Part One: Nestor Makhno: Anarchist Warlord and Book Club Aficionado

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ho ho ho, fuck the pope. I mean Mary Chriss
where that was going? I like where that was going.
I didn't hate it. It's the holidays. Yeah, how how's
I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards normally a
podcast about the worst people in all of history, but
not today because today is the Christmas episode. And with

(00:25):
me to help present our Christmas episode is my erstwhile
producer Sophie Lichterman him give him about Sophie. Okay, well
so if he didn't want about you, that's that's kind
of mean. You can bow to me, Robert the inestimable
Jamie Loftus. Why has everybody doing this holiday season? Everyone

(00:49):
feeling youle and tide? I'm feeling I'm feeling good. I've
been I've been consuming a lot of Christmas content. Oh good,
I Santy University is good to go. I feel you know,
I feel as good as I possibly could in this moment.
I won't last, no, no, of course not. I mean

(01:09):
maybe a little. We got a festive story this year,
but um yeah, Christmas is is a is a wonderful season.
I've been doing a whole lot of Christmas content. I
did my yearly viewing of White Christmas, which was the
first movie filmed in color. It pre dates Alaska being
a state. Um, and it has very subtle racism, which
is always a hoot. Uh you know it is the

(01:31):
fact that it was even subtle is is a surprise. Yeah,
I didn't notice it. I watched it every year as
a kid with my family, and I didn't notice until
I was an adult that like, oh, the only black
characters in the entire movie are like working behind the
bar on a train and they don't talk. Um tracks
that tracks? What year did it come out in? Like

(01:51):
fifty two like it is or fifty four? Maybe it's like,
you know, it's back in the day and it's got
old bingo. Uh, it's it's it's I watched, Robert, you
should watch. I would love your takes on the new
Princess Switch movie. What I think you have some like
when you say switch, are we talking like switch or

(02:12):
are we talking like so here's the run So there's
a princess not not the that would be a really
good sequel is the Princess Switch. But but these are
just simply princesses who switch with each other. Um, and
they're all played by princesses who take each other's jobs. Yes,

(02:32):
they it's kind of like the Holiday that Nancy Myers movie.
There's nothing kinky about it, although I think that there's
room in the franchise for that to change. Uh. And
and all of the princesses are played by Vanessa Hudgins.
We're up to three Vanessa h I know, I know
who Vanessa Hudgins is, but she's so she's she's like
Meet the clumpsing a princess movie. Yes, she's literally like

(02:56):
Professor Vanessa Hudgens is actress. She I don't know, doesn't
you do some Disney ship she did? Kind of yeah,
like I couldn't pick her face out. But like I've
seen Vanessa Hudgens and things, it's familiar, Like she's she's
as real a human being to me as I don't know.

(03:18):
Um uh, I've forgotten all of the names of every
other person who's ever been in movies. Um. She's as
real as Bingo at least, if not more. Famously, early
in Quarantine, she went live on Instagram and said she
didn't care. She said that, you know, in a pandemic,
people are going to die and we should just accept

(03:39):
that she's a really hardened person. She sounds like a
real hero, you know, speaking of hardened people who are heroes,
are well the person we're talking about today. Every Christmas season,
every Yule Tide, we we we switch around, you know,
the the premise of this show and go from talking

(04:01):
about the worst people in all of history to talking
about one of the best people in all of history.
And uh, you know this is this is I think
a pretty beloved tradition. We're on year three of it now,
and uh, you know, our first pick was someone who
is I think is as pure human being has ever existed.
Raoul Wallenberg, who really you can't get any better than
Raoul Um. And you know, the next year we did

(04:22):
a very flawed man who nevertheless rose to the occasion
of history and became a glory speaking of moral courage,
Mr John Brown. Um, solid guy, solid hero. And this
year we're doing yet another kind of different sort of hero.
This guy's a messy figure. He had a dark side,
and he's a man who in the end failed in
his ultimate goals. But he's someone I find inspiring. Nevertheless,

(04:44):
and after a messy year of darkness and failure, Um,
I think that he's the right person to talk about today,
because today we're chatting about Nestor mack Now. Okay, as
you know, I have no fucking clue who this person is.
But but he's coming in strong with it. I mean,
this is this is honestly my Nestor mock No. Yeah,

(05:06):
Nestor mock No. He's Ukrainian as fuck. Like he's Ukrainian
as fuck. Okay, So this is kind of a situation
of like, this is Vanessa Hudgens to you, is Nestor
mock No to me? So who is he? Nestor mock
No was an anarchist warlord and one of the most
successful guerrilla commanders in all of history. Um. Without him,
we probably would never have had a Soviet Union, which

(05:29):
is a mixed bag. And he was not trying to
make a Soviet Union. I should note that he actually
really didn't want it to happen. Not everyone can say that. Um,
But he's a he's a fascinating guy. He's a really
influential person. UM. I think a guy who in one
of the worst periods and places in human history was

(05:51):
was as good a person as you could possibly be. UM.
And he's also kind of rat. So we're going to
talk about motherfucking Nestor mock no um and yeah, yeah,
And you know, if we're going to talk about Nestor,
before we get into his life, we we're gonna have
to talk about Ukraine a little bit. Do you know
much about Ukraine, Jamie, I really don't. I gotta tell
you I don't. Yeah, almost no one does. For good reason.

(06:14):
Um See Ukraine. I think in a lot of Americans,
they kind of think of Ukraine is like any other
European kind like Germany or fucking Denmark or or or
Russia or whatever. And that's not really the right way
to think about it. Ukraine is a colonized land, um,
And Ukrainians, like the Irish, um are are victims of colonization. Um.
Kind of like the Sicilians too, right, Like the things

(06:37):
that happened to them, things we're gonna talk about happening
to Ukraine are not entirely dissimilar to things that happened
to the Congolese or to indigenous North Americans. Not to
say that like all of those are the same either,
but there's a lot of similarities. They are are a
victims of colonialism, right, Um. And they weren't considered white
by a lot of people until fairly recently. Hitler, Right,
what play took over Ukraine? To ake over? It was

(07:01):
eight minutes eight minutes before we hit Hitler. Yeah, well
that's a fun game to play with every episode of
the show. Um. You know, Hitler wanted their land because
it's good growing land. But his plan was basically to
white to to genocide them all slowly over time, Um,
to make way for for white people. Right, and like,
he was not the only person who have had a

(07:22):
broadly similar plan with Ukraine. Um. Yeah, so the Russia
we know today actually got its name from Ukraine. Russia
comes from the Kievan russ the capital of Ukraine as Kiev. Um,
you know, pretty obvious the top one things I know
about Ukraine. Yeah, that's the thing people tend to know.

(07:43):
For most of modern history, native Ukrainians have been pretty oppressed.
From seventeen seventy five to seventeen eighty two, Catherine the Second,
who is generally known as an enlightened despot, which maybe
isn't the term we should use. Um, I like, is
that that is for sure? That's for sure an oxymoron.

(08:03):
She was really good at making painters and ship like her.
But she was also like a brutal tyrant. Okay, so
you know there's pros and cons. We all contained multitudes.
She's enlightened because people with fancy coats like her, but
also she rules thousands of what are essentially slaves with
an iron fist. You know, an enlightened despot. She's a

(08:29):
despot with cloud, some serious clouds. She had some serious
cloud and she used that cloud Jamie to give away
five million hectares of Ukrainian land to Russian nobles. Um.
She didn't ask the people who were already occupying it first. Also,
that's that's where the despot comes in. Yeah, that's the
despot part. The enlightened part was giving it away. Um.
She also gave a bunch of land to German colonizers

(08:50):
who had moved into the area with her blessing. Um.
And a lot of these people that she gave all
this land to didn't actually wind up living on the land.
They were basically absentee landlords, kind of like with the
Irish dealt with right, like you give the land to
your to your loyal noble followers and they use it
to make money for themselves. But they don't. They don't
go there. They're not going to leave Moscow or whatever.

(09:10):
Everyone else, like everyone was else, was displaced from the land.
Generally they just became surfs who were the property of
the people who own the land, right, Like that's usually
more how it went. Very Yeah, it's awful now whenever
you have colonization, and that's really what's occurring to Ukraine
in the seventeen hundreds, you have resources that the colonizers
are trying to plunder, and in Ukraine's case, it's the

(09:33):
infamous Black Earth. Ukrainian soil is incredibly fertile. It's the
bread basket of Europe, right, a lot of Europe it's
hard to like grow food on. Ukraine grows a funk
load of food. Um, it's like where your fucking sunflower
oil comes from today. But like a lot of ship
grows in Ukraine. People have been fighting over it for
a long time. As a result in Ukrainian products, yeah, yeah,

(09:53):
they make some good sausages, some good soups. I had
the worst calumari of my life there, but it wasn't
a war zone, so I not gonna blame them too much.
I'm seeing Yeah, I'm seeing soup, I'm seeing T shirts
that say I'm Ukrainian. You couldn't handle me with instructions. Yeah,
that was that was Yeah, that was the most popular.

(10:14):
That's what everyone was fighting over in eighteen three was
the Ukrainian novelty T shirts. Actually all of Europe's novelty
T shirts are grown in Ukrainian soil. So yeah, secret histories.
That's why Hitler and Stalin fought over the land. You know,
that's what really decided World War two. Your Calamari choice
in a war zone, You're like, you know what would be.

(10:36):
I had to try it. I had to try. That's fair,
and as I expected war zone calamari to be. Uh,
one day I'll go back to Constantinifka and see if
I can get better calamari. So um. After Catherine the
Second in eighteen o three, the Czar of Russia assigned
a thousand hectares of Ukrainian land to every retired Russian

(10:59):
officer and five under to every retired in CEO. And
what he was doing with his retired soldiers and what
Katherine did with the Germans was the same idea. Basically,
like you have this land, that's rebellious and filled with
people you don't trust, so you give it to people
you have, people that either you trust or that have
to be loyal to you move there. Like you say, hey, Germans,
I'll give you land here if you'll help me oppress

(11:20):
the local like the native Ukrainians. Right, Like your your
job is going to be to keep this ship on
lock for me. It's the same thing with her retired soldiers. Right.
This happens all over the world. The Romans did it
a shipload um now one of the main groups of
foreigners brought into Ukraine in this period to help the
Oars and Zarina's maintained control where the Mennonites now Ukraine's
Mennonites came over from Germany in the late seventeen hundreds

(11:42):
when Katherine the Great gave again gave him a shipload
of land that she'd stolen from indigenous Cossack and Nogai
tribes people. Now each family each Mennonite family was given
a hundred and seventy five hectares and granted immunity to
taxes for thirty years. This generous deal made sense because
Mennonites were famously hard workers, and the Empress saw this
as an investment. As a result, many Mennonites in Ukraine

(12:03):
were wealthy. They owned surfs, and when serfdom was abolished,
they basically owned people who were pretty much sharecroppers. So
serfdom is like you are you are not. It's not
as bad as being like a chattel slave and like
the American South, but it's it's on that same scale.
You are part of the land. So if a nobleman
owns land that surfs her on, he owns you and

(12:25):
you're bound to that land. Okay, this is not very
bleak chart describing. It's the way all of Europe works
in the medieval period, right, and it's the way Ukraine
continues to work in Russia continues to work into the
eighteen sixties. So everywhere else in Europe is like, oh,
this is a terrible way to have a society, and

(12:46):
Russia's like, why change It could be so much worse. Yeah,
there's steam engines, when Russia is like, yeah, we should
probably not have surfs. That might be bad. Russia is
so stressful, are incredibly stressful. Yeah, it's bleak. Now, given

(13:06):
what most Americans know about Mennonites, you might assume that
being a peasant for a Mennonite overlord would be like
your best case scenario of being like a surfer a peasant,
you know, if you have to be scale Okay, yeah, yeah,
because Mennonites are pacifists, right, they don't use violence. Uh,
they're supposed to be like our Mennonites are pretty chill folks.
Mennonites have a big, big factor and like the American

(13:29):
anti war movements for a long time, Um, they're they're
supposed to be pretty chill. That has not always been
the case and was not the case in Ukraine. Ukrainian
Mennonites were not pacifist in any way that you would
recognize as pacifist. And I found a heavily researched, incitation,
full write up of all of this on a site
called lipcom dot org, which is a libertarian communalists sort

(13:50):
of information warehouse or whatever. And it's is stressful sounding.
Oh it's good to be believe, good ship, uh, And
it notes quote those who labored on these estates included
Russo Ukrainian peasants and landless Mennonites, and their treatment of
laborers and surfs. The Mennonite landlords were indistinguishable from the
Russo Ukrainian peers. A representative incident, a Mennonite landowner called

(14:13):
a Russo Ukrainian laborer stealing grain, so he pushed the
laborer into the grain bin and nailed down the lid.
He waited two days and then called the mayor to
have the captive flogged. Many Mennonite landlords practice collective punishment.
When theft was suspected, all the potential suspects were flogged,
so as to teach a lesson to both the guilty
and the innocent. The principle of pacifism had therefore been

(14:33):
abandoned by wealthy Mennonites long before the Russian Revolution, solely
ship it sucks to be in Ukraine for a long time,
and it's not easy now, you know what with the invasion.
That's I mean, even for a landlord that is, and
I'm pointing out to the Mennonites whore doing this because

(14:54):
of some stuff that comes later. But that's everyone who
has land in Ukraine, right, That's that's the Mennonites, that's
the Germans, that's that's Jewish people. That's which like some
of them, like there's about one percent to landlords but
like everyone who is rich in Ukraine is that kind
of terrible to the people who are bound to the land.
That is like, yeah, Russians bad landlord experiences. But yeah,

(15:17):
that's that's new. These are like like hyper landlords, right,
because these are landlords that also own you. Yeah. Yeah,
so again, most of the Ukrainian peasantry were surfs up
until serfdom was abolished in eighteen sixty one. Oh and
I should also note that, like we're like there were
wealthy Mennonite in Jewish and Russian and German landlords, there

(15:40):
were poor people of all who were also basically owned
by their landlords. To write, this is not a religion
or an ethnicity thing, This is a the way rich
people are in Ukraine thing, you know. Yeah, so uh yeah,
basically everyone who isn't rich is a surf. Up until
like eighteen sixty one now for abolition against serfs were

(16:01):
basically enslaved um pretty close to that at least. And
when the serfs were freed, they were given tiny parcels
of their native land three hectares per family on average,
and they generally had to buy that land back from
the person who would owned them previously. The best lands
in Ukraine were given to the czar. These were called
crown lands. Uh other good lands were given to his nobles,

(16:22):
the clergy, and favored foreigners like the Mennonites and the Germans.
For one example of kind of how the breakdown of
landownership in Ukraine went in eight one, in the province
of Katerinoslav, German planters, who were four percent of the
population controlled nine point four six percent of the land,
Greeks who were two percent of the population controlled nearly
seven percent of the land. And Ukrainian peasants, who made

(16:44):
up seventy percent of the population, controlled only thirty seven
and a half percent of the land. So, okay, that's
honestly a higher number than I expected. But that's not
because against serfdom was abolished and they were given, you know,
a chunk of land. But in many cases they were
still it was the worst land, and they were still
paying it off to the people who had owned their parents,
you know. I mean, when you put it that way,

(17:07):
it still sounds like a pretty bad deal. It's a
raw deal. Again, it's a raw deal. There are not
a lot of points in modern history where you would
have wanted to live in Ukraine, So that's pretty fucking awful.
They're man, Yeah, I mean that's Ukraine is a beautiful country.
I've I've enjoyed the people. They've just like been continuously
fucked over by everyone around them. They're like, if you

(17:28):
look at the position of Ukraine and Europe, they're in
the worst case because they have the best land and
they're in between Germany and Russia in Poland like in
the crossfires of like bleak places that could colonize your land.
Well explains the whole. I'm Ukrainian. You couldn't handle me
with instructions novelty T shirt you know there are they've

(17:51):
had to be. Yeah, it makes sense for survival based purposes. Now.
The other native peoples of Ukraine are called Cossacks um,
and the Cossacks are complicated as hell. They're a nomadic
horse writing warrior people who traditionally live by a mix
of shepherding, banditry and selling their services as mercenaries. They're
famous warriors. They're like Mongols. Right, it's like pretty dramatic

(18:14):
sounding on it. Yeah, they're fucking they are dramatic. Yeah,
it's like if they're like a fashion element to this
because it just sounds like they're a lot. Yeah, there's some.
There are some amazing pictures. I will google. Uh, there's
a great painting of cossacks Um that is is fucking
cool as hell, Jamie. It's it's one of the radst
pictures in all of the history of pictures. And I'll

(18:35):
send it along to you in a second. So the Cossack,
the term Cossack was applied by Europeans as like kind
of a a broad term to encompass all the different
groups of these people. Even though every Cossack band and
tribe was different, and you'll hear them describe differently. A
lot of people will describe them as different tribes, different bands.
It's not entirely based on like family ties or ethnicity,

(18:56):
because a lot in a lot of cases, like Cossack
bands will adopt anyone who wants to come in as
a Cossack, which also like actually some Native American tribes
did at certain periods too, So it's not I don't know,
it's I'm not an expert on the on the cossacks Um,
but they did a lot of like different Cossack bands
did a lot of different stuffs. There were Cossack groups
who sold their services to the Tsar, and we're basically

(19:19):
the czar's shock troopers. Like when there was a rebellion,
the Czar would send in his Cossacks to fucking murder everybody. Um.
And when Napoleon invaded Russia, his fleeing army like he
got he got beaten, and he wound up fleeing from Moscow. Um,
his army was harried and massacred by Cossacks. You know,
they're fast, and they're terrifying. They're like the Mongols, and
they come from a similar area, like you have all

(19:40):
these different peoples who live on horseback in the Asian steps,
and they're really good at fighting. The Cossacks are one
of those groups. Um. Back in the sixteen hundreds, when
Ukraine was owned by Poland and Poland was the one
fucking around in Ukraine, there was a mass uprising of
Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against the Poles that succeeded in
kicking Poland out of Ukraine and also bringing Poland into

(20:02):
Russian control because there weren't enough Cossacks left alive after
beating off Poland to run the country. Basically, well, sure, yeah,
there was also a genocide that occurred during this that
the Cossacks committed against Jewish people called the Kelnitsky Massacre
that might have been the largest massacre of Jewish people
prior to the Holocaust. Some some some like anyway, complicated

(20:23):
history here. I sent you a picture, so if you're
playing the Bastards bingo, that was about twenty one and
a half minutes till genocide. Yeah, yeah, one of these
things looks like Santa and the picture you sent, Wow,
the Cossacks and this famous painting. There's this famous painting

(20:43):
of a bunch of Cossacks looking like rad dudes, smoking
and drinking and covered in weapons and like, yeah, writing
a letter back from the con Yeah, there's a Santa
looking motherfucker. It's a very famous painting. He's got the
motion and it's a it's a painting of a group
of Cossacks called the zappar Rocks. And the Zapparack Cossacks

(21:04):
are the group who lead that rebellion against Poland. Um.
They're the Cossack community who kind of like was native
to eastern Ukraine. Uh. And they were the same Cossack
community who would one day produce a whoa baby named
Nestor mock No. Um, so that's this is, this is,
that's everything has been sort of laying the groundwork for

(21:24):
where this guy comes from. But like the people in
that painting are like Nestor's ancestors. Um literally one of
them looks like Santa. Them heavily armed Santa. Are you
implying that Santa at present is not heavily armed? He's
not heavily armed enough to come into my house? Wow? Okay,

(21:48):
shoot to kill on Christmas? So um so yeah, I'm
gonna quote now from a a fairy fun book about
mack No called anar Key's Cossack that talks a little
bit about what the Cossacks were like and kind of
what the what the political tradition was in the area
where Maknu grew up before the czar took over. Okay,

(22:10):
they clung to their republican traditions what was known as
Cossack freedoms, namely the practice of settling all their problems
in general assembly, the crew end of appointing their own ottoman,
an elected and revocable military leader. The Zapparags were freemen
or men whose ambition was to be such. They welcomed
many outsiders to their ranks. Russians fleeing their despotic rulers

(22:30):
are serfdom retainers, peasants, townsfolk, vagabonds of various origins, fleeing
taxation constraint in all manner of servitude, and lured by
the zapparags manner and freeway of life their antica, they
could stay permanently or just sample Cossack life for a spell.
And principle, every free Ukrainian was a Cossack while retaining
his land and could be mobilized at a moment's notice.

(22:51):
So the Cossacks have like a long kind of democratic tradition,
like a lot of like a lot of tribes, like
a lot of hunter gatherers. They don't like, you know,
if your reputation is we're all really good at killing.
It's kind of hard to have a very like strict
leader in charge of you because everyone's got weapons and
is good at murdering each other. So yeah, that's the
car And in Ukrainian peasants had some democratic traditions to

(23:14):
that go back a pretty long way that we're kind
of like they weren't powerful enough for those are to
really care about cracking down on them, but there are
some self government traditions that exist in this region even
underneath the Czar's oppression. So the Zapparas had been mostly
like wiped out by the Russian government back in the
seventeen hundreds. A lot of them have been turned in
the surfs, their homes and lands despoiled, but they were

(23:35):
kind of still around and most more or less baked
into the scenery by October, when a little baby boy
named Nestor Martin was born. The Zaparas is such a
good name for hard core name games in the good
it sounds like a college band as a compliment. That's
one of the reasons I love kind of Eastern European
history because everything is just rad as fuck. It all

(23:58):
sounds very like punk ross. Yeah, it's it's an incredibly
punk rock region of the globe. So Nestor was the
fifth son of his parents, who had been serfs to
a guy named Shebelski back in the days before getting
their freedom. Now, the land that they'd been given was
too small to feed them, and so Nestor's dad spent
the rest of his life working for the guy who
used to own him, which sucks. I wouldn't. I don't

(24:22):
imagine five. I'm trying to pursue. Yeah, you don't want that. Uh.
Nestor was a very good student, with a particular gift
for arithmetic and reading, but he only got about two
truncated school years worth of education before his dad died
and his family was poor enough that had aged ten,
he had to start working full time. Um wait, how

(24:42):
old does he what? He's a ten full time? He's
a ten year old man. He's wow. I love that.
Well double digits, you know, grow the funk up? Nestor
was his job. You know what else is a ten
year old man? Jamie? But no where is this going
the products and services support this podcast. This is so inaccurate,
Hard Tin little entrepreneurs. It's not Shark Tank, Robert. It

(25:09):
could be if we'd been a child on Shark Tank.
That's so fucked up. Cable television there, I know what
we've been talking about is fucked up. There was a
little kid on once and his his pitch was terrible,
so Mark Cuban put a cigar out on him. Wow,
that's good. It was good TV. That has told me

(25:32):
that sounds very true. It could be true. I mean,
I feel like it's an adult putting a cigarette out
on you that'll teach you to never do things. An
adult putting a cigar out on you that'll keep you
bound to the land. That's a career change. That is
a career change. All right, here's products that probably won't

(25:54):
put a cigar out on you. We're back. So I
have almost finished my first full cup of Death Wish coffee,
which is reportedly the strongest coffee in the world. And
I guess I have a severe caffeine addiction. Because you
have a caffeine addiction. I just like Rush ordered sugar

(26:18):
free pear Red Bull to my house. Yeah, I mean
it's pretty good coffee. Actually, it's nice. I got. I
got a pair of Red Bull is the one that
you also like Robberies. The sugar free pair Red Bull
is very tasty. I got a real Ship Yourself brand
of iced coffee today. I got like it's got too
much dairy in it. It's it's I think I've talked

(26:40):
about it with you before. It's the TikTok Stars coffee order.
I wish there was a brand with the courage to
just be called ship Yourself iced coffee. It's just like
this coffee will make you ship yourself. You need to
get your day started, like we will fucking ruin your pants.
You will never sleep again. But you better wear a

(27:02):
pair of pants. You're not to attach that you're telling me, Jamie. Yeah,
I got the Charlie at Duncan. Jonna's Charlie. But know
who Charlie is? Just I think that's honestly, I was
so worried. And he doesn't don't know, don't learn what
You're not talking about any Charlie. Here, we're talking about
Nestor Macnow. So, Nestor was a good student as a

(27:25):
little boy. He had a gift for arithmetic and m Yeah,
he only got about two years of school before at
age ten. He has to help provide for his family.
He worked full time from ten onwards, generally for other
wealthy property owners, like the man who had once owned
his parents. Nestor later wrote that this experience awoken him
a sort of rage, resentment, and even hatred for the
wealthy property owner. I think we can all identify with that.

(27:48):
I mean, I think that that's very relatable in for us,
and and little relatable guy. He's a cool I feel
like Okay, I am picturing ten year old nest with
the shell hair that I'm seeing in all of the
Google images of his cossacks. Yeah, he had a full
beard by age seven. Absolutely, that's when you become a
little man. That's what happened. Yeah, So, more than anything,

(28:12):
Nestor hated the wealthy children of these rich people. He
particularly hated when these that is very relatable. He called
them young idolers, and he, more than anything, he hated
when they would walk near him. Quote and this is
from Nestor's biography, all fresh and neat, with full bellies
and the cleanest clothes, reeking of perfume, while he filthy
and in rags, barefooted and stinking of dung, scattered betting

(28:34):
for the calves. See, from an early age, Nestor like
he was working in like the He was like fucking
cleaning up after the cow. So he smelled like ship
all the time. And he was extremely aware from an
early age that his circumstances were unjust and that the
situation was crooked um. He also felt it was more
or less hopeless. He told himself that, yeah, yeah, like
you fucking get to smell nice because I have to

(28:56):
clean up ship for your family, Like, I fucking hate
you people. I love the child with deep seated class
issues from like the jump that is like a very
powerful energy from to take into fucking jump. Yeah, he
goes from zero to fucking step. Yeah, it's like the
I'm like, damn, I it reminds me of all the Sophie.

(29:18):
Do you remember those weird uh, those weird little juice
bar perfumes that like rich girls in junior high would have.
They had pictures of gummy bears on them. They all
went to fucking soccer camp. It was disgusting. I'm with
I'm with Nestor. Meanwhile, I feel like a goddamn hot dog. Yeah.
I mean absolutely did not own because I was not

(29:38):
a hip or rich. But yes, you know you brought
this up in our Mark Zuckerberg episode, Jamie that time
you were drunk and huck a bottle at a rich
Stanford kid who was a Harvard kid who was who
was was rowing, he was rowing. Yeah, nest has strong
hucking a beer bottle at a rowing Ivy League college energy.

(30:01):
It's sick. It's sick. I like him so far. I
hope he doesn't. I hope he doesn't up. He doesn't,
I mean, he doesn't succeed in his ultimate goals, but
they're pretty ambitious. Yeah. Um, so yeah. He he felt
that like as fucked up as the situation where it
was pretty much an healthless Uh, this is how things are.
And he, you know, he had it was his lot

(30:22):
in life to work for his landowning masters, and they
would pay him a pittance to wreak of animal ship
so that they didn't have to wreak of animal ship.
So Nestor went on with life, showing enough talent that
as he grew up, he was promoted from taking care
of cows to taking care of horses, which is the
podcasting of the Taking Care of Animals game. Yeah yeah.
Now it was in this job that he would witness

(30:44):
one of the defining experiences of his young life. He
walked into the stable one day to see the landlord's
sons beating several of the young peasant boys who worked
in the stable for some minor funk up. He was
enraged by this, but the dark recesses of his mind,
as he wrote it, made him accept it, and like
a real slave, he strove, just like the others about him,
to avert his eyes and pretend he saw and heard

(31:06):
not a thing. So he's saying, like, mentally, in this period,
he was so enslaved that like he couldn't even resist this,
Like he knew what was fucked up, but there was
nothing to do. He'd grown up hearing stories about his
parents being beaten. His mom had been a surf and
she there's this thing called the corvet, which is this
old tradition under serfdom where you have to do free
forced labor in lieu of taxes for your master. And

(31:27):
she refused to do it at one point after being freed,
when she didn't have to um, and she'd been whipped
fifteen times for doing so. So he'd grown up hearing
stories like this that like if you don't do what
they want, they'll they just beat you, and that's the
way life is. But he also had this he'd also
he was came from Cossack ancestry, so his mom had
also told him stories of the battles of his free

(31:47):
ancestors who had like fought for their liberty, you know,
with fucking swords. So he grows up with both of
these things in his in his mind, you know. And
I'm assuming his mom admitted the genocide. Um, I mean
moms tend to do that. That's a classic mom move. Yeah. Um. So,
you know, Nestor grows up like kind of consumed with

(32:09):
this mixture of rage at what his mom had endured
and the sense that he had ancestors who wouldn't have
taken this ship, which is kind of warring in him
when he's twelve, fourteen years old, and eventually the same
situation came round again where he sees kids being beaten
by the children of his his master, and gonna quote
from Anarchy's Cossack here. One summer's day in nineteen o two,

(32:30):
the young Nestor, thirteen years old, was present at a
run of the mill scene. The landlord's sons, his manager,
and his assistant set about insulting and then raining blows
on the second stable boy in the presence of all
the other stable hands half dead from fear at the
wrath of their masters. That's Nestor's words. Nestor could take
no more, and he ran off to alert the head
stable boy, bot coo Ivan, who was busy in a

(32:52):
cow shed trimming the horse's tails, learning of what was afoot.
Botko Ivan, an elemental force burst like a man possessed
into the room where the chastisement was underway, pitched into
the young nobles and their acolytes, and sent them rolling
in the dirt with swathing punches and kicks. The attackers attacked,
fled and disarray, some through the window, some through the
nearest doorway. This was the signal for revolt. All of

(33:15):
the day laborers and stable boys were outraged and went
off in a body to demand an explanation. The old
landlord took fright and in conciliatory tone, besought them to
forgive the idiocy of his young heirs to remain in
his service, and even undertook to see that nothing of
the sort would ever happen again. Botko Ivan related the
episode to young Nestor, treating him to the first words
of rebellion he had ever heard in his life. And

(33:36):
this is Botko Ivan. Bodka's like boss. Basically, Hi, everybody,
Robert Evans here, and I need to admit something I
lied to Jamie just then. Botko does not mean boss,
it means daddy. And if you know anything about Jamie
loft As you understand why I had to lie to
her about what that word meant, because we would not

(33:56):
have gotten through the episode otherwise, no one hears countenance
the disgrace of being beaten. And as for you, little Nestor,
if one of your masters should ever strike, you, pick
up the first pitchfork you lay hands on and let
him have it. This advice, once poetic and brutal, left
a terrible mark upon Nestor's young soul and awakened him
to his dignity. Henceforth, he would keep a fork or

(34:17):
some other tool within reach, meaning to put it to
good use. So after this he keeps like a fork
on him at all times in case he's got to
stab a rich kid, which rules on the way that
this is written is first of all, very like cinematic
yepic the way it's written, because it's all they're all
he's saying is and then the guy beat the ship

(34:38):
out of a bunch of rich kids and it was awesome,
And carry a fork with me, like because I'm weird.
But that is so it sounds like a like a
superhero origin story. He when you hear this guy's life,
there's a bit of that, Like he he has a
he's a fucking and he's you know, there's a lot
of people who hate this guy. We'll talk a little

(34:59):
bit about some of allegations against him because he was
he wound up being anti Soviet. You know, he fought
against the Reds and the whites during the Soviet the
Russian Civil War, um. So there's a lot of to
like anybody on this podcast, and then I'll tell you
about this, but that happened later. We don't know if

(35:19):
it actually happened, because there's a lot of like he
fought against when he realized what the Soviet Union was
going to be. He fought against the Bolsheviks as well
as the fascists and the monarchists, um. Because he was
like an advocate of liberty, and like, yeah, there are
a bunch of stories that he already I know, we
said he already had a beard by the time that
this happened. But I imagine actually at the end of

(35:41):
this story, a beard explodes out of his face because
he's had just this revelatory moment when when Botko Ivan
tells him to just stab rich people, he like a
beard explodes out of his beard. That was his second beard. Yeah, yeah,
you're a man in Ukraine. When you get your second beard. Yeah, yeah,

(36:02):
first beard, that's kids ship. Yeah, have a beard, because
he hasn't lost his baby beard yet. At age fourteen,
Nestor quit his stable job and got a gig as
an apprentice at a local foundry. He made wheels for
harvesting machines, and this improvement in his own quality of
life corresponded to a similar improvement among the rest of

(36:23):
his family. His three older brothers got married and left
the home to set up households of their own, which
meant things were a bit less tight for Nestor and
his mother and his younger brother. Eventually, Nestor moved on
from foundry work to being the sales assistant for a
wine merchant. But he found this job disgusting. He couldn't
stand doing it, and he quit after just a couple
of months. This is too busy, too bougie. And so

(36:44):
the book Anarchy's Cossack, which is definitely is a very
well sourced biography. You keep saying Anarchy's Cossack, but I'm
hearing Gravity's Rainbow each and every time. It's a way
better book than fucking Thomas Pension. This is an anti
pension podcast. Asked, I appreciate that yeah. Um, and it's
available for free online too. You can buy a copy

(37:05):
from a k Press. But there's also the whole thing
is hosted on lipcom dot org. But um, yeah, he's
there's a lot of debate because again, this guy was
extremely controversial and a lot of people will claim that
he was an outrageous drunk, that he flew into violent
rages and like murdered people while drunk. And it's possible,
like obviously the Ukrainian peasants are a hard drinking people.

(37:27):
Soldiers who spend multiple years straight without break fighting tend
to drink heavily. Totally possible he got up to some
ship while drinking. Also, a lot of these stories tend
to involve him like cut tearing thirteen people apart with
a knife or something like crazy ship that like just
didn't happen, Like this weapon was a fork. Say fake news,
fake news. Yeah, there's there's it's it's hard to say.

(37:50):
There's also claims that he was not a drinker at all,
and Anarchy's Cossack takes the aim that he was like
not at all a drinker um and that he more
or less avoided alcohol. I don't think that's entirely true either,
be like that doesn't sound likely given the environment, right.
We we do have we do have an account from
a woman who knew him in his last years in Paris,

(38:12):
who knew him for like three years and knew him
fairly well and saw him drink occasionally, but he would
never drink more than about a glass of wine, and
he would kind of be fucked up after a glass
of wine and not able to take more. And she
was like, he was very temperate, she and she noted
she assumed that he like drank as much as normal
peasants strength, but she saw no evidence that he was

(38:32):
like a hardcore alcoholic or that he got violent when
he was he was intoxicated. He was definitely prone to depression.
But I don't know. Again, there there's there, There is
so much. There's so many hit pieces out about this
guy um that were written at the time. It's kind
of hard to tell exactly what happened. Was a hater
and who's reporting the facts? Yeah yeah, now yeah, But

(38:54):
there's one of the claims is that like he developed
a distaste for wine in particular and alcohol in general,
where King for this mine wide margin, he wasn't much
of a drinker. I don't really know what the case was. Uh,
I never met the guy because he died. N Yeah.
So for the next few years after quitting the wine business,
mak No mostly help his mom keep up their small property,

(39:15):
take care of their one horse, and did odd jobs
around town to make ends meet. He spent time working
as a house painter and a decorator until he'd saved
up enough money to buy a cart for his brother's
small farm. That used to drink. He did like he
did like interior design for Yeah, he was a home
home decorator for a while. I would love to see
his portfolio. I'm very curious as well. What is that?

(39:39):
What is what kind of spaces is nestor curry? He's
like he's the dining table, no forks, I am the
only one that can happen. He's strapped with forks, like
a fucking terrorist with a bomb vests. It's just all property, brothers,
but with a lot of forks. Yeah, he was. He was.

(39:59):
He was a guy who had a wide range of
gigs as a young man. Um things were for his family,
broadly speaking, until nineteen o four, when Russia went to
war with Japan for no reason. Really, this is the
Russo Japanese War, one of the dumbest wars that ever happened,
and Russia gets it's ass handed to its Like this

(40:21):
war is why Japan becomes a major thing on the
international stage, because like white people up to nineteen o five,
which is when the fighting starts, are all like nobody
can fun with white people, like where the fucking And
then the Japanese just destroy an entire Russian fleet and
everyone's like whoa, and that's always one more time. Yeah,

(40:42):
that's that's that's what Europe says after the Russo Japanese War.
I mean your great alarm sound. So obviously when Russia
goes to war with Japan, they can they can script
a bunch of people. And Nestor's older brother, Savo was
sent to the front and he gets horribly injured in
this war. He's they called he's what's called by people
at the time, an invalid. The rest of his life

(41:03):
he's like badly wounded in this and and not not fully. Yeah,
he never comes back in a lot of ways. Now.
That war was followed by a failed revolution in nineteen
o five and nineteen o six of the socialist variety.
So Russia enters into a dumb war, gets their ass kicked,
and there's a revolt. Uh, like you do. Now, I
want to pause here to talk a little bit about
Czar Nicholas the Second. You know, he's the czar who

(41:26):
after in nineteen seventeen, gets overthrown, his whole family gets
killed by the Bolsheviks, and because he and his young
children get massacred in captivity, I think he's become a
figure a lot of people find sympathetic. You know, the
Romanovs there, like, there's a lot of they were brutal dictators,
right like, Like even Nicholas who there if you read
like his letters to his wife and stuff, he's a guy.

(41:48):
There are definitely sympathetic things about him. He's a dude
who really legitimately loved his wife with rare among royalty.
He had a sick, terminally ill child, you know, there's
sick of the Yeah, they were horrible there. They were monsters, monsters,
And I am no apologist for the Bolsheviks, but I
will say if there's ever a justified case to murder

(42:09):
an entire family, it's when they owned you. They fucking
like they I don't know i've i've I've cracked up
in my recipe and biography again recently, like they were
fucking monsters. And also fresh, I hate that argument that
whenever people make they're like, well, yeah, sure, he was
a brutal, horrible ruler who hated his people, but he

(42:32):
was kind of a wife guy. And you're like, I
don't care if he's a wife guy. I don't care
if he's a wife guy. So he was a guy who,
like he would he was very constantly expressed, you know,
loving his people, um and wanting to like be known
by them and when they like talk to them and stuff.
But whenever they would express opinions that he didn't hold

(42:53):
or that he didn't think they should hold, then the
dictator came out again, right, Like he loved the idea
of being loved by his people, but he didn't actually
like he also thought that he he was like he
thought he was divinely appointed to rule them. You know,
he can't be a good guy and think that. Um. So,
to give a little bit of light context to how
brutal Nicholas himself was, We've talked a lot about the

(43:14):
brutality of the Russian regime, but let's talk specifically about
Nicholas here for a second. On January nineteen o five,
a massive crowd of thousands of workingmen gathered outside the
Tsar's main palace in St. Petersburg to protest all the
bullshit um and the Czar orders a cracked down on them.
And a correspondent from the London Times was there, and
here's what he wrote. The first trouble began at eleven

(43:35):
o'clock when the military tried to turn back some thousands
of strikers at one of the bridges. The same thing
happened almost simultaneously at the other bridges, where the constant
flow of workmen pressing forward refused to be denied access
to the common rendezvous in the palace square. The Cossacks
at first used their nounce wooden clubs, and then the
flat of their sabers, and finally they fired. The passions
of the mob broke loose like a bursting damn. The people,

(43:56):
seeing the dead and dying, carried away in all directions.
The snow on the streets and evements soaked with blood
cried allowed for vengeance. Meanwhile, the situation in the palace
was becoming momentarily worse, the troops were reported to be
unable to control the vast massage, which were constantly surging forward.
Reinforcements were sent and at the at two o'clock the
order was given to fire. The order was given by
the Tsar. Men, women and children fell at each volley

(44:17):
and were carried away an ambulance as sledges and carts.
By the time was over, as many as five hundred
people had been shot dead on Nicholas's orders. Like that's
that was like one thing that he did, um, And
you know, full uprising in nineteen o five is put
down brutally, uh number one, Like hundreds of different Czarists
institute programs against Jewish people and leftists who they see

(44:38):
is the same. In order to you know, defend their monarch.
Nicholas sends troops into the Baltic provinces in Georgia and
orders in the massacre everyone who resists. By the time
it's over, he kills about thirteen thousand people putting down
this rebellion. Well here's my question, um, then why is
he made out to be such a nice guy in
the animated Anastasia my favorite movie, because he seemed really
nice and he gives her a little kiss on the forehead.

(44:59):
So I just some questions about that because I'm pretty
sure that cartoon is a documentary. Yeah, it's it's very
accurate to how he was with his kids. He just
had other people's kids shot by mercenaries. They should have
shown that in the movie. Maybe it could have been fun.
It might have been nice. You know. There's also only
always completely truthful and historically accurate on everything that they do.
Ever documentary on fun it might have been Netflix recently

(45:25):
about The romanofs that's like a live action one, and
it does leave out some of the brutality. Love to
cut the romanofs slack. I want to talk about the
respute and daughters who got you know, sent to Siberia
when they were teenagers for for just for just being
related to rescue and you know, and then what about

(45:46):
all the kids to got shot. What about what about
ra Rasputin himself, lover of the Russian Queen. Yeah, the
king of Disco. He was the King of Disco. So
when they were like, we found his dick, and then
they were like, wait a second, this is a pick
some other giant dick. Uh, there is a giant penis
out there that's been preserved that is reputed to be resputants,

(46:08):
but it's probably not. But there is a there is
a big mummified wagg out there. I don't know, but
I would like you to make that into an ad
brag transition. Yeah, you know who else mummifies penises? Tell
me prods and services that support this podcast. Uh So,

(46:33):
the revolution didn't really touch Mackno's hometown of Ghulai Poli,
which is where he grows up, but news of the
brave attempts of the revolutionaries to overthrow this oar inspire
mac No. So he grows up hearing about this, and
he like it sets his imagination aflame, and he starts
to believe that perhaps people like him are not destined
to be ruled by kings and landlords and the like.

(46:54):
Nest starts reading forbidden literature, and since he was just
a baby leftist at this point, that meant social democratic propaganda.
He was initially thrilled by their quote socialist phraseology and
their phony revolutionary ardor as the word phony in that
last sentence probably keyed you went on. He fell out
of the social democratic spell pretty quickly, so he basically
he becomes a Democrat for a little while, and then

(47:16):
it's like these people don't actually want to change things
the way that I want to change things. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of people can identify with Nestors, like he's actually,
he's a very relatable guy I've found so far. So
for a year or so, he's a heart. He's hardcore
into the social democratic scene. And one of the things
you'll come to understand about Nestors that when he gets

(47:37):
into politics, he gets into politics, he starts handing out
thousands of pamphlets about like social democratic literature to everyone
who will take them. Um. And then in nineteen o six,
after like a year of this, he meets some anarchist
peasants who had a little reading circle in Ghoulia Polly,
and he found himself attracted to their ideology. Now, the
most educated member of the group was a guy named
Valdemar Antony, the son of an immigrant check work and

(48:00):
a Lathe worker. Valdemar took Nestor under his wing, and
Nestor claims rid his soul once and for all of
the lingering remnants of the slightest spirit of servility and
submission to any authority. Okay, Nester gets pilled. Yeah, like
he literally Okay, So Nestor, there's a bunch of like
Daddy figures in Nestor's life that keep pilling him. So

(48:22):
now he's got a third beard on top of his
Every time when I say anarchist reading circle, that means
one thing in the United States today. Um, what Nestor
and his friends were doing was profoundly illegal. Revolutionaries had
just tried to overthrow the government all of Russia and

(48:43):
that included Ukraine at this point was under a state
of siege, as had been proclaimed by the Czar, talking
about like social democrats. Ship was illegal, anarchists books were
like meth to the Tsar's police. People alleged to have
radical political opinions had just been shot to death and
moss by cops. So like this is risky shit. Um yeah.

(49:05):
A bunch of dawn Cossacks who were loyal to the
Czar had been stationed at guglia I Polly to beat
the ship out of anyone who's so much as whift
of socialism. One local writer later described seeing a teacher
dragged through the streets by two dawn Cossacks with sabers,
while a third Cossack beat him with a rifle butt, screaming,
take that you waste for your revolution, Oh my god,

(49:26):
and again. The Dawn Cossacks are another group of Cossacks
that are like the Czar's Stormtroopers. Basically, um So Nestor
and his friends took some serious risks to sit around
and talk about books. They met once a week in
a group of ten to fifteen people, and they would
talk for hours about the idea that it might be
possible to live without desires someday. Mac Noo later recalled
for me, such nights we most often would gather to

(49:47):
meet by night were filled with light and joy. We
peasants with our meager learning what a symbol In winter
at the home of one of us, in summer in
the fields near a pond on the green grass, or
from time to time, in the broad daylight, like young
folks out for a stroll, we would meet to debate
the issues that move us. He remembers this positively all
his life, like this is that's that's really pleasant. He's

(50:08):
he's in the book club. Yeah, he's in the nice
book club. This book club goes to some pretty intense places,
so that it was just a book club for a
little while. UM. But after six months of study and
careful vetting, conversational vetting, they make Nestor a full member
of the group. UM, so he starts to help his friends.

(50:29):
They graduate from just reading books to handing out propaganda
and giving lectures to their fellow peasants UM, and Nestor
was eager to do more than that. In the wake
of the Czar's terror, prominent anarchists in Russia had urged
their fellows into a period of black terror against Czarism itself.
Being poor peasants, mak No and his friends had few
options when it came to terror. In order to give
themselves some options, and options here means guns, they embarked

(50:53):
on a campaign of what they would call expropriation and
what the law called simple theft. They would target the
homes and property of the wealthy, steel it and use
it to buy weaponry. Makno and his fellow libertarian communists,
as they called themselves at this point, drew the ire
of local law enforcement quickly. I'm a quote from Anarchy's
Cossack here on September five, nineteen o six, and gula

(51:13):
I Polly an attack upon the home of the businessman
Pletching here by three individuals armed with revolvers with faces blackened.
On October tent, a fresh attack and gula I Polly
upon another businessman Bruke, by four individuals, faces concealed by
paper masks, who brandishing revolvers and bombs, demanded five hundred
roubles for the starving. A little later, a third attack
upon a wealthy local industrialist Kerner by four individuals with

(51:36):
three more acting as lookouts. In August nineteen o seven,
in the nearby village of Geischer, a fourth attack upon
yet another businessman, Guovich by four individuals wearing sunglasses. And
it was this last attack that would get mac known
as Friends in Trouble because they wound up shooting it
out with the local cops in order to escape. So yeah,
reservoir dogs, you know. Yeah. And again, Nestor's like seventeen

(51:59):
at this point when he gets into his first shootout
with the cops. Yeah, grew up fast, four beard. So
after after this, as this, like this fucking crime spree
is going another, I want to talk about one other
thing that got into was um lighting fields on fire
and mass because there's this plan in the wake of

(52:19):
the nineteen o five revolution, the czar decides that he
wants to uh. He wants to create a class of
peasants who have money, more money than other peasants, like
middle class, basically to separate the peasants because they were like.
One of the things that scared him is that all
of the peasants were kind of the same sort of
poor together and that might mean they would rebel together.
So he tries to create this group of like peasants

(52:41):
who own more land and property than the others called
KOLs in order to divide them. Uh. And Nestor and
his friends like. Their response to that is to light
all of the land of the rich people on fire,
um as much as they possibly can, right right, I mean,
that's just logic, that makes sense. So a police superintendent
named Kariachin of who's generally described as like Ghoulia Polis

(53:02):
Sherlock Holmes uh starts trying to unravel this anarchist ring,
like tries to catch them and yeah, yeah, he basically
tortures people until he can identify the people who are
responsible for the attacks, but he doesn't have any hard evidence,
and so he doesn't want to arrest them. In nineteen
o seven, he gets his opportunity though a member of
a political group called the Social Revolutionaries, and this guy

(53:25):
was a friend of mock No's borrows mock No's gun,
and unfortunately, it turns out he borrowed it to murder
his fiance and then shoot himself. And this happens like
in the middle of a small town. So like, mak
No runs up to provide medical aid and he gets
arrested immediately, and then one of his friends is arrested
for trying to send messages to him in jail, and
it's like this whole anyway, they wind up in jail, um,

(53:45):
and this Sherlock Holmes dude starts interrogating them and trying
to break them. Um. But they love that there's an
anarchist Sherlock Holme. Oh no, he's not an anarchi. He's
the ars man, he's the tsars. And no, okay, so
he's the czars Alock did the does did the anarchists
get a Sherlock? No? No, that's the problem, isn't it.

(54:06):
They do? Well, we'll talk about what happens to Sherlock
in a little bit here But here's what he writes,
after trying to interrogate Nester Makno and his friend. I
have never before seen men of this metal. I have
plenty of evidence on which to state that they are
dangerous anarchists. But although I have put their flesh through
a little suffering, I have extracted nothing from them. Makno
seems like a peasant dolt when one looks at him,
but I have very conclusive evidence for claiming that it

(54:27):
was he who shot at the gendarmes on August nine seven. Well,
now I have done all. I was able to extract admissions,
but to no effect. On the contrary, he supplied me
with facts which I have checked out, in which I
have been forced to acknowledge this correct demonstrating he was
not even in Gulia poll on that day. As for
the other one, Antony, when I interrogated him, having him
beaten at will, he dared declare to me, you dead meat,

(54:49):
you'll never get anything out of me. And yet I
gave him a good taste of the swing. So he's like,
these motherfucker's won't talk even though I beat the ship
out of him. Okay, so it's so he's I mean,
you have to admire that, right if you're I'm trying.
I'm trying to get into Sherlock's head. I don't like
the Sherlock's a government guy. He is. He's a hard
I mean the other the actual Sherlock is a government guy.

(55:11):
That's true. But at least he did drugs. He did
do drugs. I don't know. Maybe this guy did drugs.
I hope he did drugs. So Makno and his friends
spend ten months in jail. Um. He turns eighteen in jail,
and this would not be his last day inside of
a cell. He was eventually bailed out by oddly enough,
a well off industrialist who was like a friend of
his family would hire his family members um and by

(55:32):
the time Makna was released, the heat was on his friends,
and it was declared for a while that he would
avoid breaking the law in order to continue to radicalize
and recruit more peasants. So he gets another job as
a decorator, and he founds an anarchist study group of
his own. Heeps becoming a property brother when he I
love that. Mr Mackno loves two things, shooting it out

(55:55):
with the cops and putting together a nice living room set.
I love that Nestor is out here being like, Okay,
I know that we're anarchists, but like, we need to
do something with this space. Doesn't mean our throw rugs
have to clash with the couch, you know. I feel
like people associate too often anarchists with clashing patterns, and
I just think that that doesn't need to happen. No,

(56:16):
why not? Why Like we can look nice and get
into gunfights with the police. Okay, even more so than
I want the Czar Sherlock Holmes, I want the anarchist
Property Brothers. I do want the anarchist because the anarchist
Property Brothers is only squatted properties to like, the big
half of the show is fighting the police off to
stop an eviction, and the like decorating the interior flop

(56:39):
it's not yeah, and then very like relaxed decoration of
the spotting spaces. Yeah. So, unfortunately Nestor failed to do.
You know, he starts running his own book club, and
he fails to do the same kind of strict vetting
that his previous group had done for him, and his
reading circle quickly discovers that two of its members are
czarist info traders. And they kill them both. Like the

(57:02):
the the Reading Circle murders two people who are informing
the cops. Mom My mom circle did that too. It's
just pretty common among book clubs. Look if you if
this happens in book clubs all the time, if you
are not doing like the correct canonical read of Eat, Pray, Love,
you're fucked. Yeah, they will fucking shoot you, bary you

(57:23):
in a shallow grave. That's how book clubs work. Have
you seen the movie that's what happens. Yeah, that's The
Joy Luck Club, if I'm not mistaken. Also that in
The Joy Luck Club, And it definitely happens in the
Jane Fonda one. I got so drunk at that screening
of book Club that I got kicked out of the
movie theater. That's the only time that's ever happened to me.

(57:46):
That's the only time it is. It is. There's times
I should have been but I wasn't. But this time
you really can't funk with it. You can't funk with
a movie that old people are going to, that they
want that. You can't be loud, they're going to eat
kicked out. I have a good vomit again. A movie
theater story but there's aspects of that story that there's
still a statute of limitations on, so we'll continue. Um. So, yeah,

(58:08):
the the group holds a general meeting to talk things
out after you know, killing two dudes, but it turns
out they still had a police infill trader in their midst,
and the meeting was surrounded by heavily armed Dawn Cossacks
and members of the local Acrona, which are like the
Czar's secret police. Now the trader in their midst A
guy named Lavadne suggested everyone give themselves up, but Nestor
in the actual anarchist in the room, decided to have

(58:30):
a giant gunfight with the cops. It was dark and
they all had pistols, so they ran out shooting, and
they actually like surprised the cops surrounding their house enough
that they killed the second in command of the local police,
several Cossacks, and several detectives. Um One of Makno's friends,
a guy named Simon Utah, is wounded in the leg
during the escape, and his brother and Alexander tries to

(58:51):
carry him, but they quickly realized that he was slowing
them down too much, so the wounded guy volunteers to
stay behind, shooting until he has one bullet left and
using the last on himself in order to buy time
for his friends. Again, hardcore book club. What movie did
you throw up at? Sorry? What movie was it? Oh? God,

(59:13):
it was a mine. It was like a showing of
I think I think it was a showing of the
what is it? What is it? The fucking Jim Hinson
movie with the skexus and ship like Labyrinth? No, no, no,
not Labyrinth, no other one dark crystal, dark crystal, dark crystal,

(59:34):
alcohol or the acid. But I was not going to
be able to focus until I had an answer there. Okay, okay,
it was a long time ago. It was a different
club is heating up. So the book club is heating up.
Like nine people have died, so this is good. It's

(59:54):
an intense book club. Not a lot of people save
the last bullet for themselves in a book club, that's true. So,
of course, so this guy who dies buying time for
the other members of the book club, his brother has
to avenge his death, and Magna wasn't about to let
his friend to vench his brother's death alone. So after

(01:00:15):
they escaped, they figured that since they just killed a
bunch of cops. They might as well assassinate the governor.
When you're on a hot streak like that, you know,
not get it now. And again, everyone involved in this
as a teenager, so we are not talking about the
best decisions being made at the time. But they're committed,

(01:00:36):
so they're able to channel their horny rage into some
productive yeah, some productive anarchy. And for again, several of
the people they kill in the shootout are members of
the Okrana. And for a little bit of knowledge about
the Czar's secret police, the protocols of the Elders of Zion,
like the infamous anti Semitic propaganda piece was created by
the Acrona. So like, shitty dudes. So like, it's not

(01:00:59):
like they uh, sort of have a book club massacre coming.
They absolutely deserve a book club massacre. You can tie
millions of deaths to that document. Like Okay, yeah, anyone
who's in the Okrana, you know, I got no sympathy.
So um, they decided to assassinate the governor. Um. And
but the scheme runs into a hitch, which is that

(01:01:20):
because of all of these anarchist teams running around, it
had been made illegal for young people to be near
the governor. Um So it's like Eric Carsetti. So no,
no no, Mackno and his friends keep trying to find
out ways to get close to the governor. And while
they're scouting out, they get caught by another patrol of

(01:01:42):
cossacks and again mak No being mack No. When they
realize they've been surrounded by cossacks, they have another gunfight
and they managed to shoot their way out of a
line of cops. Yet again, they escape, but not for long.
Nestor and his friend are arrested at home soon later.
This wound up actually being good for him, because if
he'd stayed free, he would have absolutely kept trying to

(01:02:02):
kill the governor and he probably would have gotten got
to death doing so. Instead, he just winds up in
jail for a while. Um Now, this sparks another crackdown
on Gulya Poli anarchists, and the only two who escape
or Antony, Makno's mentor, and Alexander, the brother of the
guy who who died buying time for them. The police
considered Makno to be the most dangerous of the young
men that they'd actually caught, and they charged him with

(01:02:24):
a funckload of crimes, some of which he definitely committed. Now,
all of the incarcerated anarchists were taken to prison again
while the state prepared the case against them, and this
took over a year. And like during this period of time,
like Makno spends a bunch of time in solitary confinement
and like a cell called the whole um, Like it's
a terrible place to be. He's not, it's not a

(01:02:45):
nice prison. Yeah. In the meantime, Alexander sneaks back into Ukraine.
He like flees to Belgium, but he immediately comes back
and he sends a letter to the head detective before
he leaves Belgium being like, you're never gonna catch me.
I'm like to the show that comes, You're never gonna
catch me. I'm in Belgium now, motherfucker's And then he
immediately sneaks back into Ukraine with two loaded revolvers and
he sort of starts stalking the head of the head

(01:03:08):
detective and waits until he goes into a theater and
he walks into the theater where the detective is with
two loaded revolvers in his pocket. Now he doesn't shoot
him during the play because he doesn't want to hit
the innocent people. But as the detectives leaving the play,
he shoots him three times and kills him, and then
gets killed in a shoot at himself. That's the end
of the Sherlock Holmes guy, Hi, sure why? I mean?

(01:03:29):
You know it was he was a supernova. I lived briefly, burned, brightly, burned,
brightly king. Um. So yeah, Now, Alexander was never able
to He was trying. He was planning to spring his
friends from prison after killing this detective. But obviously he
doesn't get a chance to do that. But his sacrifice
and his dedication to the cause inspired Nestor for the

(01:03:49):
rest of his life. Mak knows day in court eventually came,
and he refused to beg for mercy, telling his defense lawyer,
we have no intention of asking anything for this good
for nothing czar. These ascals have sentenced to us to death,
so let them hang us. And of course he was
sentenced initially to death. Macno and his comrades spent months
on death row. Nestor wrote at the time, once inside

(01:04:09):
these cells, one half feels that one has climbed down
into the grave. One is the feeling that only one
straining fingertips are clinging to the surface. And then one
thinks of all who being yet at large, cling to
their belief and their hopes, intent upon doing something good
and useful in the struggle for a better life. Having
sacrificed oneself for this future, one feels flooded by a
quite profound and very heartfelt love for one's comrades in

(01:04:32):
the struggle. They seem so near, so dear. One wholeheartedly
hopes that they may hold on to their faith and
their hopes to the very end, and take their love
of the oppressed and their hatred of the oppressors further. Wow.
He's a good fucking right. Yeah, he's a great writer.
He can make stuff that's very depressing, very motivating. He's

(01:04:53):
a guy. He's a great for a guy who never
fully learns to read or write. Yeah, like he's I
like this guy. He's a likable dude. So Nestor's best
friend and comrade on death row was a guy named
Igor Bondarenko, which is another fucking incredible Ukrainian name. Now,
for some reason, Igor suspected Nestor's sentence might get commuted.

(01:05:16):
He claimed he had a premonition, and he basically is like,
I've had this premonition that you're we're all going to
get executed. You're not going to get executed. You're going
to get out, and you're going to lift the black,
black flag of anarchy all over this land. Uh, you,
my brother, Nestor, you are to live. I shall surely die.
I know that you will regain your freedom. And like
Nestor's other friends and jail are like, that's never got

(01:05:37):
Nesters too dumb, Like he's not smart enough to like
when like, you're a great guy, Nester, you're really good
at shooting at the cops, but you're not smart enough
to like lead a revolution. Like it couldn't be him.
That's a that's a that's a that's a great way
to motivate someone to just do that. Yeah, Okay, they're
negging him a little bit. Now. This may or may
not be may not be true. We're reliant on Nestor's

(01:05:57):
account that all this happened because all of his other
friends get executed, So he might have made this up.
I don't know. In any case, after fifty two days
on death row, Makno was informed that at the pleading
of his mother. His sentence had been commuted to hard
labor for life. He was dragged off to prison, where
he would spend nine years, and this actually wound up
being a good thing. See, prisons and Czarist Russia were

(01:06:18):
basically the equivalent of a graduate degree for revolutionaries because
all of the people who got they there were prisons
just for revolutionaries. Stalin spent a bunch of time in
one of these, an hour ten minutes first all in yep, yep. Okay,
that's actually pretty far, yeah, pretty far, okay, pretty far
for talking about, you know, Ukraine. So at the same

(01:06:41):
time is in a prison for a bunch of bank robberies. Um,
And all of these prisons are the same. They're filled
with like prisoners who are all revolutionaries, and these massive
libraries of revolutionary literature that people build up over the years,
that inmates build up, And so Makno gets to read
a bunch like he spends he's also gets hard doubly ill,
gets pneumonia, and ship like gets permanent lung damage. So

(01:07:03):
he's in the infirmary a lot, and he just spends
all of his time reading books about like anarchist political theory. Uh.
The number one book that he encounters during this time
is by a guy named Kropotkin. It's a book called
mutual Aid, which is a book about mutual aid, and
he falls in love with the concept and the book
mutual Aid never left makno side for the rest of

(01:07:23):
his life. He went in and out of the prison infirmary.
Uh you know, he was very sick all of the time,
and he he gets very frustrated at the inner prison
hierarchy because there were two kinds of political prisoners in Russia.
There were intellectual prisoners who are like students and sons
of noblemen and stuff, who got like who found themselves
drawn to left wing politics. But we're also rich kids,

(01:07:43):
and the guards treated them very well because class was
really baked into everything in Russian. Like, these guys were prisoners,
but they were still rich, so like you shake their
hands and you show them respect. And then there were
the poor revolutionaries like mak Noo, who get the ship
kicked out of them, right, And Makno noticed that these
like rich intellectual revolutionaries would like shake hands with the
guards and be friendly to like the same people who

(01:08:04):
were beating up Macna and his friends. And he was like, well,
fuck these guys, like I don't care if they're saying
the right ship, like yeah, yeah, that's okay, Okay, So
he doesn't like he doesn't like performative politics, like performative politics.
I he would be he would be really intense online. Sorry,

(01:08:25):
I'm just thinking about he would be in prison. He
would not be. He would have in prison already. I
was just cooking on us, Like what would nest ers
online presence be, Like, it would be pretty aggressive. He
would have been in prison for things he did this summer,
like yes, yeah, yeah. So nineteen fourteen came and the

(01:08:46):
prisoners were split again by those who still supported Russia
in her war with Germany and the internationalists who thought
that the war World War one was just a bunch
of rich assholes making poor kids die for politics, and
neither Russia or Germany were in the right, like it
was just a dumb war and it should be fought period.
And Magno was an internationalist. He thought it was stupid
for Ukrainian peasants to die fighting German peasants on behalf

(01:09:06):
of kings. It was like why would we do that?
Okay yeah um, And then in nineteen seventeen, while Makna
was still behind bars. The revolution happened. Bazaars overthrown, A
vaguely kind of vaguely socialist social democratic interim government underguy
named Krinsky is formed, and all the political prisoners are freed.
Because there's this period before like the Bolsheviks takeover where

(01:09:28):
there's like a social democratic kind of like a socialist
quasi thing in charge and their Social Democrats and there's
Bolsheviks and there's anarchists and they're all arguing about Russia's
going to be. But during this period, Bazaar's overthrown and
all political prisoners are freed, or at least a bunch
of them are, and mak Noo gets out of jail.
Um Now, on release, he sees a doctor because he's

(01:09:49):
sick as hell, and the doctors like, you should have
head to the crimea have your lungs treated like you're
very ill, and Makno's like, the only thing that's going
to like cure my lungs is to take part in
the revolution. You know, his exact his exact statement is
to appreciate the spirit behind that. But but I don't
I see him hitting a wall. Yeah, I mean, the

(01:10:10):
revolution was not good for my lungs. But there was
less tear gas in those days. That's true, that's true,
counting their fucking blessing. Yeah, oh you had to deal
with with machine guns. I mean, this is this, this
period is taking place, you know, during the anime movie Anastasia,
And so while this is all going on, it's I

(01:10:31):
think important, historically important to consider that the big fat
Kelsey Grammar cartoon is switching out Meg Ryan Anastasia, and meanwhile,
Resputen lives in Hell with his bat. It's just important Rescutent,
Resputent is living in Hell with a band at this point. Yeah.
So uh yeah, So he mock kind of considered throwing

(01:10:56):
himself into the revolution, you know, or throwing himself into
the Moscow part of the revolution, and he spends a
little bit of time like with Moscow based anarchists, but
he keeps getting these letters from his mom who's like,
you know, you're out of prison, you should come see
your family, And he eventually decides, all right, I'll go
home and I'll do a revolution there. So he's twenty
seven years old when he finally sets foot in his

(01:11:17):
hometown again for the first time in a decade or
nearly a decade, his neighbors showed up and Moss to
greet him, calling him a man back from the dead. Somehow,
mak no sense that this was a moment he could use,
and he started questioning his fellow villagers about their receptive
nous to libertarian ideas. Now, in modern terms, that sounds
like he's trying to talk to them about how age
of consent law should be lowered. But libertarian meant a

(01:11:39):
different thing back then, So okay, yeah, unpacked that for me. Yeah.
The word libertarian started out as an anarchist term, a
left leaning term, like if you were a libertarian in
nineteen seventeen, you were a leftist. If you weren't an anarchist,
you were like very close to one. Um that stopped
thanks to a guy like that stop thanks to a dude,

(01:12:01):
nam Murray Rothbard, who brought the term libertarian into American
politics in order to make it a right wing term.
Um and Murray Rothbart is why the word libertarian now
means a guy with a collection of Fedoras and another
collection of gas station katanas. It was like, what how
did this How did this thing I agree with become
my uncle preaching the gospel of Gary Johnson at every

(01:12:24):
available that's tunity. That's Murray Rothbart. He's what turns. He's
what turns libertarian from shooting it out with the Czar's
secret police to gas station Katana collection. Um so. Rothbart
is basically a corporate fascist. He believed the state should
be dissolved in all of its services, should be provided
for profit by corporation. Seems trash. And he carried out
a very successful campaign to convince dudes who liked guns

(01:12:45):
and not being told what to do that licking the
boots of billionaires was true freedom in his book The
Portrayal of the American Right. Yeah, it really does. In
his In his book The Betrayal of the American Right,
Murray Rothbart work wrote, one gratifying aspect of our rise
to some prominence is that, for the first time in
my memory, we our side has captured a crucial word
from the enemy. Libertarians had long been simply a polite

(01:13:07):
word for left wing anarchists, that is, for anti private
property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But
now we had taken it over. He's very conscious about
what he's done, and that's why Like, like mak No
considers himself a libertarian, But mak No is not what
we would consider a libertarian to day, right, He's what

(01:13:28):
some folks in Northeast Syria might consider a libertarian. But
I honestly, I still to this day have such a
struggle understanding what libertarianism means, depending on who's talking to
me about it. But I grew up being told them
like libertarians, they're just fucking weirdos that think everyone should
have a plow. That's how I that's what I learned libertarian.

(01:13:50):
That is the kind of libertarian Makno is is like
everyone should work for themselves and for their community, and
no one should have that. But but but then, yeah, okay, okay,
I've got I've got. I guess I have to learn
more about libertarians. That doesn't sound good to say out loud. Yeah,
I mean there's good that these libertarians are good to

(01:14:12):
learn about because these so modern libertarians are like these
libertarian states bad. We shouldn't have the state telling us things.
Rich people should tell us what to do. And Marco's
Club libertarians are no one. Yeah, the book Club libertarians
are no one should tell you what to do, and
if they tell you what to do, you should shoot
them in the face, like sick. Yeah, let's do it.
Yeah yeah, so uh yeah. Makno meets all of his

(01:14:34):
old friends and neighbors and he's like, have you guys
heard about libertarianism? And instead of following up by again
ranting about age of consent laws like Murray Rothbard would
have done, Makno starts explaining his newly educated analysis of
their situation. As he told his fellow peasants, the libertarian
movement nationwide was weak and not cohesive. The social Democrats
and the Bolsheviks were by far the most organized, and

(01:14:55):
that was not good because they were just going to
recreate some form of oppressive hierarchy that Ukrainians would have
to live under. Anarchists needed to be the vanguard of
mass revolutionary action, and Nestor figured, why not start that
in Ghoula Polly. Now it's a mark of how charismatic
he was that basically everyone in his like hometown who
turns out to see him as like, yeah, I guess
that makes sense. Like we just got rid of the czar,

(01:15:16):
why not make sure nobody else tells us what to do? Now?
Makno has no army at this point, and his old
comrades are all dead. By pure force of personality, he
convinces his neighbors to establish a local peasants union with
delegates to represent them. This inspired different groups within the
village to organize, and soon the metal workers and the
woodworkers had unions of their own. Someone suggested the peasants
should pool their money to set up a contingency fund

(01:15:38):
to help members of the community who had accidents or
fell into misfortune. Yeah, it's yeah, it's very quickly too.
This is great. Yeah. And before long the village decides
to elect a chairman and Macno tells them this is
a bad idea and he doesn't want the job, but
they elect him anyway. Um. And basically he accepts the
position because he's like, if I, if someone else gets this,
we'll start having political parties form and then everything's going

(01:16:01):
to go to ship. So I'll just take the job
and not do it. Um. And that that's that's his
reasoning at least. So within a few weeks he pushes
through a vote to have the estates of all the
large local landowners handed back to the peasants with no
payment or compensation to the rich people. Now this pisses
off the social Democrats. In the big city near gulia Poli,
a place called Alexandrovsk, they supported a buy back policy

(01:16:23):
not wildly different from the one the surfs had been granted.
The peasants, though love Nestor, Macknell and many of them
decided that if anarchism meant they got to run their
own lives and not have landlords, well fuck, maybe they
were anarchists. Now. It's worth noting how different Nestor's tactics
were from most of the other anarchist organizers in Russia
at the time. They tended to devote their efforts to
creating committees and clubs and debating with one another, rather

(01:16:45):
than traveling out to the peasant masses and converting them
by doing. Nestor couldn't stand intellectuals. He preferred to get
his hands dirty and actually change things. When he was young,
that change had come from, you know, shooting out with
the police. Now that he was nearing thirty, he was
working alongside his neighbors to transform their home into something better.
Mak No and his comrades, who now made up most
of the town, disarmed the local militia and d deputized

(01:17:07):
the police force. They're just like, go up to the cops.
You're not the police anymore, give us your guns. And
the police go, oh no, his beard is so big,
we better listen to what he says. Well, basically, so
the cops that he the cops that people don't have
a problem with, get to stay on as unarmed town
criers because they're like, hey, you guys who weren't shitty,
were you don't get guns anymore, but like you can

(01:17:28):
be town criers, Like we've got some use for you.
We're not going to just murder everybody that we used
to have an issue with, because that doesn't seem like
a good a good thing to start doing. Uh. And
the arms of the police and the militia that are
confiscated get handed to citizens who started to form become
a democratic militia geared towards self defense rather than you know,
beating people for reading the wrong books. Right now, well,

(01:17:49):
all this is happening, Russia is still in a very
bad position because this is that awkward period where they've
had their they've overthrown the czar and they're kind of
in the start of a civil war, but they're also
still in World War One fighting the Germans, even though
nobody who overthrew the czar still wanted to really be
fighting the Germans. Um and in August of nineteen seventeen,
a guy named General Kornilov who's an anti Bolshevik general

(01:18:11):
intent on and throwing overthrowing the socialist regime that had
taken over from the Czar and replacing it with probably
the monarchy or something again. Uh. He starts like advancing
on Alexandrov's the big the capital city near Gulaipoli, and
committees for self defense start being created all over Russia
and Ukraine, and of course mak No became chairman of
the Committee of for Self Defense of Gulapolyi. Now, his

(01:18:32):
solution to stopping the counter revolution was quote disarming the
entire local bourgeoisie and abolishing its rights over the people's
assets estates, factories, workshops, printing works, theaters, cinemas and other
public enterprises, which would henceforth be placed under collective control
of the workers. His defense committee is like, yeah, we'll
do this, so they all vote to do this. But

(01:18:52):
then General Kornilov gets defeated and the moderate regime that
was in charge of Russia and Ukraine at the time,
was like, hey, guys, that's too dical. You can't take
all of the rich people's stuff. Like we're democrats, were
we don't want the czar, but we're not going to
let you take all the rich people's stuff. So what
year are we in at this? This is seen okay,
okay is happening. This is starting to like overlap with

(01:19:14):
some of the Nabokov history that I cover. Okay, cool, Interesting,
Nabokov isn't in all this ship Like he's alive for
a lot of this, right, He's around, Yeah, he's around
until he he ends up going to Germany. Uh in
I think eighteen, but he's in this story. A bunch
of Germans come here and then Nestor has to shoot them. Yeah, synergy, synergy.

(01:19:36):
So uh Like Makno gets told by the government after
this general gets defeated, like hey, your plan to take
all of the weapons and property from the rich people
is too radical, and Makno is like, well fuck you.
So he and all he organizes his fellow peasants to
have a rent strike um and so they just stopped paying, right,
and they're like, this is our land now, and we're
going to take all of your livestock and equipment from
the landlords, acting on their own. A crush on, he's

(01:20:00):
fucking he's fucking cool, acting on their own. The peasants
of Gulya poly collectivized the enormous estates of the wealthy
and started forming farming communes, each of around two hundred people.
Communal life was seen by Makno as the highest form
of social justice, and some landowners even came around to
the idea and joined communes. Others were less than pleased
with the changes, and we'll talk about them later. Probably

(01:20:22):
most of them were less than please. But there were
some people who were like, Okay, you're taking my land
and giving it to everyone else. But like, yeah, this
actually is fine. Again a minority, but it does happen, um,
and it's it's important to note that he is not
like we're going to murder the landlords. He's like, we
don't need to kill them. We're just taking everything from
them and they can be part of society or not
if they want to. Okay, this is yeah, it's like that.

(01:20:44):
There's there's less lenient policies than that, so yep, yep,
especially in Russia in this periods. What you say, I'm like, well,
I guess yeah, that's that's a pretty chill approach. Yeah.
So his nineteen eighteen rolls around life and Goulaipol has
changed massively, as this right up from an article in
lipcom dot org describes. In addition to his political work,

(01:21:06):
he was based on a collective farm, working a type
of plow called a booker. His co workers at the time,
he states, included German colonists and former landowners who had
accepted the redistribution of land. Mackno's memoire describes the administrative
and political machinations of the Ukrainian Revolution with a detail
that suggests veracity. Under the direction of the RevCom, the
Revolutionary like Committee, he explains, ex soldiers from the front

(01:21:28):
began moving all the implements in livestock from the estates
of the rich and large farms to a central holding area.
The idea was not too exact revenge upon the wealthy,
but to equitably distribute wealth. Landlords and wealthier farmers were
quote left with two pairs of horses, one or two cows,
depending on the size of the family, one plow, one
seating machine, one mower, one winnowing machine, etcetera. Needless to say,

(01:21:49):
this equitable redistribution was not voluntary. So again you don't
have a choice. We're taking your stuff, but we're not
trying to starve your family like you get as what
everyone else has. Yeah, it's as how theory distribution Okay, Now,
again was not voluntary, but was not bloody either. While
there were mass killings in parts of Russia during this
period of landowners, google Hpole was so far quite peaceable,

(01:22:12):
as were most of the surrounding areas. One contemporary newspaper
article describes how the village looked during this first flowering
of anarchy. It was quote like a painting by Rippin, exotic, gouty, unusual.
The magnivists wore colorful shirts, wide pants, and wide red
belts which reached down to the ground. All of them
were armed to the teeth. The property brothers could never okay.

(01:22:36):
Another writer who hated Makno and what he turned Googliapole into,
adds that quote all night there was music and dancing
mixed with the shrieks of gay women. Um okay, no
matter which way he's been at that sounds like a
black sounds like everybody's fucking strapped in dancing. Pretty cool. Yeah,

(01:22:57):
it sounds like these writers are absolute haters who know
how to have fun. Yeah, a lot of haters in
the mock No story. And that is part one. Part
two is going to be a lot more violent. But yeah,
I'm glad. Yeah, blast and part one. Yeah, part one.
Hard not to be on mock No side at this,

(01:23:18):
you know, really most stages of this. Um vibes are good.
Vibes are good. So Jamie, you got any things to
plug before we take a quick break? And then part two? Yeah,
I guess some. I guess some holiday plugs you can
if you if you want a happy option, you can
listen to standa University comes out on Christmas even I

(01:23:41):
think it's the Daily Sad Guys Feed. If you want
to have a terrible Christmas and cry, Cry, Cry, you
can listen to Lolita podcast, which uh covers a different
area of the same portion of history. This Christmas, celebrate
being separated from your family by listening to a story
about a book about child molestation. Isn't that? I mean

(01:24:04):
it's a great I am caught up currently and very
angry that you don't have another episode for me today there,
Well you're I mean, you're performing the hell out of Naboko,
Thank you, thank you, except right mispronounced that that it
is spelled l y o n like fucking hell it is,

(01:24:25):
but you combined it to sound like it was like
you were saying Beyonce, like like the city and oh, okay,
see that's that's fancier in the same way. Okay I
I maintained she pronounced her own name wrong. Well, it's
episode three. Robert absolutely demolished this poor dead woman's name.

(01:24:46):
There's a place for you to go if you want
to demolish a poor dead woman's name. Follow us on Twitter.
Have a good Christmas. The episodes Sucking Over. Can you

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Nestor Makhno: Anarchist Warlord and Book Club Aficionado