In part four, Margaret finishes her talk with Robert Evans about the time that millions of Ukrainians rose a black flag and went to war against landlords, nationalists, and Bolsheviks.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
the only podcast that is today about an anarchist spy network,
unless you're listening to a different podcast about an anarchist spy
network that came out today, in which case you have
access to podcasts that I don't know about, and you
should tell me about them because they sound cool, unless
you're not allowed to know about them because it's a
spy agency and you're not supposed to know. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest is Robert Evans.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Hi, Robert, Hey, Margaret. You know, I really everyone at
corporate fought with us a lot, and we made that
entire thing the title of this podcast. You said a
lot about how you can't have a title that long.
It's not really a title. Please guys, stop please, But
we just ignored them. We just ignored them and it's
worked out great well.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
We we actually just left them voicemails with the name
of the podcast over and over again until they conceded. Yeah,
and we swore on an armored train.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I'm really glad they were. They funded us buying that
armored train. That's that's come in handy so much more.
Often than I expected it would, I know, I know,
and it worked out against them that we got they
got it for us. So we're on part four of
a four parter about Maria Nikki Farova and anarchy in
the Ukraine, which isn't actually the Ukraine. It's just the
(01:17):
only way that the pun works. We've been through this
and part I think my Ukrainian friends will forgive us
on behalf, you know, for the sake of the pun,
you can justify a lot, I hope.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
So they're they're having a hard time right now, and
I wish them all the luck in the world.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, I wish them all of the luck and a
significantly more of the missiles.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, I hope that they've upgraded from horse drawn machine guns.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
To horse drawn sam morses with guns.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So, if you want to run a war, you need intelligence,
and there were a bunch of anarchists already quite familiar
with intelligence and counterintelligence because they you know, I'll run
a reasonably successful terrorist campaign against the Czars for a
very long time. Take for example, Oh, I should have
done the thing where he make you bring up a photo.
(02:11):
Are you at a computer?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Robert Evans, I have been on computers and I can
be on one again.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
One am I type in I want you to type
in lev l Ev space zado v Zatoff and look
at a photo and tell me if I told you
this is the name wow of a Jewish anarchist gangster spy,
you would not be surprised.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah at all? Well, you know, because you know how
I can tell he was a good gangster. It's just
from this photo. You could not strangle this man. I
don't care what kind of tools you have on hand.
This is an unstranglable man. This guy has an Alex
Jones grade neck, like just astounding, astounding neck game.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
And also he knows that he could kill that photographer
at any moment, but he doesn't want to.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, he chooses not to. But he is confident. He
has the kind of he has the kind of confidence
you only get with you're like, oh yeah, no, I
could strangle that man, but he could not strangle me.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, it can only go one direction. So this man
is real fucking interesting. He is the most spy motherfucker
I have ever seen among the anarchist recks. He was
only twelve when the nineteen oh fives.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Anyway, that sentence ends would have been great, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, yeah, when the nineteen oh five revolution broke out,
but that didn't stop him from joining the revolution, also
being twelve and as twelve, yeah, it also didn't stop
him from having to go to work at a metallurgy factory.
I think he's a machinist when he's.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Twelve, sure, good age for it.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
By nineteen ten, he's seventeen years old and he joins
an anarchist communist bank robber crew and they are lasting.
Like nineteen ten is like past the peak, right, like
nineteen oh eight is when like everyone was getting busted.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
No, it's like it's like being in third wave ska.
Yeah yeah. He he doesn't get popped until nineteen thirteen.
This makes him like the last anarchist bank robber going
at this point. He was released in nineteen seventeen, just
like everyone else, and he hit the ground running. He
fought all over Ukraine. He specialized soon enough in spreading
(04:17):
insurgencies against German occupation armies. So he's a fucking spy
by nineteen nineteen. In March, he and some others, including
Makhno's wife, a woman named Halna Kuzmenko, is the woman
who the machine gunist who kills all the rapists. They
form the contras Vedka, which is the anarchist counterintelligence service.
(04:38):
It's decentralized, it's called together when it's needed for specific tasks.
It mostly avoids becoming basically the checko with the black flag.
We're going to talk about when they fail at that.
But it's a contradiction that they struggle with, how do
we do this without becoming the checko with a black flag?
And what did they do? God, what did they not do?
(05:00):
They tracked down nationalists and white collaborators and captured cities.
That was the first task ever put to them. They
took over a city and they were like, oh, we
probably need someone to figure out who's like trying to
overthrow us. It also ran spies to track the movements
of enemy armies. It foiled assassination attempts. It investigated who
was instigating the programs, like that's part of how Makno
(05:21):
managed to go around and kill all the people putting
on programs, which wasn't They didn't just kill their own
people who are accused of killing of doing programs. They
would like track down a nationalist leader accused of doing
programs and track him down and kill him in the streets,
like not even in a war, just fucking.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Kill that guy.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Fair They organized mass defections from the Red Army to
the Black Army. They robbed banks in White Army territory.
They foiled a white coup within the Black Army. They
also foiled a nationalist coup within the Black Army. Or
I wrote white coup and I meant nationalists coup. I
actually think that's when one of the two, one of
the two. Fair enough, it foiled a coup. So there
(06:00):
was a big typhus outbreak at one point during the war,
and they went behind enemy lines to buy medicine. They
organized units within the White Army to start sabotaging the
White war effort. When the Black Army took the city
of Burdonsk, they did so because of the spied network.
Worked with local fishermen to lead the uprising. It turns
(06:22):
out if you do organizing properly, you could do it
awful lot of the things that people think you need
a nation state to do. Yeah, like it had never
even occurred to me. Can anarchist run a spy network?
But the answers yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Well, there you go. Honestly, there's in some ways I
would say being a spy lends itself very well to
anarchy because it's really easy for your spy network to
be busted or infiltrated if they have a hierarchy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Absolutely. It is unclear how dirty they got their hands,
at least in terms of moral compromises. It had several
incarnations because of the ebb of the flow was really intense,
so they would like like there wouldn't even be a
Black Army for months at a time, and then they'd
get their shit together and have a country again, and
then they would lose their country and then they'd come
back and do it again. But during one era of it,
(07:07):
it was led by this left SR guide. There's actually
a lot of the left srs joined the Black Army
right because they're like anti Bolshevik, but they're socialist revolutionaries.
This left SR guid Dmitri Popoff had a reputation of
torture and executions for a while, and all the anarchists,
basically all of his comrades, were like, you can't do
that anymore, and his actions became more limited. Basically, they
(07:30):
had started to become the Cheka, and then the regular
Black Army stepped in and was like, we're not going
to let you do that. You can only do military
operations now. Makno, for his part, was apparently becoming slightly
tyrannical at this point. He supported the contras Vedka at
their worst, but it was his own staff that kept
(07:50):
him in check. At one point, Makno ordered the contros
Vedka to shut down a Bolshevik paper and shoot the
editorial staff because they had run article against the anarchists,
but his own anarchists subordinates were like, fuck you, we
have freedom of the fucking press in this country, like
in this or I don't if they call it a
country or not, big social organizing space that they had
(08:12):
with millions of people had freedom of the press even
though the leader didn't want them to, which actually shows
part of how they like. That's the checks and balances
in a lot of ways against Makno is that one
he is ideologically committed to anti authoritarianism and even like
running letting Bolsheviks run their papers. Of course the tolerance
(08:35):
paradox right, because yeah they're running articles like we should
have authority, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, that makes sense. It also, this is reminded me
of something, Margaret. Yeah, I think we should launch a
new podcast on this network that's entirely dedicated to the
Olympic gymnasts of the world and hosted by two Czechoslovakian men,
and we'll call it Checks and Balances.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
God damn it, that was a good bit. Yeah. And
it's easy to have moral values when it's easy, but
it's harder to have them when it's hard. And this
is not to condemn Makno specifically. I can see why
he did what he did, but instead it's to like
(09:22):
laud the people who, in the middle of a war
were like, hey, when we say freedom of speech, we
fucking mean freedom of speech. Like, you can kill the
people who are trying to kill you, we can go
to war, we can rob the rich. We can't tell
people that they're not allowed to run a newspaper. So
Marusia by nineteen nineteen, in May, she's back into the fight.
(09:42):
Her and fifty nine of her friends come together to
form a new detachment, including a bunch of anarchists who'd
been chased out of Russia, including her husband, is now
no longer happily working with the Bolsheviks, and I think
this is the first time he's serving under her command,
but I'm not certain. It also includes this new group
of sixty anarchists include a lot of the anarchist spies,
(10:06):
the folks who are experienced specifically in underground activity. Because
these new fighters want to do something different, The war
against the Red Army feels unwinnable, so they build a
clandestine network comparable to what they've been doing after the
nineteen oh five revolution, but they're doing it while a
successful revolution is also happening. The new clandestine network names
(10:29):
its units things like Hurricane and Death, and they run
around set about freeing prisoners and blowing shit up and
calling for people to rise against the Bolsheviks. Makno, for
his part, refuses clandestinity. He has an army in a country,
Why would he fucking do that, right, which also means
he has to play nicer with potential allies, including the
(10:51):
ones who keep fucking him over, like the Bolsheviks. They
just declared him illegal in June nineteen nineteen, and he's
starting to like honestly, it seems like starting to kind
of lose it at this point. I don't fucking blame him.
He sends this guy to go become the new contact
with a supply line and sends him with a ton
of cash and is like, hey, if you fuck up
(11:11):
this accounting, I'm going to shoot you because I don't
want the Bolsheviks to have any excuse to claim we're stealing,
even though the Bolsheviks have already tried to assassinate him.
At this point, the guy who's sent to do the accounting,
he has about three million rubles on him. Mari Usia
tracks him down on a train and is like, hey,
give me that money so he can continue the underground struggle.
(11:33):
I've got thirty armed terrorists with me, okay, and he's
like ah shit, trains leaving Gota Goo bye, and he
like fucks off. He gets away. So mari Usia shows
up to Makno and is like, you need to fund
our underground and he's like, nah, I'm good. We're done
with you accounts here. Very most likely, they pull guns
(11:55):
on each other and he either gives her a quarter
million rubles or he gives are five thousand rubles very
different accounts. So she robs Makno at gunpoint is what happens,
and they either get a fair amount of money or
almost nothing. But her new unit is now financed and
they have a plan. They're going to split into three
(12:17):
groups of twenty. One is going to go to Siberia
to kill the White general there, one is going to
go to Crimea to kill the White general there, and
one's going to head to Kharkoff to free a bunch
of anarchists arrested by the Cheka and blow up the
local chek A headquarters. And not a bad plan.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Not a bad plan, ambitious too, Like I feel pretty
good when I managed to both get in a workout
and go to the grocery store. This is significantly more
ambitious than that.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, the timing doesn't work out mostly, but they they're
really good at the shit. They get a lot of
stuff done. And this was either entirely autonomous from the
macn of Gina according to one group of people, or
it was part of the spy work and connected to it.
So it was clearly not happening with Makno's grace, which
is actually makes it more interesting. Honestly, these sixty are
(13:06):
some of the hardest motherfuckers in the whole war. This
is the if I was making the movie of this,
it would be about these sixty. Take for example, Maxim Chernek,
who was a poor Jewish anarchist barber from Poland. He'd
fought in nineteen oh five in that Black Banner group
from Bali Stock that we've talked about so much on
this show. He went into exile with his partner Rosa
(13:27):
and his kids, instead up a barber shop in Chicago,
and then worked with the IWW. Because you can take
a drink now, because I worked IWW into any story
I fucking want. They're fucking everywhere.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
He went home to Russia in the nineteen seventeen Revolution
and he fought in every fucking theater of that war.
Then he joined that anarchist spy group and he was
staunchly anti Bolshevik. He foiled an assassination attempt against Makno
and then he had to go underground when the Bolsheviks
outlawed the Maknivists, and just to follow him to his
conclusion because he's kind of interesting, and it also traces
(13:59):
one of these three groups of twenty. He joins the
new underground organization and he goes to Siberia to blow
up a general. He finds that the general is already
lost by the time he gets there, so he joins
the local partisan fighters to continue the war. Later in
nineteen twenty one, the Bolsheviks arrest him and he hunger
strikes a bunch. He gets exiled to Siberia and finally
(14:20):
they're like, fine, you can live, just get the fuck
out of Russia. So he moves to Warsaw and he
opens a barber shop, and he keeps helping the now
underground anarchists in Russia. Then he moved to Paris, got
into an argument with Makno about politics, moved to Buenos Aires,
and then disappears from history. So some of these people
survive and get to be barber's and maybe your barber
(14:43):
is an anarchist spy from Russia who knows.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, yeah, mine definitely is. You know, he keeps saying
he was born in Oklahoma, but no, I don't believe him.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Well, it's a city called Oklahoma, Siberia.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Sure, yeah, at Oklahoma, we call it.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah. Yeah. The weather's the same, fewer tornadoes maybe in Siberia.
And so that's that's one of the groups of twenty
They go to Siberia and just get involved in stuff,
but they don't need to defeat the white generals are
I think he's already been arrested by the Bolsheviks and
like he's lost. As for the Go Rescue our Friends group,
(15:22):
they show up to find the anarchists already executed and
the Cheka have already fled the city. I think they're
afraid of retaliation because of what they've just done, but
they might be or just done, and they moved on,
so the anarchists not to be deterred. They go on
to do the thing that like half the anarchists during
this era want to do. And I've done entire long
(15:45):
episodes about people who do about a tenth of what
these people are.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
About to do.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Entire Hollywood movies have been made about people who do
a tenth of what this group is about to do,
and we barely know about it. They moved to Moscow.
They robbed four Bolshevik banks in rapid secession of tens
of millions of rubles. Then they set up a massive
underground network of propaganda and action groups, print shops for propaganda,
print shops for counterfeit documents, safe houses, bomb factories. The
(16:13):
whole deal spread across a dozen Russian and Lotvian cities.
They infiltrated so deep, they infiltrated the Cheka. They spread
propaganda amongst the workers to count the Bolshevik lies about
Makhnov China and the anarchists. And they're just I mean,
their analysis is correct, They say you. The Bolsheviks are
(16:33):
in power in Russia. But what has changed. The factories
in the lands are still not in the hands of
the workers, but in those of the state boss. The
wage worker. The foundation of the bourgeois order continues to exist,
and this is why hunger, cold and unemployment are inevitable.
Because of the necessity to endure everything for a brighter future.
And with the excuse of defending what has already been achieved,
(16:55):
an enormous bureaucratic apparatus has been created. The right to
strike has been abolished, freedom of speech, assembly, and the
press have been eliminated. Wow, And then you know, propaganda's
one thing. The other thing they do is talk a
bomb into a meeting of a ton of Bolshevik leaders,
the Moscow Bolshevik Committee in proper fight club style. They
(17:16):
have the maps of the building because the informants, the
people who work in that building are down with the anarchists.
Sadly Lenin wasn't at the meeting, but they killed twelve
and injured one hundred and fifty of the people conspiring
to rule the working class.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Hey pretty good bombing, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Except here's the problem with almost every bombing that it
was used to justify crackdowns.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Sure, that's what bombings are usually used for, one of
the things.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, one day we're going to do an episode about
the guy who started the Reichstag fire because he actually
was like, oh, an ernest leftist trying to do a
very useful attack on Nazis.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, yeah, just kind of out of other ideas. Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah. The first crackdowns that happened, though, is that the
government because the anarchists don't immediately release the like hey
we did it memo, so they start blaming the whites
and rounding up and like killing all the white prisoners
that they have in the jails, and so the anarchists
have to be like, no, no, no, is us, we
did it. Fuck the whites. We threw the bomb. Oops,
(18:17):
And then the clandestine anarchists are like, all right, we're
going to blow up the Kremlin on the second anniversary
of the October Revolution. This would be the key point
of the movie I would make about this. Every what
important is going to be there. We'll got rid of
them all at once. We need literally a ton of explosives.
So they dutifully start gathering and preparing one ton of bomb.
(18:39):
The Cheka are onto them. I think they caught and
tortured one guy and that led to a list of
names in safe houses. Pretty much the entire Moscow branch.
About sixty people at this point died in gunfights or
in the dungeons of the Cheka. According to the Czech
A report, none of the anarchists surrendered without resistance. One
(19:00):
of them did your friend Gadson flag snake bomb?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Oh good, love it when people play that move.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The last safe house, twenty anarchists fought a two and
a half hour gun battle with the Cheka before they
finally just blew themselves up in a ton of the
checkists at the same time. So ended the Moscow branch.
But here's the thing. Eleven other branches remained, and their
history is literally unwritten. Besides a single article in Ukrainian
(19:29):
that isn't translated to English yet that only covers the
Ukrainian Clendestine resistance set up by this group. This is
the biggest question mark answer I've ever run across while
researching this show, like the biggest deal thing that is
just not known at least two English language sources that
(19:54):
anyone I know can track. But you know what we
are pretty good at in English. It's advertising, that's right.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
That's right. Only done in English, Yeah, the international language
of selling shit to people.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
That's right, or it will be in another language. It's
fine too. Here's some stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
As for Maria Niki Forev, I say the well, I say,
I say the best for last, but it's actually the
least dramatic of any of those three groups of twenty.
She set off to go blow up the White General
and Crimea. It didn't go well for her because the
White secret services recognized her and her husband in the
(20:49):
streets of Sevastopool. On August eleventh, nineteen nineteen, they were
arrested and tried. She was tried for all her crimes
like burning down prisons and killing nationalists. Her husband was
charged for knowing her and not ratting her out. He
was on trial for being married to her again.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
You know, hard to argue he wasn't.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
The single journalist present at the trial says that she
insulted the court and yelled at them, and the only
like the only time she cracked. She cried when she
said goodbye to her husband and they were both shot,
And it's the greatest love story ever told.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
When she died, her hometown was under white control and
the newspaper there wrote about her. One more pillar of
anarchism has been broken, one more idol of blackness has
crashed down from its pedestal. Legends formed around this Czarina
of anarchism. Several times she was wounded, several times her
(21:53):
head was cut off, but like the legendary hydra, she
always grew a new one. She survived and appeared again,
ready to spill more blood. And if now in our region,
the offspring of the makan nov China, the remnants of
this poisonous evil are still trying to prevent the rebirth
of normal society and are still striving to re establish
(22:14):
the bloody rule of Makno. This latest blow means we
are witnessing the funeral procession at the grave of the
Makhnovchina after they were busy having a funeral procession for
themselves and being utterly destroyed. The insurrectionary Army of the
Maknuvchina retook Alexandrov's two weeks after that article was written,
and then they went around and gave everyone equal economic
(22:35):
and political opportunity. And actually that the peak of Makinovchina
came after that, I believe, okay, so, Marianniki Forov died
and for one hundred years or so her legacy was lost.
There's an incredible amount of lost history from this time period,
and I've never run across so recent an event with
(22:56):
so many unknowns left to historians. That she was long
for so long is fascinating, because she was absolutely a
legend in her time. She was the many headed hydra
of anarchy. And after she died, partisan women all over
Russian Ukraine took her name as their own. They wouldn't
be Maria Niki Farova, they'd be Marusia something. It became
(23:18):
a common first name for revolutionists of various kinds, Marusia Chernea,
which means black. Maria commanded a different cavalry regiment in
the insurgent Army of Ukraine. I don't know anything more
about her. I don't know who cares about her. She
was killed in battle by the Reds or the peasant
rebel Mariusiya Kosova, which I think was in the Green Army,
(23:40):
those peasants who were like, fuck the Reds, fuck the
white stuff, stealing all our shit, you motherfuckers, kind of
the brotherhood without banners for like the Game of Thrones. Yeah,
honestly might have the highest moral ground of any army
in the Civil Wars, the Green Army as much as
like the Black Armies, like my team, the like, we
just don't want you to come here and steal a
(24:00):
lot of shit, you motherfuckers. People, pretty good leg to
stand on.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
There was also a Ukrainian nationalist school teacher, Mariusia Sokolovaska,
who inherited command of a cavalry unit from her dead
brother who took the name, and I can only imagine
there were countless more women leading armies and fighting in them,
like that dead woman in leather who wasn't Maria Niki Farovaya,
because I doubt all of them or even most of them,
(24:27):
would have taken her name after Niki Farova's death. These
clandestine networks continued, though they're also lost to history. The
Makinovchina continues to Makno's wife. I think his second wife,
Helena Kuzmenko, the one we've talked about a couple times.
She was a school teacher in Juliapulia. She taught the
history of Ukraine and she taught the Ukrainian language. This
(24:47):
is before the war. She helped form that spy network.
She was a machine gunner. She shot the anarchist who
committed rape. She reformed education within anarchist controlled spaces, inspired
by veteran of the Pod, the Spanish anarchist educational for
reformer Francisco Ferrar, and the schools in the area were
run by teacher parent councils. Kids were given free food
at school, and it was, by all accounts like wildly
(25:09):
popular and successful, although it's possible that the reason those
can sow popular is because the kids got food at school,
like wild idea, much like how the Black Panthers terrified
the US government by offering free breakfast.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
That's the scariest thing you can do.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, and so Helena she kind of did it all.
She gets painted as a nationalist by history, especially by
Bolshevik history. Because she unashamedly promoted Ukrainianization and taught Ukrainian
and was into saving Ukrainian as a distinct culture from Russia.
She tried to build bridges between the nationalists and the
Makin of China, but then some nationalists tried to stage
(25:46):
a coup in the movement and makanuv China reaffirmed its
position as internationalists. And this doesn't stop Ukrainianization. It just
it's about the bigotry around it. According to the Soviets,
the Makin of China became more and more nationalists as
the anarchist ideologues left the movement. But this is a lie,
at least according to Makno. Makno says that this is
(26:07):
the Bolsheviks confusing autonomy with nationalism. And I feel like
that's like such a That's a point that really stuck
with me about being like, look, you can you don't
have to be like a nationalist in the negative connotation
version of that word, to be like, hey, maybe us
the oppressed ethnic group Ukrainians could speak our own language,
(26:27):
that'd be okay. When the Red Army invaded Maknovist Ukraine
in nineteen twenty, they brought with it the Red Terror.
Everyone was sick with Typhus at this point, and a
ton of the anarchists were shot in their bed lev
that Jewish anarchist spy guy we were talking about before
he gets out and the countris Vednik goes underground and
they outlast the falling of the Insurgent Army. And it's
(26:49):
actually through their work that the Insurgent Army is able
to pick back up, because what they did while their
underground spies is they tracked Red Army movements and then
robbed the Red Army of two million rubles and ten
machine guns, which is apparently enough to start an army.
I don't know what a rubul looks like. I always
imagine it looks like the money in Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's a gem of some sort.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah yeah, it's probably because it sounds like ruby.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
But whatever.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Meanwhile, the Cheka's running around assassinating peasants suspected of anarchism.
Thousands of Maknivists are being executed without trial. So this
is where I know that the Macnivists start doing purges,
and I can't say I'd be above doing them at
this myself. At this point, the Maknivists now start killing
all the Bolsheviks they can find, purging all the state
(27:37):
officials who are Bolsheviks. A thousand Bolshevik officials are killed
by these reprisals, after about two thousand anarchists are killed
for being anarchists, and there are other histories about the
remainder of the Market of China. But by August nineteen
twenty one, the Reds had defeated the anarchist project and
Makno Kuzmenko, his wife, and others fled the rest of
(27:58):
their lives honestly not really happy periods. The anarchists were
held in an a tournament camp in Poland where they
tried to organize an anarchist revolution because they're them, and
everyone kept trying to extradite them all while they were
in prison for being suspected of trying to organize a
Bolshevik uprising in Poland, which is really funny because they
(28:18):
were trying to organize an uprising, it just wasn't Bolshevik,
and the Polish are like, we think you're trying to
do a Bolshevism. While she's in prison, she gives birth
to her and Makno's daughter, Elena. They were found not guilty,
to everyone's surprise, and they moved to Paris. By nineteen
twenty seven, they were divorced, according to one source, but
(28:39):
they stayed close. She was with him at his death.
Nestor Makno died poor in Paris of tuberculosis at the
age of forty five. He'd spent his remaining years defending
himself against Bolshevik lies that he'd been anti Semitic, Like
that was like a major thing that he had to
do with his time was go around and like over
and over again and be like, hey, here's all of
(29:02):
the evidence and all of these Jewish anarchists who were
with me, who saw me kill people for programming, And
every time you give this talk, like everyone would stand
up and be like, no, we were there. He didn't
do that. And now through all throughout history, that's still
what people have to do. What living he made he
made as a shoemaker and as an interior decorator. While
(29:25):
he was in Paris. He was also supported by the
money from his his wife was a cleaner, or his
ex wife was a cleaner, and she's giving him money.
He also gets this very modest stipend raised by Spanish
anarchists with the CNT. Whatever money he got, he spent
on his daughter Helenna. Once he knew he was going
to die soon anyway, he returned to drinking. Because there's
(29:48):
a lot of arguments about like whether or not he
was a drunk.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
You know, Warren Zevon made a similar choice.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, wait, who's up?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Zivon always a musician, I like a lot oh okay,
alcoholic for a long time. It sobered up, and then
when he got cancer was like, well I'm going back
to it.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah, So we returned to drinking because he was dead anyway,
and his last words was to his daughter and they
are be healthy and happy, my daughter. And I think
that that tells like, because people have these like the
way that people paint men like him is these like
one completely focused on the revolution, nothing else exists for them,
(30:31):
like you know, one sided fanatics, and he's kind of
a fanatic, but he's not one sided.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
It just makes me happy that he, yeah, loved his daughter. Unfortunately,
his command to his daughter didn't work. His daughter e Lenna,
as well as his wife and or ex wife well
at this point widow, they were deported to Nazi Germany
and forced to do slave labor for the Nazis. Well shit,
When the Soviets liberated Germany, the two women were arrested
(31:03):
for being Nazi collaborators and they were sentenced to hard
labor for being counter revolutionaries. The fact that they were
related to Makno was a big part of that.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah, I'll bet isn't that a fuck?
Speaker 2 (31:14):
And then after Stalin died, mother and daughter reunited. Mother
worked in a cotton factory until she died in nineteen
seventy eight. Elena lived until nineteen ninety three. Her entire life,
her family lineage was used to deny her jobs and
opportunities in Soviet Russia. She said that she chose to
never have children because she didn't want them to suffer
(31:35):
the same family legacy that she had. And that's like,
not that I think people should have kids that they
don't want to, but it's like fucking heartbreaking to think about, Like, like,
her father's a fucking hero, you know. Yeah, she swore
off politics, but she did slap a man who called
her father a Bandit fair enough, And if you want
(31:56):
to slap a man.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Slap the men who sponsor this show with your wallet.
Thus I don't know, yeah by these ads.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Yeah, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
The Maginivists in exile kept up the fight for years.
Lev the spy, who might get his own episodes if
I can find out enough about him, because I I
think once I saw that photo, everyone should go google him. Well,
I think once I saw that photo, it's just like
that's a type of guy I didn't know existed in
anarchy form, And I'm really interested.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It's fascinating because like, yeah, that type of guy you expect,
Like that's about a third of professional wrestlers. And it's
also guys who like kill people for the mob. And
I'm glad that we have our own version of that
kind of guy. Yeah. If you want to know who
would have who should have played this dude in a
TV show? During that one episode of T ANDNG that
(32:57):
one of the guys who plays a holideck gangster looks
act like this.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
He does look like a holiday gangster.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Up, he looks like a holideck gangst.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yes, yeah, God see if I had if I if
they gave me Star Trek to write, I would absolutely
it would. I wouldn't necessarily be like, here's the whole Now,
the Federation's anarchists. Whatever, No, the federation should do what
the Federation does. I love it. It's interesting. No, what
would be is you'd have a captain who is obsessed
with the Makanov China and spends all of their time
(33:28):
in the Holi deck, being in not even being the
leader of it, just being in the free convent Rosina
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah. Yeah, we're in those leathers.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So probably Lev keeps the fire going his entire life.
He becomes a double agent and then a triple agent spy,
but he stays in anarchist the entire time. He's the
one who organized the retreat of the Macnavists into Romania
in nineteen twenty one. And the way that they break
(34:01):
out of Ukraine is that they dress up as Red
Army soldiers and then like ambush the border guards and
disarm them like fucking cartoon style. They don't show up
and gun them down. They like show up, pull guns
and like disarm them and probably tie them up with
towels or whatever.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
In Romania, he sets up a Maknivist foreign center where
they would all meet and try to figure out how
to get back into Ukraine and get Magnev China going again.
Soon enough, he's a spy for the Romanian government and
he does this just so that they send him back
into Ukraine. He's like, oh, he make me a spy,
put me back in Ukraine, get me back in that fight.
(34:39):
I'm totally I hate the Bolsheviks, which is true, Get
me back in the fight. So as soon as they
send him into Ukraine, he shows up at the Bolsheviks
and he's like, hey, I'm a Romanian spy, but I'm
actually on your side. Sign me up. I'm going to
be a Bolshevik spy. And so they're like, yeah, we'll
totally take you as a double agent. By that, he's
now a triple agent. And then he gets recruited by
(35:02):
the Soviets and he has to like prove his value.
So he does it by like assassinating a French spy
and they get him installed back in fucking Romania as
a spy for the Soviets. And at this point you're like, oh,
maybe it's just the spy for the Soviet It's a
lot of anarchists became Bolsheviks in order to not be
killed you know whatever. No, as soon as he's back
in Romania, he starts using all of his contacts to
(35:24):
smuggle all the Maknivists back into Ukraine so that they
can try and fucking have a revolution again. He will,
this man will not give up. Unfortunately, there's a thing
called the Great Purge in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Ah well, yes, and all.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
The Macinivs he smuggled back into the country are caught
up in the Great Purge, including lev himself. He was
executed on September twenty fifth, nineteen thirty eight. His daughter
died fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis. His
son outlived the Soviet union man. And that's the story. Well,
one story about Marusia, Nikki Farova, Makhnovchina and love.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
I just like this stuff is like sat in my brain,
heavier than most stuff I've researched for this show. Almost
everything I research for the show ends up changing something
a little fundamentally about how I see the world. Spending
so long, I mean whenever people have their whole careers
around this, but for me, months and months is a
(36:29):
very long time. Spending so long in the history of
the Russian Civil War and the Russian Revolution has like
really influenced how I think about power and possibility. And
I don't have like conclusions out of it, but I
just find it fascinating. And I find her in particular fascinating.
I used to the first time I read about her,
(36:50):
I was like, I'm usually not the type of person
who likes the more violent anarchists and revolutionaries, Like I'm
much more of the like you know, I'm not a pacifist,
but I'm usually drawn to the people who are like
looking to to focus on the positive program. And uh,
(37:11):
you know, and I'm like, why am I so drawn
to this person? And I think part of the reason
I'm so drawn to her is her unrelenting spirit. Like
I think for her, it wasn't that she was driven
towards violence. I think this so she was driven towards
like like she kept showing up and being like, hey, Mack,
no going to You're gonna keep to your word, you know,
Like she just like was like this like conscience in
(37:33):
people's minds of just like like a an arc type
of yeah of this idea.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Well, I guess we should all seek to be that
have that kind of have the kind of influence to
where like you live on because you've permanently carved a
space for your like like to to be someone of
such strong principle that that echo of you stays alive
in other people forever. Is I don't know something to
(38:06):
aspire here to. I guess, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not
even like it's not even about her actions. Her actions only.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Make sense in the context and when she's doing them, yeaight,
But about this unrelenting spirit of like, oh no, like
she doesn't do what is easy. Ever, it's that whole
Like it's the Marines, right who are like, oh no,
man left behind or whatever, right, Like we rarely see
that actually carried out. And the fact that like again
(38:37):
and again, she was like, well they have prisoners, so
we're going to fight them because we have to rescue
our own. Like solidarity is like fundamental to her and
I like her. Yeah, that's that's my I'll probably stop
talking about the Russian Revolution now and go back to
(39:00):
other things in the very near future. Yeah, thanks everyone
for listening as I spend I guess that's ten parts
total so far.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I mean, it was a lot of It's an important
thing you can't really study it too much. It's one
of those it's like a Moby Dick kind of thing,
where like it's such a big thing that most of
the answers to most of the problems that are somewhere
hidden inside that because there's such a complicated human endeavor adventure.
(39:35):
I don't know, it's a hyper object in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yeah, and there's this thing I've been talking to a
lot of people about like why history matters. And there's
two things that is like really stuck with me about it,
because like right now, the movements that are happening right
now are much more important than the movements that are
like dead and gone right and we don't necessarily need
to copy either labels, their ideologies or their practices of
(40:01):
the stuff that's come before. But I realized history matters
because if you're like trying to catch a ball and
someone throws a ball and you know where the ball is,
but you don't know where the ball came from. You
can't create the trajectory in your head. You have to
see it in motion to see the trajectory, you know,
And so seeing the origin of different ideas gives you
(40:23):
a really good idea about like where those ideas have
gone from where they started, and that gives you an
idea of where they're going, not a certainty. And so
the trajectory thing has always been a reason that I've
really cared about history. But then the other thing is
that I keep thinking about like people are like, oh,
this stuff doesn't matter. All that matters is right now,
and I'm like, well, if someone wants to do a
(40:43):
science experiment, it's useful to be able to be like, hey,
so here's similar science experiments that people have run. Here's
the variables that were in use during those experiments. It's
useful to know. And of course I say this, my
job is to talk about history, but it's really influenced me.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad it's certainly having an influence
on me. There's there's so much to unpack here, and
I kind of think there's no too much that you
can spend staring into this. Yeah, yeah, I have my
own We've been we've delved back in you and I
the story of the German Left and their their weird
(41:27):
embrace of pedophilia, and I kind of keep pouring into
it for the same reason. It's like a moral hyper object,
you know, and there's there's almost almost no end to
what you can pull out of that because of the
big a thing it is.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
And it's awkward because that one has also been sitting
really heavily in my mind and not just a heavy subject,
but because like what it means about power and what
it means about care and like taking care of each
other and like, and that one's like funny because it's
like why both of these are things that are hard
to bring up at dinner conversations, you know, like I
(42:04):
can't be like, hey, let's talk about the German lefts
embrace of pedophilia after World War Two, like not a
not a good dinner conversation, but also even among like
some of my friends. I you know, I showed up
at one of my friend's houses recently and it's someone
I love talking to history about history with two whatever,
and and I was like, hey, can I ask you
this question about in nineteen eighteen when the anarchists disarmed
(42:27):
the uh, you know, disarmed the provisional government or whatever,
and we realized we were like we got way for everyone.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Else to go to bed.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
No one else wants to sit at this dinner conversation
as we talk about this. So it's hard sometimes to
get into the nitty gritty of it, but I really
like this phrasing, the hyper object thing that, Yeah, there's
certain certain things that use the more you pour into it,
the more you glean from it, and it that and
the things that you pull out of it aren't necessarily
(42:55):
always what you expect to pull out of it.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
No, No, I think a lot about that, that mister
quote about death where he's like, it's a thing people
don't like to talk about, but it's also fundamentally human.
And anything that's fundamentally human is mentionable, and anything that's
mentionable is manageable.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
I like that. Yeah, and even like this this Russian
Civil War thing, It's like, at the end of the day,
the main story of the Russian Civil War is millions
of people died for a bunch of different people who
were fanatics ideologies, and it was mostly bad. And then
(43:35):
finding the things like within that that are interesting. Oh
it's messy, but yeah, Well, anyway, have you got anything
a plug?
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Uh, We've got a new podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame,
about what happens after people become the Internet's main character.
I have a novel called After the Revolution, and we
also have god so many other cool Zone podcasts. Catch
them all.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, and I have a book coming out in September
called The Sapling Cage. It comes up from from this press.
It's being kickstarted in June twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
A hyper objective quality.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Oh thanks, And this summer I'm going to write the
sequel to it before the first book comes out, because
they lot a trilogy and I have to present them
with two more books. But they're going to be good.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
So I will see you all next week when we
talk about almost certainly not the Russian Revolution. That's my
almost promise.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, maybe there will be another Russian revolution by that
point and we can just sew an episode on that one. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Then it'll be another.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Quick one, real quickie. You knock that out in about
a day and a half.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah. Hey, you know that February revolution was fast. So
if you're listening in Russia, short months, you got a chance. Yeah, well,
banner drop for you over here in America.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Sure, absolutely, we've.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Got this wa Actually, America'll probably send you guns.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
We'll send everybody guns. It's what we do.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah, good guy, bad guy whatever, All right, bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
the only podcast that is today about an anarchist spy network,
unless you're listening to a different podcast about an anarchist spy
network that came out today, in which case you have
access to podcasts that I don't know about, and you
should tell me about them because they sound cool, unless
you're not allowed to know about them because it's a
spy agency and you're not supposed to know. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest is Robert Evans.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Hi, Robert, Hey, Margaret. You know, I really everyone at
corporate fought with us a lot, and we made that
entire thing the title of this podcast. You said a
lot about how you can't have a title that long.
It's not really a title. Please guys, stop please, But
we just ignored them. We just ignored them and it's
worked out great well.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
We we actually just left them voicemails with the name
of the podcast over and over again until they conceded. Yeah,
and we swore on an armored train.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I'm really glad they were. They funded us buying that
armored train. That's that's come in handy so much more.
Often than I expected it would, I know, I know,
and it worked out against them that we got they
got it for us. So we're on part four of
a four parter about Maria Nikki Farova and anarchy in
the Ukraine, which isn't actually the Ukraine. It's just the
(01:17):
only way that the pun works. We've been through this
and part I think my Ukrainian friends will forgive us
on behalf, you know, for the sake of the pun,
you can justify a lot, I hope.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
So they're they're having a hard time right now, and
I wish them all the luck in the world.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, I wish them all of the luck and a
significantly more of the missiles.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, I hope that they've upgraded from horse drawn machine guns.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
To horse drawn sam morses with guns.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So, if you want to run a war, you need intelligence,
and there were a bunch of anarchists already quite familiar
with intelligence and counterintelligence because they you know, I'll run
a reasonably successful terrorist campaign against the Czars for a
very long time. Take for example, Oh, I should have
done the thing where he make you bring up a photo.
(02:11):
Are you at a computer?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Robert Evans, I have been on computers and I can
be on one again.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
One am I type in I want you to type
in lev l Ev space zado v Zatoff and look
at a photo and tell me if I told you
this is the name wow of a Jewish anarchist gangster spy,
you would not be surprised.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah at all? Well, you know, because you know how
I can tell he was a good gangster. It's just
from this photo. You could not strangle this man. I
don't care what kind of tools you have on hand.
This is an unstranglable man. This guy has an Alex
Jones grade neck, like just astounding, astounding neck game.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
And also he knows that he could kill that photographer
at any moment, but he doesn't want to.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, he chooses not to. But he is confident. He
has the kind of he has the kind of confidence
you only get with you're like, oh yeah, no, I
could strangle that man, but he could not strangle me.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, it can only go one direction. So this man
is real fucking interesting. He is the most spy motherfucker
I have ever seen among the anarchist recks. He was
only twelve when the nineteen oh fives.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Anyway, that sentence ends would have been great, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, yeah, when the nineteen oh five revolution broke out,
but that didn't stop him from joining the revolution, also
being twelve and as twelve, yeah, it also didn't stop
him from having to go to work at a metallurgy factory.
I think he's a machinist when he's.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Twelve, sure, good age for it.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
By nineteen ten, he's seventeen years old and he joins
an anarchist communist bank robber crew and they are lasting.
Like nineteen ten is like past the peak, right, like
nineteen oh eight is when like everyone was getting busted.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
No, it's like it's like being in third wave ska.
Yeah yeah. He he doesn't get popped until nineteen thirteen.
This makes him like the last anarchist bank robber going
at this point. He was released in nineteen seventeen, just
like everyone else, and he hit the ground running. He
fought all over Ukraine. He specialized soon enough in spreading
(04:17):
insurgencies against German occupation armies. So he's a fucking spy
by nineteen nineteen. In March, he and some others, including
Makhno's wife, a woman named Halna Kuzmenko, is the woman
who the machine gunist who kills all the rapists. They
form the contras Vedka, which is the anarchist counterintelligence service.
(04:38):
It's decentralized, it's called together when it's needed for specific tasks.
It mostly avoids becoming basically the checko with the black flag.
We're going to talk about when they fail at that.
But it's a contradiction that they struggle with, how do
we do this without becoming the checko with a black flag?
And what did they do? God, what did they not do?
(05:00):
They tracked down nationalists and white collaborators and captured cities.
That was the first task ever put to them. They
took over a city and they were like, oh, we
probably need someone to figure out who's like trying to
overthrow us. It also ran spies to track the movements
of enemy armies. It foiled assassination attempts. It investigated who
was instigating the programs, like that's part of how Makno
(05:21):
managed to go around and kill all the people putting
on programs, which wasn't They didn't just kill their own
people who are accused of killing of doing programs. They
would like track down a nationalist leader accused of doing
programs and track him down and kill him in the streets,
like not even in a war, just fucking.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Kill that guy.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Fair They organized mass defections from the Red Army to
the Black Army. They robbed banks in White Army territory.
They foiled a white coup within the Black Army. They
also foiled a nationalist coup within the Black Army. Or
I wrote white coup and I meant nationalists coup. I
actually think that's when one of the two, one of
the two. Fair enough, it foiled a coup. So there
(06:00):
was a big typhus outbreak at one point during the war,
and they went behind enemy lines to buy medicine. They
organized units within the White Army to start sabotaging the
White war effort. When the Black Army took the city
of Burdonsk, they did so because of the spied network.
Worked with local fishermen to lead the uprising. It turns
(06:22):
out if you do organizing properly, you could do it
awful lot of the things that people think you need
a nation state to do. Yeah, like it had never
even occurred to me. Can anarchist run a spy network?
But the answers yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Well, there you go. Honestly, there's in some ways I
would say being a spy lends itself very well to
anarchy because it's really easy for your spy network to
be busted or infiltrated if they have a hierarchy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Absolutely. It is unclear how dirty they got their hands,
at least in terms of moral compromises. It had several
incarnations because of the ebb of the flow was really intense,
so they would like like there wouldn't even be a
Black Army for months at a time, and then they'd
get their shit together and have a country again, and
then they would lose their country and then they'd come
back and do it again. But during one era of it,
(07:07):
it was led by this left SR guide. There's actually
a lot of the left srs joined the Black Army
right because they're like anti Bolshevik, but they're socialist revolutionaries.
This left SR guid Dmitri Popoff had a reputation of
torture and executions for a while, and all the anarchists,
basically all of his comrades, were like, you can't do
that anymore, and his actions became more limited. Basically, they
(07:30):
had started to become the Cheka, and then the regular
Black Army stepped in and was like, we're not going
to let you do that. You can only do military
operations now. Makno, for his part, was apparently becoming slightly
tyrannical at this point. He supported the contras Vedka at
their worst, but it was his own staff that kept
(07:50):
him in check. At one point, Makno ordered the contros
Vedka to shut down a Bolshevik paper and shoot the
editorial staff because they had run article against the anarchists,
but his own anarchists subordinates were like, fuck you, we
have freedom of the fucking press in this country, like
in this or I don't if they call it a
country or not, big social organizing space that they had
(08:12):
with millions of people had freedom of the press even
though the leader didn't want them to, which actually shows
part of how they like. That's the checks and balances
in a lot of ways against Makno is that one
he is ideologically committed to anti authoritarianism and even like
running letting Bolsheviks run their papers. Of course the tolerance
(08:35):
paradox right, because yeah they're running articles like we should
have authority, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, that makes sense. It also, this is reminded me
of something, Margaret. Yeah, I think we should launch a
new podcast on this network that's entirely dedicated to the
Olympic gymnasts of the world and hosted by two Czechoslovakian men,
and we'll call it Checks and Balances.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
God damn it, that was a good bit. Yeah. And
it's easy to have moral values when it's easy, but
it's harder to have them when it's hard. And this
is not to condemn Makno specifically. I can see why
he did what he did, but instead it's to like
(09:22):
laud the people who, in the middle of a war
were like, hey, when we say freedom of speech, we
fucking mean freedom of speech. Like, you can kill the
people who are trying to kill you, we can go
to war, we can rob the rich. We can't tell
people that they're not allowed to run a newspaper. So
Marusia by nineteen nineteen, in May, she's back into the fight.
(09:42):
Her and fifty nine of her friends come together to
form a new detachment, including a bunch of anarchists who'd
been chased out of Russia, including her husband, is now
no longer happily working with the Bolsheviks, and I think
this is the first time he's serving under her command,
but I'm not certain. It also includes this new group
of sixty anarchists include a lot of the anarchist spies,
(10:06):
the folks who are experienced specifically in underground activity. Because
these new fighters want to do something different, The war
against the Red Army feels unwinnable, so they build a
clandestine network comparable to what they've been doing after the
nineteen oh five revolution, but they're doing it while a
successful revolution is also happening. The new clandestine network names
(10:29):
its units things like Hurricane and Death, and they run
around set about freeing prisoners and blowing shit up and
calling for people to rise against the Bolsheviks. Makno, for
his part, refuses clandestinity. He has an army in a country,
Why would he fucking do that, right, which also means
he has to play nicer with potential allies, including the
(10:51):
ones who keep fucking him over, like the Bolsheviks. They
just declared him illegal in June nineteen nineteen, and he's
starting to like honestly, it seems like starting to kind
of lose it at this point. I don't fucking blame him.
He sends this guy to go become the new contact
with a supply line and sends him with a ton
of cash and is like, hey, if you fuck up
(11:11):
this accounting, I'm going to shoot you because I don't
want the Bolsheviks to have any excuse to claim we're stealing,
even though the Bolsheviks have already tried to assassinate him.
At this point, the guy who's sent to do the accounting,
he has about three million rubles on him. Mari Usia
tracks him down on a train and is like, hey,
give me that money so he can continue the underground struggle.
(11:33):
I've got thirty armed terrorists with me, okay, and he's
like ah shit, trains leaving Gota Goo bye, and he
like fucks off. He gets away. So mari Usia shows
up to Makno and is like, you need to fund
our underground and he's like, nah, I'm good. We're done
with you accounts here. Very most likely, they pull guns
(11:55):
on each other and he either gives her a quarter
million rubles or he gives are five thousand rubles very
different accounts. So she robs Makno at gunpoint is what happens,
and they either get a fair amount of money or
almost nothing. But her new unit is now financed and
they have a plan. They're going to split into three
(12:17):
groups of twenty. One is going to go to Siberia
to kill the White general there, one is going to
go to Crimea to kill the White general there, and
one's going to head to Kharkoff to free a bunch
of anarchists arrested by the Cheka and blow up the
local chek A headquarters. And not a bad plan.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Not a bad plan, ambitious too, Like I feel pretty
good when I managed to both get in a workout
and go to the grocery store. This is significantly more
ambitious than that.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, the timing doesn't work out mostly, but they they're
really good at the shit. They get a lot of
stuff done. And this was either entirely autonomous from the
macn of Gina according to one group of people, or
it was part of the spy work and connected to it.
So it was clearly not happening with Makno's grace, which
is actually makes it more interesting. Honestly, these sixty are
(13:06):
some of the hardest motherfuckers in the whole war. This
is the if I was making the movie of this,
it would be about these sixty. Take for example, Maxim Chernek,
who was a poor Jewish anarchist barber from Poland. He'd
fought in nineteen oh five in that Black Banner group
from Bali Stock that we've talked about so much on
this show. He went into exile with his partner Rosa
(13:27):
and his kids, instead up a barber shop in Chicago,
and then worked with the IWW. Because you can take
a drink now, because I worked IWW into any story
I fucking want. They're fucking everywhere.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
He went home to Russia in the nineteen seventeen Revolution
and he fought in every fucking theater of that war.
Then he joined that anarchist spy group and he was
staunchly anti Bolshevik. He foiled an assassination attempt against Makno
and then he had to go underground when the Bolsheviks
outlawed the Maknivists, and just to follow him to his
conclusion because he's kind of interesting, and it also traces
(13:59):
one of these three groups of twenty. He joins the
new underground organization and he goes to Siberia to blow
up a general. He finds that the general is already
lost by the time he gets there, so he joins
the local partisan fighters to continue the war. Later in
nineteen twenty one, the Bolsheviks arrest him and he hunger
strikes a bunch. He gets exiled to Siberia and finally
(14:20):
they're like, fine, you can live, just get the fuck
out of Russia. So he moves to Warsaw and he
opens a barber shop, and he keeps helping the now
underground anarchists in Russia. Then he moved to Paris, got
into an argument with Makno about politics, moved to Buenos Aires,
and then disappears from history. So some of these people
survive and get to be barber's and maybe your barber
(14:43):
is an anarchist spy from Russia who knows.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, yeah, mine definitely is. You know, he keeps saying
he was born in Oklahoma, but no, I don't believe him.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Well, it's a city called Oklahoma, Siberia.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Sure, yeah, at Oklahoma, we call it.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah. Yeah. The weather's the same, fewer tornadoes maybe in Siberia.
And so that's that's one of the groups of twenty
They go to Siberia and just get involved in stuff,
but they don't need to defeat the white generals are
I think he's already been arrested by the Bolsheviks and
like he's lost. As for the Go Rescue our Friends group,
(15:22):
they show up to find the anarchists already executed and
the Cheka have already fled the city. I think they're
afraid of retaliation because of what they've just done, but
they might be or just done, and they moved on,
so the anarchists not to be deterred. They go on
to do the thing that like half the anarchists during
this era want to do. And I've done entire long
(15:45):
episodes about people who do about a tenth of what
these people are.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
About to do.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Entire Hollywood movies have been made about people who do
a tenth of what this group is about to do,
and we barely know about it. They moved to Moscow.
They robbed four Bolshevik banks in rapid secession of tens
of millions of rubles. Then they set up a massive
underground network of propaganda and action groups, print shops for propaganda,
print shops for counterfeit documents, safe houses, bomb factories. The
(16:13):
whole deal spread across a dozen Russian and Lotvian cities.
They infiltrated so deep, they infiltrated the Cheka. They spread
propaganda amongst the workers to count the Bolshevik lies about
Makhnov China and the anarchists. And they're just I mean,
their analysis is correct, They say you. The Bolsheviks are
(16:33):
in power in Russia. But what has changed. The factories
in the lands are still not in the hands of
the workers, but in those of the state boss. The
wage worker. The foundation of the bourgeois order continues to exist,
and this is why hunger, cold and unemployment are inevitable.
Because of the necessity to endure everything for a brighter future.
And with the excuse of defending what has already been achieved,
(16:55):
an enormous bureaucratic apparatus has been created. The right to
strike has been abolished, freedom of speech, assembly, and the
press have been eliminated. Wow, And then you know, propaganda's
one thing. The other thing they do is talk a
bomb into a meeting of a ton of Bolshevik leaders,
the Moscow Bolshevik Committee in proper fight club style. They
(17:16):
have the maps of the building because the informants, the
people who work in that building are down with the anarchists.
Sadly Lenin wasn't at the meeting, but they killed twelve
and injured one hundred and fifty of the people conspiring
to rule the working class.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Hey pretty good bombing, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Except here's the problem with almost every bombing that it
was used to justify crackdowns.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Sure, that's what bombings are usually used for, one of
the things.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, one day we're going to do an episode about
the guy who started the Reichstag fire because he actually
was like, oh, an ernest leftist trying to do a
very useful attack on Nazis.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, yeah, just kind of out of other ideas. Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah. The first crackdowns that happened, though, is that the
government because the anarchists don't immediately release the like hey
we did it memo, so they start blaming the whites
and rounding up and like killing all the white prisoners
that they have in the jails, and so the anarchists
have to be like, no, no, no, is us, we
did it. Fuck the whites. We threw the bomb. Oops,
(18:17):
And then the clandestine anarchists are like, all right, we're
going to blow up the Kremlin on the second anniversary
of the October Revolution. This would be the key point
of the movie I would make about this. Every what
important is going to be there. We'll got rid of
them all at once. We need literally a ton of explosives.
So they dutifully start gathering and preparing one ton of bomb.
(18:39):
The Cheka are onto them. I think they caught and
tortured one guy and that led to a list of
names in safe houses. Pretty much the entire Moscow branch.
About sixty people at this point died in gunfights or
in the dungeons of the Cheka. According to the Czech
A report, none of the anarchists surrendered without resistance. One
(19:00):
of them did your friend Gadson flag snake bomb?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Oh good, love it when people play that move.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The last safe house, twenty anarchists fought a two and
a half hour gun battle with the Cheka before they
finally just blew themselves up in a ton of the
checkists at the same time. So ended the Moscow branch.
But here's the thing. Eleven other branches remained, and their
history is literally unwritten. Besides a single article in Ukrainian
(19:29):
that isn't translated to English yet that only covers the
Ukrainian Clendestine resistance set up by this group. This is
the biggest question mark answer I've ever run across while
researching this show, like the biggest deal thing that is
just not known at least two English language sources that
(19:54):
anyone I know can track. But you know what we
are pretty good at in English. It's advertising, that's right.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
That's right. Only done in English, Yeah, the international language
of selling shit to people.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
That's right, or it will be in another language. It's
fine too. Here's some stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
As for Maria Niki Forev, I say the well, I say,
I say the best for last, but it's actually the
least dramatic of any of those three groups of twenty.
She set off to go blow up the White General
and Crimea. It didn't go well for her because the
White secret services recognized her and her husband in the
(20:49):
streets of Sevastopool. On August eleventh, nineteen nineteen, they were
arrested and tried. She was tried for all her crimes
like burning down prisons and killing nationalists. Her husband was
charged for knowing her and not ratting her out. He
was on trial for being married to her again.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
You know, hard to argue he wasn't.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
The single journalist present at the trial says that she
insulted the court and yelled at them, and the only
like the only time she cracked. She cried when she
said goodbye to her husband and they were both shot,
And it's the greatest love story ever told.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
When she died, her hometown was under white control and
the newspaper there wrote about her. One more pillar of
anarchism has been broken, one more idol of blackness has
crashed down from its pedestal. Legends formed around this Czarina
of anarchism. Several times she was wounded, several times her
(21:53):
head was cut off, but like the legendary hydra, she
always grew a new one. She survived and appeared again,
ready to spill more blood. And if now in our region,
the offspring of the makan nov China, the remnants of
this poisonous evil are still trying to prevent the rebirth
of normal society and are still striving to re establish
(22:14):
the bloody rule of Makno. This latest blow means we
are witnessing the funeral procession at the grave of the
Makhnovchina after they were busy having a funeral procession for
themselves and being utterly destroyed. The insurrectionary Army of the
Maknuvchina retook Alexandrov's two weeks after that article was written,
and then they went around and gave everyone equal economic
(22:35):
and political opportunity. And actually that the peak of Makinovchina
came after that, I believe, okay, so, Marianniki Forov died
and for one hundred years or so her legacy was lost.
There's an incredible amount of lost history from this time period,
and I've never run across so recent an event with
(22:56):
so many unknowns left to historians. That she was long
for so long is fascinating, because she was absolutely a
legend in her time. She was the many headed hydra
of anarchy. And after she died, partisan women all over
Russian Ukraine took her name as their own. They wouldn't
be Maria Niki Farova, they'd be Marusia something. It became
(23:18):
a common first name for revolutionists of various kinds, Marusia Chernea,
which means black. Maria commanded a different cavalry regiment in
the insurgent Army of Ukraine. I don't know anything more
about her. I don't know who cares about her. She
was killed in battle by the Reds or the peasant
rebel Mariusiya Kosova, which I think was in the Green Army,
(23:40):
those peasants who were like, fuck the Reds, fuck the
white stuff, stealing all our shit, you motherfuckers, kind of
the brotherhood without banners for like the Game of Thrones. Yeah,
honestly might have the highest moral ground of any army
in the Civil Wars, the Green Army as much as
like the Black Armies, like my team, the like, we
just don't want you to come here and steal a
(24:00):
lot of shit, you motherfuckers. People, pretty good leg to
stand on.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
There was also a Ukrainian nationalist school teacher, Mariusia Sokolovaska,
who inherited command of a cavalry unit from her dead
brother who took the name, and I can only imagine
there were countless more women leading armies and fighting in them,
like that dead woman in leather who wasn't Maria Niki Farovaya,
because I doubt all of them or even most of them,
(24:27):
would have taken her name after Niki Farova's death. These
clandestine networks continued, though they're also lost to history. The
Makinovchina continues to Makno's wife. I think his second wife,
Helena Kuzmenko, the one we've talked about a couple times.
She was a school teacher in Juliapulia. She taught the
history of Ukraine and she taught the Ukrainian language. This
(24:47):
is before the war. She helped form that spy network.
She was a machine gunner. She shot the anarchist who
committed rape. She reformed education within anarchist controlled spaces, inspired
by veteran of the Pod, the Spanish anarchist educational for
reformer Francisco Ferrar, and the schools in the area were
run by teacher parent councils. Kids were given free food
at school, and it was, by all accounts like wildly
(25:09):
popular and successful, although it's possible that the reason those
can sow popular is because the kids got food at school,
like wild idea, much like how the Black Panthers terrified
the US government by offering free breakfast.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
That's the scariest thing you can do.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, and so Helena she kind of did it all.
She gets painted as a nationalist by history, especially by
Bolshevik history. Because she unashamedly promoted Ukrainianization and taught Ukrainian
and was into saving Ukrainian as a distinct culture from Russia.
She tried to build bridges between the nationalists and the
Makin of China, but then some nationalists tried to stage
(25:46):
a coup in the movement and makanuv China reaffirmed its
position as internationalists. And this doesn't stop Ukrainianization. It just
it's about the bigotry around it. According to the Soviets,
the Makin of China became more and more nationalists as
the anarchist ideologues left the movement. But this is a lie,
at least according to Makno. Makno says that this is
(26:07):
the Bolsheviks confusing autonomy with nationalism. And I feel like
that's like such a That's a point that really stuck
with me about being like, look, you can you don't
have to be like a nationalist in the negative connotation
version of that word, to be like, hey, maybe us
the oppressed ethnic group Ukrainians could speak our own language,
(26:27):
that'd be okay. When the Red Army invaded Maknovist Ukraine
in nineteen twenty, they brought with it the Red Terror.
Everyone was sick with Typhus at this point, and a
ton of the anarchists were shot in their bed lev
that Jewish anarchist spy guy we were talking about before
he gets out and the countris Vednik goes underground and
they outlast the falling of the Insurgent Army. And it's
(26:49):
actually through their work that the Insurgent Army is able
to pick back up, because what they did while their
underground spies is they tracked Red Army movements and then
robbed the Red Army of two million rubles and ten
machine guns, which is apparently enough to start an army.
I don't know what a rubul looks like. I always
imagine it looks like the money in Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's a gem of some sort.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah yeah, it's probably because it sounds like ruby.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
But whatever.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Meanwhile, the Cheka's running around assassinating peasants suspected of anarchism.
Thousands of Maknivists are being executed without trial. So this
is where I know that the Macnivists start doing purges,
and I can't say I'd be above doing them at
this myself. At this point, the Maknivists now start killing
all the Bolsheviks they can find, purging all the state
(27:37):
officials who are Bolsheviks. A thousand Bolshevik officials are killed
by these reprisals, after about two thousand anarchists are killed
for being anarchists, and there are other histories about the
remainder of the Market of China. But by August nineteen
twenty one, the Reds had defeated the anarchist project and
Makno Kuzmenko, his wife, and others fled the rest of
(27:58):
their lives honestly not really happy periods. The anarchists were
held in an a tournament camp in Poland where they
tried to organize an anarchist revolution because they're them, and
everyone kept trying to extradite them all while they were
in prison for being suspected of trying to organize a
Bolshevik uprising in Poland, which is really funny because they
(28:18):
were trying to organize an uprising, it just wasn't Bolshevik,
and the Polish are like, we think you're trying to
do a Bolshevism. While she's in prison, she gives birth
to her and Makno's daughter, Elena. They were found not guilty,
to everyone's surprise, and they moved to Paris. By nineteen
twenty seven, they were divorced, according to one source, but
(28:39):
they stayed close. She was with him at his death.
Nestor Makno died poor in Paris of tuberculosis at the
age of forty five. He'd spent his remaining years defending
himself against Bolshevik lies that he'd been anti Semitic, Like
that was like a major thing that he had to
do with his time was go around and like over
and over again and be like, hey, here's all of
(29:02):
the evidence and all of these Jewish anarchists who were
with me, who saw me kill people for programming, And
every time you give this talk, like everyone would stand
up and be like, no, we were there. He didn't
do that. And now through all throughout history, that's still
what people have to do. What living he made he
made as a shoemaker and as an interior decorator. While
(29:25):
he was in Paris. He was also supported by the
money from his his wife was a cleaner, or his
ex wife was a cleaner, and she's giving him money.
He also gets this very modest stipend raised by Spanish
anarchists with the CNT. Whatever money he got, he spent
on his daughter Helenna. Once he knew he was going
to die soon anyway, he returned to drinking. Because there's
(29:48):
a lot of arguments about like whether or not he
was a drunk.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
You know, Warren Zevon made a similar choice.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, wait, who's up?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Zivon always a musician, I like a lot oh okay,
alcoholic for a long time. It sobered up, and then
when he got cancer was like, well I'm going back
to it.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah, So we returned to drinking because he was dead anyway,
and his last words was to his daughter and they
are be healthy and happy, my daughter. And I think
that that tells like, because people have these like the
way that people paint men like him is these like
one completely focused on the revolution, nothing else exists for them,
(30:31):
like you know, one sided fanatics, and he's kind of
a fanatic, but he's not one sided.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
It just makes me happy that he, yeah, loved his daughter. Unfortunately,
his command to his daughter didn't work. His daughter e Lenna,
as well as his wife and or ex wife well
at this point widow, they were deported to Nazi Germany
and forced to do slave labor for the Nazis. Well shit,
When the Soviets liberated Germany, the two women were arrested
(31:03):
for being Nazi collaborators and they were sentenced to hard
labor for being counter revolutionaries. The fact that they were
related to Makno was a big part of that.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah, I'll bet isn't that a fuck?
Speaker 2 (31:14):
And then after Stalin died, mother and daughter reunited. Mother
worked in a cotton factory until she died in nineteen
seventy eight. Elena lived until nineteen ninety three. Her entire life,
her family lineage was used to deny her jobs and
opportunities in Soviet Russia. She said that she chose to
never have children because she didn't want them to suffer
(31:35):
the same family legacy that she had. And that's like,
not that I think people should have kids that they
don't want to, but it's like fucking heartbreaking to think about, Like, like,
her father's a fucking hero, you know. Yeah, she swore
off politics, but she did slap a man who called
her father a Bandit fair enough, And if you want
(31:56):
to slap a man.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Slap the men who sponsor this show with your wallet.
Thus I don't know, yeah by these ads.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Yeah, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
The Maginivists in exile kept up the fight for years.
Lev the spy, who might get his own episodes if
I can find out enough about him, because I I
think once I saw that photo, everyone should go google him. Well,
I think once I saw that photo, it's just like
that's a type of guy I didn't know existed in
anarchy form, And I'm really interested.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It's fascinating because like, yeah, that type of guy you expect,
Like that's about a third of professional wrestlers. And it's
also guys who like kill people for the mob. And
I'm glad that we have our own version of that
kind of guy. Yeah. If you want to know who
would have who should have played this dude in a
TV show? During that one episode of T ANDNG that
(32:57):
one of the guys who plays a holideck gangster looks
act like this.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
He does look like a holiday gangster.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Up, he looks like a holideck gangst.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yes, yeah, God see if I had if I if
they gave me Star Trek to write, I would absolutely
it would. I wouldn't necessarily be like, here's the whole Now,
the Federation's anarchists. Whatever, No, the federation should do what
the Federation does. I love it. It's interesting. No, what
would be is you'd have a captain who is obsessed
with the Makanov China and spends all of their time
(33:28):
in the Holi deck, being in not even being the
leader of it, just being in the free convent Rosina
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah. Yeah, we're in those leathers.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So probably Lev keeps the fire going his entire life.
He becomes a double agent and then a triple agent spy,
but he stays in anarchist the entire time. He's the
one who organized the retreat of the Macnavists into Romania
in nineteen twenty one. And the way that they break
(34:01):
out of Ukraine is that they dress up as Red
Army soldiers and then like ambush the border guards and
disarm them like fucking cartoon style. They don't show up
and gun them down. They like show up, pull guns
and like disarm them and probably tie them up with
towels or whatever.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
In Romania, he sets up a Maknivist foreign center where
they would all meet and try to figure out how
to get back into Ukraine and get Magnev China going again.
Soon enough, he's a spy for the Romanian government and
he does this just so that they send him back
into Ukraine. He's like, oh, he make me a spy,
put me back in Ukraine, get me back in that fight.
(34:39):
I'm totally I hate the Bolsheviks, which is true, Get
me back in the fight. So as soon as they
send him into Ukraine, he shows up at the Bolsheviks
and he's like, hey, I'm a Romanian spy, but I'm
actually on your side. Sign me up. I'm going to
be a Bolshevik spy. And so they're like, yeah, we'll
totally take you as a double agent. By that, he's
now a triple agent. And then he gets recruited by
(35:02):
the Soviets and he has to like prove his value.
So he does it by like assassinating a French spy
and they get him installed back in fucking Romania as
a spy for the Soviets. And at this point you're like, oh,
maybe it's just the spy for the Soviet It's a
lot of anarchists became Bolsheviks in order to not be
killed you know whatever. No, as soon as he's back
in Romania, he starts using all of his contacts to
(35:24):
smuggle all the Maknivists back into Ukraine so that they
can try and fucking have a revolution again. He will,
this man will not give up. Unfortunately, there's a thing
called the Great Purge in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Ah well, yes, and all.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
The Macinivs he smuggled back into the country are caught
up in the Great Purge, including lev himself. He was
executed on September twenty fifth, nineteen thirty eight. His daughter
died fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis. His
son outlived the Soviet union man. And that's the story. Well,
one story about Marusia, Nikki Farova, Makhnovchina and love.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
I just like this stuff is like sat in my brain,
heavier than most stuff I've researched for this show. Almost
everything I research for the show ends up changing something
a little fundamentally about how I see the world. Spending
so long, I mean whenever people have their whole careers
around this, but for me, months and months is a
(36:29):
very long time. Spending so long in the history of
the Russian Civil War and the Russian Revolution has like
really influenced how I think about power and possibility. And
I don't have like conclusions out of it, but I
just find it fascinating. And I find her in particular fascinating.
I used to the first time I read about her,
(36:50):
I was like, I'm usually not the type of person
who likes the more violent anarchists and revolutionaries, Like I'm
much more of the like you know, I'm not a pacifist,
but I'm usually drawn to the people who are like
looking to to focus on the positive program. And uh,
(37:11):
you know, and I'm like, why am I so drawn
to this person? And I think part of the reason
I'm so drawn to her is her unrelenting spirit. Like
I think for her, it wasn't that she was driven
towards violence. I think this so she was driven towards
like like she kept showing up and being like, hey, Mack,
no going to You're gonna keep to your word, you know,
Like she just like was like this like conscience in
(37:33):
people's minds of just like like a an arc type
of yeah of this idea.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Well, I guess we should all seek to be that
have that kind of have the kind of influence to
where like you live on because you've permanently carved a
space for your like like to to be someone of
such strong principle that that echo of you stays alive
in other people forever. Is I don't know something to
(38:06):
aspire here to. I guess, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not
even like it's not even about her actions. Her actions only.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Make sense in the context and when she's doing them, yeaight,
But about this unrelenting spirit of like, oh no, like
she doesn't do what is easy. Ever, it's that whole
Like it's the Marines, right who are like, oh no,
man left behind or whatever, right, Like we rarely see
that actually carried out. And the fact that like again
(38:37):
and again, she was like, well they have prisoners, so
we're going to fight them because we have to rescue
our own. Like solidarity is like fundamental to her and
I like her. Yeah, that's that's my I'll probably stop
talking about the Russian Revolution now and go back to
(39:00):
other things in the very near future. Yeah, thanks everyone
for listening as I spend I guess that's ten parts
total so far.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I mean, it was a lot of It's an important
thing you can't really study it too much. It's one
of those it's like a Moby Dick kind of thing,
where like it's such a big thing that most of
the answers to most of the problems that are somewhere
hidden inside that because there's such a complicated human endeavor adventure.
(39:35):
I don't know, it's a hyper object in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yeah, and there's this thing I've been talking to a
lot of people about like why history matters. And there's
two things that is like really stuck with me about it,
because like right now, the movements that are happening right
now are much more important than the movements that are
like dead and gone right and we don't necessarily need
to copy either labels, their ideologies or their practices of
(40:01):
the stuff that's come before. But I realized history matters
because if you're like trying to catch a ball and
someone throws a ball and you know where the ball is,
but you don't know where the ball came from. You
can't create the trajectory in your head. You have to
see it in motion to see the trajectory, you know,
And so seeing the origin of different ideas gives you
(40:23):
a really good idea about like where those ideas have
gone from where they started, and that gives you an
idea of where they're going, not a certainty. And so
the trajectory thing has always been a reason that I've
really cared about history. But then the other thing is
that I keep thinking about like people are like, oh,
this stuff doesn't matter. All that matters is right now,
and I'm like, well, if someone wants to do a
(40:43):
science experiment, it's useful to be able to be like, hey,
so here's similar science experiments that people have run. Here's
the variables that were in use during those experiments. It's
useful to know. And of course I say this, my
job is to talk about history, but it's really influenced me.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad it's certainly having an influence
on me. There's there's so much to unpack here, and
I kind of think there's no too much that you
can spend staring into this. Yeah, yeah, I have my
own We've been we've delved back in you and I
the story of the German Left and their their weird
(41:27):
embrace of pedophilia, and I kind of keep pouring into
it for the same reason. It's like a moral hyper object,
you know, and there's there's almost almost no end to
what you can pull out of that because of the
big a thing it is.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
And it's awkward because that one has also been sitting
really heavily in my mind and not just a heavy subject,
but because like what it means about power and what
it means about care and like taking care of each
other and like, and that one's like funny because it's
like why both of these are things that are hard
to bring up at dinner conversations, you know, like I
(42:04):
can't be like, hey, let's talk about the German lefts
embrace of pedophilia after World War Two, like not a
not a good dinner conversation, but also even among like
some of my friends. I you know, I showed up
at one of my friend's houses recently and it's someone
I love talking to history about history with two whatever,
and and I was like, hey, can I ask you
this question about in nineteen eighteen when the anarchists disarmed
(42:27):
the uh, you know, disarmed the provisional government or whatever,
and we realized we were like we got way for everyone.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
Else to go to bed.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
No one else wants to sit at this dinner conversation
as we talk about this. So it's hard sometimes to
get into the nitty gritty of it, but I really
like this phrasing, the hyper object thing that, Yeah, there's
certain certain things that use the more you pour into it,
the more you glean from it, and it that and
the things that you pull out of it aren't necessarily
(42:55):
always what you expect to pull out of it.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
No, No, I think a lot about that, that mister
quote about death where he's like, it's a thing people
don't like to talk about, but it's also fundamentally human.
And anything that's fundamentally human is mentionable, and anything that's
mentionable is manageable.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
I like that. Yeah, and even like this this Russian
Civil War thing, It's like, at the end of the day,
the main story of the Russian Civil War is millions
of people died for a bunch of different people who
were fanatics ideologies, and it was mostly bad. And then
(43:35):
finding the things like within that that are interesting. Oh
it's messy, but yeah, Well, anyway, have you got anything
a plug?
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Uh, We've got a new podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame,
about what happens after people become the Internet's main character.
I have a novel called After the Revolution, and we
also have god so many other cool Zone podcasts. Catch
them all.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, and I have a book coming out in September
called The Sapling Cage. It comes up from from this press.
It's being kickstarted in June twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
A hyper objective quality.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Oh thanks, And this summer I'm going to write the
sequel to it before the first book comes out, because
they lot a trilogy and I have to present them
with two more books. But they're going to be good.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
So I will see you all next week when we
talk about almost certainly not the Russian Revolution. That's my
almost promise.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, maybe there will be another Russian revolution by that
point and we can just sew an episode on that one. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Then it'll be another.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Quick one, real quickie. You knock that out in about
a day and a half.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah. Hey, you know that February revolution was fast. So
if you're listening in Russia, short months, you got a chance. Yeah, well,
banner drop for you over here in America.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Sure, absolutely, we've.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Got this wa Actually, America'll probably send you guns.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
We'll send everybody guns. It's what we do.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah, good guy, bad guy whatever, All right, bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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