Part One: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick

Robert is joined by Jeff May to discuss Nicolae Ceaușescu.

 

(Four Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst
people in all of history and also at the same
time a podcast where I explore my Boston accent and
see how much better I can make it, and and
and to help me, today we have professional Boston coach
Jeff May. Jeff, welcome to the program. Hey, their kid,

(00:24):
what's going on? Wow? Incredible? Of course? Yeah, yeah, I
I prefer I prefer to do my accent a little
bit more authentic. Let me let me run this one
by a Jeff boy croiy Aim from Boston. That's more
of a North Shore accent, like yeah, yeah, no, that

(00:47):
that's that's very much. If you were to go up
to like, you know, like Malden or something like, really
get up there, Um, that's where you have so regional
dialect is wild out there? Critical question, Brock part of
Boston or not? Yeah? Of course, I mean, all right,
that's great. So that you're on Jamie. You're on Jamie's

(01:08):
side of this. How much is she paying you? But
let me Jamie. But here's the thing is that I
lived three thousand miles away from my hometown, right, so
if where I am now when people ask where I'm
from I tell them Boston. In reality, I'm from a
small farming hamlet in central Massachusetts called Charlton, regionally related

(01:31):
to Worcester, Massachusetts. So it's hard for me when people
are like, Jeff's from Boston and I'm like yeah, And
then when someone presses me a little bit, I'm like, Okay,
not really though, um, but I've always counted. I mean
because Brockton. Brockton is like the sort of heart of
fighting in Boston, which is something that I did. Makes sense,
that makes sense, So I relate that and often once

(01:53):
and I did want to fight somebody. Everyone would have
fought you there, jeffs a Boston accent was so much
better than yours. Robert, I'm sorry. His was really strong.
It was strong. It wasn't regionalized well, but it was strong.
Yours was very marky Mark MACKI Mack freaking Walberg. You
should do an episode on him. The only people that

(02:16):
like the Walberg with the people that are related to
the Walburg. Have you ever eaten at a wall Burgers?
I would rather fucking die. Is that a real place?
I don't want to be mean, but it is the
worst burger I've ever had in my life. Well, so
you know, I think Mark Wahlberg getting a burger chain
is evidence of one of the many crimes of capitalism.

(02:39):
And you know who hated capitalism, Donnie Wallburg. That might
be true, but also the subject of today's episode, Nikolai
Chauchco Dictator of Romania. We just start doing an entire
thing about the wall Berg family and never get to
the actual topic. That wouldn't put that could do it,
I could do, I could do an hour I related bastards.

(03:02):
I mean, we are talking about one corrupt family and
another corrupt family. So the chow Chesscus and the Wallbergs.
Who's who has caused more death and destruction? So Robert,
I need you to say, welcome to and you're ready
for go behind the Bastards. Welcome to Behind the Bastards. No,

(03:26):
that's not it. That was you nailed it. Thank you,
Thank you. Jeff. I gotta be like I thought that
you had just replayed what I said back to me. Yeah, yeah,
I've been practicing my mimicry, like whatever kind of bird
mimics things. You're like, yeah, yeah, something like that. Jeff,
what do you know about nikolaicha chessco I try to

(03:49):
not know as much as I can about Romanian people.
I know that he was a lot of Nylon sweatsuits. Uh,
he had a lot of cologne on. Yeah. I mean,
look if you want, because Romania is kind of like
edge of the Balkans, right, sometimes it's considered part of
the Balkans. Some people be like, na, Eastern Europe is

(04:11):
not really in the whatever, This is not the place
to litigate that. But what you can say, what I
can say about Romanians, which I can also say about
Serbians and Bosnians and um Um a number of other
people in that area, is that their track suit game
is incredibly strong, unbelievable. It's like they're like, yeah, it's amazing.

(04:32):
If you want to if you've gotten a good Adida's
track suit in that part of the world, you're basically
a king. Um just squatting and smoking cigarettes. It rules.
Romania is an interesting country, um and Nikolai Chauchesco is
interesting because you know, we've got all these like communist
dictators like Stalin Um who There are a lot of

(04:53):
folks today, particularly on the Internet, who will defend these guys.
A lot of like weird authoritarian communists who who have
never met a dictator they don't like. And one of
the things that's interesting about our subject today, Cchessco, is
that he is the one that no one will defend.
I mean, I'm sure you can find a couple of
Cichessco stands out there, but they're almost nobody will back

(05:14):
this guy up because he sucked so comprehensively. It's funny.
It's funny when, yeah, when you look at the old
Soviet Block and you look at like some of the
dictators they had, and you look at the old the
like the older people that lived through it, and like, well,
you know, sometimes you have to make hard decisions and
it's like hard got killed like a hundred thousand people,
and like, well, you know, the ruling is difficult. Uh.

(05:37):
It is very interesting to see the apologists of like
the really terrible people in in Russia. They're just like
sometimes you set I like. What I do like is
that he his fate was sealed on I believe if
I recall correctly, yes, Christmas, Yeah, he was. Him being
murdered was a Christmas present for the whole Romanian and

(06:00):
really the world. But we're getting ahead of ourselves a
little bit. So we're gonna talk about Nikolai Cichescu, but
we're also going to have to talk about Romania and
give some history because I don't think most Americans know
a lot about Romania. Um it's a part of the
world that you know. It's interesting because, like, there was
a period of time where Cichesco was kind of like

(06:23):
the good communist. He was very close friends with Richard Nixon. Um.
He was spoken up positively by by Ronald Reagan. It's amazing.
He's like a scholarist who Nixon loved, and Reagan was like,
he's a good guy. It's wild stuff. Those are two
people whose endorsements I could go without. Yeah yeah, um so,

(06:45):
But before we get into how he came to power
and what he did, we're gonna have to talk a
little bit of history because there's some there's some context
that is important if you're going to understand how would
guy like what do you know that he was when
he was younger? He was extremely hot that we can discuss. Sophie. Um.
I I definitely don't see that because he looks like

(07:06):
a muppet as he gets older, like up, yeah, yeah,
it's the land of the muppets. UM. Well, it was
known as Dacia uh d A c I A back
in the day and like the classical period um. If
you've ever seen, like read a book about the Roman
Empire and it talks about them fighting the Dacians and

(07:27):
conquering the Dactions. That's Romania prior to Roman contact. Um.
Dacia is like one of the last provinces that gets
conquered by the Roman Empire, and it's one of the
first they abandoned, so they're only only hang around there
for a little bit less than three hundred years and
then they leave into b C. This energy that they
bring to living in Romania, it's too dark, too many

(07:50):
mountains because like vampires, they're gonna be a thing here. Yeah,
they're like, we conquered a lemon, We're gonna get the
hell out of here. Yeah. Well they kind of get
out of here obviously, like we talk about, oh, the
Roman Empire conquers this place, who leaves this place to
b C. When the Roman Empire leaves, most people living
in the region probably would not have noticed much of

(08:11):
a change, because, for one thing, they're still trading with
the Romans. There's still a lot of Roman soldiers in
the region, and in fact, the reason that we call
it Romania now is because the like Roman soldiers who
were stationed there like bread with the local population, and
this is something they're they're pretty proud of, like the Romania.

(08:31):
Like the name Romania is kind of hearkening back to
the fact that there is a lot of Roman ancestry
in the area. Now, this ties back to for everyone
that took like seventh and eighth grade languages. Remember when
you would take like an introduction to like Spanish or
French or Latin or whatever, and they would say, you know,
whatever language you're learning, Spanish or French, they're like, they're

(08:52):
one of the five Romance language is that's my That's
where I'm from in Massachusetts. That's the accent. And it's
like you hear Spana, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian and
when they say Romanian, you're like what, like why, like
why why them? That doesn't make sense on a map

(09:12):
that that would be the language. Yeah, yeah, it is weird,
especially since again if you're in that region and further
into the Balkans, the language they're speaking is very different, right,
But but in Romania it is this kind of like
latinized tongue. Um, so that's cool. Um, Roman romance. Uh,

(09:33):
there's nothing as sexy as a as a man making
a pizza and doing violent hand gestures. I mean you're
not wrong about that. Yeah. Um, the center of Roman
Asia is a place that is known today as Transylvania.
That's actually like the province that the Romans conquered. So again,
when I say they left because of Dracula, that's that
is historically true. Um, although Dracula dude didn't exist yet. Yeah,

(09:57):
we're gonna talk about him for just a little bit.
Did you do have you done for yet? No? No? No,
Well we are kind of doing a little bit of
Lad Tepis right now. Um let me tell you real quick.
I know you're about to do that. But as somebody
who taught about the Middle Ages and I used to
do for my literacy classes, I would have them write
a research paper, and I'm like, you can pick anybody.
I'm so I got so burnt out reading term papers

(10:21):
from eighth graders about Vlad Tepis. And it's not that
he's not interesting, it's just that it's boring when you
read the same paper thirty times a year. Well, Well, Jeff,
I'm gonna try to give you a little bit different
of a paper because we're gonna be focusing on a
slightly an aspect of lads time running Romania, um that

(10:41):
people don't tend to talk about as much. Obviously, the
thing everyone knows about Vlad Tepez flat the Impaler, is
that he impaled a bunch of people, specifically a bunch
of Ottoman soldiers. And if you like hang out and
read sort of the weird right wing kind of retellings
of of medieval history, a lot of them will focus
on him as like the Shield of the West, and

(11:02):
this is something that like within the Romanian right wing,
it gets talked about a lot that like Romania was
the what protected you know, Christendom from the Ottoman Empire,
and and Vlad Tepez, you know, was this was this
heroic figure who was hard enough in order to like
keep the Muslims out. Yeah, this is not accurate to

(11:22):
the actual history. Pieces of it are accurate, but the
broad picture is wrong. Um. So, first off, his name
was legitimately Vlad Dracula because his his dad was Dracule,
which was a name he got when he got given
an award by the holy Roman Empire emperor. I think
it was sigismund um and Dracula means son of the dragon,

(11:44):
because Dracule means the dragon um. But it also at
the same time means son of the devil, which is
why the guy who wrote the Dracula book thought he
was he was a good pick for a horrible monster character.
Name like the guy like he like his name isn't
yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that dude, what's his name? Bram
the Dracula guy, but not Dracula. Sharon Lewis the the

(12:07):
guy who yeah, yeah, yeah, shitty vampire book the first Twilight,
we could say, the the yeah, the the prelude to
Twilight before we we really figured out what we wanted
from our vampires. Um sparkles and chizzled abs. M m,
that's right, that's right. No cum gutters on the original Dracula,

(12:30):
probably because he was he was riddled with various diseases.
So Gary oldman have like a huge six pack in
that movie with that stupid little hair do. But he's
just like the check out my rippling abs. This is
the thing we should be using that AI shipped to
do is go back and go back to like movies

(12:50):
that were made decades ago and give the male leads
back then who didn't have access to modern fitness technology,
just unbelievably shredded cum gutters, like go back to to
uh gone with the wind and and throw some cum
gutters in uh in uh in in red and throw
some throw some cum gutters on that guy who dies

(13:10):
to you know, the Confederate boy soldier. I would like
to come gutters all of them. The rock in to
kill a mocking bird, like the rock to kill a
rocking bird. Yeah, where he actually just kills everybody in
town in order to stop that guy from getting the
rock bottom as they're trying to out. M hm m hmm.

(13:30):
I think that's a good idea. Also, put stone Cold
Steve Austin in uh in that that that uh the
oh ship now I've you've gone rails, Citizen Kane. We
could do that. No, no, no, the movie in the
movie where that guy goes to Washington, DC. Mr Smith
goes to Washington, goes to Washington, throw stone Cold Steve

(13:53):
Austin and Mr Smith goes to Washington and have them
do a stone cold stunner and all those old Congress
fools Stone Cold Smith goes to, uh, what does this
have to do with our script? Very very very little.
So the actual historical Dracula, who is kind of your
first like he's often seen as like one of kind
of the founding figures of Romania in like Romanian nationalist

(14:17):
discourse because he's kind of this this first figure on
the scene. And this is back when Romania is called Wallachia.
Who becomes super famous. Um and he becomes famous yeah
for the impaling people. Um lad Tepez is the ruler
of Wallachia on three non consecutive occasions, which happens a
lot actually in in their history. At this point, they've

(14:37):
got this weird system that by which they pick who
their ruler is going to be, where you have these
basically this group of nobles who gets to vote on
who's going to run things, and it leads to a
shipload to turnover. From fourteen eighteen to fourteen seventy six,
Wallachia has eleven princes who are in power for about
five years each. So he gets into power, gets thrown

(15:00):
out of power, comes back into power several times. Um
and yeah. Common in Europe um, but in Romania it
is a particularly like violence system and This makes sense
when you look at just kind of where Romania is located, right,
Not only are they right next to the Ottoman Empire,
but they're right next to Hungary UH and the Holy
Roman Empire, and there's just they are just constantly dealing

(15:23):
with different groups coming in and trying to basically run things. Um.
So it's not only the the Ottomans that they're fighting,
And repeatedly Romanian leaders will side with the Ottomans in
order to protect themselves against the Hungarians or whatever. Like
this is a common thing. So so Dracula, like actual

(15:44):
Lad Dracula, spends a decent chunk of his career fighting
alongside the Ottomans. He also, for a point of it,
when he's technically a vassal to the Ottomans, is leading
like an illegal underground war against them. All this stuff
is going on. But I think what's more to the
point is that rather than kind of being a shield

(16:04):
against like the Muslim world who was defending Christendom, Vlad
is more concerned with maintaining his relative independence from an
ocean of surrounding threats. Who covet Transylvania UM and the
rest of Romania um Transylvania, specifically the area that the
Romanians fight with the Hungarians over a lot, and it
changes hands all the time. And he is a pretty

(16:25):
brutal vlad Draculus a pretty brutal ruler to his own people.
And this is the thing that gets discussed less we
talk about the impaling of all of these uh, these
Ottoman soldiers as he's trying to like throw back this
invasion from the Sultan. And I want to quote now
from the wonderful book Children of the Night by Paul Kenyon,
because this was a little piece of dracula history that
I hadn't heard. It was around this time, during the

(16:45):
first couple of years of Dracula's rule, that he organized
a notorious feast for all the beggars of targo Viste.
The event appeared to be a great humanitarian gesture. The
hall was hired and tables were filled with food and wine.
Invitations were put out around the city to the cripples,
the blind, that diseased in the destitute. They all concreated
in a large wooden hall toasting Dracula's generosity. But towards
the end of the meal, someone noticed smoke coming from

(17:07):
the walls. They ran to the door, only to find
Draculus troops had locked it from the outside and set
the place ablaze. Many hundreds were trapped, and a bonfire
of souls was left burning into the dark Wallachian sky.
The Bonfire of the Beggars, as it became known, was
a warning becking would not be tolerated. It was a
drain on the finances of the most decent and generous
and society, said Dracula, a crime as evil as theft.

(17:28):
While Achians were an easy It was one thing killing
the rich, but to massacre the poor in such violent circumstances.
On the other hand, draculus tactics did seem to be working,
and crime fell. It was said that Draculus guards would
test the townsfolk by leaving a purse full of gold
coins in a busy marketplace. When the guards came to
collect it in the evening, the purse was always left untouched.
The admiration for authoritarian solutions would also resonate down the centuries.

(17:51):
So that is this is kind of like, yeah, that's
gonna be effective because you know of the murder. Yeah, yeah,
when you murder enough people, um, you you can decrease
the crime rate. Um, that that is, that is and
this is a lesson that no Romanian leader is ever
going to forget. And it kind of like he Vlad
is sort of setting the tone here for an awful
lot of their history, right down to the fact that

(18:13):
you've got this kind of peasant population that is getting
mistreated by its leaves enough that many people are starving
in the streets, and so the solution of the ruler is, well,
what if we just light those people on fire? This
would be this is like a Facebook comments section gone
to life, like this is this is what a lot

(18:35):
of people from my hometown would like to do. Oh,
Matt Walsh is totally down for this. Yeah. Yeah. The
Daily Wire is already writing a think piece on how
Vlad Dracula had the right how literal Dracula had the
right idea on improving our our civic spaces. The New
York Times is going to post an editorial that says,

(18:55):
are there too many poor people? Yeah? What if we
just light them on fire? You know? Um? And I
think you know, this is one of those areas where
my my moral sort of uh compass is at odds
with the intellectual side of me, because on a moral level.
I think it's always okay to set fires, but clearly

(19:17):
sometimes fires can be bad, and this is something I'm
still grappling with. Jeff. Yeah, I mean, well, fires can
have disastrous results, but fire itself is awesome. Like I
keep I keep fire with me when I'm recording. At
all times, I have to have an open flame near
me or else. What's the point. What if wolves came
in while I was recording. You're not gonna keep the

(19:37):
wolves away if you don't have a fire. Like I'm
in San Francisco right now as we record this, and
I have a fire on me at all times, because famously,
San Francisco is a city with a wonderful history of
fires that I want to celebrate. You know, all of
the good fires, San Francisco. It's called knowing your history.
That's right, That's right. Um. So Romania in the years

(19:59):
after Dracula, who gets who gets murdered? Uh before he's
very old again, none of these Romanian princes last all
that long. So Romania spends a lot of most of
the medieval period as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire um.
And this actually, this state of affairs last until pretty recently. Um,

(20:19):
the country does not get its independence until the Russo
Turkish War of eighteen seventy seven to eighteen seventy eight. Um,
it becomes an independent kingdom with a hohensall learned regent.
So you know whenever they have these because this happens
a lot where you're you're having these chunks of Europe
become independent from either their former masters or from the
Ottomans or whatever, and they all need kings, right because

(20:42):
it's still the attitude in the eighteen hundreds that every
new country ought to have some sort of kings. So
there there's this kind of like constant It causes a
lot of conflict. This is a lot of what sets
up World War One. But um, Romania, because of how
close it is to Germany, winds up with a hawns
all learned region, which which, like theoretic lee should mean
that they're going to side with the Germans on everything. Um,

(21:04):
that's actually not what happens in practice, but that's certainly
what the Germans think when when they make sure Romania
gets this uh this guy who's related to the Kaiser. Um. Yeah, well,
I mean it's also the mess that by the time
World War one rules around, like the country has this
hahns all learned king, but it also has a queen

(21:25):
who's one of Queen Victoria's grandchildren, which is also super common, Right,
everybody's got one of Victoria's kids or grandkids somewhere in
their fucking royal family. They're collecting pokemon, yeah, exactly, um,
and the hohans all learns have caught at least one.
And she's actually, she's actually kind of rad um. They

(21:45):
have this horrible war um in like nineteen twelve nineteen
thirteen where Romania tries because when Romania becomes independent, they
don't have Transylvania, right, Transylvania is still property of the Hungarians.
So at one point they invade aid Hungary right before
World War One, and it goes just absolutely terribly. But
Queen Mary, who's this um victorious grandkid, winds up like

(22:09):
working as a combat nurse in this front line position
and it it really she becomes very beloved by the
Romanian people, and she seems to be legitimately the only
royal in Europe during this period of time who doesn't
completely suck because while the rest of them are starting
a series of of wars that will kill ten civilians.
She's just sort of like working as a trauma nurse
the entire time's like trying to do good. Yeah, she

(22:33):
seems dope. Actually, the Hungarians, I don't know if you've
ever covered this on the thing, but what do you
know about like their nomenclature, right, like the history of
that name that they were just so it was yeah,
so they're Magyars and then when people saw them, they
were like, ah, they fight like the Huns. It's sort
of like how we called Native Americans. They do whole

(22:57):
like you guys are Hungarians, You're like the Huns and
there like, no, we are our own people. That's that
reminds me of like where the word barbarian came from,
which is that the Greeks just thought everyone who wasn't
Greek sounded like they were going by bar bar bar
bar bar all the time. Yeah. It's like, uh yeah,
racism before racism, it's it's it's that deep racism. Um,

(23:20):
it's true pure races. Yeah, it's absolutely uncut by the
later you know, the corruption that would enter racism later. Yeah,
it before racism got so commercial, you know. M Yeah,
just a bunch of guys looking at people who live
over the hill near them and saying it sounds they
all talk weird. Yeah yeah, they did it for the

(23:41):
love of the game. Yeah yeah, it's the the Honus
Wagner of racism. That's the that's Europeans in this well,
at least in ancient history. So um. Yeah. So you've
got Romania. They have this disastrous war where they try
to take and the reason why they lose the war

(24:01):
because it goes well for like a day and then
everybody gets sick from mosquitoes and starts dying, which is
not an uncommon story. And yeah, um, but outside of that,
when kind of World War one starts to break out,
Romania is kind of in in a decent position because
they've got this king, their first king, Carol, uh, the

(24:25):
first who's in charge right up until nineteen fourteen, and
he drops kind of right before the war drums starts sounding,
and the king who follows, Ferdinand, is as a pretty
smart guy, and it's like, I don't think World War
one's gonna go well for anybody. I don't want to
get involved in this ship. I just would like to
I can sell food and fuel because Romani has got
a hell of a lot of oil. I'll just sell
that shipped to the Germans and we won't send all

(24:47):
of our guys off to die, which is a good
strategy um and and would have been a winner if
they had stuck with it um. But they are not
going to stick with it um now. Part of the
reason why the new king is kind of hesitant to
get involved in World War One and doesn't want to
like is because he doesn't want to risk upsetting the peasants. Um.
Romanian political history in this period up to pretty much

(25:10):
the modern day, a huge amount of it is kind
of based around the struggle between these urbanized populations which
are are still a very small chunk of the country
in the late eighteen hundreds UM and the majority of
the country, which is the peasantry and the peasants, especially
in the late uh in the early nineteen hundreds, late
eighteen hundreds are they're not quite surfs, but they also

(25:33):
are basically renting land from the whatever noble owns it
um and paying them kind of ruinous taxes in order
to get to farm it. So it's kind of a
worse situation than being a serf because they're actually like
they're technically free, but they have to pay their boss being,
you know whatever nobles in charge of the area for

(25:55):
the privilege of getting to work the land enough to
produce enough food to not starve to death, which is
a bad Like one of the most common foods that
Romanian peasants live on in this period of time is
like cheese that's infested with maggots. Um that and like
pickled vegetables is a lot of their their their diet
um magot cheese. Still it's like illegal, but it's like

(26:18):
a super delicacy from there, right they still do that.
I don't know if it's from Roman. I know there's
a cheese in Sicily that's all maggoty, like. I think
there's probably a few different versions of it. But back
in the day it is not a nice food, right
it's I think maybe now it's become a delicacy. But
then it's like, well, we're not gonna not eat this
cheese just because it's filled with maggots, because otherwise we'll die,

(26:41):
so speat. The products and services that support this podcast
will add maggots to any order you make. Hit us up.
Mm hmmm, we're back and I just had a HOGI

(27:01):
made entirely out of maggots delicious. Oh yeah, yeah. Maggot
proteins the cleanest burning protein out there. Um, you can't
do better than maggot's. That's that's that's the motto of
this podcast behind the Bastards. You can't do better than maggots. No, No,
that's it. It's the true super feud. If you just

(27:25):
all you actually need in your diet, just a fifty
fifty mix of maggots and a sai berries and and
you'll never die. H Yeah. I looked up Cassu Marzoo
just to see that's the cheese, and boy that was
the Romanian one. Yeahah, it's it's like a pecorino from
sheep's milk. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is not a
delicacy at the time. Yeah. Um. So one of the

(27:48):
big like reasons that that King fred Frederick doesn't want
to go to war, doesn't want to get involved in
World War One, is because he doesn't feel like he
has a good handle on the peasantry kind of as
they go into this period. And a big part of
why is that there's an uprising and like nineteen oh seven, right,
which is you know, pretty recent still in nineteen fourteen,

(28:09):
and this uprising, this peasants uprising starts because this guy
named I think, I think it's basically pronounced John Dohesku
traveled to a protest outside of the mayor's house in
a town called Flamazi, and Dohescu and his fellow peasants, again,
they're basically starving. This feudal system that that governs their
lives is super corrupt, and the way that it works

(28:31):
is you've got these these royals who own the land,
and these royals basically higher a group of middlemen to
manage it for them. And so the middlemen get their
money off of skimming what they can off the top,
and anything they're skimming is extra ship that the peasants
are paying for, right in addition to the pretty ruinously
high taxes that the royals are imposing. Um Kenyan in

(28:52):
his book notes that the peasantry in Romania is quote
so comprehensively exploited that they were effectively paying their landlords
for the priv ledge of working. So there's this protest
outside of the mayor's house and these peasants, including John Dohesku,
wind up outside yelling at this estate manager who's again
kind of like this middle manager type guy and he
throws a rock at one of them and it hits

(29:14):
Dohescu in the eye. Um. This, for whatever reason startship
you know sometimes like oh, yeah, that's gonna star ship.
You ever been hit in the eye of the rock? Yeah, yeah,
You're not not gonna throw a punch after that, no, sure, sure,
But this also starts on a bigger scale, like everyone
gets outraged on the behalf of this guy. Um, which

(29:34):
should like this, you know, it happens here too, Like
you'll have the same kind of horrible violence being done
by the same people every day, and then one day
suddenly thousands of people take to the streets, right, um,
and and this is this is that version of that
thing happening in Romania. So the peasants around Dohescu form
a mob and they start going through town and attacking

(29:56):
all of the middlemen that these local aristocrats have been
using to manage their land. And for a variety of reasons,
most of these middlemen are Jewish, right, that's just who
the aristocracy is, like, yeah, we'll have these guys. It's
actually kind of a conscious decision by the aristocracy because
like if you have if like, you have this group
of people managing your stuff and they're all Jewish. When

(30:17):
the peasants get angry, you can just use racism to
deflect from the fact that you're really the one responsible
for their suffering. Um so that that works very well
in this case. And so the peasants revolt that follows
is both an act of protest against economic exploitation that
is very justified and a vicious, a vicious racist program

(30:38):
that is not justified. You know what's funny is every
time I do the show that phrase vicious racist program
shows up, I'm just like, oh yeah, let's bring it on.
Let's see, let's see who's doing terrible things to to
decent people. To be fair, we keep bringing you on
for episodes that are about Europe from like eighteen hundred

(30:59):
to nineteen five D So you're gonna have to talk
about it's gonna nowhere that doesn't have them a little
playfully violent anti semitism to get us through the day
every time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good stuff, good stuff. So
the Peasants Revolt starts with these peasant mobs marching through towns,
dragging Jews out of their homes and then lighting the

(31:19):
homes on fire. Um. But as the revolt wears on,
because it's nineteen o seven, nineteen o five, Russia has
just had an unsuccessful socialist revolution, and a lot of
these revolutionaries who are kind of like on the on
the run from the Czar, wind up heading over to
Romania and they start preaching to the masses that like, hey, guys,
the Jews as a group are not responsible for your

(31:39):
suffer ng. It's the property holding class who's exploiting you. Um.
And this actually has a positive impact. There's there's less programs.
Kind of later in the Peasants uprising, they were just
attacking rich people. So that's good. Yeah, they relaxed a
little bit. Yeah. Um. The whole thing comes to a
head in April of nineteen o seven when six thousand

(32:00):
peasants gather with axes to protest for redistribution of land right.
And what they're protesting for is like, we we want
to own the land that we live on and work
our entire lives, rather than it being owned by some
guy who can just like jack up the rent and
starve us effectively. So the government of Romania is like,
absolutely not, because the people who have control of the

(32:21):
artillery are the people who own the land. So those
people just have the military fire artillery directly into the crowd,
killing sex six people in a matter of minutes. By
the yeah, I know, it's pretty well. Actually, by the end,
I mean the whole revolt, they kill about eleven thousand people.
Um so if they do they killed, that's a good
number of people killed. That's pretty good. That's pretty good

(32:44):
solid for a few minutes, if I'm being honest, like
it's it takes man hotten project level ship to get
numbers like that, uh so quickly. Yeah, yeah, you know,
this goes on for a few months, but like eleven
thousand people, it's pretty blood So King Ferdinand, who takes
over seven years after this, is like, we just tested

(33:06):
the peasantry a little bit and it we got closer
to losing control than we want to admit. So I
really don't want to, like have to conscript a bunch
of people and deal with the problems that that might cause.
We dipped the toes in a little bit and found
out that we get butchered. So yeah, and staying out
of World War One absolutely would have been the right
call for Romania. But here's the problem. Jeff, British people exist,

(33:31):
and British people keep whispering in the Romanian King's ear.
Oh god, not you want that Transylvania. Do you What
are you doing? My English? Oxen? What I'm doing, I'm
doing an English accent, Sophie. He was like, night, Jesus,

(33:53):
we got a little comm in. So so that's what
the British Empire is whispering into the ears of King Frederick. Um.
And you know, basically the promise they're making him is
again like hey, you, you guys are like Transylvania's majority
Romanian population, it's controlled by Hungary. We agree that's unjust.
If you come into the war on our side and

(34:15):
like help us throw us a wrench in the fucking
German war effort, will make sure that you wind up
with this greater Romania thing that all the nationalists in
Romania are are super gung ho about when the war
finally ends. Um, and eventually, this this kind of thought
of getting Transylvania back and all of these others a

(34:36):
couple of other provinces too, is too enticing for the
king and sort of the nationalists in the Romanian government
to not try to do so. In nineteen sixteen, Romania
enters World War One on the side of the the
unentant and they attack the Central Powers. This briefly goes
well for about six weeks. Romania takes back like a

(34:58):
bunch of Transylvania, they take a couple other areas from
from Hungary. They're like they're having a real good time
for for like six weeks um. But then then then
the Germans show up. Now, the Imperial German Army is
an army so competent that it took the entire world
to beat them in this war, like literally everyone else.

(35:19):
It's reminded. It's a good reminder that the German military
and obviously, you know when you trace back to Otto
von Bismarck and basically his description of creating a country
based on the world's greatest army, like that was his
whole thing. Yeah, and like so like yeah, like that's
gonna be that's gonna be a big deal because they're
so they're just so good at war. That's been like

(35:42):
their whole thing. They've been training for this, and they
are the Germans at this point are obviously they are
tied up two years into the war on the Western Front,
which has killed more men more quickly than probably any
other war in history prior to this point. They're also
fighting all of Russia, which is a fifth of the
planet's land mass, not that far from Romania. And then
Romania enters and so the Germans take like a tiny

(36:05):
little chunk of their forces and they send it towards
Romania and they just curb stomp them like yeah. Within days,
it becomes clear that like, oh, they are going to
occupy the entire country, Romania will no longer be in it,
Like they're coming for the capital. The Royals start fleeing, right,
they are fucking getting the hell out of town. Um.

(36:27):
And so the British decide, well, first off, this didn't work. Um.
Clearly Romania did not have what it took to take
the Germans out of the fight. So fu around they
found out, um, which you know, as the British Empire
is always our preference someone other than us find out.
But now we have this problem. Romania has like basically

(36:50):
the largest oil reserves in Europe is certainly at this point,
and Germany does not have any oil right on its
own pretty much. So the Germans are about to gain
access to these oil fields that would effectively allow them
to gain an enormous material advantage in this war. That
is kind of a squeaker. So the Germans send over

(37:12):
or the British send over a guy, this lieutenant colonel
named John Norton Griffiths, who sounds like a war crimes
guy and is about to do him a war crime
because he lights every oil field in Romania on fire. Um,
it's just like set it all on fire. Fuck this
ship he does like a Saddam Iraq. Yeah. Yeah, it

(37:34):
like blots out the sun. It's obviously it's an ecological disaster, um,
but it's a military success. He does stop the Germans
from gaining access to Romania's fuel reserves um, which you
know is the smart play on a millie. It's just awful. Um.
But yeah, that's what of of the natural resources. Yeah. Yeah,

(37:54):
So Romania does not do well in in World War One.
They get occupied the Germans, but a couple of years later,
the Germans eventually do lose the war. And when they
lose the war, Romania actually kind of winds up in
a really good position and we're not going to get
into like all of the wheeling and dealing that occurs
but you know, a lot of folks feel like they
kind of a lot of folks who side with the

(38:16):
central powers kind of feel like they get fucked over.
This is particularly an issue with the Italians right where
italyast like we did all this fucking dying fighting Austria
and we got basically nothing at the end of the war. Like,
what the fund is wrong with you people? Um, Romania
does really well, they get Transylvania. Um. Like the British,
to their credit, actually do give them what they had

(38:36):
promised here. And so after World War One, Romania is
like thirty or forty larger, and as a substantially larger population,
a whole lot of resources and really productive land. Um.
That's called buying low and sell high. That's right. They're
they're like, we're not gonna do much to help you
win this war, but we will reap the benefits they

(38:58):
bought the dip, Yeah, European civilization, the moon. Yeah. So
after World War One, romanias in this really interesting position.
They are subject to a lot of the same forces
that are you know, going wild in Russia. This is
the height height of the Russian Civil War. Um. So
the left has this huge surge in popularity. But Romania

(39:19):
also has a pretty stable constitutional monarchy with this like
parliamentary system right um and so because and you know,
it's interesting that it works this way. But rather than
kind of all of the the energy on the left
that is obviously like plays a huge role in what
happens in Russia, rather than that leading to the establishment

(39:41):
of a super radical political part left wing political party
in Romania that wants to get rid of the monarchy,
changed the nature of the state entirely institute a socialist state,
they get a left wing political party called the National
Peasants Party UM, which is is very large. I think
it wins like seventy eight per end of the vote
and it's it's most successful election UM. And it's advocating

(40:04):
for like a lot. Well it's because they're saying, like,
we want land reform, right, this thing that they had
just had an uprising about. But they don't ever get
like an organized large communist movement. And in fact, for
most of the twenties and thirties, there's maybe a thousand
like organized communists in all of Romania, which is not
a ton, like there's several million people in the country.

(40:26):
So it's it's a very small population. Now, the organized
far right is a lot larger than the communist left. Obviously,
it's still a smaller chunk of the country because Romania,
Romanian people tend to vote sort of progressive left in
this period. Um, but the organized far right in Romania
is very aggressive and very organized, and they start carrying

(40:47):
a lot out, a lot of violent fascist marches and
particularly attacks against the Jewish population of towns and cities,
and it becomes more and more common in the twenties
and thirties. Um. So yeah, uh uh. This is the
country and the political situation that our hero for this week,
Nikolai Chowchesco, is born into on January twenty three, nineteen eighteen.

(41:10):
So he like comes into being right as this, you know,
post World War One, Romania starts to be a thing.
His father, whose name is Andrew Toa, owned a small
farm in a village called scournish Cesti. And I'm I'm
gonna try on the names here. I listened to pronunciations.
I'm not going to get all of these right, guys.
I'm sorry, there's a lot of Romanian names and I

(41:30):
I look, I scored a sesty's probably close enough. His
dad raised cheap and worked part time as a tailor.
The family was about as poor as it as possible
to be, uh, and any money that did come into
them went swiftly to Andrewda's drinking habit. So he is
a religious extremist and an alcoholic. Um And for mysterious,

(41:50):
mysterious reasons, Nikolai Chesko is going to decide he does
not want to live around this guy for much longer. Um.
Very shocking. Uh. So there's this journalist, Romanian journalist Catalan
Gruia who interviewed people in Curchescu's hometown after his demise.
Here's what he writes about Andrew dub. He didn't take
care of his kids. He stole, he drank, he was

(42:11):
quick to fight, and he swore, said the old priest
from scorn Sesti. His mother was a submissive, hard working woman.
The families slept on benches along the walls of a
two room house. Corn mush was their staple food. Nikolai
went to the village school for years. The teacher taught
simultaneous classes for different years in a one room schoolhouse.
The young Cechescu did not have books, and he often
went to school barefoot, an outsider from early on, he

(42:34):
did not have friends. He was anxious and unpredictable. You
brought a lot of Boston energy to the beginning there. Oh,
thank you, thank you. Quick to fight all the time,
always down at the chowder house. That's right, Yeah, that's right,
very good, getting into fights at the duncan um Yeah,
and curchesco. He doesn't ever fit in, right, He's not.

(42:56):
He certainly doesn't fit in in this small rural village. Um.
He's an anxious kid. He's got a stutter. Um. He
seems to be pretty smart. Surviving records indicate he did
well in primary school. He had like the third highest
grade in his class. But education was never going to
be like a focus on his early life. Uh. And
in nineteen twenty nine, at age eleven, he leaves home.

(43:17):
He just is like fuck fuck living with an abusive
religious fundamentalist. I'm going to go to buch Arest and
live with my sister. Um so he ever and he
yeah at eleven when hard back then, Yeah, eleven is
like a hard twenty eight like nowadays. Yeah, eleven is
like eleven is like twenty eight from like the grizzledest

(43:40):
guy that you knew in your twenties, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
the toughest nails. This is like lift for ultimate fighting. Yeah,
he has as many stories of woe, is like a
seventy five year old Irish farmer by this point, Like
when you see those like pictures of like twenty five
year olds coming back from war, You're just like, oh no, yeah.

(44:01):
So he he gets to buk arreest he moves in
with his sister. He's he's working as a shoemaker, and
this is what first brings him into contact with Romania's
fairly small communist movement, because the guy he apprenticed for
was a member of the Romanian Communist Party and he
takes Nikolai under his wing. This is an act of
pure happenstance. Again, the National Peasants Party is pretty left wing,

(44:22):
uh and a lot more popular. Um So, there's just
not a whole lot of people who do fall in
with the Communists in this period, and the fact that
Nikolai wound up under the influence of one of the
fairly few active Communists in buch Arest is a wild
stroke of faith that would prove pretty bad for everyone involved,
including the Communists. At first, though Chachko just did odd
jobs for his boss. The Romanian Communist Party had been

(44:45):
made illegal by the king um because royals don't tend
to like communists, um and vice versa. So even basic
things like sending letters and distributing newspapers had to be
done underground. It was illegal to advocate for the Communist Party.
So Nikolai is kind of a low level errand boy
helping them do this, helping them keep up communication between

(45:06):
different cells, helping them distribute newsletters and all that stuff
in this communist underground. That's kind of growing up in
buch Arest. Um. He did not occupy a privileged position,
and and to his credit, he seems to be the
kind of kid who had no problem throwing down in
the street for his beliefs. He is not like um,
he's not like taking a taken a the easy jobs right,

(45:28):
not arrest. He's not a Twitter pundit here, No, he
is not a Twitter pundit. One thing you have to
give the kid is that he is putting his skin
in the game. His first arrest is at age fifteen,
when he gets picked up in this massive street fight
outside of a strike. Basically, he's like siding with a
bunch of striking workers and the police show up and
he winds up brawling in the street with the fucking

(45:49):
cops and such. Next year, if you're if somebody's ever
like they were caught brawling in the street with the cops,
you're like, all right, Yeah, at this point, he's a
fifteen year old boy who's been arrested for throwing hands
in order to him striking workers. Yeah. The next year
he gets busted for circulating a petition protesting the treatment

(46:12):
of rail workers who had unionized illegally. Right, so the
state is punishing these workers because they're not allowed to
unionize and they try to, and he circulates a petition
being like that's fucked up, and he goes to jail again. Um,
so it's it's some historians. There's a debate here between
at least the people that I've encountered, as to whether
or not is Certescu a a committed, ideologically committed communist

(46:33):
or is this kind of just something he falls into
and winds up committing to because of other reasons. Um
Kittlin Gria puts it this way. The switch from a
world in which he couldn't find his place, his own
village to another in which he still couldn't find his place.
The intimidating city marked him. His initiation into the marginalized
movement of the communist was his alternative solution for integrating

(46:54):
into social life, says sociologist Pavel Campingu, author of the
book Chochesco the count Own. So it's one angle that
that that that camping you and and it certainly seems
Gruya are pushing, which is that like, he doesn't really
fit in anywhere, and the communist movement, even though it
is a very fringe and dangerous to be involved with,
it offers him like this sense of belonging that he

(47:15):
hasn't found anywhere else. So this is kind of his
way of having a social life. Um, there's a different argument,
and Paul Kenyon makes it in his book. Uh that
is also kind of adjacent to that one. It's just
it's interesting. Uh. Quote contemporary said he had little genuine
interest in politics and might easily have chosen the Green
Shirts or the Green Shirts of Qadriano's Iron Guard, which

(47:38):
is like the fascist movement. But Nikolai Chowchesku wanted to
meet girls, and some of his friends had told him
the prettiest were in the Communist Party. So I don't know,
maybe both of those things are true. That he falls
in with the Communists because it's the kind of the
only place he fits in socially, and also part of
why he thinks he'll fit in socially there is someone
tells him the prettiest girls are Communists. Seems like he

(48:00):
might be just going with the flow, that his ideologies
are not ironclad, that he's just like, yeah, alright, I'm
going to go to there. I think that seems realistic,
that like he's looking for friends and he's looking to
hit on chicks, and the Communists offer him that opportunity.
And also over time, is he like fights with them
in the street and does time, he just kind of

(48:22):
gets more committed because when you when you do prison
time for a cause, maybe you wind up reading about it,
which I think is kind of the way his his
his story goes, Also, you don't want to double you
want to double down if you've done damn, If like
you've damaged yourself because of your commitment to a belief.
It's so much harder to reject that belief than it

(48:42):
is to be like, let me tell you why I
was right. I still defend my choice to get a
Sega Genesis over a Supernintendo, even though I know I
was wrong. Well, and as I always say, being a
Second Genesis kid in the nineties is the being a
communist underground activist of of nineteen twenties Romania. You know, same,

(49:03):
essentially identical experiences, right down to the fact that Jeff
you in the nineteen seventies wound up in charge of
a small Eastern European nation that you then led into
tremendous calamity. How did I do it? You know, things
have happened. You should at least you didn't get a Dreamcast.

(49:24):
Then then we'd be dealing with a death toll in
the millions. Let me tell you, I had a friend
you could just bootleg games on Dreamcast. What a time
that was. You could just these days Eugen's ears, don't know,
with your with your steams and your whatever Nintendo's you got. Now,
we we used to have real variety in gaming. There

(49:44):
was that game with the Dolphin. There was taxi game
that was kind of like Grand Theft Auto. Was that
Simpson's game that was a rip off of that taxi game? Oh?
It was a glorious age. Uh huh, what a time
to be alive. That was I worked video game I
worked at the Toys Arrests video game section then, so
I'm like, oh, I can name all of these things.

(50:05):
So Nikolai Chochcu is uh, you know, he's the he's
the he's the second dreamcast, uh, owner of the of
the Romanian political spectrum. I guess um by which I mean.
He was very, very vocal about his beliefs and very
committed at a certain point, at least to them. But
he was also not the most competent activist, and a

(50:28):
number of his fellow communists would later argue that, like
the fact that he kept getting arrested for the cause
was not evidence that he was like a very good
at what he was doing. More than just that like
he was he had like a short fuse and would
get into fights, and he kept getting arrested, and he
was bad at hiding from the cops and and not
getting scooped up. It was like, let's put him in

(50:49):
charge of everything. Yeah, yeah, just fighting everybody in the streets.
One of the fun things about Esco is no one
ever says that, and he winds up in charge anyway,
he's you know, it's very Andrew Jackson energy. Yeah. Um, yes,
he is here. He'll have one or two things in
common with Jackson. Um although I guess his big wheel

(51:12):
of cheese would have been filled with maggots. Although I
think Jackson's big wheel of cheese was probably filled with
maggots too. Um. So. Regardless the fact that he keeps
doing time, and he keeps getting the funk beaten out
of him by the cops and tortured and all that stuff,
obviously this earns some respect even from the people who
are like Jesus, dude, like try running, you know, like

(51:33):
trying getting arrested every time you go out into the street.
That's a New England thing too, where it's like I
know I'm gonna die, but I'm going to fight you
in this public restroom, yeah doing like Yeah, the entire
world is his waffle house in South Carolina. Um and yeah,
he he gets busted repeatedly. His biggest prison sentence so

(51:54):
far comes when he gets sentenced to two years in
ninety eight. Um. And and by that time he is
a pretty notable figure in the Romanian Communist Party, even
though he's not universally respected now. Nineteen thirty eight is
an important year in Romanian politics. After the death of
King Ferdinand, his young son Michael was technically regent, but
a council of guys governed in his stead. They were

(52:17):
sympathetic to the main conservative party in Romania, and when
the National Peasants Party wins a resounding victory in the elections,
the head of the National Peasants Party decides to try
and reduce his enemies power by bringing in a new king. Right.
So you've got this child king who has like this
guy basically governing for him as a as regent um,

(52:37):
and that guy is sympathetic to the Conservatives. So when
this kind of liberal left party takes power, they decide,
well to bring in a new king who wants to
work with us. Then we can sideline this guy and
that'll be good for the Peasants Party. Unfortunately, the new
king they pick is Prince Carol the Second. Now Carol
the Second up to this point has been like a
playboy royal. He spent actually a lot of his life

(52:59):
outside Romania because he falls in love with this chick,
but he's not allowed to marry her because she's not
royal enough. So he's like fucking move man, Yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna go live somewhere else with this broad um.
And he had been, as far as I can tell,
kind of a political most of his life. Again, he's
mostly interested in like fucking and partying um, and was
probably most famous in when at the outbreak of World

(53:22):
War One, he's in a military unit like a lot
of royals are, and he immediately deserts. He's just like
absolutely not. Oh yeah, man, i am not doing a
World War One. So again, unproblematic so far, but once
he gets brought in as king, he well, I mean,
he immediately proves to be problematic. Actually, so, Carol the
Second effectively derails the progressive, land justice oriented policies of

(53:44):
the National Peasants Party while playing the conservative and the
growing far right parties off of each other. And this
is a pretty impressive balancing act at the time that
he's able to kind of like weaponize all these groups
against each other to solidify his own power. Throughout this period,
the Great Depression hits and Romania is obviously suffering as
much as at least as much as everywhere else is.

(54:05):
And the fact that Carol the Second is kind of
derailing the Peasants Party's ability to push for real reform
leads leaves a lot of voters to abandon them and
abandon kind of the progressive left and start sighting with
these weird domestic fascists that have started to become very
popular in Romania called the Iron Guard. Never happen here, no, no, no,

(54:29):
It's only happens in the Romania this one time. So
the Iron Guard are also called the Legionaries or the
Legionary Movement. Again, like Romania, there's a big heart on
especially in kind of like the nationalist side of things,
for for Roman history, so they are kind of consciously
like talking back to their Roman heritage and calling these
guys the legion Eary Movement. UM. The Iron Guard are

(54:50):
founded by a fascist Death Squad member and a medieval
myst mystic named Cornelio Quadriano UM and Kadriano will an
episode on him at some point. He's a fascinating fascist
and one that we don't talk about enough. He's fascinating,
he is fascinating. UM. He is kind of a mix
between like there's an element of him that's like the

(55:14):
Gavin McGinnis proud boy type where he forms this street
fighting organization. But he also like he becomes famous because
he assassinates a dude like he. One of the things
he's he tells his young followers is you need to
be forming death squads and murdering people, and it's okay
if we get executed, like that's actually dope. If we
get killed for assassinating leftists, like, that's the thing that

(55:35):
we should seek to do. Um So he definitely sucks.
Another one of his beliefs is that he needs to
father thousands of children with women at all levels of
Romanian society because the saint that he liked, he believes
did that too. Um So it's a good way to
find a saint man, which saint is all about straight
fucking this horny fascist, uh fucking mystic who yeah, dresses

(56:00):
like himidieval like basically dresses in rin fair gear, marching
from town to town and inciting pagrams. Right, that's Kadrian,
who's like primary method of tour. He's an anti smack tour. Yeah. Now,
obviously Hitler loves this guy. Hitler is a big Kadrian
new fan. Um and as his means power, the Nazis

(56:21):
starts shipping guns over to the Iron Guard, right, kind
of like underground, here have some guns. We'll be over
there pretty soon, guys, so get ready. Um. King Carol
the Second he finds the Iron Guard useful in some ways,
and he's, you know, perfectly willing to overlook a few pagrams,
even though his mistress is Jewish, um, because he's like, hey,

(56:41):
you know, whatever helps me, whatever helps me stop these
peasant people from reducing the power of of the royals.
Political anti semites were selective in their choice of enforcement.
That's shocking. Another thing that only occurred once in Romania.
So King Carol the Second generally considers the fascist useful,
whereas the socialists and the Peasants Party people they want

(57:02):
to reduce his power, so he he sides with them
a lot throughout the twenties, um, in early thirties. But
then in like nineteen thirty seven, the Iron Guard starts
to win larger and larger shares of the vote. I
think they top out at of the vote in the
thirty seven election. Um, and he's like, oh shit, well,

(57:22):
I can't really control these guys necessarily right like the
they were it was a good bet to back them earlier,
but now Quadrian who's like getting within spitting distance of
real power and he doesn't owe me anything, right, Like
he's not I can't actually trust this guy. He could
fuck me up even worse than these Peasants party people would.
So Carol the second starts to panic. So hard for

(57:43):
me not to hear you go party people whenever you
say party people. By the way, yeah, I mean most
of these parties would have would have sucked, asked. I
mean I assumed the National Peasants Party parties would have
been Okay, not a lot of there it is happening
and apparently, hey, all the all the hot people are
at the mean this party, so that sounds that sounds
like it could be good. Um, although you might wind

(58:04):
up fucking Nikolai Chauchesco, which is a mixed bag, although
Sophie says he's hot, so you know, Sophie is down.
Only one photo. I take it back, only one photo. Oh,
he was just one of those guys that got caught
at a good angle once. It looked almost like a
mug shot. I don't know if it actually is or not,
but there was like one photo and then you like

(58:26):
look at the rest of your like, oh no, sharing
the hot Stalin photo. Yeah yeah, which is not not
act shockingly, you can't rely on on pictures of Joseph
Stalin to know how he actually looked. Um, But you
know what, you can rely on Robert Us and no

(58:47):
one else and the products and services that support the show.
Well sure, I just don't separate between us and the
product and services that support our show. You know, we're
one beautiful amalgam that you should just I have into
and let it. Let it, let it subsume you swim
in us, swimming us, stop or it in here. You

(59:10):
know what, I love goods and services that are provided
by the sponsors of this podcast. As a matter of fact,
it should be known that I am a subscriber slash
purchaser slash user of all of these things. Yet Jeff's
buying gold, He's joined the Washington State Highway Patrol um,
He's he's doing all of the things our sponsors are
just to do. He's engaging in sports betting. Yep, yep.

(59:31):
I'm doing all those things, just really doing them. And
we're back. So in the seven elections, the Iron Guard,
when the vote and the Peasants Party has like a
collapse of their power. You know, they they've gotten something

(59:51):
north of like a few years ago, and they get
the vote in that election, which is short of the
I mean that means that they have they do technically
the best, but they need forty of the vote to
form a government. Right, so since they don't meet that threshold,
the King's going to get to help form the government.
And that's that's that's not going to end well. And

(01:00:12):
I'm gonna quote from the book Children of the Night
here and now it was for the King to decide
who had become prime minister. He knew the public wanted
to change, and began looking down the table of results.
In fourth place, behind Quadriano's legionaries was the moderately fascist
National Christian Party led via Octavian Goga. The anti semitic
poet was a great friend and supporter of the King

(01:00:32):
and Quadriano's most bitter rifle. He had scored just nine
percent of the vote. As far as Carol was concerned,
he was perfect for the job, and anti semitic poet
is the most fascinating combination of two words in history. Yeah,
just just just a racist pope. But a moderate fascist
would be like Nazi Ballerina, Like, there's just there's certain

(01:00:55):
words that you don't necessarily conflate the two things together. Yeah,
and you don't. Also, you don't hear a lot of
moderate fascists uh these days, but I guess it is.
I mean it is actually a thing in this period,
Like it's a it's reasonable to draw a line between
the two of them because the Iron Guard UM and
the National Christian Party are pretty pretty bitter rivals and

(01:01:16):
spent a lot of time fighting each other. I would
add this. I would add that we have that here
with the quote law and order. Uh, people that that
really they're like, well, you know, I don't believe in
all of these things, but you know, we should make
sure that anybody that commits a crime is shot in
the face. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's those weirdos who are like,
I think we should execute people for spraying graffiti during protests,

(01:01:38):
but also funck the January six folks, where it's like, yeah,
you're a moderate fascist. Yeah yeah, yeah, so that's who. Uh,
that's who. Uh. This moderate fascist poet uh anti Semite
Googa gets made Prime Minister by the King and within

(01:01:58):
two days of his appointment, um, he has shut down
both of the large Jewish owned newspapers in Romania. UM.
He has the Bucharest Bar suspend the licenses of every
Jewish lawyer that they can find. Uh. He resends the
right to sell liquor and tobacco by Jewish shopkeepers. UM.
And he withdraws citizenship from all two hundred and twenty

(01:02:20):
thousand naturalized Romanian Jews. Now, so I'm going to go
out on a limb here. Not not cool, not cool,
not cool. Sorry if I'm sorry if I'm courting controversy here.
But that is an uncool move, kind of a dick move,
some would say. And this podcast is brought to you
by the letter P for programs, because that's what that's
what comes next is there's a bunch of programs because

(01:02:44):
I don't support that that specific one. I do not do.
I do not I do not consume that. Yeah, that
I mean, we never know who's going to sponsor the
show in the programmatic ads, so it's not impossible. But
we we we do, we do. We do have a
hard no program line our in our ad sheet and
back to our regularly scheduled program. Um. So there's a

(01:03:08):
bunch of programs. There's also fighting in the streets between
and his green Shirts, uh and between these moderate fascists,
right because they're the Green Shirts are angry that they
don't get the full fascism. They get some programs, but
not all of the prams that they wanted. The idea
of a moderate anything getting into a fist fight is
just very h I want racism, I want slightly less racism.

(01:03:33):
And so this is all basically a con by King Carol,
like he knows that well, if I put you know,
this fucking yoga guy in power, he's going to do
a bunch of horrible ships and also the legionaries are
going to try to do them in uprising and it's
going to be this big, gnarly mess. And it is

(01:03:55):
this big, gnarly mess. And he uses that to be like, hey, guys,
parliamentary democracy just can't work for some reason. So you
know what we're putting an into that. I'm suspending the
constitution and now I'm the dictator king. Uh. So he
does that in the tenth of February ninety eight, he
becomes the dictator king of Romania. Um So that's cool, good,

(01:04:17):
good for him. Uh. And he's not going to be
good at this, right, Carol. The second is kind of
shitty and everything. Um. The good thing that he does,
I will give him credit for one thing, which is
that he has Quadrianna murdered. Um. They arrest him in
a bunch of his supporters and just execute them at
a black site basically, um. And that's okay, I'm i'm
I'm not against that. Um. But he mainly executes Quadrianna

(01:04:39):
because he's creating his own fascist movement that is very
deliberately ripping off the legionaries. He basically like does the
does the fucking Kirkland brand Iron Guard movement. Um. And
in fact, like Hitler and the Nazis will like make
fun of him for being a fake fascist. They're like,
look at this guy, He's not even like a real fascist.
He's just being this dude he murdered. It's like when

(01:05:01):
Transformers came out and sci Fi had trans morphers. Yeah, yeah,
he has the trans morphers of Romanian fascism. Um. He
also steals a huge percentage of the national budget to
siphon into his private bank account for when he inevitably
gets forced out of the country and has to abdicate.
We couldn't have this happening soon. Yeah, we we would
not have this happening anytime soon in America. No, No,

(01:05:24):
of course not, of course not because we don't call
them kings. So it's fine. Um. Yeah. So the you know,
he's he's not a very successful royal dictator. He is
not going to last long. Um. And while he is
kind of trying to solidify his hold on power, the
USSR and Nazi Germany are deciding that, you know, why

(01:05:46):
can't we be friends, which is what that song is about. Actually,
it's about the Molotov ribbon trop packed. Um. So the
USSR and the Nazis have them a packed and they're like,
what if we what if we met in Poland and
and kissed at the lie we draw in and enforced
with an unbelievable quantity of human blood. Fair By the way,

(01:06:06):
that song is by the band War mm hmm. So
it really it really does fit it does It's actually
kind of perfect. Um. So, yeah, the USSR and Nazi
Germany are like briefly BFFs in in taking Poland and
the Molotov ribbon trup packed. A lot of people don't
know this, but it contains some secret provisions, and one
of those secret provisions is the Nazi saying Stalin, you

(01:06:30):
can take best Arabia from Romania, which is best Arabia
is like one of the wealthiest parts of Romania. It's
like literally a third of like the population and the
economy of Romania is in best Arabia. So when the
Soviets moving and take it, Romania is like Hitler, come on, guy,
we're kind of fascists. What you want to have our back?

(01:06:50):
And Hitler's like, no, man, you killed my boy Coadrian,
Who fuck you guys? So this doesn't work great for anybody.
It does certainly does not increase Carol the seconds popular
already back home. Um, so that's gonna be one of
the reasons why he doesn't last very long. And while
all this is going on, right in the late thirties,
you've got this fascist movement becoming ascendant. Um, You've got

(01:07:11):
increasing crackdowns on the communist there's maybe seven hundred of them,
many of whom are not free in the country at
this point in time. Um. But Chochesco, you know, manages
to stay alive. Uh he in part because the fascists
are not obviously like the Romanian fascist, like all fascists,
have a lot of anti communist rhetoric, but the Communists

(01:07:31):
are not the Iron Guards focus because there's just not
that many of them, right, It's not like they're They're
actually have bigger threats from the state, um, and so
that's who they focus on. And so, you know, while
Chowchesco is continuing his his string of getting arrested for
a bunch of bullshit, he doesn't, you know, get murdered
by the Nazis. And he doesn't, I don't think spends

(01:07:52):
a particularly large amount of time fighting with them in
the street. What he does do is spend a lot
of time hitting on the women of the Romanian Communist Party.
This is how in nineteen thirty nine he meets his
future wife, Lena Petrescu. She had grown up in a
tiny rural village like Nikolai and become a Communist after
moving to the city. Elena did not do well in school.

(01:08:12):
Unlike Nikolai, she does not appear to be a good
book learner. Um she failed basically every class. But in
the nineteen thirties she gets a job at a black
market pill mill and decides that this means that she's
a chemist, So her lifelong ambition is going to be
to become a chemist because she works at a pill
mill that's basically reverse engineering diet pills and and then

(01:08:33):
pressing them. Um, if you were in a place that's
going to war a lot, having what is essentially speed
on demand, that's great. Give me some of that bootleg idea.
So in the summer of nineteen thirty nine, the Romanian
Communist Party holds a picnic uh and a small fare

(01:08:53):
that like includes a fundraising competition. And the way they
do this competition is that, like, all of the girl
roles get together and they give each of them a number, um,
and the girl who is able to basically sell the
most tickets to raise funds at this party is named
Queen of the ball. Now, Elena is not a charismatic person. Um.
She is not good at talking to people, She does

(01:09:15):
not like crowds, she is not social. She is not
someone who is going to be very good at selling
tickets on her own. But Nikolai seems that pretty much
falls in love with her at first sight. Um. He
has just gotten out of prison for distributing communist propaganda
at this point, and he is like. She obviously likes
him too, because he's this like hard son of a bit.

(01:09:36):
She's just gotten out of prison, he's like a fighter
for the party, and so they make eyes and kind
of as his first gesture to win her favor, he
threatens to beat up all of his friends if they
don't buy tickets from Elena Uh in order to so
that she can win Queen of the Ball, which is
both will show because in the future he is going
to do like the nationwide version of this, like sending

(01:09:58):
out squads to beat the ship out of people who
don't vote for the Communist Party. Also, she looks like
the kid from Dick Tracy, Yeah, does like the nerd
from Can't Hardly Wait? If you remember, she looks exactly
like that dude. Yeah she is that that's a good
way of looking at her, and and a handsome woman.

(01:10:20):
Nikolai Chochesco looks like a muppet version of a communist um.
Like he's got that big head that you could if
you look at a picture of adult Chesco, you can't
imagine him talking normally. You can only imagine the entire
of his head flapping backwards. He looks like Sam Eagle. Yeah,
he has, he has strong Sam Eagle characteristics. So, um,

(01:10:42):
this is I don't know, it's kind of sweet. It's
there's a darker tone to it because he's going to
like violently fake an election later in his life. Um,
but it's kind of sweet now that he's doing that
to to, you know, make this girl he likes feel pretty.
So that's that's kind of nice. Um in the future. Yeah,

(01:11:02):
if she if the thing is this, like look not
for nothing, but seeing her win a beauty contest, I'd
be like, all right, well this is clearly a fix.
Right Well yeahologies to her family, no, no, I mean
her family is terrible. Um anyway, so yeah, that that

(01:11:23):
goes great for him, and the two of them hook
up and they get married, and he's going to spend
a lot more time in prison. But they seem to
have legitimately been a love match. Now normally that's sweeter
than it turns out to be, because they are both
some of the worst people who have ever lived. But
I'll give him one thing. They seem to have been
legitimately in love. So that's yea monsters can be in love,

(01:11:44):
that's the thing. Yeah, Yeah, there you go. Um. In
nineteen forty Carol, the seconds dictatorship collapses with some help
from the Nazis, and the new cat in town is
a military man named Marshall Antonescu who basically runs a
military dictator ship with fascist trappings. Um. He uses the
Iron Guard UM he like puts them adjacent to power.

(01:12:07):
But Antonescu he's a monster, but he's not ideologically a
fascist like you can like. Again, this is where we
get into the terms, because he like is a major
player in the Holocaust. He's a terrible, terrible person. Not
saying that to be like, he's not as bad as
he's fascists. He just he is a military dictator. He
is not a fascist dictator. And he doesn't really like

(01:12:28):
the Iron Guard all that much. He's willing to use
them because he has he's a strong nationalist UM, but
he considers them way too radical to actually run things.
And while all this is going on, all of Romania's
Communists are either in prison or hiding out in the USSR.
And again there's maybe six or seven hundred of them
in the country. Still. The leaders of the movement in

(01:12:49):
Romania are Anna Poker, a Jewish woman and a veteran
revolutionary Stalinist and Georgie Georgiou Day. He's an electrician who
became an illegal train union organized her and spends some
of Chauchesco's first arrests are like supporting his uh Jorjiu
Day's um um illegal train strikes. And he's also a Stalinist.

(01:13:10):
Everybody's a Stalinist, right um So, Georgie was a poor
peasant with what Marxist considered unimpeachable proletarian pedigrees. He's basically
like the the archetype of the kind of guy Stalin
pushed as the ideal new Soviet man. He's this like
born poor, working his entire life organizing unions and fighting

(01:13:31):
in the streets to support the rights of workers to
organize poker. Meanwhile, she's also does a lot of time
for the cause. She is a tough lady. In fact,
she gets the nickname the Iron Woman of the Iron
Lady of Romania. But she's also an intellectual, right, She's
one of these people who comes to communism like through
reading about it and and is a is a like

(01:13:53):
as opposed to like Georgiu Day does not read books, right,
does not does not talk a lot about reading. He's not,
citing a lot of like passages from Marxist tracks, which
Parker is um. She is fiercely devoted to the cause, um. Which,
But the fact that she's also on kind of this
creative ideological side of things means that she's going to

(01:14:13):
run into conflict. During the messy early years of the
u s s R. And and for a little while
Parker is in Stalin's good books. She she flees to
the USSR for a period. She goes to this Soviet
school for revolutionaries where she studies tactics to help her
build the covert communist movement in Romania. But she also
encounters a lot of difficulties because number one, she's Jewish

(01:14:34):
and number two she's a woman, and so those things
are not good at the time, not not great at
the time. It's perfect for all of those people, especially
in America. Yeah, yeah, everything's everything's fine now, um, But
but back at the time, back back in the day, difficult. Uh.
And she also runs into problems because she she runs
a foul of Stalin and she gets executed for being

(01:14:56):
or and and her husband gets executed for being a Romanians. Right, Um,
I don't believe he is. I've never seen any evidence
that Poker's husband was spying for anyone who seems to
have been a really committed communist. But he gets executed
over in the USSR and Anna finds out about it.
While she's four years into a ten year prison sentence
in Romania. She had formed a group of prisoners called

(01:15:18):
the Women's Collective of Anti Fascist Prisoners, and when the
news reaches them that Anna's husband has been executed, she
doesn't even get time to mourn him before the other
women demand that she explained why she'd married a traitor.
A criticism session is held in prison, in which Anna
is blamed for not warning the party that her husband
was an agent provocateur, and eventually Anna tells them, I

(01:15:39):
am now racking my brain to find something, a sign
of any kind that would have led me to believe
he was an enemy of the people. I'm not placing
any doubt on the party's decision. The party knows better
than I. But I did not see anything. And as
much as I searched my soul, my recollections, my memory,
I don't find anything that could prove such a thing,
which is like almost certainly true and kind of a

(01:16:00):
devastating thing to imagine this woman who's stuck in prison
has just found out the love of her life has
been killed by the state and is now like, well,
the party must have been right in killing him, but
I just didn't see a sign of it. Um, it's
super fucked up. And the rest of the best way
to handle that is to just be like, well, look,
I'm sure the people that are still alive with the guns,

(01:16:20):
they had great reason to do that. I'm just saying
I personally didn't see it, but they probably nailed that ship.
I just maybe he was tricking me. It doesn't go
well for her because she doesn't she does not like
repudiate him fully. And so these these ladies that she's
formed into a group in prison like sind backward to
Stalin saying Anna won't denounce her dead husband. Um, And

(01:16:43):
this winds up being one of the justifications Stalin would
later use for backing Georgie over Anna, because she she
winds up. Yeah, it would be funny if it was
like a real true lies scenario where he was like
this huge, checked like Austrian sounding guys like computers. Yeah, no,
it doesn't. It doesn't work out that way, unfortunately. Um,

(01:17:07):
but yeah, Um, anyway, in any case, Georgie Georgiu Day
also spends his war years locked away in a fascist
prison because the Antonesque regime is not quite as Nazi
as the straight up Nazis wanted it to be. Um,
communists and concentration camps there did have a higher rate
of survival than they did in like Germany. So what

(01:17:27):
actually happens is once all these people get thrown into
these prisons, they kind of settle out what the communist
government of the future Romania is going to be in
these prison cells. Which is a thing that happens every
time you throw a bunch of radical revolutionaries into prison
cells together, is they wind up sorting out the future
regime that they're going to bring into power at I mean,

(01:17:48):
they got they got time, Yeah, exactly, They've got time
to like read books about communism and figure out who's
going to do what when they eventually wind up in
power comes up, we're going to have to go ahead
make a perfect communist government. Yeah, and that's exactly what's
going to happen. Um. So George you Day is obviously
I think everyone kind of is aware, just because he's

(01:18:10):
such a powerful person that he's going to wind up
being like the top man if they ever do wind
up in power and show. Cescu sees this and he
is again. He's he's got gets thrown into prison again
during the World War two years for conspiring against the
social order, and he kind of turns himself into a
gopher for George you Day. He makes himself available for

(01:18:30):
like whatever sort of side jobs they need done. He
does everything that will keep it like he doesn't care
what he has to do, no no matter how like
Banel or Low, the task is as long as it's
going to keep him on the lips of his betters. Right.
I just want to stay around George you Day, you know,
as long as he keeps seeing me and knows me
is like this guy who can handle anything he wants. Like,

(01:18:51):
that's That's what I'm gonna do. Um. Just jazz to
be on the show man. Yeah, just happy to be here, man,
Just happy to be here. Um. And this strategy works
works ended ly. As Paul Kenyon writes, they had a
lackey in prison, a young hooligan who brought them food
packages and ran messages. His name was Nikolai Chowchescu. A
twenty two year old trainee cobbler who was regularly in

(01:19:11):
trouble for fighting and delivering communist leaflets. Some of his
fellow inmates thought him weird and said that they avoided
him because he was such a bore with absolutely no
sense of humor. In the presence of big men like
George you Day, Chesko remained largely silent and deferential. He
avoided speaking whenever possible because of the stutter so severe
it made his leg shake. But he also possessed a
powerful memory and an instinctive intelligence and sat among the

(01:19:34):
future leaders, listening to everything they said and slowly learning.
And this actually works out well for him because since
he's too kind of scared and nervous to speak up
or say anything, he never winds up running a foul
of George you Day, Right, he doesn't. He's never He
puts himself in positions to help with stuff, but he's
never running anything that can like go badly and reflect

(01:19:54):
poorly on him. Um. And he he pays attention to
the social relationships and kind of worms his way closer
and closer to Georgiu Day over time, um, which which
is the I mean this Stalin does a virgin of this,
that's how he rises to power. To this. This is
a pretty effective tactic. So if you are ever in
a revolutionary underground movement that's seeking to overthrow the state

(01:20:17):
and institute a new form of government, keep an eye
out for like the weird quiet kid who just hangs
around doing chores. Shoot that guy pretty quick. Okay, that's
I do need to have in my in my Uh.
I need to have that written down. Yeah. Just drop
that kid before he gets too far. Yeah, can again

(01:20:39):
him a moves ready, you know legally. And Aubert does
not mean that literally. I do mean that literally. I
know he does. Before you overthrow the government, kill the
quiet kid in your movement, just drop them all. What
a Draculus book, Burn him in a thing, put him

(01:20:59):
all in a building and light it on fire. Only
let the loud assholes inherit power because that will never
go badly. No, we've as we just mostly just get podcasts. Yeah, exactly. Uh,
and I think that's gonna do it for our part
one of Chowchescu and uh boy, howdy have you had

(01:21:20):
a good time here? Jeffrey, It's all I could ask for. Jefftoberfest,
that's me. That's that's who I am. I'm glad that
you got my name per correct. That's right, That's right,
That's that's you and the festival dedicated to celebrating your
many accomplishments every October. I gotta say I love being here.
I love spending time with you guys. It's a real blast.
I love relearning. Sometimes I'm like that degree I got

(01:21:42):
wasn't worth anything, And I do this show every once
in a while, and I'm like, that's good enough, Jeff.
You gotta plug anything here before we roll out. Are
people still listening at this point in time when we
do plugs? Let's do it, man um. I So, depending
on when this goes up, I run a stand up show,
a live stand up show at a toy store in Burbank,

(01:22:03):
California called Mint on Card at a store called Blast
from the Past on Magnolia in Burbank, California. You can
check that out the second Friday every month. I have
a great podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends, where I
interview my friends that I think have really cool jobs
and I think you should pay attention to them. You
can get that for free, or you can get early
access to uncentered episodes with bonus content at patreon dot
com slash Jeff meg It's just my name. I also

(01:22:26):
have shows like Fine, Isn't that easy? It's so easy?
Uh Fine, my monthly show with Kim Crawl. And I
also have a great show called nerd with Drey Alvarez
that we do, um we do on the Patreon and
for free. Um, and that is we just do deep
dives on Nerdy Ship. I also do Tom and Jeff
watch Batman on the game Fully Unemployee Network, which we

(01:22:46):
keep needing to bring you onto. I know you like
you want to do Batman stuff. I do want to
do Batman stuff, by which I mean I want to
I want to beat up bore people in the street
while wearing ten thousand dollars in body armor. In armor, yeah, yeah,
of course, as as an Olympic level athlete, yes yeah,
dr martial artists, beating the ship out of a heroin

(01:23:07):
addict in an alley, perfect. Yeah, just breaking someone's back
for stealing a magnavox. Um. And you can also hear
me on Unpopular Opinion and you don't even like sports,
both on the un Popps network. UM. Other than that,
you know, thank you. This is fun. We have fun. Yes,
I had fun here. Yeah, yeah, I wish I still

(01:23:31):
have health insurance after this. That's what I'm saying. So look,
there are a lot of things said at the end there, Buddy,
I'm I'm not going to give our followers bad advice
about how to form their underground anti government terrorists cell.
The question is, why aren't you giving that advice, so Fie,
because it really like having health insurance. Well, I like

(01:23:54):
making sure that some weird quiet kid doesn't wind up
in charge up to the revolution and murders gone. I thought,
I thought, there's a lot of really like, I've encouraged
violence against so many. I hear what you're saying, and
I know that you're like, well, I know worse and

(01:24:17):
like you have. But I particularly hate Sophie. Sophie. This
is unfortunately, this was Sophie's choice to hate that Sophie's
choice joke. We did it, get it, We did the
whole thing. And she has a Boston accent in that movie. Yep,

(01:24:40):
so do I. Anyway, that's going to be the episode.
Come back tomorrow, while not tomorrow, but soon Thursday, and
there will be more more Choo, less Romanian uh history,
more more getting into the weeds of chow cho, So
stick around for that oaks. It ends in tens of

(01:25:04):
thousands of starving orphans, as it always does. Behind the
Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media
dot com, or check us out on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.