In part three, Margaret continues to talk with Robert Evans about the time that millions of Ukrainians rose a black flag and went to war against landlords, nationalists, and Bolsheviks.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People did
Cool Stuff the podcast about Deep Space nine, the.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Best Star Trek, the horniest Star Trek has ever been,
And yeah, God, I've been appreciating that. There's something about
I made a comment about how horny Geene Roddenberry, who
we will do a hybrid cool people Bastard's episode on
He's certainly more on the cool people end, But I
made a comment about like what a horny man he was,
(00:34):
and someone said, like, what you have to understand about
Star Trek is that it's fundamentally smut, and that is
that is very true. Yeah, it's just in a way
that's a lot more wholesome because it's not at all.
Roddenberry has this great line where he was being asked
about like the objectification of women in Star Trek, and
he's like, well, you know, I've been objectified for my
body a lot in my life, and if it's done right,
(00:55):
it could be perfectly healthy, not totally wrong.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Jeed, Yeah, we should do it. We should do it.
Just about the media of that rough era, and then
you do Jim Henson and Geene Roddenberry.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, Henson and Roddenberry, Sure.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
But yeah, the stuff that made me who I am today.
Absolutely Normally, this episode is not actually about Deep Space nine.
You'll probably figure that out because you're on part three,
But in case you're not, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and today my guest is Robert Evans.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi, Robert, Hey, are we doing, Margaret good?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
And we are allowed to go completely off the rails
because Sophie's not here.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yes, we have to keep at a certain level of
baseline sanity. We're calling that like the Bill Burgh floor, right,
just a certain floor of rationality that we're going to keep.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yeah, well, the main thing that will keep me on subject.
Today I realized I've finished the script since the last
time we recorded. I knew an awful lot about Marie
Niki Ferova before I started writing the script, and by
the time I had finished the first two parts. But
now I have sort of finished reading more or less
(02:13):
everything that is available in English about her. I think
she's one of my favorite figures of all of history,
and probably my favorite anarchist.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah. Yeah, she's growing on me. I gotta give it
to you.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
And she's going to keep doing some really interesting stuff.
I also think, although we don't have enough of the details.
This is going to be the greatest love story ever told.
I know more about the situation with the husband now. Yeah,
and I feel confident in the assertation I made about
assertion whatever the thing.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, both are fine.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, Look, people expect me to pronounce the Russian names, right,
I can't pronounce the English ones. But where we last
left our heroes Marussia, Niki Farova and her free combat jersey.
You know, we're running around Ukraine on trains and on horseback,
robbing the rich, giving to the poor, setting fire to prisons,
(03:06):
and generally being cool. We're gonna get back to some
of her exploits. She's got an awful lot of them,
more than is easy to keep track of. There's so
many cities that she liberates from governments. If I liberated
one city from a government and redistributed all the goods
from the rest of the poor and empowered the workers
to take over their factories, I'd be done.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, I would say, like, one of the best moments
of my life is about a fifteen minute period where
roughly two city blocks were liberated from the government. And yeah,
we had maybe a half hour at the long end.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
And that was great, totally, Like the Paris Commune looms
large in the history of leftism in general. That was,
you know, six weeks one city. That is what Mercia
does for breakfast.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
So it's nineteen eighteen now and things are spicy, all yearned.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, yeah, spicy, famously spice period.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Of ten yeah. Yeah, not always the easiest to live in.
She found out that the Bolsheviks and Sevastpool had imprisoned
eight anarchists. So the free combat Jerzina like drops its
war against the nationalists at this moment to go show up.
The Bolsheviks don't even wait for her to arrive. As
soon as they hear she's on her way, they free
(04:22):
the anarchist prisoners because they heard she was coming.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
That's the best compliment you could give somebody. Yeah, and
then you spread liberty by your presence the same way
that like a nuclear meltdown spreads radiation. You're like the
chernoble of human freedom.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh, I wonder if she ended up
in that area anyway. In nineteen eighteen or nineteen, depending
on your source, she helped overthrow the government of another city,
and she found out that the local Bolshevik military leader
who had taken power. There was a tyrant and the
soldiers underneath him were underdressed and underfed. So she went
(05:07):
to his apartment, marched him outside, forced him to strip,
give all of his clothes to his men, and then
shot him. Her and the anarchists then went around the
city and forced the food to be distributed equally, despite
because basically at this point the Bolsheviks are giving food
and clothes to Bolsheviks but not to other leftists who
are part of the revolution, like Leftis suppers and unaffiliated folks.
(05:31):
And she basically went to the Bolshevik RevCom of the
city and was like, look, if you don't start feeding
people here equally, I'm just going to shoot all of you.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
There. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
So, since there bureaucrats to the end, the RevCom set
up a quote committee on the settlement of the conflict
with Mariusia amazing stuff. Yeah, you're going.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
To have my own committee dedicated to the fact that, Yeah,
because it's like everybody scared beef with me.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, and they can't quite just arrest or shoot her
because she is like the hero of the revolution at
this point.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, she's simply too cool for that.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah. Becas eventually she leaves the city, and meanwhile the
local nationalists reach in an agreement with Germany to ask
for German aid. So the Germans invade and they start
taking over Ukraine, and they just start brutally massacring people,
especially anyone who might be a leftist, like especially Jews,
who are all suspected of being leftists. That's not the
(06:33):
only reason they're killed. They're also being killed because it's
nationalists and they want to kill all the Jews anyway,
but it's like they double hate them. There's a huge
battle in the city of Yusavathrad where the Black Army
led by Nikki Farova, alongside the Red Army, tried to
take the city back from the nationalists or conquer it
from the nationalists, depending on who you ask. There's a
lot of like I liberated the city and like, well,
some of the people are really happy you were there,
(06:54):
but some of the people like the other.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
People too, yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
And the Red and Black Army is they attacked by
railway because this is a war where in which you
could fight from armored trains.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
People had just figured out trains and they were very
excited about the killing other people. Potential that trains.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Have Yeah, which is funny because I think this is
also the war in which we learned why we don't
do this anymore. Yeah, you know, because trains only go
one direction at a time, fairly predictable.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I mean, I think two technically, right, you can you
can reverse them. Yeah, well that's how the Cossacks got
fucked up. So they reversed, and then they reversed into
their own front's train, but rowick. So they captured the
city by railway, and they won the main strategic goal,
which was freeing all the anarchist prisoners in town. Maria
(07:43):
Nikifova could not stand to see pretty much anyone in
a cage, but especially her comrades, especially the anarchists. Then
the German army invaded and they were forced to retreat
again for a moment. In nineteen eighteen, all was lost. Nationalists,
alongside the Aufe Hungarian occupiers, started retaking the country, and
(08:05):
all throughout this time the management of individual areas and
cities was in constant flux. Basically, it's like, oh, the
nationalists control this, like, oh no, now theres areus control it.
Oh now the Bolsheviks control Oh no, now the anarchists
control it, and almost every side, sometimes including the anarchists,
but like mostly not is just purging everyone every chance
(08:25):
they can get.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
So it's kind of awful. I run across statements about
how non purgy the anarchists were. Those statements were written
by anarchist historians, however, they seem to be reasonably accurate.
But I can point to at least one counter example
where when the anarchists take over a city, they're like, where,
we're going to kill all the nationalist leaders or whatever,
you know, and that's just war. You actually do a
(08:49):
pretty good job in your episode talking about the fact
that it's like all of the people fighting during this
It's like, no, one's great. You have a war.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
You can't do a war and not do bad things, right,
That doesn't excuse it. It's this really complicated nuance that
I'm talking about. Ethics on Twitter does not prepare us
well for where like it's like, yeah, you know, it
was bad, for example, to level so many German cities
the way that we did in World War Two. It
(09:21):
doesn't equivocate us to the Nazis. It's just like you
can't in saying that, like, yeah, well, we were going
to do bad stuff because we were prosecuting a war
and that's inevitable. Also, does it mean you can't do better? Right,
These are important things to understand, and it really shouldn't
be all that hard to get people through.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
And this is one of the best examples I've ever
seen of people trying to do that. I mean, I
think I'm going to get into it a little bit
more later. But like Makano for example, and the Makknow China,
the anarchist society that gets set up during this they
whenever the Black Army, whenever the anarchists do anyone in
that group does programs, they get killed by their own side.
(10:02):
And they like Makno is like running around arming Jewish
communities that aren't part of his thing, just to be like, hey,
like we hear the people are trying to put gram
you here's a bunch of guns and stuff like that,
you know, And that doesn't mean that people weren't doing
bad stuff, but that's like they were proactive about trying
to mitigate the effects of the bad stuff. Yeah, And
so marius Yah, she's running around liberating in all these cities.
(10:26):
Her charisma ideas often win over the working class. Also,
the fact that like one really good way to win
over the working classes to steal all this stuff from
the rich people and then hand it out like the
thing that anytime they show up anywhere, they just like
rob all the rich people. They take inventory, and then
they distribute it equally as best as they can, and
that's a really good way to get people on your side.
But in early nineteen eighteen, i think February, her detachment
(10:49):
was camped out in the local train station in a
city called Elizavi Gorod and went around forcing the rich
people to donate to their cause, all while in a
vague truce with the impromptu government of the city, because
like sometimes it's not even held by one of the sides,
the city's just held by, like in this case, the
city's kind of held by like an impromptu coalition of
(11:10):
the bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks. While the anarchists are running
around doing this redistribution. One factory had all of its
wages stolen, like someone showed up and stole all the
money was supposed to go to the workers, And this
was quite possibly done by the free combat Rosina and
the workers are all real pissed, right, So Mariusia She's like,
(11:31):
all right, I'm gonna do the thing I always do.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna give a talk and
everyone's gonna love me and it's gonna be great. She
goes to get a talk for the assembled workers at
the factory and everyone's basically like no, fuck you and
doesn't let her get a word in. So she pulls
out two guns and like shoots them into the air
and be like, oh, that's going to get it.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Ah, And usually it's it's assigned to how cool she is.
Nearly everyone who pulls out two guns is like, just
be just being an idiot, right, Yeah, to be to
be able to pull out two guns and use them
properly and credible stuff, incredible stuff. She assemite sammed it
and did it right, but it didn't work this time.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
She does it a lot, but this time it turns
out like sometimes if you shoot a gun above a crowd,
it'll make everyone go quiet. Sometimes it just may everyone panics.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Well, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
A fire in a crowd in theater environment. So this
did not work that day. The workers panicked, Mario Ucia
had to get whisked out by her bodyguards, and workers
fired on her retreating carriage and she was quote lightly wounded.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Well, okay, I guess this. I'm back on side. Maybe
don't fire two guns in the air most of the time,
I know.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
But have ever told you my two knife theory of
self defense?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
No? No, no, well you know I think you have
brought this up, but please, for the ship, for purpose
of the show, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah. Okay. So you know when I was I was
a street kid for a while, and people would give
me a lot of shit because I was wearing a
dress and living on the street or whatever. And I
thought to myself, well, if you pull a knife on
some never pull I'm speaking theoretically. I never I totally
never did this. So if you pull a knife on
(13:07):
someone who's messing with you, that's often a bad idea.
And you know, knives are not actually great for self
defense in a lot of ways. If you pull two
knives on someone, you're a crazy motherfucker. And so people
would mess with me and I'd pull two knives and
run after them screaming, and then they would run away.
And then later I was, you know, studying proper self defense,
and I was explaining this theory of self defense and
(13:27):
they were like, well, what do you do if they stop?
And I'm like, well, I turn around and run away.
Like if it didn't work, I'm just casting a fear spell.
If the fear spell doesn't work, I'm not fighting them,
I'm running the fuck away.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I would never encourage anyone to do almost anything I
did in my twenties, to be honest, and that's among
the things I would not encourage.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
But yeah, yeah, it works for me. The only version
of the gads did flag I like is the uh
the snake wrapped around to hand grenade that says fuck
with me and I'll kill us all.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, there's actually some there's actually some wisdom buried within
that meme.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah, I mean, that is what has kept us out
of World War three since the nineteen forties, is that
many countries are a snake wrapped around a grenade right now.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, yeah, And that could all stop working in a
really bad way, but it hasn't. It hasn't yet, right
at least in this timeline.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
My theory is that we can't exist in a world
that destroyed itself in nuclear war in the twentieth century
and anyway, so Mariuciam gets out the city. Militia marches
on the train station where the anarchists are camped, and
the anarchists are better armed, but the militia is more numerous,
which means that the anarchists had to retreat, but they
(14:44):
killed a fuck ton of people that They're like, at
this point, you're like shooting union workers who are trying
to march on you and kill you. But it's like
that sucks. Civil wars suck, you know. Yeah, And a
machine gunned down a bunch of people because they're much
better armed than the masses marching on them. So the
Bolsheviks show up and try to force the city to surrender.
(15:05):
The city was like, nah, I'm good, We're not going
to surrender to you. And the Red Army unit invaded
and the militia just trashed them and then started torturing
and executing all the Red Army prisoners, accusing them of
working with Mariusia. Yeah, the militia's slogan was down with anarchy,
and rumors were being spread that she was basically just
a bandit, and that was the primary This kind of
(15:28):
remains the primary anti anarchist view of the Ukrainian anarchists
during this era is that they're bandits. I would argue
that every military in this area is doing some version
of this, and we'll talk about more of that. But
the problem now Mariusia, she's gotten out of the city,
but there's now prisoners in the city. She can't leave prisoners.
(15:51):
It's like she's constitutionally incapable of leaving prisoners. I can't
point to a single instance where she does.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The Free combat Jersey and now attacks the city that
just trashed their allies right attacks the city from the north,
and the city can scripts everyone it can to throw
them into the trenches, and they do the same thing
that later the Bolsheviks are going to do in Cronstadt,
where you dig one trench and that's where you put
all the conscripts, and then you dig a trench behind that,
and that's where you put the officers with machine guns
(16:19):
to kill all the conscripts who try to run away. Sure,
so that's not great, and they have a battle and
at last days the anarchists got help from the Red Army.
The city to government declares itself for the nationalists and
tries to get help from the Germans. But the Germans
don't get there fast enough. A Red Army train with
(16:39):
a freedom or Death banner rode in from the south
while the battle that was in the north, and they
take the city. Because the Malicia is busy, the anarchists
and the Bolshevik prisoners are freed. Mariusia and others spend
their time trying to say it was like all a
big misunderstanding and they're friends with the workers, and this
time it works. This time she's like, She's probably like, hey,
(17:01):
remember when they were machine gunning you and forcing you
to fight us, We're actually on your side. And that
time it kind of worked. And the anarchists who took
the city didn't do reprisals. They just robbed the rich
and distributed it to the working class. Again, I think
this is why it worked when they said we're on
your side. The Bolsheviks held the city for about a month.
Then the German invaders took it. The German soldiers, they
(17:24):
loved reprisals, lots of torture and murder and rape when
they came through. And I'm going to quote from that book,
The Revolution without Delay. The Battle of eliza it Grod
is an typical example of the Ukrainian Civil War, desperate
battles between fierce opponents, then a third more powerful side
arriving to take the pot. But if you want to
(17:47):
take the pot, you can.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Oh, you know, Margaret, I'm so excited that Joseph Robinette Brandon,
our president, has made marijuana kind of legal, because I
think soon we're going to get to actually have pot
advertisements on this show, Like it's gonna be one of
those things like this has happened with ketamine, and we'll
take the ketamine ad money if they'll give it to us,
where you can go you hire a doctor online and
(18:12):
the doctor's job is to prescribe you ketamine and it
is completely legal. We're going to be doing that with
pot soon. And I'm really because it was like that.
It was never federally legal, but in California for a
time back and forth, was it was legal legal. You'd
go to a fake doctor and you'd get prescribed your marijuana,
and then there was this brief period where you could
just take it anywhere at any time and no one
(18:33):
could get angry at you because you're like, I literally
have a doctor's note. And that's what we're finally going
to have the federally where you can like walk up
to a deage and with your joint and be like,
this is my medicine. I have a prescription for as
much pot. It's like an hold in my pockets. And
I'm just letting you know, pot companies, we'll sell weed
for you. We'll do it happily once that's legal.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, that's the only way any of us have ever
sold weed is if it's legal.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
But yeah, like all law abiding pot heads, I've only
smoked marijuana in Portugal.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, exactly. When I moved to Amsterdam, everyone was like, ah,
you're moving there for a weed. I'm like, no, squatting's
legal there, squatting.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Like yeah, it's like how we like the One of
my favorite stories is that like the federal government accidentally
legalized marijuana federally as long as you as long as
it's technically hemp. Like that's why you can buy pot
at the store in Texas now they can't, so interesting.
Yeah yeah, yeah, and they had to. Like it's because
(19:37):
of the way that like certain different kinds of THHC
are regulated when they're in hemp. But like, yeah, the uh, yeah,
I think it was the FDA came out and was like, no,
this specific kind of weed is not regulated under the
Controlled Substances Act. It's beautiful stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I mean, it's so dumb that, like ketamine, had it happen.
Don't get me wrong. Ketamine has saved many of my friends' lives,
Like chem therapy has been incredibly.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, useful for a lot of my friends. Unbelievably powerful. Medicine.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, way more, fox you up, way more than weed.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh my god, so much more, so much stronger of
a drug.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah. Weed better for you than alcohol.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah, better for you than basically everything, Probably.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Better than caffeine. As a song.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Is certainly less harmful than caffeine. Yeah, probably probably, Yeah,
with you with the caveat that. Like marijuana, like most hallucinogens,
has the ability to set off schizophrenic symptoms and people
who are prone to that already.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Yeah, No, I mean nothing is and I think people
at all. I don't do drugs. I'm justgalization.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah. Yeah, I've been sober for years. Well, I've been
Oregon sober. So I take creative.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Well, if you're listening in the future, you might be
about to get a pod ad, right, But here's the
rest of them.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
So one of the things that actually I was really
surprised about about this timeline of the invasion of Ukraine
by the Germans is that I had thought that had
happened when the Bolsheviks signed the treaty, the peace treaty
with the to end World War One, but it actually
on invitation of the nationalists. You start getting foreign armies
coming in from the west. The German invasion was about
(21:29):
a half a million soldiers. The defenders, the Bolsheviks and
the anarchists had about thirty thousand people total. Those are
fucking crazy odds. The conquest took all of the spring
of nineteen eighteen, despite only thirty thousand people holding off
half a million. The free combat Jerzina no longer had
access to the railways, so this is when they switched
(21:51):
to horseback and start doing that thing where they ride
in colored stripes. I found another source that back that
went out, although that other source might have been using
the first source. It's all can messy with this particular story.
And since the Reds were desperately outnumbered and then retreat.
You ever been in a leftist social movement that's suddenly
not winning anymore? Robert, No, that's never happened to any
(22:13):
other leftist movement. It was just the one guys trash. Well,
since then, nothing has never happened before or after. You'll
be surprised to know that what they did was immediately
started in fighting the Bolsheviks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bolsheviks
used the opportunity to argue about ideology and to politically
maneuver themselves. They had this captured a state, right, and
(22:35):
they used it to have this how is this going,
how do we retreat meeting between the Bolsheviks and the anarchists. Yeah,
and both sides at that were like, hey, we are
allies of convenience. We just got to make sure everyone
knows that. And one of the reasons for that is
that the anarchists, they just captured this estate, right, so
they start inventory into distributing the clothes of all the
(22:56):
rich people to the local poor people in the neighborhood.
And the Bolshevik can Anders said that on principle he
didn't talk about such trivial matters as that. So the
Bolsheviks at this meeting, they start giving these speeches about
the need for unity and discipline and mari Usia and
the rest of the anarchists they hear this, and they're like, oh.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Has anyone ever used the word unity and not meant
do what exactly what I want you to do?
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I wish they did. The concept is okay.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
The concept there's there's there's a there's a rational basis
for it. It's just almost always used bardly Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And so Mariusia and the other anarchists they hear this
and they're like, we know which way the wind is blowing,
and so they leave, like in the middle of the speech.
They're like, we're out of here, which is good because
as soon as the speech was done, the Bolsheviks showed
up to disarm her and dissolve the anarchist units. But
there weren't only there. They had all left because they
(23:51):
went to back to home to Alexandrovsk to prepare to
defend the city against the nationalist invasion. And here's where
we get one of the old only hints that there
were plenty, or at least more women in the anarchist ranks.
During a battle in the outskirts of the city, someone
found a woman's body wearing all black leather, which was
(24:11):
the style of the free combat Dresina yeah, and assumed
it was Mariusia, but it was a different woman, presumably
a fighter. So again it's this like everyone's being like, oh,
and then all the anarchists men's soldiers, you know, and
you're like, so you start thinking, like, oh, Mariusia is
like the sole woman and she's just a leader, she's
not a rank and file fighter. I'm certain that isn't true.
(24:35):
And here's like one of the pieces of counter evidence
I have, but no one's talking about it and really
annoys me. So I just don't know. By April eighteenth,
Alexandrovsk fell with a Jerzina, the last unit to flee
the city, and this actually is going to come up
later and like trial against her. They're going to like
put her on trial for like deserting, and she's like,
I was literally you all fucking deserted first. You were
(24:56):
to fuckers.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, there was no one left.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, and peasants were slaughtered without trial at the slightest
hint of having been anti landlord. And of course the
German invaders also went around taking the rich people's stuff.
They just also took the poor people's stuff, and they
took it for their own army nearby Gouliepulia, which is
Makno's hometown. We talked about a bit. It has fallen
(25:21):
too the nationalists as well, and all the local managing
bodies have been arrested. Mariusia runs into Makno to hear
about how his older brother had been shot in front
of his own wife. Another of his brothers was captured,
so Mariusia convinced him to join her and an assault
to retake the village. And they go around and they
start gathering up armored cars and all that shit. But
(25:41):
the Nationalists had advanced too far, and so there's no
longer a clear line of attack because now that it
is no longer the front, you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Know, yeah, yeah, it's the back at this point.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Yeah. And so they, the two anarchist commanders and their
forces retreat east. The Bolsheviks in March sign a peace tree.
You at Germany, giving up Ukraine in the process, and
a quarter of its population and three quarter of its
industry of all of Russia, and now the Bolsheviks are
out of the fight down there as well. At this point,
(26:12):
the structural differences between Bolshevik and anarchist revolutions are starting
to come to a head. The Bolsheviks wanted war communism,
which was top down control of all industry, while the
anarchists wanted worker control of the industry. On April twelfth,
nineteen eighteen, in Russia, the Bolsheviks launched raids against twenty
six anarchist spaces. They arrested four hundred people. They dissolved
the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, and the Bolsheviks said
(26:35):
all this was to stop the criminals who had been,
you know, taking things from the rich and distributed them.
Like That's what the main beef was about, is that
the anarchists were like, well, as soon as we do this,
we take the stuff from the rich people and we
distributed it, and the Bolsheviks were like, no, it's like
comes later, it's eventually, it's fine. It's fine. In Ukraine Marusia,
she reaches the city Taganrog on the Azov Se and
(26:57):
the Bolsheviks arrest her, and when she asks the Bolshevik
commander why she's been arrested, he says, I don't know.
I don't know why you've been arrested, just that you've
been arrested, and the charges wound up being the desertion
of the city right as well as the robbing rich
people thing. She let herself go to trial, and we
(27:18):
know she let herself go to trial. We know that
she one hundred percent could have been busted out because
of what then happened. An anarchist takes the stand at
this trial as like a character witness, and what he
does is he explains in no uncertain terms. He said
that if quote the comrade Nikki Farova had accepted to
appear in court, it was because she considered most of
(27:38):
the judges to be real revolutionaries and she knew that
in leaving this court room, she and her detachment would
be cleared of all suspicions, that their weapons would be returned,
and that they would be left to continue fighting the
counter revolution. If she had thought that the tribunal would
rather show leniency to the plans of the government and
it's provocateurs, she would have informed me and I swear
(27:59):
in the name of the whole crew of the armored
train that we have would come and free her by force.
And there's so many good things going on.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, one that's a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Yeah, Like sure, it's better for me if you find
me innocent, that if I just kill you all, you know.
And second, it's one thing to swear on God, it's
another thing to swear on the whole crew of that
armored train over there.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, and that's your man. One day, one day, if
this country ever heals, we'll have a president sworn in
on their anarchist armored train of the Bible. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
You'll be shocked to know, Robert, that she was acquitted
of all charges.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh ah, that that that warms my heart.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah yeah, justice, justice wins out, or at.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Least an armored train did.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Yeah. And as soon as she's out, her and Makno
are running around making speeches to the workers again. And
one of their whole big things is, we don't need
a revolutionary army from Russia to do this. We the
workers can arm ourselves and drive out the nationalists. And
they they do prove that over and over again, like
(29:17):
the big army from Russia, all so useful to have,
don't get me wrong. And then after that their paths
diverge again. Makno goes home to retake Gugliepulia and wage
a guerrilla war and start building the anarchist society we
all know in love in history, the Maknovchina Marusia. She's
less of a build the Revolution type. She's not anti that,
(29:37):
but she's less that, and she's more of a war leader,
so she's off to the front. She stops along the
way to burn property records and big bonfires in the
middle of towns while the townspeople look on and cheer.
A description from a witness of them at the time
said they looked like Spaniards with long hair and black capes,
a pair of large pistols stuck out of their belts,
(29:58):
and they carry grenades in their pots. The younger ones
wore bell bottom trousers and gold bracelets.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Amazing stuff. Yeah, and it goes it just it further
proves what I've said for a long time, which is
that you're never fully dressed without some hand grenades in
your pocket.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I know, I know, it's criminal. We should be arresting
people for going around naked.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, yeah, police, just to like the reverse stopping frisk
where you're like stopping people in the subway going now,
you can't get on the subway. You don't even have
one hand grenade. What are you think?
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, come on, yeah, totally what are you doing? By
autumn the German invasion was stopped, and the Bolsheviks immediately
went back to trying to disarm the anarchists as soon
as the anarchists are done stopping the German invasion once again,
whenever the Bolsheviks wanted to find Maryus, he had to
disarm her. Her and her soldiers were nowhere to be found.
(30:52):
By November, Germany had lost World War One and the
peace treaty said get the fuck out of Ukraine though
for real, and so the German occupation government fell to
a coup a'ta by Ukrainian nationalists, which is now distinct
at this point from the White army who wanted to
bring back Grand Ole Russia. And they're still around too. Yeah, Mariucia,
though she's busy. She's capturing Odessa from the Whites, burning
(31:14):
the prison before being driven out by Greek and French
armies who were allied with the nationalists. And then she's
also busy getting arrested again by the Bolsheviks. Sure, sure,
that's a full time job. It is a full time job.
Most people only apply to that job once. This is
time to where she got the job. The White terror
(31:34):
is going on everywhere, all potential revolutionaries being killed, but
you also have the Red Terror in which potential revolutionaries
are being killed just by the Bolsheviks instead. But so
it would have been completely in character for them to
shoot her. But they couldn't shoot her because she was famous.
She's the heroine of the revolution. I'm unsure exactly when
she starts getting compared to Joan of Arc, but I
(31:56):
think it's around now, and they definitely were like, she's
personally met Lenin. We can't shoot her, right, great stuff, Yeah,
they do. They take her out of the front. She's
transferred to Moscow and released on bail. The anarchists hadn't
fully split from the Bolsheviks yet everywhere, and some high
(32:18):
up Bolsheviks also really actually liked her because when they
were like, hey, we think that the you judges actually
have some real revolutionaries in you. There's still some real
revolutionaries in the Bolsheviks, and there's like some Bolsheviks who
particularly like have a soft spot for and so this
high at Bolshevik and then an anarchist, her husband who
has been working in the administration of the Bolsheviks, like
a lot of anarchists, they were there like we personally
(32:42):
guarantee her good behavior. She'll be fine. She's not going
to do anything mean to you if you let her
go before trial. Her charges were basically what she'd already
been acquitted of, stealing from the rich people without asking
for permission. First, while she was out on bail awaiting trial,
she got back into art, and she also got back
into trying to get all the anarchists into one organization. Basically,
(33:04):
as soon as she's like, well, I can't be in
a war, I guess I'll do organizing an art. In
December eight, nineteen eighteen, she joins the All Russian Congress
of Anarchist Communists and they argue about how much to
support the Bolsheviks. They couldn't reach consensus on the matter,
and in the end they kind of went with Maryusia's suggestion,
which was to work with the Soviets only when they
quote went with the masses, which implies leaving each one
(33:27):
to their free conscience. So she's not even like, hey,
we declare war on the Bolsheviks. She's like, we don't
trust the Bolsheviks, but we still know that sometimes they're
actually working for the revolution, And we don't have a
lot of firsthand quotes from her we've got what Makno
wrote about her. We've also got the notes from the meeting,
(33:48):
and it's the best understanding we have of her as
a political thinker. And this is where I started being like, oh,
like I genuine because she's usually painted as kind of
the like bad anarchist to Makno's good anarchist. You know,
she's the like kill the rich and he's the rob
the rich. Is the way that they often present it, right, Yeah,
but we have some of our own talking about this
at these meetings. She believes in both the violent revolution
(34:10):
and also nonviolent components, like spreading ideas of mutual aid
and solidarity. She believes that anarchist should form organizations, ideally
one big federation to coordinate, but obviously she's into groups
maintaining their autonomy. She's also against people going all out
all the time. She said, quote to sacrifice oneself is
easier than to work constantly, steadily achieving defined goals.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
God, that's such an important point yep.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, because you can look at someone like her and
be like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could
just go all out and then die tragically suddenly? And
she's pointing out that it's like, well that's almost the
easy way, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the actual the hard thing is surviving
and doing the work. Yeah. Yeah, it's this Yah at
this point, I make we talk about this in the
three weeks that we spent on g Gordon Liddie, Like
this like very understandable but also toxic. And it's not
(35:13):
I think it's it's masculine coded. Not that men are
the only or you know, males are the only people
who have this desire, but it's very much deeply within
kind of what we consider to be like traditional masculinity,
that this like hope that like if I could just
throw my body away in some in a moment of
desperate heroism, that's so easy, yeah, compared to being a
(35:40):
good person over the long haul.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, and being a good person when thing when it's
hard to be a good person. Yeah, and like yeah,
no absolutely and yeah. And so hearing that attitude from
her surprised me and impressed me. And it was only
surprising because it's just like, well, she's the I mean,
it is shocking she has lived this long, she has
been she was a teenage terrorist and then she has
(36:08):
been in a war. At this point, first in World
War One in the trenches on the Western Front. Uh
maybe a dead not on the Western front of mind,
actually sure which where she was fighting.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
But you know she was in the trenches in the
It wasn't it good front to be in in that war? Yeah,
all of the fronts were rough.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Yeah. It was the first time machine guns met mass war.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah. You know, there was that one Christmas party that
was pretty nice. Otherwise all a bad time.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, okay. And then the other thing that she
said that really I like about her. She said that
in Moscow, quote, for example, in Moscow itself, we should
create a whole network of vegetable gardens on a communist basis.
This would be the best means of agitation among the people,
people who are in essence anarchists, Like I would say
(36:54):
that now, like that's like a very modern, common, peaceful like, hey,
let's show people that anarchy works by setting up gardens
and feeding people.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Like fuck, yeah, yeah, I uh that is my favorite. Yeah, No,
I like that. That's that's good lived anarchy. Yeah, setting
up gardens and feeding people. Sometimes again, it's enough to
admit I don't know how to save the world, So
I'm just going to do something that I can't fuck up,
and like setting up a garden really hard to harm
(37:28):
anybody by doing that.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Like distributing food is a good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's a good thing that like,
if you can't think of anything else to do, find
someone who needs a meal and get it to them. Yeah.
There's no way for the world to not be a
little bit better after doing that. And that's enough as
long as you don't confuse yourself into thinking that like
this is how we fix all of the problems, right,
it is the underpinning solution to all of the problems,
(37:56):
which is like looking for a need and then filling it.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah. Absolutely, much like we had a need to go
to an AD break, and now I'm going to go
to an ad break. Yeah, right now, and we're back. Yeah.
And so she's waiting trial. The trial starts, she's a
(38:23):
character witness when she's accused of banditry, who said all
she had she gave away, even to comrades she barely knew.
She wouldn't keep a kopek for herself. She gave away everything. Also,
this is where we learned that she's fucking straight edge.
She never drank Wow. Yeah, that's that's hard just as
a normal person, particularly as a Ukrainian living through yesperiod.
(38:49):
Yeah yeah, like no shade to anyone knew as cclusion.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
It's just hard to get through a nine to five
without drinking occasionally, let alone the Russian Civil War.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, they found her guilty. They found her guilty of quote,
discrediting Soviet power, which you know she was guilty of.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, I'm true, Like, they're not wrong. If they didn't come,
I think the punishment, whatever it was, is not going
to be right. But that's not inaccurate.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Sure, they're afraid to punish her like they want to,
and so they don't. They absolutely could have ordered her
executed and like it was like and did a lot
of times. Yeah, yeah, they didn't. They acquitted her on
charges of pillaging and they sentenced her to basically you
can't be a military commander probation for six months.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Ah okay, I'll bring that back as a punishment.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
I know, but is like almost death.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
She is not happy about this, so she fucks off
down to Gulie Poia to see what her Budon Makno
is up to. And here's where they start disagreeing more
actively these two. When Mariucia gets down to Guliapoya, she
finds the start of a new society and anarchist society.
Oh my god, I just found out that the Macno
(40:10):
Museum in Guliapoya has been destroyed in the current Russian invasion.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Well, I hope they got a machine gun or two
out of it to use.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
I hope so too.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
I think it's a pretty good chits.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Yeah. Yeah. And so she goes down there and she
sees this anarchist society, but it's one that's struggling against
his own contradictions. How do you have a new society
in the middle of a war. How do you negotiate
how that new society is kind of run by one guy?
How do you not piss off the Bolsheviks while also
refusing to follow their orders? How do you keep soldiers
(40:41):
from doing war crimes and pograms and rape and murder.
They were really trying during that struggle. They were trying
to keep their moral head above water and not drown
in the war. Mariusia found an anarchist society organized by
a regional congress of peasants that had declared the land
belongs to nobody, and the only ones who can use
it are those who work it. In the village of
(41:04):
Gouie Pulliem, they're all kinds of new schools and hospitals
and shit, all built by workers. And this actually runs
counter to what I had thought and what I had
maybe heard before. She also found that the anarchists didn't
do mandatory conscription. Makinuvcino was not a mandatory conscription. Military
defended area enlistment was voluntary, and this worked. People were
(41:28):
signing up to fight, like without machine guns at their
back if they refused to do it because they're fighting
for something. They had thirty thousand fighters with seventy thousand
reserves at the beginning of nineteen nineteen. This is like
way before their peak. I think they actually like had
too many people offering to go fight. The biggest problem
(41:48):
they had is that they needed industrial production of arms.
So a lot of people who are like, I want
to go fight, They're like, could.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You make guns instead?
Speaker 3 (41:53):
We really need people to make guns.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
But the biggest contradiction happening at this point, at least
from Mariusi's point of view and or the historians I'm
reading talking about all of this is that Makno is
trying really hard not to piss off the Bolsheviks. He
doesn't want to be invaded by them. He's trying to
fight the whites. And here comes Mariusia, who's clearly pissed
off the Reds, and so he's like, look, I'm going
(42:17):
to respect that sentence. I'm you can't be a commander
here either until your six months are up. And she
tried to speak up at a meeting and be like,
here's what's going on in Moscow, blah blah blah, but
she didn't wait her turn or something, and he basically
shouted her down and was like, if the Reds had
convicted you, they must have had a good reason to
do it, and we don't. Makno didn't write that into
(42:38):
his journals, but a different anarchist president at that meeting
from the Maknevchina did the Reds. At this point, the
Bolsheviks are being full shitty war communism assholes in the
areas they control. They're requisitioning food from peasants, They're burning
down the houses of anyone refuse. The Whites are, of course,
way worse. They kill one hundred thousand Jews in pokegrams.
They burn whole villages to the ground like that, rape
(43:00):
and conscription everywhere the White Army goes, which actually is
it leads to a lot of Later They're going to
do a lot of like uprisings within the White Army.
And the reason they're able to do that is the
White Army or all conscripts who really don't want to
be in the White Army. As a fun side note,
Makno is married I think twice during the Civil War,
(43:20):
and his second wife was a machine gunner who personally
executed any anarchist soldier who committed rape.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Hey, that's a good thing, to good reason to personally
execute somebody I know.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I know. Also like I can imagine wanting to marry her. Hello,
machine gunner who kills other rapists?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
What's up?
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Do I hang out? If you're still around, you're a
vampire lady to hit me up on Twitter. So anyway,
Macinno is still playing nice with the Bolsheviks on some level.
So is Nikki Farova. She actually talks to them and
gets her sentence reduced to three months, but while she
gets back to the fight soon enough, she doesn't do
(44:02):
it with any connection to the Bolsheviks. Ever, again, she
may or may not have been working for the Makhnov
China and what she is about to do. Sources conflict
about that, but she was working probably as part of
the anarchist spy agency, the contras Vedka, which we're going
to talk about on Wednesday. Excellent, that's my cliffhanger because
(44:30):
I'm really excited about the anarchist spy agent.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Say yeah, so am I, let's get to that story tomorrow,
by which I mean roughly ten minutes from now. But yeah, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Well, Robert Evans, you've got anything you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, we have a new podcast called sixteenth Minute of Fame.
It's about what happens after somebody becomes the main character
of the entire internet with the great Jamie Loftus, who
is only accused of has not been proven to have
killed anybody in Grand Rapids, Michigan. No, no, no hard
evidence either way on that game.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
And actually not accused by any court of law, just
by not accused, friends and podcast fellow podcasters, who should.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Look, it's not an allegation if you just say that.
There's a lot of people are talking about the Hammer
murders that some people say Jamie committed, but not me.
Not mem sixteenth minute of Fame, everybody.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
I listened to the first episode the other day and
I was like, I'll listen to anything. Jamie doesn't be
really happy about it, but I was like, how am
I about to listen to like an hour about a
guy who said some stuff on Twitter or on the
internet in twenty twelve. It was really good. It was
really good, my attention deeply the entire time, learned some stuff,
(45:42):
very into it.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, anyway, check that out, everybody, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
And uh, see you all on Wednesday. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Or more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People did
Cool Stuff the podcast about Deep Space nine, the.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Best Star Trek, the horniest Star Trek has ever been,
And yeah, God, I've been appreciating that. There's something about
I made a comment about how horny Geene Roddenberry, who
we will do a hybrid cool people Bastard's episode on
He's certainly more on the cool people end, But I
made a comment about like what a horny man he was,
(00:34):
and someone said, like, what you have to understand about
Star Trek is that it's fundamentally smut, and that is
that is very true. Yeah, it's just in a way
that's a lot more wholesome because it's not at all.
Roddenberry has this great line where he was being asked
about like the objectification of women in Star Trek, and
he's like, well, you know, I've been objectified for my
body a lot in my life, and if it's done right,
(00:55):
it could be perfectly healthy, not totally wrong.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Jeed, Yeah, we should do it. We should do it.
Just about the media of that rough era, and then
you do Jim Henson and Geene Roddenberry.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, Henson and Roddenberry, Sure.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
But yeah, the stuff that made me who I am today.
Absolutely Normally, this episode is not actually about Deep Space nine.
You'll probably figure that out because you're on part three,
But in case you're not, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and today my guest is Robert Evans.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi, Robert, Hey, are we doing, Margaret good?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
And we are allowed to go completely off the rails
because Sophie's not here.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yes, we have to keep at a certain level of
baseline sanity. We're calling that like the Bill Burgh floor, right,
just a certain floor of rationality that we're going to keep.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yeah, well, the main thing that will keep me on subject.
Today I realized I've finished the script since the last
time we recorded. I knew an awful lot about Marie
Niki Ferova before I started writing the script, and by
the time I had finished the first two parts. But
now I have sort of finished reading more or less
(02:13):
everything that is available in English about her. I think
she's one of my favorite figures of all of history,
and probably my favorite anarchist.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah. Yeah, she's growing on me. I gotta give it
to you.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
And she's going to keep doing some really interesting stuff.
I also think, although we don't have enough of the details.
This is going to be the greatest love story ever told.
I know more about the situation with the husband now. Yeah,
and I feel confident in the assertation I made about
assertion whatever the thing.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, both are fine.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, Look, people expect me to pronounce the Russian names, right,
I can't pronounce the English ones. But where we last
left our heroes Marussia, Niki Farova and her free combat jersey.
You know, we're running around Ukraine on trains and on horseback,
robbing the rich, giving to the poor, setting fire to prisons,
(03:06):
and generally being cool. We're gonna get back to some
of her exploits. She's got an awful lot of them,
more than is easy to keep track of. There's so
many cities that she liberates from governments. If I liberated
one city from a government and redistributed all the goods
from the rest of the poor and empowered the workers
to take over their factories, I'd be done.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, I would say, like, one of the best moments
of my life is about a fifteen minute period where
roughly two city blocks were liberated from the government. And yeah,
we had maybe a half hour at the long end.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
And that was great, totally, Like the Paris Commune looms
large in the history of leftism in general. That was,
you know, six weeks one city. That is what Mercia
does for breakfast.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
So it's nineteen eighteen now and things are spicy, all yearned.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, yeah, spicy, famously spice period.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Of ten yeah. Yeah, not always the easiest to live in.
She found out that the Bolsheviks and Sevastpool had imprisoned
eight anarchists. So the free combat Jerzina like drops its
war against the nationalists at this moment to go show up.
The Bolsheviks don't even wait for her to arrive. As
soon as they hear she's on her way, they free
(04:22):
the anarchist prisoners because they heard she was coming.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
That's the best compliment you could give somebody. Yeah, and
then you spread liberty by your presence the same way
that like a nuclear meltdown spreads radiation. You're like the
chernoble of human freedom.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh, I wonder if she ended up
in that area anyway. In nineteen eighteen or nineteen, depending
on your source, she helped overthrow the government of another city,
and she found out that the local Bolshevik military leader
who had taken power. There was a tyrant and the
soldiers underneath him were underdressed and underfed. So she went
(05:07):
to his apartment, marched him outside, forced him to strip,
give all of his clothes to his men, and then
shot him. Her and the anarchists then went around the
city and forced the food to be distributed equally, despite
because basically at this point the Bolsheviks are giving food
and clothes to Bolsheviks but not to other leftists who
are part of the revolution, like Leftis suppers and unaffiliated folks.
(05:31):
And she basically went to the Bolshevik RevCom of the
city and was like, look, if you don't start feeding
people here equally, I'm just going to shoot all of you.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
There. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
So, since there bureaucrats to the end, the RevCom set
up a quote committee on the settlement of the conflict
with Mariusia amazing stuff. Yeah, you're going.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
To have my own committee dedicated to the fact that, Yeah,
because it's like everybody scared beef with me.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, and they can't quite just arrest or shoot her
because she is like the hero of the revolution at
this point.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, she's simply too cool for that.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah. Becas eventually she leaves the city, and meanwhile the
local nationalists reach in an agreement with Germany to ask
for German aid. So the Germans invade and they start
taking over Ukraine, and they just start brutally massacring people,
especially anyone who might be a leftist, like especially Jews,
who are all suspected of being leftists. That's not the
(06:33):
only reason they're killed. They're also being killed because it's
nationalists and they want to kill all the Jews anyway,
but it's like they double hate them. There's a huge
battle in the city of Yusavathrad where the Black Army
led by Nikki Farova, alongside the Red Army, tried to
take the city back from the nationalists or conquer it
from the nationalists, depending on who you ask. There's a
lot of like I liberated the city and like, well,
some of the people are really happy you were there,
(06:54):
but some of the people like the other.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
People too, yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
And the Red and Black Army is they attacked by
railway because this is a war where in which you
could fight from armored trains.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
People had just figured out trains and they were very
excited about the killing other people. Potential that trains.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Have Yeah, which is funny because I think this is
also the war in which we learned why we don't
do this anymore. Yeah, you know, because trains only go
one direction at a time, fairly predictable.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I mean, I think two technically, right, you can you
can reverse them. Yeah, well that's how the Cossacks got
fucked up. So they reversed, and then they reversed into
their own front's train, but rowick. So they captured the
city by railway, and they won the main strategic goal,
which was freeing all the anarchist prisoners in town. Maria
(07:43):
Nikifova could not stand to see pretty much anyone in
a cage, but especially her comrades, especially the anarchists. Then
the German army invaded and they were forced to retreat
again for a moment. In nineteen eighteen, all was lost. Nationalists,
alongside the Aufe Hungarian occupiers, started retaking the country, and
(08:05):
all throughout this time the management of individual areas and
cities was in constant flux. Basically, it's like, oh, the
nationalists control this, like, oh no, now theres areus control it.
Oh now the Bolsheviks control Oh no, now the anarchists
control it, and almost every side, sometimes including the anarchists,
but like mostly not is just purging everyone every chance
(08:25):
they can get.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
So it's kind of awful. I run across statements about
how non purgy the anarchists were. Those statements were written
by anarchist historians, however, they seem to be reasonably accurate.
But I can point to at least one counter example
where when the anarchists take over a city, they're like, where,
we're going to kill all the nationalist leaders or whatever,
you know, and that's just war. You actually do a
(08:49):
pretty good job in your episode talking about the fact
that it's like all of the people fighting during this
It's like, no, one's great. You have a war.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
You can't do a war and not do bad things, right,
That doesn't excuse it. It's this really complicated nuance that
I'm talking about. Ethics on Twitter does not prepare us
well for where like it's like, yeah, you know, it
was bad, for example, to level so many German cities
the way that we did in World War Two. It
(09:21):
doesn't equivocate us to the Nazis. It's just like you
can't in saying that, like, yeah, well, we were going
to do bad stuff because we were prosecuting a war
and that's inevitable. Also, does it mean you can't do better? Right,
These are important things to understand, and it really shouldn't
be all that hard to get people through.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
And this is one of the best examples I've ever
seen of people trying to do that. I mean, I
think I'm going to get into it a little bit
more later. But like Makano for example, and the Makknow China,
the anarchist society that gets set up during this they
whenever the Black Army, whenever the anarchists do anyone in
that group does programs, they get killed by their own side.
(10:02):
And they like Makno is like running around arming Jewish
communities that aren't part of his thing, just to be like, hey,
like we hear the people are trying to put gram
you here's a bunch of guns and stuff like that,
you know, And that doesn't mean that people weren't doing
bad stuff, but that's like they were proactive about trying
to mitigate the effects of the bad stuff. Yeah, And
so marius Yah, she's running around liberating in all these cities.
(10:26):
Her charisma ideas often win over the working class. Also,
the fact that like one really good way to win
over the working classes to steal all this stuff from
the rich people and then hand it out like the
thing that anytime they show up anywhere, they just like
rob all the rich people. They take inventory, and then
they distribute it equally as best as they can, and
that's a really good way to get people on your side.
But in early nineteen eighteen, i think February, her detachment
(10:49):
was camped out in the local train station in a
city called Elizavi Gorod and went around forcing the rich
people to donate to their cause, all while in a
vague truce with the impromptu government of the city, because
like sometimes it's not even held by one of the sides,
the city's just held by, like in this case, the
city's kind of held by like an impromptu coalition of
(11:10):
the bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks. While the anarchists are running
around doing this redistribution. One factory had all of its
wages stolen, like someone showed up and stole all the
money was supposed to go to the workers, And this
was quite possibly done by the free combat Rosina and
the workers are all real pissed, right, So Mariusia She's like,
(11:31):
all right, I'm gonna do the thing I always do.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna give a talk and
everyone's gonna love me and it's gonna be great. She
goes to get a talk for the assembled workers at
the factory and everyone's basically like no, fuck you and
doesn't let her get a word in. So she pulls
out two guns and like shoots them into the air
and be like, oh, that's going to get it.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Ah, And usually it's it's assigned to how cool she is.
Nearly everyone who pulls out two guns is like, just
be just being an idiot, right, Yeah, to be to
be able to pull out two guns and use them
properly and credible stuff, incredible stuff. She assemite sammed it
and did it right, but it didn't work this time.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
She does it a lot, but this time it turns
out like sometimes if you shoot a gun above a crowd,
it'll make everyone go quiet. Sometimes it just may everyone panics.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Well, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
A fire in a crowd in theater environment. So this
did not work that day. The workers panicked, Mario Ucia
had to get whisked out by her bodyguards, and workers
fired on her retreating carriage and she was quote lightly wounded.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Well, okay, I guess this. I'm back on side. Maybe
don't fire two guns in the air most of the time,
I know.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
But have ever told you my two knife theory of
self defense?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
No? No, no, well you know I think you have
brought this up, but please, for the ship, for purpose
of the show, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah. Okay. So you know when I was I was
a street kid for a while, and people would give
me a lot of shit because I was wearing a
dress and living on the street or whatever. And I
thought to myself, well, if you pull a knife on
some never pull I'm speaking theoretically. I never I totally
never did this. So if you pull a knife on
(13:07):
someone who's messing with you, that's often a bad idea.
And you know, knives are not actually great for self
defense in a lot of ways. If you pull two
knives on someone, you're a crazy motherfucker. And so people
would mess with me and I'd pull two knives and
run after them screaming, and then they would run away.
And then later I was, you know, studying proper self defense,
and I was explaining this theory of self defense and
(13:27):
they were like, well, what do you do if they stop?
And I'm like, well, I turn around and run away.
Like if it didn't work, I'm just casting a fear spell.
If the fear spell doesn't work, I'm not fighting them,
I'm running the fuck away.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I would never encourage anyone to do almost anything I
did in my twenties, to be honest, and that's among
the things I would not encourage.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
But yeah, yeah, it works for me. The only version
of the gads did flag I like is the uh
the snake wrapped around to hand grenade that says fuck
with me and I'll kill us all.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, there's actually some there's actually some wisdom buried within
that meme.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah, I mean, that is what has kept us out
of World War three since the nineteen forties, is that
many countries are a snake wrapped around a grenade right now.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, yeah, And that could all stop working in a
really bad way, but it hasn't. It hasn't yet, right
at least in this timeline.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
My theory is that we can't exist in a world
that destroyed itself in nuclear war in the twentieth century
and anyway, so Mariuciam gets out the city. Militia marches
on the train station where the anarchists are camped, and
the anarchists are better armed, but the militia is more numerous,
which means that the anarchists had to retreat, but they
(14:44):
killed a fuck ton of people that They're like, at
this point, you're like shooting union workers who are trying
to march on you and kill you. But it's like
that sucks. Civil wars suck, you know. Yeah, And a
machine gunned down a bunch of people because they're much
better armed than the masses marching on them. So the
Bolsheviks show up and try to force the city to surrender.
(15:05):
The city was like, nah, I'm good, We're not going
to surrender to you. And the Red Army unit invaded
and the militia just trashed them and then started torturing
and executing all the Red Army prisoners, accusing them of
working with Mariusia. Yeah, the militia's slogan was down with anarchy,
and rumors were being spread that she was basically just
a bandit, and that was the primary This kind of
(15:28):
remains the primary anti anarchist view of the Ukrainian anarchists
during this era is that they're bandits. I would argue
that every military in this area is doing some version
of this, and we'll talk about more of that. But
the problem now Mariusia, she's gotten out of the city,
but there's now prisoners in the city. She can't leave prisoners.
(15:51):
It's like she's constitutionally incapable of leaving prisoners. I can't
point to a single instance where she does.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
So.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The Free combat Jersey and now attacks the city that
just trashed their allies right attacks the city from the north,
and the city can scripts everyone it can to throw
them into the trenches, and they do the same thing
that later the Bolsheviks are going to do in Cronstadt,
where you dig one trench and that's where you put
all the conscripts, and then you dig a trench behind that,
and that's where you put the officers with machine guns
(16:19):
to kill all the conscripts who try to run away. Sure,
so that's not great, and they have a battle and
at last days the anarchists got help from the Red Army.
The city to government declares itself for the nationalists and
tries to get help from the Germans. But the Germans
don't get there fast enough. A Red Army train with
(16:39):
a freedom or Death banner rode in from the south
while the battle that was in the north, and they
take the city. Because the Malicia is busy, the anarchists
and the Bolshevik prisoners are freed. Mariusia and others spend
their time trying to say it was like all a
big misunderstanding and they're friends with the workers, and this
time it works. This time she's like, She's probably like, hey,
(17:01):
remember when they were machine gunning you and forcing you
to fight us, We're actually on your side. And that
time it kind of worked. And the anarchists who took
the city didn't do reprisals. They just robbed the rich
and distributed it to the working class. Again, I think
this is why it worked when they said we're on
your side. The Bolsheviks held the city for about a month.
Then the German invaders took it. The German soldiers, they
(17:24):
loved reprisals, lots of torture and murder and rape when
they came through. And I'm going to quote from that book,
The Revolution without Delay. The Battle of eliza it Grod
is an typical example of the Ukrainian Civil War, desperate
battles between fierce opponents, then a third more powerful side
arriving to take the pot. But if you want to
(17:47):
take the pot, you can.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Oh, you know, Margaret, I'm so excited that Joseph Robinette Brandon,
our president, has made marijuana kind of legal, because I
think soon we're going to get to actually have pot
advertisements on this show, Like it's gonna be one of
those things like this has happened with ketamine, and we'll
take the ketamine ad money if they'll give it to us,
where you can go you hire a doctor online and
(18:12):
the doctor's job is to prescribe you ketamine and it
is completely legal. We're going to be doing that with
pot soon. And I'm really because it was like that.
It was never federally legal, but in California for a
time back and forth, was it was legal legal. You'd
go to a fake doctor and you'd get prescribed your marijuana,
and then there was this brief period where you could
just take it anywhere at any time and no one
(18:33):
could get angry at you because you're like, I literally
have a doctor's note. And that's what we're finally going
to have the federally where you can like walk up
to a deage and with your joint and be like,
this is my medicine. I have a prescription for as
much pot. It's like an hold in my pockets. And
I'm just letting you know, pot companies, we'll sell weed
for you. We'll do it happily once that's legal.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, that's the only way any of us have ever
sold weed is if it's legal.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
But yeah, like all law abiding pot heads, I've only
smoked marijuana in Portugal.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, exactly. When I moved to Amsterdam, everyone was like, ah,
you're moving there for a weed. I'm like, no, squatting's
legal there, squatting.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Like yeah, it's like how we like the One of
my favorite stories is that like the federal government accidentally
legalized marijuana federally as long as you as long as
it's technically hemp. Like that's why you can buy pot
at the store in Texas now they can't, so interesting.
Yeah yeah, yeah, and they had to. Like it's because
(19:37):
of the way that like certain different kinds of THHC
are regulated when they're in hemp. But like, yeah, the uh, yeah,
I think it was the FDA came out and was like, no,
this specific kind of weed is not regulated under the
Controlled Substances Act. It's beautiful stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I mean, it's so dumb that, like ketamine, had it happen.
Don't get me wrong. Ketamine has saved many of my friends' lives,
Like chem therapy has been incredibly.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, useful for a lot of my friends. Unbelievably powerful. Medicine.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, way more, fox you up, way more than weed.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh my god, so much more, so much stronger of
a drug.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah. Weed better for you than alcohol.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah, better for you than basically everything, Probably.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Better than caffeine. As a song.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Is certainly less harmful than caffeine. Yeah, probably probably, Yeah,
with you with the caveat that. Like marijuana, like most hallucinogens,
has the ability to set off schizophrenic symptoms and people
who are prone to that already.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Yeah, No, I mean nothing is and I think people
at all. I don't do drugs. I'm justgalization.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah. Yeah, I've been sober for years. Well, I've been
Oregon sober. So I take creative.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Well, if you're listening in the future, you might be
about to get a pod ad, right, But here's the
rest of them.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
So one of the things that actually I was really
surprised about about this timeline of the invasion of Ukraine
by the Germans is that I had thought that had
happened when the Bolsheviks signed the treaty, the peace treaty
with the to end World War One, but it actually
on invitation of the nationalists. You start getting foreign armies
coming in from the west. The German invasion was about
(21:29):
a half a million soldiers. The defenders, the Bolsheviks and
the anarchists had about thirty thousand people total. Those are
fucking crazy odds. The conquest took all of the spring
of nineteen eighteen, despite only thirty thousand people holding off
half a million. The free combat Jerzina no longer had
access to the railways, so this is when they switched
(21:51):
to horseback and start doing that thing where they ride
in colored stripes. I found another source that back that
went out, although that other source might have been using
the first source. It's all can messy with this particular story.
And since the Reds were desperately outnumbered and then retreat.
You ever been in a leftist social movement that's suddenly
not winning anymore? Robert, No, that's never happened to any
(22:13):
other leftist movement. It was just the one guys trash. Well,
since then, nothing has never happened before or after. You'll
be surprised to know that what they did was immediately
started in fighting the Bolsheviks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bolsheviks
used the opportunity to argue about ideology and to politically
maneuver themselves. They had this captured a state, right, and
(22:35):
they used it to have this how is this going,
how do we retreat meeting between the Bolsheviks and the anarchists. Yeah,
and both sides at that were like, hey, we are
allies of convenience. We just got to make sure everyone
knows that. And one of the reasons for that is
that the anarchists, they just captured this estate, right, so
they start inventory into distributing the clothes of all the
(22:56):
rich people to the local poor people in the neighborhood.
And the Bolshevik can Anders said that on principle he
didn't talk about such trivial matters as that. So the
Bolsheviks at this meeting, they start giving these speeches about
the need for unity and discipline and mari Usia and
the rest of the anarchists they hear this, and they're like, oh.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Has anyone ever used the word unity and not meant
do what exactly what I want you to do?
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I wish they did. The concept is okay.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
The concept there's there's there's a there's a rational basis
for it. It's just almost always used bardly Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And so Mariusia and the other anarchists they hear this
and they're like, we know which way the wind is blowing,
and so they leave, like in the middle of the speech.
They're like, we're out of here, which is good because
as soon as the speech was done, the Bolsheviks showed
up to disarm her and dissolve the anarchist units. But
there weren't only there. They had all left because they
(23:51):
went to back to home to Alexandrovsk to prepare to
defend the city against the nationalist invasion. And here's where
we get one of the old only hints that there
were plenty, or at least more women in the anarchist ranks.
During a battle in the outskirts of the city, someone
found a woman's body wearing all black leather, which was
(24:11):
the style of the free combat Dresina yeah, and assumed
it was Mariusia, but it was a different woman, presumably
a fighter. So again it's this like everyone's being like, oh,
and then all the anarchists men's soldiers, you know, and
you're like, so you start thinking, like, oh, Mariusia is
like the sole woman and she's just a leader, she's
not a rank and file fighter. I'm certain that isn't true.
(24:35):
And here's like one of the pieces of counter evidence
I have, but no one's talking about it and really
annoys me. So I just don't know. By April eighteenth,
Alexandrovsk fell with a Jerzina, the last unit to flee
the city, and this actually is going to come up
later and like trial against her. They're going to like
put her on trial for like deserting, and she's like,
I was literally you all fucking deserted first. You were
(24:56):
to fuckers.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, there was no one left.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, and peasants were slaughtered without trial at the slightest
hint of having been anti landlord. And of course the
German invaders also went around taking the rich people's stuff.
They just also took the poor people's stuff, and they
took it for their own army nearby Gouliepulia, which is
Makno's hometown. We talked about a bit. It has fallen
(25:21):
too the nationalists as well, and all the local managing
bodies have been arrested. Mariusia runs into Makno to hear
about how his older brother had been shot in front
of his own wife. Another of his brothers was captured,
so Mariusia convinced him to join her and an assault
to retake the village. And they go around and they
start gathering up armored cars and all that shit. But
(25:41):
the Nationalists had advanced too far, and so there's no
longer a clear line of attack because now that it
is no longer the front, you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Know, yeah, yeah, it's the back at this point.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Yeah. And so they, the two anarchist commanders and their
forces retreat east. The Bolsheviks in March sign a peace tree.
You at Germany, giving up Ukraine in the process, and
a quarter of its population and three quarter of its
industry of all of Russia, and now the Bolsheviks are
out of the fight down there as well. At this point,
(26:12):
the structural differences between Bolshevik and anarchist revolutions are starting
to come to a head. The Bolsheviks wanted war communism,
which was top down control of all industry, while the
anarchists wanted worker control of the industry. On April twelfth,
nineteen eighteen, in Russia, the Bolsheviks launched raids against twenty
six anarchist spaces. They arrested four hundred people. They dissolved
the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, and the Bolsheviks said
(26:35):
all this was to stop the criminals who had been,
you know, taking things from the rich and distributed them.
Like That's what the main beef was about, is that
the anarchists were like, well, as soon as we do this,
we take the stuff from the rich people and we
distributed it, and the Bolsheviks were like, no, it's like
comes later, it's eventually, it's fine. It's fine. In Ukraine Marusia,
she reaches the city Taganrog on the Azov Se and
(26:57):
the Bolsheviks arrest her, and when she asks the Bolshevik
commander why she's been arrested, he says, I don't know.
I don't know why you've been arrested, just that you've
been arrested, and the charges wound up being the desertion
of the city right as well as the robbing rich
people thing. She let herself go to trial, and we
(27:18):
know she let herself go to trial. We know that
she one hundred percent could have been busted out because
of what then happened. An anarchist takes the stand at
this trial as like a character witness, and what he
does is he explains in no uncertain terms. He said
that if quote the comrade Nikki Farova had accepted to
appear in court, it was because she considered most of
(27:38):
the judges to be real revolutionaries and she knew that
in leaving this court room, she and her detachment would
be cleared of all suspicions, that their weapons would be returned,
and that they would be left to continue fighting the
counter revolution. If she had thought that the tribunal would
rather show leniency to the plans of the government and
it's provocateurs, she would have informed me and I swear
(27:59):
in the name of the whole crew of the armored
train that we have would come and free her by force.
And there's so many good things going on.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, one that's a lot.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Yeah, Like sure, it's better for me if you find
me innocent, that if I just kill you all, you know.
And second, it's one thing to swear on God, it's
another thing to swear on the whole crew of that
armored train over there.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, and that's your man. One day, one day, if
this country ever heals, we'll have a president sworn in
on their anarchist armored train of the Bible. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
You'll be shocked to know, Robert, that she was acquitted
of all charges.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh ah, that that that warms my heart.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah yeah, justice, justice wins out, or at.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Least an armored train did.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Yeah. And as soon as she's out, her and Makno
are running around making speeches to the workers again. And
one of their whole big things is, we don't need
a revolutionary army from Russia to do this. We the
workers can arm ourselves and drive out the nationalists. And
they they do prove that over and over again, like
(29:17):
the big army from Russia, all so useful to have,
don't get me wrong. And then after that their paths
diverge again. Makno goes home to retake Gugliepulia and wage
a guerrilla war and start building the anarchist society we
all know in love in history, the Maknovchina Marusia. She's
less of a build the Revolution type. She's not anti that,
(29:37):
but she's less that, and she's more of a war leader,
so she's off to the front. She stops along the
way to burn property records and big bonfires in the
middle of towns while the townspeople look on and cheer.
A description from a witness of them at the time
said they looked like Spaniards with long hair and black capes,
a pair of large pistols stuck out of their belts,
(29:58):
and they carry grenades in their pots. The younger ones
wore bell bottom trousers and gold bracelets.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Amazing stuff. Yeah, and it goes it just it further
proves what I've said for a long time, which is
that you're never fully dressed without some hand grenades in
your pocket.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I know, I know, it's criminal. We should be arresting
people for going around naked.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, yeah, police, just to like the reverse stopping frisk
where you're like stopping people in the subway going now,
you can't get on the subway. You don't even have
one hand grenade. What are you think?
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, come on, yeah, totally what are you doing? By
autumn the German invasion was stopped, and the Bolsheviks immediately
went back to trying to disarm the anarchists as soon
as the anarchists are done stopping the German invasion once again,
whenever the Bolsheviks wanted to find Maryus, he had to
disarm her. Her and her soldiers were nowhere to be found.
(30:52):
By November, Germany had lost World War One and the
peace treaty said get the fuck out of Ukraine though
for real, and so the German occupation government fell to
a coup a'ta by Ukrainian nationalists, which is now distinct
at this point from the White army who wanted to
bring back Grand Ole Russia. And they're still around too. Yeah, Mariucia,
though she's busy. She's capturing Odessa from the Whites, burning
(31:14):
the prison before being driven out by Greek and French
armies who were allied with the nationalists. And then she's
also busy getting arrested again by the Bolsheviks. Sure, sure,
that's a full time job. It is a full time job.
Most people only apply to that job once. This is
time to where she got the job. The White terror
(31:34):
is going on everywhere, all potential revolutionaries being killed, but
you also have the Red Terror in which potential revolutionaries
are being killed just by the Bolsheviks instead. But so
it would have been completely in character for them to
shoot her. But they couldn't shoot her because she was famous.
She's the heroine of the revolution. I'm unsure exactly when
she starts getting compared to Joan of Arc, but I
(31:56):
think it's around now, and they definitely were like, she's
personally met Lenin. We can't shoot her, right, great stuff, Yeah,
they do. They take her out of the front. She's
transferred to Moscow and released on bail. The anarchists hadn't
fully split from the Bolsheviks yet everywhere, and some high
(32:18):
up Bolsheviks also really actually liked her because when they
were like, hey, we think that the you judges actually
have some real revolutionaries in you. There's still some real
revolutionaries in the Bolsheviks, and there's like some Bolsheviks who
particularly like have a soft spot for and so this
high at Bolshevik and then an anarchist, her husband who
has been working in the administration of the Bolsheviks, like
a lot of anarchists, they were there like we personally
(32:42):
guarantee her good behavior. She'll be fine. She's not going
to do anything mean to you if you let her
go before trial. Her charges were basically what she'd already
been acquitted of, stealing from the rich people without asking
for permission. First, while she was out on bail awaiting trial,
she got back into art, and she also got back
into trying to get all the anarchists into one organization. Basically,
(33:04):
as soon as she's like, well, I can't be in
a war, I guess I'll do organizing an art. In
December eight, nineteen eighteen, she joins the All Russian Congress
of Anarchist Communists and they argue about how much to
support the Bolsheviks. They couldn't reach consensus on the matter,
and in the end they kind of went with Maryusia's suggestion,
which was to work with the Soviets only when they
quote went with the masses, which implies leaving each one
(33:27):
to their free conscience. So she's not even like, hey,
we declare war on the Bolsheviks. She's like, we don't
trust the Bolsheviks, but we still know that sometimes they're
actually working for the revolution, And we don't have a
lot of firsthand quotes from her we've got what Makno
wrote about her. We've also got the notes from the meeting,
(33:48):
and it's the best understanding we have of her as
a political thinker. And this is where I started being like, oh,
like I genuine because she's usually painted as kind of
the like bad anarchist to Makno's good anarchist. You know,
she's the like kill the rich and he's the rob
the rich. Is the way that they often present it, right, Yeah,
but we have some of our own talking about this
at these meetings. She believes in both the violent revolution
(34:10):
and also nonviolent components, like spreading ideas of mutual aid
and solidarity. She believes that anarchist should form organizations, ideally
one big federation to coordinate, but obviously she's into groups
maintaining their autonomy. She's also against people going all out
all the time. She said, quote to sacrifice oneself is
easier than to work constantly, steadily achieving defined goals.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
God, that's such an important point yep.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, because you can look at someone like her and
be like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could
just go all out and then die tragically suddenly? And
she's pointing out that it's like, well that's almost the
easy way, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the actual the hard thing is surviving
and doing the work. Yeah. Yeah, it's this Yah at
this point, I make we talk about this in the
three weeks that we spent on g Gordon Liddie, Like
this like very understandable but also toxic. And it's not
(35:13):
I think it's it's masculine coded. Not that men are
the only or you know, males are the only people
who have this desire, but it's very much deeply within
kind of what we consider to be like traditional masculinity,
that this like hope that like if I could just
throw my body away in some in a moment of
desperate heroism, that's so easy, yeah, compared to being a
(35:40):
good person over the long haul.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, and being a good person when thing when it's
hard to be a good person. Yeah, and like yeah,
no absolutely and yeah. And so hearing that attitude from
her surprised me and impressed me. And it was only
surprising because it's just like, well, she's the I mean,
it is shocking she has lived this long, she has
been she was a teenage terrorist and then she has
(36:08):
been in a war. At this point, first in World
War One in the trenches on the Western Front. Uh
maybe a dead not on the Western front of mind,
actually sure which where she was fighting.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
But you know she was in the trenches in the
It wasn't it good front to be in in that war? Yeah,
all of the fronts were rough.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Yeah. It was the first time machine guns met mass war.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah. You know, there was that one Christmas party that
was pretty nice. Otherwise all a bad time.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, okay. And then the other thing that she
said that really I like about her. She said that
in Moscow, quote, for example, in Moscow itself, we should
create a whole network of vegetable gardens on a communist basis.
This would be the best means of agitation among the people,
people who are in essence anarchists, Like I would say
(36:54):
that now, like that's like a very modern, common, peaceful like, hey,
let's show people that anarchy works by setting up gardens
and feeding people.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Like fuck, yeah, yeah, I uh that is my favorite. Yeah, No,
I like that. That's that's good lived anarchy. Yeah, setting
up gardens and feeding people. Sometimes again, it's enough to
admit I don't know how to save the world, So
I'm just going to do something that I can't fuck up,
and like setting up a garden really hard to harm
(37:28):
anybody by doing that.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Like distributing food is a good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's a good thing that like,
if you can't think of anything else to do, find
someone who needs a meal and get it to them. Yeah.
There's no way for the world to not be a
little bit better after doing that. And that's enough as
long as you don't confuse yourself into thinking that like
this is how we fix all of the problems, right,
it is the underpinning solution to all of the problems,
(37:56):
which is like looking for a need and then filling it.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah. Absolutely, much like we had a need to go
to an AD break, and now I'm going to go
to an ad break. Yeah, right now, and we're back. Yeah.
And so she's waiting trial. The trial starts, she's a
(38:23):
character witness when she's accused of banditry, who said all
she had she gave away, even to comrades she barely knew.
She wouldn't keep a kopek for herself. She gave away everything. Also,
this is where we learned that she's fucking straight edge.
She never drank Wow. Yeah, that's that's hard just as
a normal person, particularly as a Ukrainian living through yesperiod.
(38:49):
Yeah yeah, like no shade to anyone knew as cclusion.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
It's just hard to get through a nine to five
without drinking occasionally, let alone the Russian Civil War.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, they found her guilty. They found her guilty of quote,
discrediting Soviet power, which you know she was guilty of.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, I'm true, Like, they're not wrong. If they didn't come,
I think the punishment, whatever it was, is not going
to be right. But that's not inaccurate.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Sure, they're afraid to punish her like they want to,
and so they don't. They absolutely could have ordered her
executed and like it was like and did a lot
of times. Yeah, yeah, they didn't. They acquitted her on
charges of pillaging and they sentenced her to basically you
can't be a military commander probation for six months.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Ah okay, I'll bring that back as a punishment.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
I know, but is like almost death.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
She is not happy about this, so she fucks off
down to Gulie Poia to see what her Budon Makno
is up to. And here's where they start disagreeing more
actively these two. When Mariucia gets down to Guliapoya, she
finds the start of a new society and anarchist society.
Oh my god, I just found out that the Macno
(40:10):
Museum in Guliapoya has been destroyed in the current Russian invasion.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Well, I hope they got a machine gun or two
out of it to use.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
I hope so too.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
I think it's a pretty good chits.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Yeah. Yeah. And so she goes down there and she
sees this anarchist society, but it's one that's struggling against
his own contradictions. How do you have a new society
in the middle of a war. How do you negotiate
how that new society is kind of run by one guy?
How do you not piss off the Bolsheviks while also
refusing to follow their orders? How do you keep soldiers
(40:41):
from doing war crimes and pograms and rape and murder.
They were really trying during that struggle. They were trying
to keep their moral head above water and not drown
in the war. Mariusia found an anarchist society organized by
a regional congress of peasants that had declared the land
belongs to nobody, and the only ones who can use
it are those who work it. In the village of
(41:04):
Gouie Pulliem, they're all kinds of new schools and hospitals
and shit, all built by workers. And this actually runs
counter to what I had thought and what I had
maybe heard before. She also found that the anarchists didn't
do mandatory conscription. Makinuvcino was not a mandatory conscription. Military
defended area enlistment was voluntary, and this worked. People were
(41:28):
signing up to fight, like without machine guns at their
back if they refused to do it because they're fighting
for something. They had thirty thousand fighters with seventy thousand
reserves at the beginning of nineteen nineteen. This is like
way before their peak. I think they actually like had
too many people offering to go fight. The biggest problem
(41:48):
they had is that they needed industrial production of arms.
So a lot of people who are like, I want
to go fight, They're like, could.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You make guns instead?
Speaker 3 (41:53):
We really need people to make guns.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
But the biggest contradiction happening at this point, at least
from Mariusi's point of view and or the historians I'm
reading talking about all of this is that Makno is
trying really hard not to piss off the Bolsheviks. He
doesn't want to be invaded by them. He's trying to
fight the whites. And here comes Mariusia, who's clearly pissed
off the Reds, and so he's like, look, I'm going
(42:17):
to respect that sentence. I'm you can't be a commander
here either until your six months are up. And she
tried to speak up at a meeting and be like,
here's what's going on in Moscow, blah blah blah, but
she didn't wait her turn or something, and he basically
shouted her down and was like, if the Reds had
convicted you, they must have had a good reason to
do it, and we don't. Makno didn't write that into
(42:38):
his journals, but a different anarchist president at that meeting
from the Maknevchina did the Reds. At this point, the
Bolsheviks are being full shitty war communism assholes in the
areas they control. They're requisitioning food from peasants, They're burning
down the houses of anyone refuse. The Whites are, of course,
way worse. They kill one hundred thousand Jews in pokegrams.
They burn whole villages to the ground like that, rape
(43:00):
and conscription everywhere the White Army goes, which actually is
it leads to a lot of Later They're going to
do a lot of like uprisings within the White Army.
And the reason they're able to do that is the
White Army or all conscripts who really don't want to
be in the White Army. As a fun side note,
Makno is married I think twice during the Civil War,
(43:20):
and his second wife was a machine gunner who personally
executed any anarchist soldier who committed rape.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Hey, that's a good thing, to good reason to personally
execute somebody I know.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I know. Also like I can imagine wanting to marry her. Hello,
machine gunner who kills other rapists?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
What's up?
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Do I hang out? If you're still around, you're a
vampire lady to hit me up on Twitter. So anyway,
Macinno is still playing nice with the Bolsheviks on some level.
So is Nikki Farova. She actually talks to them and
gets her sentence reduced to three months, but while she
gets back to the fight soon enough, she doesn't do
(44:02):
it with any connection to the Bolsheviks. Ever, again, she
may or may not have been working for the Makhnov
China and what she is about to do. Sources conflict
about that, but she was working probably as part of
the anarchist spy agency, the contras Vedka, which we're going
to talk about on Wednesday. Excellent, that's my cliffhanger because
(44:30):
I'm really excited about the anarchist spy agent.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Say yeah, so am I, let's get to that story tomorrow,
by which I mean roughly ten minutes from now. But yeah, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Well, Robert Evans, you've got anything you want to plug.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, we have a new podcast called sixteenth Minute of Fame.
It's about what happens after somebody becomes the main character
of the entire internet with the great Jamie Loftus, who
is only accused of has not been proven to have
killed anybody in Grand Rapids, Michigan. No, no, no hard
evidence either way on that game.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
And actually not accused by any court of law, just
by not accused, friends and podcast fellow podcasters, who should.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Look, it's not an allegation if you just say that.
There's a lot of people are talking about the Hammer
murders that some people say Jamie committed, but not me.
Not mem sixteenth minute of Fame, everybody.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
I listened to the first episode the other day and
I was like, I'll listen to anything. Jamie doesn't be
really happy about it, but I was like, how am
I about to listen to like an hour about a
guy who said some stuff on Twitter or on the
internet in twenty twelve. It was really good. It was
really good, my attention deeply the entire time, learned some stuff,
(45:42):
very into it.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, anyway, check that out, everybody, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
And uh, see you all on Wednesday. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Or more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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