Cool Zone Media.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know.
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.
The producer, Sophie Hi.
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.
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.
That one I don't know about, but it might be comparable to working with Chinese.
This is probably worse because by that point they're just worked than many of them.
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.
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, like nationalist weirdo. But you know, that's for another episode.
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 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, 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.
Right.
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, 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.
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.
Yeah, it's just a great line.
But they great wood lighters, less great organizing in politics.
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 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
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
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.
Actually, yeah, great way to pass the time. It will pass all of your time.
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 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 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.
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.
Well, I guess I'm gonna be the most czarish tzar because I.
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.
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, 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.
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.
Please stop, please stop telling us that Robert looks like him.
We've heard your theories. I, after having done more research about Rasputin, would never say that about Robert.
Please stop, please stop doing that theory.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It's not great.
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, 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 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.
Like, yeah, but so was Louis Napoleon, so Napoleon the third, so you know, not not necessarily a good yeah.
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 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.
Oh my god.
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.
Did do people even know what XVX? Because like, I didn't know what that was, even though everyone says that.
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. 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 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 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. 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, wasn't that.
They stop giving him arsenic or something or like lead.
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 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.
Yeah, especially especially pre like full pre them figuring out how the human body sort of works. Doctors.
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.
What is like you guys were doing surgeries by cutting people's bones with saws. What is wrong with you?
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 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.
I'm not actually sure.
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
young daughters. There's a lot of fairly reasonable ideas that he was mistreating the young daughters of the royal family.
He sucks.
That's the Even though the people who dislike him are super right wing, it doesn't matter.
He sucks. Yeah he was actually, so he just sucks for a different reason than the right wing people hate him for.
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, 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 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, I've killed the Antichrist. Just pretty cool. It's kind of up there with six temper Tyrannus.
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 problems in Russia, right, yeah, directly, Yeah, take the second shot and possibly the third one.
You might also need number four, you know, going until the problem is certainly solved, reload, keep spare mags like whatever.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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, they're betraying their Marxist principles here.
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.
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?
Oh?
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?
Is is it the products and services that support the podcasts.
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.
Here in the words, in the words of the of another Bolshevik destended party, the Chinese Communist Party, I follow the party started business.
Yeah, well, actually no, the Bolsheviks don't let people do that. Yeah, fair enough, Okay, well here's the adsoper back. And then 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.
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
sweet things. That didn't happen, which also implies that either he also didn't drink or he had started drinking again.
I don't know.
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
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 resputants running, That's what I'm trying to say. I would never make any allegations about any candidates besides resputant.
Anyway.
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 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.
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.
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.
Did it go well for Yeah?
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 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.
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.
They went to war against the entire world and almost won, yeah twice twice.
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.
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. 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 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 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.
So that's like close, yes, like one in a quarter, one in an eighth.
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 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.
Yeah.
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 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.
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.
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.
Would you see this is a Russian whatever anyway, Oh my god.
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
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 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.
Those two places.
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,
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.
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.
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, 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, 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 marched through the streets, looting stores to distribute like rich pastries that were just for rich people.
Rules unbelievably based, no, I know.
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 facts to represent or even only know about certain facts, right.
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.
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.
And some of the accounts of this the reason I'm.
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.
Because it's cool. It turns out.
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, happening immediately prior to this.
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?
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, 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 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.
Yeah, no, it's it's it's incredible.
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.
They did the first the first revolution, they did a really good job. They did everyone everything subsequent to that, they did issues emerge.
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 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 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 and stuff, because we're in the middle of a war.
You know.
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 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, 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, 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.
To which rules, more people should do this. This is great.
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
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 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 do whatever they tell you to do.
And we're back.
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 it's also dangerous I'm not trying to let everyone's like starving.
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.
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 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. 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 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.
It's like, come on, and.
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.
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.
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 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 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, 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, 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 help advise Kerensky was our buddy Peter Kropakin. This part, yeah, I mean, like the tracks.
A lot of.
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
important than viewing things specifically along class lines. Most anarchists were against any participation in yeah war.
It was like, this is a terrible idea, Like what are you doing?
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, 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 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 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.
Part of it.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
The fire mountain.
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 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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
That's not true. I was trying to put the math on that. I was like, I'm not a great.
Math person, but Yeah, weeks and dates are unrelated to each other by in large. Yeah, but what is related to.
Nothing?
This is the worst segue I've ever had, is Mia, what do you do with your life that people could pay attention to?
Well?
I do a podcast called a kadap in here that also has some truly abominable segues.
Yeah, fun time job you gets me up in the morning. It's the segue from waiting it anyway. Sorry.
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.
It's all I do it in my collective meetings, and people kind of enjoy it.
I think so annoying.
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, And by the way, here's a fun fact about how okay I am podcast.
Promod Bye. We will win with that. See you Wednesday.
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