a history of the revolution for
a museum. So they like hit the ground running and
they're like, oh, we gotta you know, the revolution's here.
We got to make sure to document it, you know,
because we love it. We love the revolution. And what
they found as they traveled around the country to see
(25:24):
the effects of the revolution was not the liberation of
the working class, but instead it's a miseration. Lenin met
with them personally and was like, Hey, don't worry. As
soon as the war is done, we'll go back to
free speech. I promise. It's me.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
It's Lenin narrator. It's never right yet.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Either didn't mean it, or he meant it and then
just didn't bother to do it. I don't know. War
communism is tearing everyone up. Lenin wrote about it. The
essence of war communism was that we actually took from
the peasant all of his surpluses, and sometimes not only
the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasants needed
for food. So they're running around taking grain, horses, everything
(26:07):
they can get, and like, you know, they're not just taking,
they're also taking like the stuff people are supposed to
plant next time and things like that.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
It is also deeply funny the main Bolshevik anti anarchist
lines that their bandits. It's like, okay, so one of
these two groups of people is running around the countryside
stealing stuff a gunpoint, and the other one is the anarchists.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I know, really, I know, because the anarchists are running
around stealing stuff a gunpoint from the rich. And the
reason that the anarchists are getting called bandits is because, yeah,
the Bolsheviks are mad at the anarchists for expropriating too
much and too early, because the Bolsheviks are trying not
to totally piss off the rich. But I think they're
expropriating too at this point. By now, I'm not actually
sure exactly when they start robin hood in also, but anyway,
(26:52):
so the peasants get really good at hiding grain. One
estimate says that a third of the food was successfully
hidden from the bulshit bandits. Yeah, and peasants also just
like they stopped growing more food than was personally needed
because they knew whatever they grew would gets stolen by
band Like, why work harder if there's nothing in it
(27:13):
for you, It's just all going to get stolen. Autocracy
meant that Russia only grew less than half of what
it grew before the war. And since one of the
primary justifications people have of war communism is oh, it
was necessary to get as much food as possible to
run this war. We needed strong authoritarian measures in order
(27:33):
to do it, here's how it backfired. Besides just morally
it backfired and that people suddenly didn't have any reason
to grow food.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, although it's funny because this discreens into just a
sort of self justifying loop, because then the argument is like, oh, well,
we need more authoritarianism to crack down and the peasants,
because the peasants are like the culocks are food hoarding.
It's like, well, yet they're food hoarding because they're going
to starve if because you keep taking all of their food,
(28:02):
so you know it's not actually working.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah. So Goldman later would write a book called My
Disillusionment in Russia, and Berkman wrote the Bolshevik Myth. Basically,
by the end of nineteen twenty there's no more justification
available anymore for the Bolsheviks to people. You can only
promise people that war communism is temporary for so long.
And actually, one of the things that I don't think
I talked about too much last time. The Civil War
(28:27):
came in waves and the Green Army, the peasants who
were revolting. A lot of that came after the White
Armies were destroyed, and you had a lot of soldiers
going back home and seeing what was happening, and you
also just had like, well, your justification is done, you know,
And things eventually came to a head in March nineteen
twenty one or February, depending on how you count it. Yeah,
(28:51):
there's no such thing as the final leftist rebellion against Bolshevism,
because these rebellions cropped up from time to time and
will continue to wherever they're authoritarianism, and I suspect we'll
have to do more revolts against Bolshevism in our future,
although maybe people will just learn from the past and
then we won't have to. Bad stuff will still come,
but we could just have a different bad thing next time.
(29:13):
That would be great.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Okay, I figured out. I figured out how we neutralize
them preemptively. We have to start the argument over whether
Jucha is Bolshevism right now, and this will keep them
arguing with each other for so long that they will
not be able to.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Effectively do anything. Wait, who is Bolshevik?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Whether Jeucha? Which is the revolution? Well, okay, it's the
nominal ideology of North Korea.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Oh okay, okay, Yeah, No, that is a good idea.
Like we can get them too caught up arguing with
each other on at least that I know of, at
least three.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
American communist parties to split over this.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So excellent, excellent.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Keep going, guys, keep doing this.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah. So, the rebellious period of early nineteen twenty one
is sort of the final hurrah of what if the
Soviet Revolution actually empowered the Soviets and gave workers control
over their own lives. And we're going to start with
the symbolic death of hope for the working class, for emancipation,
the death of Peter Kropotkin, and now, interestingly, Peter Kurpakin
(30:18):
was not incredibly popular with the anarchists at this time,
but he was still respected. He wasn't particularly popular because
of stuff that people still want to hash out on
Twitter today and I don't care enough, which was that
he you know, famously did support the Allied fight in
World War One and wanted Russia to stay involved in
the war because he wanted the Allies to win, because
(30:39):
he thought that bourgeois democracy was a better system than
the German empire and monarchy. And it's one simplified way
of looking at it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
But whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
So Kerpakin had been living in exile in Canada. In
June nineteen seventeen, he returned to Russia, whereupon he refused
cabinet seat from the provisional government, but continued to advocate
that Russia continue in the war, which was not a
popular position. His reputation as a socialist is like not
super high right now, and there are two versions of
his last days in Russia. The official account written by
(31:14):
the victorious Bolsheviks has him welcomed in lovingly by Lenin,
with whom he was great friends. In this version of
the story, he decided the hustle and bustle of Moscow
was too much for him because he was kind of old,
so he moved to the countryside, to a town called Dimitrov.
It is true that Kropawkin was treated better than many
(31:34):
other anarchists by Lenin for whatever reason, and Kropakin leveraged
that as best as he could to get his fellow
socialists srs and anarchists alike out of Bolshevik jail, and
he kept trying to sell Lenin on a like don't
do this bro plan. But Kropawkin's friend Alexander Berkman paints
a different story than the one that Lenin paints. Quote
(31:56):
on two occasions were the Kropotkin apartments in Moscow requisite
and the family forced to seek other quarters. It was
after these experiences that the Kropowkins moved to Dimitrov, where
Old Peter became an involuntary exile. His only visitors were
peasants and workers of the village, and some members of
the intelligentsia, whose wont it was to come to him
(32:16):
with their troubles and misfortunes. He had always kept in
touch with the world through numerous publications, but in dmitrov
he had no access to these sources. His only channels
of information now were the two government papers. His comrades
from abroad, as well as the anarchists of Ukrainia, often
sent him food packages. Once he received some gifts from Makno,
(32:37):
at that time heralded by the Bolsheviki as the terror
of the counter revolution in southern Russia especially, did the
Kropawkins feel the lack of light? When I visited them
in nineteen twenty, They were considering themselves fortunate to be
able to have even one roomlet. Most of the time,
Kropotkin worked by the flicker of a tiny oil lamp
that nearly drove him blind. During the short hours of
(33:00):
the day, he would transcribe his notes on a typewriter,
slowly and painfully, pounding out every letter. That's really pleache,
I know, But the real reason that Kerpakin suffered wasn't
the lack of lamp oil. It was that hope was
draining away from him. At one point, the Bolsheviks said
that for every Bolshevik killed by the SRS, they would
(33:22):
execute ten imprisoned sars Jesus. So he tried to stop
that plan by writing Lenin and you know, putting his
leverage as much as he could. He also tried to
stop the no more private printing houses plan, and failed
at that one too, because at this point literally only
state run papers. He spent his last days despairing, drawing,
(33:45):
and playing piano. He caught pneumonia in January nineteen eighteen,
and all his friends rushed to be by his side,
but most arrived an hour late, and the Bolsheviks offered
him a state funeral, but the anarchists refused it. They
basically had to beg the Soviets to let them organize
the funeral themselves, getting special permission to print a pamphlet
(34:06):
commemorating the most influential anarchist thinker in history. As his
body left the village, the entire village came out to
pay its respects. In Moscow, twenty thousand anarchists marched with
him one last time. They marched with him five miles
to the graveyard in a mile long procession of red
and black banners, students and children at the front holding wreaths.
(34:30):
They passed the Tolstoy Museum and lowered their banners to
honor another one of the great Russian anarchists.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
We're hitting all of them today.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, yeah, we've already had tuberculosis and Tolstoi. Oh I
think Volin organized with the industrial workers of the world,
but I can't remember. Wait, I know who did, and
we'll get to him real soon.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Very great bingo day for us.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, totally. Tolstoyan's came out and played Chopin's Funeral March,
which is the like dun d dun d d du
dun dun dun song, which probably didn't seem cliche at
the time. Actually, while I was reading this, I like
listened to a bunch of versions of It's really beautiful,
and like I got real like this is the part
where I cried while writing. Okay, seven of his friends
(35:16):
were released from jail for the day to attend, and
there was supposed to be like twenty more, but then
the Bolsheviks were like, well, they refused, and it was
that like the anarchists had been like lied to about
what was involved or whatever, and they were like, we
don't trust you. So seven of his friends were released
from jail, and anarchist later turned Bolshevik victor Surge described
(35:37):
what happened. Aaron Baron, who organized with IWW, there's my connection, okay.
Aaron barn arrested in the Ukraine due to return that
evening to a prison from which he would never again emerge.
Lifted as emaciated, bearded, gold spectacled profile to cry relentless
protests against the new despotism, the butchers at work in
(35:58):
their cellars, the dishonor shed upon socialism, the official violence
that was trampling the revolution underfoot. Fearless and impetuous, he
seemed to be sowing the seeds of new tempests. Aaron's wife, Fanya,
who was also in prison, will be executed before the
year is out. Aaron himself will live in the prison
system before his execution. In nineteen thirty seven. This was
(36:22):
the last anarchist demonstration of any size in Russia until
the Soviet Union collapsed almost seventy years later. By the
end of that year, Kerpawkin's writings were banned by the
Bolshevik government and the movement. He'd given his life to
gave it one last push, one last try, much like
(36:43):
how we have one last push to sell you on
advertisements unless you're one of those weirdos who lifts in's
after the end, but year's ads and we're back.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
That might be the bleakest ad pivot of full time.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Thank you, thank you, as I described the thing that
had me crying and as the end of I mean,
it's not the end of the anarchist movement. We're still
in it, but it is a thing that signaled a
thing metaphorically symbolically whatever people kept doing uprisings, and this
next batch, like all of the other cool uprisings that
(37:24):
had happened, started with uprisings in Saint Petersburg. So the
nineteen oh five revolution had started. This how the nineteen
seventeen revolution had started. Okay, I've actually heard that it
kind of started in Moscow. But the thing that kind
of immediately kicked off what we're going to talk about
happened in Saint Petersburg. It started with friend of the
Pod general strikes and bread riots. Bread rations had been
reduced by a third over the course of ten days,
(37:46):
which tends not to make people happy, especially when party
members continue to eat well enough. It's the same shit
that had led to previous revolutions, watching the wealthy eat
while you starve. Only these wealthy were instead the like
party bureaucrats, many of whom were the czarist officers from
before the old aristocracy. Yep. And one of the ways
(38:09):
that this uprising happened was like one factory and had
all these things set aside, like winter clothes and shoes
that were supposed to go be a reserved for Bolsheviks,
and they just started giving them to everyone. That was
the uprising. That was the thing that the socialists had
the communists had to crush. Okay, one thing that came
out of me reading this. People are always like, magpie,
(38:33):
what's an anarchist, what's the socialist, what's a communist? What's
the difference between them? I actually do get this question.
It sounds like I'm joking, but and it's hard to
answer because it depends on the context of when people
were talking. But here when we are talking about it
in Russia, and this is one of the things that
has filtered down through the ages. The communists mean the
(38:53):
Bolsheviks right now because they have changed their name to
the Communist Party, the socialists by and large means the socialists,
the SRS, the Socialist revolutionaries, and the anarchists means the anarchists,
and all of them are socialists, and most of the
anarchists and all of the communists are communists in terms
(39:16):
of what they actually believe ideologically. But I kind of
went through when I wrote all this to make sure
I just wrote Bolsheviks and not communists throughout. But a
lot of the sources of the time are going to
start calling all these people communists, and that's what they
mean by it, as they mean people who are part
of the Bolshevik Party, which is now the Communist Party.
One Damama just to do a like I don't whenever
(39:38):
I try and explain, like, here's the difference between the three,
it's like, well, it really depends on what you're talking about.
And I know that this is annoying and messy. The
general aim of these uprisings was to end war communism.
In the city. It was like, we want better bread
rations in the countryside. A lot of it was about
the return to free labor, the ability for small perducers
(40:00):
to buy and sell without using the state as it
go between, which will actually we're going to kind of
win this one. We'll talk about that. These uprisings are
put down, but not easily. The Red Army showed up
in forced and proclaimed martial law. The Checha arrested thousands
of people, including sr's anarchists and Mensheviks. Even within the Bolsheviks,
(40:21):
they're starting to be resistance to this centralization of power.
You have two different opposition groups. You have the workers
Opposition faction and the group of Democratic Centralism, which ironically
advocated for decentralization. Yeah, because words.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Are random, Yeah, this is the thing with Like, this
is the thing especially inside of this Like if you're
trying to figure out Soviet factions, like the names are
not going to tell you anything, like, yeah, it's a disaster.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah. Fortunately, you don't have to remember those two again.
I'm not going to bring them up again in this script.
If you are like trying to be a historian of
the Russian Civil War and how things went badly, you're
gonna have to remember them. But for now, just understand
what does matter is to understand that not all of
the Bolsheviks approve of what's happening.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could mention so I
know a bit about the workers opposition. They're kind of
like the last off ramp if you're a Bolshevik, for like,
if you're a Bolshevik who like genuinely believes in like
the power of the Soviets, like this is your last
like thing and everyone else going forward from that, Like
(41:33):
there are going to be people who like, like Trotsky
is going to make this pivot where he starts talking
about democracy and it's like, well, no, like this is
all your fault, like specifically right, And it's like that
these are sort of the last people who are like
even in some sense committed to what the Bolsheviks were,
like saying that they believed in like early nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
That makes sense to me, and that's actually gonna be
a big part of the crunch Dat rebellion. People are like,
there's this over simplified thing where people are like, oh,
the Cronschat rebellion was the anarchist versus the Bolsheviks. The
Kronschat rebellion was political pluralism versus the Bolsheviks, And that
means it was the Bolsheviks versus the Bolsheviks. To some
degree too. There's several hundred of them. We'll talk about
them more later, although they didn't stay Bolsheviks see the
(42:17):
off ramp part anyway, So the worker uprisings set fire
to the imaginations and the can infuses eh of perhaps
the single most powerful military faction of the Red Army,
the Sailors of Kronstadt, which we'll talk about Wednesday, because yeah, baby,
five parts context to one part Kronstat. I believed in
(42:41):
me and I have done it incredible.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
When I first heard this episode, I was like, that's
a really six episodes about Cronstat. That's a really granular
look like. And then I was like, it's probably gonna
be a lot of context. But even I didn't expect
it's gonna be five episodes of text in one cross step.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
I thought we'd at least get to yeah, yeah, Well,
I continue to believe I think that this research. I
knew the broad strokes of most of this, right, and
I knew the more granular of a bunch of specific
anarchy things like Cronchdad and Ukraine and a little bit
(43:22):
about Siberia and some other stuff, right. But I actually
think that reading about the Russian Revolution more broadly and
learning about it has influenced my thinking about revolution and
history probably more than any other single thing that I've
(43:45):
researched for this show. And maybe it's because like a
lot of the things I've researched for the show are
things that I already knew more about, right, But this
is just such a like big complicated thing that like
it's really really worth understanding. I don't know how to
put it other than that, but I think that it influences,
(44:10):
you know, like my friends are like, how are you
doing this week? And I'm like, I'm kind of fucked.
I'm like lost in thought in a really intense way,
thinking about things that happened one hundred years ago. Like
I I got lost in this story more than most
of the times, and not because some other stories I
see myself in more easily, right, Like I don't I mean,
(44:32):
I know i'd be an anarchist, but I don't know
where I'd be positioned within this story. Whereas like when
I you know, read about like late sixties radical movements,
it's real easy for me to position myself or even
like you know, a lot of nineteenth century stuff, it's
really easy. This one's like messier. But I really am
(44:53):
I don't know, I wish I had my epiphanies, but
all I have is the story so far. The epiphanies
will come later. Any grand epiphanies for us, I.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Mean, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
I it's been I think I said this at the beginning,
It's been a really long time since I've been in
the Russia trenches in terms of like really granularly going
through this revolution.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
But I think.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
I think there's the sort of like pop left conception
of what the Russian Civil War was. It has a
lot of triumphalism in it that really really just completely
ignores how unbelievably bloody it was and how you know,
(45:43):
and how many And this is the thing that like,
you know, you can see this in like the Culture
Revolution too, of like the parts of it that don't
that have just vanished, which is that like almost I
mean not almost all, but enormous numbers of the people
who are being killed by the bulsh or other communis.
This is the same thing in the Cultural Revolution. It's
like like the vast but and this is you know,
(46:04):
I've talked about on other shows, like the vast majority
of people who get killed in the Culture Revolution are
killed by the rebel factions, they're killed by the government.
It's it's this process of you know, and and I
guess in some sense, like I think you can make
this argument that the vulture of revolution like really ends
in the great terror of the purges, because like, from
(46:25):
a macro perspective, what it is is it's this process
of every single person who made the revolution just systematically
being fed into a meet writer and killed.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
And that's a apocalyptically bleak although oddly karmac h everyone
who's going to be involved in putting down the crunch
at revolution.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah, well, I mean that's the Yeah, all all those
people have d nineteen thirty six, nineteen thirty seven next
to their names.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Yeah, we're going to talk a bit more about that
the next one too. But yeah, that is a there's
this thing where people want to say it all went
wrong when Stalin got in charge, you know, and clearly
Stalin is one of history's great monsters. It's almost like, hey,
what was the first behind the bastards? Was that the
Stalin one? Was it Hitler's sex life or was it Hitler? No?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
I think it was about Carl May, the author who
I's obsessed with.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
That I could be wrong, because that was nine hundred
and fifty two thousand years ago. Yeah, the earliest ones
I remember is the Carl May and then Hitler's Drinking Buddies.
I mean Stalin's Drinking Buddies. But I didn't start listening
at the beginning. I just like went back, which is
what you all should do, is go back and listen
(47:46):
to all the because you're not going to get to
hear part six until Wednesday, and so you have almost
twenty four hours maybe forty eight if you listened to
this early enough to go and listen to every episode
of Cool People to Cool Stuff.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
I feel like, well we can, we can. You can
accelerate it to okay, okay, you play one in each
ear and you move it up to like ten times speed.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Well you can't do that.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
That's true. I only go, well one, I can.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I can listen to that. That's not always fun. Yeah,
people were like Oscar, I could read both sides of
the page at once. I'm like, I don't believe you.
But that said, I watch YouTube at about two x speed.
I listen to podcasts at one x speed because I'm
(48:36):
doing something else when I'm listening to a podcast, shout
out to everyone who right now is walking their dog
or cleaning or driving a car. But YouTube, if I
have to like sit down and watch a thing, it's
got to be at least one point five or two
x speed, so I understand people who listen at high speed. Anyway,
(48:57):
You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah, I have a podcast that I'm one of the
people on. It's called dicodapp and here it's about the
present day and how bad it is and how you
can make it less bad. And you can find it
wherever there's podcast. I guess you can't find it on SoundCloud.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Unless you pirate it and then upload it and put
relaxing beats behind it.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
Legally, I don't know if I could advocate that, but
you know, oh, okay, don't do that. Yeah, you can't
do that. It's in fact impossible technologically. No one has
ever overcome this.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
No, all right, well, if you want to. I actually
wrote about a bunch of Russia revolutions stuff on my
substock a couple of weeks ago. By the time you
all hear this, it's called the Lost Promise of the Soviets.
If you're like, man, that's not enough. I need to
hear Margaret go over it again and talk about it
differently and more emotionally. Well, that's where you can do
(49:54):
it and see everyone else on Wednesday. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff that you didn't start at part five. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is my
guest Mia Wong.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hello, Amya, how are you well? I can't hear out
of one ear, so things going great. We're about to
see whether you could podcast like this. My guess is yes. However,
if I say anything wrong, that's immediately. My excuse is
that I can't hear and this has destroyed my brain.
So we're doing the caveats beforehand.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, Well, fortunately we've taken our producer, Sophie's audio and
routed it through one part of the stereo channel and
my voice to the other part of the stereo channel.
Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, Hi, My dog just
sneeze seven times? Are you okay? Everyone is having a day?
Is what we have learned before recording.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You see seven times here, Andrew.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
That's so many sneezing.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh most traumatic. I saw her. She went, why am
I doing this so many times? And I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Rentrow has started doing this thing that I'm very excited about.
Where he when I record, he used to hang out
on the futon behind me, but now he hangs out
at my feet. Oh, hi Rentrow, if you can hear me,
you're the best boy. And our audio engineer is Daniel
Hi Danel. Yeah. Our theme musical was written forced by
un woman. We are in deep. This is part five,
(01:28):
our first ever part five on cool people did cool stuff,
which is funny because we will get to a bunch
of cool people did a bunch of really cool stuff
finally this week. But first, either of you ever heard
of a song called roast Chicken?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Okay, So my favorite Soviet era anarchists song, because I
have one of those, is this song called roast Chicken.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit about
it beforehand, and then Sovie's gonna hit play on it
in a little bit. There's a song called roast Chicken.
I first learned about it from a Bulgarian friend of
mine who grew up in Communist Bulgaria, and I was
(02:06):
learning to play accordion, and she was like, oh, you
have to learn how to play this song roast Chicken.
And I actually theoretically know how to play the song
on accordion, but it's been a very long time since
I made playing accordion, so I wouldn't hold it past
me right now, and I was like, hm, this song
seems familiar. It sounds like part of Go Go Bordello's
song Start Wearing Purple, and it is because it's part
(02:28):
of it. There is this song that comes from the
war communism era of the USSR. It's a children's song,
but it's the anarchist children's song. And all throughout the
Soviet era, whenever Soviets made movies about the Civil War
and they wanted to like talk trash about anarchists, the
anarchists would come in as like sailors on a boat
(02:51):
or on an armored train or whatever in the armored
train and be called anarchy or whatever, and they'd be
singing roast Chicken. And this song is amazing because this
the song that is meant to make fun of war communism,
but it became the song to make fun of the
anarchists were making fun of war communism. And I'll tell
you the lyrics after we listen to a little bit,
which we're gonna do now.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
See Polo now.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Shooting me push old panes.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
You, oh my Molly Iris.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So much, must.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
See my shu yan you say yes, Si, I aquitely
give me son.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Okay, So this is my favorite Soviet era anarchist song.
This song is about exactly what you think it would
be about. The lyrics are I'm gonna paraphrase here. So
there's like this roast chicken, this steam chicken, and he's
walking down the street and the cops are like, hey,
you can't be walking down the street. Show me your passport.
(04:20):
Let's see some papers. And the Chicken's like, I don't
have any papers. I'm a fucking chicken. I'm a roast chicken.
Why would I have papers? And so they take the
chicken to jail. You know, that's the song Oh my god.
There's also versions where like the chicken is so scared
it poops its pants. The song rules and so that
(04:42):
particular version was Arcadie Severni, who is a Soviet era
a folk musician from primarily the sixties who got famous
Plaine prison songs, and that was like the way that
he played all of the band's Soviet songs, like he
has these he sings songs about like I'm an anarchist
time and anarchist or whatever, and he gets away with
(05:03):
it because he's like, oh, I'm just playing the prison songs.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So he's like outlaw folk. This is the outlaw folk
or outlaw country the rules of the Soviet Union, And
I don't know, I really like it.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
It's so fun.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, if you ever want to see all, not all,
of most of the clips of this song, in all
the different Soviet things, there's one page that anthologizes them all.
And the way I always find it when I can't
remember as I type into Google roast Chicken Anarchists song,
because this song you've probably never run across this particular problem.
When you leave the Western language set, I forget the
(05:41):
name of the Roman alphabet. It becomes harder to find
things with Google. Yeah, Like, if you like just search
roast chicken song, you're not getting anything useful, But if
you search it in cyrillic, you get what you're looking for. Anyway,
that's my unrelated well what's related, But that's my aside
that I got really excited about. I realized I could
(06:02):
shoehorn into here. I was never good enough to sing it,
but I would play this song while busking a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
That's so cool.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So where we left off, we talked a lot about
the Civil War, last time, and the civil war is
now over. The Whites are defeated, the Whites being the
sort of bizarrest forces or the not the revolution forces.
I think by the end a lot of even more
like moderate socialists started joining the White Army because they
(06:31):
were like the Bolsheviks, they're terrible, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, you get this a lot where it's like you
have these really weird constellations of groups because whose sole
uniting factor is the Bolsheviks. You're trying to kill us all.
And like that's the thing you see like repeated down
through history. You got all these really weird political coalitions
that are like, yeah, the Marxists are killing us all.
So you know, guess we're all in this boat now.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah. Absolutely. And so the Black Army did the defeating
of the Army in Ukraine, but that Black Army has
now also been defeated, as have millions of people trying
to live the promise of the revolution down there. They've
been defeated, not necessarily all killed. That'll come a little later.
We're not going to talk about the famines and stuff
too much. All the while, the Bolsheviks are promising like, hey,
(07:18):
don't worry this war communism thing that's only for a while.
We're at war, and to some degree people believed them,
and that's kind of what they held onto this whole time.
People were like, well, we just got aside with the
Red Army and the grain, you know, them coming by
and stealing all the grain and stuff for so long.
We got to make sacrifices to defend the revolution. Everyone
knows that. And by sacrifices, when we're talking about the
(07:40):
Russian Civil War, we're somewhere in the six million to
twelve million people range of sacrifice, which makes it one
hell of a civil war.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, it's extraordinarily bloody.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, compared to the February Revolution of thirteen hundred people
who don't The anti Bolshevik left continues to grow as
the Bolsheviks keeps showing themselves for what they really are.
Of course, the Bolshevik party itself was also growing because
they were the only game in town and it kept,
you know, killing everyone who didn't join it. Like I've
(08:14):
used several sources for example, throughout that I think I've
talked about where it was people who weren't Bolsheviks and
then suddenly they were Bolsheviks because it was kind of
join or die, and plenty of revolutionaries chose join when
offered join or die, and plenty of revolutionaries chose die
when given that same choice. All throughout the revolution in
the Civil War, revolutionaries are pouring into the country from
(08:36):
exile or being deported back to Russia, since one of
Russia's primary exports for decades at this point had been
hardened revolutionaries of every stripe. And it's honestly hard to
imagine just how great this betrayal must have felt, how
hopeful everyone was when they were turned home only to
find out what was happening. And I'm going to give
a couple examples of that, because they're kind of fun stories,
(09:00):
even if they don't end super great. People who listen
to my podcast are familiar with this arc. Take as
an example, the case of the staff of the newspaper
Golos Truda Russian for the Voice of Labor, because again,
anarchists have only two ideas of how to name newspapers.
(09:20):
It's either labor paper or it's like the blast, you know,
sometimes it's black and then object, Oh that's true, so
you black flag, black wave, black tide. Yeah, which doesn't
work as well as in the American context, but that
never stops people.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
So the Voice of Labor was started at nineteen eleven
in New York City by the Union of Russian Workers
in the United States and Canada. Speaking of how we
choose to name things historically, the Union of Russian Workers
of the United States and Canada, which was an anarchist organization. Yeah,
incredible stuff, guys, No notes, and this is an anarcho
(10:03):
synicalist labor organization started by political exiles who had fled
the nineteen oh five revolution. This union had helped new
exiles integrate into New York. They had set up English
classes for refugees, they'd put out books in Russian and generally,
we're just being cool. They had about ten thousand members
across the US and Canada, and of course a monthly newspaper.
(10:24):
How can you do anything without a newspaper. I swear
to God. The accidental subtext this podcast is just Margaret
talks about tuberculosis and old radical newspapers in nineteen seventeen,
give this general amnesty in Russia. So everyone involved in
the newspapers like, holy shit, here we go. It's the
fucking revolution. Let's get home and transform the entire fucking world.
(10:46):
The largest country in the world is having a revolution
and the anarchists are at the forefront among in a pluralistic,
great cool way. They're very excited. One of them goes
first and is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, come on over,
you know. And their journey itself was kind of epic
and beautiful, like nothing bad happened, but they did all
(11:07):
the anarchy stuff along the cultural stuff along the way.
They boarded a boat from Vancouver to Japan and then
went over to Siberia and then took a train to
Saint Petersburg.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Of course.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, in many such cases, yeah, now, yeah, the go
literally all the way around the world in order to
do this. And because they're anarchists, they can't go anywhere
without doing cultural events and printing a newspaper. So the
whole time they're on this ship out to Japan, they
organized lectures and put on plays for all the passengers
on board.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And they put out a newspaper while they were on
the boat. Oh my god, it was called the Float.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Rules. I know, I know.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Did they like bring a printing press like they must?
I don't know enough about it. I get all of
the different time periods around this era, because like what
people would print with kept changing so quickly around this
era that I can't remember exactly what they would have
been using. But yeah, they must have brought a little
hand press or something like that.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Once they made it to Saint Petersburg, they started printing
The Voice of Labor again in Saint Petersburg, and they
tried and of course famously failed, to turn the revolutionary
tide away from authoritarianimism and Bolshevism. This is in between
the February and October revolutions. The most famous member of
this group was this Jewish anarchist guy named Volin. And
(12:34):
when I say famous, I mean in the context of
you and I have heard of Volin and yeah, I've
read his book The Unknown Revolution. Yeah yeah, yeah, famous
gifts context here, Yeah, well known in certain anarchist circles, think, yeah, yeah.
(12:56):
He had fled Russia in nineteen oh five. He was
a Jewish anarchist who fled Russia nineteen oh five and
became an anarchist while in exile. Actually I think he
started off I think in the SRS. And he is
most famous again famous guests quotes as the man that
is behind what is called synthesis anarchism, which is basically
the like, hey, all different kinds of anarchism are valid,
(13:17):
we should figure out how to create a unity and
diversity set of anarchist organizations in which syndicalist communists and
individualists and insurrectionary anarchists can all just coordinate and offer
one another solidarity and mutual daid. This of course made
everyone that oh yeah, no, totally for one hundred years,
but it's not the worst idea. My friend Brian is
(13:39):
always like, one day, Margaret, you're going to unite all
of the anarchist factions because they're all going to unite
in their anger against you for trying to unite them
all and stop all the infighting.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
I think synthesis anarchism is great. It builds on the
anarchists without adjectives that Malatests and all these other people
were putting forward. And anyway, I like his ideas. I
haven't read The Unknown Revolution yet, to be clear. It's
on my shelf and I'm excited about.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
It, but it's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Slightly weird.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, that makes sense to me. It turns out there's
an awful lot of books you can read about the
Russian Revolution. Yeah, someone should do a really long podcast
series about the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Like yeah, wrong, cool, micy right sort revolutions. I was
talking to him well, like on Twitter about that show,
and I was like, Okay, you're gonna do the because
so there's like a bunch of other revolutions that happened
around that time, right, there's one in Italy, there's Germany.
There's something we talked about in the show. Its Argentina.
So I was like, okay, are you going to cover
the other ones? And he was like, We're going to
(14:45):
cover a lot of it, and then no, there was
simply too much Russian Revolution to get to any of
the other ones except Germany because Jermany is the one
that like most directly matters for Russia.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Yeah, it's interesting to me because part of learning about
the Russian Revolution, and part of the reason I think
it's important enough to do this, you know, six part
series or whatever about it is how much it influences
everything else we've talked about on this show. You know,
everything is in the context of this until about World
War two, and then everything's in the context of World
(15:16):
War Two. It's still probably the most influential revolution since
like either the French or Haitian realm, there's a lot
of by a lot of I mean, historians who are
talking about this revolution have all said that this is
the most influential event of the twentieth century and like
single event, And I mean, is that a World War two?
(15:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, well, and you know, but the thing with World
War two is you can argue that like World War
two is a direct product of this.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right totally, which yeah, and would have been real different
if our heroes of today had pulled some stuff off.
But yeah, so our guy Volin, he spends a lot,
a lot of time in Ukraine influencing things there, setting
up a synthesis organization called Nabot that's spread throughout Ukraine,
(16:07):
and later he's going to become the chairman of the
Military Revolutionary Council, the machnivist Ukrainian anarchist thing that we
talked about last time. And I think the reason he
ended up the Military Revolutionary Council chairman is because he
was like, he was not a pacifist, but he spent
his whole time doing that trying to curb the excessive
(16:28):
violence of the revolutionaries because there is no army that
is not committing war crimes, and that absolutely included the
anarchist army. You know, there is no ideology so pure
that it will prevent people from abusing power in different circumstances. However,
you can put a lot of work in to curb
(16:50):
that and keep that from happening. And it sounds like
that's why Volin was involved in sense idea. Yeah. Volin
was arrested on his sick bed by the Cheka and
only released basically because the Bolsheviks needed a cozy up
to the anarchists, you know, because we talked about last time.
The Bolsheviks were like, oh, we're resting all the anarchists,
and then all of a sudden they're fighting alongside the anarchists.
(17:10):
So they keep doing this back and forth, depending on
how much they need the anarchists.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
The Bolsheviks actually tried to recruit him. They offered to
make him a commissar in Bolshevik Ukraine, and he was like, no,
that's not going to fucking happen. Yeah, So the Bolsheviks
arrested him again a little bit later. Once again, political
pressure got him released and deported. In nineteen twenty two,
and the anarchists take care of their own even though
(17:35):
a lot of syndicalists didn't like his theories because his
theories were Syndicalism is not the only correct belief structure.
The most prominent German anarchis syndicalist who's come up a
bunch on this show before Rudolph Rocker put him up
in his own house, like gave him the attic room
and took care of him.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Oh that's really sweet.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
I actually didn't know.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
That, I know. And then there's like this also this
whole thing where like Volin helped escape Ukraine, and then
they like got into this huge fight because yeah, there's
no reason that you, dear listener should care about this,
but Makno wanted platformism, which was all anarchists have unity
of theory, where a synthesis anarchism is unity and diversity,
(18:16):
and so they were like arguing about that and then
they Uh, Makno's wife was like, could you just shut
the fuck up and be friends again? And they became
friends again because listen to women.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And it's funny too because I'm pretty sure unknown revolutions
written like in the part where they're feuding, so there's
just like a bunch of random like mackno slander in it.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
I believe it. I believe it. There's so much from
this time period of people being like, I don't know
where the Magno is even really anarchists, and I'm like,
I'm not interested in gate keeping that.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
They absolutely feud like anarchists.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So yeah, totally. Uh. Anyway, Volin from exile, he writes history.
He gets into arguments about anarchist theory. He describes Bolshevism
as red fascism, and if anyone would know that firsthand,
it's him. He lived in near poverty in France. He
(19:14):
had to go in hiding once more in nineteen forty
because it was not a good time to be Jewish
in Nazi occupied countries, and friends tried to get him
to go to Mexico and they were like, we'll get
you out, We'll get you to Mexico, and he left Paris,
but he was like, I am fucking staying in France.
We are going to kick out the fucking Nazis and
we're going to have a goddamn anarchist revolution, or I'm
(19:36):
going to cut damn by trine. And he died of
tuberculosis in Paris in nineteen forty five, cool guy Volin
back to his newspaper and the early days of the revolution. Actually,
you know, one of the things that I ran across
sometimes is some of these old papers actually had advertisements
(19:56):
in them. I don't know whether the Voice of Labor
had advertisements or not, but I'm aware that a lot
of radical newspapers throughout time have had advertisements, and keeping
in that tradition, we've decided to one time only allow
sponsors to go and give us money in exchange for
space for them to talk about things for a little while.
(20:19):
So that's what we're going to do, just in the
spirit of historical accuracy, and we're back in the early
days of the revolution. The Voice of Labor accurately saw
(20:40):
the writing on the wall. Immediately after the October Revolution.
They wrote, once their power is consolidated and legalized, the
Bolsheviks will begin to rearrange the life of the country
and of the people by governmental and dictorial methods imposed
by this center. Your soviets and your other local organizations
will become, little by little, simply executive organs of the
(21:01):
will of the central government, in place of healthy, constructive
work by the laboring masses in place of free unification.
From the bottom, we will see the installation of an
authoritarian and status apparatus, which will act from above and
set about wiping out everything that stands in its way
with an iron hand.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, and not even like it wasn't even just like, oh,
they're going to totally be authoritarian. It was like, this
is exactly the way they will do it and how
it will play out. A lot of people are like, oh, early,
people just didn't know how it was going to go.
Some people knew.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
By August nineteen eighteen, the Bolsheviks suppressed the Voice of Labor,
So these editors from New York they put out a
different paper, the Free Voice of Labor, and then they
got arrested again in nineteen twenty one. We'll talk more
about that later, about how the anarchist are crack down
on real hard after.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I'm so excited to do my version of this where
we have to put out free it could happen here,
and then freer it could happen here.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
It might happen here.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Yeah, like the final one is the freest.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
It already happened yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Might happen here. We might pull we might pull out
of a tailspin. So famously, it's not like the USSR
was the only place it was hard to be a
leftist at this time. Well, okay, it's not the USSR.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Russia whatever. Famously, the US was
not exactly tolerant of actual leftists either.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The first Red Scare hit the anarchists particularly hard, especially,
and actually I didn't realize this. The main group as
far as I can tell by numbers that hit was
the Union of Russian Workers, this anarcho syndicalist union that
the newspaper folks have been working with, which kept going
after its newspaper edit. It turns out you can actually
have a movement without a newspaper, I know, shocking.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
But every trotsky I simultaneously running in circles and streaming.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I know. On March twelfth, nineteen nineteen, its headquarters was
raided in New York and one hundred and sixty two
people were arrested. Jeez, and they only managed to get
criminal anarchy charges against two of them. New York still
has criminal anarchy.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
On the books, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
And it's not criminal being an anarchist. It's like criminal
disorderly conduct or whatever. But it's every anarchist I know
he's gotten that charge is a little bit like.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
The news was full of talk about how these Russian
agents were just waiting to throw the US, which is
I mean, well, I guess that's true, Like you know.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by
Russian agent. It's like, right, agent, who is Russian?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Totally? They're not agents of the Bolsheviks. They are Russian
revolutionaries who would also be imprisoned in Russia because that's
what happened to them in Russia. And so this led
to the justification of the Palmer raids in nineteen nineteen,
and this time the Union of Russian Workers was raided again,
and this time is really really violently. People were beaten
with clubs and blackjacks. Just people on the street are like,
(24:22):
why are all these bloody people pouring out of this building?
And on December twenty one, nineteen nineteen, two hundred and
forty nine anarchists were deported to Russia, including friends of
the pod Emma Goldman, the anarchist advocate of birth control
has come up time and time again and her sometimes lover,
Alexander Berkman, who had spent fourteen years in prison for
(24:42):
trying and failing to kill an industrialist during a strike. Unfortunately,
at first, these two are excited Russia was having a revolution.
They knew they were anarchists involved, and that that revolution
that was happening was the hope of the entire leftist world.
Berkman said that that he arrived in Russia was even
better than the day he walked free after fourteen years
(25:04):
in prison. They spent nineteen twenty traveling around the country
trying to put together a history of the revolution for
a museum. So they like hit the ground running and
they're like, oh, we gotta you know, the revolution's here.
We got to make sure to document it, you know,
because we love it. We love the revolution. And what
they found as they traveled around the country to see
(25:24):
the effects of the revolution was not the liberation of
the working class, but instead it's a miseration. Lenin met
with them personally and was like, Hey, don't worry. As
soon as the war is done, we'll go back to
free speech. I promise. It's me.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
It's Lenin narrator. It's never right yet.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Either didn't mean it, or he meant it and then
just didn't bother to do it. I don't know. War
communism is tearing everyone up. Lenin wrote about it. The
essence of war communism was that we actually took from
the peasant all of his surpluses, and sometimes not only
the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasants needed
for food. So they're running around taking grain, horses, everything
(26:07):
they can get, and like, you know, they're not just taking,
they're also taking like the stuff people are supposed to
plant next time and things like that.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
It is also deeply funny the main Bolshevik anti anarchist
lines that their bandits. It's like, okay, so one of
these two groups of people is running around the countryside
stealing stuff a gunpoint, and the other one is the anarchists.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I know, really, I know, because the anarchists are running
around stealing stuff a gunpoint from the rich. And the
reason that the anarchists are getting called bandits is because, yeah,
the Bolsheviks are mad at the anarchists for expropriating too
much and too early, because the Bolsheviks are trying not
to totally piss off the rich. But I think they're
expropriating too at this point. By now, I'm not actually
sure exactly when they start robin hood in also, but anyway,
(26:52):
so the peasants get really good at hiding grain. One
estimate says that a third of the food was successfully
hidden from the bulshit bandits. Yeah, and peasants also just
like they stopped growing more food than was personally needed
because they knew whatever they grew would gets stolen by
band Like, why work harder if there's nothing in it
(27:13):
for you, It's just all going to get stolen. Autocracy
meant that Russia only grew less than half of what
it grew before the war. And since one of the
primary justifications people have of war communism is oh, it
was necessary to get as much food as possible to
run this war. We needed strong authoritarian measures in order
(27:33):
to do it, here's how it backfired. Besides just morally
it backfired and that people suddenly didn't have any reason
to grow food.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, although it's funny because this discreens into just a
sort of self justifying loop, because then the argument is like, oh, well,
we need more authoritarianism to crack down and the peasants,
because the peasants are like the culocks are food hoarding.
It's like, well, yet they're food hoarding because they're going
to starve if because you keep taking all of their food,
(28:02):
so you know it's not actually working.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah. So Goldman later would write a book called My
Disillusionment in Russia, and Berkman wrote the Bolshevik Myth. Basically,
by the end of nineteen twenty there's no more justification
available anymore for the Bolsheviks to people. You can only
promise people that war communism is temporary for so long.
And actually, one of the things that I don't think
I talked about too much last time. The Civil War
(28:27):
came in waves and the Green Army, the peasants who
were revolting. A lot of that came after the White
Armies were destroyed, and you had a lot of soldiers
going back home and seeing what was happening, and you
also just had like, well, your justification is done, you know,
And things eventually came to a head in March nineteen
twenty one or February, depending on how you count it. Yeah,
(28:51):
there's no such thing as the final leftist rebellion against Bolshevism,
because these rebellions cropped up from time to time and
will continue to wherever they're authoritarianism, and I suspect we'll
have to do more revolts against Bolshevism in our future,
although maybe people will just learn from the past and
then we won't have to. Bad stuff will still come,
but we could just have a different bad thing next time.
(29:13):
That would be great.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Okay, I figured out. I figured out how we neutralize
them preemptively. We have to start the argument over whether
Jucha is Bolshevism right now, and this will keep them
arguing with each other for so long that they will
not be able to.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Effectively do anything. Wait, who is Bolshevik?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Whether Jeucha? Which is the revolution? Well, okay, it's the
nominal ideology of North Korea.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Oh okay, okay, Yeah, No, that is a good idea.
Like we can get them too caught up arguing with
each other on at least that I know of, at
least three.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
American communist parties to split over this.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So excellent, excellent.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Keep going, guys, keep doing this.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah. So, the rebellious period of early nineteen twenty one
is sort of the final hurrah of what if the
Soviet Revolution actually empowered the Soviets and gave workers control
over their own lives. And we're going to start with
the symbolic death of hope for the working class, for emancipation,
the death of Peter Kropotkin, and now, interestingly, Peter Kurpakin
(30:18):
was not incredibly popular with the anarchists at this time,
but he was still respected. He wasn't particularly popular because
of stuff that people still want to hash out on
Twitter today and I don't care enough, which was that
he you know, famously did support the Allied fight in
World War One and wanted Russia to stay involved in
the war because he wanted the Allies to win, because
(30:39):
he thought that bourgeois democracy was a better system than
the German empire and monarchy. And it's one simplified way
of looking at it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
But whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
So Kerpakin had been living in exile in Canada. In
June nineteen seventeen, he returned to Russia, whereupon he refused
cabinet seat from the provisional government, but continued to advocate
that Russia continue in the war, which was not a
popular position. His reputation as a socialist is like not
super high right now, and there are two versions of
his last days in Russia. The official account written by
(31:14):
the victorious Bolsheviks has him welcomed in lovingly by Lenin,
with whom he was great friends. In this version of
the story, he decided the hustle and bustle of Moscow
was too much for him because he was kind of old,
so he moved to the countryside, to a town called Dimitrov.
It is true that Kropawkin was treated better than many
(31:34):
other anarchists by Lenin for whatever reason, and Kropakin leveraged
that as best as he could to get his fellow
socialists srs and anarchists alike out of Bolshevik jail, and
he kept trying to sell Lenin on a like don't
do this bro plan. But Kropawkin's friend Alexander Berkman paints
a different story than the one that Lenin paints. Quote
(31:56):
on two occasions were the Kropotkin apartments in Moscow requisite
and the family forced to seek other quarters. It was
after these experiences that the Kropowkins moved to Dimitrov, where
Old Peter became an involuntary exile. His only visitors were
peasants and workers of the village, and some members of
the intelligentsia, whose wont it was to come to him
(32:16):
with their troubles and misfortunes. He had always kept in
touch with the world through numerous publications, but in dmitrov
he had no access to these sources. His only channels
of information now were the two government papers. His comrades
from abroad, as well as the anarchists of Ukrainia, often
sent him food packages. Once he received some gifts from Makno,
(32:37):
at that time heralded by the Bolsheviki as the terror
of the counter revolution in southern Russia especially, did the
Kropawkins feel the lack of light? When I visited them
in nineteen twenty, They were considering themselves fortunate to be
able to have even one roomlet. Most of the time,
Kropotkin worked by the flicker of a tiny oil lamp
that nearly drove him blind. During the short hours of
(33:00):
the day, he would transcribe his notes on a typewriter,
slowly and painfully, pounding out every letter. That's really pleache,
I know, But the real reason that Kerpakin suffered wasn't
the lack of lamp oil. It was that hope was
draining away from him. At one point, the Bolsheviks said
that for every Bolshevik killed by the SRS, they would
(33:22):
execute ten imprisoned sars Jesus. So he tried to stop
that plan by writing Lenin and you know, putting his
leverage as much as he could. He also tried to
stop the no more private printing houses plan, and failed
at that one too, because at this point literally only
state run papers. He spent his last days despairing, drawing,
(33:45):
and playing piano. He caught pneumonia in January nineteen eighteen,
and all his friends rushed to be by his side,
but most arrived an hour late, and the Bolsheviks offered
him a state funeral, but the anarchists refused it. They
basically had to beg the Soviets to let them organize
the funeral themselves, getting special permission to print a pamphlet
(34:06):
commemorating the most influential anarchist thinker in history. As his
body left the village, the entire village came out to
pay its respects. In Moscow, twenty thousand anarchists marched with
him one last time. They marched with him five miles
to the graveyard in a mile long procession of red
and black banners, students and children at the front holding wreaths.
(34:30):
They passed the Tolstoy Museum and lowered their banners to
honor another one of the great Russian anarchists.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
We're hitting all of them today.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, yeah, we've already had tuberculosis and Tolstoi. Oh I
think Volin organized with the industrial workers of the world,
but I can't remember. Wait, I know who did, and
we'll get to him real soon.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Very great bingo day for us.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, totally. Tolstoyan's came out and played Chopin's Funeral March,
which is the like dun d dun d d du
dun dun dun song, which probably didn't seem cliche at
the time. Actually, while I was reading this, I like
listened to a bunch of versions of It's really beautiful,
and like I got real like this is the part
where I cried while writing. Okay, seven of his friends
(35:16):
were released from jail for the day to attend, and
there was supposed to be like twenty more, but then
the Bolsheviks were like, well, they refused, and it was
that like the anarchists had been like lied to about
what was involved or whatever, and they were like, we
don't trust you. So seven of his friends were released
from jail, and anarchist later turned Bolshevik victor Surge described
(35:37):
what happened. Aaron Baron, who organized with IWW, there's my connection, okay.
Aaron barn arrested in the Ukraine due to return that
evening to a prison from which he would never again emerge.
Lifted as emaciated, bearded, gold spectacled profile to cry relentless
protests against the new despotism, the butchers at work in
(35:58):
their cellars, the dishonor shed upon socialism, the official violence
that was trampling the revolution underfoot. Fearless and impetuous, he
seemed to be sowing the seeds of new tempests. Aaron's wife, Fanya,
who was also in prison, will be executed before the
year is out. Aaron himself will live in the prison
system before his execution. In nineteen thirty seven. This was
(36:22):
the last anarchist demonstration of any size in Russia until
the Soviet Union collapsed almost seventy years later. By the
end of that year, Kerpawkin's writings were banned by the
Bolshevik government and the movement. He'd given his life to
gave it one last push, one last try, much like
(36:43):
how we have one last push to sell you on
advertisements unless you're one of those weirdos who lifts in's
after the end, but year's ads and we're back.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
That might be the bleakest ad pivot of full time.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Thank you, thank you, as I described the thing that
had me crying and as the end of I mean,
it's not the end of the anarchist movement. We're still
in it, but it is a thing that signaled a
thing metaphorically symbolically whatever people kept doing uprisings, and this
next batch, like all of the other cool uprisings that
(37:24):
had happened, started with uprisings in Saint Petersburg. So the
nineteen oh five revolution had started. This how the nineteen
seventeen revolution had started. Okay, I've actually heard that it
kind of started in Moscow. But the thing that kind
of immediately kicked off what we're going to talk about
happened in Saint Petersburg. It started with friend of the
Pod general strikes and bread riots. Bread rations had been
reduced by a third over the course of ten days,
(37:46):
which tends not to make people happy, especially when party
members continue to eat well enough. It's the same shit
that had led to previous revolutions, watching the wealthy eat
while you starve. Only these wealthy were instead the like
party bureaucrats, many of whom were the czarist officers from
before the old aristocracy. Yep. And one of the ways
(38:09):
that this uprising happened was like one factory and had
all these things set aside, like winter clothes and shoes
that were supposed to go be a reserved for Bolsheviks,
and they just started giving them to everyone. That was
the uprising. That was the thing that the socialists had
the communists had to crush. Okay, one thing that came
out of me reading this. People are always like, magpie,
(38:33):
what's an anarchist, what's the socialist, what's a communist? What's
the difference between them? I actually do get this question.
It sounds like I'm joking, but and it's hard to
answer because it depends on the context of when people
were talking. But here when we are talking about it
in Russia, and this is one of the things that
has filtered down through the ages. The communists mean the
(38:53):
Bolsheviks right now because they have changed their name to
the Communist Party, the socialists by and large means the socialists,
the SRS, the Socialist revolutionaries, and the anarchists means the anarchists,
and all of them are socialists, and most of the
anarchists and all of the communists are communists in terms
(39:16):
of what they actually believe ideologically. But I kind of
went through when I wrote all this to make sure
I just wrote Bolsheviks and not communists throughout. But a
lot of the sources of the time are going to
start calling all these people communists, and that's what they
mean by it, as they mean people who are part
of the Bolshevik Party, which is now the Communist Party.
One Damama just to do a like I don't whenever
(39:38):
I try and explain, like, here's the difference between the three,
it's like, well, it really depends on what you're talking about.
And I know that this is annoying and messy. The
general aim of these uprisings was to end war communism.
In the city. It was like, we want better bread
rations in the countryside. A lot of it was about
the return to free labor, the ability for small perducers
(40:00):
to buy and sell without using the state as it
go between, which will actually we're going to kind of
win this one. We'll talk about that. These uprisings are
put down, but not easily. The Red Army showed up
in forced and proclaimed martial law. The Checha arrested thousands
of people, including sr's anarchists and Mensheviks. Even within the Bolsheviks,
(40:21):
they're starting to be resistance to this centralization of power.
You have two different opposition groups. You have the workers
Opposition faction and the group of Democratic Centralism, which ironically
advocated for decentralization. Yeah, because words.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Are random, Yeah, this is the thing with Like, this
is the thing especially inside of this Like if you're
trying to figure out Soviet factions, like the names are
not going to tell you anything, like, yeah, it's a disaster.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah. Fortunately, you don't have to remember those two again.
I'm not going to bring them up again in this script.
If you are like trying to be a historian of
the Russian Civil War and how things went badly, you're
gonna have to remember them. But for now, just understand
what does matter is to understand that not all of
the Bolsheviks approve of what's happening.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could mention so I
know a bit about the workers opposition. They're kind of
like the last off ramp if you're a Bolshevik, for like,
if you're a Bolshevik who like genuinely believes in like
the power of the Soviets, like this is your last
like thing and everyone else going forward from that, Like
(41:33):
there are going to be people who like, like Trotsky
is going to make this pivot where he starts talking
about democracy and it's like, well, no, like this is
all your fault, like specifically right, And it's like that
these are sort of the last people who are like
even in some sense committed to what the Bolsheviks were,
like saying that they believed in like early nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
That makes sense to me, and that's actually gonna be
a big part of the crunch Dat rebellion. People are like,
there's this over simplified thing where people are like, oh,
the Cronschat rebellion was the anarchist versus the Bolsheviks. The
Kronschat rebellion was political pluralism versus the Bolsheviks, And that
means it was the Bolsheviks versus the Bolsheviks. To some
degree too. There's several hundred of them. We'll talk about
them more later, although they didn't stay Bolsheviks see the
(42:17):
off ramp part anyway, So the worker uprisings set fire
to the imaginations and the can infuses eh of perhaps
the single most powerful military faction of the Red Army,
the Sailors of Kronstadt, which we'll talk about Wednesday, because yeah, baby,
five parts context to one part Kronstat. I believed in
(42:41):
me and I have done it incredible.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
When I first heard this episode, I was like, that's
a really six episodes about Cronstat. That's a really granular
look like. And then I was like, it's probably gonna
be a lot of context. But even I didn't expect
it's gonna be five episodes of text in one cross step.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
I thought we'd at least get to yeah, yeah, Well,
I continue to believe I think that this research. I
knew the broad strokes of most of this, right, and
I knew the more granular of a bunch of specific
anarchy things like Cronchdad and Ukraine and a little bit
(43:22):
about Siberia and some other stuff, right. But I actually
think that reading about the Russian Revolution more broadly and
learning about it has influenced my thinking about revolution and
history probably more than any other single thing that I've
(43:45):
researched for this show. And maybe it's because like a
lot of the things I've researched for the show are
things that I already knew more about, right, But this
is just such a like big complicated thing that like
it's really really worth understanding. I don't know how to
put it other than that, but I think that it influences,
(44:10):
you know, like my friends are like, how are you
doing this week? And I'm like, I'm kind of fucked.
I'm like lost in thought in a really intense way,
thinking about things that happened one hundred years ago. Like
I I got lost in this story more than most
of the times, and not because some other stories I
see myself in more easily, right, Like I don't I mean,
(44:32):
I know i'd be an anarchist, but I don't know
where I'd be positioned within this story. Whereas like when
I you know, read about like late sixties radical movements,
it's real easy for me to position myself or even
like you know, a lot of nineteenth century stuff, it's
really easy. This one's like messier. But I really am
(44:53):
I don't know, I wish I had my epiphanies, but
all I have is the story so far. The epiphanies
will come later. Any grand epiphanies for us, I.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Mean, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
I it's been I think I said this at the beginning,
It's been a really long time since I've been in
the Russia trenches in terms of like really granularly going
through this revolution.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
But I think.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
I think there's the sort of like pop left conception
of what the Russian Civil War was. It has a
lot of triumphalism in it that really really just completely
ignores how unbelievably bloody it was and how you know,
(45:43):
and how many And this is the thing that like,
you know, you can see this in like the Culture
Revolution too, of like the parts of it that don't
that have just vanished, which is that like almost I
mean not almost all, but enormous numbers of the people
who are being killed by the bulsh or other communis.
This is the same thing in the Cultural Revolution. It's
like like the vast but and this is you know,
(46:04):
I've talked about on other shows, like the vast majority
of people who get killed in the Culture Revolution are
killed by the rebel factions, they're killed by the government.
It's it's this process of you know, and and I
guess in some sense, like I think you can make
this argument that the vulture of revolution like really ends
in the great terror of the purges, because like, from
(46:25):
a macro perspective, what it is is it's this process
of every single person who made the revolution just systematically
being fed into a meet writer and killed.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
And that's a apocalyptically bleak although oddly karmac h everyone
who's going to be involved in putting down the crunch
at revolution.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah, well, I mean that's the Yeah, all all those
people have d nineteen thirty six, nineteen thirty seven next
to their names.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Yeah, we're going to talk a bit more about that
the next one too. But yeah, that is a there's
this thing where people want to say it all went
wrong when Stalin got in charge, you know, and clearly
Stalin is one of history's great monsters. It's almost like, hey,
what was the first behind the bastards? Was that the
Stalin one? Was it Hitler's sex life or was it Hitler? No?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
I think it was about Carl May, the author who
I's obsessed with.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
That I could be wrong, because that was nine hundred
and fifty two thousand years ago. Yeah, the earliest ones
I remember is the Carl May and then Hitler's Drinking Buddies.
I mean Stalin's Drinking Buddies. But I didn't start listening
at the beginning. I just like went back, which is
what you all should do, is go back and listen
(47:46):
to all the because you're not going to get to
hear part six until Wednesday, and so you have almost
twenty four hours maybe forty eight if you listened to
this early enough to go and listen to every episode
of Cool People to Cool Stuff.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
I feel like, well we can, we can. You can
accelerate it to okay, okay, you play one in each
ear and you move it up to like ten times speed.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Well you can't do that.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
That's true. I only go, well one, I can.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I can listen to that. That's not always fun. Yeah,
people were like Oscar, I could read both sides of
the page at once. I'm like, I don't believe you.
But that said, I watch YouTube at about two x speed.
I listen to podcasts at one x speed because I'm
(48:36):
doing something else when I'm listening to a podcast, shout
out to everyone who right now is walking their dog
or cleaning or driving a car. But YouTube, if I
have to like sit down and watch a thing, it's
got to be at least one point five or two
x speed, so I understand people who listen at high speed. Anyway,
(48:57):
You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah, I have a podcast that I'm one of the
people on. It's called dicodapp and here it's about the
present day and how bad it is and how you
can make it less bad. And you can find it
wherever there's podcast. I guess you can't find it on SoundCloud.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Unless you pirate it and then upload it and put
relaxing beats behind it.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
Legally, I don't know if I could advocate that, but
you know, oh, okay, don't do that. Yeah, you can't
do that. It's in fact impossible technologically. No one has
ever overcome this.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
No, all right, well, if you want to. I actually
wrote about a bunch of Russia revolutions stuff on my
substock a couple of weeks ago. By the time you
all hear this, it's called the Lost Promise of the Soviets.
If you're like, man, that's not enough. I need to
hear Margaret go over it again and talk about it
differently and more emotionally. Well, that's where you can do
(49:54):
it and see everyone else on Wednesday. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.