Behind the Bastards - Part One: Nestor Makhno: Anarchist Warlord and Book Club Aficionado

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Nestor Makhno, our 2020 holiday non-bastard episodeFOOTNOTES:1. https://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/en/Collective_-_The_Personal_Side_of_Nestor_Makhno.html2. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3194162-one-gratifying-aspect-of-our-rise-to-some-prominence-is3. http://www.ditext.com/arshinov/7.html4. https://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/en/Collective_-_The_Personal_Side_of_Nestor_Makhno.html5. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/nestor-makhno-and-russian-civil-war6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-04469-6_67. https://libcom.org/history/makhnovists-mennonites-war-peace-ukrainian-civil-war8. https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/makhno-and-memory Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ho, ho, ho! Fuck the po- I mean, Merry Chris! I liked where that was going. I liked where that was going. I didn't hate it. It's the holidays! Yeah. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards,

normally a podcast about the worst people in all of history. But not today, because today is the Christmas episode. And with me to help present our Christmas episode is my erstwhile producer, Sophie Lichterman. Hi. Give him a bow, Sophie. No. Okay, well, Sophie didn't want to bow to you. That's kind of mean. You can bow to me, Robert.

The inestimable, Jamie Loftus. Hi. How's everybody doing this holiday season? Everyone feeling yule and tide? I'm feeling good. I've been consuming a lot of Christmas content. Oh, good. Santa University is good to go.

I feel as good as I possibly could in this moment. But I'm sure that won't last. No, no, of course not. I mean, maybe a little. We got a festive story this year. But yeah, Christmas is a wonderful season. I've been doing a whole lot of Christmas content. I did my yearly viewing of White Christmas, which was the first movie filmed in color.

It predates Alaska being a state. And it has very subtle racism, which is always a hoot. You know, the fact that it was even subtle is a surprise. Yeah, I didn't notice it. I watched it every year as a kid with my family. And I didn't notice until I was an adult that like, oh, the only black characters in the entire movie are like working behind the bar on a train and they don't talk.

That tracks. Tracks. Wait, year did it come out in? It's like 52. Or 54 maybe. It's like, you know, it's back in the day and it's got old bingo. Uh, it's, it's.

I watched you, Robert, you should watch. I would love your takes on the new princess switch movie. What? Like when you say switch, are we talking like switch? Or are we talking like? So here's the rundown. So there's a princess. Not the print.

That would be a really good sequel is the princess switch. Uh, but the, but these are just simply princesses who switch with each other. Um, and they're all played by. Two princesses who take each other's jobs. Yes. They, it's kind of like the holiday that Nancy Meyers movie. There's nothing kinky about it.

Although I think that there's room in the franchise for that to change. Uh, and, and all of the princesses are played by Vanessa Hudgens. We're up to three Vanessa Hudgens. He doesn't know who that is. I know, I know who Vanessa Hudgens is, but she plays. So she's, she's like meet the clump sing a princess movie. Yeah. Like this is her nutty professor.

You know who Vanessa Hudgens is. Yeah, she's an actress. Wow. I don't know. Wow. Doesn't she do some Disney shit? She did. This is the first time.

Yeah. Like I couldn't pick her face out, but like I've seen Vanessa Hudgens and things. It's familiar. Like she's, she's as real a human being to me as I don't know. Um, uh, uh, uh, uh, I forgotten all of the names of every other person who's ever been in movies. Um,

She's as real as bingo, at least if not more. No, no, no. She's famously bingo early in quarantine. She went live on Instagram and said she didn't care. Uh, she said that, you know, in a pandemic, people are going to die and we should just accept that she's a really hardened person. She sounds like a real hero. You know, speaking of hardened people who are heroes.

Disney star. Yeah. Well, the person we're talking about today, every Christmas season, every Yule tide, we, uh, we, we switch around, you know, the premise of this show and go from talking about the worst people in all of history to talking about one of the best people in all of history. And, uh, you know, this is, this is, I think a pretty beloved tradition. We're on year three of it now.

And, uh, you know, our first pick was someone who is, I think is, as pure a human being as ever existed, Raoul Wallenberg, who really you can't get any better than Raoul. Um, and you know, the next year we did a very flawed man who nevertheless rose to the occasion of history and became a glorious beacon of moral courage. Mr. John Brown, um, solid guy, solid hero. And this year we're doing yet another kind of different sort of hero.

Uh, this guy's a messy figure. He had a dark side and he's a man who in the end failed in his ultimate goals. But he's someone I find inspiring nevertheless. And after a messy year of darkness and failure, um, I think that he's, uh, the right person to talk about today because today we're chatting about Nestor Makhno. Okay. As you know, I have no fucking clue who this person is,

but he's coming in strong with it. I mean, this is, this is honestly my Nestor Makhno. Yeah. Nestor Makhno. He's Ukrainian as fuck. Like he's Ukrainian as fuck. Okay. So this is kind of a situation of like, this is Vanessa Hudgens to you is Nestor Makhno to me. So who is he?

Nestor Makhno was an anarchist warlord and one of the most successful guerrilla commanders in all of history. Um, without him, we probably would never have had a Soviet Union, which is a mixed bag and he was not trying to make a Soviet Union. I should note that he actually really didn't want it to happen. Not everyone can say that. Um, but he's a, he's a fascinating guy. He's a really influential person.

Um, I think a guy who in one of the worst periods and places in human history, uh, was, was a as good a person as you could possibly be. Um, and he's also kind of rad. So we're going to talk about motherfucking Nestor Makhno. Um, and yeah, yeah. And you know, if we're going to talk about Nestor before we get into his life, we're going to have to talk about Ukraine a little bit. Do you know much about Ukraine, Jamie?

I really don't. I got to tell you, I don't. Yeah. Almost no one does for good reason. Um, see Ukraine, I think in a lot of Americans, they kind of think of Ukraine as like any other European kind of like Germany, your fucking Denmark or, or, or Russia or whatever. And that's not really the right way to think about it.

Ukraine is a colonized land. Um, and Ukrainians like the Irish, um, are, are victims of colonization. Um, kind of like the Sicilians too, right? Like the things that happen to them, the things we're going to talk about happening to Ukraine are not entirely dissimilar to things that happen to the Congolese or to indigenous North Americans. Not to say that like all of those are the same either,

but there's a lot of similarities. They are, are victims of colonialism, right? Um, and they weren't considered white by a lot of people until fairly recently. Hitler, right? What took over Ukraine to take over? Okay. It was eight minutes, eight minutes before we hit Hitler. Yeah.

Sorry. That's a fun game to play with every episode of the show. Um, but no, Hitler wanted their land cause it's good growing land, but his plan was basically to white, to, to genocide them all slowly over time, um, to make way for, for white people, right? And like he was not the only person to have had a,

a broadly similar plan with Ukraine. Um, yeah. So the Russia we know today actually got its name from Ukraine. Uh, Russia comes from the Kiev and Rus, uh, the capital of Ukraine is Kiev. Um, you know, pretty obvious math there. In the top one things I know about Ukraine. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the thing people tend to know.

Uh, for most of modern history, native Ukrainians have been pretty oppressed, uh, from 1775 to 1782. Catherine II, who was, is generally known as an enlightened despot, uh, which maybe is a term we should use. Um, I was like, is that, that is for sure. The French called her one. That's for sure an oxymoron.

She was really good at making painters and shit like her, but she was also like a brutal tyrant. Okay. So, you know, there's, you know, there's pros and cons. We all contain multitudes. She's enlightened because people with fancy coats like her, but also she rules thousands of what are essentially slaves with an iron fist. You know, an enlightened despot.

Yeah. She's a despot with clout, some serious clout. Yeah. She had some serious clout and she used that clout, Jamie, to give away 5 million hectares of Ukrainian land to Russian nobles. Um, she didn't ask the people who were already occupying it first. Uh, she also, That's, that's where the despot comes in.

Yeah. That's the despot part. The enlightened part was giving it away. Um, she also gave a bunch of land to German colonizers who'd moved into the area with her blessing. Um, and a lot of these people that she gave all this land to didn't actually wind up living on the land. They were basically absentee landlords, kind of like what the Irish dealt with, right?

Okay. Like you give the land to your, to your loyal noble followers and they use it to make money for themselves, but they don't, they don't go there. They're not going to leave Moscow or whatever. Um, although a lot of them... And was everyone else like displaced, everyone else was displaced from the land?

Generally they just became serfs who were the property of the people who own the land, right? Like that's usually more how it went. Terrifying. Yeah. It's awful. Now, whenever you have colonization, and that's really what's occurring to Ukraine in the 1700s, uh, you have resources that the colonizers are trying to plunder.

And in Ukraine's case, it's the infamous black earth. Ukrainian soil is incredibly fertile. It's the bread basket of Europe, right? A lot of Europe, it's hard to like grow food on. Ukraine grows a fuckload of food. Um, it's like where your fucking sunflower oil comes from today, but like a lot of shit grows in Ukraine. People have been fighting over it for a long time as a result.

Fulfilling Ukrainian products. Yeah. Yeah. They make some good sausages, some good soups. I had the worst calamari of my life there, but it was in a war zone, so I'm not going to blame them too much. Nice. I'm seeing, yeah, I'm seeing soup. I'm seeing t-shirts that say,

I'm Ukrainian. You couldn't handle me with instructions. Yeah, that was, uh, that was, yeah, that was the most popular. That's what everyone was fighting over in 1803. The novelty t-shirts. The Ukrainian novelty t-shirts. Actually, all of Europe's novelty t-shirts are grown in Ukrainian soil.

Wow. Yeah. Secret histories. That's why Hitler and Stalin fought over the land. You know, that's what really decided World War II. I'm just dumbfounded over your calamari choice in a war zone. You're like, you know what would be? I had to try it.

I had to try it. You had to try it. That's fair. And it was as bad as I expected war zone calamari to be. Uh, one day I'll go back to Konstantinifka and see if I can get better calamari. So, um, after Catherine II and 1803, the Tsar of Russia assigned a thousand hectares of Ukrainian land

to every retired Russian officer and 500 to every retired NCO. And what he was doing with his retired soldiers and what Catherine did with the Germans was the same idea, basically. Like you have this land that's rebellious and filled with people you don't trust. So you give it to people,

you have people that either you trust or that have to be loyal to you move there. Like you say, hey, Germans, I'll give you land here if you'll help me oppress the local, like the native Ukrainians, right? Like your, your job is going to be to keep this shit on lock for me. It's the same thing with her retired soldiers, right? This happens all over the world. The Romans did it, a shit load.

Um, now one of the main groups of foreigners brought into Ukraine in this period to help the Tsars and Tsarinas, uh, maintain control were the Mennonites. Now, Ukraine's Mennonites came over from Germany in the late 1700s when Catherine the Great gave, again, gave up a shit load of land that she'd stolen from indigenous Cossack and no guy tribes people.

Now each family, each Mennonite family was given 175 hectares and granted immunity to taxes for 30 years. This generous deal made sense because Mennonites were famously hard workers and the Empress saw this as an investment. As a result, many Mennonites in Ukraine were wealthy. They owned serfs and when serfdom was abolished, they basically owned people who were pretty much sharecroppers.

So serfdom is like you are, you are not it's not as bad as being like a chattel slave and like the American South, but it's, it's on that same scale. You are part of the land. So if a nobleman owns land that serfs are on, he owns you and you're bound to that land. Okay. This is a very bleak chart that you're describing.

It's the way all of Europe works in the medieval period, right? And it's the way Ukraine continues to work and Russia continues to work into the 1860s. Got it. So everywhere else in Europe is like, oh, this is a terrible way to have a society. And Russia is like, why change? It could be so much worse.

Yeah. There's steam engines when Russia is like, yeah, we should probably not have serfs. That might be bad. Russia is so stressful. God. All right. Incredibly stressful.

So yeah, it's bleak. Now, given what most Americans know about Mennonites, you might assume that being a peasant for a Mennonite overlord would be like your best case scenario of being like a serf or a peasant, you know, if you have to be. Unlike the disenfranchisement scale. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Because Mennonites are pacifists, right? They don't use violence. They're supposed to be like, our Mennonites are pretty chill folks. Mennonites have a big factor in like the American anti-war movements for a long time. They're supposed to be pretty chill. That has not always been the case and was not the case in Ukraine.

Ukrainian Mennonites were not pacifist in any way that you would recognize as pacifist. And I found a heavily researched and citation full write-up of all of this on a site called libcom.org, which is a libertarian communalist sort of information warehouse or whatever. And it's speaking of stressful sounding locations to be. Oh, it's good shit. I believe it.

It's good shit. And it notes, quote, those who labored on these estates included Russo-Ukrainian peasants and landless Mennonites. In their treatment of laborers and serfs, the Mennonite landlords were indistinguishable from their Russo-Ukrainian peers. A representative incident, a Mennonite landowner caught a Russo-Ukrainian laborer stealing grain so he pushed the laborer into the grain bin and nailed down the lid.

He waited two days and then called the mayor to have the captive flogged. Many Mennonite landlords practiced collective punishment. When theft was suspected, all the potential suspects were flogged so as to teach a lesson to both the guilty and the innocent. The principle of pacifism had therefore been abandoned by wealthy Mennonites long before the Russian Revolution. Holy shit. It sucks to be in Ukraine for a long time.

And it's not easy now, you know, with the invasion. That's, I mean, even for a landlord, that is uniquely bad. That's the bad shit. And I'm pointing out that the Mennonites are doing this because of some stuff that comes later. But that's everyone who has land in Ukraine, right? That's the Mennonites. That's the Germans.

That's Jewish people. Some of them. That's about one percent of landlords. But everyone who is rich in Ukraine is that kind of terrible to the people who are bound to the land. That is fucked. Yeah, that's Russians. I've had bad landlord experiences, but yeah, that's new.

These are like hyper landlords, right? Because these are landlords that also own you. Yeah. So, again, most of the Ukrainian peasantry were serfs up until serfdom was abolished in 1861. Oh, and I should also note that, like, there were wealthy Mennonite and Jewish and Russian and German landlords.

There were poor people of all who were also basically owned by their landlords too, right? This is not a religion or an ethnicity thing. This is the way rich people are in Ukraine thing, you know? Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, basically everyone who isn't rich is a serf up until like 1861.

Now, before abolition, again, serfs were basically enslaved, pretty close to that at least. And when the serfs were freed, they were given tiny parcels of their native land, three hectares per family on average. And they generally had to buy that land back from the person who would own them previously. The best lands in Ukraine were given to the Tsar. These were called crown lands.

Other good lands were given to his nobles, the clergy and favored foreigners like the Mennonites and the Germans. For one example of kind of how the breakdown of land ownership in Ukraine went, in 1891, in the province of Ekaterinoslav, German planters who were 4% of the population controlled 9.46% of the land.

Greeks who were 2% of the population controlled nearly 7% of the land. And Ukrainian peasants who made up 70% of the population controlled only 37.5% of the land. Wow. Okay. That's honestly a higher number than I expected, but that's not good.

Yes. Because, again, serfdom was abolished and they were given, you know, a chunk of land. But in many cases, they were still, it was the worst land and they were still paying it off to the people who had owned their parents, you know? I mean, when you put it that way, it still sounds like a pretty bad deal.

It's a raw deal. Again, it's a raw deal. There are not a lot of points in modern history where you would have wanted to live in Ukraine. It sounds pretty fucking awful there. Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, like Ukraine is a beautiful country. I've enjoyed the people.

They've just like been continuously fucked over by everyone around them. They're like, if you look at the position of Ukraine in Europe, they're in the worst case because they have the best land and they're in between Germany and Russia and Poland. Like, it's a horrible place to be. You're really in the crossfires of like,

bleak places that could colonize your land. Well, that explains the whole, I'm Ukrainian and you couldn't handle me with instructions, you know, like a novelty t-shirt, you know? They're a quarrelsome people. They've had to be. Yeah. It makes sense for survival-based purposes.

Now, the other native peoples of Ukraine are called Cossacks. And the Cossacks are complicated as hell. They're a nomadic horse-riding warrior people who traditionally live by a mix of shepherding, banditry, and selling their services as mercenaries. They're famous warriors. They're like Mongols, right? It's like pretty dramatic sounding, honestly.

Yeah, they're fucking, they are dramatic. They're like a fashion element to this because it just sounds like they're a lot. Yeah, there are some amazing pictures. I will Google. There's a great painting of Cossacks that is fucking cool as hell, Jamie. It's one of the raddest pictures

in all of the history of pictures. And I'll send it along to you in a second. So the term Cossack was applied by Europeans as like kind of a broad term to encompass all the different groups of these people, even though every Cossack band and tribe was different. And you'll hear them described differently. A lot of people will describe them as different tribes,

different bands. It's not entirely based on like family ties or ethnicity because in a lot of cases like Cossack bands will adopt anyone who wants to come in as a Cossack, which also like actually some Native American tribes did at certain periods too. So it's not, I don't know. I'm not an expert on the Cossacks.

But they did a lot of like different Cossack bands, a lot of different stuffs. There were Cossack groups who sold their services to the Tsar and were basically the Tsar's shock troopers. Like when there was a rebellion, the Tsar would send in his Cossacks to fucking murder everybody. And when Napoleon invaded Russia, his fleeing army, like he got beaten and he wound up fleeing from Moscow,

his army was harried and massacred by Cossacks. They're fast and they're terrifying. They're like the Mongols and they come from a similar area. Like you have all these different peoples who live on horseback in the Asian steppes and they're really good at fighting. The Cossacks are one of those groups. Back in the 1600s, when Ukraine was owned by Poland,

and Poland was the one fucking around in Ukraine, there was a mass uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against the Poles that succeeded in kicking Poland out of Ukraine and also bringing Poland into Russian control because there weren't enough Cossacks left alive after beating off Poland to run the country basically. Well, sure.

Yeah. There was also a genocide that occurred during this that the Cossacks committed against Jewish people called the Kelnitsky Massacre, that might have been the largest massacre of Jewish people prior to the Holocaust. Some, like anyway, complicated history here. So now if you're playing the bastards bingo,

that was about 21 and a half minutes till genocide. Yeah, yeah. Wow. One of these guys looks like Santa in the picture you sent. Yeah. He's kind of wearing a little... Wow. I love Christmas.

So the Cossacks in this famous painting, there's this famous painting of a bunch of Cossacks looking like rad dudes smoking and drinking and covered in weapons and like, yeah, writing a letter back to the con. Look out. Yeah, there's a Santa looking motherfucker. He looks like he's in the middle of ho-ho-ho-ing.

He's got the hidden motion. And it's a painting of a group of Cossacks called the Zapperogs. And the Zapperog Cossacks are the group who led that rebellion against Poland. They're the Cossack community who kind of like was native to Eastern Ukraine. And they were the same Cossack community

who would one day produce a low baby named Nester Makno. So that's everything has been sort of laying the groundwork for where this guy comes from. But like the people in that painting are like Nester's ancestors. To keep an idea of the kind of thing. Literally, one of them looks like Santa. So this is exciting. Yeah, one of them does a heavily armed Santa.

Are you implying that Santa at present is not heavily armed? I'll tell you, he's not heavily armed enough to come into my house. Wow. Oh, shit. Okay, okay. I shoot to kill on Christmas. So, yeah, I'm going to quote now from a very fun book about Makno called Anarchy's Cossack

that talks a little bit about what the Cossacks were like and kind of what the political tradition was in the area where Makno grew up before the Tsar took over. Okay. They clung to their Republican traditions, what was known as Cossack freedoms, namely the practice of settling all their problems in General Assembly, the Kruk,

and of appointing their own Ottoman, an elected and revocable military leader. The Zaporhugs were free men or men whose ambition was to be such. They welcomed many outsiders to their ranks, Russians fleeing their despotic rulers or serfdom, retainers, peasants, townsfolk, vagabonds of various origins, fleeing taxation,

constraint in all manner of servitude and lured by the Zaporhugs' manner and free way of life, their volnitsia. They could stay permanently or just sample Cossack life for a spell. In principle, every free Ukrainian was a Cossack while retaining his land and could be mobilized at a moment's notice.

So, the Cossacks have like a long kind of democratic tradition, like a lot of tribes, like a lot of hunter-gatherers. They don't like, you know, if your reputation is we're all really good at killing, it's kind of hard to have a very, like, strict leader in charge of you, because everyone's got weapons and is good at murdering each other. So, yeah.

That's the cause. And Ukrainian peasants had some democratic traditions, too, that go back a pretty long way, that were kind of like they weren't powerful enough for the Tsar to really care about cracking down on them, but there are some self-government traditions that exist in this region, even underneath the Tsar's oppression.

So, the Zaporhugs had been mostly, like, wiped out by the Russian government back in the 1700s. A lot of them had been turned into serfs, their homes and lands despoiled, but they were kind of still around and more or less baked into the scenery by October 27th, 1888, when a little baby boy named Nestor Makno was born. The Zaporhugs is such a good name for...

Hardcore name games in the Cossacks. It's so good. It sounds like a college band as a compliment. That's one of the reasons I love kind of Eastern European history, because everything is just rad as fuck. It all sounds very like punk rock. Yeah. It's an incredibly punk rock region of the globe.

So, Nestor was the fifth son of his parents, who had been serfs to a guy named Shabelsky back in the days before getting their freedom. Now, the land that they'd been given was too small to feed them, and so Nestor's dad spent the rest of his life working for the guy who used to own him, which sucks. I wouldn't...

Yeah, that's not good. That's not a vibe I'm trying to pursue. Yeah, you don't want that. Nestor was a very good student with a particular gift for arithmetic and reading, but he only got about two truncated school years worth of education before his dad died and his family was poor enough that at age 10,

he had to start working full-time. Wait, how old is he when he starts working full-time? 10. He's a 10-year-old man. Wow, I love that. Well, double digits, you know? Grow the fuck up, Nestor. What's his job?

I don't know what else is a 10-year-old man, Jamie. No, where is this going? The products and services that support this podcast. This is so inaccurate. A hard 10. Little entrepreneurs. They better be. This is not Shark Tank, Robert.

It could be. What if we did that show? Has there ever been a child on Shark Tank? Oh, 100%. That's so fucked up. It's cable television. I know what we've been talking about is fucked up, but there was a little kid on once and his pitch was terrible,

so Mark Cuban put a cigar out on him. Wow, that's good. It was good TV. That'll teach you. That'll teach you. That'll teach you. That told me that sound very true. I was like, it could be true.

I mean, I feel like an adult putting a cigarette out on you, that'll teach you to never do things. Yeah, an adult putting a cigar out on you. That'll keep you bound to the land. That's a career change. That is a career change. All right, here's products that probably won't put a cigar out on you. During the summer of 2020,

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Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not on the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So I have almost finished my first full cup of Death Wish coffee, which is reportedly the strongest coffee in the world. And I guess I have a severe caffeine addiction. You have a severe caffeine addiction? I just like rush-ordered sugar-free pear Red Bull to my house. Yeah, I mean it's pretty good coffee actually. It's nice. I got a sugar-free pear Red Bull is the one that you also like, Robbery.

The sugar-free pear Red Bull is very tasty. It is. I got a real shit-yourself brand of iced coffee today. It's got too much dairy in it. I think I've talked about it with you before. It's the TikTok Stars coffee order. I wish there was a brand with the courage to just be called shit-yourself iced coffee.

It's just like, this coffee will make you shit-yourself. You need to get your day started. We will fucking ruin your pants. You will never sleep again, but you better wear a pair of pants you're not too attached to. You got the Charlie that way. You're telling me, Jamie? Yeah, I got the Charlie at Dunkin' Donuts.

I got the Charlie. Robbery doesn't know who Charlie is. I think that's honestly for the... I would be so worried. He doesn't even know. Well, we're not talking about any Charlie here. We're talking about Nestor Macnoe. So Nestor was a good student as a little boy.

He had a gift for arithmetic and reading, but yeah, he only got about two years of school before, at age 10, he has to help provide for his family. He worked full-time from 10 onwards, generally for other wealthy property owners, like the man who had once owned his parents. Nestor later wrote that this experience awoke in him a sort of rage, resentment,

and even hatred for the wealthy property owner. I think we can all identify with that. I mean, I think that that's a very relatable in for us, and Lil Nest. He's a relatable guy. He's a cool, relatable guy. I feel like, okay, I am picturing 10-year-old Nestor with the facial hair that I'm seeing

in all of the Google images. All of his cossacks. Yeah, he had a full beard by age seven, absolutely. That's when you become a little man. That's what happens. Yeah. So more than anything, Nestor hated the wealthy children of these rich people.

He particularly hated when these... That is very relatable. He called them young idolers, and more than anything, he hated when they would walk near him, quote, and this is from Nestor's biography, all fresh and neat with full bellies and the cleanest clothes,

reeking of perfume while he, filthy and in rags, barefooted and stinking of dung, scattered bedding for the calves. See, from an early age, Nestor, he was working in like, he was like fucking cleaning up after the cow, so he smelled like shit all the time. And he was extremely aware from an early age

that these circumstances were unjust and that the situation was crooked. He also felt it was more or less hopeless. He told himself that... Yeah, yeah. Like, you fucking get to smell nice because I have to clean up shit for your family. Like, I fucking hate you people.

I love a child with deep-seated class issues from like the jump. That is like a very powerful energy to take into life. From the fucking jump. Yeah, he goes from zero to fucking... Yeah. It's like the... I'm like,

damn, I... It reminds me of all the... Sophie, do you remember those weird... those weird little juice bar perfumes that like, rich girls and junior high would have? Why yes, I do. They had gummy... They had pictures of gummy bears on them.

They all went to fucking soccer camp. It was disgusting. I'm with Nestor. Meanwhile, I smell like a goddamn hot dog. Yes. I mean, absolutely did not own because I was not hip or rich. But yes.

You know, you brought this up in our Mark Zuckerberg episode, Jamie. That time you were drunk and hooked a bottle at a rich Stanford kid who was... Or Harvard kid who was... Who was rowing. He was rowing. Yeah.

Nestor has strong hucking a beer bottle at a rowing Ivy League college student energy. It's sick. It's sick. I like him so far. I hope he doesn't fuck up. He doesn't. I mean, he doesn't succeed in his ultimate goals,

but they're pretty ambitious. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, he felt that like as fucked up as the situation were, it was pretty much unhealthless. This is how things are. And he, you know, he had...

It was his lot in life to work for his landowning masters and they would pay him a pittance to reek of animal shit so that they didn't have to reek of animal shit. So Nestor went on with life showing enough talent that as he grew up, he was promoted from taking care of cows to taking care of horses, which is the podcasting of the taking care of animals game. Cool.

I like that. Yeah. Now, it was in hit this job that he would witness one of the defining experiences of his young life. He walked into the stable one day to see the landlord's sons beating several of the young peasant boys who worked in the stable for some minor fuckup.

He was enraged by this, but the dark recesses of his mind, as he wrote it, made him accept it. And like a real slave, he strove just like the others about him to avert his eyes and pretend he saw and heard not a thing. So he's saying like mentally in this period, he was so enslaved that like he couldn't even resist this.

Like he knew it was fucked up, but there was nothing to do. He'd grown up hearing stories about his parents being beaten. His mom had been a serf, and there's this thing called the Corvée, which is this old tradition under serfdom where you have to do free forced labor in lieu of taxes for your master. And she refused to do it at one point after being freed

when she didn't have to. And she'd been whipped 15 times for doing so. So he'd grown up hearing stories like this that like if you don't do what they want, they'll, they just beat you and that's the way life is. But he also had this, he'd also, he was, came from Cossack ancestry. So his mom had also told him stories of the battles

of his free ancestors who had like fought for their liberty, you know, with fucking swords. So he grows up with both of these things in his, in his mind, you know, and I'm assuming his mom omitted the genocide. You know, moms tend to do that. That's a classic mom move. Yeah. Um, so, you know, Nester grows up like kind of consumed

with this mixture of rage at what his mom had endured and the sense that he had ancestors who wouldn't have taken this shit, which is kind of warring in him when he's 12, 13, 14 years old. And eventually the same situation came round again where he sees people, kids being beaten by the children of his, his master. I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here.

One summer's day in 1902, the young Nester, 13 years old, was present at a run-of-the-mill scene. The landlord's sons, his manager and his assistant, set about insulting and then reigning blows on the second stable boy in the presence of all the other stable hands. Half dead from fear at the wrath of their masters. That's Nester's words.

Nester could take no more and he ran off to alert the head stable boy, Botko Ivan, who was busy in a cow shed trimming the horse's tails. Learning of what was afoot, Botko Ivan, an elemental force burst like a man possessed into the room where the chastisement was underway, pitched into the young nobles and their acolytes and sent them rolling in the dirt with swathing punches and kicks.

The attackers attacked, fled in disarray, some through the window, some through the nearest doorway. This was the signal for revolt. All of the day laborers and stable boys were outraged and went off in a body to demand an explanation. The old landlord took fright and in conciliatory tone besought them to forgive the idiocy of his young heirs. To remain in his service and even undertook to see

that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. Botko Ivan related the episode to young Nester, treating him to the first words of rebellion he had ever heard in his life. And this is Botko Ivan. Botko is like boss basically. Oh, okay. Hi, everybody.

Robert Evans here. And I need to admit something. I lied to Jamie just then. Botko does not mean boss. It means daddy. And if you know anything about Jamie Loftus, you understand why I had to lie to her about what that word meant because we would not have gotten through the episode otherwise.

No one here should countenance the disgrace of being beaten. And as for you, little Nester, if one of your masters should ever strike you, pick up the first pitchfork you lay hands on and let him have it. This advice, once poetic and brutal, left a terrible mark upon Nester's young soul and awakened him to his dignity. Henceforth, he would keep a fork or some other tool within reach,

meaning to put it to good use. So after this, he keeps like a fork on him at all times in case he's going to stab a rich kid, which fucking rules. The way that this is written is, first of all, very cinematic. It's epic the way it's written because all he's saying is, and then the guy beat the shit out of a bunch of rich kids and it was awesome and now I always carry a fork with me because I'm weird.

But that is so, it sounds like a superhero origin story. When you hear this guy's life, there's a bit of that. Like he has a, he's a fucking, and he's, you know, there's a lot of people who hate this guy. We'll talk a little bit about some of the allegations against him because he was, he wound up being anti-Soviet, you know, he fought against the Reds and the Whites during the Soviet, the Russian Civil War.

So there's a lot of... When were you starting to like anybody on this podcast? I don't know. Well, hold on. Yeah, trust me. And then I'll tell you about this fucked up shit that happened later. We don't know if it actually happened because there's a lot of like, he fought against, when he realized what the Soviet Union was going to be,

he fought against the Bolsheviks as well as the fascists and the monarchists. Because he was like an advocate of liberty and like, yeah, there are a bunch of stories that are... I know we said he already had a beard by the time that this happened, but I imagine actually at the end of this story, a beard explodes out of his face because he's had just this revelatory moment. When Batko Ivan tells him to just stab rich people,

he like, a beard explodes out of his beard. Yeah, that was his second beard. Yeah, yeah. You're a man in Ukraine when you get your second beard. Yeah, first beard, that's kid shit. Yeah. First beard. He hasn't lost his baby beard yet.

At age 14, Nester quit his stable job and got a gig as an apprentice at a local foundry. He made wheels for harvesting machines, and this improvement in his own quality of life corresponded to a similar improvement among the rest of his family. His three older brothers got married and left the home to set up households of their own,

which meant things were a bit less tight for Nester and his mother and his younger brother. Eventually, Nester moved on from foundry work to being the sales assistant for a wine merchant, but he found this job disgusting. He couldn't stand doing it, and he quit after just a couple of months. Too bougie.

Too bougie for Nester. Too bougie. Too bougie, and so the book Anarchy's Cossack, which is definitely a very well-sourced biography. You keep saying Anarchy's Cossack, but I'm hearing Gravity's Rainbow each and every time. It's a way better book than fucking Thomas Pynchon's bullshit. Yeah.

This is an anti-Pynchon podcast. I appreciate that. Yeah. And it's available for free online, too. You can buy a copy from AK Press, but there's also the whole thing is hosted on libcom.org. But yeah, there's a lot to debate because, again, this guy was extremely controversial,

and a lot of people were claimed that he was an outrageous drunk, that he flew into violent rages and murdered people while drunk. And it's possible. Obviously, the Ukrainian peasants are a hard-drinking people. Soldiers who spend multiple years straight without break fighting tend to drink heavily. Totally possible.

He got up to some shit while drinking. Also, a lot of these stories tend to involve him tearing 13 people apart with a knife or something like crazy shit that just didn't happen. I thought his weapon was a fork. Yeah, so I was going to say fake news. Fake news. Yeah, it's hard to say.

There's also claims that he was not a drinker at all. And Anarkis Kosak takes the aim that he was not at all a drinker and that he more or less avoided alcohol. I don't think that's entirely true either. I was like, that doesn't sound likely given the environment, right? We do have an account from a woman who knew him in his last years in Paris who knew him for like three years and knew him fairly well and saw him drink occasionally.

But he would never drink more than about a glass of wine. And he would kind of be fucked up after a glass of wine and not able to take more. And she was like, he was very temperate. And she noted she assumed that he drank as much as normal peasant strength. But she saw no evidence that he was like a hardcore alcoholic or that he got violent when he was intoxicated. He was definitely prone to depression.

But I don't know. Again, there is so many hit pieces out about this guy that were written at the time. It's kind of hard to tell exactly what happened. Who's a hater and who's reporting the facts? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but one of the claims is that he developed a distaste for wine in particular and alcohol in general

working for this wine merchant. He wasn't much of a drinker. I don't really know what the case was. I never met the guy because he died in 1935. Oh, wow. So for the next few years after quitting the wine business, Makno mostly helped his mom keep up their small property, take care of their one horse,

and did odd jobs around town to make ends meet. He spent time working as a house painter and a decorator until he'd saved up enough money to buy a cart for his brother's small farm. They used it to transport wheat. He did like interior design for a while? Yeah, he was a home decorator for a while. I would love to see his portfolio.

I am very curious as well. What kind of space is Nestor Curie? He's like, here's the dining table. No forks. I am the only one that can have the forks. He's strapped with forks like a fucking terrorist with a bomb vest. It's just all property brothers,

but with a lot of forks. I really hate that show. Yeah, he was a guy who had a wide range of gigs. A wide range of gigs as a young man. I like that. Things seemed to be going well for his family, broadly speaking, until 1904, when Russia went to war with Japan for no reason really.

This is the Russo-Japanese war, one of the dumbest wars that ever happened, and Russia gets its ass handed to it. Nice. This war is why Japan becomes a major thing on the international stage, because white people up to 1905, which is when the fighting starts,

nobody can fuck with white people. We're the fucking, and then the Japanese just destroy an entire Russian fleet, and everyone's like, whoa! You do that noise one more time. Whoa! That's what Europe says after the Russo-Japanese war. I feel like that'd be a great alarm sound.

Obviously, when Russia goes to war with Japan, they conscript a bunch of people, and Nestor's older brother, Savva, was sent to the front, probably injured in this war. He's what's called by people at the time an invalid the rest of his life. He's like, badly wounded in this, and not fully, yeah.

He never comes back in a lot of ways. Now, that war was followed by a failed revolution in 1905 and 1906 of the socialist variety, so Russia enters into a dumb war, gets their ass kicked, and there's a revolt, like you do. Now, I want to pause here to talk a little bit about Tsar Nicholas II.

Tsar, who in 1917 gets overthrown, his whole family gets killed by the Bolsheviks, and because he and his young children get massacred in captivity, I think he's become a figure a lot of people find sympathetic, you know? The Romanovs are like, there's a lot of... They were brutal dictators, right?

Like even Nicholas, who if you read like his letters to his wife and stuff, he's a guy that are definitely sympathetic things about him. He's a dude who really legitimately loved his wife with rare among royalty. He had a sick, terminally ill child, you know? I am so sick of the... Yeah, they were horrible.

They were absolutely horrible. They were fucking monsters. They were fucking monsters. And I am no apologist for the Bolsheviks, but I will say if there's ever a justified case to murder an entire family, it's when they owned you. They fucking... I don't know.

I cracked up in my Rasputin biography again recently. They were fucking monsters. They were trash. I hate that argument that whenever people make... They're like, well, yeah, sure. He was a brutal, horrible ruler who hated his people, but he was kind of a wife guy.

And you're like, well, I don't care if he's a wife guy. I don't care if he's a wife guy. So he was a guy who like... He was very... He constantly expressed, you know, loving his people and wanting to like be known by them and want to like talk to them and stuff. But whenever they would express opinions

that he didn't hold or that he didn't think they should hold, then the dictator came out again, right? Like he loved the idea of being loved by his people, but he didn't actually like... He also thought that he was like... He thought he was divinely appointed to rule them, you know?

You can't be a good guy and think that. So to give a little bit of like context to how brutal Nicholas himself was, we've talked a lot about the brutality of the Russian regime, but let's talk specifically about Nicholas here for a second. 1905, a massive crowd of thousands of working men gathered outside the Tsar's main palace in St. Petersburg

to protest all the bullshit. And the Tsar orders a crackdown on them. And a correspondent from the London Times was there, and here's what he wrote. The first trouble began at 11 o'clock when the military tried to turn back some thousands of strikers at one of the bridges. The same thing happened almost simultaneously at the other bridges,

where the constant flow of workmen pressing forward refused to be denied access to the common rendezvous in the palace square. The troops were reported to be unable to control the vast massage which were constantly surging forward. Reinforcements were sent, and at two o'clock the order was given to fire. The order was given by the Tsar.

Men, women, and children fell at each volley and were carried away in ambulances. The troops were sent to the palace by the Tsar. The troops were sent to the palace by the Tsar. The troops were sent to the palace by the Tsar.

The troops were sent to the palace by the Tsar and fell at each volley and were carried away in ambulances, sledges, and carts. By the time it was over, as many as 500 people had been shot dead on Nicholas's orders. That was like one thing that he did. This uprising in 1905

is put down brutally. Number one, hundreds of different Tsarists institute pogroms against Jewish people and leftists who they see as the same in order to defend their monarch. Nicholas sends troops into the Baltic provinces in Georgia to massacre everyone who resists.

By the time it's over, he kills about 13,000 people putting down this rebellion. Well, here's my question. Then why is he made out to be such a nice guy in the animated Anastasia, my favorite movie? Because he seems really nice and he gives her a little kiss on the forehead. So I just have some questions about that

because I'm pretty sure that cartoon is a documentary. Yeah, it's very accurate to how he was with his kids. He just had other people's kids shot by mercenaries. They should have shown that in the movie, maybe. It might have been nice. It's always completely truthful and historically accurate on everything

that they do ever. There's a fun documentary on it might have been Netflix recently about the Romanovs. It's like a live action one. And it does leave out some of the brutality. People love to cut the Romanovs

slack. I want to talk about the Rasputin daughters who got, you know, sent to Siberia when they were teenagers for just being related to Rasputin. And then what about all the kids that got shot? What about Ra Ra Rasputin himself?

Lover of the Russian Queen. Yeah, the king of disco. He was the king of disco. Remember when they were like, we found his dick and then they were like, wait a second, this is a pickle. It was some other giant dick. There is a giant penis out there that's been preserved

that is reputed to be Rasputin's probably not. But there is a big mummified wang out there. I don't know how, but I would like you to make that into an ad break transition. Yeah. You know who else mummifies penises? Tell me. Please tell us.

The products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting

a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. In 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story

of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows

like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific

price. I don't think that's going to happen in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? Listen to CSI

on trial on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So, the revolution didn't really touch Makhno's hometown of Gulayipoli, which is where he grows up. But news of the brave attempts of the revolutionaries to overthrow the

czar inspire Makhno. He grows up hearing about this and he like, it sets his imagination aflame. And he starts to believe that perhaps people like him are not destined to be ruled by kings and landlords and the like. Nestor starts reading forbidden literature and since he was just

a baby leftist at this point, that meant social democratic propaganda. He was initially thrilled by their quote socialist phraseology and their phony revolutionary ardor. As the word phony in that last sentence probably keyed you in on, he fell out of the social democratic spell pretty quickly.

So he basically, he becomes a democrat for a little while and then is like, that's the way that I want to change things. Wow, Ben there baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people can identify with Nestor's journey. Yeah, he's actually, he's a very relatable guy I've found so far.

So for a year or so, he's hardcore into the social democratic scene and one of the things you'll come to understand about Nestor is that when he gets into politics, he gets into politics. He starts handing out thousands of pamphlets about like social democratic literature to everyone who will take them. And then in 1906

after like a year of this, he meets some anarchist peasants who had a little reading circle in Guliai Polie and he found himself attracted to their ideology. Now the most educated member of the group was a guy named Valdemar Antony, the son of an immigrant check worker and a lathe worker. Valdemar

took Nestor under his wing and Nestor claims, rid his soul once and for all of the lingering remnants of the slightest spirit of servility and submission to any authority. Okay, hot. So Nestor gets killed. Yeah. Okay. So Nestor, there's

a bunch of like daddy figures in Nestor's life that keep pilling him. So now he's got a third beard on top of his every time he's radicalized, he gets another beard. This is when his third beard bursts out. Now when I say anarchist reading circle, that means one thing in the United States

today, what Nestor and his friends were doing was profoundly illegal. Revolutionaries had just tried to overthrow the government, all of Russia, and that included Ukraine at this point, was under a state of siege as had been proclaimed by the Tsar. Talking about like social democrat

shit was illegal. Anarchist books were like meth to the Tsar's police. People alleged to have radical political opinions had just been shot to death and moss by cops. So like this is risky shit. Yeah, a bunch of Don Cossacks

who were loyal to the Tsar had been stationed at Gulyaipoli to beat the shit out of anyone so much as whiffed of socialism. One local writer later described seeing a teacher dragged through the streets by two Don Cossacks with sabers while a third Cossack beat him with a rifle butt screaming take that you wastrel for your revolution.

Oh my god. Yeah. Okay. And again, the Don Cossacks are another group of Cossacks that are like the Tsar's storm troopers basically. So Nestor and his friends took some serious risks to sit around and talk about books. They met once a week in a group

of 10 to 15 people and they would talk for hours about the idea that it might be possible to live without Tsar someday. Makno later recalled, for me such nights we most often would gather to meet by night were filled with light and joy. We peasants with our meager learning would assemble in winter at the home of one of us in summer

in the fields near a pond on the green grass or from time to time in the broad daylight like young folks out for a stroll we would meet to debate the issues that move us. You remember this positively all his life like this is that's really pleasant. He's he's in a book club.

Yeah, he's in a nice book club. This book club goes to some pretty intense places. So it was just a book club for a little while. But after six months of study and careful vetting, conversational vetting, they make Nestor a full member

of the group. So he starts to help his friends. They graduate from just reading books to handing out propaganda and giving lectures to their fellow peasants and Nestor was eager to do more than that. In the wake of the czar's terror prominent anarchists in Russia had urged their fellows into a period of black

terror against czarism itself. Being poor peasants, Makno and his friends had few options when it came to terror. In order to give themselves some options and options here means guns, they embarked on a campaign of what they would call expropriation and what the law called simple theft. They would target the homes and

property of the wealthy, steal shit and use it to buy a weaponry. Makno and his fellow libertarian communists, as they called themselves at this point, drew the ire of local law enforcement quickly. I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here. On September 5th, 1906 in Guliaypolyi, an

attack upon the home of the businessman Plechinger by three individuals armed with revolvers with faces blackened. On October 10th, a fresh attack in Guliaypolyi upon another businessman, Bruk by four individuals, faces concealed by paper masks, who, brandishing revolvers and bombs, demanded 500 rubles

for the starving. A little later, a third attack upon a wealthy local industrialist, Kerner, by four individuals with three more acting as lookouts. In August 1907 in the nearby village of Geitscher, a fourth attack upon yet another businessman, Gurovich, by four individuals wearing sunglasses. And it was this last attack that would

get Makno and his friends in trouble, because they wound up shooting it out with the local cops in order to escape. So, Yeah, it also sounds like little reservoir dogs. It's like, you know? Yeah. And again, Nestor's like 17 at this point when he gets into his first shootout with the cops.

God. Yeah. Grew up fast. Fourth beard. So, after this, as this like, this fucking crime spree is going, I want to talk about, one other thing they got into was lighting fields on fire in mass. Oh, sure. Because there was this

plan in the wake of the 1905 revolution. The Tsar decides that he wants to create a class of peasants who have money, more money than other peasants, like middle class basically, to separate the peasants. Because they were like, one of the things that scared him is that

all of the peasants were kind of the same sort of poor together. And that might mean they would rebel together. So, he tries to create this group of like peasants who own more land and property than the others called Kulaks in order to divide them. And Nestor and his friends, like, their response to that is to light all of the land of the rich people on fire

as much as they possibly can. Yeah. Right, right. I mean, that's just the logic. Yeah. That makes sense. So, a police superintendent named Karyatchensev who's generally described as like Gulyay Poy's Sherlock Holmes starts trying to unravel this anarchist ring,

like, tries to catch them. I want this movie. This is good. Yeah. Yeah. He basically tortures people until he can identify the people who are responsible for the attacks, but he doesn't have any hard evidence. And so, he doesn't want to arrest them. In 1907, he gets his opportunity, though, a member of a political

group called the Social Revolutionaries. And this guy was a friend of Makno's. Borrowed Makno's gun. And unfortunately, it turns out he borrowed it to murder his fiance and then shoot himself. And this happens like in the middle of a small town. So, like, Makno runs up to provide medical aid and he gets arrested immediately.

And then one of his friends has arrested for trying to send messages to him in jail. And it's like this whole, anyway, they wind up in jail. And this Sherlock Holmes dude starts interrogating them and trying to break them. But they won't... I love that there's an anarchist Sherlock home. Oh, no, he's not an anarchist.

He's the czar's man. He's the czar's... No, okay. So, he's the czar's Sherlock. Did the anarchist get a Sherlock? No. No. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? They do. Well, we'll talk about what happens to Sherlock in a little bit here. But here's what he

writes after trying to interrogate Nester Makno and his friend. I have never before seen men of this metal. I have plenty of evidence on which to state that I am an anarchist. But although I have put their flesh through a little suffering, I have extracted nothing from them. Makno seems like a peasant dote when one looks at him. But I have very

conclusive evidence for claiming that it was he who shot at the Gendarmes on August 26th, 1907. Well, now, I have done all I was able to extract admissions but to no effect. On the contrary, he supplied me with facts, which I have checked out and which I have been forced to acknowledge is correct, demonstrating he was not even in Gullye

Polje on that day. As for the other one, Antony, when I interrogated him, having him beaten at will, he dared declare to me, you dead meat, you'll never get anything out of me. And yet I gave him a good taste of the swing. So he's like, these motherfuckers won't talk even though I beat the shit out of him. Okay.

So he is, I mean, you have to admire that, right? If you're, I'm trying to get into Sherlock's head. I don't like the Sherlock's a government guy. He is. He's a hard guy. I mean, the other, the actual Sherlock is a government guy. That's true. But at least he did drugs. He did do drugs.

I don't know. Maybe this guy did drugs. I hope he did drugs. So Makno and his friends spent 10 months in jail. He turns 18 in jail and this would not be his last day inside of a cell. He was eventually bailed out by oddly enough a well-off industrialist who was like a friend of his family who had

hired his family members. And by the time Makno was released, the heat was on his friends and it was declared for a while that he would avoid breaking the law in order to continue to radicalize and recruit more peasants. So he gets another job as a decorator and he founds an anarchist study group of his own.

He keeps becoming a property brother when he needs to pay rent. He loves decorating. I love that. Nester Makno loves two things, shooting it out with the cops and putting together a nice living room set. I love that Nester is out here being like, okay, I know that we're anarchists,

but like we need to do something with this space. That doesn't mean our throw rugs have to clash with the couch, you know? I feel like people associate too often anarchists with clashing patterns and I just think that doesn't need to happen. No, why not?

We can look nice and get into gunfights with the police. Okay, even more so than I want the Tsar Sherlock Holmes, I want the anarchist property brothers. I do want the anarchist because the anarchist property brothers is only squatted properties too. Like a big half of the show is fighting

the police off to stop an eviction and then like decorating the interior. Flipper flop, it's not necessary. Yeah, let's do this. And then the second half is a very relaxed decoration of the squatted spaces. Yeah. So unfortunately, Nester failed to do,

he starts running his own book club and he fails to do the same kind of strict vetting that his previous group had done for him and his reading circle quickly discovers that two of its members are Tsarist infiltrators and they kill them both. The reading circle murders two people who are informing the cops.

My mom's circle did that too. Yeah, it's just pretty common among book clubs. This happens in book clubs all the time. If you are not doing the correct canonical read of Eat, Pray, Love, you're fucked. Yeah, they will fucking shoot you.

You're fucked. Bury you in a shallow grave. That's how book clubs work. Have you seen the movie? That's what happens. Yeah, that's the Joy Luck Club if I'm not mistaken also. That happens in the Joy Luck Club and it definitely happens

in the Jane Fonda one. I got so drunk at that screening of book club that I got kicked out of the movie theater. That's the only time that's ever happened to me. That's the only time. It is. There's times I should have been, but I wasn't.

But this time, you really can't fuck with it. You can't fuck with a movie that old people are going to, that you can't be loud. They're gonna get you kicked out. You can't fuck with a movie theater story, but there's aspects of that story that there's still a statute of limitations on,

so we'll continue. The group holds a general meeting to talk things out after killing two dudes, but it turns out they still had a police infiltrator in their midst and the meeting was surrounded by heavily armed Don Cossacks and members of the local Ocarana, which are like the Tsar's secret police.

The trader in their midst, a guy named Lavadne, suggested everyone give themselves up, but Nestor and the actual anarchists in the room decided to have a giant gunfight with the cops. It was dark and they all had pistols, so they ran out shooting and they actually surprised the cops surrounding their house enough that they killed the second in command

of the local police, several Cossacks and several detectives. One of Makno's friends, a guy named Simon Yuta, is wounded in the leg during the escape and his brother Alexander tries to carry him, but they quickly realize that he was slowing them down too much, so the wounded guy volunteers to stay behind,

shooting until he has one bullet left and using the last on himself in order to buy time for his friends. Again, hardcore book club. Yeah. What movie did you throw up at? Huh? Sorry, what movie was it?

Oh, God, it was a midnight movie. Sorry, I have... It was like a showing of... I think it was a showing of the... What is it? The fucking Jim Henson movie with the Skexas and shit. Wait, like Labyrinth? No, no, not Labyrinth. No, no.

The other one. The fucking Skexas. Dark Crystal? I don't know. Dark Crystal. Wow, okay, sorry. I don't know if it was the alcohol or the acid, but... I was not going to be able to focus until I had an answer there. Okay, okay. It was a long time ago.

The book club is heating up. So the book club is heating up like nine people have died. So... Kill counted the book club. It's an intense book club. Not a lot of people save the last bullet for themselves in a book club.

That's true. So... Of course, so this guy who dies buying time for the other members of the book club, his brother has to avenge his death. And Makno wasn't about to let his friend avenge his brother's death alone. So after they escaped, they figured that

since they just killed a bunch of cops, they might as well assassinate the governor. I mean, fair enough. When you're on a hot streak like that, if you know, I get it. Now, and again, everyone involved in this is a teenager. So we are not talking about the best decisions being made

at the time, but they're committed. Yeah. I like that they're able to channel their horny rage into some productive... Yeah, some productive anarchy. And for, again, several of the people they kill in the shootout are members of the Okrana. And for a little bit of knowledge about the Czar's secret police,

the protocols of the elders of Zion, like the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda piece, was created by the Okrana. So like, shitty dudes. So like, it's not like they don't sort of have a book club massacre coming. They absolutely deserve a book club massacre.

Sure. You can tie millions of deaths to that document. Okay. I got no sympathy. So they decide to assassinate the governor. But the scheme runs into a hitch, which is that because of all of these anarchist teens running around,

it had been made illegal for young people to be near the governor. So... He sounds like Eric Garcetti. Yeah. So... No, no, no. No use. Makno and his friends keep trying to find out

ways to get close to the governor. And while they're scouting out, they get caught by another patrol of Cossacks. And again, Makno being Makno, they've been surrounded by Cossacks. They have another gunfight, and they manage to shoot their way out of a line of cops yet again. They escape, but not for long.

Nester and his friend are arrested at home soon later. This wound up actually being good for him, because if he'd stayed free, he would have absolutely kept trying to kill the governor, and he probably would have gotten shot to death doing so. Instead, he just winds up in jail for a while. Now, this sparks another crackdown

on Guliai Poli anarchists, and the only two who escape were Anthony, Makno's mentor, and Alexander, the brother of the guy who died buying time for them. The police considered Makno to be the most dangerous of the young men that they'd actually caught, and they charged him with a fuckload of crimes,

some of which he definitely committed. Now, all of the incarcerated anarchists were taken to prison again while the state prepared the case against them, and this took over a year. And during this period of time, Makno spends a bunch of time in solitary confinement in a cell called the Hole.

It's a terrible place to be. It's not a nice prison. In the meantime, Alexander sneaks back into Ukraine. He flees to Belgium, but he immediately comes back, and he sends a letter to the head detective before he leaves Belgium, being like, you're never going to catch me.

You're never going to catch me. I'm in Belgium now, motherfuckers. And then he immediately sneaks back into Ukraine with two loaded revolvers. And he sort of starts stalking the head detective and waits until he goes into a theater. And he walks into the theater where the detective is with two loaded revolvers in his pocket.

Now, he doesn't shoot him during the play, because he doesn't want to hit any innocent people. But as the detective's leaving the play, he shoots him three times and kills him, and then gets killed in a shoot at himself. Wow. That's the end of the Sherlock Holmes guy. Bye, Cheryl. I mean, you know, it was

he was a supernova. He lived briefly, burned brightly. Burn brightly, King. So, yeah. So, yeah. Now, Alexander was never able to he was trying, he was planning to spring his friends from prison after killing this detective, but obviously he doesn't get a chance to do that.

But his sacrifice and his dedication to the cause inspired Nestor for the rest of his life. Makno's day in court eventually came and he refused to beg for mercy, telling his defense lawyer, we have no intention of asking anything for this good for nothing czar. These rascals have sentenced us to death,

so let them hang us. And of course, he was sentenced to death. Makno and his comrades spent months on death row. Nestor wrote at the time, once inside these cells, one half feels that one has climbed down into the grave. One has the feeling that only one straining fingertips are clinging to the surface. And then one thinks of all

who, being yet at large, cling to their belief and their hopes, intent upon doing something good and useful in the struggle for a better life. Having sacrificed oneself for this future, one feels flooded by a quite profound and very heartfelt love for one's comrades in the struggle. They seem so near, so dear.

One whole heartedly hopes that they may hold on to their faith and their hopes to the very end and take their love of the oppressed and their hatred of the oppressors further. Wow. Good prison leather. He's a good fucking writer. He's a great writer. He can make stuff that's very depressing and boring

sound, very motivating. He's a guy, he's a great writer for a guy who never fully learns to read or write. Yeah, like he's, I like this guy. I like this guy. He's a likable dude. So Nestor's best friend and comrade on death row

was a guy named Igor Bondarenko, which is another fucking incredible Ukrainian name. Perfect. No notes. Now, for some reason, Igor suspected Nestor's sentence might get commuted. He claimed he had a premonition, and he basically is like, I've had this premonition that you're, we're all going to get executed.

You're not going to get executed. You're going to get out and you're going to lift the black flag of anarchy all over this land. You, my brother, Nestor, you are to live. I shall surely die. I know that you will regain your freedom. And like Nestor's other friends in jail are like, that's never, Nestor's too dumb.

Like he's not smart enough to like, you're a great guy, Nestor, you're really good at shooting at the cops, but you're not smart enough to like lead a revolution. Like it couldn't be him. That's a great way to motivate someone to just do that. Yeah. They're negating them a little bit.

Now this may or may not be true. We're reliant on Nestor's account that all this happened because all of his other friends get executed. So he might have made this up. I don't know. In any case, after 52 days on death row, Makno was informed that at the pleading of his mother, his sentence had been commuted to hard labor

for life. He was dragged off to prison where he would spend nine years. And this actually wound up being a good thing. See, prisons in Tsarist Russia were basically the equivalent of a graduate degree for revolutionaries because all of the people who got, they, there were prisons just for revolutionaries. Stalin spent a bunch of time

in one of these prisons. Bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo, an hour, 10 minutes for Stalin. Yep. Yep. Okay. That's actually pretty far. Wow. Yeah. Pretty far. Okay. Pretty far for talking about, you know, Ukraine. So Stalin, at the same time,

is in a prison for a bunch of bank robberies. And all of these prisons are the same. They're filled with like prisoners who are all revolutionaries and these massive libraries of revolutionary literature that people build up over the years, that inmates build up. And so Makno gets to read a bunch. Like he spends

he also gets horribly ill, gets pneumonia and shit, like gets permanent lung damage. So he's in the infirmary a lot. And he just spends all of his time reading books about like anarchist political theory. The number one book that he encounters during this time is by a guy named Kropotkin. It's a book called Mutual

Aid, which is a book about mutual aid. And he falls in love with the concept and the book Mutual Aid never left Makno's side for the rest of his life. He went in and out of the prison infirmary. You know, he was very sick all of the time. And he gets very frustrated at the inner

prison hierarchy because there were two kinds of political prisoners in Russia. There were intellectual prisoners who were like students and sons of noblemen and stuff who got like, who found themselves drawn to left wing politics, but were also rich kids. And the guards treated them very well because class was really

baked into everything in Russian. Like these guys were prisoners, but they were still rich. So like you shake their hands and you show them respect. And then there were the poor revolutionaries like Makno, who get the shit kicked out of them, right? And Makno noticed that these like rich intellectual revolutionaries would like shake hands with

the guards and be friendly to like the same people who were beating up Makno and his friends. And he was like, well, fuck these guys. I don't care if they're saying the right shit. Like, yeah. Yeah, that's okay. Okay. So he he doesn't like, he doesn't like performative politics. We like that for him. He does not

like performative politics. I, he would be he would be really intense online. Sorry, I'm just thinking. He would be in prison. He would not be online. He would be in prison already. I was just cooking on his like, what would Nestor's online

presence be like? It would be pretty aggressive. He would have been in prison for things he did this summer. Like. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So 1914 came and the prisoners were split again by those who still supported Russia in her war with Germany and the

internationalists who thought that the war World War One was just a bunch of rich assholes making poor kids die for politics and neither Russia or Germany were in the right. Like, it was just a dumb war and it shouldn't be fought period. And Makno was an internationalist. He thought it was stupid for Ukrainian peasants to die fighting German

peasants on behalf of kings. It was like, why would we do that? Okay. Yeah. So in 1917, while Makno was still behind bars, the revolution happened. The Czar's overthrown, a vaguely kind of vaguely socialist, social democratic interim government under a guy named

Kerinsky is formed and all the political prisoners are freed because there's this period before like the Bolsheviks take over where there's like a social democratic kind of like a socialist quasi thing in charge and there's social Democrats and there's Bolsheviks and there's anarchists and they're all arguing about

Russia's going to be. But during this period the Czar's overthrown and all political prisoners are freed or at least a bunch of them are and Makno gets out of jail. Now, on release, he sees a doctor because he's sick as hell and the doctor's like, you should head to the Crimea, have your lungs treated like

you're very ill and Makno's like, the only thing that's going to like cure my lungs is to take part in the revolution. You know, his exact, his exact statement is that. I appreciate the spirit behind that, but but I don't, I see him getting a wall. Yeah, I mean, the revolution

was not good for my lungs, but there was less tear gas in those days. That's true. Different kinds of gas though. They should have been counting their fucking blessings. Yeah. Oh, you had to deal with was machine guns. I mean, this is, this, this period is taking place, you know, during the anime

movie Anastasia and so while this is all going on, it's, I think, historically important to consider that the, the big fat Kelsey grammar cartoon is switching out Meg Ryan Anastasia and meanwhile, Rasputin lives in hell with his bat.

Yes, Rasputin, Rasputin is living in hell with a band at this point. Yeah. So, yeah, so he Makno kind of considered throwing himself into the revolution, you know, or throwing himself into the Moscow part of

the revolution and he spends a little bit of time like with Moscow based anarchists, but he keeps getting these letters from his mom who's like, you know, you're out of prison, you should come see your family and he eventually decides, all right, I'll go home and I'll do a revolution there. So he's 27 years old when he finally

sets foot in his hometown again for the first time in a decade, or nearly a decade. His neighbors showed up in Mos to greet him, calling him a man back from the dead. Somehow, Makno sensed that this was a moment he could use and he started questioning his fellow villagers about their receptiveness to libertarian ideas.

Now, in modern terms, that sounds like he's trying to talk to them about how age of consent law should be lowered, but libertarian meant a different thing back then. So. Okay, can you unpack that for me? Yeah, the word libertarian started out as an anarchist term, a left leaning

term. Like if you were a libertarian in 1917, you were a leftist. If you weren't an anarchist, you were like very close to one. That stopped thanks to a guy, like, that stopped thanks to a dude named Murray Rothbard, who brought the term libertarian into

American politics in order to make it a right-wing term. Murray Rothbard is why the word libertarian now means a guy with a collection of fedoras and another collection of gas station katanas. I was going to say, I was like, wait, how did this, how did this thing I agree with become my uncle

preaching the gospel of Gary Johnson at every available opportunity? That's Murray Rothbard. He's what turns libertarian from shooting it out with the czar secret police to gas station katana collection. So Rothbard is basically a corporate fascist.

He believed the state should be dissolved and all of its services should be provided for profit by corporations. He was trash. And he carried out a very successful campaign to convince dudes who liked guns and not being told what to do that licking the boots of billionaires was true freedom. In his book, The Betrayal of the American Right.

Yeah, it really does. In his book, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard work wrote, one gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that for the first time in my memory, we, our side has captured a crucial word from the enemy. Libertarians had long been simply a polite word for left

wing anarchists. That is for antiprivate property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over. He's very conscious about what he's done and that's why like, like Machno considers himself a libertarian, but Machno

is not what we would consider a libertarian today. Right. He's what some folks in Northeast Syria might consider a libertarian, but I honestly, I still to this day have such a struggle understanding what libertarianism means, depending on who's talking to me about it. Yeah,

totally. But I I grew up being told and like, oh, libertarians, they're just fucking weirdos that think everyone should have a plow. That's how I, that's what I learned libertarian. That is the kind of libertarian Machno is, is like everyone should work for themselves and for their community

and no one should have a boss. So that's what I want. See, that's good. But, but, but then, yeah, okay, okay, I've got, I've got I guess I have to learn more about libertarians. That doesn't sound good to say out loud. Yeah, I mean, there's good that these libertarians are good to learn about

because these, so modern libertarians are like, these libertarians are bad. The state's bad. We shouldn't have the state telling us things. Rich people should tell us what to do and Machno's like, the book club libertarians are good. No one. Yeah. The book club libertarians are, no one should tell you what to do. And if they tell you what to do, you should shoot them in the face.

Like sick. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Machno meets all of his old friends and neighbors and he's like, have you guys heard about libertarianism? And instead of following up by again ranting about age of consent laws like Murray Rothbard would have done, Machno starts explaining his

newly educated analysis of their situation. As he told his fellow peasants, the libertarian movement nationwide was weak and not cohesive. The social democrats and the Bolsheviks were by far the most organized and that was not good because they were just going to recreate some form of oppressive hierarchy that Ukrainians would have

to live under. Anarchists needed to be the vanguard of mass revolutionary action and Nestor figured, why not start that in Gulyaipoli? Now, it's a mark of how charismatic he was that basically everyone in his like hometown who turns out to see him is like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Like we just got rid of the czar.

Why not make sure nobody else tells us what to do? Now, Machno has no army at this point and his old comrades are all dead. By pure force of personality, he convinces his neighbors to establish a local peasants union with delegates to represent them. This inspired different groups within the village to organize and soon the metal

workers and the wood workers had unions of their own. Someone suggested the peasants should pool their money to set up a contingency fund to help members of the community who had accidents or fell in the misfortune. Now, all this happens, yeah, it's very quickly too. This is great, yeah. And before long, the village

decides to elect a chairman and Machno tells them this is a bad idea and he doesn't want the job but they elect him anyway. And basically he accepts the position because he's like, if I, if someone else gets this, we'll start having political parties form and then everything's going to go to shit. So I'll just take the job and not do it.

And that's, that's his reasoning at least. So within a few weeks, he pushes through a vote to have the estates of all the large local landowners handed back to the peasants with no payment or compensation to the rich people. Now this pisses off the social democrats in the big city near Guliipoli, a place

called Aleksandrovsk. They supported a buyback policy, not wildly different from the one the serfs had been granted. The peasants though, love Nester Machno and many of them decided that if anarchism meant they got to run their own lives and not have landlords, well fuck, maybe they were anarchists. Now, it's worth noting

how different Nestor's tactics were from most of the other anarchist organizers in Russia at the time. They tended to devote their efforts to creating committees and clubs and debating with one another rather than traveling out to the peasant masses and converting them by doing. Nester couldn't stand intellectuals. He preferred to get his hands dirty and actually

change things. When he was young, that change had come from, you know, shooting out with the police. Now that he was nearing 30, he was working alongside his neighbors to transform their home into something better. Machno and his comrades, who now made up most of the town, disarmed the local militia and de-deputized the police force. They just

like go up to the cops. Holy shit. You're not the police anymore. Give us your guns. The police go, oh no, his beard's so big. We better listen to what he says. Well, basically, so the cops that people don't have a problem with get to stay on as unarmed town criers, because they're like, hey,

you guys who weren't shitty, you don't get guns anymore, but like, you can be town criers. Like, we've got some use for you. We're not just going to murder everybody that we used to have an issue with, because that doesn't seem like a good thing to start doing. And the arms of the police and the militia that are confiscated get handed

to citizens who started to form what would become a democratic militia geared toward self-defense rather than, you know, beating people for reading the wrong books. Right. Now, well, all this is happening. Russia's still in a very bad position, because this is that awkward period where they've had their, they've overthrown the Tsar

and they're kind of in the start of a civil war, but they're also still in World War One fighting the Germans, even though nobody who overthrew the Tsar still wanted to really be fighting the Germans. And in August of 1917, a guy named General Kornalov, who's an anti-Bolshevik general intent on overthrowing

the socialist regime that had taken over from the Tsar and replacing it with probably the monarchy or something again, he starts like advancing on Alexandrovsk, the big, the capital city near Gulyaipoli. And committees for self-defense start being created all over Russia and Ukraine. And of course, Makno became

chairman of the Committee for Self-Defense of Gulyaipoli. Now, his solution to stopping the counter-revolution was quote, disarming the entire local bourgeoisie and abolishing its rights over the people's assets, estates, factories, workshops, printing works, theaters, cinemas, and other public enterprises,

which would henceforth be placed under collective control of the workers. His defense committee is like, yeah, we'll do this. So they all vote to do this. But then General Kornalov gets defeated and the moderate regime that was in charge of Russia and Ukraine at the time was like, hey guys, that's too radical.

We can't take all of the rich people's stuff. Like, we're Democrats. We don't want the czar, but we're not going to let you take all the rich people's stuff. So what year are we in at this point? This is 1917. Okay, okay. A lot of shit's happening. This is starting to like overlap with some of the Nabokov

history that I covered. Okay, cool. Yeah, Nabokov is in all this shit. Like, he's alive for a lot of this, right? He's around. Yeah, he's around until he ends up going to Germany in, I think, 1918. But he's around for a while. And in this story, a bunch of Germans come here

and then Nestor has to shoot them. Synergy. Synergy. So, like, Makno gets told by the government after this general gets defeated like, hey, your plan to take all of the weapons and property from the rich people is too radical. And Makno's like, well, fuck you. So he organizes

his fellow peasants to have a rent strike. And so they just stop paying right now like, this is our land now and we're going to take all of your livestock and equipment from the landlords acting on their own. That's just so much. I have a crush on him. He's fucking cool. Acting on their own, the peasants of

Guliipoli collectivized the enormous estates of the wealthy and started forming farming communes, each of around 200 people. Communal life was seen by Makno as the highest form of social justice. And some landowners even came around to the idea and joined communes. Others were less than pleased with the changes

and we'll talk about them later. Probably most of them were less than pleased. People who were like, okay, you're taking my land and giving it to everyone else, but like, yeah, this actually is fine. Again, a minority, but it does happen. And it's important to note that he is not like we're going to murder the landlords.

He's like, we don't need to kill them. We're just taking everything from them. And they can be part of society or not if they want to. Right? Okay. Yeah, there's less lenient policies than that. Yep, yep, especially in Russia in this period.

I guess, yeah, that's a pretty chill approach. Yeah, so as 1918 rolls around, life in Guliipolyi has changed massively as this right up from an article in libcom.org describes. In addition to his political work, he was based on a collective farm

working a type of plow called a buker. His coworkers at the time, he states, included German colonists and former landowners who had accepted the redistribution of land. Makno's memoir describes the administrative and political machinations of the Ukrainian Revolution with a detail that suggests veracity. Under the direction of the revcom,

the revolutionary-like committee, he explains, ex-soldiers from the front began moving all the implements in livestock from the estates of the rich and large farms to a central holding area. The idea was not to exact revenge upon the wealthy, but to equitably distribute wealth. Landlords and wealthier farmers were,

quote, left with two pairs of horses, one or two cows, depending on the size of the family, one plow, one seeding machine, one mower, one winnowing machine, etc. Needless to say, this equitable redistribution was not voluntary. So again, you don't have a choice, we're taking your stuff, but we're not trying to starve your family.

Like, you get what everyone else has. Yeah, it's just healthy redistribution. Yeah. Now, again, it was not voluntary, but it was not bloody either. While there were mass killings in parts of Russia during this period of landowners, Guliipolyi was so far quite peaceable

as were most of the surrounding areas. One contemporary newspaper article describes how the village looked during this first flowering of anarchy. It was, quote, like a painting by Repin, exotic, gaudy, unusual. The Maknovists wore colorful shirts, wide pants, and wide red belts,

which reached down to the ground. All of them were armed to the teeth. The property brothers could never. Okay. Another writer who hated Makno and what he turned Guliipolyi into adds that, quote, all night there was music and dancing mixed with the shrieks of gay women.

Okay. No matter which way you spin it, that sounds like a fucking blast. Sounds like a blast, right? Everybody's fucking strapped and dancing. Pretty cool town. Yeah. Sounds like these writers are absolute haters

who don't know how to have fun. Yeah. A lot of haters in the Makno story. And that is part one. Part two is going to be a lot more violent, but yeah. Well, for a bit, I had a blast. Yeah. Blast in part one.

Yeah. Part one, hard not to be on Makno's side at this, you know, really most stages of this. Vibes are good. Vibes are good. So, Jamie, you got any things to plug before we take a quick break and then part two?

Yeah, I got some holiday plugs. If you want a happy option, you can listen to Santa University that comes out on Christmas Eve. I think it's the Daily Zeitgeist feed. If you want to have a terrible Christmas and cry, cry, cry,

you can listen to Lolita podcast, which covers a different area of the same portion of history. This Christmas, celebrate being separated from your family by listening to a story about a book about child molestation. Isn't that, I mean...

It's a great podcast. I am caught up currently angry that you don't have another episode for me today. Well, I mean, you're performing the hell out of Nabokov. Thank you, except I mispronounced that lion girl's name.

Of course you did. It is spelled L-Y-O-N, like fucking hell. It is, but you combined it to sound like you were saying Beyonce. I was saying Leon, like the city in France. Oh, okay, see, that's fancier. It's spelled the same way. I maintain

she pronounced her own name wrong. Well, it's episode three if you want to hear it. Put in a Robert, absolutely demolish this poor dead woman's name. There's a place for you to go. If you want to demolish a poor dead woman's name, follow us on Twitter.

Have a good Christmas. The episode's fucking over. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.