Part One: Russian Nihilists: The Gender-bending Subculture that Blew Up the Tsar

Margaret talks with Io about the science hippies of the 1860s who wore sunglasses at night and invented modern terrorism.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is a podcast about cool people who did stuff
cool cool stuff. It's a very specific title. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I've got my friend io On,
who was a designer, a comic book writer, general ne'er
do well say hello? Io? That's me Hello, Hi, thanks

(00:23):
for having me on. What are you famous for? Io? Oh? Oh,
you're gonna put me on? Black? I did I did
the BA do crime thing, and now I gotta live
with it. Cast I cast I cast a long shadow
upon this fallen age and now it haunts me. It
haunts me, and you know who else did crime? I

(00:47):
actually can't speak to their sexuality enough. Unfortunately I tried
to do that research. Oh but also speaking of crime,
we have our producer Sophie also eavesdropping if you want
to say hello hello. Um, she has us both up
to electric shock collars, but she won't need them. Will
be good. Maybe I'm not afraid of anything. So alright,

(01:12):
so this week you're really excited. This week we're talking
about that sixties subculture. Okay, you know you've heard of them.
Oh yeah, sound of Summer. Yeah, they rejected everything about
their parents worldview. They refused military service, They crammed together
into flop houses, fought for women's liberation. The boys grew
their hair long, the women cut their short. Huge beard,
weird sunglasses, funny hats. You know, the disaffected student movement

(01:35):
that lounged around listening to poetry and started a lot
of fires until inevitably their subculture was cracked down on,
leaving only hardened revolutionaries behind who started blowing shut up.
That's right, you guested Io. We're talking about the young
nihilists of the eighteen sixties Russia. Yeah, I, oh, you've

(01:57):
heard of the nihilists. Yeah, oh, I've heard of the
nihilist I you know, like like any queer grew up
in the Bay Area, I've dabbed. I've dabbled in the
modern nihilism myself. But as for the historical context, um,
I more or less only really know they we're a
bunch of bunch of wicked freaks who eventually they eventually

(02:19):
just turned the czar into blood, and that they were
all I all I essentially know is that they were
like the Michael Jordan's of blowing guys up. That's pretty cool. Yeah, well,
big fan. I've always wanted to. I've always wanted to
find a book about them, but you know, life, life

(02:39):
gets in the way and it finds a way. But
I was just waiting for one of my friends to
have a podcast about it. They're actually a little bit
more of the Thomas the Tan Pinshion of blowing dudes up,
because explain, if they really really try, they really put
work in, they might be able to eventually do it.
Or wait, no, I actually don't. Is that timeAs the

(03:01):
tank engineers the little engine that could, it's the little
engine that could they both. So the shortest version, just
to get everyone acquainted, is that there was this youth
subculture in nineteenth century Russia called the Nihilists. They were
into edgy philosophy and we'll get we'll get more into
that later, but just to start understand that they wanted
to reject everything about Zara society, and in the process

(03:24):
they decided the best way to do that was just
end the Czar, which led them to kind of more
less invent political terrorism. Alright, So to start us off,
I'm going to talk about not my favorite of the
nihilist but I feel like a good um, a good
example one, and I'm going to do that annoying mandatory
thing where I apologize for butchering basically every name I

(03:46):
run across in this uh coming hours. Um, but I'm
gonna be talking about Dmitri carcass Off. And he was
born in eighteen forty in the Russian city of Coast Roma.
He was chronically ill. He he was partially deaf. He
was not a very happy man or boy. I presume
he was the child of minor nobility, but nobility is

(04:08):
kind of meant a different thing in the middle of
the nineteenth century in Russia. Like he's so minor in
his nobility that history books always talk about how he's
a commoner. Um, he was not a commoner. He was nobility,
but you know, he wasn't like important nobility. Growing up
in a country without nobilities is all very alien to me, okay.
But so he goes off to university and he's a

(04:31):
nihilist like basically everyone else in his generation. And he
gets expelled from one school for rioting, then another school
a few years later because he wasn't paying tuition. So
we like this guy, and he joins his cousin's revolutionary
organization in Moscow called organization. It's the name of the
organization that he joins, affecting something like like the People's

(04:54):
Revolution or the People's put whatever in They really they
took a lunch break for that, for the naming portion.
I know, good for them. I respect that. It's like
three styles of nihilist namings. One of them is like
the People's blah blah blah Subcommittee of the Revolution of
Russia or whatever. Yeah, boring, one of them is organization.

(05:17):
And then there was a subsect of organization called Hell. Yeah. Oh, never,
never mind. I'm not on team organization. I'm on team Hell,
as I have been all my life. So, because organization
does a lot of propaganda and outreach and education and stuff,
Hell blackmails rich people, steal ship, and kills people, or

(05:40):
at least tries to. There's not a lot of concrete
information about Hell. In fact, a lot of the history
books argue about whether Hell is real, which is like
a lot of other books that argue about whether Hell's real. Okay, So,
so our boy Dmitri he's suicidal, and he decides if
he's going down, he's taking out the czar with him.
So he heads off to St Petersburg. His pockets stuff
full of manifestos and leaflets to distribute to rile up

(06:03):
the masses. And once he gets there, he keeps chickening
out and he kind of just like bums around St.
Petersburg trying to rile up the masses, but he keeps
getting thrown out of everywhere. He tries to stay because
he has no money and no idea. But a local
radical that we'll talk about later, who sucks, gives him
money to buy a gun. That's not what he sucks for.
He sucks about other stuff. And then a doctor gives him,

(06:25):
because good doctors at this time, the nihilist doctors, give
him a poison, acid and morphine. I want you to
try and guess what these various things are for. Huh, Well,
morphine for fun um, we're talking. We're talking. No acid
was the other sixties. Yeah, he had different kinds of acid. Yeah,

(06:45):
this is the disfiguring acid. Just uh, you know, hopefully
throw that in the tsar's face, pow right in the processor.
It's actually for his own face. WHOA. If he gets
away and he needs to disc figure himself, he can
he can put he can acid himself. Yeah, and if

(07:06):
and if he isn't going to get away, he can
take the Stryck nine and die. Mhmm. So anyway, yeah,
that's roughly. But he was essentially trying to do like
one of the most elaborate suicide by cops. Yeah. Yeah, basically,
I'm going to kill the monarch and then die is
kind of like his plan. But everyone's a little like,

(07:28):
don't carry yourself, bud, But they're also a little like,
I mean, fill this out though, that's cool. Yeah, So
he waits outside the winter gardens, the small crowd eager
to see our man's our Alexander the second Star comes
out and Dmitri draws his gun and he misses. Not
a lot of times spent at the range. You gotta understand,

(07:48):
he just he just got the gun. He ain't that
Ain't that just the way. And so here's where I
get into there's like, there's fucking propaganda everywhere all over
the history of all of this off and I maybe
someone in the crowd jostled him. The monarchist propaganda at
the time wants you to believe that someone jostled him
because the people they love their father, they love the

(08:10):
father's are and that's why this man jostled his elbow
or whatever and the gun misfired. The Bolsheviks, on their part,
are like, no, everyone hated the Tsar and it never
happened in it was total lie and we don't know
what happened, but maybe maybe he got jostled. Either way,
he misses, and he also probably never takes a second
shot in his two barrel gun. He gets captured, the

(08:33):
Ar comes over and he says to him, what do
you want? Nothing? Dmitri answers, because he's a fucking nihilist.
Nothing and Dmitri, we don't make demands. Yeah, he's just
And so I feel like he's like such a good
character to start with because he literally tries to shoot
the Zar and says he wants nothing. Uh. So he

(08:54):
gets thrown in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul,
which keeps coming up over and over again in this story.
It's basically the cool kids prison. Um, it's where the
cool kids get sent for doing cool shit. Uh. He
also then gets hanged, which is happens to way too
many cool kids, including in this story. None of his
pals get hanged, though his cousin the sort of leader

(09:15):
of both hell and organization gets like mock executed. He's
up on the gallows and they put the noose around
his neck and then they kill his cousin and then
they get to him and they're like no, just kidding,
and they take the news off. Just just Josh and yeah,
which actually means he could do that meme where he's
on he has a noose around his neck and he
says like first time to the next guy, you know,

(09:39):
if he gets if he gets back up there, and
he didn't. He really missed an opportunity to be funny.
I know, he really could have. The meme wasn't out yet,
but yeah, um so he instead he got sent to
Siberia and went insane. And actually there's a lot of
people in the story who go insane from repression, especially
in Siberia. It seems like Beery will do that to

(10:01):
you that that's the impression I get that in like
solitary confinement and prison and general. Yeah, that's why that's
why they still do it. Anyway, Yeah, what I thought
all this was fixed. Now, this is a story about history,
pal There's no Russian autocrats that need killing. This is
the nineteenth century. We're talking about you're you're right, I'm

(10:22):
getting I'm getting into bummer territory. Anyway, let's talk about
the guys who wanted to die killing the R. Yeah, well, okay,
let's talk about another guy dead really quick, the arm Jostler.
He gets held up as like a propaganda hero everyone
the monarchists sort of like, hooray arm Josseler whose name
I didn't bother to, right down, and they give him
hereditary nobility. He's this commoner and they give him a

(10:45):
hereditary nobility, whereupon he drinks himself to death fairly quickly. Okay,
so now we know that nihilism involves at least attempting
to shoot the R and saying you want nothing beyond that.
We need to talk about with nile ism is and
everyone thinks that nihilism means something, and everyone thinks something

(11:06):
different than the other people who think that they know
what nihilism means. Mm hmm. The annoying thing is that
all of those people are right. Yeah. Yeah, there's so
many definitions of nihilism to the point where it's kind
of a meaningless word from my point of view. But anyway,
let's pretend like it has a meaning. Come come to

(11:28):
come to the same conclusion like in my in my youth,
I think I interpreted it basically like a sort of
like a more active sort of Taoism for lack for
lack of a better comparison, like I was just you know,
the I it's very romantic, extreme acts as affirmations of

(11:48):
life and knowing life wasn't meant to be this way,
but it wasn't meant to be any sort of way. Um,
But we wound up with this nightmare anyway. And there's
nothing more cool than you can that you and do
with life than taking revenge upon the forces that made
it this way. Um. But yeah, nihilism is a nonsense word.

(12:08):
That's why I still that's why I still like it.
You actually would have done really well with the Russian
Nihilists with that particular definition. That's great, Oh my god,
thank you. So the Russian Nihilists weren't the very first
time that the word nihilist was used. It was like
kind of thrown around as like a pejorative to describe
medieval heretics, and I guess sometimes like against various philosophers

(12:29):
or something, But these are the first people to call
themselves nihilists, at least in any kind of large number,
and interesting politically, they weren't actually necessarily incredibly radical. Most
of them. There were like anarchists amongst them, and some
of them ended up Marxists later once Marxism hit Russia,
but overall most of them would probably be like Bernie

(12:51):
guys and stuff today. Um, Like, most of them were
like progressives and social democrats. But the thing is is that,
like when you live within absolute dictator and everything is terrible,
like really really terrible, being a progressive or social democrat
actually makes you incredibly radical, so radical that you might

(13:12):
you know, throw bombs of people. Yeah, the terrain is
quite different. Um okay, And actually you did a pretty
good job of defining nihilism. They're they're specific thing was
that basically was the rejection of the existence rather than
like it. They didn't reject the idea that something might
replace the existent, but that's not what they were focused on.

(13:34):
So it wasn't like nothing better could ever happen, But
it's like, we're not focused on that. What we're focused
on is destroying the existence. Um yeah, And it wasn't
just be political go ahead to have to imagine that
you're going to both like diagnose the problem and come

(13:55):
up with the cure. Is kind of like kills a
lot of people in in there like revolutionary thought, like
at the beginning of them sort of thinking that way.
Um oh yeah, because they don't have all the answers yet. Well,
I mean, what, well, you know, this sucks, but what

(14:16):
else am I supposed to do? Oh that this idea
could turn out even worse? And that's I mean, it's
imagining that one a human has like a lifespan far
longer than you do. We're not elves who are gonna
like be able to build the world after after the
Great War happens or whatever. Um. But you don't need

(14:40):
to really be like a genius or have a degree
to be like, wow, this ship ships really fucked. And
I think we should all be willing to take the
chance that we maybe won't know exactly where to go
after destroying this old order. And sounds like that's what

(15:01):
they were all about, and I'm down with it, especially
when you have an absolute monarch like in Russia, which
seemed to be kind of for that time period, really
a really unique sort of monarch on the world, on
the world stage. Yeah, as as far as ordained by God.
Dudes who can do whatever they want. Go. Yeah, he

(15:22):
managed to hold on to some autocracy past past pretty
much everyone else, at least in Um, at least in Europe.
Um they were they were good at that those was
it the Romanovs. You'd think i'd know because I just
did all this research and I'm doing a podcast about it,
But I'm actually less focused on Yeah, I'm less focused
on the bad people. Well, in my mind, the bad

(15:43):
people are the Czars that the good people are trying
to kill Bazars, So I'm more focused on them. But
that's nice, perrtue. Yeah. Um, but okay, so it was
a rejection not only the political order, but it was
also a rejection of basically Russian society and it's like
standard and f X, and it was a rejection of
the Orthodox Church. But it actually wasn't necessarily atheistic. It

(16:05):
was more agnostic in character, which also was kind of
cool to me. Um, And it rejected social norms and
gender relations. It also rejected high fashion. And I put
in here my notes that this is the place where,
if I really wanted to, I could talk about dialectics
and how it's a dialectical process. But I'm not going to.
You know, I thought you were going to say, if

(16:25):
I really wanted to, I could talk about crass, because
because immediately I was just like hell, yeah like crass. Yeah,
so crass is more interesting to me in the dialectics.
But yeah, snooze, snooze fest. I will say that, Okay.
One of their main influences was before the anarchist author
bakun In was an anarchist. He was just a revolutionist.

(16:47):
And in eighteen forty two he wrote an essay called
Reaction in Germany, and he has the following quote, which
is one of the more interesting, I think quotes of
bacun In and of nineteenth century politics. Let us therefore
trust the eternal spirit, which just stroys and annihilates, only
because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life.
The passion for destruction is a creative passion too. Oh yeah,

(17:10):
he got he got some stuff right. Yeah, you didn't
get everything right. And we're actually gonna get into some
stuff he got wrong in this episode. Oh good, I
love to dunk on that dead old man. Most of
what's written about the Nihilists talks about where they are
in terms of political philosophy. Um, But as far as
I can tell, the average nihilists really didn't care about that.
Most actively rejected political participation. And I think it's like

(17:33):
less useful to talk about, like, here's how the nihilists
react to the young Hegelians and the relationship between materialism
and idealism. But instead, I'm going to argue that the
more interesting way to describe the nihilists might be they
all wore blue tinted glasses day and night, and the
men grew their hair long and the women cut their short,
and they hung out in graveyards and they got into
fist fights with seminary students because first and foremost, at

(17:56):
the very beginning, it was a subculture or a counterculture,
and it was a fucking interesting one. And they they
basically they were trying to live their lives and take
agency over their own fate in a way that had
been denied to them, which of course eventually led to
assassinations and bombings and basically inventing political terrorism in the
modern sense, because they were just trying to live their

(18:18):
weird lives. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna split nihilism
into into two parts. And I'm stealing this, this dichotomy
or way of understanding it from an indigenous nihilist anarchist
named Ericorn who was alive until very recently. Yeah, and
he called the first part of it foundational nihilism, and

(18:40):
then that developed into revolutionary nihilism. So those are the
those are the two parts. And the revolutionary nihilists they
dropped a lot of the subcultural fashion, but they captain
intensified the rejection of the current order. And Okay, so
just like the word nihilism itself, who wasn't wasn't a
nihilist is really blurry and really up to subjective analysis.

(19:03):
Some of the people who are in this story who
I'm going to call nihilists are going to be called
nihilists by history and all of these things. And they
might have hung out with nihilists, but they might have
personally been like, well, I'm not a nihilist, I'm a
blah blah blah blah blah. Right. The important thing is
the real nihilist wouldn't give a ship if you describe
them that way or not. Yeah, I think that that's true.
If we can get if we can get a medium

(19:24):
in here to ask them. That's how we'll know. Yeah, Yeah, Sophie, Actually,
could we get a medium for part two? At least
just one? I'd love to have different opinions. Yeah, I
feel like I feel like if we're gonna, if we're
gonna do this, there should be at least three so
that we have you know that twink who has a

(19:46):
Netflix show where he talks to dead people. Um and
Miss Cleo. Turns out, I don't know many mediums along
the Long Island Medium from from Really Bad Caple TV
and the Long Island Medium, get the get them in
here right away. I'll wait. So while we're waiting, let's

(20:07):
do some background on Russia. Okay, I actually feel like
this does matter, and because one of the things I
learned while while doing this research is that all of
the things that tie into it and create the contexts
are so important to understand why they're rejecting what they're rejecting.
And the other thing I've learned about doing this research
is that everyone has an opinion about Russia, and everyone's
opinion about Russia absolutely flavors what they think about what

(20:30):
actually happened and what people thought and what mattered to
whom and even just the objective facts of what happened,
and it's it's all partisan. Basically, everyone who writes Russian
history has like an opinion about what happens in nineteen seventeen.
I also have an opinion about what happens in nineteen seventeen,
but I'm not going to talk about my opinion about
nineteen seventeen. And I'm trying to take the Nihilis on

(20:51):
their on their own as much as I can. I
don't have an opinion on nineteen seventeen, but that's because
I'm humble. That's why we brought you on. Yeah, and
I and I can't abide arguing with Tanky's on Twitter,
where I would inevitably develop more opinions on it. Yeah. See,

(21:13):
that's that's that's my fault, that's my grant fault. You
got you gotta life. Life is too short. That's what
I'm trying to learn in this rudderless world. You cannot
you cannot content yourself with arguing with Tanky's on Twitter.
It's not good for you. It's not good for you, Margaret.
But you're trying to remove my one source of joy

(21:33):
in this world. Okay, So I'm going to talk about surfs,
and that's where you thought, I assume this would come
understanding serfdom. I feel like it's important understanding everything that's
going on in Russia and basically a surface like kind
of halfway between an enslaved person and a peasant, though
to be honest, they're closer to when a slave person

(21:55):
than a peasant. It's basically the idea that there's people
who belong to the land, and whoever owns the l
and owns the people who are on the land. If
you sell the land, the people stay with it. If
you're born a surf, you die a surf. They're the
property of the owner. There's also house surfs, and they
don't they're like, don't even have any land to work on.
And actually Russia experimented with basically factory surfs, which let

(22:17):
urban rich own their workers as well. Yeah, they're really
ahead of the curve on this. And the one advantage
of being a surf is that you supposedly aren't supposed
to be able to be ripped apart from your family
and sold to a neighbor because you belong to the
land instead, and there are ostensible limitations on what owners
could do too inserfed people. I don't know the polite

(22:40):
way to say, someone who has made a surf by
society somebody and so okay. So. But the thing, one
of the things that's most interesting me about this is
that everyone talks about how backwards Russia is, and Russia
was very backwards, that they got rid of all of
these things way later than everyone else. They still got
rid of serfdom before the US got rid of chattel

(23:02):
slavery um, and back in the day in Russia like
everywhere else, used chattel slavery um. But by sixteen seventy
nine the field slaves were converted into surfs, and in
seventeen twenty three the house slaves were converted into surfs.
And this didn't really change that much for most of
the people who had been enslaved um. Some laws got

(23:24):
put into place, no one was really enforcing them. People
still got sold internationally, there was a lot of It
wasn't like a good deal. It wasn't a good thing
to be a surf. Uh. They The way they lived though,
was that they basically lived in communes. They would be
part of their household, which would be part of a village,
which should be part of a commune, and the communes

(23:45):
were sort of autonomously run and very egalitarian lee run.
They would be run in such a way where like
the farmland was divided up into strips. I think it's
called strip farming, which said's very different than like strip mining,
for example, And basically so that way by having these
like long strips of land, everyone gets some decent land.
And so a commune's farming wasn't everyone farms the communal fields.

(24:09):
It was like everyone farms their little chunk, and but
those are arranged so that everyone has equal access to
the ability to produce. And what happens at the end
of that is then their owners take about a third
of everything they produce and also make them do extra labor.
About a third of their labor is also getting used
for whatever purposes. And once again you run into weird

(24:35):
bias in terms of everything you read about it, because
everyone wants to like compare everything to US slavery, and
usually their goal is to kind of downplay chattel slavery
in the US, Like everyone's trying to be like, oh,
everyone had this stuff, It's fine, it was a rough
time all over. What do you want? What do you want? Yeah, exactly,

(24:58):
I mean, I mean, uh, and they're just really different
and they shouldn't be compared. It's like my primary takeaway
from all of the work I've done about it. And yeah,
the only the only take I've ever heard uh that
I was like, huh, all right, point is they were like, well,
you know, at least surfs got like off compared compared

(25:20):
to know. Oh yeah, that's true. There's the whole like
feudalism actually leaves you with more free time than modern capitalism.
You're talking about that I have to do something after
this call. I don't know what you're talking about. Um, yeah, okay.
So but people in Russia knew that surfdom was bad,
and for a lot of different reasons. Mostly people thought

(25:43):
surfdom was bad because it didn't really allow like industrialization
and capitalism and for everyone to like compete on the
world stage. Is not that they actually cared about how
people lived. And maybe like people shouldn't like own a guy,
you know, like just overall, like as a general rule,
that's like not where people were at, but people were
there a good bedrock to build on. People should own guy.

(26:05):
This is a broad categorization and so in eighteen fifty five,
Czar Alexander the Second comes into power after the death
of Nicholas the First. Nicholas the First was like a
classic tyrant, and Alexander the Second was an absolute monarch,
but he was like a reformer. And his whole thing
is he kind of people try and paint him as

(26:26):
like a reformer because he cared about people, and he
probably cared about people a little bit, but he basically,
as far as I can tell, he was a reformer
because he didn't want everyone to overthrow him, and he
thought that maybe some reforms would keep that from happening.
And then also he really was aware of how backwards
Russia was compared to everyone else, and so he wanted
to bring some capitalism and industrialization to the picture. Yeah,

(26:50):
it's it always struck me reading world leaders from the
worst possible standpoint um that one, he was embarrassed for
his country, as well he should be, and he just
wanted to make a big show of these phantom pangs
of a non existent conscience that he kept getting. Yeah,
I like that phrasing a lot. So in in eighteen

(27:13):
sixty one, I keep almost say in nineteen sixty one,
but the century that matters. Here's eighteen hundreds. Um, the
in eighteen sixty one, he he frees the surfs with
a stroke of his pen. And when he does this,
he basically like locks them all into into debt and
into continued servitude, but just from a capitalist point of view. Instead, uh,

(27:35):
he the peasants now owe him a lot of money
for the land that they are given, which is the
worst land. And then he is like gives the money
to the nobles who have lost their property or whatever.
And so surf's got a really shitty deal, except kind
of interestingly, the surfs in Poland got a way better deal.

(27:56):
And the reason is that Bizarre hated Poland and one
of the noble to suffer, so he made the serfs
have a better time there, which really goes to show
like he does not care about people. Uh what he
sees the nobles as more representing Poland than the majority
of Poland. And yeah yeah um. And so these were

(28:18):
called redemption payments and they were the serfs owed them
for their freedom until nineteen o seven, almost fifty years later, which,
of course, if you know about like the Haitian Revolution,
when Haiti won its independence in they wind up owing
France and their former enslavers would amounted to one billion
dollars in today's money. So this is like a thing
that they like, you know, people like doing. It's a

(28:41):
a if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, we
want you to stay poor and locked into this particular
economic system. And also those are didn't bother free in
the state owned serfs until five years later, and we
too live under a system of capitalism. Here's some ads

(29:03):
and we're back and we're talking about the serfs, and
we're talking about how Czar Alexander the second sort of
read them and he stayed in Autocrat, but he gave
himself the name of the Czar Liberator and people were like, okay,
cool constitution and he was like, no, you don't understand.
I was chosen by God to rule Russia. You can't
rule yourselves because you know autocrat. Oh you don't want

(29:27):
to get God angry? No, yeah, that's true. Imagine what
would have happened and it's cold, chill runs from my spine. Yeah,
Hell would have been involved somehow. Oh, I can't avoid
that forever. But back to our story. So there were
other there were other reforms that he made that also mattered. Um.

(29:49):
He overhauled the taxes to encourage entrepreneurship. A state bank
was founded. There was more local governments in the form
of what we're called the Zemstva, which is the plural
of zemps foe. And they also kind of more importantly
to our story, the universities were more. Universities were opened.
Women were allowed to audit some classes. They weren't allowed

(30:10):
to attend, God forbid, but they were allowed to go
learn a little bit, and public education became available to
more people, and for a brief period of time, they
universities were even given some autonomy about what they taught
until people started learning stuff and thinking for themselves and
putting on scary, scary blue glasses and also starting fires everywhere.

(30:32):
So that will happen. You gotta gotta get rid of
the blue glass of salesman first than the university professors
teaching I don't know anything other than flatters stuff basically,
And so everyone is convinced, oh wow, these serfs got

(30:53):
a bum deal and they're gonna know it and they're
going to revolt, and that's what everyone is like, that's
going to happen, and so that's the stage onto which
steps are heroes. The nihilists ray there all right, mew beu,
that's my airhorn. It probably started eighteen fifty five, about

(31:16):
six years before the serfs were freed. It did not
have a name. They did not have a name for themselves.
They were just a subculture, and they were mostly young students.
Some of them came from the upper classes, let people
had long had access to higher education, and they were
like revolting against their parents generation, like the whole thing
is a lot of funk, you dad energy. But the
bulk of them were this class called the razno chintzi,

(31:39):
which I might be pronouncing correctly and I might not
be pronouncing correctly, and which could most easily translate at
the time to the lower middle class or the classless people,
as it's sometimes called. A hundred years earlier, it had
meant the miscellaneous minor nobles, but by this point it
actually doesn't mean nobility at all. This is the lower
middle class. This is like the children of clerks and

(32:00):
clergy and low ranking officers and people who had previously
not been able to be students, but now they were
allowed as commoners to go to university. And people were
fucking into it. And so this is where you first
get the like lower class intelligencia. And everything about this
subculture was rooted in the fact that like we are

(32:20):
like science nerds, we are intelligentsia. Everything about their aesthetic,
their mannerisms. Um, it's like if the hippies were just nerds.
I'm putting together some dots with some people in my life. Yeah,
maybe maybe that ought to get cut, but whatever. Yeah,
we've all met these people, you know. Yeah, And and

(32:43):
they were actually revolutionarily subcultural. Subcultural people kind of talk
about the subculture is just like this thing that they
had to go through before they could like actually do
the real work of politics. But the subculture itself got
them facing constant repression because they were, you know, wearing
the wrong clothes and like basically scaring people by their existence.

(33:04):
There's some like chicken in the egg question about like
did they start setting fires around St. Petersburg before they
were repressed or after they were you know, like, um,
like we don't, I totally don't know exactly how it
maps out, but as as somebody hasn't always been politically active,
but who has been young before? Young people love to
start fires, like who knows who cares totally? Is there

(33:28):
information about like if it's started in a I've always pictured, um,
these people starting as like a I learned about it
as like a little bit of a subculture, but it's
it's surprising to see like the parallels between like any
other subculture that I know about, except they like had

(33:51):
a more less like going to shows or doing art
or getting drunk together thing and more like going to
kill cops together thing. Um. Did it center around a
specific city at first? Or was it just a what
like this thing that settled over Russia where where a
lot of the youth were like, you know, what funk this?

(34:13):
And they all kind of came to the same fairly
obvious conclusion, which is burned down. Well, okay, so they
actually did meet at shows and and all of that
stuff too, And I'm going to talk about in the minute,
same as it ever was. Exactly, it's all the same
as it ever was. I personally can't point to a
specific city where it started because it started so amorphous.
Lee there was about six or seven years before it

(34:35):
even had its name where it was starting to develop.
I only personally read more about the Nihilis of St.
Petersburg and Moscow, and so my like instinct is that
it more started there, but I honestly couldn't tell you.
But I am gonna but now I'm gonna tell you
about their subculture and how fucking cool they were. And yeah,
first I'm going to quote. I'm gonna quote from an

(34:58):
anonymous article called Dressed to Kill Illegal Dandyism that came
out about ten years ago. And to be clear, it
came out in a magazine that I edited, but I
didn't actually write this. A lot of people think I
wrote it, but I did not. Um this is how
I first learned about the Nihilists, was the person who
submitted this article to me. And unfortunately, some of the
information in this article is a little bit harder to

(35:20):
track down with other sources. This particular article, because the
author comes from has more access to an Eastern European
context and non English sources. Okay, so the Nihilists, they
fancied wearing blue sunglasses even at night, and wearing long
black silk jackets, cutting a style of the priestly robe,
but adorned with intricate designs. Young Nihilist men kept their

(35:43):
hair long and unmanaged, while the women streaked their hair
with lye and braided cotton fuses into it. Both male
and female nihilists took to adorning their clothes with dried
flowers pilfered from the graveyards where they often met. The
men carried straight razors sheathed on their belts in case
they decided to take their own lives at any moment,
and the female nihilists strolled the seats streets of St.
Petersburg with lockets filled with poison, deadly sharp hat pins

(36:07):
and gentleman's walking sticks. Both male and female nihilists smoked
with elongated and oriental ivory cigarette holders. And there's some
stuff in there that doesn't come up elsewhere about specifically
anything that's about ornamentation, because a lot of their stuff
that you read about now is about how they rejected ornamentation.
But as I'm gonna get to in a little bit,

(36:29):
they also really consciously rejected ornamentation in this way that
actually meant they put an enormous amount of effort into
looking like they weren't pretty effort into what they did.
It's all that's all really exciting to hear about, because
from like the sort of cursory understanding I had about
them before, which is why I'm like brought up crass earlier,

(36:51):
because I heard like they just dressed in straight up
like black button nuts and black pants and black shoes
and more black sun glasses at all times. To hear
that they had had some panash, some flair to it. Hell, yeah,
I love these This sounds like, sounds like my friends.
I love them. The stealing of the dried flowers from

(37:13):
light tube stoves, Yeah, it's so edgy, braiding cotton fuses
into your head. I wrote that down, like remember to
do start doing okay, and the other thing that the
same article talks about that Again, because so little of

(37:34):
the English language stuff focuses on their time as a subculture,
I couldn't find as much information about. But apparently seminary
students would come out and fight them in the graveyards
and in the streets, and if the seminary students won,
they'd cut the men's hair and the like, shred the
women's masculine clothes. They don't quite say what the the
nihilists would do if they want, I don't know, um

(37:56):
And but later a different person is quoted as saying
that the Czar if he saw a Nihilist or any
young student at all, he shook with fear. I've I've
heard that one, and boy, yeah it's it's more than
a hundred years ago. But I get a lot of
delight thinking about that. That nasty old fuck just shaken

(38:18):
in his boots when he saw somebody in sunglasses. Yeah,
which I mean, it makes sense because a lot of
them tried to kill him, and eventually some of them
even succeeded. Spoiler spoiler alert. Yeah, sorry, sorry, he's our fans.
But he gets he gets blowed up, he gets exploded. Um,

(38:41):
how many people have tried at this point? Do we know?
I guess we're sort of talking about. This is early,
pretty wide period this. Yeah, and actually what I'm talking
about right now is before anyone has tried. The first
attempt on the Tsar's life is eighteen six, Is that, Dimitri? Yeah,
he's the first one in eighteen sixty six, just a
little bit after the initial stuff that I'm currently talking about.

(39:04):
Oh okay. He actually marks the sort of end of
the foundational period of the Nihilists and starts the revolutionary
period of the Nihilists because he takes it to the
shooty phase. But so for now they're all crazy radical students.
And the blue sunglasses they wore weren't sunglasses. It turns out,

(39:24):
I had to do it. Took me a while digging
through to figure this out. They were reading glasses. When
reading glasses were first invented, they were mostly blue and
green because it was seen as favorable to the health
of the eyes. And so it's they were all walking
around wearing affectatious fake reading glasses all the time because
they're so serious about their studies. They're so they're so

(39:46):
serious about their studies, but they're also very like for
people who don't care about anything, they really serious about
looking cool. Yeah, exactly. And they're uncombed hair. They were
really into like going ungroomed. Is actually one of the
ways that they were distinguished from some of the younger,
the older, the prior to them radical subcultures that were
very into like careful grooming. The uncombed hair and the

(40:07):
grown up beards and stuff. Was just because they didn't
want to waste their time grooming because they were too
busy doing serious science stuff. Um, and that's cute. I
love him. Yeah, that's when I was. When I was
a little, a little, a little nasty train hop in Google.
I would always keep some like nice ish, some nice

(40:29):
clothes in my bag for you know, you've I needed
it a lot, Like I was exhausted and I'm in
a hotel, like, oh, my friend's gonna show up later.
Can I just hang out in the lobby and catch
a fuzes for three hours or whatever? And it's worth it,
But respected dedication to just like fuck it, I'm gonna

(40:50):
look like a rat king just walking around walking around St.
Petersburg all day. And that's that's what they did. And
they also to see me coming tremble in his boots.
And they were doing some serious science stuff. You don't
build bombs of that, learning chemistry, and one of them
kind of invented rocket science. But we'll get to that later.

(41:11):
Uh oh my, oh wow. This is a found This
is gonna be a foundational history podcasts. I've looked for
books about these guys before and I just haven't found any.
It's glad you well, thanks, um okay. They were also
quite into the arts, and especially they look westward to
the the Enlightenment of Europe. To quote from that same source,
illegal dandyism since Most Nihilists came from educated families. They

(41:33):
often had musical training in various instruments. They would meet
in bone amphitheaters, the holding crypts and Russian Orthodox cemeteries
and played decadent music from France and England. They read
aloud from Western poems smuggled into the country. They spoke
together in an argot of Russian peppered liberally with nonsense
slang as well as French and English words, and there

(41:55):
their fashion choices were influenced by the West as well.
They one of the things that they wore way more
than like a Boughton up or something like that. They
all wore like Scottish tartans or their interpretation of them.
They call it wearing a plaid and it was basically
a sort of shawl. And they also a lot of
them were like funny Italian military hats. This sort of

(42:15):
goes to the non like it's it's the stuff that
was fashionable like decades earlier at various points um and
it's because of random popular books from the West, and
so it's it's really got that like more that like
old punk vibe of wearing like military surplus. You know,
when I was a teenager, and I'd walk around in
my like German army surplus coat that was three sizes

(42:39):
too big and stuff. And the the women's the women's
fashion in particular was a huge departure from the style
at the time. They avoided corsets and colonel ns, which
are hoop skirts, and to look that up personally, because
everyone I noticed calls them hoop skirts, and instead they
went for for plane garb. And they were completely obsessed
with this anti fashion. And I put hours and hours

(43:01):
of work into looking like they didn't put effort into
it at all, which again anti fashion matches so perfectly
with my my punk friends and listen to the sex pistols.
So okay. So one historian who wrote about their fashion
was this woman Vera Breida who in the nine seven
book Apostles into Terrorists, Women in the Revolutionary Movement and

(43:24):
in Russia of Alexander the Second It's a long book title,
and okay, so Vera herself was really interesting, um like
something that every time I researched Russian history, I run
across things like this. Her mother, the historian's mother had
been exiled for fighting the czar and then later was
executed by the Bolsheviks for being a social democrat. Um,

(43:45):
so it goes. But but Vera described the nihilist like so,
the true Russian nihilist wore his baggy trousers tucked into
unpolished and clumsy boots. His peasant blouse of cheap cotton
was held around the waist by leather strap. A so
called plaid or rug was hung over one shoulder. The
hair was worn long, and the face overgrown with a

(44:07):
beard and further obscured by dark glasses. Many of the
students were indeed very poor and underfed, and this contributed
in some measure to the drab appearance. The female counterpart,
a very new phenomenon, also dressed with deliberate plainness. Heavy
boots showed under somber black skirts topped with high necked blouses.
The hair was worn short, and there were of course

(44:28):
dark glasses and yet worse cigarettes. All right, later, I'm
going to talk about this, uh, this would be assassin
named Vera Zasul. But first i'mone talked about the clothes
she wore to go commit the assassination. She planned it
out really carefully because she knew she'd be photographed. And

(44:51):
this is a quote from Margaret Maxwell's you Know, I Know.
This is a quote from Margaret Maxwell's book Nara Nick Women.
It's self quoting from a woman who saw Vera. Vera
wore a shapeless gray outfit that might be best described
as a good sized piece of linen, and in the
center of which had been cutting a hole for her head,

(45:11):
and on the sides two holes for her arms. This
piece of linen was held in with a narrow belt,
but its edges hung down on all sides, fluttering in
the wind. On her head there was something not a hat,
but more like a pie, made out of cheap gray material.
On her feet were wide, clumsy looking boots that she
later explained to me had been specially made for her

(45:32):
according to her own design. Her linen body covering, of course,
had no pockets, so in place of a handkerchief, she
simply picked up the edge of one of the hanging
corners of the material. If you brought this up to
one of the Looney Tunes animators, they would say, two cartoon, Yeah,

(45:53):
what I'm trying to make a show here. I would
love to get a visual of the pie on her head.
She's literally wearing a potato sack and a pie on
her head that she spent hours and hours working on
and had custom made for her. Yeah, and and like
she wasn't like maybe I deserve pocket. Yeah no, I

(46:14):
know that women's live didn't go to the right places. Okay,
so reactionaries still not there. No, that's true, we still
don't have pockets. I gotta weary dang fanny pack with
with all my dresses. I was about to say, I
wear a fanny pack with my dresses. Yeah. Okay, So
reactionary sources like to focus on how it's like slumming nobility,
but Soviet sources seem to focus on how they're all commoners.

(46:36):
And basically, the best I can tell is both true.
It seems like a bell curve. The Nihilists were mostly
lower middle class and then their outliers in both directions.
Does it seem like the Soviets are This might be
a little off topic, but it seems like the Soviets
are trying to discredit them a bit because they do
have a tendency like pre revolution, everyone working towards revolutionary

(46:59):
ends gets a little bit credit for stuff. Yeah. No,
actually I think the Soviets like them and generally they
kind of want to call them naive for like carrying
about subculture and carrying about not having a hard party
line and like having syncratic politics and stuff. I'm gonna
talk about a little bit about later. But overall, the
Soviets want to bring them in and be like, oh,

(47:20):
these people totally would have loved Bolshevism, uh, which does
not map to my understanding of these people's beliefs. Some
of them, I'm sure absolutely some of them. M Via
actually ends up a menshevik um. We'll talk more about
her later. There's a lot of people named Vera in
this case, I mean the one who I just described
with the pie in her head. Yeah, potato sack via Um,

(47:41):
it's actually really cool, but we can call her potato
saia um okay. And then the other thing, though, is
that the lower class folks were less likely to be
as obsessed with the fashion, the high anti fashion, and
overall dressed a little like we're more into it for
the rejection of society and a little less like particular
about the clothes. Um. But when cops would try and

(48:02):
infiltrate just to make this even more like punk, when
cops are to try and infiltrate. They would do two
things wrong that would get them out. One is they
would try and dress the part, but they would like
have the wrong sized glasses and everyone would be like,
ha ha ha, that person is obviously a cop. Look
at the size of their blue glasses. And and then
later um a Russian anarchist of the time, crop hot

(48:25):
Can pointed out that informers about informers, he might possess
the perfect nihilist slang and manners, but he could never
assimilate the sort of nihilist ethics which had grown up
amongst the Russian youth. Spies can imitate anything else but ethics.
And obviously they did get infiltrated here and there, but
this is how they tended to catch people. M hmm. There. Yeah,

(48:49):
there's there's still a lot of stories about you know,
the good, the good infiltrators who really studied their craft
or like you know, people we just may not have
been paying close attention, but still still infiltrators by and
large just really make clown Speaking of clown shoes, there

(49:13):
are things that you can buy. Other things that you
can buy or consume in other ways. Are the things
that you'll hear about in these ads, and we are
back and we're talking about nihilists. I guess you knew
that because you probably didn't start listening to this episode
about halfway or two thirds through. Welcome person who started

(49:37):
halfway through. We're glad you're friends. Welcome to the show.
Way to run against the grain. Okay, So the Nihilists, right,
they the whole thing was actually uniquely rush Russian. There's
a lot of talk about how they look to the West,
and that's true, but they actually really influenced Russian literature
and art and kind of everything. Obviously the politics too,

(49:58):
because they fundamentally changed well who's a live and who's
not and things like that. But to to quote Kropokin
again about them, it is nihilism again, and it's various manifestations,
which gives to many of our writers that remarkable sincerity,
that habit of thinking aloud, which astounds Western European readers.
And all right, and to to to sum it up
with one more Cropocin quote about the nihilists sounds a little.

(50:20):
This one's just about their belief structure. First of all,
the Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as
the conventional lies of civilized mankind. Absolute sincerity was his
distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he
gave up and asked others to give up those superstitions, prejudices, habits,
and customs which their own reason could justify. He refused

(50:41):
to bend before any authority except that of reason, and
in the analysis of every social institution or habit, he
revolted against any sort of of more or less mass sophism.
He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his father's
and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist and agnostic,
a Spencerian evolutionist or sign typic materialist. And while he
never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief, which is the

(51:04):
physiological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy
that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion,
which they repeatedly throw aside as useless ballast. The life
of civilized people is full of little conventional lies. Persons
who hate each other meeting in the streets make their
faces radiant with a happy smile. The nihilist remained unmoved

(51:26):
and smiled only for those whom he was genuinely glad
to meet. All those forms of outward politeness, which are
mere hypocrisy, were equally repugnant to him, and he assumed
a certain external roughness as a protest against the smooth
amiability of his father's He saw them wildly talking as
idealist sentimentalists and at the same time acting as real
barbarians towards their wives, their children, and their serfs, and

(51:50):
he rose in revolt against that sort of sentimentalism, which,
after all, so nicely accommodated itself to anything but ideal
conditions of Russian life. Yeah. Basic, they were like crass hell, yeah,
trying to bring it back around to the band a
bunch of penny rimbas. But like I've always pictured them

(52:10):
in a back room of some bar somewhere, like some
guy named like st. Stale Dale and the widow maker,
smoking cigarettes above a bunch of black powder, making making
round cartoon bombs. That's not so far off, makes it sound,
makes it sound so romantic, and that's how I want
to Yeah, I mean that's that's yeah, it's my interpretation

(52:34):
of it, Okay. And so they tried their hardest to
bring this rejection of the sort of barbarity of polite
society into their interpersonal relationships. Nihilist women left their husbands
unless they loved them. They refused marriage without love, except
of course, when they organized marriages of conveniences, which they
did all the time. Women at the time apparently had
their passports controlled either by their fathers or their husbands,

(52:56):
so nihilist would just marry each other like willy nilly
in order to give women their own passports back. Basically,
um wow, I said, I said it before, but same
as it ever was totally. I've onto more green card
marriages than I have really, but I love weddings, so
it doesn't matter. Um And usually the parents will pay
for it either way, which is also another reason that

(53:18):
they used to get married, was in order to get
their parents money in order to build bombs hell. Yeah,
I get your parents to throw throw you a nice
party and make some bonds along the way. When when
they refused chivalry towards women, they thought it was condescending.
They were blunt and terse and told hypocrites and bureaucrats
alike what was on their mind. And they were also okay,

(53:41):
they were really into adultery, except not they were like,
adultery is chill and good, but they were all a
bunch of prudes. They were like they all wanted to
be free love, polyamorous or whatever, but they were all
like really obsessed with the asceticism and self denial, so
they like just didn't really hook up. And they would

(54:01):
move four to five people into a room, and they
would blow all their families money, starting workers cooperatives, and
the men would refuse to join the military, and women
like ran to the cities to learn professions and avoid
domestic labor. And they also spent apparently most of the
year eighteen sixty two setting fire to everything all over St. Petersburg.
That sort of brings up something that a few weeks ago,

(54:24):
I was on my friends podcast Gender Reveal, and we
were talking about you have other podcasts, Oh, I wish
you didn't have to find out this way. It's fine.
If the nihilists can handle it, I can handle it.
We were talking about how there's like queer history is

(54:46):
a fairly recent thing, and it's not something that was
talked about even in like fairly radical circles, and certainly
didn't survive to the modern era in in tons of
instances you really have to dig to find it, but
you can find the evidence in it of you know,

(55:08):
free love movements and the and women's lib movements and
like places that were While while it totally makes sense
that these would be like a bunch of like self
serious prudes, um, it stands to reason, they still had
like very progressive views about like what sex and romance

(55:36):
could look like in the first place, which is why
I choose to sort of interpret a lot of the
historical like anarchists are just like freak like anti state
movements as things that had that couldn't be described as
queer but had certainly queer occurrents running through them that

(55:57):
we just have like very little reviving text of. I
just wanted to sort of sort of point point that
out as maybe it's my fan pick, but I think
I would I would love to hear a history and
argue with me about it. I'm hard to argue with.
I would love to watch you argue with this story
and about it because that makes honestly a lot of

(56:18):
things kind of fit into place when you just start
understanding queerness, especially the way it's like not only a
race from history, but like not talked about even at
the time, you know, yeah, yeah, we even like less
than a hundred years ago. It's really hard to come
up with instances where people talked in depth about it

(56:40):
unless somebody was being particularly brave up until like AIDS
really made it. You know, it's not it's not a
I wouldn't paint it as a as a good thing,
but it really made it impossible to ignore in the
historical context anymore. That is sort of where word explodes

(57:01):
on the historical stage as an undeniable fact. And while
and I'm sure that there were people like this who
I don't think that there was a lot of homophobia
amongst the amongst people who didn't give a shit about
anything like the nihilists um or transphobia, or a lot
of enforcing of gender norms or anything, um. And where

(57:26):
there are subcultures like that, that is inevitably going to flourish.
While they didn't have the language that we have now,
so which is another reason why I didn't have survived
through like the text we can read now. It's still
like I believe, I believe that it's there in many
many freak centered social movements. I think you're right. I

(57:50):
am only somebody who you know has has read read
a bit of history. But you know, if anybody listening
to this podcast has has some instances of that um
or Like, I know that there are queer historians out there, UM,
but I've never seen one who specifically studies radical tradition,

(58:13):
and I would love to hear that because I think
that those were maybe the some of the biggest hotbeds
of gay stuff going on back then. I know that
there was a lot of um I've read like throwaway
lines from a hundred years ago that talk about like, well,
if you go hang out the anarchist, that's where you
can find the homosexuals and the men who like dressing

(58:34):
as women. I don't remember exactly how they phrased all
of it, but I actually really like that it distinguished
between like, uh basically trans and gay in the in
the way it described it, and it it made me
really happen again. It was like a throwaway line I
read once in like a history of Queer Anarchism or something, um.
But it but it was written, you know, a hundred
years ago. I was like someone just being like, Oh,

(58:54):
if you want to find the gays, just go over
and hang out the anarchist club or whatever, you know, which,
of course, you know, maybe if I came from a
different ideological background, I would find that somewhere else also,
but it still makes me happy. Um yeah, speaking of books,
we're not talking about books, but and A's what we're
gonna talk about now. We're gonna talk about books because
the Nihilists eventually got their name. And how did the

(59:15):
Nihilists get their name? They got it from a book,
a book called Fathers and Sons written by Ivan Turgenev,
whose name I should have looked up before I started recording,
but I didn't. I looked up several the other names,
and books were like really fucking important. It's hard to
overstate how important books were culturally at the time, right

(59:36):
because there weren't as many other mediums going on. And
some people actually claimed that Turgenev's earlier collection of short
stories called Sportsman Sketches is what convinced Alexander the Second
to free the serfs. But the Fathers and Sons, I know, right,
like he influenced the Czar, the Nihilists and Cat Stevens
years later. Um okay, so Fathers and Sons is a

(59:59):
is a book about jen ration gap, and it's like
basically like millennials versus boomers the book which actually really
tracks I kind of like this because that makes millennials
the disaffected students and then who like kind of starts
some fires here and there, and then gen Z is
going to like really kick stuff up a notch um,
And so I'm excited about this read whether or not
at whether or not it's true, just interject some hope

(01:00:21):
into the conversation, you know. And Okay, So in this book,
there's a young nihilist named Basirov and he calls himself
a nihilist, and it's the first time that that's where
the name comes from. Basically he's not the main character
even but he's the main character even though he's he's
like the one that the author clearly is paying the
mist attention to. We're the name or the or the word.

(01:00:43):
So nihilist, nihilist nihilism was a word before that, yes,
but again it was like really rarely used. Um. It's
kind of actually like the history of the word anarchism,
where until Pruden was like I am an anarchist, it
was just like kind of thrown around like to be
mean for hundreds of years, um. And so basiov is

(01:01:04):
basically describing his attitude as nihilism, and he's like, whole
thing is that he's like, I refuse sentimentality and blah
blah blah, and Okay, to be real, like the book
is kind of dumb, um because his big problem is
that he falls in love and he's like, oh, no,
love is that's you, That's your first mistake. He he's like,

(01:01:26):
this is ikey, it complicates my feelings of true nihilism
and whatever bullshit I believe in. And so he doesn't
even like hook up with her or anything, but he
just like falls in love and he gets a crush
and it's enough to like throw him into torment, which
I want to laugh at, but then I remember that
I was young once too. You know that happens, um.
And so anyway, Basierov spoiler or he he's like doing

(01:01:47):
a science because he's a very serious science nihilist, and
he's doing an autopsy and then he gets blood poisoning
and then he dies and on his deathbed, the girl
he likes, on his death bed, the girl he likes
kisses him on the flour, which is you know, kind
of a thing because the nihilists were sucking prudes. But

(01:02:08):
and then but but Turgenev wasn't a nihilist when he
wrote this book, and so the nihilists were a little
bit like, I don't know how I feel about this representation.
But then tons of people joined their movement in eighteen
sixty two after this thing, and so they were like,
we have come around on it, and we accept this book. Um,
and uh, we don't. We didn't hate it, and therefore

(01:02:31):
that's as good as liking it. Yeah. Basically they decided
to roll with it and give him a pass and um.
And apparently turg was like really upset that people thought
he didn't like Bazaroff, apparently Karpokin and the anarchist that
I'll talk about sometimes. He said to him, because Karpokin
his friends with him. He said, I like basierof, but

(01:02:51):
it seems like you didn't love him, And Targanov said, no,
I I loved him. It made me cry to to
end the book with his death. And in fact, turgon
Uh for the rest of his life he kept a
diary as if he was Basireoff the Nihilist, and he
would respond to current events in his own journal as
Basioff instead of as himself whoa in his in his job,

(01:03:14):
like he didn't publish it anywhere, he just he like he.
I think he understood nihilism as Actually, it's kind of interesting.
It's kind the way I understand nhilism. It's a I'm
probably not a nihilist, but I'm very sympathetic and I
really like having that lens available to me. Um, and
so I think that he did. That's my my guess
is that he liked having that lens available to him. Um. Wow,

(01:03:35):
he just larped his way through the rest of his
life as a nihilist, but but secret a secret nihilists,
a secret larpin. I love that. Though. I understand a
nihilist as somebody who understands love very deep. I know exactly.
But this is they were new to it, you know.
It's yeah, they're just getting they're just getting off the runway.

(01:03:58):
And also nihilism is a nonsense yeah, um okay. And
then another random anecdote about ten he had his portrait
taken by this guy named Felix Nadar, who I'm going
to talk about in future episodes. I'm certain, who is
basically the photographer who took all of the pictures of
all of the random revolutionaries. If you ever see a
picture of like a random important person in the nineteenth century,
especially revolutionaries, is probably taken by this guy. I'm literally

(01:04:19):
wondered this before. I'm like, this motherfucker didn't have money
to get his portrait taken. What's going on? So there
was like this French hipster photographer named Nadair who loved
all this stuff and took pictures of it. He also
defended the Paris Commune with a hot air balloon, and
he invented He invented airmail because airmail was invented by

(01:04:39):
a photographer radical who wanted to get letters out of
the besieged Paris Commune. And he also invented He took
the first aerial photography. He took the first aerial photos
in a hot air balloon. Um, and so is there
an aerial photo of the Paris community. I actually don't
know the answer to that, but I will know the
answer to that by the time that you listeners are
listening to this, because I will be you in an

(01:05:00):
episode about the Paris Commune. I google this later and Okay,
so that's Fathers and Sons, and that was like a
very very important book. But the more important book that
actually hasn't come through history as much, but was far
more important to the nihilists themselves, that comes from the
nihilist movement itself, is a book called What Is to

(01:05:20):
Be Done by Nikolai Chernishevski And oh who who could
that be? Well? Never? He was an author who was
a nihilist, and he actually wrote the book from his
prison cell. He was in prison for organizing with the
neuron Necks, which I'll talk about at some point, and
he was locked up in Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul,
the cool kid prison I was talking about, um, And incidentally,

(01:05:43):
Kripakin ten years later is the first kid who was
too cool for school and broke out of the cool
kids prison. He sure sure, Santa in his sleigh got
out and went to, Uh, yeah, I'm sure, I won't.
I won't, I won't blow the story. I'm sure you'll
do an episode about Kropok eventually. Um. Okay. So the
book What Is to Be Done gets its title from

(01:06:04):
the Bible, which is sort of interesting with the obsessive
nihilism or people's perceps presumptions about nihilism. It actually it
gets it from Luke three ten, which is what should
we do? Then the crowd asked, John answered, anyone who
has two shirts should share with the one who has none,
and anyone who has food should do the same. Um,

(01:06:25):
which is kind of a handy take if you're ever
talking to it, like one of those fake Christians who
thinks that Christianity means capitalism. The Bible fucking slaps sometimes Yeah,
it's like it's yeah, but um, Jesus kicking the ship
out of money lenders. Okay. And then the other thing

(01:06:45):
about what is to be done? The book is you
have to be careful not to confuse it with that.
The then the other Russian book by Tolstoy called what
is to be Done, or that Russian political pamphlet by
Lenin which is called what is to be Done? Um, say,
it was the same guy all things well, Okay, to

(01:07:05):
be fair to Tolstoy, his title is actually slightly different
in Russian. Um, But Lennon just like straight up was
like it's like if I was like, man, I love
the book that dispossessed, I'm going to write a pamphlet
about something completely different and how I should be in
charge of everything. And I'm going to call that book
The Dispossessed. I do like that. UM. In whenever I

(01:07:26):
got mail orders, I was including this zine for a
while that I really liked. That was after the George
Floyd uprising. Um. Someone wrote how it might should be done. Yeah,
it's quite quite good, big big fan of that one. Yeah.
I think that in this you know, yeah, yeah, continuing
the tradition a hundred years after the last one. Yeah,

(01:07:49):
I know of at least so the first one, Sharnishevski
is about. It's about nihilist women who start sewing cooperatives.
They're basically like, oh, we should do this in order
to you know, the is how we challenge the society
we're in. And because once again fashion is actually part
of the resistance movement, but that it's constantly ignored. UM.
But that said, Schernishowski was also ignoring nihilist fashion himself

(01:08:11):
because he didn't actually understand it really UM. And his
characters didn't make clothes for nihilists. They made like fancy
clothes for rich people. UM. And there was a side
character in that book named Rakhmatov, whose name I do
not know how to pronounce. And this is the guy
that everyone gets obsessed with instead of um, you know
who they should be obsessed with, which is anyway whatever.

(01:08:33):
He's like this total um, self negating revolutionary saint. He
sleeps on a bed of nails. He only eats black
bread and steak. He lifts weights and halls boats around,
and he doesn't drink or fuck. And Lennon copied the
weightlifting thing. Uh, nietzschev is an Asshole'm gonna talk about
later slept on a bed of nails. Nikolaia shooting the
cousin of the assassin the gut, the guy who got

(01:08:55):
mock executed earlier he did the boat hauling thing. And
the Russian American anarchist Alexander Berkman used the pseudonym Rakhmatov
when he was conspiring to shoot industrious Henry clay Frick,
so very influential, and then Scherrechovsky himself got mock executed.
It was like the style of the time, I guess
and sent a sentence to hard labor, and then the
almost on talking about the books. The other important thing

(01:09:17):
that happened with the nihilis and books. Is that Dosievsky
hated the nihilists and he spent his entire career writing
novels about how much he hated them. That's like all
he did, because he wrote he there's the genre called
the anti nihilist novel, and it's him. It's basically him. Um,
Which is enough about books, No, let's keep going about books. Yeah,

(01:09:45):
I should make an entertaining podcast. I mean a lot
of the stories about nihilism just talking about those books,
but they actually are They're important enough that they they
need to be included. Um. And which is kind of
bringing us back around to the mid eighteen sixties when
we get our our guy we started this story with,

(01:10:08):
and this is probably the where we're gonna end on today.
We're going to talk more about organization and hell because
this is kind of where it switches over switches gears,
and so we're gonna talk first really quickly about my
least favorite nihilist, who's named Ivan. Almost everyone in this
story is named Ivan. If they're not named Vera Ivan
could uh and I should like him. He's a he's

(01:10:31):
a nihilist. He was an nihilist and a folklorist. But
he totally sucked, or maybe the book I read about
him was reactionary garbage because it's so hard to tell. Um. Okay,
as a kid, ivan like to pull on horses tails.
You just like liked annoying horses. Um. Can you guess
how that went for him? You got kicked in the head,

(01:10:52):
He got kicked in the nuts. Oh that's classic comedy
right there. I don't care who you are. He got
kicked so hard in the nuts. He never reached physical maturity,
or it's all transphobic shit written by reactionaries who didn't

(01:11:14):
like him. I don't know. Because he couldn't He had
a high pitched voice, and he couldn't grow a beard.
So I know plenty of people like that, and they didn't.
And then him pull on no horses tails? Yeah? Um?
And then he but and in his own memoir I
had trouble interpreting it. Either he masturbated constantly or he
never masturbated. I think he never masturbated, and he hated

(01:11:37):
everyone who masturbated. Does he talk about pulling horses tails
in his own memoirs? That this is self? I don't know.
The thing I know I only read the book about him.
I didn't read the book by him. Um And I
kind of he's not quite an important enough character. But
he's just an interesting, I don't know, interesting little foil

(01:11:58):
somebody who grows up, uh pulling horses tails and and
then fox up nihilism a little bit and here's your sign. Yeah,
he kind of just embarrasses nihilism. Really, he actually doesn't
have that big of an impact, but he's an example
of an embarrassing nihilist. I feel like it's important to
balance this out because I like most of these nihilists
a lot. Um. Okay, So Ivan was a folklorist, but

(01:12:21):
he kept not being allowed to do folklorism because basically
the authorities were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you could spread
revolutionary propaganda through folklore, which rules and is a good idea. Um.
And he also got refused jobs because of his clothes,
I think because of his nihilist outfit, and so he
like and he hung out with the St. Petersburg Crue
nihilist so like, so far, so good, right, But then

(01:12:42):
he took on a reach research assistant a young woman
and married her. And then there's a problem. She wanted
to funk all of the time and he likes to
complain about how much she wanted to funk. I think
it had to do with how bourgeoish she was that
she wanted to fuck. He constantly complained about it, probably
more often than she complained about wanting to fuck tendency

(01:13:02):
known as horny I know exactly. And he also she
wasn't a very good research assistant after they got married
because she just wanted to funk all the time. So
the original take my wife please guy is this fun
Russian he fucking He goes on a trip abroad. At
first he tries to go without her, and she's like, oh,

(01:13:23):
I'm coming, and then he's like okay, So he tries
to go home without her and he tries to ditch her,
and there's something going on I don't understand, because even
later when he's sent to Siberia, he's like, finally I
can leave my wife and she's like I'm coming, and
like he does not deserve her. I don't know enough
about her, but he does not deserve this woman. Um.
He also wrote a bunch of racist ship against like

(01:13:45):
Jews and Latvians and Germans and really I'm kind of
including and just to include how nihilist could be like
really shitty and how counterculture doesn't solve misogyny even when
you like claim to be feminist and all that ship
important to include in the cool people who do cool
stuff is that sometimes there's a bad apple and it
didn't spoil the bunch. Yeah it's time he Um. The

(01:14:08):
cool thing he did was he he gave our boy
karak Is off the the assassin. He gave him the
money for the gun um. He should have given him
money for range time, but he only gave him money
for the gun um. And also I know and when
he was rounded up, you'll be shocked to know he
snitched like crazy, Uh, but he made up funny stuff

(01:14:29):
when he confessed, like he made up this secret society
in Europe that was going to kill all of the
rulers of Europe and had been sending him money and
like super special secret fancy bombs. Uh. Anyway, fun him.
Let's talk about cooler. Yeah, yeah, he snitched, but at
least he got a fun type five out of it. Um. Okay,
so organization and hell, the most influential member was this

(01:14:52):
guy Nikolaiah shooting. He was the cousin he gets mock executed, etcetera.
And they do a bunch of cool stuff. One of
the things they do is a teen sixty four organization
helps a Polish socialist named Yaroslav Dombrowski escape transport to Siberia.
He's been arrested as part of this Polish rebellion in
eighteen sixty three that I wish I had time to
go into but do not. Uh, And this guy was

(01:15:13):
cool to get more Paris Commune ties. This guy he
ends up in Paris after he escapes, after they bust
him out, and when the Paris Commune happens, he's the
only one who has any like or he has the
most military training, so he becomes the commander of all
of the armed forces of the Paris Commune, which means
he negotiates the surrender, so everyone thinks he's a sellout.
And then he dies of the wounds that he got
on the barricades, and he's like, you think I'm gonna

(01:15:35):
sell out now? Like literally his last words were, do
they still say I'm a trader? I just like all
the weird tiny characters. I'm not tiny. This guy lived
an amazing life, but I do love theme, like like
nothing to learn from it, but I love the characters
who were like who had a bit of moral compromise
that was able to be passed down through to us

(01:15:57):
later on, where they still struggle with that later. Last time,
like as as a quick aside, like I um, last
time I was in gay Paris, I went to the
to the cemetery where some people from the Paris Commune
are and also Jim Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, and

(01:16:20):
there was a bunch of fucking freaks is just uh
wandering around and like, I know what you're here for.
And I went up to the little wall that they
had um for the Paris Commune I had, and I
had like a little, a little, a sweet little moment
um and then I started walking away and it and
this like super spiky punk with a huge backpack walks

(01:16:42):
up to the wall and he pulls this like half
full forty out of his or like yeah something what
uh a large amount of alcohol that he downs in
front of the wall and he smashes the ass in
front of it, and then any and he like walks

(01:17:02):
away and I'm like, fun, we don't speak the same language,
but dude, let's hang out, okay. So I hope he's
doing well, whoever he is. Organization and hell organization. We
kind of talked about them at the beginning, and basically

(01:17:24):
they're important now because they basically end the period of
foundational nihilism, at least as I've read, and you know,
the suicidally depressed car because Off goes and tries to
kill the czar says nothing, nothing, he only took one
shot with a two barreled gun. And then the white
terror begins. A guy with the nickname Hanger mirav Is

(01:17:46):
Off gets put in charge of the oppression. Two radical
journals are shut down, a lot of the educational reforms
are walked back. Some of the educational reforms got walked
back earlier when people are setting fires too. And this
kind of ends nihilist fashion in a mainstream way, apparent
really almost overnight. Men cut their hair, women grew theirs out.
Some do it because they're done with the whole thing
and just want to go back to their lives. And

(01:18:07):
some do it because they figure, look, if I'm gonna
keep trying to kill motherfucker's I should blend into the
crowd a little better. Let's go underground. Yeah, yeah, And
that's where we're gonna end it for today. When we
come back, it's Bomb's time and hippies back to the
land time, boy boy Boy. Finally, finally we get to
the round cartoon Bomb Round Cartoon, bomb time and the

(01:18:29):
Hippies back to the land time. So, so, how are
you feeling about these nihilists? Oh, big fan? At this point,
um reminds me of a lot, a lot of my buddies,
and and I can't help but but root for them
all the all the flaws, warts and all I must.

(01:18:51):
I must root for them, um. And I'm sure it
will continue. I'm sure that the next episode will get
me put on some sort of list for how hard
I root for them. Yeah, that might be true. I Oh,
do you have anything you want to plug before we
head out? Yeah? I have Twitter and an Instagram and

(01:19:14):
they are bum lung bum like the thing that doesn't
work and lung like the thing that works. Sometimes if
you're me, Um and uh, I have I have a store.
I still prints and I make comics and stuff like that.
It's also under the same name. Awesome Margaret. Where can

(01:19:35):
people follow you? Well, I have a I have a
new podcast out that people can listen to. It's called
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm on Twitter at
Magpie kill Joy and I'm on Instagram at Margaret Killjoy.
And if you follow me on Instagram, I will probably
just talk about how much I love my dog and
then have pictures of videos and me playing piano. But
on Instagram, no, the other one, Twitter, that's where I'm

(01:19:58):
pick fights and m smart. There's also dog pictures on
that one though. Oh, it's a great, great dog. Everybody,
you gotta see this dog. Yeah, I can't recommend Margaret's dog.
And then and then we'll be back with her two
on Wednesday. Just cool and good. Yeah, you can say

(01:20:20):
cool and good on ironically in this show fine Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff as a production of cool
Zone Media. Or more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zone media dot com, or check us
out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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