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

In the SIXTH part of this longest-series-ever, Margaret finally gets to Kronstadt with Mia Wong and talks 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 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who have Battleships, which
is the name of this show always. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest Mia
Hei Miya. Hello.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
I'm excited for the second episode of Cool People who
Have Battleships about the Germans scuttling their entire davy because
Alder ships are about to be seized by a bunch
of leftists. Whoa wait, when was that right after World
War One? Oh?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Okay, okay, cool are not audio engineer producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie, Hi,
but our actual audio engineer is Daniel Hi. Danel Sophie.
We can't continue to see Hi, Hi, Daniel I, thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
You're welcome.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Our theme music is written for us by Unwoman. This
is part six where we finally get to cron stat. Hey,
and if you only are listening to this part, then
the real quick rundown. Usually I'm like, why would you
start she's just here, but you actually could kind of
just start here. The real rundown is that there has
been this revolution. There's been multiple revolutions and the whole

(01:08):
Civil War, and Russia has fallen to the Bolsheviks. Who
stepped in despite being a minority party, and declared themselves
to be the only party that can run the revolution
and institute of war Communism and started starving everyone. And
everyone's really unhappy about it. And people are so unhappy
about it that they had a little rebellion in nineteen

(01:34):
oh five, nineteen seventeen and the Civil War. The Sailors
of Kronstadt were the famous and infamous Red Sailors. They
were the most politically reliable and politicized military element of
the left in Russia. When the Tsar walked through his
own island fortress, he talked about it like he was
walking through enemy territory, which, to be fair, he was, yeah, wu,

(01:56):
did you have that in the script too? Oh no,
but he was, yeah, yeah. Kronstadt is a port city.
It's a whole city. I used to assume it was
like the name of a fortress. There are multiple forts
in the city of Kronstadt, which is a port city

(02:16):
on an island called Cotland in the Gulf of Finland.
It's less than twenty miles west of Saint Petersburg. When
the golf freezes over the winter, you can walk to
Finland from Cortland this will save Wow, more than half
of our heroes today. This actually has a much higher
survival rate than almost any rebellion like this I have covered. Yeah,

(02:39):
almost fifty percent. That's good. More than fifty percent. Wow,
that's yeah. Yeah, which is a better survival rate than
the Bolshevik officers who put down the rebellion. A although
some of the people who then got away to Finland,
they like come back later and some of them, like

(03:01):
like one of them kind of tries to spy for
both Finland and the Bolsheviks and eventually like anyway whatever.
During the February Revolution, that first revolution, the more liberal revolution,
the sailors of Cronstadt had enthusiastically been like, what if
we just kill our commanding officers and take our over
our own lives, And so then they did that. Yeah,

(03:23):
there's this whole like thing where like they you know,
pull the guy out and he like comes out in
his bathrobe or whatever in the morning, and he tries
to order them what you know, they like storm his
like thing, and he like comes out he does to
order them, and they're like they just laugh at him
and then arrest him. Incredible. Yeah, the Sailors of Cronschat

(03:46):
were the elite. They were the shock troops of the revolution.
They actually that's not a later thing that they get called.
They actually are referred to the as shock troops, even
in direct translations of primary sources. Trotsky had called them
the pride of the revolution. One thing they'd never been, though,
was particularly interested in Bolshevism. Anarchism was a strong tendency there,

(04:11):
but it was mostly that thing that I keep hitting
home politically, pluralist socialism. They were srs the Bolsheviks, they
were anarchists. Part of why they'd been the shock troops
is that they were reliable, competent, and politically engaged. But frankly,
part of why they'd been the shock troops is because

(04:32):
Bolsheviks again and again put all of the non Bolsheviks
socialists at the front of every engagement because they wanted
them to die first. Famously lead from the back types
the Bolshevik leaders, which is ironic to their claim to
be a vanguard. Usually you imagine the vanguard being at

(04:53):
the van, which means the front. But you know, ah,
but that's where you're wrong. The most politically advance must
stand at the back of the line. So exactly one
of the incidents. The Kronchet Sailors have been involved in
all of it, from the July Days, that early uprising
in nineteen seventeen, to the October Revolution to the dissolution

(05:15):
of the Constituent Assembly. It was actually an arcosynicalist who led.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
I want to say the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly
as a military action, and maybe the October Revolution as well,
but I'm not one hundred percent certain about that, because
I took a bigger picture instead of writing down names,
which totally isn't related to how hard to pronounce the
names are. It was just because I wanted to do
a big picture. I swear they were also involved in

(05:40):
fighting the Whites in the Civil War, but all along
they'd refuse to just accept Bolshevik centralization of power. They
quite liked being equals to one another, electing their own
officers and not taking Czarist officers back into their ranks,
thank you very much. All throughout the Civil War, sailors
of Kronshet left the Bolshevik Party. It had been a
sizable minority at first, but in nineteen twenty by in

(06:04):
like April nineteen twenty, out of about I want to
say about fifteen thousand sailors or so, five six hundred
and thirty of them were Bolshevik Party members in April
nineteen twenty. By the end of nineteen twenty, only two
two hundred and twenty eight of them were still members
of the Bolshevik Party. Jeez, because they saw what was

(06:24):
happening and they didn't like it. Wow, that's yeah, yeah,
So by January nineteen twenty one, they ousted the Bolshevik
Commander in chief, whom they'd never much cared for. Basically,
like the Bolsheviks were like, hey, the guy who Margaret
didn't write down the name of go take over, And
they were like, we don't really like that, and so

(06:44):
then they kicked him out. They wanted power to remain
within their own Soviet, their own Democratic Assembly. Later, Leon
Trotsky made all kinds of hay out of the idea
that the Revolting Sailors weren't the real Red Sailors. They'd
all been cycled out. These were just some new guys,
you know, they didn't even deserve a stolen valor really

(07:07):
for them to claim to be the shock troops of
the revolution. So because of those kinds of lies, historians
have had to put in a lot of work to
track down like all the individual people, the overwhelming majority
of them, of the people who revolted were veterans of
the revolution. So the crew of two battleships, which were

(07:28):
trapped in the ice but had plenty of artillery, sent
a delegation to Saint Petersburg to figure out what the
fuck was going on with all these strikes and stuff
that are happening, right, and so they brought back a worker.
This delegation came back like three days later, this is
the end of February nineteen twenty one, and the worker
told them, quote, since you are from Cronstadt, with which

(07:50):
they frightened us all the time, and you want to
know the truth, here it is. We are starving, We
have no shoes and no clothes. We are physically and
morally terrorized. Each and every one of our requests and
demands is met by the authorities with terror, terror, endless terror.

(08:11):
Look at the prisons of Petrograd and you will see
how many of our comrades sit there after being arrested
in the last three days, No comrades. The time has
come to tell the communists openly, you have spoken enough
on our behalf down with your dictatorship, which has landed
us in this blind alley. Make way for non party men.
Long live, freely elected soviets. They alone can take us

(08:35):
out of this mess. And this is the core of
what they are fighting for. And Cronstadt, they are fighting
for non party rule. So it's you know, like people
who write history want it to be like, oh, well
it was the Mensheviks, or it was the SRS, or

(08:55):
even like you know, I have this like instinct room,
like all the anarchists did everything cool, Like no it
was not. I mean, the anarchist is in a political party,
but it's like not not a fult. You know, they
don't run for office, but there they have an ideology
and they ascribe to it, you know, and they're just like, well,
we want this dictatorship thing didn't work. We want to
be done with it. We want our soviets. Yeah, we

(09:20):
want the thing we fought in the revolution for. Yeah
that six to twelve million of us died for. Yeah. Yeah.
And so the people of Kronschat mostly the military, but
there's a whole town there too, and they all work together.
They were like, okay, fuck it, it is time for
what they called the third Revolution of the toilers. I

(09:41):
more modern translations use laborers, and I think that's a
better translation, but they mean the peasants and the workers.
And also I think often in cronschat they're also talking
about the soldiers as like the three groups. Makes sense. Yeah,
Later the Bolsheviks are going to claim that it's a
white army plot, an attempt to reverse the revolution. It

(10:02):
was not. It was an attempt to save it. And
so they got together and they passed a resolution with
fifteen demands, and I'm going to read the whole thing
because I think it really gives a sense of what
people were fighting for and what they were willing to
die for. One, in view of the fact that the
present Soviets do not express the will of the workers
and the peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret

(10:25):
ballot the pre election campaign. To have full freedom of
agitation among the workers and peasants. Two to establish freedom
of speech and press for workers and peasants, for anarchists
and left socialist parties. Three to secure freedom of assembly
for labor unions and peasant organizations. Four to call a

(10:47):
nonpartisan conference of the workers, Red Army, soldiers and sailors
of Petrograd, Cronstadt and of Petrograd Province no later than
March tenth, nineteen twenty one. Five To liberate all political
prisoners of socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants,
soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labor and
peasant movements. Six to elect a commission to review the

(11:10):
cases of those held in prisons and concentration camps. Seven
to abolish all the politelli deli the political sections of
the armed forces, because no party should be given special
privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the
financial support of the government for such purposes. Instead, there

(11:31):
should be established educational and cultural commissions, locally elected and
financed by the government. Eight to abolish immediately all the
Bolshevik units armed to suppress traffic and confiscate food. Nine
to equalize the rations of all who work, with the
exception of those employed in trades detrimental to health. Ten

(11:56):
to abolish the Bolshevik fighting detachments in all branches of
the army, as well as the Bolshevik guards kept on
duty in mills and factories. Should such guards or military
detachments to be found necessary. They are to be appointed
in the army from the ranks and in the factories
according to the judgment of the workers. Eleven to give

(12:16):
the peasants full freedom of action in regard to their land,
and also the right to keep cattle, on condition that
the peasants manage with their own means, that is, without
employing hired labor. Twelve to request all branches of the army,
as well as our comrades in the military Cussanti, which
is like a youth cadet corps in the Red Army,

(12:38):
to concur in our resolutions. Thirteen to demand that the
press give the fullest publicity to our resolutions. Fourteen to
appoint a traveling Commission of Control, and fifteen to permit free,
individual small scale production by one's own efforts. So they

(13:00):
wanted a quality. They wanted freedom of the press, they
wanted the ability for people to work their own land
as long as they weren't exploiting people by wage labor.
They just they wanted to not be tweend like shit.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, And I mean one of the things I think
is really funny that like one of the things that
people yell about this is like, oh, these people there
were small business owners. They wanted to bring individual production back,
and like that's just not what they're talking about. But also,
be Lenin is going to literally do that in about
one year, so like a couple months actually, yeah, like

(13:37):
a moth. So it's like, if you're going to hold
that position, you also have to hold that Lenin is
a kind of revolutionary, which I guess, yeah, someone somewhere
holds that position, which would be really funny, right, But yeah,
these are I mean just genuinely, these are not even
particularly radical demands. These are demands that the revolution that

(13:57):
everyone was promised actually happened.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yeah, that they won militarily, you know, they get the
thing that they won, that's what they want. Yeah. No,
And I mean I remember the first time I read
this a long time ago, the thing that actually really
did stick out was the you know, give peasants full
freedom of action in regard to their land as long
as they manage it themselves without employee hired labor. And

(14:21):
it like gets that one of these core things that's
interesting to me about rather than forced collectivization, the thing
that theoretically the broadest chunk of anti capitalism is against
is the exploitation of other people's labor, not the idea

(14:42):
of producing something on a small scale yourself for a market.
You know a lot of these people like, yeah, they're like, well,
there's this thing that happened in the Spanish Civil War,
which we've talked about a lot, right, is that you know,
when the anarchists went around and collectivized farms, they didn't
force collectivization on small family farms by and large, to
my knowledge, I have feeling that they probably every now
and then did because no one's perfect. And then overall

(15:04):
what would happen is about a year later, all of
the small family farms were like, you know what, actually
we do want to collectivize because they looked over and
they're like, that's actually more efficient to work together. Right,
But no one is making you. What they're making you
do is stop exploiting people by being the employer who
takes profit off of other people's labor. So, yeah, there's

(15:28):
something like this.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
That happens in China too. We're like China, it's more
by force, but people aren't really mad about it. It's
like a six stage process, and the first five stages
of it are effectively all these really really small petty
farmers like combined their tools and their cows and now
there's like twelve cows.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Instead of everyone having one cow, the group has.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
And then the part where everything completely goes to shit
and you start getting like mass resistance where everyone starts dying.
It was stage six of it, where the communists are like, oh, yeah,
by the way, you don't control this anymore. Now the
size of the commune and people working together is like
I don't remember the exact number, it's basically like the
size of the city. And also instead of the peasants

(16:13):
being people who are like working together the run to thing,
all of you are now like under the command of
some guy from the party.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
That's when like really truly the famines start, because everything
just completely goes to shit, and it's like, right, it
gets into this fundamental question of like what actually is communism? Right,
Like is communism like you know, something that was consistent
even with sort of Maoist principles, right of like stage
five where everyone has just pulled their stuff together and

(16:39):
they're this isn't even like an anarchist thing, this is
specifically a Maoist project, right, They have a sort of
functioning system that people are happy with, which is all
of these people in a town work.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Together collectivization or cooperativization or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, and they're the people making the decisions and like, yeah,
there's a party and they want grain for stuff. Yeah,
but that like worked and was popular. But then you know,
because all of these people have this like unbelievable ideological
obsession with like mass state control and having one guy
from the party running everything, it just goes to shit.

(17:13):
And it's like this is literally the thing if you
want to talk about, like, yeah, what completely destroyed the
Chinese Revolution, It's like it's like this, it's you did
this thing and all of the peasants starved, and then
all the peasants did decollectivization because they were like, well,
collectorization means that like this the state, like this guy,
the state bureaucrat, takes everything we've ever done. Steals are grain,

(17:34):
and we start right. And so they're like, well, okay,
why not do capitalism because the alternative is that And
it's just like you could have just avoided this all
if you just let them alone for like one year.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
But no, yeah, no, yeah, I mean it's the difference
I think we talked about in an earlier episode, or
it's later in this script. I've been so lost in
these words for the past many weeks that I'm not
entirely or is the different things like socialization and nationalization, Yeah,
you know, like does everyone get workers control or does
everyone get top down authority telling them what to do?

(18:10):
And like collectivization can be part of socialization, Like collectives
are really good ways to get stuff done, Like speaking
to someone who lives alone, I can't farm my bakriage
like Rentraw's not going to do it, you know, it's
nice to work with people. Yeah, And for the crush

(18:33):
that of sailors, it was less like the thing we
want is small crafters and farmers to be able to
do stuff. What they want is to have the freedom
to kind of figure it out as long as they're
not oppressing people, you know. Yeah, Like all of these values,
the different demands are different for different people. That's why

(18:53):
they're like, well, we want freedom of press for the
anarchists and the left socialists who don't agree about everything.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
No, Yeah, And I think the other important thing is
like not forcing these people to work at gunpoint yeah, totally,
which is what's happening now.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Totally. It's actually one of the things that I talk
about a lot is that I'm like, look, you can
point a gun at someone's head and say you are
now a communist. You cannot point a gun at someone's
head and say you are now an anarchist. All you
can do is point a gun at someone's head and
say I am now an anarchist. You don't get to
make me be a Bolshevik anymore or whatever. You know. Yeah,

(19:35):
and in this case, the guns that they have are
really big, and they're on battleship. Yes, always have battleships. Actually,
probably not anymore. They're getting worse, So wet anarchists care
about battleships. Yes, ACAB that's what that stands for.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Anyways, I'm gonna do my plug here for it could
happen here a podcast where we had two episodes about
a modern irregular naval warfare, which you should go listen
to because they're really fun.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
They are really good. And uh and you know what
else you should listen to, is it these products and services? Yeah, totally,
don't press forward fifteen seconds a bunch of times, never
do that here you go and we're back, and so

(20:22):
much like the ads you just heard, the slogans of
the Cronschat sailors were things like all power to the
Soviets and not to parties, and down with the counter
revolution of the left and the right, and my favorite slogan,
it's a little long for a slogan, but it's clever.
Lenin said, communism is Soviet power plus electrification. But the

(20:44):
people have become convinced that the Bolshevik communism is comisocracy
plus executions. That is, you can't chat that. But it's not. No,
it's not the worst I will, okay, but hear me out.
The best chance I have ever pulled off in my life.
My crowning moment as a political actor in this world

(21:04):
came more than twenty years ago now, at an anti
globalization demonstration where I got a black block that was
in the middle of you know, dragging things into the
street in order to prevent traffic from coming to this
meeting where people were talking about how to rule and
rule the world and things. And I managed to get
a pretty large group of people, like the entire block,
to chant, what do we want? A free association of

(21:27):
cooperative autonomous groups for the purpose of mutual aid. When
do we want it now? My finest hour incredible. My
best one is solo school. For that.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
I got an entire occupied airport at O'Hare to chant
build a fence around Mike Pence. I'm happy about that.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
That's pretty good. It's catchier than mine, I gotta admit,
but I've always liked absurdity.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Anyway, By most analyzes, this Kronschat rebellion was doomed from
the start because they were doing it in solidarity with
the workers in the larger cities. But those worker uprisings
were put down right around the time that the Kronschat
rebellion kicked off. There's not much of an overlap between

(22:19):
those two groups. If the Kronschat sailors had been doing
what they were trying to do, it could have gone
real interesting, you know.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Yeah, they'd been like like a week earlier or something.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah, yeah, but they were largely alone. It kicked off
on March first, when fifteen thousand people from Kronstat gathered
to heckle the President of the Soviet Republic, the formal
head of it, this guy named Kalinin, and they basically
scared him off and then stepped up and people started
stating their grievances, and the rally itself ratified the fifteen

(22:53):
demands that had been come up with. I think maybe
the night before even those two thousand dish rank and
file Bolsheviks agreed to these fifteen demands, except three hundred
tried to stop them and did wind up arrested during
this third revolution. So they re elected their local Soviet
and declared a revolt. They took over the entire city

(23:14):
without a single shot fired. All of the forts and
ships signed on to this. Right away. The Bolsheviks are like,
it's a White army plot, but also right away, by
March third, the first naval air squadron at another nearby
town of Oranabaum was like, fuck, yeah, fifteen points, we
are down. They formed a revolutionary committee. They sent three

(23:35):
folks across the ice to meet it up a Kronstat
and the Red Army came and rounded them up and
forty five of them was shot, and that revolt was
suppressed within hours. But Kronschat itself was not so easily defeated.
This part's going to shock you. They put out a
daily newspaper. Yeah, I think I've.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
Heard about this paper, but like an like I kind
of want to like be vaguely silly about it, but like,
by putting out a daily paper, they are keeping everyone
informed about what's going on.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
It is actually a like really important practical thing, you know.
And the tone of this paper all throughout is optimistic.
I don't think you can then say that all of
the sailors were always optimistic themselves, because it is the
job of this newspaper to not and still doom, you know. Yeah, yeah,

(24:31):
So I can't say, like, oh, I know totally how
they were all feeling because of their newspaper, but it's
still indicative. It's still interesting. The first issue announced our
country is enduring a difficult moment. Hunger, cold and economic
ruin have held us in an iron vice these three years. Already,
the Communist Party which rules the country has become separated
from the masses and shown itself unable to lead her

(24:54):
from her state of general ruin. It has not face
the reality of the disturbances which in recent times have
occurred in Petrograd and Moscow. This unrest shows clearly enough
that the party has lost the faith of the working masses.
Neither has it recognized the demands presented by the workers,
it considers them plots of the counter revolution. It is

(25:15):
deeply mistaken. This unrest, these demands are the voice of
the people in its entirety, of all laborers, all workers,
sailors and soldiers. See clearly at the present moment that
only through common effort, by the common will of the laborers,
is it possible to give the country bread, wood and coal,
to dress the barefoot and naked, to lead the republic

(25:36):
out of this dead end.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, that's one of the things that I always thought
was so sort of I don't know, like their tone
is really cheerful, and I think what's so bleak about
it is that this isn't even that radical of a thing.
It's like, yeah, we're trying to put shoes on people's
feet and put bread on their tables, and we think

(26:00):
that like the party autocracy can't do that. Yeah, and
for this, they're you know, labeled as traders and like
reactionaries and white army. Like I think at some point
they start getting accused of being like an international plot
or something. For over one hundred years, like they've labeled this.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, it was immediate that they started trying to label
it this way. I didn't end up put it in
the script that like ins and outs of it. A
lot of people who write about it have to put
in the following ins and outs because they're trying to
convince people who have been sold Bolshevik propaganda for eighty
years or whatever, right, oh, more than a hundred years ago.
Now right away they dredged up this newspaper from a

(26:42):
different western country that was like the sailors of Crunched
Out have rebelled. But it was just like some random
incorrect guests, you know, from like weeks earlier or whatever.
And so a lot of people have done a lot
of work to like check to see if it was
a White Army plot, and it wasn't.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
No, It's like, how on earth would the White Army
have had agents in Kronstat Like, yeah, what, I'm pretty
sure their closest army in this point in nineteen twenty
one is in Siberia? Is that the only one left
at this point too? Also like yeah, I'm pretty sure
literally the last thing they have is is like Coldsruck
and Siberia.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
And it's like, yeah, what this makes no sense? No,
But it was an effective way to convince the people. Yeah,
like overall, what won was the propaganda. The control of
the flow of information rather than a military was the
more important thing that defeated Kronstak. On March fourth, the
Petrograd Soviet, which is under Bolshevik control, voted to force

(27:39):
cronshadt to surrender. Emma Goldman was at this meeting and
witnessed it. A worker stood up in that meeting and
despite heckling, despite the obvious risk to his life, he
faced the Bolshevik party boss and said, quote, we the
workers and sailors protected you and helped you to power.
Now you denounce us and are ready to attack us

(28:00):
with arms. And then a sailor spoke up and read
the Kronstadt resolution and begged the Communists not to engage
in fratricide. Bolshevik radio is announcing a cronschat's been taken
over by a white general. Emma Goldman and others are
desperately trying to counter that. They write a letter to
the Bolsheviks begging to let a commission of five people,

(28:20):
two of them anarchists, be dispatched to Kronstadt to negotiate peace.
So even the anarchists on the outside are like Kronstad,
it's our people, let's go. They're like, oh fuck, we're
gonna lose. We need to try and make this work.
And the Bolsheviks are like nah. Specifically, Trotsky writes a
piece called a Last Warning to the garrison and inhabitants

(28:41):
of Kronstadt and the mutinous forts. It says, quote, only
those who surrender unconditionally may count on the mercy of
the Soviet Republic. Responsibility for the harm that may consequently
be suffered by the peaceful population will fall entirely upon
the heads of the counter revolutionary mutineers. This warning is final.
Which is the most classic thing that I hate about

(29:04):
authoritarian military forces is the if we have to bomb
a civilian center, it's your fault. Yeah, you know, I
mean it's it's literally the moss it's your fault. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
It's like indistinguishable from their proclamation bind Israeli general, like indistinguished,
or like an other American talking about chok and Awe
in Iraq or something like.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, totally, or it's the Japanese emperor's fault that the
US dropped nukes on Japan. Yeah, And speaking of their
lack of care about people and justice. They start rounding
up the Bolsheviks, start rounding up the families of participants
in the big cities and holding them hostage. Meanwhile, in Cronstadt,

(29:47):
the regular workers were armed by the soldiers and they
work to ensure their own democracy. Immediately, they expanded the
RevCom the Revolutionary Committee, from five to fifteen members, and
they would like post the names, the like employment of
each of the people in all of the newspaper issues
and be like, hey, like we're accountable delegates. You know.

(30:07):
The de facto head of this committee is an anarcho
syndicalist named Petrichenko who had grown up an iron worker
and then joined the navy, and he had fought in
the revolution under the red and black flag. Does another
thing that I run across as people think that the
only anarchist fighting in the Russian Civil War was Makno's
Black Army, and it's just not the case.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
I think part of that assidue with the casualty rate
of the anarchist fighting is so high, because you know,
there are the people actually doing the fighting at the front. Yeah,
And I think that's contributed a lot to the way
that people think about this as just a sort of
like Ukrainian thing.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Well, and it's also like we're constantly erased from history
every chance they can, and there's certain things that they
cannot successfully erase, and so that's like all that's left.
And you can't deny the existence of Makno and the
anarchist territory in Ukraine. You can just basically call everyone
in the Red Army Bolshevik, even if some of them
were explicitly anarchists fighting under a red and black flag.

(31:04):
And also I think Left s rs and stuff. I
know less about the Left s rs in general because
there's so many books about this shit. Yeah, so the
Revolutionary Committee put out some decrees, you know, it wasn't
like perfect absolute freedom within rebelling cronstat no one can
leave town was one of the big ones, because they're

(31:25):
afraid of well, they're afraid of the Bolsheviks leaving and
going and like reporting on everything out to the to
the Bolsheviks on the outside. They put in place at
eleven o'clock curfew, which is four hours later than the
seven pm curfew that is happening in Saint Petersburg at
this time, you know, because they're expecting to be invaded,
but also part of these decrees included trying to limit

(31:49):
their own revolutionary power. They included things like, quote, it
is ordered that during searches of organizations of whatever party,
nothing is to be removed or stolen, which is basically
them saying like, look, we're probably going to search the
Bolshevik party headquarters, but we're not going to be dicks
about it. Most of the arrested Bolsheviks, those who had

(32:10):
tried to stop the takeover the town, were released and
were like continued to allow to live their lives within
croun Shot, and those who are imprisoned are told that
there is no death penalty waiting for them. The rebels
take on a new slogan in response to Trotsky's warning,
victory or death. Their newspaper runs emphatic and beautiful statements

(32:31):
by former Bolsheviks who are rejoining the ranks of the revolution,
and I have like the first couple I read were
like really like, WHOA, that's really powerful. I mean, they're
not arresting the Bolsheviks, who aren't you know, it's not
illegal to be a Bolshevik within Cronstad at this point,
but it's like pretty frowned upon so like it's not

(32:51):
necessarily I think that these mostly read as very honest
denunciations of their former Bolshevik past. And my favorite is
that they would like run reports were like the following
hundred Bolsheviks have written us and signed and said we
no longer want to be Bolsheviks, and then one guy
wrote in to be like, I demand a retraction. I
left the Bolshevik party a year ago, like incredible, And

(33:15):
there was a lot of people like that, right because
a lot of people had quit being Bolsheviks and cronshtak
once they saw what was happening, and they're just like
really interesting. On March seventh, Trotsky ordered artillery to start
shelling Kronstadt. Cronstadt started shelling right back. It could be
heard from Saint Petersburg, where Alexander Berkman wrote in his diary.
I've seen that maybe he wrote this a few days later.

(33:36):
I've read both days of anguish and cannonading. My heart
is numb with despair. Something has died within me. The
people on the street look bowed with grief, bewildered. No
one trusts himself to speak. The thunder of heavy guns
rend the air, and again that's not in Kronschat. That's
in Petrograd. Saint Petersburg. Mass arrests continue in Saint Petersburg,

(34:01):
which is under martial law. The quick version of this
whole thing is that the revolts had been put down
in Saint Petersburg and then Cronschat pops off. But there
is overlap. People do continue, you know, and so they're
still mass arresting in Saint Petersburg. Seven pm curfew, no
feeder or assemblies, no passenger trains, only military trains. Meanwhile,

(34:26):
morale remains high in Cronstadt. They print in their paper
that day a piece titled we are not taking revenge.
The long oppression of the communist dictatorship over the laborers
has called forth the completely natural indignation of the masses.
As a result of this, the boycott or removal from
service of communists relatives has been adopted in several places.

(34:49):
This must not be we are not taking revenge, but
defending our laboring interests. It is necessary to act with
restraint and to remove only those who strive to sabotage
or slanderous agitation to interfere with the restoration of the
power and rights of the laborers.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, It's such a studying in contrast to the Soviets
being like, yeah, we're gonna kidnap your families and threaten
to kill them.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Like, and these people are like, don't boycott that guy's
brother just because he's in jail, you know, Like yeah,
people all the time talk about how, oh, during revolution
and war, you're just gonna have to leave some of
your morality behind. Fuck that. Like, I love how many
times throughout history people have looked at this and been like,

(35:34):
how do we minimize civilian casualties? How do we make
sure that the aggression that we are using, the violence
that we are using, does not spiral out of control?
What systems can we put in place to minimize that?
Like we are asked to do that as people who choose, Like,
if you are in a revolution and you choose to

(35:55):
use violence, I believe that we are asked morally to
be very aware of where the limits of the violence
needs to be.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah, And I think a lot of that is you know,
like the people who like now are talking about like
a necessity of this, and it's like, this is not
about the necessity of this. This is about the fact
that you want to do violence and you need to
find a sort of rationale for doing it. And because
you live in a suburb, you don't have an outlet
for sort of like your blood loss, and that's probably

(36:26):
a good thing, but you know, you've chosen this as
your outlet. And it's like, well, I don't think you're
actually making a sort of philosophical statement here. I think
you just want to kill people and you should maybe
think about that and attempt to not. Yeah, because it's
not good for you. According to the crownschet Sailors, no
one is up against the wall like the arrested Bolsheviks

(36:48):
who are trying to stop them are imprisoned so that
they can't continue to do that, you know, And that's it.
You know what else is a complicated moral decision to
make engaging with an economic system that's destroying the world.
But here we are doing it because it's that or starve.
Here you go, and we're back from that incredible series

(37:17):
of ads with a beautiful ad transition by the highly
skilled Margaret Kiljoy. So on March eighth, what would be
the funniest battle in history if it were not the
tragic loss of life happens March eighth, nineteen twenty one,
the Red Army gathers up twenty thousand soldiers to storm

(37:40):
a well fortified city that's like bristling with battleships, that
has fifteen thousand of the most skilled combatants in.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
The Russian Army. This did not go well. Behind the
starving low morale. Soldiers in the Red Army were machine
gunners from the Cheka with orders to shoot anyone who
doesn't charge across the ice to defeat their own comments. Christ,
that is the image of Bolshevism. Yeah, nothing says it
more than that in my mind. When at all possible,

(38:13):
avoid charging across the ice against a fortress that has
artillery a fuck ton. I've read scores, I've seen hundreds.
No one's really sure. A fuck ton of Red Army
soldiers just disappear through the ice to meet their watery
graves because you don't have to hit a soldier with
a shell, you just have to it near enough on

(38:33):
the ice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
I'm trying to think of a worse possible thing you
could attempt to do a charge in our chilling. Maybe
they directly ordered you to like walk over lava. Yeah,
that's like slightly worse than trying to charge a bunch
of archillry over an ice field. But it's not that
much worse.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
I know. And the only way that they did it
is by having the check out behind them with machine guns,
you know.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Hundreds of Red Army soldiers died, two Crunch statters were injured.
And it was March eighth, International Women's Day, so even
in the middle of being attacked, they took the time
to shout out women in their paper that day. Quote,

(39:17):
today is a worldwide holiday, the Day of the Working Women.
We the people of Cronstadt, under the thunder of cannons,
under the explosion of shells sent at us by the
enemies of the laboring people, the Communists, send our fraternal
greetings to you, the working women of the world. We
send our greetings from Red Cronstadt, from the Kingdom of liberty.
Let our enemies try to destroy us. We are strong,

(39:39):
we are undefeatable. We wish you fortune to all the
sooner win freedom from all oppression and coercion. Long live
the free revolutionary working women, Long live the worldwide social revolution.
Oh yeah, total white army people right there, total counter revolutionary, yes,
and they're speaking to us. One hundred three, one hundred

(40:04):
and three years in the future. Like when they say
we are undefeatable, I mean obviously they as individuals, we're not.
But we're still here and we're still fighting. I know
that's like a little self aggrandizing my current position versus theirs,
but like I think it's important to hold on to them.

(40:25):
We are strong, we are undefeatable. The Bolsheviks are getting worried.
Once the ice melts, the rebels can get help and
move freely, and they have a fuck ton of battleships,
so it could go really badly for the Bolsheviks if
they don't act quickly. For days, they bomb the place,
but because of the artillery the sailors have only fourteen
people are killed. March eleventh, the Bolsheviks attack again. They

(40:49):
fail again. A group of deserters I think seven hundred
strong come to reinforce the rebels over the ice. They're like,
we're done with this fucking Red army. We're going to
cross this ice and be like we're with you. March fourteenth,
the same kind of thing happens. They try and attack,
they fail, but the rebellion isn't spreading to quote crime

(41:11):
thanks article on this it was not the superior military
force that had won the day for the Bolsheviks, but
rather superior command of the flows of information. The final
issue of the paper came out in March sixteenth, nineteen
twenty one, and it printed the following, which I've seen
described as a song, and I've also seen described as
a satire, and I think it's just something happening. In

(41:32):
the translation of how to describe this, it's a poem.
I'm going to read like a fucking poem. The All
Russian Commune raised us to the ground. The Communist dictatorship
brought us to ruin. We drove the landowners out. We
waited for freedom, land, We shook off all the Romanovs,
and we were blessed with Communists. Instead of freedom and land,
they gave us the Cheka. They're bringing surfdom for us anew. Hey,

(41:56):
wake up, peasants. Only the Bolsheviks alone eat and drink
like the barons before a rise, peasant folk. A new
dawn is rising, will throw off Trotsky's fetters, will throw
off Lenin, the Czar, will overthrow the dictatorship. We'll give
freedom to labor, well, a lot for labor. The land,
factories and plants, labor will establish a quality and with

(42:18):
labor free forever, fraternity of all people will come and
otherwise never. It's not the best translation, or maybe it's
not the most poetic thing in the world, but it's
just honest.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's really beautiful in a lot
of ways. I think, I don't know. I mean, it
says something that the ideas survived, like you know, and
I mean, yeah, the things they were fighting force outlive
their executioners, which is something like it's not the most

(42:53):
sort of comforting thing in the world, but you know,
these people are gone now, like all the people who
killed them fucking die for it later, well not for this.
All these people are fucking murdered later anyways, and the
state that they built is gone. So you know, the
things that they're fighting for have outlived the people who

(43:16):
tried to kill them.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
I think it's like we we're so used to a
certain type of happily ever after story where you have
this thing and you want it, and you fight and
you win and then you get the thing. You know,
And one of the things that I've learned by writing
history podcast scripts and reading history books all the time
and stuff. Is that that's not a particularly useful way

(43:38):
at looking at these things. It is worth fighting for things,
it's worth trying to have things and then fighting for them.
But it is the fighting itself that is the winning.
And it is also our participation in this. When I
say movement, I don't mean like social movement, although I
guess I also do this like movement that happens forever

(44:02):
of people fighting to try and be equal and free,
you know, and we are blessed that we get to
be part of that because it's like there's no happily
ever after, because we are humans and we will die
like no matter how we manage it. Like that is
something that is going to happen. And one of my

(44:26):
favorite like things about this. On the last day, two
hundred and forty prisoners of war held by the Cronschat
rebels swore allegiance to the rebels, saying that they ask
the rebels to quote add our strength to its army units,
since we want to stand up as defenders of the
workers and peasants, not just of Cronstadt, but of all

(44:47):
Russia also, and these people there's no death penalty waiting
for them, right they could have just stayed in Cronstadt
jail for literally another day and then they would have
been free, right, So this was their actual decision to
be Like you ever see that movie, the Warsaw Ghetto

(45:09):
movie called Uprising or Warsaw or something like that. It's
got like the guy from Friends in it.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
No, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
It's a beautiful movie. It's about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
It's a fictionalized account. There's a Nazi soldier in it
who realizes he's on the wrong side and fights for
the Warsaw Ghetto folks. Right, It's kind of a Hollywood trope,
but it's like a beautiful and emotionally impacted part of it.
Two hundred and forty people who had tried to storm

(45:36):
Kronstat I mean, with machine guns at their back, right,
we're like, all right, we're with you in a victory
or death where we kind of know it. We yeah,
we know what's gonna happen here. Yeah, Well we're gonna die,
except more than half of them we're gonna survive. Yeah.
On March seventeenth, the final assault took Kronstadt. D thousand

(46:00):
troops were marshaled and upwards of ten thousand of them
died in the fighting that lasted all day and into
the night. Jesus Christ. More than half the rebels, about
eight thousand of them, including eleven of the fifteen members
of the Revolutionary Committee, escaped across the ice to Finland.
Oh my god. More than two thousand of the surrendering

(46:21):
rebels were executed by the Bolsheviks. And the first time
I had like kind of heard the Cliffsnowes version of this,
I thought it was all the leaders who had gotten
away over the ice to Finland, and I was a
little bit like that sucks. Yeah. It was like no, no, Ashley.
It was instead it was like, you know, I don't
know the blow by blow, right, they didn't get to

(46:42):
write a paper about this one, you know. Yeah, but
they like this is all of the Hollywood beautiful moments, right,
this is the like you all go, we will hold
them off, and then killed ten thousand soldiers Like yeah,
Jesus Christ. Author Murray Bukchin put it the Kronstadt Uprising

(47:08):
marked the definitive end of the Russian Revolution itself. He wrote,
what might have happened had Cronschat succeeded, we certainly would
have been spared a stalinist development, a development which turned
the entire world communist movement into an instrument of international
counter revolution. In the end, it was not only Russia
that suffered brutally, but humanity as a whole. A victory

(47:31):
by the Cronschat Sailors might have also opened a new
perspective for Russia, a hybrid social development, combining workers control
of factories with an open market in agricultural goods based
on small scale peasant economy and voluntary agrarian communes. A
participant in the uprising, put it or I think the
RevCom put it this way. Our demands are modest. We

(47:54):
want fewer freedoms than we had in nineteen seventeen. For this,
we are going to die. God, that's so bleak. It's
just I know. Alexander Berkman wrote soon afterwards in his diary,
this man could fucking write. It wasn't him writing for posterity.
It's just his diary, right, Gray are the passing days?

(48:18):
One by one The embers of hope have died out.
Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October.
The slogans of the revolution are forsworn, Its ideals stifled
in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday
is dooming millions to death. The shadow of today hangs
like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling

(48:39):
the masses underfoot. The revolution is dead. Its spirit cries
in the wilderness. I have decided to leave Russia. And
Leon Trotsky, in charge of the repression, was himself exiled
from Russia less than eight years later, and on August twentieth,
nineteen forty, he was assassinated at Mexico on orders from Stalin.

(49:03):
Grigory Zinoviev, who is the Bolshevik who ran the suppression
of the Saint Petersburg uprisings, was executed by Stalin in
nineteen thirty six, as were pretty much all the leaders
of the suppression of Cronstadt. Victor Serge, the anarchist term
Bolshevik writer who did a lot of justifying of the
repression of Cronstadt to history, he was kicked out of

(49:23):
the Bolshevik Party. He spent years in prison before going
into exile. His sister, mother in law, and two of
his brother and brothers in laws all died in Soviet prison.
Crime think put it like this, as the saying goes.
If you love a Bolshevik, the best thing you can
do for him is prevent his party from coming to power,

(49:44):
since he is certain to be next up against the
wall after you. After Cronstadt, partly in response to Kronschet,
but not solely, Lenin ended war communism, announcing the new
economic policy, which was mixed economy, in which there was
limited private business and there was no more forced grain requisition.

(50:05):
Soon they're making trade agreements with the western capitalist powers.
In the twentieth century, Kronstat was a watchword for losing
faith in the Communist Party. Your Cronstat moment, according to
ex Stalinist journalist Louis Fischer in nineteen forty nine, is
when you finally open your mind to criticism of this

(50:26):
thing that you've been unwaveringly loyal to. A few years later,
after the Hungarian revolt in nineteen fifty six, plenty more
people had their Cronstat moment. People today are still having
these moments where they realized that the easy answer is
promised by authoritarian movements are never the real answers. The
real answers are much harder. Instead of listening to this

(50:48):
or that daddy figure, we actually have to figure things
out collectively. We have to be responsible to one another,
not to ideology, and we have to learn from the past.
That's my sex part and the.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Yeah, I think that's an interesting place to end because
like this moment and then sort of the moment of
the early nineteen fifties where the communists admit that like
Stalin had killed all these people, have this really profound
impact on everything else that's going to happen in that

(51:30):
century because so many people who had goyay he gets
to the fifties of people who've held on believing through
like the Moscow Trials, through the Persia's like through through
the alliance with Hitler, like through everything, suddenly realized that
like oh my god, like no, this wasn't actually propaganda,

(51:50):
Like this stuff actually happens and it just destroys. Like
this is part of the reason why Britain is such
a like fiasco, because like whatever sort of like communist
woment they'd had, like it just basically implosed because of it.
Like this is where the term tankey comes from, is
like from that, right, and the apocle sort of horror
of this leaves you in this position through the early

(52:11):
twentieth century, where like your options if you're not in
like Spain, are you live under capitalism, you get fascism
or you get this like horribly mutated, deformed communism that
like largely consists of the super police dragging your family

(52:32):
away in the middle of the night, and that really
just it's so bleak and it's so much of the
I think like the history of what follows is about
nobody being able to sort of like once the people
who had actually tried to build a revolution of people
are free or dead, there's this real thing that I

(52:55):
think we get now too, of like there's just nothing
else and you know, like if you're in Germany, like
are you going to go to the barricades to get
crosstauted yourself? Like no, of course not right, So people
just sit there and then the Nazi show up, right,
and it's like it's this whole sort of I don't know,
it's this terrible spiral that just sort of drags the

(53:15):
rest of history down with it.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
I think this is the end of like the hopeful
period of the left. It holds on in different places
in different ways, right, but you have this we can
do it thing. Then the big, huge time. Everyone worked
together to do it. One group pulled all the strings
carefully to take power and turn it into red fascism,

(53:43):
you know, and it takes the wind out of so
much because you're like, yeah, like the level of distrust
that people have for each other now, you know, because
we've all seen it go so badly. And one thing
that changed for me, knowing about the Russian Revolution and
the c versions, I was always like, ah, that's why
you can't trust tankies, and that's true, but once you

(54:06):
really drill down into it, it doesn't mean therefore, only
hang out and work with other anarchists or only work
with whatever you dear listener, are you know, progressive social
Democrats or im Tratskis or whatever right like? Instead, actually
the most beautiful parts of all of this were the

(54:29):
political pluralism, were the people learning how to you know,
the thing that like really blew my mind. On some level.
I knew I'd been told, oh, Crunchat was anarchist rebellion,
and then I was like, no, it wasn't. And therefore
you sort of think anarchists were this minor player. They
were not. They were a very major player in it
that they were the leader of it, ironically was a

(54:51):
you know, an anarchist, and but they weren't fighting for anarchism,
although they were fighting for something that is compatible with anarchism,
like Soviet decentralized control is compatible, but it's compatible with
a lot of things. You know, there are a lot
of different ways of doing things that are compatible with
each other. And we're so used to thinking that nothing

(55:13):
we can do it has to be our way and
everything else is bad. And that is the kind of
thinking that leads to Bolshevism, is thinking that only your
way works. It's the tolerance paradox. I don't remember if I
brought this up before, so sorry, I've been like thinking
about this so obsessively for weeks now, you know, the
tolerance paradox of like, well, we can tolerate everyone who

(55:36):
wants to have political pluralism, like how the Bolsheviks were
able to run their paper in anarchist Ukraine, you know.
And I think that there's also some stuff here that
like would be a little bit surprising to people about
how hard these people are, Like no, we just want
freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and like freedom
of like thought and ideological thing, and that is the
anti authoritarian position. Rather than saying you have to be

(55:58):
an anti authoritarian, you're saying the structure should be anti
authoritarian so that people can think freely within it. I
don't know, I feel like I hadn't totally pulled out
my epiphanies out of all of this yet, but it's
like all I've been able to think about for weeks.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
The thing that I keep thinking about with all of
the demands about like not having single party control, reminds
me a lot of so. I think it was twenty
fourteen there was this uprising in this Mexican town called
Charan where people just ran, you know, like basically a

(56:31):
bunch of women went into the woods and were like
beating up a bunch of legal loggers because they were
cartel guys, and they were pretty sure they're cartel like loggers.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
I think it was cartel, but I'm yeah, and at
least that's the news that I got.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Yeah yeah, And they, you know, they come back into
the town and they're like, okay, we're doing this now,
and the town runs out.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
They were not the cops.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
They run into the cartels and they run out every
political party and this actually, you know, it had the
effect of healing like a very divided community because suddenly,
you know, once the parties are gone, everyone has to
actually confront each other as people instead of sort of
like abstract assemblages of symbols.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Yeah, yeah, like things like that.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
And you know, I'm pretty sure for everything that I've heard,
it's still like to this day, the cops have not
been able to come back in, the cartels haven't been
able to come back in, and the parties haven't come
back in. That rules, Yeah, I think it has two
things that are interesting. One is people have this real
tendency to project revolution purely into the past and be like, well,
something that happens one hundred years ago won't happen again,

(57:32):
Like you're stuck here with this now nothing ever happens.
But then also that's a really extreme way to enforce pluralism. Yeah,
I mean I think that obviously encrounchedat right. Anarchism was
a ideological position, but it was not a party position.
And that's actually what you just said helped me like
really point out what the difference between those are, you know,

(57:55):
because like you expect someone to be loyal to their party,
and so you're a electing someone based on the larger
party rather than like when you're talking about a delegate
who has a mandate, it's not that you're like, oh,
I want a Republican to watch me to say whatever
Republicans do, and that's the best I can choose from. Instead,
you're saying like, hey, Mia, you're our delegate. This is

(58:16):
what I'm hoping you're able to accomplish and what you speak,
you know, And it's not even like Mia, go be there.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
And be a political party. You know. I don't know,
but I do know that anarchists care about battleships and
oh god, is that our like? Is that like the tanks?
Is that our tanks? Yeahs, I'm okay with it.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
I'm so down. I the anarchist pirate Navy will sail again.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
Yeah. And according to some of the Soviet propaganda films
that I've watched parts of the song on our lips,
as we do, it will be. I'm a roast chicken,
I'm a steam chicken. I'm walking down the street. The
cop asked me for our passport. Now got a passport
because I'm a fucking chicken. And I'm alright with that,

(59:10):
all right? Well, uh, you got anything to plug.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Yeah, I have the show It Could Happen Here. It
comes out five days a week. I'm on it. Other
Green people are on it.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
I have absolutely no idea what's going to be happening
when this episode comes out, but something it'll probably be good.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Who knows. I will say that as I've been writing this,
the only non Russian Revolution podcast that I've been listening
to as I work on this is been It Could
Happen Here is talking about what is it called, like
Agenda forty seven or something with that. So if you
want to be terrified about stuff that's happening now, is

(59:48):
that I've been terrified about stuff that happened one hundred
and two years ago. You can go back in time
and listen to those podcast episodes. And also you can
follow me on the internet. I'm on substack and Instagram
and Twitter and blue Sky and I even use some
of those sometimes. And you can check out the newest

(01:00:10):
Cool Zone Media podcast sixteenth Minute by Jamie Loftus about
Internet fame. And I've never heard of Jamie Loftis podcast
that I didn't love, so I'm really excited to listen
to it, and I'm really excited because it's an ongoing one.
Because I have this problem where Jamie Loftis puts out
a new podcast and then I'm like, and then I
binge listen, and then I'm like, but now it's done.

(01:00:34):
I have to wait a year before there's some subject
I didn't know I cared about, like Kathy comics, to
suddenly learn about. But it's not gonna be a problem
because it's ongoing anyway, see y'all. Actually, I think what's
gonna happen next Monday is that I'm going to take
a week off because someone's gonna cut into my mouth

(01:00:56):
and implant some kind of necromatic ritual where the corpse
of another person's bones is going to go into my
jaw and I can't record while I'm recovering from someone
else's jaw becoming part of my jaw. So instead you'all
going to get to hear about Mayday. Unless you already
heard it, just listen to it again. Whatever overly earnest

(01:01:20):
anarchist history time, and then I'll go back to doing
things that aren't just overly earnest anarchist history whenever I
come back from that. Unless I just keep doing more
of it Hie Everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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