Part Four: Kronstadt and the People Who Tried to Save the Russian Revolution

In part four, Margaret continues to talk with Mia Wong about at least four Russian revolutions and general strikes, workers councils, and rebellions that tried to keep them on course.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff You Were?
A podcast that is part four of a six part
or so. If you are just tuning in for part four,
I don't understand your brain. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and my guest today and last week and next week
is Mia.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Walm, the Ons in Future podcast guest.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Exactly today we're talking about. Oh wait, I almost forgot
the rest of the introductions. The thing that Sophie always
says it, Margaret, if you don't write it down in
your scripture, nen forget. And I'm always like, I'm not
going to forget.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Did that happen?

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I get? No, I actually scripted this entire exchange. That's
not true the host. No, I'm the host. The producer
is Sophie Kai. Sophie allegedly, Hi, I wonder if people
can tell I've had more sugar than usual today.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
What was your snack during the break? Oh?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
My sactuary in the break was terrible. It was literally
a couple of basil leaves off of a hydroponic basil
plant that I keep in my kitchen. It doesn't have
any caloric value. I just couldn't find any other snacks.
I love basil.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
I was like, I was like, I support that, I
really do. I was like, should I do that?

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah? Yeah, I got one of the little I'm not
going to say the brand because they're not paying me,
but they want me to I will. I like their stuff.
I got one of those little hydroponic kitchen ones that
you just like put the little pod in and you
can grow different herbs. Yeah. It works great. I've used it.
It's like the fourth time I've grown plants in it.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
You're like really influencing me.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
It's a being able to just like reach over and
like grab a couple of leaves of basil and put
it on whatever I'm making. It even turns the like
if you're someone who only eats ramen for dinner, you
can spice it up with the new Margaret's not going
to say the name of the brand unless they pay her.
Mm hm, So you know, not kind of like it.

(01:56):
But what I don't like is almost everything we're going
to talk about today.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Who's who's our sound engineer and who wrote our theme song?

Speaker 2 (02:10):
You're trying to say I didn't finish my intro Daniel
as our audio engineer. I want to say high Daniel
high Danel. Oh my god, we didn't say high Danel
last time. Good okay, all right, and our themes music
does to.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
Limit your sugar and record days of you already live
it limit you know your your.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Carbonation intake no carbonation? Yeah no, and make sure I
think it's good. Is a whole new world. It's I
literally have my feed up for the first time ever.
Your position is completely different.

Speaker 5 (02:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah, I'm just gonna go for it. It's a whole
new Margaret.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
You're doing great.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, it's not Magpie. It's bad Pie.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Wow goes push right through that one. So I gotta go. Actually, yeah,
I understand. I'll just podcast two room.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Who was that?

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Oh my god, I'll tell you who it was, but
it would get me in trouble again because it wasn't Magpie.
You said that. So where we last left our anti heroes,
they had had a revolution that was like the method
of the revolution was pretty cool. It didn't put power
into the hands of the Soviets quite far enough for

(03:27):
a lot of people's minds, and it started the counter revolution.
It started being like we're just the state now. Then
come November nineteen seventeen, you have the October Revolution, and
the fun thing to do is read eight different accounts
where some of them call it a coup, and some
people were like, it wasn't a coup, and then other

(03:47):
people were like, it was a coup, but it was fine.
It's kind of a coup. This particular revolution was not
like a huge popular uprising as much as it was
professional soldiers the guns, storming the halls of power, and
that's usually what gets called a coup, and a lot

(04:07):
of those people doing the coup, the professional soldiers with
guns were the anarchists. And it wouldn't have necessarily been
a bad idea if the Bolsheviks that weren't up to
no good, because this is not overthrowing the revolutionary government.
This is throwing one half of the revolutionary government that
is more democratic, overthrowing the less democratic one and whatever.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, and Kresky's gotten like like Kerensky's the person who's
in charge of the visional Government's gotten like increasingly like
shitty in the in the sort of period after this,
so it's like, it's not it's not the most indefensible
idea in theory anyone's ever had, But yeah, if it
hadn't been the Bolsheviks. You know, like if it had

(04:55):
literally been about power to the Soviets, I'm not sure
I would have been anti. Yeah, yeah, great revolution. Ten
out of ten. We did it, folks. We saved human history.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, time machine. So the most powerful Soviet in the
country was the Petrograd Soviet, Petrograd being with it called
Saint Petersburg, which went Saint Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Saint Petersburg.
That's the order, I think, But I'm just going to
keep calling Saint Petersburg throughout the whole thing for my

(05:24):
own brain. And the Bolsheviks had recently engineered to become
a majority power within that Soviet, and this Soviet voted
to overthrow the provisional government. So they did. The anarchists,
especially sailors out of the naval base of Kronstadt, were
the shock troops. A coalition of pro Soviet forces took
over the Winter Palace where the provisional government was run

(05:47):
out of, under the banner of all power to the Soviets.
This included Bolsheviks, anarchists, and left s rs. This was
organized by the Military Revolutionary Council. Four of the sixty
six people on that Council Anarchists. One historian I read
was basically like, whoever had tried to well, it was
a direct quote, whoever had tried to overthrow the provision

(06:09):
Oh wait, no, it isn't a direct Quote's as weak
as fuck. It's definitely me paraphrasing sugar time. Okay, So
one historian was like, you know, whoever tried to overthrow
the provisional government would have succeeded. That shit was weak
as fuck. If zaras had been organized, they could have
fucking overthrown the provisional government. And anyone could vote Mia,
you and I and Sophie as long as we had
Daniel and non women's help, could probably have overthrown the

(06:31):
provisional government of Revolutionary Russia.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
I love our odds. They seem really good.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
You know, better than any other particular government I've tried
to overthrow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
Yeah, and now I'm just like really confident I could
overthrow a government.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
I believe in you. Yeah, That's that's why I'm here
at cool Zone media like, I, oh yeah, do you
all still sell always be Cooen shirts?

Speaker 5 (06:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (07:00):
Robert's the one I'm supposed to be in charge of
doing merch stuff, and uh, that's all I'll say about that.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
All right, Well, if Robert's specialty is that shirt, my
specialty is unsourced anecdotes, where at least I flagged that
is an unsourced anecdote. One time, like fifteen years ago,
I was hanging out with his older anarchist friend of
mine who had spent a lot of time in Soviet
influenced countries, like right after the fall of the Soviet Union,
and spent a lot of time in Bulgaria in particular,

(07:28):
And he was the one who first told me the
story of the Russian Revolution, and there was a part
I remember vividly of him telling me this. During the
October Revolution, they're having all these meetings between all the
various factions. It wasn't necessarily just a Bolshevik coup, right,
It was all of these different groups that got together
that were all power of the Soviets, and so they
had these meetings to figure out how they were going
to run things and share power. And the anarchists were like, yeah,

(07:52):
we're with you, but we like hate power. So we're
just going to stand guard outside to make sure no
counter revolutionary is common, you know, mess with you and
It was during one of those meetings when the Bolsheviks
sort of did their internal coup within the Soviets and
took power over all the Soviets, which they always intended
to disenfranchise. So that was the lesson I learned from that.
Maybe don't sit that meeting out. Yeah, but again I

(08:17):
don't have a source on that, besides my friend told
me years ago, and he learned it from people have
been organizing illegally as anarchists for generations in the USSR.
So it's kind of an oral history at this point.
And I want to talk about the leader of the
anarchist forces that storm the Winter Palace because he's kind
of fun. His name was anatotly Jeleeshmikoff. Prior to the

(08:40):
October Revolution in nineteen seventeen, the anarchists were doing what
anarchists do. Like in the middle of nineteen seventeen, you know,
they squatted a rich person's villa in Saint Petersburg and
turned it into a social center. I know, and I
don't think it was abandoned. I think they expropriated this
villa in the middle of Saint Petersburg.

Speaker 5 (08:58):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
It was complete with a Baker's union and offering childcare
to the neighborhood. Oh my god, nothing has ever changed,
I know, and sometimes we're great. I love this for us.
And they did this despite that both the provisional government
and the Petrograd Soviet did not want them doing this
because they didn't want them expropriating this rich person's villa yet, right,

(09:24):
because they were like going too far, too fast for
his participation in that. When they so the it was
raided by the Kerensky right Anatolely Juleshnikov was arrested by
the provisional government and was sentenced to fourteen years for
having stolen a villa from a rich person during an
anti capitalist revolution.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, very great, great revolutionary government. You got their incredible job.
That's ours, Like, yeah, doing great, honey. Fortunately, one thing
anarchists were really good at back then was escaping Russian prison.
So he escaped Russian prison and he cooperated with the
Bolsheviks for the October Revolution. Slightly less incredible, I know,

(10:04):
but I see why he did it. But I'm going
to skip ahead and talk a little bit more about
him because he's interesting. He's going to fight alongside the
Bolsheviks and the Red Army time and time again because
he believed an anarchist revolution. Spoiler alert, there's going to
be a civil war, and once it breaks out, Leon Trotsky,
the now Bolshevik, brings back a bunch of Czarist officers
and Czarist methods of running an army. We'll talk more

(10:26):
about that later, like corporal punishment and officers getting better
treatment than everyone else. And so anarchists like Anatole are
going to revolt within the Red Army. But later he's
going to rejoin the Red Army to defeat the White Army.
The man, I'm really okay, well whatever, And he gets
killed in action on July twenty sixth, nineteen nineteen, and

(10:46):
the Bolsheviks tried to claim him. They were like, well,
he's in a Red Army. He's like, our guy is a Bolshevik.
He's a hero, he's a war hero. Everyone loves him,
patriot loves Russia. You know, I'm pretty sure that he
never became a Bolshevik. The reason is is the following
quote from him. Whatever may happen to me and whatever
they say of me, know well that I am an

(11:08):
anarchist that I fight as one, and whatever my fate
I will die an anarchist, you know, a incredibly anarchist line.
B This is like one of the other things that
I remember, like my first reading of the Russian Revolution.
It's like one of the issues the anarchists have is
that they actually believe in the revolution, and so all
of the most prominent anarchists go fight, and so they
all end up dying because they went to go fight

(11:30):
in the revolution, and all the Bolshevik leaders were like, Okay,
I'm going to sit here in this committee yep, and
I am never going here like in a friend of
an army, and so they lived through it. I remember
when I first became an anarchist to my roommate in college.
I was like analyzing the situation and was like, you
all are just the political berserkers for every other group,

(11:53):
and I was like, no, we're not. And then I
started reading in history for my job and old college roommate,
you're right, and we shouldn't be. But we take more
risks than a lot of people. And we also specifically
don't seek like glory and fame with our names, so

(12:16):
we're often forgotten about and I don't know, I mean,
like that's the whole tragedy of this particular revolution, not
how we were treated specifically, but like, okay, but I'm
gonna to finish out anatoly. He wrote poetry too, and
honestly pretty good poetry. I read a lot of these
old revolutionist poets and or revolutionaries who are also writing

(12:38):
some poetry, and like, it's pretty mid overall, right. But
he wrote a poem in prison. Here's an excerpt that
I really like Falcon Falcon, when you chance to fly
into the limitless and mountainous space, don't forget to give
the clouds my greetings, tell all that I shall break
my chains, that my life in jail is only a
twilight nap, only a spectral daydream. That's really, I don't know,

(13:03):
it's courteous.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, And he wrote that while he was imprisoned by
this provisional government revolutionary government.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
You know, ah love a provisional government. Yeah, nothing effort
has gone wrong.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
No, No, I mean, you know, it's like, I get
why they tried to have a provisional government in the meantime.
I think that the Soviets were always the better plan.
But then again, you know how things go. Anyway back
to nineteen seventeen, ever, since the February Revolution, people have
been promised a Constituent Assembly, which would be the democratic

(13:40):
government the republic that they were promised, And the Bolsheviks
are initially all about this even after the October Revolution,
at least as best as I can tell, because like,
they don't care about bottom up power. They care about power,
and they're like, all right, whatever, you know. But they
had a problem with the Constituent Assembly, which is that
forty million people voted and less than ten million of

(14:01):
them voted Bolshevik. Yeah, that's not enough Bolshevik. The SRS
swept that election and more than sixty percent of people
voted in it. Russia clearly wanted the SRS. That said,
the Bolsheviks did do the best among military on the
Western Front, because the Bolsheviks were the ones promising to

(14:22):
bring them home and among the urban proletariat, which is
their main base. And so they form a Constituent Assembly
and it went really well, and Russia became a republic.
And wait, no, here is the worst thing that anarchists
have ever done history that I can find. Do you
know what's gonna do you know the do you know
this part?

Speaker 3 (14:42):
I actually am not sure what you're talking for.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
So, the Constituent Assembly is elected and they meet in
January nineteen eighteen, and the Bolsheviks and the anarchists together
broke it up with force. Oh, I didn't know the
anarchists were involved in that. Yeah, the Bolshevik broke up
the Constituent Assembly because they had lost the election and
had less than twenty five percent of the seats, you know.

(15:06):
And the anarchists did it because they believed all power
to the Soviets. They were trying to have a Soviet
Revolution in which all power was held by decentralized people,
you know, by these decentralized decision making bodies. But in
doing so, they sided with the Bolsheviks in this process,
and this proved a mistake with deadly consequences for the anarchists.

(15:30):
Pretty much right away, the Bolsheviks did a couple things
to show where they were going. They turned the executive
committee of the Pan Russian Congress of Soviets into a
body that stood as a government over the other Soviets.
Prior to that, basically this like Pan Russian Congress of Soviets,
the like larger federation right or Congress, had the executive
body of it had kind of just been the executive

(15:52):
body of like internal affairs, like hey, when are we
meeting next and stuff like that. Right, Yeah, So then
they turned it into a government, and there's a pyramid
of power. This committee was delegates elected by delegates, elected
by delegates, so it is even less accountable than the
Constituent Assembly that they'd just broken up. Soon they formed

(16:13):
the Council of People's Commissars with Lenin as the chairman.
And then they didn't do anything that they promised. This
is gonna be so shocking to you. They didn't do
anything they promised. They're supposed to distribute land to the toilers,
you know, the factories and the land to the toilers, right, Instead,
they nationalized it, so farmers became essentially wage workers at

(16:34):
state run farms, rather than what everyone had been fighting for,
which was distributing land to the peasants so that they
could work the land. Yeah, factory committees, for a very
brief period, managed to control industry, you know, like Soviets,
like the power to the Soviets that people have been fighting.
Lenin distrusted them. By January nineteen nineteen, Lenin opposed them.

(16:57):
He said that the revolution required quote precisely in the
interests of socialism, that the masses unquestionably obey the single
will of the leaders of the labor process.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Yeah. That's one of my favorite Lenin quotes to pull
out because it's it makes it clear, like just so
incredibly clear what the actual stakes of like not just
this revolution, but like every subsequent revolution that's going to
happen in like you know, like the Hungarian Revolution, a

(17:29):
lot of the Spanish Revolution, there's a lot of the
revolutions in nineteen sixty eight. It's like the stakes are
like is is are you the worker going to have
to unquestionably submit to the will of one guy?

Speaker 5 (17:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (17:42):
Or are you going to democratically manage your affairs? And
this is one of these interesting things where both Lenin
and the capitalists are in complete agreement with this. This is
something that and this is something about World War two, right,
is that in World War two, the US, the Nazis,
and the Soviets are all in complete agreements that you
the worker should unquestionably submit yourself to the will of
the single individual in the factory. All of them completely

(18:04):
agree about this. They're all taking planning, like all of
their planning stuff they're all taking this from each other.
It's like, this is the moment where Lenin is like
stops lying basically like where he stops like it's really
it's like the greatest mask off moment in history, and
no one remembers it. It's so wild. It's like he

(18:25):
just he just gave a villain bottle lock and everyone's
just I don't know.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
I've just been baffled by this for many years. No
it I mean, this is the betrayal of the revolution.
The revolution was about, and that's why, in retrospect the
Constituent Assembly offered more power to workers. It still wasn't good.
I understand why people fought for the Soviets, you know,

(18:51):
but Lenin Shure didn't like them. He also specifically referred
to workers control as petty bourgeoisie and a a narcos
syndiclus deviation. It's so funny that he think it's like
because like Lenin Lenin's entire theory is it a class
at petit bourgeois revolutionaries must lead the social revolution, and

(19:11):
then when actual workers do something, he's like, this is
actually petit bourgeois. It's like, what what class do you
belong to? Vlendim your lenin, like what are.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
We doing here?

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, no, totally. It's like how to hang out in
the weeds for a minute. It's like Marx would always
call Prudon like bourgeois. Marx was bourgeois and prud was
was proletarian like by like actual like birth and class
and jobs they worked. Like, Yeah, prud On the first

(19:41):
Western anarchist or whatever. I don't have very high good
feelings about. If you want to know he sucks. Talk
shit about prud On, you can listen to Paris Commune episode.
But he sure taught himself to read by being a printer.
The working class job, yea, and Marx had a pH
d and lived off the largest of Angles, a factory owner.
So like, you know, yeah, but opinions about Irish women

(20:03):
that I don't approve of anyway, I'll just keep vaguely
mentioning that every like ten episodes until I start a
podcast about bad people.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
That's a terrible idea.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Bad people did bad stuff.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, would never sell, never couldn't get past legal No.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah that's true, get sued by Angles as a state.
It's actually just a podcast about Angles anyway. Well, you
know who else loved. All power to the Soviets, our sponsor,
the seven hundred Soviets of Russia, who want you to

(20:46):
buy goods from the small farmers who they empower. Here
are the ads for.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
Them, and we're back.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
So.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
The other thing the Bolsheviks did right away, even before
busting up the Constituent Assembly, was they formed the Cheka,
a secret police group. And it's called the like pre
KGB and it's like roughly true, but the Czecha is
more than a secret police force. They're also just like
the the storm troopers. They're the like, yeah, behind the soldiers,

(21:29):
when the soldiers go into war, there's going to be
cheko with machine guns to kill everyone who runs away
from the war.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
That's like, that's these guys. Checha stands for the All
Russian Emergency Commission from Combating counter Revolution and Sabotage only
you know the Russian abbreviation of it. It was created
in large part to combat other leftist organizations that wanted
to take power share power with them. Its leader was
this guy named Dirzinski, who's a Polish aristocrat who became

(21:58):
a Bolshevik and who was nicknamed Iron Phoenix. Sorry that
would have been cooler Iron Felix. Actually, Iron Felix is
kind of cooler than Iron Fietix.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yes, that's not bad.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, Iron Phoenix sounds like a second rate Marvel character.
Iron Felix is a third rate Marvel character and therefore
one of the weird ones who's bisexual and like kind
of cool. The check has started their repression of the
Left even before they just disbanded the Constituent Assembly. They
arrested a bunch of srs, including an electric delegate to
the Constituent Assembly, in December nineteen seventeen. By January, Bolsheviks

(22:35):
are doing this like food requisitioning thing where they go
around demand food from the peasants, and then in March
nineteen eighteen they formally sign a peace treaty with Germany.
It is not inherently bad. I'm just describing what happens
in history. And there's a whole bunch more of this,
And since it's part of World War One, there is
so much you can read about this if you want.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Yeah, you can. You can bury yourself in yeah, in
books written about this.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah, you could take a bath in books of this.
Just pages like hanging out like instead of hanging out
with money, you know, like you're supposed to for photos.
It should just be pictures of god World War One
history books about Russia. Anyway, Russia was like, we want
to get out of this war, and Germany was like
all right, fine, but then we get all the Baltic states,

(23:23):
Poland in Ukraine, and Russia was like, wait, really, but
we we like those places, and Germany was like really,
And then there was some invading and some shooting involved,
and Russia was like, all right, fine, fuck it, you
can have those places. And this kicks off some of
the wildest stuff about the whole Revolution, including, most notably
to me and my interests, the struggle for Ukraine that

(23:45):
led to millions of people living the actual revolution promised
by the Soviets, freely elected assemblies at the local level
coordinating together for mutual aid in defense the dreaded anarchism.
This was the first consciously and large scale social experiment
in history, and it lasted for several years, but always
at war. And I'm going to get a little bit

(24:06):
more into it further in this episode, but there's going
to be a whole four parter about it. But basically,
at this point, Ukraine is like, well, we don't want
to be Germany. So they declared what they called neither
war nor peace, which was no more imperialist war but
fuck military occupation. And the Bolsheviks didn't like it because
uncontrollable revolutionary guerrillas was was worse to Lenin than giving

(24:27):
Ukraine to the German Empire. At this point, the SRS
are like, we're fucking done with you Bolsheviks. You keep
arresting and killing us and stuff, and we're not big
fans of that. And basically they're like, you Bolsheviks are
just German proxies. And this is starting to get like
calling Lenin and op is like getting some traction in Russia,

(24:50):
which makes sense because I.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah, they did. They did. They did send him on
a train with a pile of money to do exactly
what he did. Yeah, Like, it's not not it's not
that that didn't happen. It's just right, slightly more complicated
than right totally. And so the Srs leave the government.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
I think this means that they stepped out from the
Soviets at this point, because that's the only government left.
By April nineteen eighteen, like three months after they'd relied
on anarchists to be the shock troops breaking up the
Constituent Assembly and relied on the Cronstadt sailors to do
the October Revolution. And all of this, the Checha starts
killing the anarchists in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in April

(25:36):
nineteen eighteen through eight hundred anarchists are killed without a
trial in an attempt to liquidate all anarchist organizations. Anarchists
in Bolsheviks are BFF no longer, although unfortunately they whatever,
they form a little bit of an alliance again later
and Leon Trotsky, well before he met an ice Pick,
helped run this particular set of repressions. He ran propaganda

(26:00):
that all these veterans of the revolution, the hardiest fighters
were bandits and criminals because the anarchists were expropriating the rich,
which was again the point.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Of the revolution doing the revolution.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah, On April twelfth, nineteen eighteen, alone, the Czecha attack
twenty six anarchist centers in Moscow. Up to this point,
as the Red Army was consolidating, like getting together a
Red Army, it too operated under revolutionary conditions. Like actual
revolutionary conditions, Officers were elected by the people that they represented.
There were soviets for the soldiers, and while officers were

(26:33):
in charge, they weren't seen as better or higher like
you need. Most people, including most anarchist group throughout history,
have felt that a hierarchy is important during the heat
of battle, right. However, that doesn't make the person who's
telling you what to do better than you, and that
was what people cared about, which makes sense. In June

(26:56):
nineteen eighteen, Trotsky ended the worker control over the Red Army.
No more elected officers, no more equality. Brought back not
only aristocratic hierarchical systems with like the checho watching no
matter what you're doing, like they're always watching, waiting for
you to step out of line. Officers got good pay
in food. Anyone who spoke out against the party was shot.
That's a big sign that things are bad.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
This was also mass recruitment of old Czarist officers. At
the beginning of this process, it soon meant that seventy
five percent of officers in the Red Army were former
Czarist officers. By the end of the Civil War, that
number goes up to eighty three percent. And this particularly
matters in Russia because under the Czar, the officer class

(27:40):
was a separate social class compared to the rank and
file soldiers. So this is Trotsky not just bringing back
what he considers military efficiency. It is bringing back the
aristocracy as a separate class and giving them guns and
telling them that they're better than the peasants again, only
now they're communists who are better than the peasants instead
of nobles who are better than the peasants.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
Yeah, and you'd think that, like you know, I mean,
this has been something that through throughout sort of the
history of Marxism, right, Like one of the deals that
these people cut all the time is like will ally
with like the national bourgeois because we need to do
a revolution to overthrow feudalism. And the Bolsheviks are like,
not only are we like, not only are we doing
this kind of revolution, we're bringing we're bringing like the

(28:24):
feudal aristocracy back and putting them.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
In charge of our army. Is like, what are you
people doing? And it's like just like on some level,
I'm like, well, these are the officers who know how
to run an army, right, But when you make them
also better than people, that's when you then also are
making them the aristo aristos.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
Again, that army was terrible.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
That's a good point.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
A different thing. Yeah, it's like this to be a different
thing if you're bringing back like okay, like the German army, right,
like no, this is that army was like I don't know,
maybe theal it's like one of like bottom of three armies.
The entirety of World War One. Terrible.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, like dreadful stuff. It's a really good point. And
especially because like a lot of it, because it was
an aristocratic army even more than I think a lot
of the other places. The officers were just officers because
they were rich goods. Yeah, and like if you had
a like various types of like middle class job, you
got an officership. I read a couple examples of this

(29:25):
and didn't write them into the script. So in contrast
in the anarchist armies at the time, and I was
always kind of curious about this because you're like, you
read about these anarchist armies, and you read about these
anarchist generals, and you're like, well, how does that work?
And the answer is it works like how the Soviets
were promised to work, people vote and then they like
when they need to create pyramids of power, the power

(29:46):
of those pyramids is at the base, but some of
the decision making in times of wars at the top.
But it's like entirely always everyone's recallable. So if you're
fucking up as a leader, people are like, well, we
don't want you anymore. And so you have a bunch
of famous leaders of the anarchist militaries, including and I'll
talk more about them than other episodes, but Maria Nikki

(30:08):
Farova and Nester Makhno Olga Tatua, and they'd all been
elected by their peers. And also two of those three
names are women. They've been elected by their peers because
they were good at leading in battle, and I don't know,
in many cases they turned the course of the war
because there's a war now. The Bolsheviks have taken power,
but not everyone wants them to, so civil war breaks out.

(30:31):
The boring way to describe this war, the way that
you read in the boring version, is that it's the
reds versus the Whites, the Communists versus the Czarists. The
more accurate way, which sounds more like something out of
the Battle of Five Armies in Tolkien and therefore is cooler,
is that there was the Red Army composed of Bolsheviks
and anarchists and others. There was the Black Army in

(30:54):
Ukraine composed of anarchists. There was the Green Army, which
was the sort of brotherhood of without banners from Game
of Thrones. These are the massive peasant armies who are like,
we fucking hate the Bolsheviks, we also fucking hate the Czarists.
We just fucking let us love heaver Land in peace.
And these sometimes are affiliated with the SRS, but not
like formally. And on top of that, you have almost
every chunk of people have independence movements, not just even

(31:15):
the ones that are like now seen as nations, but
a lot of like the ethnic nations that are within
what is now Russia, have all these different nationalist armies.
And then you have the Western occupiers and so like
you know, Germany and Ukraine, and then you also have
the other Western powers who throw in a bunch of armies,
including Japan who's like come in and trying to take Nanchuria.
And we'll talk about that in a second. So like

(31:36):
in Ukraine, you have the anarchist Black Army, the Bolshevikian
anarchist Red Army, the Ukrainian Nationalists, the German occupiers, and
the Tsarist White Army. One might say a battle of
five armies.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
In the broader Civil war, there's also other forces trying
to intervene against the revolution, most notably the UK and
the US and the France, which are so reporting the
White Army because they want to get Russia back into
the war against Germany, and Japan, which is supporting the
White Army in Siberia because they're always trying to land
grab Manchuria for their empire, and they actually I don't
know whether, like historically, this is like the only place

(32:14):
I've personally run across Japan is being presented as one
of the Western powers. But is that in any way normal.
There's two sources I read that referred to it as
one of.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
These because so Japan's on Japan's on the Allied side
of the war, okay, And so yeah, they're also one
of the Western parts. Yeah, and by part of Japan's
like I don't know, villain arc I guess is that they,
like Italy, are pissed off the end of the war.
They don't get enough territory becaus as part of what

(32:45):
drives both Italy and Japan into what's eventually going to
well into fascist governments and then eventually into what's going
to become the Axis because okay, also that I mean
that process is complicated and fraud. But yeah, that's the
really high up bird's eye. Yeah, I guess, I like
what's happening there.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
I was like, there's so many places that I don't
totally understand some of the contexts. I'm really glad that
me as the guest. And that's a good example. And yeah,
and they're the majority of about forty percent of the
Western power of troops that are committed to defending the
White Army come from Japan, but they never go into
Western Russia. They stop at.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, that's that's only about the occupying armies. Everyone talks
about how like, oh, there's like twelve countries sent armies.
It's like, okay, the US sent like five thousand troops
to archangel and they sat there for a few months
and they left, Like it wasn't as serious of an
attempt to like conquer Russia restore the White Army as
you would have thought there there would have been except

(33:48):
for Japan, who sends a shit ton of troops and
is but also doesn't care about what's really going on,
and like, right, that other part of Russia and like
the other like basically effectively on a different continent, right, like.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
You know, like yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense to me.
And I know about one hundred and eighty thousand troops
all told from all the different countries when but yeah,
like I'm under the impression that there was never a
really serious attempt and they weren't very well coordinated with
each other them and most of them are kind of
just sitting in this. They'll be in a city and

(34:25):
they'll just like sit there, yeah, and they won't like
go out and do offensives because the commitment level is really.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Not that high. And also like I shall also like it,
but like I don't know, because I get very mad
about people talking about this issharies. It's like if by
by World War One standards, one hundred and eighty thousand
troops is like nothing, right, totally, like it's like seven guys. Yeah,
and again that one hundred and forty one hundred and
eighty thousand, like eighty thousand of them are just Japan, right,
So yeah, sorry, this is my no, no totally bears

(34:56):
about this revolution is that, like, it's not that the
Western Allies weren't trying to oversol the government, but they
weren't trying anywhere near as hard as they could have,
or they would have if World War One hadn't been
like going on.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, totally. So the White Army is the main antagonist
force that people talk about, or I guess protagonist force
depending on who's writing. There are three separate White armies,
and they're all kind of doomed, like they weren't gonna win,
at least according to again more than one thing I

(35:28):
read about this, partly because they have nothing to offer ideologically,
like their whole thing is like, I don't know, not
the Bolsheviks will sort the rest out later, probably something
pretty right wing, but huh. And the three armies also
don't coordinate well together, and so they kind of get
smashed one at a time because they're a little bit
separately timed, and often they are smashed by the anarchists.

(35:53):
Juleshnikov and Makno take out the Southern White Army in Ukraine,
defeeding two of the White generals there. And in Ukraine,
the anarchists have kind of classic militaries, like there's a
I mean there's an anarchist country of sort right in
Ukraine that with seven million people, that supplies them, and
they fight and win battles against the whites. In Siberia,

(36:14):
the anarchists were also very strong, but they were less organized,
and they were less building a new society and more
running a gorilla war because it's a low population density,
mountains and forests. Yeah, the Civil war actually lasts longest
in Siberia, and anarchist guerrillas beat the White army in Siberia,
or at least are a major part of it. It's

(36:35):
like the source I read was like and then the
anarchists and named several of them, like beat the White army,
And then I'm like, well now I'm moving that an
anarchist source. So of course it says like the anarchist Yeah, yea.
In Ukraine, I feel reasonably confident about saying that. In Siberia,
I don't have as much information, but they certainly helped
or did it all, I don't know. Each time anarchists

(36:56):
succeeded at defeating the whites, they were immediately shot by
the Reds because ufulness had come to an end. The
Bolsheviks wrote most of the history since they won. A
historian named Igor Pushivalov put it quote. For many decades,
Soviet historians diligently suppressed the presence of non communist forces
and the partisan movement. In the years of the Civil War,
left communist forces fighting against the whites were virtually deprived

(37:19):
of recognition as revolutionaries on the basis that their conceptions
of revolution and social justice differed from those of the communists.
But the true story is otherwise. It was far from
the case that all the workers and peasants fought for
their rights under the red banner, or if they did so,
it was not always a communist symbol. The socialist revolutionaries
had a red banner with a slogan, in struggle you

(37:42):
will gain your rights. A considerable portion of the toilers
just went into battle under the black banner of freedom,
justice and the memory of the victims of capital, the
banner of the anarchists. The reds were victorious not because
the majority of the people went with them, but because
the majority went against the whites. In those years, this
was obvious even for many communists. As early as October

(38:05):
nineteen eighteen, one of the leaders of the Siberian Communists
AA Melesnikoff reported to the Bolsheviks, Unfortunately, the uprising is
beginning without our leadership. It's the most Bolshevik light of
all time.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
I know.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Unfortunately we're winning, but it's not us.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
So in June nineteen eighteen, the Bolsheviks declare war communism,
which is an economic thing. And you know what else
is an economic decision?

Speaker 5 (38:40):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (38:40):
Decision not to buy the products and services to support
this podcast? It's a poor one.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
It's as bad as war communism. You are supporting if
you don't support American capitalism. Those are the only two options.
So you'd better do it. Here they go, and we're back.

(39:11):
War communism, to put it bluntly, is not communism. It
has almost no relationship to the concept of communism. Instead
of workers and peasants controlling factories and farms, it is
distant bureaucrats. There's strict discipline for all the workers. I mean,
it's just autocracy, right, Is there any other like it
is longer? Yeah, oh sorry, you'll probably get to this, okay,

(39:33):
and then and then come in with it. If I
don't longer work days, striking becomes a capital crime all peasants.
Christ I did know that part. Yeah, by killing strikers,
all peasant goods are appropriated by the state, not just
people who own more than they can use, but anyone,
anything is appropriated by the state. This was worse than
anything Thezar had done to his serfs. Millions died of starvation,

(39:56):
and many would revolt, and the aristocratic Red Army would
come in and put those rebellions down. The party is
now allowed to veto any decision by any Soviet. All
power to the Soviets did not last a year. That's
my war communism. What am I missing?

Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (40:11):
Why?

Speaker 3 (40:11):
I mean, this is like the thing I wants to
emphasize about this specifically is, you know, the one thing
that revolutionary theorists had learned from the original French Revolution
was that you cannot have a revolution that functions just
by armies of urban workers going into the countryside and
taking everyone' stuff at gunpoint. Yeah, and like, like this

(40:33):
is very specifically so Kpotan, who we've been talking about.
His book The Conquest of Bread is his sort of,
you know, depiction of what the what a revolution looks
like and how and why and the sort of moral
justification for it. And he is very very sophific about
this of like, okay, so, like, if you have an
urban revolution, you've taken one city, right, you have to
go into the countryside and give like finished goods to

(40:56):
the peasants, and then they will give you food if
you are like nice to them and make deals with them.
And the Bolsheviks are like, okay, hold on, but what
if instead of that, we sent literally enormous armies of
like systematized bandits into the countryside and we took all
these people's food at gunpoint, Like what if? And then
like spend all this time complaining about peasant uprisings. Yeah,

(41:18):
it's like, you know, if only, if only there was
a guy who was there, literally who was like I
wrote a book telling you how to avoid this problem.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, Kirpacken's literally that. I think we end up talking
about it in this script. I can't remember. He's like
in conversation with Lenin. He doesn't like Lenin. Lenin is
like trying to be like, oh, Kropackett and I are
like best friends, don't worry, but like Korpakin is like
writing him like what the hell are you doing letters
all the time? But he's he's willing to talk to him.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, I think Krpakin in a letter I think it
was it was one of the anders. I think it
was Schapawkin literally said in a letter of Lenin, Lenin
is not a revolutionary. Revolutionaries have principles, Lenin has none.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, I think that's scripakn So.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Like, yeah, they're not getting along.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Great, No, no, it's another Lenin lie that they're getting along.
And at this point probably Lenin doesn't even bother with
that lie, right, he only bothers when he's like trying
to use the anarchists, although he is again actually even
though he's like run around and killed all the anarchists,
now that the whites attack, he's like, oh yeah, like
we're like all friends. But in July nineteen eighteen, the

(42:25):
SRS try to rebel against the Bolsheviks and they are
defeated and the party was criminalized, and the Bolsheviks now
say that they are the only party that can participate
in government. And frankly, the anarchist should have joined the
SRS in that fight. Yeah, But like I know, I'm
armchair generally from a one hundred years in the future.
But what's going to happen is that the anarchists are

(42:51):
going to be are going to stand alone because they
were with the bad guys for too long and put
down all the other people who could have stood with them.
Somewhere along the way in nineteen eighteen, the first concentration
camps are set up, soon leading to the Gulag system.
Stalin will become famous for. August nineteen eighteen, Lenin declares
quote mass terror against revolts. There are mass executions of

(43:15):
peasants and workers. There are mass executions of sex workers.
Because Lenin said that these are the reason that discipline
is so low among the soldiers. And he also would
do things like, hey, while we're at it, kill one
hundred random peasants, just so people know we are fucking scary.
Which is the most Czarrest asked thing. This is the

(43:38):
country that gives us the word decimate, where you just
kill one and ten of the soldiers to try and
make them all bab.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
I thought it was a Roman thing.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Oh maybe not. I don't know. I read a Tolstoy
story once. Eh, I read a Tolstoy story, I promise,
and it talks about decimation. But it's probably a Roman thing.
But I mean, I think or maybe wrote about it,
and that's a fiction story, and I'm not.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
Two toll stoys. I think that's two SIPs of whatever
you choose to drink.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Either way, it sucks. Don't kill one hundred random peasants
to scare the rest, don't mass execute sex worker, don't
kill a single sex worker.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
Yeah, I will say I've heard a lot of argument
over whether that over whether Okay, So the question is
it's not a question of whether Lenin ordered it. The
question is whether it actually happened. And I've seen a
bunch of conflicting reports about it. But at the very
least they at the very least they tried, like like

(44:34):
they wanted to. I don't know if they ever actually
did it, because but again, this is one of these
things that's been like lost to the haze of it's
everyone's conflicting accounts are mutually irreconcilable, and it's impossible to
tell who's telling the truth totally. You just have to
sort of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
That particular one is from an account of Matelonian anarchists
celebrating the one hundredth anniversary. Is from a piece they
wrote about the counter revolution of the Bolsheviks. That particular
that's my source for it, so I don't know, you know.
In September nineteen eighteen, the Czecha openly decide on their
policy of red terror against counter revolutionaries, which means anyone

(45:17):
who's not a Bolshevik. Folks don't take this line down,
of course, and revolts against the Bolsheviks keep picking up.
Fanya Koplan was a Jewish sr woman who had been
doing some maximalist stuff. When she was sixteen nineteen oh six.
She and her partner were like building bombs to Bomzaris
leaders back then, but one went off prematurely. She spent

(45:39):
eleven years in Siberia, going mostly blind, until she was
free during the February Revolution, and on August thirtieth, nineteen eighteen, she,
as she puts it, quote, my name is Fanya Kaplan.
Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own.
I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver.
I will give no details. I've resolved to kill Lenin

(46:01):
long ago. I consider I'm a trader to the revolution.
I was exiled to Actui for participating in an assassination
attempt against a Zarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven
years at hard labor. After the revolution, I was freed.
I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.
So by most versions of this story, she shoots Lenin

(46:23):
three times with the handgun that actually wasn't a revolver,
but it was like the first handgun operator with a slide.
Any gun nerds, it's an FNM one nine zero zero.
She got him in the neck and the shoulder and
punctured his lungs. He recovered, but he never made a
full recovery, and Fanya's bullets were likely part of what
brought Lenin too an early grave in nineteen twenty four.
There's another version of the story where she took credit

(46:45):
for the crime and she was there ready to do
the crime, but a different woman who wasn't blind did
the shooting, and then they caught her and she was like, yep,
it was me.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
I definitely did it.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
That's so funny, principled as hell. Either way, Yeah, it
may may or her memory be eternal. She was caught,
immediately refused to give up her comrades and was executed.
She got a bullet to the back of her head
and then her body shoved into a barrel and burned
Jesus and then partly in response to that, you have

(47:16):
the red tear. In two months, they killed ten to
fifteen thousand people. By nineteen twenty two they killed around
one point five million people. It's around this point, not
nineteen twenty two, but you know nineteen where am I
at nineteen eighteen? And in nineteen eighteen Ukrainian anarchists start
doing their thing and talked tobim a little bit morem
I'm talking about a little bit more even, I promise

(47:37):
you a four part are about them, mostly about Maria
Niki Ferova because she's amazing, but she's so cool. Yeah,
and ooh, arguments about sources as relates to that one.
That's why we're not doing too much about her yet. Anyway,
I'm like talking with someone who's trying to get me
in touch with the Ukrainian anarchist to be like, no,
this is actually how she died or whatever. That's besides

(47:57):
the point. I'm talking about a woman that most of
you don't know who I'm talking about, but the Ukrainian
anarchists seven million people in South Ukraine declare the free territory.
This is an anarchist society where power is held by communes.
Militias were free and decentralized. Land was collectivised, workers took
control of their factories. Education was modernized along the lines
of Francisco Ferrar, who we did a whole series of

(48:20):
episodes about. There is no party control of Soviets, including
anarchist control. This is anarchist in form, so there's political pluralism.
Even the Bolsheviks are allowed to print their papers in
anarchist Ukraine. The organization is basically you have regional congresses
of peasants, workers and insurgents called the Free Soviets, which

(48:42):
then have a more central military Revolutionary Council that people
sometimes argue was technically a government, usually Bolsheviks trying to
argue that anarchists isn't real. You can't possibly have anarchism. Yeah,
but a Bolshevik who hated the Ukrainian anarchists said the
following about them at the time. Quote, these organs of

(49:03):
power the Free Soviet were very primitive. There was no
central organ of government. There was only the Military Revolutionary Soviet,
which was at once a sort of parliament and central
military agency dealing with both military and civil matters. This
agency had a wide range of functions, but in performing these,
it presented itself only as a steering body and had

(49:23):
no rights of its own, all power being vested in
the local organs. Everything boiled down to each village in
each district, directing itself with complete independence, which really doesn't
sound like a state when you put it like that. No,
and it's just like but it also sounds functional, you know. Yeah,
And what I love about it is that the Bolsheviks

(49:46):
of the time are like, that's scarcely a government at all,
whereas Bolshevik apologists today are like, oh, Makos, Ukraine is
totally a state. Everyone makes states. There's no escaping it. Yeah,
something is is kind of the tangent. But I wanted
to talk about this of all of the sort of
weird stuff that marks us do to define a state,
to like avoid having to deal with the thing that

(50:09):
they created. Like so like in Lenin's Satan Revolution, he
has this thing or like a state is like it's
a special armed body. Okay, now, so.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Think about those eight He never explains what that is, right,
he just says a special armed body. That doesn't mean anything. Yeah,
it means nothing. And his argument is that like Okay,
So the the sort of social estate isn't going to
be a special armed body because it just it is
the proletaria blah blah, bah blah blah. But there's this
issue with it, which is that one of the things
Lenin like this is very explicit about this is that

(50:38):
under like in like the lower phases of socialism or whatever,
which is the first thing you set up, the state
is still going to be your landlord.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
And so if you think that through for about five seconds, right,
you can tell that everything they're saying is a lie
because in order for the state to be your landlord,
there has to be a special armed body that collects rent,
right totally, because otherwise how can like, you know, if
the state really is simply sort of the manifestation of
the political will, the proletariat or whatever, what is collecting

(51:07):
rent from you? Yeah, And if you look at that
and you look at this as like, oh no, he's
lying about all of this, yeah, because there has to
be something else that's that's going to collect rent from
all these pleny. As it turns out, like the Bullshviks
don't even follow at all the stuff they wrote in
the in statean Revolution right, like, there's no cheka in

(51:27):
the state revolution. I mean there is in real life.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
It was an appeal to get the other radical groups
on board, is yeah, the way that I read it
referred to. You know, I'm not a specific expert on that,
but yeah, yeah, And the Bullsheviks were good at this, right,
Like they stole the sr's land reform policy, and then
they stole the sort of anarchisty like all powder the Soviets.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
Thing, and that gets you to this moment of everyone
arguing about whether or not this is a state because
that was something that originally the Bolsheviks claimed to care
a lot about and.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
Then yeah, stopped. And what the anarchists in Ukraine did
when they set up this society, what they didn't do,
despite everyone involved in the organizing openly calling themselves anarchists,
like the people who set it up, is they did
not call the society that they set up anarchists. It

(52:21):
was politically pluralist using anarchist organizational ideas set up by
anarchists and get your red string out. How do they start? Well,
even before any of this other shit, like in nineteen seventeen,
I think they adopted the preamble of the constitution of
the United States based labor Union. Get out your banko

(52:43):
guards under your drinks, the industrial workers of the world. Bye,
I did not know that that's so cool, which means
Lucy Parsons born a slave in the US South, You've
done it again. Might be the most influential figure in
anarchist history, if not in terms of incredileary of agitation,
speech and the construction of organizations. And if you go

(53:04):
back to the very first episode of the show, it's
about the Haymarket murders, which we might run nawish or
maybe even ran recently. Again, we're going to rerun that
one around May Day. Anyway. The Maknivists, as they end
up getting called, refer to their goals because Makno the
guy who kind of ended up being the general or whatever.

(53:26):
They refer to their goals like this. The toilers themselves
must freely choose their soviets which will carry out the
will and desire of the toilers. That is, administrative soviets,
not state soviets. The land, factories, mills, mines, railways, and
other popular riches must belong to the toilers who work
in them. That is, they must be socialized and how

(53:48):
did they do it? Well, quote, an uncompromising revolution and
a direct struggle against all the arbitrariness, lies and oppression,
whatever their source, a struggle to the death, struggle for
free speech and for the righteous cause, a struggle with
weapons in hand. Only through the abolition of all rulers,
through the destruction of the whole foundation of their lies

(54:11):
in state as well as political and economic affairs. Only
through the destruction of the state by means of social revolution,
can we attain a genuine worker, peasants Soviet order and
arrive at socialism. That I know, it's just like, well,
that's what I'm so good, that's what I believe in,
Like I'm in you know. I mean, of course I

(54:33):
was in. But and by nineteen nineteen, the Civil War
is raging. There's conscription in the Red Army, and the
Czecha are just wandering around the country killing deserters in Russia.
Some deserters go home. There's like millions of deserters who
are leaving the army. Right, some deserters go home and
they form these green armies of peasants who are trying
to defend their areas from both the whites and the Bolsheviks.

(54:57):
So the Cheka didn't just execute desertings soldiers. They kidnapped
the families of deserting soldiers and then killed family members
until the soldiers returned to face justice themselves.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Yeah, the civil wars going badly though, and the Bolsheviks
need allies, so they're like, hey, SRS, you're like no
longer illegal, can you can you can you get your help?
So the SRS come out of hiding. So the Czecha
started arresting all the SR leadership now that they're not
in hiding anymore. And this is like kind of you

(55:30):
get this period where the anarchists are now fighting the
White armies again, even though the Bolsheviks have turned against them.
In March twelfth to March fourteenth and nineteen nineteen, in
only one city, the Cheka murdered two thousand to four
thousand striking workers, as well as the Red Army soldiers
who had thrown down with the striking workers. Because the

(55:50):
Red Army has a morale problem when they fight leftists.
They don't have a moral problem when they fight the
right wing. No, we need to sign up or like
shooting factory workers, like what is it, Yeah, what kind
of proletary and revolution are you running? Well, you're shooting
striking workers, like, yeah, what are we doing here? And
so the Cheka as they're murdering all of these strikers,

(56:12):
two thousand and four thousand of them. They some of
them are killed by firing squad, but they decided to
save the bullets and they were tied to rocks and
thrown into the freezing river Jesus. On March sixteenth, nineteen nineteen,
the Checha attacked a striking factory. The workers were demanding
non starvation food rations, freedom of the press, the end
of red terror, the end of special privileges for party members.

(56:36):
Nine hundred were arrested, two hundred were executed without a trial.
And these are specific examples among many others. The Chech
in particular were torturers as well. They boiled people alive,
they flayed people, they buried people alive. And you know
that they did the Orwell trick. Literally no, they would

(56:58):
put a rat in a metal two tube, press it
against a prisoner's body, and then light a fire under
the tube, so the rat has to eat its way
through the prisoner to escape the fire. What Jesus In
May nineteen nineteen, they try and fail to execute Makno
and Ukraine. By June nineteen nineteen, the Bolsheviks tried to
criminalize and execute anarchists in Ukraine. They were like, oh,

(57:21):
we don't like you anymore. Right, Trotsky said, I'd rather
Ukraine fall to the whites than be held by the anarchists.
Especially by that fall, when the Ukrainian anarchists had successfully
beaten back the Whites, the Bolsheviks were like, yeah, we
don't need them anymore. In May nineteen twenty, ten thousand
rebels in southern Siberia, the Altai and Thomsk regions. They

(57:43):
start fighting against the White Army, but they're not doing
it like how the Red Army wants. They're actually fighting
for work or control in Soviets. So the Red Army
criminalizes the Altai on Anarchists Federation and starts fucking them
up too. In June nineteen twenty, women workers in the
city of tul go on strike for the right to
have Sundays off work, and they are sent to concentration camps.

Speaker 3 (58:05):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (58:06):
On August nineteenth, nineteen twenty, the tambof peasant rebellion kicks off. See,
the Red Army was in town and they were beating
up old men in order to scare villagers to give
their grain to the government like you do. So fifty
thousand people got together to fight the Bolsheviks and the
whites alike. This spread. By January nineteen twenty one, there
were seventy thousand people fighting back the Communists to defend

(58:26):
their territory, demanding regional autonomy. It took one hundred thousand
Red Army soldiers and a fuck ton of chemical weapons
and taking hossages Chris to put that rebellion down. In
the end of that rebellion, two hundred and forty thousand
people died, most of them noncombatants.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
God.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
The final battles against the White Army happened in November
nineteen twenty at least in Ukraine, I don't remember elsewhere.
After that, the Red Army summoned Makno and the other
Ukrainian anarchist commanders to a meeting, and Makno's like, that
sounds like a trap. Remember how you tried to kill
me last year. Yeah, So he didn't go. Everyone who

(59:07):
did go was murdered by the Cheka. Then the Red
Army did a sneak attack invasion of the anarchist country,
despite the state and revolution saying that everyone has a
right to secede, but their own troops kept deserting to
join the anarchists, which is pretty cool. But after ten
months of battle, the Red Army defeated the Black Army.

(59:28):
Makhno himself was injured, but made his way across the
River de Nestere into Romania in August nineteen twenty one.
And that's how we'll leave it for the week. The
Bolsheviks have just won the civil war by using and
betraying their allies and using and betraying the working class.
A middle class intellectual vanguard pretending to speak for the workers,
used them to gain power, and then instituted themselves as

(59:51):
the new ruling class to be obeyed. Absolutely war communism,
and everything was for the state. No trade between city
and countryside, no freedom whatso ever. What will happen, Well, spoiler,
the last heart in revolutionaries, both striking workers and well
armed soldiers will make a noble and doomed stand on
the ice, well behind the ice, at the fortress of Kronstadt.

(01:00:15):
It will be beautiful, it will be short lived, it
will be doomed. It will be the Cronchat rebellion, the
whole reason we're doing all these episodes, and we'll talk
about it next week.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
I wanted to do a woo, but this is just
a this is this is a this is this is
that I know eis this is a this is Oh god,
I've been I've been secretly summoned into a Bastard's episode.
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
And it's like, because I I want to do a
lot more stuff around this period. And I was like
both the readers and also I just needed to get
way more background because I've read a ton of books
about Ukrainian anarchism, but I hadn't read a ton of
books about the Russian Civil War and the revolutions, and
so like I believe in con text, you know, Oh

(01:01:02):
really yeah, so this is really just I'm doing six
parts of context so I can finally start talking about
these other things.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
I just really want to know if you have had
a sugar crash yet.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
No, no, I don't understand why. It's a whole new me.
I'm never going back. You can't make me go back, Magpie.
I'm taking over pure sugar Land. Okay, what happened was.
I was driving a lot this last weekend. And I
don't normally consume caffeine because I'm a different version of XVX,
where I do drink alcohol, but I don't drink caffeine.

(01:01:34):
So I do also have one drug, just like straight
edge people. But it's not actually a rule for me.
I don't have caffeine. Ages don't do it. But I
had to drive a whole bunch. I to wake up
before thirty in the morning to go to this library
and association assigned books for my new book that's coming
out called A Sapling Cage. It comes out February September
twenty fourth from Femruary Press. Yeah and no, what I
was enjoying, okay anyway, And so I had to consume caffeine.

(01:01:55):
And I don't know how to consume caffeine because I
don't really understand coffee. So I got these cliff blocks,
these energy blocks. This is not an ad for oh no,
And they have like some caffeine in them, oh no,
And so I ate some of them and then but
they're basically just candy. They're just caffeine candy presented as
like energy bar, but it's not even bar form it's

(01:02:16):
like gel form and or like cube form. And then
I found out that a bunch of the flavors that
came in the box I got didn't have caffeine. So
today I ate a lot of them. But they didn't
have caffeine, but they had sugar. Oh no, And that

(01:02:37):
explains my mood.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
Yeah, go run outside with Rintrough for the next hour.
Just keep doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
It's probably a good idea.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
It's gonna be great. Yeah, do you have anything you
want to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
Yeah? I have a podcast called could Happen Here? I
just realized I don't think I've ever explained what it
is in the last four episodes.

Speaker 5 (01:02:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
The one sentence thing is it's about things falling apart.

Speaker 3 (01:03:01):
And how to put them back together again. So it's
a combo of the dystopia beat and the how do
you combat the dystopia beat. It's a good Yeah. I
have no idea when this is going to be coming out.
Who knows what's going to be coming out on that
podcast that week.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
We don't plan this forehead, but I do highly recommend
the Agenda forty seven series the entire team put out
that will be out by the time this drops.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
Go check that out. It's really important.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
Excited about that, although I'm nervous about it. I have
a book it's called a Sapling Cage. It comes out
The Sapling Cage, The Sapling Cage. It comes out from
Feminist Press September twenty fourth, and it is the best
book I've ever written. I've written a bunch of books,
but this is my debut novel. I mostly write a
little bit ADHD. I don't know if anyone who listens
to my podcast could ever figure that out, And so

(01:03:49):
I used to have a lot of hard time writing
long form fiction. So I I've written a lot of novellas.
This one's a novel, whole novel, and it's about a
trans witch who fights against the enclosure of the magical
comments that's not actually what is what it's about, but
it's a I think magic is being enclosed and she
fights against it. And you can pre order it probably

(01:04:10):
in June. But I'm really excited about so I'm just
gonna be talking about it a lot. Yay and everyone
else can hear from me next week, where we finally
talk about the thing that I promised you two weeks ago.

Speaker 4 (01:04:28):
Cool people who did cool Stuff is a production of
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