Al Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, a podcast about the people who did stuff that was cool who I like. Usually I'm Margaret Kiljoy and I'm your host, and every week I talk about a new subject, except for the following three weeks where I talk about related subjects of the Russian Revolution. And this is part two, and my guest is Mia Wong.
Heiya, Hello, I'm back again. I had a momentary moment of panic before we started recording, because I I do so many podcasts that I was going, oh no, I don't have an intro written. What am I going to do? And then to do the intro? Yeah, what else's episode?
So?
What else doing? Today?
You are doing a much harder job, which is pretending to be the podcast idiot about a subject that you know at least as much about as I do.
That's definitely not I've forgotten so much of I haven't done fair enough a Russia dive in half a decade, so it's all it's all like in one year the.
Other now, Yeah, fair enough. Our producer is Sophie Hi.
Sophie Hi.
Our audio engineers Daniel Hi, danel Hide. Our theme music was written for us by a woman, and as promises, it's too part of a sixth part about the crown Stout Rebellion, and by doing that, I decided to cover
all of all of the Russian Revolution. I'm actually have a specific thing where I'm going to talk about the anarchists in Ukraine and Makno and Maria Niki Farova later, but like not as part of the series, but it's just as part of the show separately, So it's not everything about the Russian Revolution.
Don't worry, There'll be more Russian Revolution for you. There's so much revolution, so much I know it.
This is this is the big overview one and where you last left off, I introduced the concept of Russia, the concept of socialist revolutionaries, the concept of social democrats who are the Marxists who are going to become the Bolsheviks, and the concepts of the Russian anarchists.
And now.
We're going to talk about nineteen oh five, which was a revolution. I first heard about the nineteen oh five revolution because of a band and an arcopunk band called nineteen oh five. They have a good song about one brick today is one less for Tomorrow about like it's very posi it's very like Turn of Millennia an Arco punk, where they like stop in the middle to like rant about like early Posi anarchist stuff. They're so good if you're listening nineteen oh five, I like your band that.
It was a big important thing for me when I was a baby anarchist. Anyway, I since then, I was like, why are they called nineteen oh five? That seems random? And then people were like because of the year that the revolution in Russia happened. I was like, that's nineteen seventeen, and they're like, no, there's more than one. And I was like, how many revolutions these people need? Save some
for the rest of us. And then and the other thing about nineteen oh five is that I used to sleep on the roof of a not abandoned school right next to a house. And the house was the address was nineteen oh five. This is in Portland, but I'm not gonna tell you where, but you probably know what. Someone listening knows what roof I used to sleep on. And there was like a punk house next door, and it was nineteen oh five was the address.
And I was like, that's so cool.
And they were like why, And I was like never mind, and one time I'll just go full full on embarrassing. So I had scabies and I was like, I need somewhere to sleep because I couldn't stay in anyone's house.
So I went to go sleep on the roof. And I like covered myself in poisonous ointment in someone's garage and went to go sleep on this roof, and I brought a handle of whiskey, and I was like stopped and talked to the skateboarding guy who was just like hanging out at midnight on this street next to the house, nineteen oh five, and he told me, you know that permethine cream like it it's already attacking your liver. If you drink that handle of whiskey, you might not wake up.
Oh no, So thank you skateboarding man for saving my life next to the house nineteen oh five. That's not what we're talking about today.
Good thing.
I totally told you all that story. So revolutionary fervor or revolutionary terror, depending on how you want to call it, it's spreading across Russia. General strikes or the order of the day. Students are striking, workers are striking, and workers are bringing revolutionary ideas back to their families in the countryside, which is really cool. One of the things that people don't like. They're like, oh, the peasant and the worker
near the twains shall meet. They're like, it's the kids of the peasants who became the workers, like it happened. This is the generation where it happened.
Yeah, And this is one of these things that I think, like some Marxists figure this out, but they don't figure it out until later, which is like the most revolutionary generation of like like working class city kids are the first generation out of the countryside, Like, those are the people who are most likely of anyone to go into revolt. But Marxists don't figure this out for another like till it's a little too late years. Yeah, it takes a long time for them to really get there.
Like why won't hey revolt?
Come on? Why won't.
Class My dad had and my grandma had, and so to get a sense of the of the the revolutionary fervor at the time, A lyricist at the time, Alexander Block wrote a you know, it's referred to as a lyricist, but I read it as poetry. We will set the world a flame, bitter woe to all bourgeoisie with blood will set the world a flame. Good Lord, give us thy blessing that rules. Yeah. So that's the attitude at the time. And that guy's like important enough. I didn't
read it, but he has this whole Wikipedia page. It's like he's not famous as a revolution he's just a famous lyricist or whatever. So you have all these people living in an autocracy who wish they didn't live in an autocracy. The peasant population has exploded somehow. Okay, this part the math doesn't track to me, but a historian who's very good named Paul Averich, wrote that the population went from five million to eighty million in a single
generation of the peasants. That doesn't I don't get it, but I'm sure it went up and maybe even went up that much. MIAs also doing a like I'm not sure about that math.
Yeah, I hm. They had a lot of kids. I know that is a baby, all of who lived. Yeah, I'm not sure. Anyway, people were living in one room wooden huts with dirt floors. They were living off of bread, cabbage, and vodka, and folks were supplementing their farming through cottage industry work like and they had been for years, right. They were like, Oh, we're gonna like make nails and sad and whatever the fuck we can make when we're done farming, because that's how we're going to make enough
money to live. But all of a sudden, there's in these industrial factories and they're just spitting out nails. How's a nail farmer supposed to compete? One ethnicity in particular was particularly fucked. That ethnicity was the Jews. Even within the Pale, there are new limitations on where they can go and what they can do. There are reverse quotas where schools can't have more than like ten percent Jewish students.
Even in the Pale. They're no longer allowed in the sort of small regional governmental assemblies, and there are constant programs. More and more Jewish folks are leaving the more moderate organizations like the boond to join the anarchists. I think less because they think they'll win, and more because they'll go down fighting. It gives them the chance to do
something concrete and immediate. The Booned overall argued against the terrorism approach of robbing the rich and killing right wing politicians who are organizing the oppression, although soon enough some people were like, well, we don't want to leave the Boon to become anarchists, but you know what, can we just have a faction of the Boon that's like down with like Stabin guys. And they were like, I guess, so it seems like there's a lot of guys who need Stabin since there's pograms happening.
Did they have their own combat organization?
I believe so, but I'm not entirely certain they had a group of I don't know whether they called themselves maximalists. There's like all these ways like we were talking about last time, where it's like, oh, the left wing of this in the center of this and whatever. The maximalist position is usually the like we're going to get to the revolution right away through Stabin, you know. But I don't know whether the Boon specifically had their own of that or what they called it. And they're all looking
for a chance when what happens. But in nineteen oh four, Russian and Japan got in an argument about who got to colonize Korea and Manchuria, and Japan was like, well, what if you get Manchuria and we get Korea, And like presented a I mean, it's all evil, it's all colonization, right, It's two empires fighting, but they like presented a colonial compromise, and we've talked actually, if you want to hear a lot of Japanese labor history, listen to MIA's episodes on
it could happen here. And then I've also done a couple also on this show that people can listen to, especially in episodes about women who keep trying to kill emperors, if you want to hear more about that, And it's specifically how it ties into the struggle against the colonization of Korea by Japan. But anyway, Russia's like, no, we
want a buffer zone. We don't want to be near you or whatever, so where we want the following buffer zone that I guess keeps them out of mainland China was I guess part of the big deal about this. And Japan was like, well, what if we sneak attack and destroy your entire eastern fleet? And then Russia was like, oh, well, we're just going to easily win this war because not white.
Do you know the story about how that whole fleet got wiped out? I just turned as a sneak attack it will tell me really funny. Well, so the thing that happens in that battle is this is the first time Japan wipes out a fleet, right, because they do it.
Yeah, this is the first one. Is the first one. And one of the problems that the Russian Navy has is that basically all of their admirals are just like some guy's cousin. They have guy knows Yeah, they have one guy who actually knows what he's doing this, a guy named Barkov. He's the guy who invented the icebreaker,
so he's like, he's legitimately a good admiral. However, Kama Japan does its first volley at unbelievable maximum maximum possible range of cannonball could possibly be fired and hit something. And this is an era of warfare where like your guns are so inaccurate, you're not like pointing a gun at a ship, You're pointing it in like the general
direction of a ship. And one of their cannonballs just like perfectly good, like just perfectly shreds the bridge of the Russian flagship, kills Macrov, kills Markov, and then but does it in a way where I think I can't rever's mark off from Bacroff, one of the two. It
kills the animal and does it in a way. The wrestler ships don't realize that they're that the flagship's like bridge is gone, and so all the rest of the ships and the Russian fleet are waiting for orders and they never get orders because everyone's dead on the flagship, and so Jetpe just run them through.
So it was a lucky shot combined with like the failures of hierarchy.
Yeah, it's like they accidentally like knocked out the toothpick that was supporting the entire Russian aristocracy, and the entire Russian aristocracy somed me had to do something on their own.
They just fell over and died. It's staggery. That's hilarious. Oh my god. Yeah.
So so basically Russia declares war, which makes sense in this context, and they're like, all right, we just got to figure out how to get a bunch of guys over there with guns. And everything I've read is that they just straight up assumed that white people are the best in Japan and they chance because like their eyes
are funny whatever, Like I mean, no racist, it's really staggered. Yeah, racism will get you killed, hopefully indirect and immediate ways, but sometimes just by underestimating Japan.
There's a good way to don't do that. Get cad so terrifying, terrifying militarist society in the late nineteen hundreds yea early twentieth century, probably at least for a couple hundred more years, people aren't going to underestimate Japan. Yeah, ough, bad memories.
Yeah, I'm like, my granddad lived in a submarine as a torpedoist for a very long time and almost died multiple times.
Yeah, because there's my grandma thought she was an orphan growing up because her mom like picked up her older sister and just physically ran, like like just started running and didn't stop running until she was like halfway across the country.
Yeah.
It's like just nightmare stuff.
Yeah.
Really, it's really so thick.
And that's like like no one in the West pays any attention to this, isn't okay, let's not talk about Okay, Well we'll go back to the topic instead of talking about the Pacific theater of World War two one day. I want to talk to you more about that. So Japan bee is the shit out of Russia. Russia had this mighty navy, but it was on the western side of Russia, based out of this little island fort called
Kronstat just west of Saint Petersburg. So they sailed all the way the fuck around the world, like down past Africa and all the way back up just to get wiped off the map by the Japanese navy. And Russia had been really late to the railroad game in general, so they kept trying to like move troops east, but they had I think, like single track like so they couldn't send like a train one way and back or whatever.
I don't know.
I don't have the details about this in front of me. Their railroad system sucked and they could not get an army over there except by ship effectively. So they lost.
They lost like fuck.
And the war against Japan had been this big nationalist, patriotic thing. We all love our two headed eagle flag or the best it's okay that we're all starving or whatever, just this moment because we're better than someone else. And with the loss, people were like, this really isn't Amorican.
You guys lost to Japan. I know, really the Liberals are on one in this.
Oh were they like specifically, like, what the hell's wrong with you lost to Japan?
Yeah, I mean, well they were okay, they were slightly less racist than the czar, which is you know, it's.
Like saying Biden is left of Trump. Well that's sort of true, and most did not. Yeah.
Yeah. It's also like very little consolation if you're in Palestine. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, So people are not excited, and and actually a lot of the stuff kicks off before I'm playing a little fast and loose with a specific time. A lot of the stuff kicks off before the war is like totally lost. I mean, it's always doomed.
It's dumb war.
Well, from Russia's point of view, it was not a well thought thought out military campaign, and general strikes are getting more and more common. And you have this group that I sort of don't talk about as much during this the sort of centrist reformist organizations, like they're honestly kind of center right. I think there's this guy named Georghi Gapon, and he's a moderate Russian Orthodox priest who's a reform minded group that only Russian Orthodox people can join.
That's why I'm calling him center right. I think he was racist I don't have that evidence in front of me. I am conjecturing. They start the meeting with the lords. They're like reform meetings. They start with the lord's prayer and they close out by singing, God save the Cizar.
Oh my God.
That is how not revolutionary this group is. And he Georghi, believed that the czar had a right to rule, and he worked with cops constantly, and he just wanted the good, loyal Russian workers to be treated a bit better by their father, the czar. Do you have this like autocratic idea at the time, where like the czar is like your dad is like the dad of everyone you know, and a lot of people believed it. There are all these revolutionary groups running around, the SRS, the social democrats
and the anarchists. But I think the average person in Russia just wanted a fucking duma like a congress. They wanted maybe a constitutional monarchy, or they wanted everything the same, but just not starving, like a lot of people probably would have been happy with no more control and just more food. So Georgi led us a worker's march. I almost had a strike. It was absolutely not a strike, but this like peaceful workers march to the Winter Palace
to present a petition to the Tzar. The revolutionary stayed home from this. They were like, this is some reform shit.
This is not us.
And Georgy agreed it wasn't a revolution. Like people were like in his group were like ripping up the revolutionary propaganda. They're like, no, we're the good guys. And Georgy sent a copy of his petition ahead of time and was like, Hey, I'm coming on January twenty second, don't worry. Oh, he actually wrote January ninth. But that's because Russia worked on a different calendar before the nineteen seventeen revolutions.
Oh yeah, that's.
Figure dates the October revolution that happened in November. Yeah. So Georgy and either three thousand or fifty thousand of his closest buds. I love history. It's so great. Either three thousand or fifty thousand of his closest buds marched along, singing God Save the Czar and holding up like religious icons and all that shit. So the soldiers shot them, ran them down with horses, cut them with swords. The best averagest guess is that a thousand people died there's
a lot of fucking people to die in March. This gets called bloody Sunday, like so many Sundays in history, and GEORGI didn't want a revolution, but a revolution it would be. People were not happy about bloody Sunday. Georgy himself, he actually made it. Have you heard about how he met his fate?
No? Actually, I mean I knew the part about the Russian Revolution being started by a police informant, but I didn't know. Yeah.
So he makes it out alive, and he leaves the country to hang out with all the revolutionists and next Isle and actually at this point he's a little bit like, oh, maybe we need a revolution.
Yeah, you know, it tends to happen when you get to watch a bunch of soldiers killing a thousand people of the street who were following you.
I believe he refers to it as like the river of blood that stands between us and the czar.
Yeah.
And so he's an exile and he starts hanging out with the SRS and the anarchists. But he wanted to play both sides, and I think it was less than he was like a Tzaris spy among the revolutionaries. I think he genuinely thought, well, I want to play both sides because in the end, I'm going to make peace with everyone. That's my I'm not a Georgy expert. I'm just proud that I looked up how to pronounce his
first name because it looks like Georgie. So he's like, I think it's best if I work with both the hard and revolutionaries and the secret police of the Czar. But he said that where some hard and revolutionaries could hear him, So they hanged him in his room in nineteen oh six. Yeah, they were what'd you think is gonna happen?
Yeah, there's no good at it. Well, I mean, I guess there's a version of the story where he lives long enough to get to nineteen seventeen where they burn all the police archives and then we can figure out who all the informants were. Totally.
Yeah, he had eleven, like twelve years to make it through it.
Yeah, or just not talking to the fucking cops. God, Yeah, it's not that hard, friend of the pod, don't talk to cops. Actually, you know what that's our ad today is, don't talk to the police. It makes everything worse. Here's your ads, Hi, Margaret Kiljoy here, boy. The world sure is a mess right now? Huh. Seems like every day there are more and more reasons to get out into the streets and protest. That's why when I get arrested, there's only one strategy. I trust, I shut the fuck up.
I say, I would like to remain silent, I would like to talk to my lawyer, and then I shut the fuck up. In the United States of America, it's constitutionally protected and recommended by the National Lawyer's Guild. That's shut thch f u c k up. Once again, that's shut thch e f uck up. Because you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can talk yourself into a conviction.
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And we're back.
So after Bloody Sunday, strikes break out even more and half of Russia's industrial workers total are going on strike. In this early time, Poland, however, throws the fuck down. Ninety three point two percent of Polish workers are on so oh why god, yeah, incredible. One hundred strikers are killed in Warsaw. One hundred and thirty are killed in Rigo, which is now not Latvia but was Russia at the time. Universities closed because of the upheaval, so students all join
the revolution. Saint Petersburg and Moscow are soon shut down by workers' strikes, and it just spreads. The revolution spreads, and it it like never quite knows exactly when it's a revolution and when it's a general strike and when it's a you know, and like, and that's kind of one of the kind of interesting and cool things about it.
I actually I thought I was going to like blow right past the reason this game of six part it was going to be a four Parter, and then I was like, oh, the nineteen oh five revolution like needs some attention to understand nineteen seventeen and especially nineteen twenty one, which is what we're building too, you know. So for the most part, this is self organized political groups like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are running to catch up
a pattern we've seen time and time again. And if you read some histories, they're like, and then the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks set up all of the following things, And then if you read the other histories, they're like, and then the other things got set up, and the Bolsheviks showed up and tried to say that they were theirs.
Which is not to say that the Bolsheviks are boring and late to everything, but rather than the organized groups in general, the professional revolutionaries and the vanguards are usually caught with their pants down. During actual revolutions and rebellions, sailors start mutineering all over the place, including at Cronstadt, which is the military the island fortress that's later going
to be the center of what we're talking about. But I read one history and who said, and I believe it the reason this particular revolution didn't work is that the rebellion in the military stays relatively minor and uncoordinated. Overall, the military stays loyal to the czar and is therefore able to One of the best ways to stop a revolution is to kill everyone, but they don't succeeded that yet.
The revolution is still going on. In towns, workers start forming soviets, and these are the first soviets that I found reference to, and people talk about it specifically coming out.
Of this revolution.
That's why I want to talk about this revolution so much is the soviets, and these are councils or assemblies used to coordinate actions. The first one was in the city of Ivanovna. The strike committees at a textile strike turned into an elected body of all the workers in town. Soon enough, soviets formed in sixty different towns. These councils are attended by delegates elected from various factories in workplaces, and these delegates are subject to immediate recall if they
don't do what they've been mandated to do. So this isn't like what we think of as democracy in America, which isn't fundamentally democracy. This is like, oh, well, we can all go to the meeting. So Mia, you're going to go to the meeting to represent cool Zone media, but you're not there to come up with what you
want to do. You're there because we've all talked together about what we want to do, and you're just there to report for us and stuff like that, you know, and if you don't, if you like start wilden out and try and talk about some bullshit that we don't care about, well then we'll send someone else next time. It's a it's a pretty good system.
Yeah, And it's funny because later versions of these I didn't episode I don't know when this is gonna come out, but I did an episode like God some time ago about the revolution in Algeria. And they also also end up setting up a bunch of these workers councils. But one of the reasons they don't work is because they they're not they don't run on delegates, they're just basically
elected politicians. Yeah, and because this season sort of nested like electoral things, they're not designed to represent the like the actual views of the group. They're designed to have one person in charge whose decisions get like kind of rubber stamped by like the mass things, and it's it's it's really interesting that the the original ones of these didn't work like that. They worked more like like how you would expect an anarctive system to work well.
That actually gets to the crux, and we'll talk about it in a little bit about how this model was purposefully changed by Lenin, the most famous of these Soviets. If you read a brief history of nineteen oh five revolution, you're only going to hear about the Saint Petersburg Soviet of workers Deputies built out of the Great October Strike that started with printers and sued Lenda workers shutting down all the railways in Russia. And the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
were both heavily involved in that Soviet. However, it's not as directly, I believe, as later Bolshevik history presents it. There's this revolutionary he's back from exile named Leon Trotsky, and he I mean, he's not a slacker, I will say about him.
Unfortunately for all of us.
I know he's the one who like actually, in like I believe nineteen oh four wrote about how, hey, if we do exactly what the Bolsheviks are planning to do later, it's going to go really badly. I should have written that quote into the scripts, and I didn't. But he has this quote about that, and then he didn't follow his own advice. At this point, he is neither a
Bolshevik nor Menshevik. He had been in the Menshevik faction and then he left the Menshevik faction because he was like, the Bolsheviks are kind of shitty and authoritarian, I don't like Lenin, and the Mensheviks are kind of boring and liberal. So he's like, I'm just a social democrat. I'm a non affiliated, non party affiliated social democrat. So at this point he's like, I haven't got anything against him right now.
You know, he gives speeches that hundreds of thousands of people attend, at least according to like literally they're like two hundred thousand people. Half the workers in Saint Petersburg came to see him talk, and maybe I don't know, that's a lot of people. Yeah, but oh, and he is the vice chair of this Soviet And the way that the nineteen oh five revolution went down completely flabbergasted the Marxists. Is not often I get to use the word flabbergasted, but it is the perfect word for what.
Happened to the Marxists.
They rush to keep up both organizationally and then what's fun because I'm a nerd. They had to rush to keep up theoretically because general strikes and self organized soviets, these are the two core things of the nineteen oh five revolution that become the core of the later revolution. Well thatden like the check on a bunch of evil shit.
But neither of these two things, general strikes and self organized soviets are in the rule book for how a scientific revolution led by the vanguard of the proletariat is supposed to go down. Because did you know that Marxists hate general strikes?
Yeah? I have, I I I oh god, this is a whole thing. Oh I to talk about it. Yeah, you know I've been like this is yeah.
Yeah, all of us are grinning.
That is how deep nerds, all three of us are.
Yeah, we're like all teeth right now.
I'm like, there's only like two other things that I think mea is it more nerdy about one?
Which is sending me things about football that She's like, what the fuck is happening?
You don't want star Wars?
Yes? Fuck? Yeah, So okay, I'm going to go through what I'm my understanding event, and you should correct or add or anything you want. General strikes are for anarchists, according to the Marxists. In eighteen seventy three, Frederick Engels the like the other half of the marx pair and the one that I have nothing nice to say about. Terrible, he wrote in the Bacoonist Anarchist Program. A general strike is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started.
But that's like bad according to him. Yeah, and so the Marxists, instead of changing their dogma to fix the facts the way that science works, they just reworded everything. General strikes are hopelessly utopian. So what had happened were mass strikes? These are different, you see. And I wrote in my script I don't want to get two into the weeds here, but I kind of do because it's fun. So the difference between these two ideas is really funny
to me. Because Angles defined a general strike like roughly as like a single organized strike where one day everyone wakes up and has a general strike, right, And he's like, and that's a terrible plan. No one had ever it's a strong man argument. No anarchist had ever put forth that definition. Of a general strike or had because that is a terrible plan. That's not how general strikes hap.
Yeah, that's like a chartless thing like the British in nineteen thirty. Okay, like no one believes that.
Yeah, And so he claims that this is the anarchist theory and this is not true. That's like one of his favorite things to do is claim things that are our theories and they're not. So these later Marxist theories theorists, they have to develop the mass strike instead in response to these revolutions that happening. And this is good and Marxist compared to the anarchist general strike and the mass strike, it's actually just like more anarchistic. It's a bit more organic.
It's something that builds and ebbs and flows, you know. So they just described how anarchists actually viewed and used the general strike all the time. Yeah, okay. And then the other thing. The Soviets too, were fulfillment of anarchist principles. They are fundamentally what collectivists and communist anarchists are fighting for. But Marxists didn't have anything like them in their books by Marx and Engels, which advocated for the seizure of
state power instead of building bottom up power. And so the way that the Bolsheviks decided to incorporate the Soviets is to treat them like you were saying, what happened in Algeria. Later, I guess to treat them like little parliaments to be attended by political parties and eventually, ideally only the Bolsheviks. The small scale of the Soviets was
not a feature but a bug, according to them. Lennin wrote nineteen oh seven that his party could utilize Soviets for quote, the purpose of developing the social democratic movement, but soon they would be supliferous. So he's saying exactly what he's going to do ten years later, which is use the revolutionary program to centralize power and then get rid of the revolution. However, credit where's due the Mensheviks. Meanwhile, they're like still Marxists, right, but they're like kind of pragmatic.
They're like, I don't know, Soviets seem cool, Like, yeah, let's just do the Soviets. This seems great, like whatever. I kind of like them. And it gets really funny because later the anarchists are going to be like more siding with the Bolsheviks, because the anarchists are idiots and are going to like be like.
Well, they're more radical, so they're therefore better.
You know, by the time I finished writing that part of the script, maybe all of a different attitude, and I've done a lot of work on the rest of it. Anyway, that's my difference between general strike and mass strike. And there are real and serious differences between all these various factions of leftists. But it seems to me that the things that happened in nineteen seventeen and onward, only the
Bolsheviks wanted to do those things. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, and we only know one thing that happened, which is that the Bolsheviks did these bad things right. And one of the reasons that anarchism gets left out of the story of nineteen oh five is because anarchism wasn't party politics. They rarely were like this is now an anarchist Soviet or an anarchist general strike. Soviets in
general strikes were just the anarchist position. But that's not how the people involved in the uprising ideologically would have necessarily called themselves anarchists. Although in Poland and several other places they were. And now I'm gonna talk about what the anarchists in Poland were doing during the revolution, which is where I promised you bombs. A Black Banner was highly So now am I talk about the organizational structure.
The Black Banner was highly organized into federations, and I have read that it was organized into multiple federations, each of about three hundred members. And I have read and that was the first person account the original source. The secondary source claimed that there was three hundred total in Black Banner. I find that unlikely. I tended not because the primary source is inherently better, but I am based on what he describes whatever. Anyway, the federations each represent this or
that branch of an industry. They had huge meetings where the members themselves discuss theory and strategy together. And apparently it's like the whole revolution is just like endless meetings. It's like fighting and meetings and like. But the meetings are kind of like the social thing because you're like, oh, are you going to that like theoretical talk where we're going to talk about like theory that one hundred years from now people are still going to be talking about,
And people like yeah, I'm gonna go to that. I'm going to go to the other thing and whatever.
You know, it's like Twitter that you have to go to.
Yeah, totally. And so they've set up these organizations and whenever someone was mistreated by a boss or a landlord or even a teacher abusing their students, they went to Black Banner, and Black Banner would dish out some justice. Most of the time they met in like their houses or whatever. But the other main gathering place for them was graveyards, which is cool as shit.
That's so cool.
Anarchists have never changed, no single time I have been to graveyard meetings before.
Zero changes ever.
Yeah, And overall, the revolution of nineteen oh five didn't fully succeed. It did not succeed, but it it got slightly more than sometimes is given credit for. The army stayed loyal to the Tzar, and so repression was pretty bad. A bunch of nationalists did a bunch of pograms against Jews, probably with the help of the Tzar.
I've read that.
During this period of uprisings about three thousand Jews were killed. There's one notable exception. The Jews in the anarchist quarter of bial Stock in the heart of Black Banner territory. Right wing thugs, cops nor the military dared to go there, and there were other Jewish combat organizations that fought off programs every now and then. But I just had read that specific Like a guy who was there was like, yeah, you know even that, Yeah, it was like pretty terrible,
the anti Semitism and stuff. There's one place they wouldn't go, Like that's cool. They have like bomb factories and shit, they're just like rocks, and they're just like when they get bored, they throw dynamite into someone's house.
That's bad.
Like I am also certain they occasionally threw dynamite into houses of people who weren't bad, and like later, well, we'll talk about what happens after the revolution. They managed to win some suit serious demands. Not necessarily anarchists, but the revolution managed to win some serious demands, and they
managed to fundamentally change organizing in Russia. It laid the groundwork for the nineteen seventeen Revolution, and much like how the twenty twenty Uprising in the US laid the groundwork for the future revolution here, only this time we'll have learned enough history to not let authoritarian communist sweep in at the last minute instead of a dictatorship. The way that the nineteen oh five revolution ended is kind of
fun I hadn't heard this before. I knew, like, there's one part of it that I think is funny that I hadn't heard before. There's a centrist politician, the guy who spearheaded Russian industrialization. His name is Sergei Witte or Wit or something. I know how to pronounce its first name, Witta. That makes sense, but I know how to pronounce sir gay gay. Someone's gonna tell me I didn't pronounce that right, but maybe anyway.
Look, if you ever do a podcast your listener, you too will learn that daves are hard.
I know, I look up almost all of them, and then there's like one that'll slip through the cracks or like I know how to pronounce that, and then I'm like, oh, I spent so long on the first name.
Listen.
We do the best we can.
Yeah.
So he wrote the October Manifesto, and it laid out a bunch of reforms like have a constitution and create a Duma which is like a congress, and all men can vote, and Zar Nicholas was like, no, you don't understand. And I think he believed this. He was like, I am honor bound to stay the autocratic czar like hundreds of years of my ancestors, Like who am I to turn away from my like divine duty to be the father of Russia. And it's funny because he's like just
a fucking shitty czar who sucks at everything. Yeah, and like he can't do anything right and like I can't remember I Rasputants on the picture now or not or if that's a couple of years later. But he's like not an impressive example of leadership. So he asked Grand Duke Nicholas to lead up a military dictatorship. Grand Duke Nicholas looks at his first cousin, once removed Zar Nicholas the second, and says, I'm gonna give you a choice.
Either you accept the October Manifesto or I'm gonna shoot myself in the head right now.
Shit, I heard this far. That was the part I hadn't heard before. And it works while.
Because this is like like his kind of his uncle, Like this is the guy who's like, yeah, Zar Nicholas is a seconds like grandfather had been another czar whatever, fucking royalty. And as soon as these reforms are promised, the rebellions stopped, those strikes stopped, and then the reforms didn't come, and the revolution actually reached its peak in that December, primarily led by the Bolsheviks and Saint Petersburg as best as I can tell, before they were put
down by the army. Only the leftist groups like the SRS and the Social Democrats and the anarchists and shit wanted to keep going. Everyone else was like, woo, we can vote now if these things go through. The revolutionists doubled down and tried to go for it, and they they failed, and nineteen oh six Russia became a constitutional
monarchy with a multi party system. But it was except Nicholas the second was like, well, except I'm just still going to be an autocrat and you can have like the trappings of democracy, and he like slowly he made
the doom a powerless. There was this brief moment at the end of nineteen oh five where there's free press and a ton of groups put out a ton of material, and a lot of the material is like, hey, everyone, let's organize and put a bunch of holes in the czar until there's no more czar, and so all of these groups build up their ranks because the nineteen oh five revolution was fairly spontaneous and not necessarily party led.
But during what came after, the parties were like, oh, we can organize, and then free speech was like immediately revoked. But do you know what else is free speed?
No, it's not.
People pay a lot of money to have people advertise to you. You know who else has given a lot of money to feed my dog is the sponsors of this podcast, who you can listen to if you want, or you can press forward a couple times on the little thing on your phone, or you can subscribe to Cooler Zone Media and give the money directly to my dog and then you don't have to hear the ads or the ads are great and you're like, man, I just love getting to hear what's going on in the
world and learn about why I should gamble. Here's ads and rebec So for several years you have the rise of political violence and there's like more strikes and rebellions going on, like kind of this echo of nineteen oh five, and here's where we get what we promised you last time. The kind of pissing match between sars and anarchists to see who can like kill the most motherfuckers. The SRS
had their own split. He was the maximalist faction that wanted to bring about an immediate revolution, who turned to revolutionary violence. But things slowly settled down again. In that pattern we see again and again after the mass movement fails, the diehards keep going, like the how in the nineteen sixties to nineteen seventies. You know, partly things settled down because the crackdowns on the leftists were pretty fucking successful.
The leaders and organizers of most of the revolutionary parties died, were imprisoned in Siberia, or went into exile around the country. This includes a bunch of the major figures. Leon Trotsky was sentenced to Siberia but escaped during transport made it to London. I do want to hear that story of that escape. I don't know it, but you randomly know it.
Yeah, I don't. I don't actually know that one. Unfortunately, that's right, we're into the territory of leftist prison breaks. They don't know the story. I don't know. It's just I just don't like Trotsky.
No, I know That's one of the things about this is like, yeah, like spoiler alert for anyone who's like wondering why we're like, but Trotsky seems like the reasonable one you're all talking about. Trotsky is the one who's going to lead the attack on Kronstad and put down and like lead the counter revolution, and he's he's the guy who should have known better, unlike Vladimir Lenin is the next one we're gonna talk about. He actually sat
the nineteen oh five revolution out. He wrote from London about how the Russian Bolsheviks should get involved in all the armed insurrection and mass terror and expropriation, because overall the Bolsheviks back then were like, that's not really our deal, Like that's more Maximus stars and anarchists who do that kind of stuff. And Lenin's like, but why not us? Can't we do it too? And by us doing it, I mean you, I'm going to write a letter and then you can do it, and then I'm going to
stay in London. And I actually don't think Lennon was a coward. That's not an accusation I'm trying to make. But there was some serious lead from the back energy happening.
Yeah.
After the Tsar accepted the Manifesto and was briefly liberalizing, Lenin went home to Saint Petersburg and the Bolsheviks joined the s RS and the anarchists and doing the rob the rich, kill the rulers stuff. Most famous of these Bolshevik bank robbers was the admittedly attractive, later mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
Okay, I want to clear something up here. The picture of young Stalin that everyone points out is not real. Wait what, yeah, it's it's a it's a it's a propaganda picture that Stalin distributed and has hundreds of years.
Well, not necessarily the shirtless one, just that even the one with him like like the picture where like him with like a mustache and yeah, yeah that's fair to look like the from one direction not real. I don't know reference is that. Nobody on this thing but me.
I just don't know what Zaye looks like that. I was a one direction hater.
So the like, if you google young Stalin, it's like a porky. That's not it's not like shirtless whatever, you're just hot.
That's not him.
Yeah, that's fake. Yeah, that's someone else that they as the Stalin thing.
I literally showed you.
A screen by screen of Zaye and the fake Stalin thing.
Oh no, yeah, no, I to listening. Yeah, fake Stalin is even hotter than Zaane would It would be so fun if he was in a boy band. Sorry, the world would have been a better place.
Yeah, someone should have silo him there.
Yeah, I'm like, all right, Saddam wrote romance novels Stalin was in a boy band, like, that's fun.
Yeah, do it for the girlies.
Yeah.
Well, by the time Joseph Stalin, who is apparently not as attractive as I was led to believe, was robbing banks, Lenin was already out of the country again. He moved to Switzerland and then Paris, where he argued that instead of educating the Russian masses, the important thing was that the existing intelligency. I should lead the working class. I see where the anti intellectual anarchists were coming from.
Yeah, I do the anti intellectual. The intellectual was Lenin.
Yeah, exactly if the intellectual meant I get to learn things and you don't, yeh like if everyone gets to learn things, It's cool that sometimes people focus on learning things. Nesser Makno the anarchist who's going to be important later he goes to Siberia for killing a cop and a lot of the maximalists, and I'm a little bit confused about whether Sr's were the only ones who could be called maximalists. I also feel like I've heard anarchists referred
to as maximalists or maybe ultras. At this time, I get there's so many All of the words that are used for the left everywhere else in the West are not the words that people use in Russia anyway. An awful lot of the people doing the terrorism take their own lives rather than be arrested. Death is the sister of liberty, when anarchists put it before ending his life, I believe to the court many of them took their own lives by self immolating, like setting themselves on fire.
One anarchist at the time, a guy who's later are going to become Bolshevik anti anarchist. His name is Victor Serge. He referred to it, Yeah, he referred to it. It was like a collective suicide. And actually the fact that Victor Surge is one of the people writing about this is part of what makes it so hard. All of this stuff is clouded in misinformation, you know, because the Bolsheviks have a specific way that they want to paint the anarchists, and what they want to paint the anarchists
as is bandits. So they want to play up the disorganized nature, the fractious nature, and the like noble sack self sacrificing.
Like fool.
But on the other hand, that happens too, you know. Yeah, those anarchists who were arrested generally gave Baller's speeches or just refused to talk to the court at all, refusing to dignify the proceedings. One young anarchist woman on trial for killing a priest and then trying to kill a cop, told the court proudly and bravely, we shall mount the scaffold, casting a look of defiance at you. Our death like
a hot flame, will ignite many hearts. We are dying as victors forward, then our death is our triumph.
Rules.
Yeah, she took cyanide pills in captivity. That seems to be the attitude of a lot of these people, because you're you're living in a dirt floor house, oppressed like hell, and you're like, oh, we almost had a revolution.
It didn't work.
I'm not going back to starving, like, yeah, I will take as many months out with me and I knew that the end result of living is death, and I'm gonna do it as nobly as I can. Other final words to court are things like you yourself should be sitting on the bench of the accused. Down with you, all, villainous hangmen, Long live anarchy, and that the anarchists would take away quote your privileges and idleness, your luxuries and authority, death and destruction to the whole bourgeois order. Hail the
revolutionary class struggle of the oppressed. Long live anarchism and communism. They also promised that they were the first swallows of a coming spring, and they were right. Actually, it's a shame that spring was hijacked by power hungry tyrants.
Yeah, it rapidly became winter. And yeah, as springs are wont to do.
I know, stupid cycles. Why can't we just have utopia, gonna stop the earth?
Yeah vie. Yeah.
With all the mass arrests happening, the Russian left turned to a group that had been active for decades, the political Red Cross. This was a group, or rather several groups working together that helped political prisoners in Russia. Interestingly, this predates the modern Red Cross by several years, at least under that name. Yeah, no, I this one like I fell into a hole about well, I mean, that's what could probably call this podcast is.
Margaret reports from the hole that Margaret fell in this week.
But where all the groups got the name of the Red Cross was at in eighteen sixty four, the first Geneva Convention picked the Red Cross as an international symbol for don't shoot, contrary to some pictures that have come out of Gaza over the past couple decades. Yeah, it is the symbol of neutrality and armed conflict is what the Red Cross was designed as, not even specifically medical. It's obviously become that, but it was like it's it's
the don't shoot symbol. And I'm sure that other groups use the name, but the first one I'm aware of is the political Red Cross in Russia, which is later
going to become the anarchist Black Cross. To be clear to where I'm going with this, it was formed in eighteen seventy, whereas the International Committee of the Red Cross, the group that we talk about today, picked its name in eighteen seventy six, the Political Red Cross fundraised and offered support to political prisoners that had been doing it since eighteen seventy. They fundraised basically the same way that people do now like again, and then nothing ever changes.
First bail support group, it is, it absolutely is. They did it through benefit shows, oh my god, donations from leftists with middle class jobs and or generational wealth and crime. Nothing has ever changed, nothing has ever changed. To be fair, To be fair, I do want this on the record, we don't actually fund bail funds with crime. That's actually not a thing that happens.
But yeah, fair enough. Yeah.
They first started off by supporting the Nerodniks, the eco hippies, the Back of the Landers, and then the nihilists, the eco hippies plus guns, and then all the various political groups after the nineteen oh five revolution failed is where they went next. But here's the interesting part. The group was meant to be non ideological right. But then the Social Democrats. I believe this means the Bolsheviks, but what I read was the Social Democrats. They started only helping
their own folks. Oh, after nineteen oh five, as the political Red Cross, so the anarchist Red Cross split off and what matters about this? And it mattered then and it matters now, and I think is crucial for understanding the Russian Revolution. The Anarchist Red Cross split off to support not the anarchist prisoners, but all political prisoners, regardless of their ideology, whereas the Bolsheviks used the larger umbrella
name Polytical Red Cross to only support their folks. Anarchists in the Russian Revolutions were fighting for an anarchist society, they almost always did so in a way that encouraged and supported ideological pluralism. So as compared to the Bolsheviks, who would take the big umbrella name but mean the tiny click and they've been doing it since the beginning, since they got the name Bolsheviks. They are the smaller group that takes the larger umbrella group name and then
turns it into the tiny elite banguard. This new Anarchist Red Cross started spreading across the world as Russians went into exile. At some point along the way, I think the late nineteen oughts, but I'm not sure, it changed its name to Anarchist Black Cross to avoid being confused the International Red Cross, and good on it. That is a better name for this particular project is the Anarchist
Black Cross. Is still around today and it is one of the best entry points into anti authoritarian politics for folks who are interested but don't know.
Where to start.
ABC chapters. Anarchist Black Cross chapters put on political prisoner letter writing nights and support all politicized prisoners, not just anarchists, and have since the start. There are even still chapters in Russia. They are officially marked as undesirable organizations by the state, which means that they are prohibited from organizing and disseminating information. The first time that you're caught is
a fine. After that it is a jail sentence. But that's where we're going to leave Russia for this week. They've had a mostly failed revolution, all the radicals are dead or in jail or in exile or desperately supporting
imprisoned comrades. And then famously nothing happened in Europe for the nineteen tens except World War One and a string of revolutions, including the most famous of all revolutions, the Russian Revolution, which is really three revolutions, the sort of liberal one, the more radical one, and then a desperate revolutionary attempt against the Bolshevik counter revolution, which we'll get at into. That wasn't right grammar, but I'm going with it.
We're gonna get at into in parts three, four, five, and six. Fuck yeah, our first six parter. Any thoughts, of course, it's cronstat that no other episode could possibly.
Have been for six partner.
No, it could have been a two parter, Kross I could have been two parter if I had already done the enough of the Russian Revolution.
Yeah, but but just morally it had to be cross sixth part.
I think Kronschat is one of the single pivotal moments of human history.
Yeah, it is, like.
And I was surprised years ago when I used to make my living selling buttons on Etsy. I tried to be clever all the time for a living, and I made one that said I'm still mad about Kronstadt, and like, I thought that was gonna be my like ten people are gonna buy this. Ever, that was one of my most popular buttons.
I've seen them in the wild. Before I knew you, i'd seen those in the wild.
Yeah, it's been one hundred years, We're still bad.
You ruined literally all of human history. Congratulations.
Yeah, and It's funny too, because it's like one of the things that I used to think, oh, Cronshot was when the anarchists tried to stop the Bolsheviks. No, it's when everyone who was a communist tried to stop the Bolsheviks.
Yeah, like it.
Was when socialism tried to stop a terrible thing. Oh, anyway, we'll talk about all those revolutions next week, but first we'll talk about your plugs. Yeah, you can find me a podcasting could happen here. We do it every day except Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, and you two can figure out how to not have this happen to you again. That is one of the I really appreciate the like strategic analysis that you all do with current events as well as like historical events and how they relate to
current events. I actually, I was really I was really impressed. People should check out Gare's recent breakdown of organizing in Atlanta and like updates that are fairly recent. This is a couple of weeks old now at this point, but Garret did a good talk that just is like here's how people try to organize, and here's what works, and here's what didn't, and that's the kind of you know, that's the kind of without like talking trash on each other and being like, oh, y'all are fools, Just be like,
well this didn't work. What can we try instead? And that's what I'm doing with these episodes.
My episode is called Crackdown on Stop Cup City.
Oh thank you if you're looking for it. My main plug is a September twenty fourth, I have a new book coming out. It is actually my debut novel in a ton of books, but they are all either short novellas or long novellas, like a Country a Ghost is like right on the line between novella and novel, and so I'm going with con a long novella. And this is my debut novel. It's called The Sapling Cage and it is a crossover book, and crossover is a marketing term.
It means it's a ya book that like a young adult book that knows that it's mostly adults who are going to read it. And it is about a young person who wants to go be a witch. But they have one major problem, which is that they were born a boy and their best friend has been promised for the witches and they go in their friend's place and learn all about magic and in the meantime have.
To save the world.
Because it's a high fantasy book and I hope you like it is the first book in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, because of course that's the title of my trilogy, Rules Kingdom that Doesn't have a King. It comes out September twenty fourth. I'll be talking about a lot more. It's going to go for pre order probably in June. And it's from Feminist Press. And there's a new Pool Zone media podcast called sixteenth Minute, and
it is by someone who wrote about hot dogs. And you don't need to know anything else about Jamie Besides. That's what's so great is that everyone can have the one thing that people decide they're famous for and then never deviate from that ever. Yeah.
For me, it's ice must be Destroyed. Yes, that's all I got.
Yeah, And I even like when I'm like, oh wow, like Margaret writes fiction too, It's like, look, I know, my podcast is probably the widest reaching thing I've ever done. Writing about history is way newer to me than writing fantasy and science fiction. I've been doing that for a long time. Anyway, Sixteenth minute. I somehow made it about me, but it's not at all. It's about Jamie Loftus and you should check it out in May June May you
may check. Nope, not gonna do it by everyone seeing it next week.
Bye.
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