April 15, 2024 • 49 mins
In part three, Margaret continues to talk with Mia Wong about at least four Russian revolutions and general strikes, workers councils, and rebellions that tried to keep them on course.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly podcast of which I'm the host, Parker Kiljoy, of
which this time Miawong is the guest.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Amya, Hello, I'm back again. We're crunched at two Cronstead harder. Yeah,
excited to be here. Three to Tokyo Drift already. I
don't I don't know how you count the episode pairs.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh I'm not sure. Yeah, because this is I mean,
this is part three of a six parter. But since
I always think of him as double no.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We're in the middle, we're entering the middle period. But
fortunately here to guide us along is our producer, Sophie Hy. Sophie,
it's me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
The producer, Sophie Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
As one of the other people makes it happen is Daniel.
He's an audio engineer, Daniel. Our theme music was written
for us by un woman, and I promised Mia right
before we recorded that today I am going to talk
about what I believe to be the largest moral and
strategic misstep in anarchist history.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Yeah. This is wild to be because I think, wow,
this is this is this is this, This is worse
than working with the government in Catalonia's is worse than
going off the barricades. It's like, oh wow, this is
this is this is worse than the Chinese anarchists working
with Chen Kai Sheck.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That one I don't know about, but it might be
comparable to working with Chinese.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
This is probably worse because by that point they're just
worked than many of them.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I have a feeling that this is probably why they
worked with Shanghai Shek to be for anyone who's listening,
that's the nationalists general who the Maoist Army was fighting
in China.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Right, Yeah, I that that one. Yeah, I can explain
really briefly basically that one was there was a faction
of anarchists who were just like friends with him. Yeah,
so they backed Chan Kay Sheck. Also partially as a
result of a bunch of anarchists getting killed in Russia.
A lot of other anarchists refused to back them and
were like, what are you guys doing? This guy is
like this kuys he like right drug barn like right wing,
(02:04):
like nationalist weirdo. But you know, that's for another episode.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Although I want to see at the end of part
four how you feel about that decision that they made
because where we last left our heroes and soon to
be antagonists, the revolution of nineteen oh five had largely
failed in Russia. Right, this is our sixth part about
the cronstat Uprising, but it's it's secretly the entire nineteen
(02:30):
oh five to nineteen twenty one Russian Revolution series so
that I can eventually do other spinoff episodes that talk
about these things and have done more of the research
myself and or you all have had options to hear it.
So nineteen oh five revolution is largely failed, most of
the militant revolutionaries are dead, imprisoned or in exile. And
of all of the different socialist factions, and once again,
(02:52):
you've got the s RS, who are the agrarian socialists
that came out of Russia's own nineteenth century social movements.
You've got the Marxists who are the social democrat, and
then you've got the anarchists and all of these factions.
You also have the Cadets, which are like the like
liberal centrists. Actually will they come later, But there are
other factions, but these are the like leftist factions.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
All of these factions have their own internal divisions, Most
famously the Marxists are split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
and the Bolsheviks are headed up by Vladimir Lenin, who
wanted an elite vanguard of middle class intellectuals to drag
the working class kicking and screaming into the revolution. And
you have the Mensheviks who are just kind of like
a little bit less fiery and a little bit less vanguardy,
(03:35):
and so in some ways they're kind of like better,
and in some kind of ways they're I mean, I
like it those things like better, and I like the Bolsheviks,
but they have some great one liners.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I remember it was like an art class in college.
But we revent this line of this Venshevik in like
I think nineteen eighteen going talking about the Bolsheviks saying
you can't build socialism the way the Pharaoh's built the pyramids,
which I always liked.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, it's just a great line.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
But they great wood lighters, less great organizing in politics.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
So maybe I mean they're still better than the Bolsheviks, like,
but anyway, well they didn't do as good of a
job as it because the Bolsheviks win, But you can
say that about everyone else. We're gonna talk about today, Yeah,
because the Bolsheviks beat everyone, including themselves and all of
the people who followed anyway. Whatever, So the SRS have
(04:28):
their moderate wing and their extreme wing. The extreme wing
are the Maximalists. The anarchists are less like divided into
two factions as much as they are a series of
different ideologies who sometimes work together and sometimes don't. In general,
you've got the least revolutionary, who are the anarcho syndicalists,
and then you have the anarcho communists, and then you
have the anarco communists who are like too radical for
the other a narco communists who are like, we don't
(04:49):
like you Kropotkinists, you all are too democratic. Whatever, nothing changes.
All of the more extreme factions of each of these groups,
from the Bolsheviks to the left s RS and the
Maximalists to the most of the anarchists, are running around
killing motherfuckers, robbing motherfuckers, and just generally trying to utilize
(05:11):
terrorism for political lens. By and large, they've all failed
at this point, so most of them are writing about
all this in exile or getting political education from other
imprisoned radicals, or being dead, which was another popular pastime
of failed revolutionaries worldwide.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Actually, yeah, great way to pass the time. It will
pass all of your time.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, all everything's past tense at this point. This quiets
down Russia a little bit. But to be honest, it
was mostly just angry peasants and workers who were doing
all the uprising, not the ideologues of any of these
groups or parties. So things stayed kind of spicy. And
you've got Tzar Nicholas the Second, who never wanted to
(05:52):
be czar. He's pretty every single historian that I have
run across, of every lee and right, agrees this guy
was just weak and spineless as far as autocrats go.
And he was just like the wimpy Tzar, and most
historians tend to be like, there was no way he
was going to survive as Zar Zardam was fucking done
(06:14):
no matter how it went with this guy in charge.
With the possible exception as if he had really leaned
into constitutional monarchy after nineteen oh five and had basically
just like stepped back, him and his family could have
survived and Russia could have been like the UK of
the Netherlands.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But I think the problem with that is like Azar
could have done that. Zar Nicholas the guy could not
have done that now, like he is too much of
a micromanager. He is too much of a like I'm
going to be the czar guy, yeah, which is because
he didn't even want a bizarre like yeah, it is
a fiasco.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, I guess I'm gonna be the most czarish tzar
because I.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
You could just not be the czar. But no, I know,
I know so easy to not be the czar. I'm
doing it right now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, I am eighty percent committed to not be in
the czar. So the Zar promised to Duma, which is
a congress of sorts, and even though it barely had
any power, and he still kept disbanding it and getting
annoyed at it because of micromanagy autocratic stuff, and then
he would like call for new elections every time it
seemed like politically necessary. People were getting really annoyed by this,
(07:17):
and lots, but not all of the revolutionaries are boycotting
Duma elections, which actually sort of worked as far as
I can tell. Like, boycotting elections is sometimes a strategy
that does not work, and sometimes is a strategy that works.
Whenever people are like this is the revolutionary strategy that works.
I'm always like, yeah, it's always a crapshoot, just always.
(07:40):
So the only fun part about talking about inter revolutionary
Russia is that we get to talk about everyone's favorite
piece of shit, Rasputant. Eh, he's so cool that Bonie
m wrote a six song about him. It was covered
by the folk metal band Teresis because it's.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Please stop, please stop telling us that Robert looks like him.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
We've heard your theories. I, after having done more research
about Rasputin, would never say that about Robert.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Please stop, please stop doing that theory.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, Like so Rasbuten is not cool. People did cool stuff,
and I used to think he's interesting people who survived
a lot of assassination attempts. Right, Realistically, he only survived
one assassination attempt, which is more assassination attempts than I've survived.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That's true, but like that's also he's also on the
list of like on the like the the memorial Hitler
list of that guy shouldn't have made it.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, totally, And so we're going to talk about him
because he's he's still kind of funny. Is interesting because
this is the part of the story where you can
point to royal inbreeding as being the driving force of
the Russian Revolution in world attempts to stay socialism if
you really want to pull your red yarn out as
far as it can go. Because Nicholas the Second his
(09:03):
wife Alexandra, was a German princess and was granddaughter of
Queen Victoria of the UK. Because everything that you think about,
how in bread and incestuous and the aristocracy was an
entirely different class of people that ruled all of Europe.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
However bad you think it was, you're right, that's how
bad it was. Yeah, they're all cousins. Yeah, Like it's terrible.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The Royal line is famous for being a pretty straight
and narrow family tree, and it means as certain traits
are more likely to occur. Alexandra was a carrier for hamophilia,
which means that blood doesn't clot properly. If you get cut,
you can bleed out.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
It's not great.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I mean people have it, and I'm not trying to
be like, ah, everyone has it sucks like, but you know,
it wasn't a good thing to have. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, it was also called the Royal disease.
Because so many men in the family had it, and
so the heir to the throne, Nicholas's own son, Alexey,
had it, and they tried to hide it from everyone,
(10:05):
and they tried everything to solve the problem, especially doctors.
But doctors didn't help. Because it's the beginning of the
twentieth century, and eventually people will say the same thing
about doctors now because we're all still learning. Enter the
wandering mystic Grigory Rasputin. He was born a Siberian peasant
(10:27):
and people know almost nothing about his upbringing. Okay, The
thing that I like about him, he is kind of
this blank thing that you can like project whatever you
want onto.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Like, yeah, but so was Louis Napoleon, so Napoleon the third,
so you know, not not necessarily a good yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Fair enough. He was not formally educated. Was Robert formally educated?
And also was Robert born a Siberian peasant is an
unknown We may never know. Much like Robert Evans, nothing
is known about this man's past. He was probably a
rowdy kid. Okay, this part does a lineup. And then
when he's like twenty eight and he had like a
(11:07):
wife and kids and stuff, he was like oh shit,
I'm having visions I should go wandering. In the process,
he became friends of the pod XVX. He swore off
meat and alcohol.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, usually it's revolutionary, so I talk about our XVX
on this show. But apparently this piece of shit sexual
assault or spoil alert. He's a massive rapist.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Did do people even know what XVX? Because like, I
didn't know what that was, even though everyone says that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I'm sure, like, no, Okay. So XVX is punk shorthand
for vegan straight edge, and that means that you don't
eat animal products, and you don't drink alcohol or do
drugs besides caffeine. And it's a thing that some people
are I'm not. I'm vegan almost edge. It's a different thing.
(11:54):
I don't get the cool points for it. I'm also
not a wandering mystic until I get this van done. Anyway,
He's like he attracted a following. He joined a cool,
probably terrible, but interesting self flagellation and orgy cult and
one day I'm going to do a whole episode just
about weird Russian cults when I'm like not doing actual
(12:14):
cool people the cool stuff, and I'm just doing weird stuff.
Because the very first episode that I ever did of
this show in terms of research was about the Russian Nihilists,
and I fell down this two day rabbit holes before
I knew how to do this properly, where I have
to put out a two episodes every week. I found
on a two day rabbit hole about this like castration
cult that was really big in Russia where they were
(12:35):
all like chopping off dix and nuts and stuff all
the time. I think it might have only been nuts,
but I can't remember. It might have been dicks too.
I have all the notes about it. And it was
this like wild cult that like came out of Siberian peasantry.
And then like was it kind of like the Masons
where it was like this like secret society that like
this is completely offscript anyway, that's a different weird cult stuff.
(12:59):
So he's in a weird cult. He is not a
formal priest or doctor or anything, much like Robert Evans
is not actually a doctor, regardless of what he tells you,
And soon enough he is basically the personal physician to
this six Czar's kid. You ever read about how he
actually managed to cure the hemophilia of the Czar's kid,
(13:20):
wasn't that.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
They stop giving him arsenic or something or like lead.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Willow bark ah aspirin. So all the doctors have been
failing to heal this kid, and so this faith healer
who came in and just like prayed over him and
like made him lay in bed did And there's two
possible explanations. One is that the praying worked and the
you know various God or God's intervened on the behalf
(13:46):
of this child. And the other is that since he
had scared off the doctors, the doctor stopped gilia of
giving him aspirin basically willow bark which is a blood thinner.
So bed rest was not aspirin helped. Because sometimes nothing
better than what doctors do.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah, especially especially pre like full pre them figuring out
how the human body sort of works. Doctors.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, totally. Again, I never want to come too hard
for old timey doctors because I'm like, that is what
people will say about us if the human race survives
the oh yeah, climate crisis, They'll be like, they thought.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What is like you guys were doing surgeries by cutting
people's bones with saws. What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (14:33):
People, Yeah, and they'll like conflate. They'll be like old
timey medicine, and they'll be like, they'll conflate like ether
and like ssries and the four humors all into one.
They'll be like, you know anyway, So Rasputin he is
almost certainly a sex chrize piece of shit who sectually
(14:54):
assaults people and extorts influence favors for sexual favors. He's like, oh, yeah,
I have a wrecked line to the Czar and the
Tzarina in particular. Well, I guess the Tsar's wife, and
I think Zorina means she's regnant ruling, but.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Anyway, He's like, yeah, you do this thing for me,
I'll do this thing for you. And it's funny because
the main thing people argue about is whether or not
he was sleeping with the Czar and the Empress, which
he may or may not have been, But that's so
much less important to me than understanding that multiple women
came forward accusing him of rape, one of whom was
immediately disbelieved in fired she was a governess for the
(15:29):
young daughters. There's a lot of fairly reasonable ideas that
he was mistreating the young daughters of the royal family.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
He sucks.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's the Even though the people who dislike him are
super right wing, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
He sucks. Yeah he was actually, so he just sucks
for a different reason than the right wing people hate
him for.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, totally, because they hate him because there's a wild
scandal going on, like about whether he's fucking the czar
in the wife and like whether or not, you know,
like I don't know whatever, And the royal family keeps
defending him. They're like, well, he's holy everything, he's practically
a saint. He can't do anything wrong. And the Russian people,
(16:10):
both high born and low are like, oh my god,
fuck this guy. It is seriously impacting Nicholas the Second's
reputation internally and internationally that this is happening. And I
don't know if you knew this, mehm. Overall during this
time period, the people of Russia are not afraid to
assassinate people. Yeah, it's like kind of a thing, not
(16:36):
saying anyone should bring that back in Russia right now.
But oh wait, well there's the whole dead oligarchs thing.
But that's the other direction, that's state sponsored killing. So
The first attempt on his life was by this peasant
woman who didn't have a nose named Keonia, Gussia, and
she was thirty three, and she stabbed him and screamed,
(16:57):
I've killed the Antichrist. Just pretty cool. It's kind of
up there with six temper Tyrannus.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
It's pretty good. But it has this issue. This is
the thing I've run into a lot of like in
the history of political assassination, just like you got to
go for multiple stabs and you have to you have
to do follow up shots. Oh yeah, sure they're actually dead.
This is this happens all the time. Always take the
second shot. This is this is my advice to the
aspiring I don't know, guy who wants to solve some
(17:26):
problems in Russia, right, yeah, directly, Yeah, take the second
shot and possibly the third one.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
You might also need number four, you know, going until
the problem is certainly solved, reload, keep spare mags like whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
No, And they didn't have like CSI or whatever, so
they didn't know that, like when people die of stab wounds,
they have like thirty seven stab wounds.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, you know, And that's the thing I think to
this day, people like there's this weird thing that comes
from movies and video games where people think that like
you can just like like killing someone with a knife
is like really quiet and they just instantly die. No,
this is like the loudest conceivable way to kill someone
that's not like an anti aircraft gun. Yeah, it takes
a long time. And yeah, and so it didn't work.
(18:09):
He ran away, she chased him. He turned around and
like fought her in a crowd formed and you know,
she gets arrested. Later, she's released after the revolution, and
then she tries to kill a bishop, and I think
she's like then sent into an asylum at some point. Wait,
you're the revolutionary censor decided we're trying to kill a bishop. Okay, wow, Wow,
(18:30):
they're betraying their Marxist principles here.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
This is really by trying to Wait now, I don't
I don't think she was a Marxist. She was just
released by the revolution.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah sure, But if you if you're a revolutionary, if
you're like a Bolshevik, are you supposed to be fine
with people killing bishops?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:46):
I see what you're saying. Well, we're going to get
to how little the Bolsheviks care about what that's But first,
do you know what the Bolsheviks do care about?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Is is it the products and services that support the podcasts.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
That's right, because they are universally loved. They are so
universally loved that even anti capitalists put their ads into
their shows, and even authoritarian anti capitalists like the Bolsheviks
also love them.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Here in the words, in the words of the of
another Bolshevik destended party, the Chinese Communist Party, I follow
the party started business.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, well, actually no, the Bolsheviks don't let people do that. Yeah,
fair enough, Okay, well here's the adsoper back. And then
(19:47):
some nobles do take out Respute and they take them
out in nineteen sixteen. The story is like pretty murky
and retold in different ways, and it's almost certainly told
in a very sensationalist way, but that very weighs fun,
so I'll tell it, which is that they like lured
him into the basement. They gave him a whole bunch
of poisoned cakes and he ate like ten of them,
and he was like, those are good, and they were like, here,
drink this wine. It's totally not poison, but it was poison.
(20:09):
And then he drank like three glasses and he was like,
I'm happy, this is good, which and then they shot
him in the chest and then he was like leaped
up like a horror movie and was like, ah, I
like chase the person who had shot him in the chest,
and so they had to put a bullet in his
head and throw his body into the river in order
to stop him. Later people were like, he didn't eat
(20:30):
sweet things. That didn't happen, which also implies that either
he also didn't drink or he had started drinking again.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I don't know enough about his who knows. The problem
with him is he's a fucking edge breaker. That's the
problem with him, which is what you call someone who's
straight edge who stops being straight edge. Anyway, the most
likely story is that some aristocrats were like, we don't
like this guy, and then they shot him in the
head and then it was done. One bullet anyway, resput
(21:00):
and weird guy glad he's dead. But it plays a
big part in the downfall of Yeah, because people were
really unhappy about this, which is you should be upset
when there is a rapist and executive power like you do.
After the next election, you would think, but yeah, because
(21:22):
resputants running, That's what I'm trying to say. I would
never make any allegations about any candidates besides resputant.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
More important to the story is the old World War One.
So check that off on your bingo cards. It's nineteen fourteen.
Resputant still isn't dead. At this point, some Bosnian Serbs
assassinated an Austro Hungarian guy, and then Austro Hungary was like,
fuck you, Serbia, and then Russia was like, well, we
don't have treaty obligations, but we like kind of consider
(21:51):
Serbia to be part of the general Russian sphere of influence.
So Nicholas the second was like, all right, fuck it,
let's go, and so mobilized to defense Serbia, and Germany
was like, well, then we had a cclar war, and
then Russia was like, well then we're going to attack,
and that's the start of World War One.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
And herbal idea, Yeah, can all of you worst No, yeah, don't, don't.
Don't be ruled by kings. Yeah, did not go well
for anybody this particular war. I'm going to ask the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah that's true, Okay, it did go well. For the Bolsheviks,
although the first thing that they did was get out
of anyway, so no one who is involved.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Did it go well for Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Nicholas's second was, like, you know, last time I threw
a war in order to stave off revolution, it didn't
work out at all and I almost died. Surely this
time it all go better. Because there's all this propaganda
about ho, Russia is going to like roll right into
Germany and conquer. This did not happen. As per usual,
Russia did what Russia does best in a war, have
(22:52):
a very large army full of conscripts with very bad
leadership and bad equipment, and throw bodies at the problem.
Has no comparison to now famously.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, although they were fighting a much like no no
offense to the Ukrainian army, which is fought above its capacity,
but like the N eighty fourty German Army, Oh boy,
do you not want to fight that arby? Like Jesus,
those guys are scary. Like those people.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
They went to war against the entire world and almost won,
yeah twice twice.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, And it's like like really like especially in World
War One, like all of their allies are a joke Okay,
so they're terrifying arby zero out of ten. Don't let
the Germans form an army because yeah, never good.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, I mean, you know, they're famous for their efficiency,
and unfortunate efficiency is an incredibly important part of war,
so famously. Also, soldiers don't like being sent to war without.
Some of them don't have boots and are basically told
get boots off the guy next to you and he dies.
(24:06):
And like this is also a like like I've read
accounts from people who fought in the Red Army during
World War Two and like were told to attack tanks
with their bare hands. You know, most of the peasants
were drafted from the peasant class. Families watched their sons
leave pretty sure that they'd never see their sons again,
and they were mostly right. Yeah, and people are really
(24:27):
fucking poor. As per usual, a third of the draftees
have to be rejected for medical reasons because ill health
is so rampant. World War One doesn't do anyone any favors.
It's the first time European powers have the machine gun
to use in a war against each other instead of
colonized people, and so they're just throwing bodies into the grinder,
and it's bad times all around. The only thing good
(24:48):
thing that came out of World War One is, of
course Lord of the Rings and almost the Russian Revolution,
the Lord of the Ring things that Tolkien fought in
World War One, and that influenced his decision around how
to make the most important book of our time. So
the Russian Revolution almost was really cool and came out
of World War One.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
So that's like close, yes, like one in a quarter,
one in an eighth.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, I hate the big Man theory of history. Everything
I've read, you can kind of blame the destruction of
socialism at the feet of Latimer Lenin more than anyone else,
because he engineered again, this is the best I can tell.
He engineered the Bolsheviks into doing what even they didn't
want to do, at least at first. And I think
(25:38):
all of them were fine with taking power and stuff.
But the way in which the Bolsheviks did this, which
we'll get to, but we'll get to that he's not
even in the country at this point. He's in Switzerland,
so without any of the leaders of the revolution. I
just wanted to point out that Lenin wasn't there because
I'm a little salty anarchist bitch.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So without any of the so called leaders of the revolution,
including all the anarchists, right, like, they're all fucking locked
I mean, the leaders of the anarchist movement or whatever.
We're all locked up to right or in exile or dead.
Russia is going to have a revolution without everyone, and
they're going to call it the February Revolution because it
happened in March. That's a little switching calendar's joke for you.
All throughout World War One, the Zars kind of like
(26:20):
off at war, becoming increasingly popular, and Alexandra is acting
as sort of a tzarina and no one likes her
at all. Their general strikes all over a massive upheaval
over a year and a half. They had four prime ministers,
five ministers of the Interior, three four ministers, three war ministers,
three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
That's so that look, they have adopted the British mode
of government, which is very traditionally aside, things are going great, yeah,
because it's hanging cabbages outside, one for every minister.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, And so the Duma is like, hey, can this
bad ruler Alexandra stop being ruler. And Saint Nicholas. No,
Nicholas the Second not a saint. Oh wait, they did
saint him, the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Would you see this is a Russian whatever anyway, Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
So Nicholas the Second dissolved the Douma yet again, instead
of doing what they asked him to do, which was
the reasonable thing, and they announced that the Interior Minister
was dictator. And this was not a popular move. So
one morning in February or March nineteen seventeen, We're going
to go with March eighth, because I am cool Zone
Media's officially Western calendar bigots. So March nineteen seventeen, Russia
(27:40):
throws a revolution. It is a balmy sixteen degree day,
sixteen degrees in the real temperature scale, of course, fahrenheit,
but soon it gets way colder. Like all the best revolutions,
they did not know they were throwing a revolution, and
so often is the case, it was started by women. Yeah,
I didn't know that. That's like I probably learned that
in high school. To be clear, that's not like a
(28:01):
hidden fact, but like I didn't realize that the first
Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen, was started by women for
years at this point, as the war and misery the
peasants and the workers, the aristocracy who was still like
eating cake and going to the theater and drinking champagne
and everyone else is starving at home or starving at
the front or dying violently in one of.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Those two places.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And so they're like, all right, we're going to do
something about it, you know, right. And the cool thing
about internationalism is as international. So I'm going to tie
the roots of this particular thing to the United States.
Only then I'm going to tie it back to Russia.
Because there's this woman, Teresa Machel. She was born a
Russian Jew, born in what's now Ukraine. She was born
on May Day, May one, eighteen seventy four. Ah, yeah,
(28:48):
before there was a May Day even. She was seventeen
when her family emigrated to the Lower East Side of
New York City and she got to work as a cloakmaker.
She organized the Infant Cloakmakers Union of New York because
people knew how to dress their babies back then in
cloaks with chainmail.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Wait, we got it, okay, I have I now know
people who have babies We've got it. We've got to
bring this back. We can do this.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Since the main expense in diy in a cloak is
that it costs hundreds of dollars of wool to make.
Ask me how I know infant cloaks are a discount.
It's a sweet deal. Bonus sponsor infant cloaks because not
even an ad break. That's just how excited I am. Anyway,
(29:38):
Teresa represents her union through various labor federations and such
and winds up in the Socialist Party of America. Supposedly,
the Socialist believes in equal rights for women, and she,
like a lot of other people, tried to make that
actually true by fighting for it. And she pitched that
there should be a national Women's Day, and it was
first on February twenty eighth, nineteen nine. By nineteen eleven,
(30:02):
the International Socialist Women's Conference managed to get in International
Women's Day and over a million people participated in that
first one so International Women's Day. Nineteen seventeen, women in
Russia went on a one day strike and the strike
was focused in Saint Petersburg. And this was not a
polite and peaceful affair. They demanded bread and peace. They
(30:24):
marched through the streets, looting stores to distribute like rich
pastries that were just for rich people.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Rules unbelievably based, no, I know.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And one of the reasons I point that out is because,
like there is no clear history of the Russian Revolution
that's ever been written as far as the cantel. Everyone
either their own angle, yes, and so I'm just trying
to be really upfront about my own angle here. But
like everything you read from all of these different sources,
because there's also so much happened chaotically that it's not
like these sources are lying. It's that they're choosing which
(30:55):
facts to represent or even only know about certain facts, right.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
I Mean, there's like, like len It Lenden's best lying
about this period that I really felt drink twenty twenty
was there are decades where nothing happens, in weeks where
decades happened.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Yeah, And this is the decades are happening, like right
here totally in eight days, they ended a three hundred
year didnesting and like the thing that took years for
them to try to get in nineteen oh five happened
in eight days.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
And some of the accounts of this the reason I'm.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Pointing out that these folks looted on the very first
day of it was because some of the accounts are like,
and then they let everyone out of jail, but they
didn't just let the good political prisoners let out. They
let everyone else out too, and suddenly there was looting,
you know, And it's like, I'm sure that a lot
of the people that they let out of jail looted,
there's no doubt in my mind. Also a whole bunch
of people who weren't in jail already looted.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Because it's cool. It turns out.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, so some troops refused to fire on them because
there were women, and frankly and very importantly, morale among
soldiers was fucking, to use your phrase, dog shit at
this point. Men joined in soon enough. There's actually there
was men there at the beginning too, But like overall,
more of the workers now are coming out and there
are more general strikes have been happening among different industries,
(32:15):
happening immediately prior to this.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
But the version of it that I heard was like,
part of what goes on is like, so it's an
international Women's Day event, and a lot of the like
the male political group for like, eh, we're not going
to go out, and so people are like running from
factory to factory yelling like get out here, like what
are you people doing? Which rules?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
And I believe you that makes more sense, frankly. And
it takes them a while to even get the political
parties involved, because so many actual uprisings start with marginalized people,
and eventually political groups attach themselves once they realize that
the momentum can't be stopped, because usually they want to
be like, well, we want to be the ones who
have done it right. Revolution takes eight days. On March twelfth,
(33:01):
the military in Saint Petersburg switched teams to join the revolution,
killing the officers that wouldn't let them. A few days
after that, Nicholas the Second was like, okay, fine, I
give up. You can have your country back, you fucking peasants,
all without any central organizing to the revolution. None of
that has happened yet at this point. About thirteen hundred
people or so died during that revolution. And then you
(33:24):
have the classic rhythm like that's so few people I
know for a system of government that is like twice
as old as like the United States.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Yeah, no, it's it's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, it's like respect to those thirteen hundred people who died,
but it is such an incredibly low number, and you
have this classic problem, a power vacuum. Don't worry, plenty
more people are going to die because of this revolution.
It was not during the immediate revolution, but.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
They did the first the first revolution, they did a
really good job. They did everyone everything subsequent to that,
they did issues emerge.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
It's the people who tried to take power that anyway whatever.
So two forces step into the vacuum and with a
really uneasy alliance. And the laziest way that people talk
about the February Revolution is that the provisional government took over.
The accurate way is that the provisional government had to
figure out how to share power with the Soviets because
the Soviets are back. The provisional government is composed of
(34:25):
people from the Duma and shit, and so the last
time that they've been elected was nineteen twelve, and so
they're like, they kind of know they're not ready to
be the elected officials of the government, right, But they're
the kind of middle class version of the revolutionists. At
that point, it's mostly centrists and liberals and the Duma
because everyone else has been boycotting elections and stuff. The
(34:48):
Soviets are filled with socialists of all kinds, unless you
read a Bolshevik history, in which case they were all Bolsheviks.
Sh And the Provisional Government is like, all right, we're
going to become a republic and have elections and shit
and solve the land problem for the peasants. Just not yet.
We got to stay in World War One. We can't
ditch the Allies. We can't like redistribute all the land
(35:10):
and stuff, because we're in the middle of a war.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Everyone else is like, well, why are we in the
middle of this war? Yeah, But their plan is to
eventually have a constituent Assembly that is voted for and
this would become the government and they would be a republic,
but for now they would be in charge. The Soviets,
who are an elected body already and they've been elected
in a grassroots direct delegate way, are like, well, the
(35:35):
people of Russia aren't at war with Germany. The Russian
Empire was at war and that's gone. So they disagreed.
The Provisional Government had like the symbols and stuff. The
symbolic parts of the state. The Soviets had the actual
practical power because they had the workers and the peasants
and the soldiers. So the provisional government is like, hey, socialists,
(35:58):
could you please please join us? You can join us now,
hey do you want to? You want to join us?
And the Soviets and a lot of them do, a
lot of the SRS in particular, which is the largest
group by popularity and delegates, it is the most important
socialist group at this point. And the Soviets are like,
(36:18):
all right, our order number one, it's literally their order
number one is that the provisional government orders will only
be followed if we if we want.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
To which rules, more people should do this. This is great.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
No, it's so frustrating because it's like, the Soviets are
the good guys here. I mean that the provisional government
I like kind of get where they're coming from. I'm
not trying to be like, oh, what a bunch of assholes, right,
but like, no, there's this bottom up electoral system that's
already in place. Just fucking go with it and not
do what Lenin's about to do. And seven hundred of
(36:52):
these Soviets spread across the country. And this is like
I think actually has further reach overall than the provisional
government doesn't have as much reach in the peasant areas,
is my understanding, but I'm not one hundred percent certain
about that because you read like eight different things and
they all disagree. But what everyone does agree about is
(37:17):
that these are deals that you should totally listen to
and not do this thing that would be really easy
to do, which is press the four fifteen second button
on your phone as soon as you hear the theme
music and then wait until you hear the theme music
again and then stop pressing forward. You shouldn't do that, never.
You should listen to all of these advertisers and then
(37:38):
do whatever they tell you to do.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
So things are unstable in Russia after this revolution. All
the revolutionaries are suddenly let out of prison all over
the country, and so are a lot of other people.
So there's looting, I mean whatever, Like I'm like looting
to get the cakes. It's also like, I'm sure it's
also kind of bad and hard to be alive right now.
You know, it's like interesting, it's not boring, but like
(38:12):
it's also dangerous I'm not trying to let everyone's like starving.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
I mean like that's that's the other element of this.
It's just like totally. It's like, wow, I wonder why
these starving people are stealing cakes from the cake shop.
It's like, I know, no one could possibly answer this.
It must be the criminal elements.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, have you heard about Lenin's return during this I'm
going to talk about a little bit, and you need
to fill in any gaps because this is the this
is the tea so wild so imperial Germany really wants
the provisional government overthrown because it wants Russia to get
(38:48):
out of the war so that Germany can focus on
the Western Front. And they're like, well, if we let
the Kamis overthrow, the provisional government will have one less
antagonist in our war. Lenin wants to overthrow the provisional
government to institute a dictatorship, not a dictatorship of the proletariat,
but a dictatorship by him. As we talked about last time.
(39:08):
His whole thing was to try and use the Soviets
and then they become superliferous, right, and so the German
government finances him and sends him back to Russia on
a train that's there so with a whole bunch of
money and shit, hoping he'll do exactly what he goes
on to do. That's the version I heard. Yeah, it's
really wild because it's like, for all that every single
(39:30):
one of sort of Lenin's ideological to SAand insequendy spent
all their time accusing everyone else of being a psyopist,
like your guy was literally paid by the German government
to do this like him.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
It's like, come on, and.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Actually, the interesting lesson here isn't that Bolshevism is a
psyop It's that sometimes powerful groups finance other groups in
order to try and get what they want. It doesn't
mean that Lenin wanted Imperial Germany to get what it wanted.
Lenin wanted what he wanted and had no p problems
taking a bunch of money from the people that his
country had been at war with, you know.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah. And it's also I mean, I think the ever
thing here is like, this is something you see a
lot with empires, is they'll hand someone a bunch of
money and that person will just turn around and then
go do whatever they want with it. Yeah, totally. It
turns out it doesn't always work well for the people
handing them the money and the guns.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yeah, Like, I am not saying this to say that
Lenin is a pawn of the German government. I am
saying that Lenin that Germany wanted to use him as
a pawn, and that Germany got what it wanted out
of it. But anyway, Lenin gets back to Russia and
he sets up trying to engineer the whole a further revolution,
and he does that by bringing the Bolshevik position closer
(40:48):
to the anarchist position, by bringing their tactics and strategies
but not their goals closer in line to anarchism. Anarchism
was the main ideology at this point that had been
promoting an immediate revolution, whereas Bolshevism was still kind of
gradual even at this point. So, at least according to
some of the histories I read when Lenin wrote his
(41:09):
like big important theory book, The State and Revolution, at
this time, this fundamentally changes the Marxist revolutionary strategy. And
it's also kind of an appeal to the anarchists and
to the other people who are like, well, we got
to do this now. So anarchists saw this as Bolsheviks
coming to them rather than them going to the Bolsheviks,
(41:31):
as they start having more and more of an alliance
going forward over these next few months. And he also
in the State and Revolution pushes that all states have
the right to secede. He will not hold to this
very long. Yeah example, Yeah, Later the Democratic Republic of
Georgia will split off formed by Mensheviks, only to be
invaded by the Bolsheviks, and then of course Ukraine and whatever. Anyhow,
(41:56):
so Lenin's back, oh boy. Provisional government is headed up
by an SR a guy named Kerensky. He's not right away,
he's in April, but because in April they're like, please
socialists come join us, right And one part I didn't
know about. That's a little bit tea in a different direction.
One someone one person who came out of exile to
(42:17):
help advise Kerensky was our buddy Peter Kropakin. This part, yeah,
I mean, like the tracks.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Anarchists are not stoked about Kripakin. We talked about him
a little bit last time. He' an abolutionary biologist and
a former prince who is very interesting and very important
to anarchist communist theory, and also modern mutual aid and
why animals are gay theory. He's a very interesting man.
So he wanted anarchists to side with the Allies in
World War One to stop imperial Germany felt like more
(42:51):
important than viewing things specifically along class lines. Most anarchists
were against any participation in yeah war.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
It was like, this is a terrible idea, Like what
are you doing?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
So the anarchists in nineteen seventeen generally supported the Bolsheviks,
as did a lot of the Actually we need a
real revolution people. Lenin is really appealing to people. He's
running around shouting all power to the Soviets. That's his thing.
When people say all power to the Soviets, what they
mean is not provisional government, the top down body, but yes,
(43:23):
the bottom up body that was actually already elected. And
people are into it. And his slogan is a piece
bread in land, and people like those things. I like
those things as best as you can figure out. In
nineteen seventeen, here and there and afterwards, the anarchists were
useful idiots for the Bolsheviks. The anarchists did the dirty
work because we believed in revolution, and because we also
(43:45):
believed in political pluralism. It is the tolerance paradox. Right
anarchists at this point tend to believe in political pluralism,
including having political pluralism and allies with groups that don't
believe in political pluralism. And in nineteen seventeen in Russias
on stable as fuck and you have revolution one point
five that happens in July. It's called the July Days
(44:06):
and it's an uprising by socialists of all different stripes,
actually kind of less the Bolsheviks than like skin the people, yeah,
because because Lenin didn't order them to do it, and
they were like, but some Bolsheviks were.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
And then also it's like history is so annoying and
hard to read because it's like I also read accounts
that were like and then the Bolsheviks did this thing,
but that was like a Western capitalist reading of the history.
So like everyone who's bad as a Bolshevik, you know, yeah,
which is sometimes though they formed that like meme without
two arms or holding hands, because they both want to
blame everything on the Bolsheviks, because the Bolsheviks think the
(44:44):
thing was good and the capitalists think that the thing
was bad. But it wasn't done by the Bolsheviks at all.
Is done by like srs or anarchists or people who
know political ideology. And what happened in July is that
that sr. Kerensky was pushed for a military offensive against Germany,
and that actually kind of worked for a minute, but
at home it made everyone remember how much they didn't
want to be in a war. And the only socialist
(45:06):
who had enjoined the provisional government were the radicals, and
so therefore everyone else had to back the offensive, right
because they were in the government that it declared it,
you know, the same way they could have.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Not, but they're just like, you know, they just sort
of fell in line. It's just like, yeah, you could
have not done this, but well, I mean you can.
Taking power destroys your brain. See.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
The best thing that came out of World War One
is the Lord of the Rings, which is the parable
about why you have to throw the ring of power into.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
The fire mountain.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Anyway, So the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and some of the
other like left stars and stuff, where the I think
some of the left users were a lot of the
only people involved in the July Days, which was a
big uprising by people. It's always like everyone wants to
have the labels, but it's like a lot of times
there's just people. People are mad, you know. And Lenin
was like, no, we're not ready yet. But the uprising
(45:59):
was put down by the provisional government including Mensheviks and
s rs, and Lennon runs off to Finland. Street demonstrations
are banned, so the counter revolution, to be fair, started
before the Bolsheviks take power. Yeah, And like Kerensky's like
pretty explicit about this, I remember, right, like he's he's
I mean, he's also every single person in this like
(46:19):
Kkin wrote a history of the French Revolution that like
I think is longer than capital, Like every single one
of these people is. It's a French revolutionary history, nerd.
And Kerensky's thing is he's like I'm gonna like be
the directorate or something from the the front from the
French Revolution. So I'm gonna be the guy who comes
in after and like ends the revolution. Yeah, like produces
a stable government. So they all, like all these people
(46:41):
have their sort of I am this person, even though
Marx is very explicit that like don't do this, like
this is actually bad, but nobody listened to him, because welcome,
welcome to the history of Marxism, where no one listens
to Marx fair enough, and sometimes I'm really glad when
people don't listen. But there is some stuff everyone once
(47:02):
in a while, like he's more than stop clock, you know. Yeah,
he's like he's wrong several times a day, not just twice,
but still not an act. But yeah, but so sometimes
he's like, don't put on the costumes of the previous revolution.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
You have to. Well, I think it's exactly line. It
was like, the revolution must take us poetry from the future,
which I always loved. Yeah, the weight of dead generations
or whatever, what is the Yeah, the memory of dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Yeah,
another great one.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, absolutely, So the counter revolution has begun. Soon enough,
Lennon will be back from Finland and he'll take power
in the October Revolution, which happens in November, of course,
and we'll talk about it on Wednesday, unless you follow
the Russian Old calendar, in which case it's Tuesday.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
That's not true. I was trying to put the math
on that. I was like, I'm not a great.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Math person, but Yeah, weeks and dates are unrelated to
each other by in large. Yeah, but what is related to.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Nothing?
Speaker 2 (48:10):
This is the worst segue I've ever had, is Mia,
what do you do with your life that people could
pay attention to?
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (48:19):
I do a podcast called a kadap in here that
also has some truly abominable segues.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, fun time job you gets me up in the morning.
It's the segue from waiting it anyway. Sorry.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
I start doing it in real life and I'm just like,
oh no, it's too late for me. I'm too far gone.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
It's all I do it in my collective meetings, and
people kind of enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
I think so annoying.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
You have to be friends with other people who get
it because they do it too, and then it's just normal.
But if you're ever around people who are just not podcasts,
not necessarily the people that work in the podcast space,
but that like are not podcast listeners, they look at
you like, I'm sorry, are you okay? And it's like yes,
(49:09):
And by the way, here's a fun fact about how
okay I am podcast.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Promod Bye. We will win with that. See you Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly podcast of which I'm the host, Parker Kiljoy, of
which this time Miawong is the guest.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Amya, Hello, I'm back again. We're crunched at two Cronstead harder. Yeah,
excited to be here. Three to Tokyo Drift already. I
don't I don't know how you count the episode pairs.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh I'm not sure. Yeah, because this is I mean,
this is part three of a six parter. But since
I always think of him as double no.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We're in the middle, we're entering the middle period. But
fortunately here to guide us along is our producer, Sophie Hy. Sophie,
it's me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
The producer, Sophie Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
As one of the other people makes it happen is Daniel.
He's an audio engineer, Daniel. Our theme music was written
for us by un woman, and I promised Mia right
before we recorded that today I am going to talk
about what I believe to be the largest moral and
strategic misstep in anarchist history.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Yeah. This is wild to be because I think, wow,
this is this is this is this, This is worse
than working with the government in Catalonia's is worse than
going off the barricades. It's like, oh wow, this is
this is this is worse than the Chinese anarchists working
with Chen Kai Sheck.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That one I don't know about, but it might be
comparable to working with Chinese.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
This is probably worse because by that point they're just
worked than many of them.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I have a feeling that this is probably why they
worked with Shanghai Shek to be for anyone who's listening,
that's the nationalists general who the Maoist Army was fighting
in China.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Right, Yeah, I that that one. Yeah, I can explain
really briefly basically that one was there was a faction
of anarchists who were just like friends with him. Yeah,
so they backed Chan Kay Sheck. Also partially as a
result of a bunch of anarchists getting killed in Russia.
A lot of other anarchists refused to back them and
were like, what are you guys doing? This guy is
like this kuys he like right drug barn like right wing,
(02:04):
like nationalist weirdo. But you know, that's for another episode.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Although I want to see at the end of part
four how you feel about that decision that they made
because where we last left our heroes and soon to
be antagonists, the revolution of nineteen oh five had largely
failed in Russia. Right, this is our sixth part about
the cronstat Uprising, but it's it's secretly the entire nineteen
(02:30):
oh five to nineteen twenty one Russian Revolution series so
that I can eventually do other spinoff episodes that talk
about these things and have done more of the research
myself and or you all have had options to hear it.
So nineteen oh five revolution is largely failed, most of
the militant revolutionaries are dead, imprisoned or in exile. And
of all of the different socialist factions, and once again,
(02:52):
you've got the s RS, who are the agrarian socialists
that came out of Russia's own nineteenth century social movements.
You've got the Marxists who are the social democrat, and
then you've got the anarchists and all of these factions.
You also have the Cadets, which are like the like
liberal centrists. Actually will they come later, But there are
other factions, but these are the like leftist factions.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
All of these factions have their own internal divisions, Most
famously the Marxists are split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
and the Bolsheviks are headed up by Vladimir Lenin, who
wanted an elite vanguard of middle class intellectuals to drag
the working class kicking and screaming into the revolution. And
you have the Mensheviks who are just kind of like
a little bit less fiery and a little bit less vanguardy,
(03:35):
and so in some ways they're kind of like better,
and in some kind of ways they're I mean, I
like it those things like better, and I like the Bolsheviks,
but they have some great one liners.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I remember it was like an art class in college.
But we revent this line of this Venshevik in like
I think nineteen eighteen going talking about the Bolsheviks saying
you can't build socialism the way the Pharaoh's built the pyramids,
which I always liked.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, it's just a great line.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
But they great wood lighters, less great organizing in politics.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
So maybe I mean they're still better than the Bolsheviks, like,
but anyway, well they didn't do as good of a
job as it because the Bolsheviks win, But you can
say that about everyone else. We're gonna talk about today, Yeah,
because the Bolsheviks beat everyone, including themselves and all of
the people who followed anyway. Whatever, So the SRS have
(04:28):
their moderate wing and their extreme wing. The extreme wing
are the Maximalists. The anarchists are less like divided into
two factions as much as they are a series of
different ideologies who sometimes work together and sometimes don't. In general,
you've got the least revolutionary, who are the anarcho syndicalists,
and then you have the anarcho communists, and then you
have the anarco communists who are like too radical for
the other a narco communists who are like, we don't
(04:49):
like you Kropotkinists, you all are too democratic. Whatever, nothing changes.
All of the more extreme factions of each of these groups,
from the Bolsheviks to the left s RS and the
Maximalists to the most of the anarchists, are running around
killing motherfuckers, robbing motherfuckers, and just generally trying to utilize
(05:11):
terrorism for political lens. By and large, they've all failed
at this point, so most of them are writing about
all this in exile or getting political education from other
imprisoned radicals, or being dead, which was another popular pastime
of failed revolutionaries worldwide.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Actually, yeah, great way to pass the time. It will
pass all of your time.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, all everything's past tense at this point. This quiets
down Russia a little bit. But to be honest, it
was mostly just angry peasants and workers who were doing
all the uprising, not the ideologues of any of these
groups or parties. So things stayed kind of spicy. And
you've got Tzar Nicholas the Second, who never wanted to
(05:52):
be czar. He's pretty every single historian that I have
run across, of every lee and right, agrees this guy
was just weak and spineless as far as autocrats go.
And he was just like the wimpy Tzar, and most
historians tend to be like, there was no way he
was going to survive as Zar Zardam was fucking done
(06:14):
no matter how it went with this guy in charge.
With the possible exception as if he had really leaned
into constitutional monarchy after nineteen oh five and had basically
just like stepped back, him and his family could have
survived and Russia could have been like the UK of
the Netherlands.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
But I think the problem with that is like Azar
could have done that. Zar Nicholas the guy could not
have done that now, like he is too much of
a micromanager. He is too much of a like I'm
going to be the czar guy, yeah, which is because
he didn't even want a bizarre like yeah, it is
a fiasco.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, I guess I'm gonna be the most czarish tzar
because I.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
You could just not be the czar. But no, I know,
I know so easy to not be the czar. I'm
doing it right now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, I am eighty percent committed to not be in
the czar. So the Zar promised to Duma, which is
a congress of sorts, and even though it barely had
any power, and he still kept disbanding it and getting
annoyed at it because of micromanagy autocratic stuff, and then
he would like call for new elections every time it
seemed like politically necessary. People were getting really annoyed by this,
(07:17):
and lots, but not all of the revolutionaries are boycotting
Duma elections, which actually sort of worked as far as
I can tell. Like, boycotting elections is sometimes a strategy
that does not work, and sometimes is a strategy that works.
Whenever people are like this is the revolutionary strategy that works.
I'm always like, yeah, it's always a crapshoot, just always.
(07:40):
So the only fun part about talking about inter revolutionary
Russia is that we get to talk about everyone's favorite
piece of shit, Rasputant. Eh, he's so cool that Bonie
m wrote a six song about him. It was covered
by the folk metal band Teresis because it's.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Please stop, please stop telling us that Robert looks like him.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
We've heard your theories. I, after having done more research
about Rasputin, would never say that about Robert.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Please stop, please stop doing that theory.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, Like so Rasbuten is not cool. People did cool stuff,
and I used to think he's interesting people who survived
a lot of assassination attempts. Right, Realistically, he only survived
one assassination attempt, which is more assassination attempts than I've survived.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That's true, but like that's also he's also on the
list of like on the like the the memorial Hitler
list of that guy shouldn't have made it.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, totally, And so we're going to talk about him
because he's he's still kind of funny. Is interesting because
this is the part of the story where you can
point to royal inbreeding as being the driving force of
the Russian Revolution in world attempts to stay socialism if
you really want to pull your red yarn out as
far as it can go. Because Nicholas the Second his
(09:03):
wife Alexandra, was a German princess and was granddaughter of
Queen Victoria of the UK. Because everything that you think about,
how in bread and incestuous and the aristocracy was an
entirely different class of people that ruled all of Europe.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
However bad you think it was, you're right, that's how
bad it was. Yeah, they're all cousins. Yeah, Like it's terrible.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The Royal line is famous for being a pretty straight
and narrow family tree, and it means as certain traits
are more likely to occur. Alexandra was a carrier for hamophilia,
which means that blood doesn't clot properly. If you get cut,
you can bleed out.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
It's not great.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I mean people have it, and I'm not trying to
be like, ah, everyone has it sucks like, but you know,
it wasn't a good thing to have. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, it was also called the Royal disease.
Because so many men in the family had it, and
so the heir to the throne, Nicholas's own son, Alexey,
had it, and they tried to hide it from everyone,
(10:05):
and they tried everything to solve the problem, especially doctors.
But doctors didn't help. Because it's the beginning of the
twentieth century, and eventually people will say the same thing
about doctors now because we're all still learning. Enter the
wandering mystic Grigory Rasputin. He was born a Siberian peasant
(10:27):
and people know almost nothing about his upbringing. Okay, The
thing that I like about him, he is kind of
this blank thing that you can like project whatever you
want onto.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Like, yeah, but so was Louis Napoleon, so Napoleon the third,
so you know, not not necessarily a good yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Fair enough. He was not formally educated. Was Robert formally educated?
And also was Robert born a Siberian peasant is an
unknown We may never know. Much like Robert Evans, nothing
is known about this man's past. He was probably a
rowdy kid. Okay, this part does a lineup. And then
when he's like twenty eight and he had like a
(11:07):
wife and kids and stuff, he was like oh shit,
I'm having visions I should go wandering. In the process,
he became friends of the pod XVX. He swore off
meat and alcohol.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, usually it's revolutionary, so I talk about our XVX
on this show. But apparently this piece of shit sexual
assault or spoil alert. He's a massive rapist.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Did do people even know what XVX? Because like, I
didn't know what that was, even though everyone says that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I'm sure, like, no, Okay. So XVX is punk shorthand
for vegan straight edge, and that means that you don't
eat animal products, and you don't drink alcohol or do
drugs besides caffeine. And it's a thing that some people
are I'm not. I'm vegan almost edge. It's a different thing.
(11:54):
I don't get the cool points for it. I'm also
not a wandering mystic until I get this van done. Anyway,
He's like he attracted a following. He joined a cool,
probably terrible, but interesting self flagellation and orgy cult and
one day I'm going to do a whole episode just
about weird Russian cults when I'm like not doing actual
(12:14):
cool people the cool stuff, and I'm just doing weird stuff.
Because the very first episode that I ever did of
this show in terms of research was about the Russian Nihilists,
and I fell down this two day rabbit holes before
I knew how to do this properly, where I have
to put out a two episodes every week. I found
on a two day rabbit hole about this like castration
cult that was really big in Russia where they were
(12:35):
all like chopping off dix and nuts and stuff all
the time. I think it might have only been nuts,
but I can't remember. It might have been dicks too.
I have all the notes about it. And it was
this like wild cult that like came out of Siberian peasantry.
And then like was it kind of like the Masons
where it was like this like secret society that like
this is completely offscript anyway, that's a different weird cult stuff.
(12:59):
So he's in a weird cult. He is not a
formal priest or doctor or anything, much like Robert Evans
is not actually a doctor, regardless of what he tells you,
And soon enough he is basically the personal physician to
this six Czar's kid. You ever read about how he
actually managed to cure the hemophilia of the Czar's kid,
(13:20):
wasn't that.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
They stop giving him arsenic or something or like lead.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Willow bark ah aspirin. So all the doctors have been
failing to heal this kid, and so this faith healer
who came in and just like prayed over him and
like made him lay in bed did And there's two
possible explanations. One is that the praying worked and the
you know various God or God's intervened on the behalf
(13:46):
of this child. And the other is that since he
had scared off the doctors, the doctor stopped gilia of
giving him aspirin basically willow bark which is a blood thinner.
So bed rest was not aspirin helped. Because sometimes nothing
better than what doctors do.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Yeah, especially especially pre like full pre them figuring out
how the human body sort of works. Doctors.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, totally. Again, I never want to come too hard
for old timey doctors because I'm like, that is what
people will say about us if the human race survives
the oh yeah, climate crisis, They'll be like, they thought.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What is like you guys were doing surgeries by cutting
people's bones with saws. What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (14:33):
People, Yeah, and they'll like conflate. They'll be like old
timey medicine, and they'll be like, they'll conflate like ether
and like ssries and the four humors all into one.
They'll be like, you know anyway, So Rasputin he is
almost certainly a sex chrize piece of shit who sectually
(14:54):
assaults people and extorts influence favors for sexual favors. He's like, oh, yeah,
I have a wrecked line to the Czar and the
Tzarina in particular. Well, I guess the Tsar's wife, and
I think Zorina means she's regnant ruling, but.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Anyway, He's like, yeah, you do this thing for me,
I'll do this thing for you. And it's funny because
the main thing people argue about is whether or not
he was sleeping with the Czar and the Empress, which
he may or may not have been, But that's so
much less important to me than understanding that multiple women
came forward accusing him of rape, one of whom was
immediately disbelieved in fired she was a governess for the
(15:29):
young daughters. There's a lot of fairly reasonable ideas that
he was mistreating the young daughters of the royal family.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
He sucks.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
That's the Even though the people who dislike him are
super right wing, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
He sucks. Yeah he was actually, so he just sucks
for a different reason than the right wing people hate
him for.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, totally, because they hate him because there's a wild
scandal going on, like about whether he's fucking the czar
in the wife and like whether or not, you know,
like I don't know whatever, And the royal family keeps
defending him. They're like, well, he's holy everything, he's practically
a saint. He can't do anything wrong. And the Russian people,
(16:10):
both high born and low are like, oh my god,
fuck this guy. It is seriously impacting Nicholas the Second's
reputation internally and internationally that this is happening. And I
don't know if you knew this, mehm. Overall during this
time period, the people of Russia are not afraid to
assassinate people. Yeah, it's like kind of a thing, not
(16:36):
saying anyone should bring that back in Russia right now.
But oh wait, well there's the whole dead oligarchs thing.
But that's the other direction, that's state sponsored killing. So
The first attempt on his life was by this peasant
woman who didn't have a nose named Keonia, Gussia, and
she was thirty three, and she stabbed him and screamed,
(16:57):
I've killed the Antichrist. Just pretty cool. It's kind of
up there with six temper Tyrannus.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
It's pretty good. But it has this issue. This is
the thing I've run into a lot of like in
the history of political assassination, just like you got to
go for multiple stabs and you have to you have
to do follow up shots. Oh yeah, sure they're actually dead.
This is this happens all the time. Always take the
second shot. This is this is my advice to the
aspiring I don't know, guy who wants to solve some
(17:26):
problems in Russia, right, yeah, directly, Yeah, take the second
shot and possibly the third one.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
You might also need number four, you know, going until
the problem is certainly solved, reload, keep spare mags like whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
No, And they didn't have like CSI or whatever, so
they didn't know that, like when people die of stab wounds,
they have like thirty seven stab wounds.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, you know, And that's the thing I think to
this day, people like there's this weird thing that comes
from movies and video games where people think that like
you can just like like killing someone with a knife
is like really quiet and they just instantly die. No,
this is like the loudest conceivable way to kill someone
that's not like an anti aircraft gun. Yeah, it takes
a long time. And yeah, and so it didn't work.
(18:09):
He ran away, she chased him. He turned around and
like fought her in a crowd formed and you know,
she gets arrested. Later, she's released after the revolution, and
then she tries to kill a bishop, and I think
she's like then sent into an asylum at some point. Wait,
you're the revolutionary censor decided we're trying to kill a bishop. Okay, wow, Wow,
(18:30):
they're betraying their Marxist principles here.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
This is really by trying to Wait now, I don't
I don't think she was a Marxist. She was just
released by the revolution.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah sure, But if you if you're a revolutionary, if
you're like a Bolshevik, are you supposed to be fine
with people killing bishops?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:46):
I see what you're saying. Well, we're going to get
to how little the Bolsheviks care about what that's But first,
do you know what the Bolsheviks do care about?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Is is it the products and services that support the podcasts.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
That's right, because they are universally loved. They are so
universally loved that even anti capitalists put their ads into
their shows, and even authoritarian anti capitalists like the Bolsheviks
also love them.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Here in the words, in the words of the of
another Bolshevik destended party, the Chinese Communist Party, I follow
the party started business.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, well, actually no, the Bolsheviks don't let people do that. Yeah,
fair enough, Okay, well here's the adsoper back. And then
(19:47):
some nobles do take out Respute and they take them
out in nineteen sixteen. The story is like pretty murky
and retold in different ways, and it's almost certainly told
in a very sensationalist way, but that very weighs fun,
so I'll tell it, which is that they like lured
him into the basement. They gave him a whole bunch
of poisoned cakes and he ate like ten of them,
and he was like, those are good, and they were like, here,
drink this wine. It's totally not poison, but it was poison.
(20:09):
And then he drank like three glasses and he was like,
I'm happy, this is good, which and then they shot
him in the chest and then he was like leaped
up like a horror movie and was like, ah, I
like chase the person who had shot him in the chest,
and so they had to put a bullet in his
head and throw his body into the river in order
to stop him. Later people were like, he didn't eat
(20:30):
sweet things. That didn't happen, which also implies that either
he also didn't drink or he had started drinking again.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I don't know enough about his who knows. The problem
with him is he's a fucking edge breaker. That's the
problem with him, which is what you call someone who's
straight edge who stops being straight edge. Anyway, the most
likely story is that some aristocrats were like, we don't
like this guy, and then they shot him in the
head and then it was done. One bullet anyway, resput
(21:00):
and weird guy glad he's dead. But it plays a
big part in the downfall of Yeah, because people were
really unhappy about this, which is you should be upset
when there is a rapist and executive power like you do.
After the next election, you would think, but yeah, because
(21:22):
resputants running, That's what I'm trying to say. I would
never make any allegations about any candidates besides resputant.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
More important to the story is the old World War One.
So check that off on your bingo cards. It's nineteen fourteen.
Resputant still isn't dead. At this point, some Bosnian Serbs
assassinated an Austro Hungarian guy, and then Austro Hungary was like,
fuck you, Serbia, and then Russia was like, well, we
don't have treaty obligations, but we like kind of consider
(21:51):
Serbia to be part of the general Russian sphere of influence.
So Nicholas the second was like, all right, fuck it,
let's go, and so mobilized to defense Serbia, and Germany
was like, well, then we had a cclar war, and
then Russia was like, well then we're going to attack,
and that's the start of World War One.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
And herbal idea, Yeah, can all of you worst No, yeah, don't, don't.
Don't be ruled by kings. Yeah, did not go well
for anybody this particular war. I'm going to ask the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah that's true, Okay, it did go well. For the Bolsheviks,
although the first thing that they did was get out
of anyway, so no one who is involved.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Did it go well for Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Nicholas's second was, like, you know, last time I threw
a war in order to stave off revolution, it didn't
work out at all and I almost died. Surely this
time it all go better. Because there's all this propaganda
about ho, Russia is going to like roll right into
Germany and conquer. This did not happen. As per usual,
Russia did what Russia does best in a war, have
(22:52):
a very large army full of conscripts with very bad
leadership and bad equipment, and throw bodies at the problem.
Has no comparison to now famously.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, although they were fighting a much like no no
offense to the Ukrainian army, which is fought above its capacity,
but like the N eighty fourty German Army, Oh boy,
do you not want to fight that arby? Like Jesus,
those guys are scary. Like those people.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
They went to war against the entire world and almost won,
yeah twice twice.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, And it's like like really like especially in World
War One, like all of their allies are a joke Okay,
so they're terrifying arby zero out of ten. Don't let
the Germans form an army because yeah, never good.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, I mean, you know, they're famous for their efficiency,
and unfortunate efficiency is an incredibly important part of war,
so famously. Also, soldiers don't like being sent to war without.
Some of them don't have boots and are basically told
get boots off the guy next to you and he dies.
(24:06):
And like this is also a like like I've read
accounts from people who fought in the Red Army during
World War Two and like were told to attack tanks
with their bare hands. You know, most of the peasants
were drafted from the peasant class. Families watched their sons
leave pretty sure that they'd never see their sons again,
and they were mostly right. Yeah, and people are really
(24:27):
fucking poor. As per usual, a third of the draftees
have to be rejected for medical reasons because ill health
is so rampant. World War One doesn't do anyone any favors.
It's the first time European powers have the machine gun
to use in a war against each other instead of
colonized people, and so they're just throwing bodies into the grinder,
and it's bad times all around. The only thing good
(24:48):
thing that came out of World War One is, of
course Lord of the Rings and almost the Russian Revolution,
the Lord of the Ring things that Tolkien fought in
World War One, and that influenced his decision around how
to make the most important book of our time. So
the Russian Revolution almost was really cool and came out
of World War One.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
So that's like close, yes, like one in a quarter,
one in an eighth.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, I hate the big Man theory of history. Everything
I've read, you can kind of blame the destruction of
socialism at the feet of Latimer Lenin more than anyone else,
because he engineered again, this is the best I can tell.
He engineered the Bolsheviks into doing what even they didn't
want to do, at least at first. And I think
(25:38):
all of them were fine with taking power and stuff.
But the way in which the Bolsheviks did this, which
we'll get to, but we'll get to that he's not
even in the country at this point. He's in Switzerland,
so without any of the leaders of the revolution. I
just wanted to point out that Lenin wasn't there because
I'm a little salty anarchist bitch.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So without any of the so called leaders of the revolution,
including all the anarchists, right, like, they're all fucking locked
I mean, the leaders of the anarchist movement or whatever.
We're all locked up to right or in exile or dead.
Russia is going to have a revolution without everyone, and
they're going to call it the February Revolution because it
happened in March. That's a little switching calendar's joke for you.
All throughout World War One, the Zars kind of like
(26:20):
off at war, becoming increasingly popular, and Alexandra is acting
as sort of a tzarina and no one likes her
at all. Their general strikes all over a massive upheaval
over a year and a half. They had four prime ministers,
five ministers of the Interior, three four ministers, three war ministers,
three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
That's so that look, they have adopted the British mode
of government, which is very traditionally aside, things are going great, yeah,
because it's hanging cabbages outside, one for every minister.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, And so the Duma is like, hey, can this
bad ruler Alexandra stop being ruler. And Saint Nicholas. No,
Nicholas the Second not a saint. Oh wait, they did
saint him, the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Would you see this is a Russian whatever anyway, Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
So Nicholas the Second dissolved the Douma yet again, instead
of doing what they asked him to do, which was
the reasonable thing, and they announced that the Interior Minister
was dictator. And this was not a popular move. So
one morning in February or March nineteen seventeen, We're going
to go with March eighth, because I am cool Zone
Media's officially Western calendar bigots. So March nineteen seventeen, Russia
(27:40):
throws a revolution. It is a balmy sixteen degree day,
sixteen degrees in the real temperature scale, of course, fahrenheit,
but soon it gets way colder. Like all the best revolutions,
they did not know they were throwing a revolution, and
so often is the case, it was started by women. Yeah,
I didn't know that. That's like I probably learned that
in high school. To be clear, that's not like a
(28:01):
hidden fact, but like I didn't realize that the first
Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen, was started by women for
years at this point, as the war and misery the
peasants and the workers, the aristocracy who was still like
eating cake and going to the theater and drinking champagne
and everyone else is starving at home or starving at
the front or dying violently in one of.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Those two places.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And so they're like, all right, we're going to do
something about it, you know, right. And the cool thing
about internationalism is as international. So I'm going to tie
the roots of this particular thing to the United States.
Only then I'm going to tie it back to Russia.
Because there's this woman, Teresa Machel. She was born a
Russian Jew, born in what's now Ukraine. She was born
on May Day, May one, eighteen seventy four. Ah, yeah,
(28:48):
before there was a May Day even. She was seventeen
when her family emigrated to the Lower East Side of
New York City and she got to work as a cloakmaker.
She organized the Infant Cloakmakers Union of New York because
people knew how to dress their babies back then in
cloaks with chainmail.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Wait, we got it, okay, I have I now know
people who have babies We've got it. We've got to
bring this back. We can do this.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Since the main expense in diy in a cloak is
that it costs hundreds of dollars of wool to make.
Ask me how I know infant cloaks are a discount.
It's a sweet deal. Bonus sponsor infant cloaks because not
even an ad break. That's just how excited I am. Anyway,
(29:38):
Teresa represents her union through various labor federations and such
and winds up in the Socialist Party of America. Supposedly,
the Socialist believes in equal rights for women, and she,
like a lot of other people, tried to make that
actually true by fighting for it. And she pitched that
there should be a national Women's Day, and it was
first on February twenty eighth, nineteen nine. By nineteen eleven,
(30:02):
the International Socialist Women's Conference managed to get in International
Women's Day and over a million people participated in that
first one so International Women's Day. Nineteen seventeen, women in
Russia went on a one day strike and the strike
was focused in Saint Petersburg. And this was not a
polite and peaceful affair. They demanded bread and peace. They
(30:24):
marched through the streets, looting stores to distribute like rich
pastries that were just for rich people.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Rules unbelievably based, no, I know.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And one of the reasons I point that out is because,
like there is no clear history of the Russian Revolution
that's ever been written as far as the cantel. Everyone
either their own angle, yes, and so I'm just trying
to be really upfront about my own angle here. But
like everything you read from all of these different sources,
because there's also so much happened chaotically that it's not
like these sources are lying. It's that they're choosing which
(30:55):
facts to represent or even only know about certain facts, right.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
I Mean, there's like, like len It Lenden's best lying
about this period that I really felt drink twenty twenty
was there are decades where nothing happens, in weeks where
decades happened.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Yeah, And this is the decades are happening, like right
here totally in eight days, they ended a three hundred
year didnesting and like the thing that took years for
them to try to get in nineteen oh five happened
in eight days.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
And some of the accounts of this the reason I'm.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Pointing out that these folks looted on the very first
day of it was because some of the accounts are like,
and then they let everyone out of jail, but they
didn't just let the good political prisoners let out. They
let everyone else out too, and suddenly there was looting,
you know, And it's like, I'm sure that a lot
of the people that they let out of jail looted,
there's no doubt in my mind. Also a whole bunch
of people who weren't in jail already looted.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Because it's cool. It turns out.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, so some troops refused to fire on them because
there were women, and frankly and very importantly, morale among
soldiers was fucking, to use your phrase, dog shit at
this point. Men joined in soon enough. There's actually there
was men there at the beginning too, But like overall,
more of the workers now are coming out and there
are more general strikes have been happening among different industries,
(32:15):
happening immediately prior to this.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
But the version of it that I heard was like,
part of what goes on is like, so it's an
international Women's Day event, and a lot of the like
the male political group for like, eh, we're not going
to go out, and so people are like running from
factory to factory yelling like get out here, like what
are you people doing? Which rules?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
And I believe you that makes more sense, frankly. And
it takes them a while to even get the political
parties involved, because so many actual uprisings start with marginalized people,
and eventually political groups attach themselves once they realize that
the momentum can't be stopped, because usually they want to
be like, well, we want to be the ones who
have done it right. Revolution takes eight days. On March twelfth,
(33:01):
the military in Saint Petersburg switched teams to join the revolution,
killing the officers that wouldn't let them. A few days
after that, Nicholas the Second was like, okay, fine, I
give up. You can have your country back, you fucking peasants,
all without any central organizing to the revolution. None of
that has happened yet at this point. About thirteen hundred
people or so died during that revolution. And then you
(33:24):
have the classic rhythm like that's so few people I
know for a system of government that is like twice
as old as like the United States.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Yeah, no, it's it's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, it's like respect to those thirteen hundred people who died,
but it is such an incredibly low number, and you
have this classic problem, a power vacuum. Don't worry, plenty
more people are going to die because of this revolution.
It was not during the immediate revolution, but.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
They did the first the first revolution, they did a
really good job. They did everyone everything subsequent to that,
they did issues emerge.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
It's the people who tried to take power that anyway whatever.
So two forces step into the vacuum and with a
really uneasy alliance. And the laziest way that people talk
about the February Revolution is that the provisional government took over.
The accurate way is that the provisional government had to
figure out how to share power with the Soviets because
the Soviets are back. The provisional government is composed of
(34:25):
people from the Duma and shit, and so the last
time that they've been elected was nineteen twelve, and so
they're like, they kind of know they're not ready to
be the elected officials of the government, right, But they're
the kind of middle class version of the revolutionists. At
that point, it's mostly centrists and liberals and the Duma
because everyone else has been boycotting elections and stuff. The
(34:48):
Soviets are filled with socialists of all kinds, unless you
read a Bolshevik history, in which case they were all Bolsheviks.
Sh And the Provisional Government is like, all right, we're
going to become a republic and have elections and shit
and solve the land problem for the peasants. Just not yet.
We got to stay in World War One. We can't
ditch the Allies. We can't like redistribute all the land
(35:10):
and stuff, because we're in the middle of a war.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Everyone else is like, well, why are we in the
middle of this war? Yeah, But their plan is to
eventually have a constituent Assembly that is voted for and
this would become the government and they would be a republic,
but for now they would be in charge. The Soviets,
who are an elected body already and they've been elected
in a grassroots direct delegate way, are like, well, the
(35:35):
people of Russia aren't at war with Germany. The Russian
Empire was at war and that's gone. So they disagreed.
The Provisional Government had like the symbols and stuff. The
symbolic parts of the state. The Soviets had the actual
practical power because they had the workers and the peasants
and the soldiers. So the provisional government is like, hey, socialists,
(35:58):
could you please please join us? You can join us now,
hey do you want to? You want to join us?
And the Soviets and a lot of them do, a
lot of the SRS in particular, which is the largest
group by popularity and delegates, it is the most important
socialist group at this point. And the Soviets are like,
(36:18):
all right, our order number one, it's literally their order
number one is that the provisional government orders will only
be followed if we if we want.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
To which rules, more people should do this. This is great.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
No, it's so frustrating because it's like, the Soviets are
the good guys here. I mean that the provisional government
I like kind of get where they're coming from. I'm
not trying to be like, oh, what a bunch of assholes, right,
but like, no, there's this bottom up electoral system that's
already in place. Just fucking go with it and not
do what Lenin's about to do. And seven hundred of
(36:52):
these Soviets spread across the country. And this is like
I think actually has further reach overall than the provisional
government doesn't have as much reach in the peasant areas,
is my understanding, but I'm not one hundred percent certain
about that because you read like eight different things and
they all disagree. But what everyone does agree about is
(37:17):
that these are deals that you should totally listen to
and not do this thing that would be really easy
to do, which is press the four fifteen second button
on your phone as soon as you hear the theme
music and then wait until you hear the theme music
again and then stop pressing forward. You shouldn't do that, never.
You should listen to all of these advertisers and then
(37:38):
do whatever they tell you to do.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
So things are unstable in Russia after this revolution. All
the revolutionaries are suddenly let out of prison all over
the country, and so are a lot of other people.
So there's looting, I mean whatever, Like I'm like looting
to get the cakes. It's also like, I'm sure it's
also kind of bad and hard to be alive right now.
You know, it's like interesting, it's not boring, but like
(38:12):
it's also dangerous I'm not trying to let everyone's like starving.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
I mean like that's that's the other element of this.
It's just like totally. It's like, wow, I wonder why
these starving people are stealing cakes from the cake shop.
It's like, I know, no one could possibly answer this.
It must be the criminal elements.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, have you heard about Lenin's return during this I'm
going to talk about a little bit, and you need
to fill in any gaps because this is the this
is the tea so wild so imperial Germany really wants
the provisional government overthrown because it wants Russia to get
(38:48):
out of the war so that Germany can focus on
the Western Front. And they're like, well, if we let
the Kamis overthrow, the provisional government will have one less
antagonist in our war. Lenin wants to overthrow the provisional
government to institute a dictatorship, not a dictatorship of the proletariat,
but a dictatorship by him. As we talked about last time.
(39:08):
His whole thing was to try and use the Soviets
and then they become superliferous, right, and so the German
government finances him and sends him back to Russia on
a train that's there so with a whole bunch of
money and shit, hoping he'll do exactly what he goes
on to do. That's the version I heard. Yeah, it's
really wild because it's like, for all that every single
(39:30):
one of sort of Lenin's ideological to SAand insequendy spent
all their time accusing everyone else of being a psyopist,
like your guy was literally paid by the German government
to do this like him.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
It's like, come on, and.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Actually, the interesting lesson here isn't that Bolshevism is a
psyop It's that sometimes powerful groups finance other groups in
order to try and get what they want. It doesn't
mean that Lenin wanted Imperial Germany to get what it wanted.
Lenin wanted what he wanted and had no p problems
taking a bunch of money from the people that his
country had been at war with, you know.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah. And it's also I mean, I think the ever
thing here is like, this is something you see a
lot with empires, is they'll hand someone a bunch of
money and that person will just turn around and then
go do whatever they want with it. Yeah, totally. It
turns out it doesn't always work well for the people
handing them the money and the guns.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yeah, Like, I am not saying this to say that
Lenin is a pawn of the German government. I am
saying that Lenin that Germany wanted to use him as
a pawn, and that Germany got what it wanted out
of it. But anyway, Lenin gets back to Russia and
he sets up trying to engineer the whole a further revolution,
and he does that by bringing the Bolshevik position closer
(40:48):
to the anarchist position, by bringing their tactics and strategies
but not their goals closer in line to anarchism. Anarchism
was the main ideology at this point that had been
promoting an immediate revolution, whereas Bolshevism was still kind of
gradual even at this point. So, at least according to
some of the histories I read when Lenin wrote his
(41:09):
like big important theory book, The State and Revolution, at
this time, this fundamentally changes the Marxist revolutionary strategy. And
it's also kind of an appeal to the anarchists and
to the other people who are like, well, we got
to do this now. So anarchists saw this as Bolsheviks
coming to them rather than them going to the Bolsheviks,
(41:31):
as they start having more and more of an alliance
going forward over these next few months. And he also
in the State and Revolution pushes that all states have
the right to secede. He will not hold to this
very long. Yeah example, Yeah, Later the Democratic Republic of
Georgia will split off formed by Mensheviks, only to be
invaded by the Bolsheviks, and then of course Ukraine and whatever. Anyhow,
(41:56):
so Lenin's back, oh boy. Provisional government is headed up
by an SR a guy named Kerensky. He's not right away,
he's in April, but because in April they're like, please
socialists come join us, right And one part I didn't
know about. That's a little bit tea in a different direction.
One someone one person who came out of exile to
(42:17):
help advise Kerensky was our buddy Peter Kropakin. This part, yeah,
I mean, like the tracks.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Anarchists are not stoked about Kripakin. We talked about him
a little bit last time. He' an abolutionary biologist and
a former prince who is very interesting and very important
to anarchist communist theory, and also modern mutual aid and
why animals are gay theory. He's a very interesting man.
So he wanted anarchists to side with the Allies in
World War One to stop imperial Germany felt like more
(42:51):
important than viewing things specifically along class lines. Most anarchists
were against any participation in yeah war.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
It was like, this is a terrible idea, Like what
are you doing?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
So the anarchists in nineteen seventeen generally supported the Bolsheviks,
as did a lot of the Actually we need a
real revolution people. Lenin is really appealing to people. He's
running around shouting all power to the Soviets. That's his thing.
When people say all power to the Soviets, what they
mean is not provisional government, the top down body, but yes,
(43:23):
the bottom up body that was actually already elected. And
people are into it. And his slogan is a piece
bread in land, and people like those things. I like
those things as best as you can figure out. In
nineteen seventeen, here and there and afterwards, the anarchists were
useful idiots for the Bolsheviks. The anarchists did the dirty
work because we believed in revolution, and because we also
(43:45):
believed in political pluralism. It is the tolerance paradox. Right
anarchists at this point tend to believe in political pluralism,
including having political pluralism and allies with groups that don't
believe in political pluralism. And in nineteen seventeen in Russias
on stable as fuck and you have revolution one point
five that happens in July. It's called the July Days
(44:06):
and it's an uprising by socialists of all different stripes,
actually kind of less the Bolsheviks than like skin the people, yeah,
because because Lenin didn't order them to do it, and
they were like, but some Bolsheviks were.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Part of it.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
And then also it's like history is so annoying and
hard to read because it's like I also read accounts
that were like and then the Bolsheviks did this thing,
but that was like a Western capitalist reading of the history.
So like everyone who's bad as a Bolshevik, you know, yeah,
which is sometimes though they formed that like meme without
two arms or holding hands, because they both want to
blame everything on the Bolsheviks, because the Bolsheviks think the
(44:44):
thing was good and the capitalists think that the thing
was bad. But it wasn't done by the Bolsheviks at all.
Is done by like srs or anarchists or people who
know political ideology. And what happened in July is that
that sr. Kerensky was pushed for a military offensive against Germany,
and that actually kind of worked for a minute, but
at home it made everyone remember how much they didn't
want to be in a war. And the only socialist
(45:06):
who had enjoined the provisional government were the radicals, and
so therefore everyone else had to back the offensive, right
because they were in the government that it declared it,
you know, the same way they could have.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Not, but they're just like, you know, they just sort
of fell in line. It's just like, yeah, you could
have not done this, but well, I mean you can.
Taking power destroys your brain. See.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
The best thing that came out of World War One
is the Lord of the Rings, which is the parable
about why you have to throw the ring of power into.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
The fire mountain.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Anyway, So the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and some of the
other like left stars and stuff, where the I think
some of the left users were a lot of the
only people involved in the July Days, which was a
big uprising by people. It's always like everyone wants to
have the labels, but it's like a lot of times
there's just people. People are mad, you know. And Lenin
was like, no, we're not ready yet. But the uprising
(45:59):
was put down by the provisional government including Mensheviks and
s rs, and Lennon runs off to Finland. Street demonstrations
are banned, so the counter revolution, to be fair, started
before the Bolsheviks take power. Yeah, And like Kerensky's like
pretty explicit about this, I remember, right, like he's he's
I mean, he's also every single person in this like
(46:19):
Kkin wrote a history of the French Revolution that like
I think is longer than capital, Like every single one
of these people is. It's a French revolutionary history, nerd.
And Kerensky's thing is he's like I'm gonna like be
the directorate or something from the the front from the
French Revolution. So I'm gonna be the guy who comes
in after and like ends the revolution. Yeah, like produces
a stable government. So they all, like all these people
(46:41):
have their sort of I am this person, even though
Marx is very explicit that like don't do this, like
this is actually bad, but nobody listened to him, because welcome,
welcome to the history of Marxism, where no one listens
to Marx fair enough, and sometimes I'm really glad when
people don't listen. But there is some stuff everyone once
(47:02):
in a while, like he's more than stop clock, you know. Yeah,
he's like he's wrong several times a day, not just twice,
but still not an act. But yeah, but so sometimes
he's like, don't put on the costumes of the previous revolution.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
You have to. Well, I think it's exactly line. It
was like, the revolution must take us poetry from the future,
which I always loved. Yeah, the weight of dead generations
or whatever, what is the Yeah, the memory of dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Yeah,
another great one.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, absolutely, So the counter revolution has begun. Soon enough,
Lennon will be back from Finland and he'll take power
in the October Revolution, which happens in November, of course,
and we'll talk about it on Wednesday, unless you follow
the Russian Old calendar, in which case it's Tuesday.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
That's not true. I was trying to put the math
on that. I was like, I'm not a great.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Math person, but Yeah, weeks and dates are unrelated to
each other by in large. Yeah, but what is related to.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Nothing?
Speaker 2 (48:10):
This is the worst segue I've ever had, is Mia,
what do you do with your life that people could
pay attention to?
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (48:19):
I do a podcast called a kadap in here that
also has some truly abominable segues.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, fun time job you gets me up in the morning.
It's the segue from waiting it anyway. Sorry.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
I start doing it in real life and I'm just like,
oh no, it's too late for me. I'm too far gone.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
It's all I do it in my collective meetings, and
people kind of enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
I think so annoying.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
You have to be friends with other people who get
it because they do it too, and then it's just normal.
But if you're ever around people who are just not podcasts,
not necessarily the people that work in the podcast space,
but that like are not podcast listeners, they look at
you like, I'm sorry, are you okay? And it's like yes,
(49:09):
And by the way, here's a fun fact about how
okay I am podcast.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Promod Bye. We will win with that. See you Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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