Part Two: Kronstadt and the People Who Tried to Save the Russian Revolution

In part two, Margaret continues to talk with Mia Wong about at least four Russian revolutions and general strikes, workers councils, and rebellions that tried to keep them on course.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, a
podcast about the people who did stuff that was cool
who I like. Usually I'm Margaret Kiljoy and I'm your host,
and every week I talk about a new subject, except
for the following three weeks where I talk about related
subjects of the Russian Revolution. And this is part two,
and my guest is Mia Wong.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Heiya, Hello, I'm back again. I had a momentary moment
of panic before we started recording, because I I do
so many podcasts that I was going, oh no, I
don't have an intro written. What am I going to do?
And then to do the intro? Yeah, what else's episode?

Speaker 1 (00:41):
So?

Speaker 3 (00:41):
What else doing? Today?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
You are doing a much harder job, which is pretending
to be the podcast idiot about a subject that you
know at least as much about as I do.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
That's definitely not I've forgotten so much of I haven't
done fair enough a Russia dive in half a decade,
so it's all it's all like in one year the.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Other now, Yeah, fair enough. Our producer is Sophie Hi.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Sophie Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Our audio engineers Daniel Hi, danel Hide. Our theme music
was written for us by a woman, and as promises,
it's too part of a sixth part about the crown
Stout Rebellion, and by doing that, I decided to cover
all of all of the Russian Revolution. I'm actually have
a specific thing where I'm going to talk about the
anarchists in Ukraine and Makno and Maria Niki Farova later,

(01:31):
but like not as part of the series, but it's
just as part of the show separately, So it's not
everything about the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Don't worry, There'll be more Russian Revolution for you. There's
so much revolution, so much I know it.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
This is this is the big overview one and where
you last left off, I introduced the concept of Russia,
the concept of socialist revolutionaries, the concept of social democrats
who are the Marxists who are going to become the Bolsheviks,
and the concepts of the Russian anarchists.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
And now.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
We're going to talk about nineteen oh five, which was
a revolution. I first heard about the nineteen oh five
revolution because of a band and an arcopunk band called
nineteen oh five. They have a good song about one
brick today is one less for Tomorrow about like it's
very posi it's very like Turn of Millennia an Arco punk,

(02:28):
where they like stop in the middle to like rant
about like early Posi anarchist stuff. They're so good if
you're listening nineteen oh five, I like your band that.
It was a big important thing for me when I
was a baby anarchist. Anyway, I since then, I was like,
why are they called nineteen oh five? That seems random?
And then people were like because of the year that

(02:49):
the revolution in Russia happened. I was like, that's nineteen seventeen,
and they're like, no, there's more than one. And I
was like, how many revolutions these people need? Save some
for the rest of us. And then and the other
thing about nineteen oh five is that I used to
sleep on the roof of a not abandoned school right
next to a house. And the house was the address

(03:10):
was nineteen oh five. This is in Portland, but I'm
not gonna tell you where, but you probably know what.
Someone listening knows what roof I used to sleep on.
And there was like a punk house next door, and
it was nineteen oh five was the address.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
And I was like, that's so cool.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
And they were like why, And I was like never mind,
and one time I'll just go full full on embarrassing.
So I had scabies and I was like, I need
somewhere to sleep because I couldn't stay in anyone's house.
So I went to go sleep on the roof. And
I like covered myself in poisonous ointment in someone's garage

(03:44):
and went to go sleep on this roof, and I
brought a handle of whiskey, and I was like stopped
and talked to the skateboarding guy who was just like
hanging out at midnight on this street next to the house,
nineteen oh five, and he told me, you know that
permethine cream like it it's already attacking your liver. If
you drink that handle of whiskey, you might not wake up.
Oh no, So thank you skateboarding man for saving my

(04:07):
life next to the house nineteen oh five. That's not
what we're talking about today.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Good thing.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I totally told you all that story. So revolutionary fervor
or revolutionary terror, depending on how you want to call it,
it's spreading across Russia. General strikes or the order of
the day. Students are striking, workers are striking, and workers
are bringing revolutionary ideas back to their families in the countryside,

(04:37):
which is really cool. One of the things that people
don't like. They're like, oh, the peasant and the worker
near the twains shall meet. They're like, it's the kids
of the peasants who became the workers, like it happened.
This is the generation where it happened.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Yeah, And this is one of these things that I think,
like some Marxists figure this out, but they don't figure
it out until later, which is like the most revolutionary
generation of like like working class city kids are the
first generation out of the countryside, Like, those are the
people who are most likely of anyone to go into revolt.
But Marxists don't figure this out for another like till

(05:12):
it's a little too late years. Yeah, it takes a
long time for them to really get there.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Like why won't hey revolt?

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Come on? Why won't.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Class My dad had and my grandma had, and so
to get a sense of the of the the revolutionary
fervor at the time, A lyricist at the time, Alexander
Block wrote a you know, it's referred to as a lyricist,
but I read it as poetry. We will set the
world a flame, bitter woe to all bourgeoisie with blood

(05:45):
will set the world a flame. Good Lord, give us
thy blessing that rules. Yeah. So that's the attitude at
the time. And that guy's like important enough. I didn't
read it, but he has this whole Wikipedia page. It's
like he's not famous as a revolution he's just a
famous lyricist or whatever. So you have all these people
living in an autocracy who wish they didn't live in

(06:07):
an autocracy. The peasant population has exploded somehow. Okay, this
part the math doesn't track to me, but a historian
who's very good named Paul Averich, wrote that the population
went from five million to eighty million in a single
generation of the peasants. That doesn't I don't get it,
but I'm sure it went up and maybe even went

(06:29):
up that much. MIAs also doing a like I'm not
sure about that math.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, I hm. They had a lot of kids. I
know that is a baby, all of who lived. Yeah,
I'm not sure. Anyway, people were living in one room
wooden huts with dirt floors. They were living off of bread, cabbage,
and vodka, and folks were supplementing their farming through cottage

(06:55):
industry work like and they had been for years, right.
They were like, Oh, we're gonna like make nails and
sad and whatever the fuck we can make when we're
done farming, because that's how we're going to make enough
money to live. But all of a sudden, there's in
these industrial factories and they're just spitting out nails. How's
a nail farmer supposed to compete? One ethnicity in particular

(07:18):
was particularly fucked. That ethnicity was the Jews. Even within
the Pale, there are new limitations on where they can
go and what they can do. There are reverse quotas
where schools can't have more than like ten percent Jewish students.
Even in the Pale. They're no longer allowed in the
sort of small regional governmental assemblies, and there are constant programs.

(07:41):
More and more Jewish folks are leaving the more moderate
organizations like the boond to join the anarchists. I think
less because they think they'll win, and more because they'll
go down fighting. It gives them the chance to do
something concrete and immediate. The Booned overall argued against the
terrorism approach of robbing the rich and killing right wing
politicians who are organizing the oppression, although soon enough some

(08:04):
people were like, well, we don't want to leave the
Boon to become anarchists, but you know what, can we
just have a faction of the Boon that's like down
with like Stabin guys. And they were like, I guess,
so it seems like there's a lot of guys who
need Stabin since there's pograms happening.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
Did they have their own combat organization?

Speaker 2 (08:20):
I believe so, but I'm not entirely certain they had
a group of I don't know whether they called themselves maximalists.
There's like all these ways like we were talking about
last time, where it's like, oh, the left wing of
this in the center of this and whatever. The maximalist
position is usually the like we're going to get to
the revolution right away through Stabin, you know. But I

(08:42):
don't know whether the Boon specifically had their own of
that or what they called it. And they're all looking
for a chance when what happens. But in nineteen oh four,
Russian and Japan got in an argument about who got
to colonize Korea and Manchuria, and Japan was like, well,

(09:02):
what if you get Manchuria and we get Korea, And
like presented a I mean, it's all evil, it's all colonization, right,
It's two empires fighting, but they like presented a colonial compromise,
and we've talked actually, if you want to hear a
lot of Japanese labor history, listen to MIA's episodes on
it could happen here. And then I've also done a
couple also on this show that people can listen to,

(09:25):
especially in episodes about women who keep trying to kill emperors,
if you want to hear more about that, And it's
specifically how it ties into the struggle against the colonization
of Korea by Japan. But anyway, Russia's like, no, we
want a buffer zone. We don't want to be near
you or whatever, so where we want the following buffer
zone that I guess keeps them out of mainland China

(09:46):
was I guess part of the big deal about this.
And Japan was like, well, what if we sneak attack
and destroy your entire eastern fleet? And then Russia was like, oh, well,
we're just going to easily win this war because not white.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Do you know the story about how that whole fleet
got wiped out? I just turned as a sneak attack
it will tell me really funny. Well, so the thing
that happens in that battle is this is the first
time Japan wipes out a fleet, right, because they do it.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah, this is the first one. Is the first one.
And one of the problems that the Russian Navy has
is that basically all of their admirals are just like
some guy's cousin. They have guy knows Yeah, they have
one guy who actually knows what he's doing this, a
guy named Barkov. He's the guy who invented the icebreaker,
so he's like, he's legitimately a good admiral. However, Kama
Japan does its first volley at unbelievable maximum maximum possible

(10:37):
range of cannonball could possibly be fired and hit something.
And this is an era of warfare where like your
guns are so inaccurate, you're not like pointing a gun
at a ship, You're pointing it in like the general
direction of a ship. And one of their cannonballs just
like perfectly good, like just perfectly shreds the bridge of
the Russian flagship, kills Macrov, kills Markov, and then but

(11:00):
does it in a way where I think I can't
rever's mark off from Bacroff, one of the two. It
kills the animal and does it in a way. The
wrestler ships don't realize that they're that the flagship's like
bridge is gone, and so all the rest of the
ships and the Russian fleet are waiting for orders and
they never get orders because everyone's dead on the flagship,
and so Jetpe just run them through.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
So it was a lucky shot combined with like the
failures of hierarchy.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, it's like they accidentally like knocked out the toothpick
that was supporting the entire Russian aristocracy, and the entire
Russian aristocracy somed me had to do something on their own.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
They just fell over and died. It's staggery. That's hilarious.
Oh my god. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
So so basically Russia declares war, which makes sense in
this context, and they're like, all right, we just got
to figure out how to get a bunch of guys
over there with guns. And everything I've read is that
they just straight up assumed that white people are the
best in Japan and they chance because like their eyes
are funny whatever, Like I mean, no racist, it's really staggered. Yeah,

(12:02):
racism will get you killed, hopefully indirect and immediate ways,
but sometimes just by underestimating Japan.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
There's a good way to don't do that. Get cad
so terrifying, terrifying militarist society in the late nineteen hundreds
yea early twentieth century, probably at least for a couple
hundred more years, people aren't going to underestimate Japan. Yeah, ough,

(12:35):
bad memories.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, I'm like, my granddad lived in a submarine as
a torpedoist for a very long time and almost died
multiple times.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, because there's my grandma thought she was an orphan
growing up because her mom like picked up her older
sister and just physically ran, like like just started running
and didn't stop running until she was like halfway across
the country.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
It's like just nightmare stuff.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Really, it's really so thick.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
And that's like like no one in the West pays
any attention to this, isn't okay, let's not talk about Okay,
Well we'll go back to the topic instead of talking
about the Pacific theater of World War two one day.
I want to talk to you more about that. So
Japan bee is the shit out of Russia. Russia had
this mighty navy, but it was on the western side

(13:24):
of Russia, based out of this little island fort called
Kronstat just west of Saint Petersburg. So they sailed all
the way the fuck around the world, like down past
Africa and all the way back up just to get
wiped off the map by the Japanese navy. And Russia
had been really late to the railroad game in general,
so they kept trying to like move troops east, but
they had I think, like single track like so they

(13:47):
couldn't send like a train one way and back or whatever.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
I don't have the details about this in front of me.
Their railroad system sucked and they could not get an
army over there except by ship effectively. So they lost.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
They lost like fuck.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
And the war against Japan had been this big nationalist,
patriotic thing. We all love our two headed eagle flag
or the best it's okay that we're all starving or whatever,
just this moment because we're better than someone else. And
with the loss, people were like, this really isn't Amorican.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
You guys lost to Japan. I know, really the Liberals
are on one in this.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Oh were they like specifically, like, what the hell's wrong
with you lost to Japan?

Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, I mean, well they were okay, they were slightly
less racist than the czar, which is you know, it's.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
Like saying Biden is left of Trump. Well that's sort
of true, and most did not. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah. It's also like very little consolation if you're in Palestine. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, So people are not excited, and and actually a
lot of the stuff kicks off before I'm playing a
little fast and loose with a specific time. A lot
of the stuff kicks off before the war is like
totally lost. I mean, it's always doomed.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
It's dumb war.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Well, from Russia's point of view, it was not a
well thought thought out military campaign, and general strikes are
getting more and more common. And you have this group
that I sort of don't talk about as much during
this the sort of centrist reformist organizations, like they're honestly
kind of center right. I think there's this guy named

(15:27):
Georghi Gapon, and he's a moderate Russian Orthodox priest who's
a reform minded group that only Russian Orthodox people can join.
That's why I'm calling him center right. I think he
was racist I don't have that evidence in front of me.
I am conjecturing. They start the meeting with the lords.
They're like reform meetings. They start with the lord's prayer

(15:50):
and they close out by singing, God save the Cizar.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Oh my God.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
That is how not revolutionary this group is. And he Georghi,
believed that the czar had a right to rule, and
he worked with cops constantly, and he just wanted the good,
loyal Russian workers to be treated a bit better by
their father, the czar. Do you have this like autocratic
idea at the time, where like the czar is like
your dad is like the dad of everyone you know,

(16:16):
and a lot of people believed it. There are all
these revolutionary groups running around, the SRS, the social democrats
and the anarchists. But I think the average person in
Russia just wanted a fucking duma like a congress. They
wanted maybe a constitutional monarchy, or they wanted everything the same,
but just not starving, like a lot of people probably
would have been happy with no more control and just

(16:38):
more food. So Georgi led us a worker's march. I
almost had a strike. It was absolutely not a strike,
but this like peaceful workers march to the Winter Palace
to present a petition to the Tzar. The revolutionary stayed
home from this. They were like, this is some reform shit.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
This is not us.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
And Georgy agreed it wasn't a revolution. Like people were
like in his group were like ripping up the revolutionary propaganda.
They're like, no, we're the good guys. And Georgy sent
a copy of his petition ahead of time and was like, Hey,
I'm coming on January twenty second, don't worry. Oh, he
actually wrote January ninth. But that's because Russia worked on

(17:18):
a different calendar before the nineteen seventeen revolutions.

Speaker 3 (17:21):
Oh yeah, that's.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Figure dates the October revolution that happened in November. Yeah.
So Georgy and either three thousand or fifty thousand of
his closest buds. I love history. It's so great. Either
three thousand or fifty thousand of his closest buds marched along,
singing God Save the Czar and holding up like religious
icons and all that shit. So the soldiers shot them,

(17:48):
ran them down with horses, cut them with swords. The
best averagest guess is that a thousand people died there's
a lot of fucking people to die in March. This
gets called bloody Sunday, like so many Sundays in history,
and GEORGI didn't want a revolution, but a revolution it
would be. People were not happy about bloody Sunday. Georgy himself,

(18:13):
he actually made it. Have you heard about how he
met his fate?

Speaker 3 (18:16):
No? Actually, I mean I knew the part about the
Russian Revolution being started by a police informant, but I
didn't know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
So he makes it out alive, and he leaves the
country to hang out with all the revolutionists and next
Isle and actually at this point he's a little bit like, oh,
maybe we need a revolution.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, you know, it tends to happen when you get
to watch a bunch of soldiers killing a thousand people
of the street who were following you.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
I believe he refers to it as like the river
of blood that stands between us and the czar.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
And so he's an exile and he starts hanging out
with the SRS and the anarchists. But he wanted to
play both sides, and I think it was less than
he was like a Tzaris spy among the revolutionaries. I
think he genuinely thought, well, I want to play both
sides because in the end, I'm going to make peace
with everyone. That's my I'm not a Georgy expert. I'm

(19:10):
just proud that I looked up how to pronounce his
first name because it looks like Georgie. So he's like,
I think it's best if I work with both the
hard and revolutionaries and the secret police of the Czar.
But he said that where some hard and revolutionaries could
hear him, So they hanged him in his room in
nineteen oh six. Yeah, they were what'd you think is

(19:34):
gonna happen?

Speaker 3 (19:36):
Yeah, there's no good at it. Well, I mean, I
guess there's a version of the story where he lives
long enough to get to nineteen seventeen where they burn
all the police archives and then we can figure out
who all the informants were. Totally.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, he had eleven, like twelve years to make it
through it.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, or just not talking to the fucking cops. God, Yeah,
it's not that hard, friend of the pod, don't talk
to cops. Actually, you know what that's our ad today is,
don't talk to the police. It makes everything worse. Here's
your ads, Hi, Margaret Kiljoy here, boy. The world sure

(20:16):
is a mess right now? Huh. Seems like every day
there are more and more reasons to get out into
the streets and protest. That's why when I get arrested,
there's only one strategy. I trust, I shut the fuck up.
I say, I would like to remain silent, I would
like to talk to my lawyer, and then I shut
the fuck up. In the United States of America, it's
constitutionally protected and recommended by the National Lawyer's Guild. That's

(20:40):
shut thch f u c k up. Once again, that's
shut thch e f uck up. Because you can't talk
yourself out of custody, but you can talk yourself into
a conviction.

Speaker 4 (20:56):
Providing identification to law enforcement required in some states and situations,
giving name an address expedient in most circumstances. Never discuss
the events leading to arrest with anyone except your lawyer, doctor,
or therapist. Hosting pictures of protests and actions on social
media may lead to complications.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
If you have.

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Already talked to cops or experienced confusion about talking to cops,
call your attorney immediately, as these may be signs of
more serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to
cops does not provide legal advice, and the foregoing statements
are for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions,
consult an attorney.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
So after Bloody Sunday, strikes break out even more and
half of Russia's industrial workers total are going on strike.
In this early time, Poland, however, throws the fuck down.
Ninety three point two percent of Polish workers are on
so oh why god, yeah, incredible. One hundred strikers are

(21:55):
killed in Warsaw. One hundred and thirty are killed in Rigo,
which is now not Latvia but was Russia at the time.
Universities closed because of the upheaval, so students all join
the revolution. Saint Petersburg and Moscow are soon shut down
by workers' strikes, and it just spreads. The revolution spreads,
and it it like never quite knows exactly when it's
a revolution and when it's a general strike and when

(22:16):
it's a you know, and like, and that's kind of
one of the kind of interesting and cool things about it.
I actually I thought I was going to like blow
right past the reason this game of six part it
was going to be a four Parter, and then I
was like, oh, the nineteen oh five revolution like needs
some attention to understand nineteen seventeen and especially nineteen twenty one,
which is what we're building too, you know. So for

(22:37):
the most part, this is self organized political groups like
the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks are running to catch up
a pattern we've seen time and time again. And if
you read some histories, they're like, and then the Bolsheviks
and the Mensheviks set up all of the following things,
And then if you read the other histories, they're like,
and then the other things got set up, and the
Bolsheviks showed up and tried to say that they were theirs.
Which is not to say that the Bolsheviks are boring

(22:58):
and late to everything, but rather than the organized groups
in general, the professional revolutionaries and the vanguards are usually
caught with their pants down. During actual revolutions and rebellions,
sailors start mutineering all over the place, including at Cronstadt,
which is the military the island fortress that's later going
to be the center of what we're talking about. But

(23:21):
I read one history and who said, and I believe
it the reason this particular revolution didn't work is that
the rebellion in the military stays relatively minor and uncoordinated. Overall,
the military stays loyal to the czar and is therefore
able to One of the best ways to stop a
revolution is to kill everyone, but they don't succeeded that yet.

(23:41):
The revolution is still going on. In towns, workers start
forming soviets, and these are the first soviets that I
found reference to, and people talk about it specifically coming out.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
Of this revolution.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
That's why I want to talk about this revolution so
much is the soviets, and these are councils or assemblies
used to coordinate actions. The first one was in the
city of Ivanovna. The strike committees at a textile strike
turned into an elected body of all the workers in town.
Soon enough, soviets formed in sixty different towns. These councils

(24:16):
are attended by delegates elected from various factories in workplaces,
and these delegates are subject to immediate recall if they
don't do what they've been mandated to do. So this
isn't like what we think of as democracy in America,
which isn't fundamentally democracy. This is like, oh, well, we
can all go to the meeting. So Mia, you're going

(24:36):
to go to the meeting to represent cool Zone media,
but you're not there to come up with what you
want to do. You're there because we've all talked together
about what we want to do, and you're just there
to report for us and stuff like that, you know,
and if you don't, if you like start wilden out
and try and talk about some bullshit that we don't
care about, well then we'll send someone else next time.

(25:00):
It's a it's a pretty good system.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Yeah, And it's funny because later versions of these I
didn't episode I don't know when this is gonna come out,
but I did an episode like God some time ago
about the revolution in Algeria. And they also also end
up setting up a bunch of these workers councils. But
one of the reasons they don't work is because they

(25:26):
they're not they don't run on delegates, they're just basically
elected politicians. Yeah, and because this season sort of nested
like electoral things, they're not designed to represent the like
the actual views of the group. They're designed to have
one person in charge whose decisions get like kind of

(25:47):
rubber stamped by like the mass things, and it's it's
it's really interesting that the the original ones of these
didn't work like that. They worked more like like how
you would expect an anarctive system to work well.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
That actually gets to the crux, and we'll talk about
it in a little bit about how this model was
purposefully changed by Lenin, the most famous of these Soviets.
If you read a brief history of nineteen oh five revolution,
you're only going to hear about the Saint Petersburg Soviet
of workers Deputies built out of the Great October Strike

(26:20):
that started with printers and sued Lenda workers shutting down
all the railways in Russia. And the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
were both heavily involved in that Soviet. However, it's not
as directly, I believe, as later Bolshevik history presents it.
There's this revolutionary he's back from exile named Leon Trotsky,
and he I mean, he's not a slacker, I will

(26:45):
say about him.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Unfortunately for all of us.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
I know he's the one who like actually, in like
I believe nineteen oh four wrote about how, hey, if
we do exactly what the Bolsheviks are planning to do later,
it's going to go really badly. I should have written
that quote into the scripts, and I didn't. But he
has this quote about that, and then he didn't follow
his own advice. At this point, he is neither a

(27:10):
Bolshevik nor Menshevik. He had been in the Menshevik faction
and then he left the Menshevik faction because he was like,
the Bolsheviks are kind of shitty and authoritarian, I don't
like Lenin, and the Mensheviks are kind of boring and liberal.
So he's like, I'm just a social democrat. I'm a
non affiliated, non party affiliated social democrat. So at this
point he's like, I haven't got anything against him right now.
You know, he gives speeches that hundreds of thousands of

(27:32):
people attend, at least according to like literally they're like
two hundred thousand people. Half the workers in Saint Petersburg
came to see him talk, and maybe I don't know,
that's a lot of people. Yeah, but oh, and he
is the vice chair of this Soviet And the way
that the nineteen oh five revolution went down completely flabbergasted

(27:54):
the Marxists. Is not often I get to use the
word flabbergasted, but it is the perfect word for what.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
Happened to the Marxists.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
They rush to keep up both organizationally and then what's
fun because I'm a nerd. They had to rush to
keep up theoretically because general strikes and self organized soviets,
these are the two core things of the nineteen oh
five revolution that become the core of the later revolution.
Well thatden like the check on a bunch of evil shit.

(28:24):
But neither of these two things, general strikes and self
organized soviets are in the rule book for how a
scientific revolution led by the vanguard of the proletariat is
supposed to go down. Because did you know that Marxists
hate general strikes?

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Yeah? I have, I I I oh god, this is
a whole thing. Oh I to talk about it. Yeah,
you know I've been like this is yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah, all of us are grinning.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
That is how deep nerds, all three of us are.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, we're like all teeth right now.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
I'm like, there's only like two other things that I
think mea is it more nerdy about one?

Speaker 4 (29:04):
Which is sending me things about football that She's like,
what the fuck is happening?

Speaker 3 (29:12):
You don't want star Wars?

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yes? Fuck? Yeah, So okay, I'm going to go through
what I'm my understanding event, and you should correct or
add or anything you want. General strikes are for anarchists,
according to the Marxists. In eighteen seventy three, Frederick Engels
the like the other half of the marx pair and
the one that I have nothing nice to say about. Terrible,

(29:36):
he wrote in the Bacoonist Anarchist Program. A general strike
is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started.
But that's like bad according to him. Yeah, and so
the Marxists, instead of changing their dogma to fix the
facts the way that science works, they just reworded everything.

(29:57):
General strikes are hopelessly utopian. So what had happened were
mass strikes? These are different, you see. And I wrote
in my script I don't want to get two into
the weeds here, but I kind of do because it's fun.
So the difference between these two ideas is really funny
to me. Because Angles defined a general strike like roughly

(30:18):
as like a single organized strike where one day everyone
wakes up and has a general strike, right, And he's like,
and that's a terrible plan. No one had ever it's
a strong man argument. No anarchist had ever put forth
that definition. Of a general strike or had because that
is a terrible plan. That's not how general strikes hap.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, that's like a chartless thing like the British in
nineteen thirty. Okay, like no one believes that.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Yeah, And so he claims that this is the anarchist
theory and this is not true. That's like one of
his favorite things to do is claim things that are
our theories and they're not. So these later Marxist theories theorists,
they have to develop the mass strike instead in response
to these revolutions that happening. And this is good and
Marxist compared to the anarchist general strike and the mass strike,

(31:09):
it's actually just like more anarchistic. It's a bit more organic.
It's something that builds and ebbs and flows, you know.
So they just described how anarchists actually viewed and used
the general strike all the time. Yeah, okay. And then
the other thing. The Soviets too, were fulfillment of anarchist principles.

(31:29):
They are fundamentally what collectivists and communist anarchists are fighting for.
But Marxists didn't have anything like them in their books
by Marx and Engels, which advocated for the seizure of
state power instead of building bottom up power. And so
the way that the Bolsheviks decided to incorporate the Soviets
is to treat them like you were saying, what happened
in Algeria. Later, I guess to treat them like little

(31:51):
parliaments to be attended by political parties and eventually, ideally
only the Bolsheviks. The small scale of the Soviets was
not a feature but a bug, according to them. Lennin
wrote nineteen oh seven that his party could utilize Soviets
for quote, the purpose of developing the social democratic movement,

(32:12):
but soon they would be supliferous. So he's saying exactly
what he's going to do ten years later, which is
use the revolutionary program to centralize power and then get
rid of the revolution. However, credit where's due the Mensheviks. Meanwhile,
they're like still Marxists, right, but they're like kind of pragmatic.

(32:36):
They're like, I don't know, Soviets seem cool, Like, yeah,
let's just do the Soviets. This seems great, like whatever.
I kind of like them. And it gets really funny
because later the anarchists are going to be like more
siding with the Bolsheviks, because the anarchists are idiots and
are going to like be like.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
Well, they're more radical, so they're therefore better.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
You know, by the time I finished writing that part
of the script, maybe all of a different attitude, and
I've done a lot of work on the rest of it. Anyway,
that's my difference between general strike and mass strike. And
there are real and serious differences between all these various
factions of leftists. But it seems to me that the
things that happened in nineteen seventeen and onward, only the

(33:15):
Bolsheviks wanted to do those things. I don't know, maybe
I'm wrong, and we only know one thing that happened,
which is that the Bolsheviks did these bad things right.
And one of the reasons that anarchism gets left out
of the story of nineteen oh five is because anarchism
wasn't party politics. They rarely were like this is now
an anarchist Soviet or an anarchist general strike. Soviets in

(33:39):
general strikes were just the anarchist position. But that's not
how the people involved in the uprising ideologically would have
necessarily called themselves anarchists. Although in Poland and several other
places they were. And now I'm gonna talk about what
the anarchists in Poland were doing during the revolution, which

(33:59):
is where I promised you bombs. A Black Banner was
highly So now am I talk about the organizational structure.
The Black Banner was highly organized into federations, and I
have read that it was organized into multiple federations, each
of about three hundred members. And I have read and that
was the first person account the original source. The secondary

(34:23):
source claimed that there was three hundred total in Black Banner.
I find that unlikely. I tended not because the primary
source is inherently better, but I am based on what
he describes whatever. Anyway, the federations each represent this or
that branch of an industry. They had huge meetings where
the members themselves discuss theory and strategy together. And apparently

(34:44):
it's like the whole revolution is just like endless meetings.
It's like fighting and meetings and like. But the meetings
are kind of like the social thing because you're like, oh,
are you going to that like theoretical talk where we're
going to talk about like theory that one hundred years
from now people are still going to be talking about,
And people like yeah, I'm gonna go to that. I'm
going to go to the other thing and whatever.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
You know, it's like Twitter that you have to go to.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah, totally. And so they've set up these organizations and
whenever someone was mistreated by a boss or a landlord
or even a teacher abusing their students, they went to
Black Banner, and Black Banner would dish out some justice.
Most of the time they met in like their houses
or whatever. But the other main gathering place for them

(35:26):
was graveyards, which is cool as shit.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
That's so cool.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Anarchists have never changed, no single time I have been
to graveyard meetings before.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
Zero changes ever.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, And overall, the revolution of nineteen oh five didn't
fully succeed. It did not succeed, but it it got
slightly more than sometimes is given credit for. The army
stayed loyal to the Tzar, and so repression was pretty bad.
A bunch of nationalists did a bunch of pograms against Jews,
probably with the help of the Tzar.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I've read that.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
During this period of uprisings about three thousand Jews were killed.
There's one notable exception. The Jews in the anarchist quarter
of bial Stock in the heart of Black Banner territory.
Right wing thugs, cops nor the military dared to go there,
and there were other Jewish combat organizations that fought off

(36:22):
programs every now and then. But I just had read
that specific Like a guy who was there was like, yeah,
you know even that, Yeah, it was like pretty terrible,
the anti Semitism and stuff. There's one place they wouldn't go,
Like that's cool. They have like bomb factories and shit,
they're just like rocks, and they're just like when they

(36:45):
get bored, they throw dynamite into someone's house.

Speaker 3 (36:47):
That's bad.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Like I am also certain they occasionally threw dynamite into
houses of people who weren't bad, and like later, well,
we'll talk about what happens after the revolution. They managed
to win some suit serious demands. Not necessarily anarchists, but
the revolution managed to win some serious demands, and they
managed to fundamentally change organizing in Russia. It laid the
groundwork for the nineteen seventeen Revolution, and much like how

(37:11):
the twenty twenty Uprising in the US laid the groundwork
for the future revolution here, only this time we'll have
learned enough history to not let authoritarian communist sweep in
at the last minute instead of a dictatorship. The way
that the nineteen oh five revolution ended is kind of
fun I hadn't heard this before. I knew, like, there's
one part of it that I think is funny that

(37:32):
I hadn't heard before. There's a centrist politician, the guy
who spearheaded Russian industrialization. His name is Sergei Witte or
Wit or something. I know how to pronounce its first name, Witta.
That makes sense, but I know how to pronounce sir
gay gay. Someone's gonna tell me I didn't pronounce that right,
but maybe anyway.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
Look, if you ever do a podcast your listener, you
too will learn that daves are hard.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
I know, I look up almost all of them, and
then there's like one that'll slip through the cracks or
like I know how to pronounce that, and then I'm like, oh,
I spent so long on the first name.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
Listen.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
We do the best we can.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
So he wrote the October Manifesto, and it laid out
a bunch of reforms like have a constitution and create
a Duma which is like a congress, and all men
can vote, and Zar Nicholas was like, no, you don't understand.
And I think he believed this. He was like, I
am honor bound to stay the autocratic czar like hundreds

(38:31):
of years of my ancestors, Like who am I to
turn away from my like divine duty to be the
father of Russia. And it's funny because he's like just
a fucking shitty czar who sucks at everything. Yeah, and
like he can't do anything right and like I can't
remember I Rasputants on the picture now or not or
if that's a couple of years later. But he's like

(38:54):
not an impressive example of leadership. So he asked Grand
Duke Nicholas to lead up a military dictatorship. Grand Duke
Nicholas looks at his first cousin, once removed Zar Nicholas
the second, and says, I'm gonna give you a choice.
Either you accept the October Manifesto or I'm gonna shoot

(39:16):
myself in the head right now.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
Shit, I heard this far. That was the part I
hadn't heard before. And it works while.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Because this is like like his kind of his uncle,
Like this is the guy who's like, yeah, Zar Nicholas
is a seconds like grandfather had been another czar whatever,
fucking royalty. And as soon as these reforms are promised,
the rebellions stopped, those strikes stopped, and then the reforms
didn't come, and the revolution actually reached its peak in

(39:55):
that December, primarily led by the Bolsheviks and Saint Petersburg
as best as I can tell, before they were put
down by the army. Only the leftist groups like the
SRS and the Social Democrats and the anarchists and shit
wanted to keep going. Everyone else was like, woo, we
can vote now if these things go through. The revolutionists
doubled down and tried to go for it, and they

(40:18):
they failed, and nineteen oh six Russia became a constitutional
monarchy with a multi party system. But it was except
Nicholas the second was like, well, except I'm just still
going to be an autocrat and you can have like
the trappings of democracy, and he like slowly he made
the doom a powerless. There was this brief moment at
the end of nineteen oh five where there's free press

(40:39):
and a ton of groups put out a ton of material,
and a lot of the material is like, hey, everyone,
let's organize and put a bunch of holes in the
czar until there's no more czar, and so all of
these groups build up their ranks because the nineteen oh
five revolution was fairly spontaneous and not necessarily party led.
But during what came after, the parties were like, oh,

(41:00):
we can organize, and then free speech was like immediately revoked.
But do you know what else is free speed?

Speaker 3 (41:09):
No, it's not.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
People pay a lot of money to have people advertise
to you. You know who else has given a lot
of money to feed my dog is the sponsors of
this podcast, who you can listen to if you want,
or you can press forward a couple times on the
little thing on your phone, or you can subscribe to
Cooler Zone Media and give the money directly to my

(41:31):
dog and then you don't have to hear the ads
or the ads are great and you're like, man, I
just love getting to hear what's going on in the
world and learn about why I should gamble. Here's ads

(41:52):
and rebec So for several years you have the rise
of political violence and there's like more strikes and rebellions
going on, like kind of this echo of nineteen oh five,
and here's where we get what we promised you last time.
The kind of pissing match between sars and anarchists to
see who can like kill the most motherfuckers. The SRS

(42:16):
had their own split. He was the maximalist faction that
wanted to bring about an immediate revolution, who turned to
revolutionary violence. But things slowly settled down again. In that
pattern we see again and again after the mass movement fails,
the diehards keep going, like the how in the nineteen
sixties to nineteen seventies. You know, partly things settled down

(42:40):
because the crackdowns on the leftists were pretty fucking successful.
The leaders and organizers of most of the revolutionary parties died,
were imprisoned in Siberia, or went into exile around the country.
This includes a bunch of the major figures. Leon Trotsky
was sentenced to Siberia but escaped during transport made it
to London. I do want to hear that story of
that escape. I don't know it, but you randomly know it.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
Yeah, I don't. I don't actually know that one. Unfortunately,
that's right, we're into the territory of leftist prison breaks.
They don't know the story. I don't know. It's just
I just don't like Trotsky.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
No, I know That's one of the things about this
is like, yeah, like spoiler alert for anyone who's like
wondering why we're like, but Trotsky seems like the reasonable
one you're all talking about. Trotsky is the one who's
going to lead the attack on Kronstad and put down
and like lead the counter revolution, and he's he's the
guy who should have known better, unlike Vladimir Lenin is
the next one we're gonna talk about. He actually sat

(43:37):
the nineteen oh five revolution out. He wrote from London
about how the Russian Bolsheviks should get involved in all
the armed insurrection and mass terror and expropriation, because overall
the Bolsheviks back then were like, that's not really our deal,
Like that's more Maximus stars and anarchists who do that
kind of stuff. And Lenin's like, but why not us?

(43:59):
Can't we do it too? And by us doing it,
I mean you, I'm going to write a letter and
then you can do it, and then I'm going to
stay in London. And I actually don't think Lennon was
a coward. That's not an accusation I'm trying to make.
But there was some serious lead from the back energy happening.

Speaker 4 (44:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
After the Tsar accepted the Manifesto and was briefly liberalizing,
Lenin went home to Saint Petersburg and the Bolsheviks joined
the s RS and the anarchists and doing the rob
the rich, kill the rulers stuff. Most famous of these
Bolshevik bank robbers was the admittedly attractive, later mass murderer
Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
Okay, I want to clear something up here. The picture
of young Stalin that everyone points out is not real.
Wait what, yeah, it's it's a it's a it's a
propaganda picture that Stalin distributed and has hundreds of years.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Well, not necessarily the shirtless one, just that even the
one with him like like the picture where like him
with like a mustache and yeah, yeah that's fair to
look like the from one direction not real. I don't
know reference is that. Nobody on this thing but me.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
I just don't know what Zaye looks like that. I
was a one direction hater.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
So the like, if you google young Stalin, it's like
a porky. That's not it's not like shirtless whatever, you're
just hot.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
That's not him.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Yeah, that's fake. Yeah, that's someone else that they as
the Stalin thing.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
I literally showed you.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
A screen by screen of Zaye and the fake Stalin thing.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Oh no, yeah, no, I to listening. Yeah, fake Stalin
is even hotter than Zaane would It would be so
fun if he was in a boy band. Sorry, the
world would have been a better place.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, someone should have silo him there.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
Yeah, I'm like, all right, Saddam wrote romance novels Stalin
was in a boy band, like, that's fun.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, do it for the girlies.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Well, by the time Joseph Stalin, who is apparently not
as attractive as I was led to believe, was robbing banks,
Lenin was already out of the country again. He moved
to Switzerland and then Paris, where he argued that instead
of educating the Russian masses, the important thing was that
the existing intelligency. I should lead the working class. I
see where the anti intellectual anarchists were coming from.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
Yeah, I do the anti intellectual. The intellectual was Lenin.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah, exactly if the intellectual meant I get to learn
things and you don't, yeh like if everyone gets to
learn things, It's cool that sometimes people focus on learning things.
Nesser Makno the anarchist who's going to be important later
he goes to Siberia for killing a cop and a
lot of the maximalists, and I'm a little bit confused

(46:40):
about whether Sr's were the only ones who could be
called maximalists. I also feel like I've heard anarchists referred
to as maximalists or maybe ultras. At this time, I
get there's so many All of the words that are
used for the left everywhere else in the West are
not the words that people use in Russia anyway. An
awful lot of the people doing the terrorism take their

(47:03):
own lives rather than be arrested. Death is the sister
of liberty, when anarchists put it before ending his life,
I believe to the court many of them took their
own lives by self immolating, like setting themselves on fire.
One anarchist at the time, a guy who's later are
going to become Bolshevik anti anarchist. His name is Victor Serge.

(47:24):
He referred to it, Yeah, he referred to it. It
was like a collective suicide. And actually the fact that
Victor Surge is one of the people writing about this
is part of what makes it so hard. All of
this stuff is clouded in misinformation, you know, because the
Bolsheviks have a specific way that they want to paint
the anarchists, and what they want to paint the anarchists

(47:45):
as is bandits. So they want to play up the
disorganized nature, the fractious nature, and the like noble sack
self sacrificing.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Like fool.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
But on the other hand, that happens too, you know. Yeah,
those anarchists who were arrested generally gave Baller's speeches or
just refused to talk to the court at all, refusing
to dignify the proceedings. One young anarchist woman on trial
for killing a priest and then trying to kill a cop,

(48:22):
told the court proudly and bravely, we shall mount the scaffold,
casting a look of defiance at you. Our death like
a hot flame, will ignite many hearts. We are dying
as victors forward, then our death is our triumph.

Speaker 3 (48:36):
Rules.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Yeah, she took cyanide pills in captivity. That seems to
be the attitude of a lot of these people, because
you're you're living in a dirt floor house, oppressed like hell,
and you're like, oh, we almost had a revolution.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
It didn't work.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
I'm not going back to starving, like, yeah, I will
take as many months out with me and I knew
that the end result of living is death, and I'm
gonna do it as nobly as I can. Other final
words to court are things like you yourself should be
sitting on the bench of the accused. Down with you, all,

(49:15):
villainous hangmen, Long live anarchy, and that the anarchists would
take away quote your privileges and idleness, your luxuries and authority,
death and destruction to the whole bourgeois order. Hail the
revolutionary class struggle of the oppressed. Long live anarchism and communism.
They also promised that they were the first swallows of
a coming spring, and they were right. Actually, it's a

(49:40):
shame that spring was hijacked by power hungry tyrants.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Yeah, it rapidly became winter. And yeah, as springs are
wont to do.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
I know, stupid cycles. Why can't we just have utopia,
gonna stop the earth?

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Yeah vie. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
With all the mass arrests happening, the Russian left turned
to a group that had been active for decades, the
political Red Cross. This was a group, or rather several
groups working together that helped political prisoners in Russia. Interestingly,
this predates the modern Red Cross by several years, at
least under that name. Yeah, no, I this one like

(50:26):
I fell into a hole about well, I mean, that's
what could probably call this podcast is.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
Margaret reports from the hole that Margaret fell in this week.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
But where all the groups got the name of the
Red Cross was at in eighteen sixty four, the first
Geneva Convention picked the Red Cross as an international symbol
for don't shoot, contrary to some pictures that have come
out of Gaza over the past couple decades. Yeah, it
is the symbol of neutrality and armed conflict is what
the Red Cross was designed as, not even specifically medical.

(50:58):
It's obviously become that, but it was like it's it's
the don't shoot symbol. And I'm sure that other groups
use the name, but the first one I'm aware of
is the political Red Cross in Russia, which is later
going to become the anarchist Black Cross. To be clear
to where I'm going with this, it was formed in
eighteen seventy, whereas the International Committee of the Red Cross,
the group that we talk about today, picked its name

(51:20):
in eighteen seventy six, the Political Red Cross fundraised and
offered support to political prisoners that had been doing it
since eighteen seventy. They fundraised basically the same way that
people do now like again, and then nothing ever changes.
First bail support group, it is, it absolutely is. They
did it through benefit shows, oh my god, donations from

(51:43):
leftists with middle class jobs and or generational wealth and crime.
Nothing has ever changed, nothing has ever changed. To be fair,
To be fair, I do want this on the record,
we don't actually fund bail funds with crime. That's actually
not a thing that happens.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
But yeah, fair enough. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
They first started off by supporting the Nerodniks, the eco hippies,
the Back of the Landers, and then the nihilists, the
eco hippies plus guns, and then all the various political
groups after the nineteen oh five revolution failed is where
they went next. But here's the interesting part. The group
was meant to be non ideological right. But then the

(52:24):
Social Democrats. I believe this means the Bolsheviks, but what
I read was the Social Democrats. They started only helping
their own folks. Oh, after nineteen oh five, as the
political Red Cross, so the anarchist Red Cross split off
and what matters about this? And it mattered then and
it matters now, and I think is crucial for understanding

(52:46):
the Russian Revolution. The Anarchist Red Cross split off to
support not the anarchist prisoners, but all political prisoners, regardless
of their ideology, whereas the Bolsheviks used the larger umbrella
name Polytical Red Cross to only support their folks. Anarchists
in the Russian Revolutions were fighting for an anarchist society,

(53:07):
they almost always did so in a way that encouraged
and supported ideological pluralism. So as compared to the Bolsheviks,
who would take the big umbrella name but mean the
tiny click and they've been doing it since the beginning,
since they got the name Bolsheviks. They are the smaller
group that takes the larger umbrella group name and then

(53:29):
turns it into the tiny elite banguard. This new Anarchist
Red Cross started spreading across the world as Russians went
into exile. At some point along the way, I think
the late nineteen oughts, but I'm not sure, it changed
its name to Anarchist Black Cross to avoid being confused
the International Red Cross, and good on it. That is

(53:52):
a better name for this particular project is the Anarchist
Black Cross. Is still around today and it is one
of the best entry points into anti authoritarian politics for
folks who are interested but don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Where to start.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
ABC chapters. Anarchist Black Cross chapters put on political prisoner
letter writing nights and support all politicized prisoners, not just anarchists,
and have since the start. There are even still chapters
in Russia. They are officially marked as undesirable organizations by
the state, which means that they are prohibited from organizing

(54:25):
and disseminating information. The first time that you're caught is
a fine. After that it is a jail sentence. But
that's where we're going to leave Russia for this week.
They've had a mostly failed revolution, all the radicals are
dead or in jail or in exile or desperately supporting
imprisoned comrades. And then famously nothing happened in Europe for

(54:48):
the nineteen tens except World War One and a string
of revolutions, including the most famous of all revolutions, the
Russian Revolution, which is really three revolutions, the sort of
liberal one, the more radical one, and then a desperate
revolutionary attempt against the Bolshevik counter revolution, which we'll get
at into. That wasn't right grammar, but I'm going with it.

(55:09):
We're gonna get at into in parts three, four, five,
and six. Fuck yeah, our first six parter. Any thoughts,
of course, it's cronstat that no other episode could possibly.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
Have been for six partner.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
No, it could have been a two parter, Kross I
could have been two parter if I had already done
the enough of the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
Yeah, but but just morally it had to be cross
sixth part.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
I think Kronschat is one of the single pivotal moments
of human history.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Yeah, it is, like.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
And I was surprised years ago when I used to
make my living selling buttons on Etsy. I tried to
be clever all the time for a living, and I
made one that said I'm still mad about Kronstadt, and like,
I thought that was gonna be my like ten people
are gonna buy this. Ever, that was one of my
most popular buttons.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
I've seen them in the wild. Before I knew you,
i'd seen those in the wild.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Yeah, it's been one hundred years, We're still bad.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
You ruined literally all of human history. Congratulations.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Yeah, and It's funny too, because it's like one of
the things that I used to think, oh, Cronshot was
when the anarchists tried to stop the Bolsheviks. No, it's
when everyone who was a communist tried to stop the Bolsheviks.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
Yeah, like it.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Was when socialism tried to stop a terrible thing. Oh, anyway,
we'll talk about all those revolutions next week, but first
we'll talk about your plugs. Yeah, you can find me
a podcasting could happen here. We do it every day

(56:53):
except Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, and you two can figure
out how to not have this happen to you again.
That is one of the I really appreciate the like
strategic analysis that you all do with current events as
well as like historical events and how they relate to
current events. I actually, I was really I was really impressed.

(57:14):
People should check out Gare's recent breakdown of organizing in
Atlanta and like updates that are fairly recent. This is
a couple of weeks old now at this point, but
Garret did a good talk that just is like here's
how people try to organize, and here's what works, and
here's what didn't, and that's the kind of you know,
that's the kind of without like talking trash on each

(57:37):
other and being like, oh, y'all are fools, Just be like,
well this didn't work. What can we try instead? And
that's what I'm doing with these episodes.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
My episode is called Crackdown on Stop Cup City.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
Oh thank you if you're looking for it. My main
plug is a September twenty fourth, I have a new
book coming out. It is actually my debut novel in
a ton of books, but they are all either short
novellas or long novellas, like a Country a Ghost is
like right on the line between novella and novel, and
so I'm going with con a long novella. And this

(58:12):
is my debut novel. It's called The Sapling Cage and
it is a crossover book, and crossover is a marketing term.
It means it's a ya book that like a young
adult book that knows that it's mostly adults who are
going to read it. And it is about a young
person who wants to go be a witch. But they
have one major problem, which is that they were born
a boy and their best friend has been promised for

(58:34):
the witches and they go in their friend's place and
learn all about magic and in the meantime have.

Speaker 3 (58:40):
To save the world.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Because it's a high fantasy book and I hope you
like it is the first book in the Daughters of
the Empty Throne trilogy, because of course that's the title
of my trilogy, Rules Kingdom that Doesn't have a King.
It comes out September twenty fourth. I'll be talking about
a lot more. It's going to go for pre order
probably in June. And it's from Feminist Press. And there's

(59:04):
a new Pool Zone media podcast called sixteenth Minute, and
it is by someone who wrote about hot dogs. And
you don't need to know anything else about Jamie Besides.
That's what's so great is that everyone can have the
one thing that people decide they're famous for and then
never deviate from that ever. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
For me, it's ice must be Destroyed. Yes, that's all
I got.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Yeah, And I even like when I'm like, oh wow,
like Margaret writes fiction too, It's like, look, I know,
my podcast is probably the widest reaching thing I've ever done.
Writing about history is way newer to me than writing
fantasy and science fiction. I've been doing that for a
long time. Anyway, Sixteenth minute. I somehow made it about me,

(59:48):
but it's not at all. It's about Jamie Loftus and
you should check it out in May June May you
may check. Nope, not gonna do it by everyone seeing
it next week.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
Bye.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.