Behind the Bastards - Part One: Tzar Nicholas II Was A Real Dick

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Robert is joined by Jeff May for part one of our four part series on Tzar Nicholas II.FOOTNOTES: https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.2307/1396423 https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8682 https://www.historynet.com/last-czar-leader.htm https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/04/the-pogrom-that-transformed-20th-century-jewry/ https://www.thoughtco.com/czar-nicholas-ii-of-russia-murder-1779216 https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=qb_pubs https://www.historytoday.com/archive/reforms-tsar-alexander-ii https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/russia%E2%80%99s-nicholas-ii-is-scarred-for-life-in-1891-japan https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315646336-11/assassination-tsar-alexander-ii-first-world-war https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/CXXVI/518/198/392654?redirectedFrom=PDF Radzinsky, Edvard. The Last Tsar Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Oh, it's behind the bastards again, the podcast that is every week, but is also this week and will be the next week until the heat death of the universe or the end of my contract. This is a podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history, and folks, we got a banger for you this week. And to help me deliver, give birth to this banger,

the midwife of several hours of Russian history. Jeff Moe. Yeah, consider me a doula right now. Like I'm doing it for you. Yeah. Gonna get your hands up in there, gonna get all really good in there. Just get all the placenta of information all over. We do mail placenta to every one of our guests. Don't ask where it comes from. That's not. I take it from my vitality. It is. One of my favorite moments traveling was in Japan, going to like a pharmacy to get contact solution and stumbling onto an entire aisle of placenta-based products, mostly horse. But I had not been aware that it was used for that until that point. It was a fun moment. How are you going to get strong, Robert? How are you going to get strong if you're not taking

horse placenta to get you going? That's why I run so fast. Yeah, I run like, you know, 45 miles an hour when I run. Now, Jeff, Jeff May, you are a stand-up comedian. You are also a podcaster. You do a podcast on the Gamefully Unemployed Network, Friends of the Pods. Tom and Dave have both also been on the show where you talk about Batman, Tom and Jeff watch Batman. Yes. You also have the Jeff May has cool friends podcast. I think Jeff has cool friends. Jeff has cool friends. Anything else you want to plug up here at the top? Yeah, I also do a show called You Don't Even Like Sports with Adam Todd Brown, Sports Podcast for People That Hate Sports, which is most of my fan base because I am a

professional nerd specifically as well as... You have a Batman podcast. I do. Well, it's funny too because Jeff has cool friends. He used to be a corporate podcast for a big nerdy company and then we split up and I was just like, well, I'm just going to change the name and keep doing what I was doing. Well, Jeff, speaking of what you were doing, were you having a good day up until this point? No, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. Okay. Well, then good. Not for two years. That's good because we're going to talk about somebody really unpleasant. How do you feel about Zars? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think you knew this about me, but I am... Before I got into

stand up and this, I was a teacher. I taught world history, including Russian history. And Buddy, let me tell you, there's a few of them that... Some messes. Oof. Yeah. You got a favorite Zar or a least favorite? I mean, I would say that if we're going through like the entire history of up since the inception of the word ZAR up towards Nicholas the Second. I got to be honest, Peter the Great is fascinating to me. He was pretty great. Yeah. Because people were like, this man is a seven foot tall giant monster that toured Europe and came back and decided to just shave everyone's beards or tax them on it. And that's just wild to me. What a life. Yeah. Peter the Great's a fun one.

We're not talking about a fun one today, Jeff. We're talking about the least impressive of the Zars, Nicholas the Second. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's... So it's one of those things. There's this weird thing Americans kind of have with royalty sometimes, right? There's a lot of Americans who love the British royal family, if that's your thing, like whatever. There's a weird number of Americans throughout history who've gotten really obsessed with the Romanovs since, you know, they were all killed by the Bolsheviks, right? There's like movies and... Well, that's really what it comes down to, right? It's like Anastasia. Yeah, right. Oh, they got a bad rap. And it's one of those things where there's this attitude

people have. Obviously, the kids got a bad rap, right? Kids never deserve to be machined, well, gunned down by a variety of forms in a basement. That's always bad. But Nicholas and Alexandra Git, who's the czar in this arena, get a lot of like slack from people. They're nearly always portrayed even when like they're shown to be incompetent. You can't really show Nicholas as being anything but incompetent. But you know, like, well, he was a good man. He loved his wife and his kids. He was, you know, he was, you know, broken down by the weight of this impossible job. And like, he was a terrible person. He was a monster. I love when people are like, he's a good person. He loves his family. It's like, that is not the criteria for being a good

person. I hate to break it to you, but that's just biology at that point in time. Yeah, a lot of people love their families and manned concentration camps. There's pictures of them with their kids outside Auschwitz. Yeah, you know, like, like they're at Fenway, you know, but instead it's just a horrible crap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, he's like, he's, he gets way more slack than he deserves. And this is going to be an episode about trying to put him in his proper context. Because I think if you see Nicholas II and Alexandra accurately, they're like Bashar al-Assad. They're like Hitler. They're like, like they're, they're real bad people who kill a lot of folks to stay in power. They, there's a reason that they finished the way

they did. Yeah. Yeah. Like not for nothing. I think we put Rasputin, we give a, we were like, well Rasputin was bad and he victimized these people. So yeah. And it's one of those things where like, if you actually read the history, Rasputin is not, not the most objectionable person. And in fact, there's times when he's the guy being like, boy, seems like y'all are pretty anti-Semitic. I'm not down with that. It's, it, this is, I have a feeling, because obviously it's been a while. I've, I've been retired for almost a decade now and I haven't been in college in 20 years. But at this point in time, like it seems like a story that's not going to have a lot of heroes in it. No, no, none, none at all really, you know. And I think that's, that is really the

overarching story. When we talk about like the murder of the entire Romana family, when we talk about the tragedies that came in the Russian civil war and the millions that died in that, part of why everything was so ugly and so violent was that the system that the Romanovs perfected over the course of generations was inherently brutalizing. And when it collapsed, there was nowhere for things to go, but really badly. I mean, that's, that's Russia. That's Russia, baby. I don't know. I won't tell you, but there's so many, there's so much retroactive, like, well, they did what they could. It's like, that's not what you say about Stalin. He's like, things were different. It was bad time. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Ivan 4th had to fry people on giant frying

pan. That's just what you do when you have power. He's intense part of world. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. He did an ex Siberia. Granted, he killed many people there, but he didn't exit. Yeah. And it, you do have, when you go over to that part of the world and have conversations with people, they are often very phlegmatic like that, where it's like, you know, it was a rough time. Everyone did what they could. We tried to do what we want, but, you know, things that, sometimes your ruler cut your head off. There's nothing you can do about that. You just move forward. That's why all like Russian literature is so depressing. Yeah. Like all the happiest stories are like, and then he died in prison. Isn't that nice? Yeah. It finally was over.

So I think we need to start by noting that because number one, the monarchy, thankfully, has, has mostly passed. Although it's getting, it's a little resurgence in some areas. People tend to forget how successful monarchism was in a lot of cases and how successful the Romanov version of monarchism was. This is by, by any reasonable, if you're looking at this as a historian, by any reasonable judgment of, you know, success, the Romanov dominated monarchy in Russia was one of the most successful governments in human history. The Romanov family came to power in 1613, after a civil war and like 10 years of fighting and stuff in the death of the previous Tsar. And they stayed in power for more than 300 years. That's longer than the United

States has existed. This one family ruled Russia. While the Romanovs were in charge of the Russian Empire, it grew consistently by an average of 55 square miles per day, 20,000 miles per year. By the end of the 1800s, in the events of the story we're talking about this week, the Russian Empire ruled one-sixth of the landmass of planet Earth. They were good at this. I like how they're basically like, you can describe their monarchy like the blob. Yeah. People are just like, and then within three months, look at what we've predicted. It's like that scene in the thing where they use the Apple IIE to show you what's going to happen to the world. Yeah. Yeah. That's what, that's what the Romanovs were doing for like a couple of

centuries without a whole lot of pushback that was effective, you know? You get your moments, there's always, you know, military successes and reversals, but like they really kept chugging along. And the benefit that they always have is that like, yeah, their military is usually not the best or the most easiest to maneuver into place. And their, their Navy, you know, waxes and wanes and its efficacy, but there's just so much Russia that you never want to start a fight with them. No, you never get in a land war in Asia. I think we've learned that very specifically. Yeah. Now, yeah. Yeah. But before they came to power, Tsar was more or less before the Romanovs. Tsar was just kind of an interchangeable word for king, right? Like it didn't,

being a Tsar wasn't wildly different than being a king in a lot of other parts of like the feudalist Europe in that period. It means Caesar, right? Yeah. It comes from Caesar. Same root word as Kaiser, right? Both Kaiser and Tsar come from Caesar, which is you want to talk about having an influence on history. That used to just be a family. Like that's a last name that became our byword for billions of people for king. I mean, that's, that's influence right there. That's, that's influence, baby. Yeah. That's like branding. That's like Jordan's. Yeah. And actually, you could say Tsar has kind of had its own journey like that because like,

especially, I think people say it less now, but really in like the 80s and early 90s, constantly you would hear like, oh, the president has appointed a drug Tsar, you know, someone to like oversee the specific aspect of the government or a trade gap Tsar or whatever. So it, you know, the, the, the Romanovs are really responsible for that because by the modern era, being a Tsar is not like being a king. Kings in most of Europe, there's constitutional monarchies, there's limits on their power. The nobles will hold even in a lot of areas where there's not really democracy, it's still ceremonial because the nobles are the ones in charge and the king is more of a, a figurehead. And it's not that way with the Tsars and they are really

they're totalitarian rulers in a way that very few governments in history have ever really been. The Tsar is in the late 1800s and early 1900s, very close to an absolute autocrat. That means no real checks on their power, no real influence from the people. This starts to change in Nicholas's period, but Tsars maintained total power long after pretty much every other crowned head of Europe has been either turned into a figurehead or reduced to just another organ of the government. And that's, that's significant. That says a lot about what the Romanov family valued that they maintained that kind of absolute power. You could probably argue that Russian, the Tsarism was kind of the most controlling sort of feudalism practiced on the

largest scale, at least in Europe. And you can make a case for worldwide because again, it's a sixth of the world's land mass. For most of the history that the Romanovs are in charge, the vast majority of people in Russia are serfs. They're pretty close to slaves, they are bound to the land, they are kind of the property of the noble that controls that land. And the way the whole system works is the nobles maintain the peace in their little area and they pay taxes to the Tsar. And in exchange, the Tsar uses those taxes to build an army, to take more land, to exercise more power, and to maintain this absolute structure. So the Tsar lets the nobles have total control over their little area. In exchange, he's the absolute monarch

of the entire country. It's like an MLM scheme. Yeah, it is a lot. I mean, yeah, feudalism absolutely is, right? Oh, when I used to teach feudalism, I used to teach it based on like the kids working their desks. I was like, you're the serf, this is your plot of land, you have to work. I am your noble. I have a noble, my principle that I have to answer to. And then he has a superintendent that he has to answer to. And it all kind of like, you know, it's all a similar structure to most things when you really break down what feudalism is. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, we could talk a lot about the way our system works. And yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. But this is obviously a more intense version because you don't have, you don't have, you don't have the ability to

like move around. And this is one of those things that works pretty well when kind of everybody's doing it. As things modernize, you suddenly have this problem of like, well, how do you industrialize if somebody is a part of the land that they live on, as opposed to an individual who could move to a city and get training to be a machinist or and in fact, oftentimes when Zars were overthrown or killed, and these are Romanovs, I was talking about, it wasn't because they'd been super brutal, it was because they had used a mix of brutality and like liberalizing things. So they had given people some power and then not liked what they did with it and like tried to crack down and that often leads to

like the kind of upset that gets a czar killed. It's not Simon Montefiore, who is a historian who wrote a great book called the Romanovs, describes it as like the problem a lot of Zars have is not being consistently harsh, right? That's the thing that'll get you killed as a czar. And that's the thing when you're a kid, if you're going to inherit the Romanov dynasty, that's what's drilled into your head throughout childhood is you have to be consistently harsh. And it's a dangerous gig. Six of the last 12 Romanovs Zars are assassinated in office. That's like 50-50 though. That's not that bad, you know? Yeah, like I feel like I could make it through, you know?

Yeah, I could, I feel like I could have been a great czar. Oh my gosh. I bet I would have been, no, I would have been killed. Yeah, I don't think I would have. That doesn't mean you're not a great czar. I'm pretty chill. Yeah. So like, you know, I'd be like, ah, you guys can do that. Oh, you're going to kill me. Okay. Yeah, I guess I saw this. I was seeing this one coming. Robert, Robert, with confidence, not a job for you. I think I'd be a great czar. I do not. The key again is just consistent brutality. Yeah, Sophie would be better.

Usually when Zars were assassinated, in fact, in all of the time, Zars were assassinated up to the modern period. It's never the peasants, right? There's not, you don't have successful peasant revolutions in Russia. Like, not during the time the Romanovs are in power, it's the noble. It's the nobility who murders them. Like, it's someone, some czar does something that pisses off these nobles that are also powerful and they kill the czar and another czar winds up in charge, you know? Tale as old as time. That's it. That's like, that happens every time you see some kind of assassination. It's very rare that somebody bumps into an archduke.

Or, you know, successfully breaks through the walls of the Imperial Palace or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. That's not, not counting, you know, recent events in American history. Yeah. It's a very rare situation. Yeah. The populace will have access to people at that level. Yeah, you do not. And in fact, part of why Zars actually really tend to be, at least most historians tend to think that the Zars were beloved generally by the peasants. And this is because of the distance they have. It's because the peasants don't ever get to see the czar really. They were referred to him as the little father. God is, you know, the big father. And he was kind of this

benevolent but almost ethereal force because the nobles who ruled them directly were the ones they had issues with, right? That's kind of the brilliance of this system. All the peasants are going to hate the noble who's telling them what to do. But the czar, like, you never see that motherfucker. Like, he doesn't know what's going on, right? He loves us. He loves us. Good cop, bad cop. You know, it would make life easier for you. But, you know, the nobles, they're not going to, you know, they got to do their thing. And I try to be hands-off, you know. Yeah. And you actually hear this story if you read people talking about, like, kind of political discontent with the Nazi Germany. A lot of Nazis would, when members

of the Nazi high command would do shit that, like, even Nazis thought was fucked up, they'd be like, well, Hitler must not know about this, right? Like, he wouldn't do this to us. He must just not be aware of what's going on. Classic good guy Hitler. Oh, Hitler. He just got flummoxed by bureaucracy again. No, I'm just a good guy. I'm doing, I've been painting this whole time. Just Hitler fumbling with papers like Chevy Chase at his desk. Yeah. I'm just playing with my, my good German shepherd puppy here. Yeah. Why would I be doing anything evil? There's this very common phrase among the peasantry that is the czar is good, the nobles are wicked, right? So he is, he is like, beloved often. At least that's what they're, you're not getting

gallops not rolling through the Russian steps and being like, how do you feel about this? Right? There's, I think, and I do tend to think that this is so consistent. I'm not going to, obviously, I'm not going to second guess a bunch of historians who write stuff like this, but it's also consistent enough that I think, well, the czar believed this. And maybe that's why that went down in history, but maybe a lot of peasants would have been like, well, actually, fuck that dude. Yeah, it's definitely, you definitely see the cult of personality in situations like that where you, where you see, you know, the person that's unattainable up at the top. Yeah, they're great. He's the champion and the people that I actually have to deal with are

assholes. Yeah. And part of why I do think this is probably still broadly accurate is that you see this today, right? You see a lot of like conservatives who will be like, well, I don't like this thing that happened under Trump, but I don't like, I like Trump and like, he probably just like, couldn't do anything about this, you know? It's just how human beings work, you know, like Russian serfs and Americans in Kentucky or California are all the same people, basically, they're just in different circumstances. Yeah, if you're at the table, you don't know what's happening at the table. Right. And it's easy to just pretend that this guy that you've been conditioned to like by a shitload of propaganda and the Tsar has a lot of propaganda, it's very easy to just be like, oh,

he's like God, you know, like, I don't have to think about him as a person because he's not a person, you know, he's this like semi-divine figure. And the Tsar really is, they would not say it that way. The Tsars did not pretend to be divine, but they are chosen by God. Like that's the whole thing about the Tsar. They are picked by God to absolutely rule Russia. And so there's this attitude that like, if you question the Tsar or if people want to have input in their own ruling, that is satanic because God has set down this system. Obviously, this happens other parts of the world, you know, the mandate of heaven, yadda, yadda, yadda. This is not the only time this sort of thing happens. But what's unique kind of about Russia is that up until the modern era,

the Tsar owns everything in Russia. He is the personal owner of basically a sixth of the world's landmass. Like we can talk about who the richest person in history was. It's almost certainly whatever the last Tsar was because he was the personal owner of all of Russia effectively. Like, it doesn't get much wealthier than that. Jeff Bezos doesn't, can't pretend to that shit. And like, well, wealthy enough that when they tried to gun down the Tsar's family, it was, it took a ton of bullets and a ton of time because people, bullets kept getting stopped by all of the diamonds sewn into their clothing. They removed 17 pounds of diamonds from the dead Romanov family. 17 pounds? They could have done better. They could have done better. That's

just what they could get out of the palace, you know, like that's how fucking rich these people are. Yeah. And so this is a really totalitarian system. And probably the most totalitarian system could be in an era before modern technology. And being the center of that as the Tsar, like, fucks with your head. And I want to read a quote from the book, The Romanovs by Simon Montfuhr, which describes kind of what this does to a person. Then this is him kind of giving a broad overview of Tsarism. All of the monarchs were dutiful and hardworking, and most were charismatic, intelligent and competent. Yet the position was so daunting for the normal mortal that no one sought the throne anymore. It was a burden that had ceased to be enjoyable. How can a single man

manage to govern Russia and correct its abuses? Ask the future Alexander I. This would be impossible not only for a man of ordinary abilities like me, but even for a genius. He fantasized about running off to live on a farm by the Rhine. His successors were all terrified of the crown and avoided it if they could. Yet when they were handed the throne, they had to fight to stay alive. So this is not Yeah, it's not good to be the king. Like it really is not all it's great to be a noble. It's great to be like the younger brother of the Tsar or whatever. You know, there's a lot like those guys get up to some shit and exercise a lot of power. But being the Tsar kind of especially in the last hundred years of the Romanov monarchy is a fucking trash gig. Some could say heavy is the

head that wears the crown. I just created. I just did that. That's good. That's my words. You can quote me on that one. We could turn that into like a soap brand. Yeah, don't do it. Just just take my word for it. Don't Google anything in the show as a rule. That's we are the Google. Yeah. Yeah, we did it for you. Don't need to learn anymore than what we give you. That's part of what makes it a good cult. You know, what else is a good cult, Jeff? The cult of personality. Well, that is but the cult of the products and services that support this podcast all have cult followings, especially the Washington State Highway Patrol. Oh hell yeah, culty motherfuckers there. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So I gotta get, I gotta involve myself in all those things. Yeah, yeah, it's a cult of all of those sponsors. So the thing to keep in mind when we're talking about the czar is that this is a job people hate. It is a job that like destroys you over time. It's an incredible amount of like effort and labor you have to do. You're the head of the church effectively. You're the head of the military. You're the head of state. Like you're kind of the pope and the commander-in-chief and like all of Congress at the same time. And think about like all of our presidents, even the really,

really bad ones. Think of like what eight years in office does to them, how much they age. Most czars rule more than 20 years. Like you're out of your mind by the end of this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that has to be just so like try doing two things. Yeah. When it was like, when I started moving more to podcasting, I'm like, well, stand up is going to have to take a huge step back. And those are both easy jobs. Yeah. Then I'm like, no, no, I can't do what? Imagine if you had to do stand up podcasting and reform the Russian military while leading every major state religious service every single year. I mean, I feel like I could do that.

I do feel like you could do that, especially given your experience reforming national militaries. Jeff, a lot of people don't know this. You're the guy who reformed the El Salvadorian military. Yeah. You know, I don't like to brag, but yeah, it's just like it's a side gig. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, everybody needs like stand up doesn't pay all the bills every now and then you got to go like overseas and use a lot of USAID money to arm pair of militaries. It's just what, you know. Yeah. It's a very, it's a very Jeff of a rabie of existence that I'm having over here. Yeah. So the thing about this is like fucked up as this is, the system works pretty good for like 250 years or so. Taylor's oldest time. Taylor's oldest time, right? Yeah. We're dealing with that

right now. This form of government works pretty good for up to 300 years. Yeah. Up to, but not past. Never past. When the Tsarist system really starts to show its age in a calamitous way is the Crimean War, which happens in like the 1850s. And this is a battle. This is, some people will say this is kind of like the first world war in some ways. There's like five or six wars people say are the first world war, you know. But this is like, this is basically everybody and fighting Russia. And it's like Russia trying to take the Crimea, which they took recently from Ukraine, but we're trying to take it back then. And like Turkey gets involved and the British get involved and the French get involved. I think there's Austrians up in that bitch. Like it's this whole

fucking thing. And it doesn't go really well for Russia. It's a fucking disaster for Russia. And a big part of why is that their army is hideously outdated. Not just like their guns aren't modern. They don't have an advanced rail system in the country. So, and they don't have like, their navy isn't as nimble as it needs to be. So, everyone's running circles around them. Who needs a rail system? They're such a compact and tight. Tight, yeah. There's so little Russia. Why would you need rails? It's a walking town, you know. Why do we need that? That's what everyone says about Russia, the smallest country. Yeah.

There's five whole sixths of the rest of the world that's not Russia. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. It's one is the smallest number. That's right. And one is less than one. So. So, this is a fucking shit show for Russia. They kind of get their butts kicked. There's also a pretty good poem that comes out of it. Charge of the Light Brigade, which, you know, you can like or see as problematic depending on how you feel about men charging into lines of guns on horseback. I think it's rad and we should do more of it. But other people have different opinions. When's it from?

Crimean War. Yeah. So, like, I think we can give problematic a bit of a push on something written 200 years ago. Well, yeah. So, yeah, this is a Russia gets its butt kicked and like that bums everybody out in Russia. And so, there's this big drive to modernize, right? Every it's kind of made aware of how flawed the whole system is. And so, Russia really rapidly industrializes. And they do this by going hideously into debt to a bunch of Western nations. And the Tsar who takes command. Another tale is all this time. Another tale is all this time, right? Yeah. Everybody does this shit.

And the Tsar who takes charge during this period, he actually comes to power like in the last year of the Crimean War, 1855. This Tsar is a guy named Alexander II. And he's Nicholas's grandpa. He's the grandfather of the last Tsar. So, he walks out of that war dedicated to reforming things. And he's like a bold dude. This is not one of those like Joe Biden kind of nothing will fundamentally change guys. Alexander II is a very courageous person because it is not easy to make big reforms in Russia. And spoilers, it doesn't end well for him. No, no, there's always, there's always, there's always people pushing back generally. Half the time it's the Orthodox Church. Yeah. That pushes back and they have a lot of influence as well. And then half the time it's

the nobility. Yeah. And he fights with all of that. But that's actually not who's going to wind up being his undoing. So, his number one, Alexander II's number one claim to fame, the biggest thing that he does, and this is a pretty titanic change, is he abolishes serfdom in 1861. So, the start of the U.S. Civil War is when Russia decides every single person basically in the country is no longer part of the land that someone else owns. So, that's a good move, I would say. Yeah. Do you think somebody's like, there's something going on over in the United States about people in land? Seems like this goes badly. Yeah. Oh boy. It doesn't go the way. It doesn't say something about house divided. Very ugly president has big problems over there.

Long beard though. We have complex history with beard. Good Russian beard on that guy. And he wrestles. That is good. Which is also very Russian. Yes. So, obviously, abolishing serfdom like every other massive social change in every other country in history is not like a super even process. It's not like one day, everything's different. You know, we talk about this somewhat in our two-parter on Nestor Makno. It's a messy thing. It's a really big change. But it does lead to like enormous unthinkable socials. Everything that happens in the Soviet Union is possible in part because serfdom starts being a thing, right? That's why Russia is able to industrialize. It's why they develop a proletariat. It's why everything else that happens happens,

you know? And Alexander becomes known as the Tsar Liberator for freeing the serfs. So, a lot of people feel pretty good about Tsar Alexander II. A lot of peasants feel pretty good about this dude. But not all of them. He is not popular everywhere. Particularly among the kind of this is when Russia is starting to have a socialist movement. And all pretty much all these early socialists are like rich or nobles, right? Like that's a lot of this early period of like Russian socialism. His guys who are like very highly born because that's who has access to like education and gets to read books and stuff, you know? Not a lot of people, like a lot of peasants aren't coming into contact with the Communist Manifesto in 1850, you know, whatever.

Really? I'm sorry. But my uncle would disagree, okay? Yeah. So, Alexander, yeah. So, the socialists really don't like Alexander II because they see fundamentally his reforms are conservative. He's freed the serfs, but he's done it to maintain this system of absolute autocracy. He just wants to have a government, a country that works a little bit better, but he doesn't want to upend any of the social or class relationships. He just wants to really be able to like more efficiently use the people that he still owns, which is accurate. The socialists are not misreading this situation. They're like, well, he's not trying to make anything better. He's just trying to make the country work better for the shit that the rich

people want to do, you know? Fair. Which is true. Yeah. I mean, not for nothing, but like if I was in that position, I'd be like, yeah, I would like to also solidify my power and prevent myself from being murdered. Yeah. Yeah. And they fundamentally like see through what he's doing. He also adds a bunch of capitalistic elements to the Russian economy, which hadn't really been in place before. That's how he wants to like fund the reformation of the military. He's trying to make the state more efficient economically. This also pisses off the Marxists for, you know, obvious reasons. They're not huge on capitalism, the Marxists. This is surprising to a lot of people. What? Hold the phone. Bold statements about ideology being made behind the bastards.

Now, state communists. I need a refund on my education, because that is not what I remember. So on April 4th, 1866, a guy named Dmitry Kerakozov attempts to shoot Alexander the Second in the middle of the capital, St. Petersburg. He's a socialist, obviously. He misses and is arrested and executed. And this is a huge moment in Russian history. And I want to quote now from the English Historic Review. Russian emperors were no strangers to attempts on their life. Indeed, Paul I had been strangled to death in his own bedroom in 1801. But Paul had been murdered by a group of noblemen, and these palace coups had been the principal threat to the Tsars before mid-19th century. Kerakozov's assassination attempt was the first occasion in which an ordinary Russian

had tried to kill the monarch, motivated by a desire to bring down the Russian regime. So that's a big moment, right? Suddenly, there's forces in part, maybe, because we freed us some other fucking serfs. Now the people are going to play an increasing role in bad shit happening to Tsars. I would like to add, they said ordinary Russian. He was extraordinary. He was extraordinary. Not quite extraordinary enough. No, his aim wasn't extraordinary. His aim was not extraordinary. But his go-get-it-ness. Yeah. I really admire the way he tried to shoot the Tsar to death. His gum sheet. You can't teach that. You can't teach heart.

Yeah, you can't teach heart. That's the key. He would have been an incredible baseball player. So this brings us to May 6th, 1868, when Nikolai II, Alexandrovich Romanov, was born in the Alexander Palace south of St. Petersburg. He was the first child of the Crown Prince, or Zarovich, Alexander Alexandrovich, and his wife Princess Dagmar of Denmark, which brings up an interesting point. The Tsars of all Russia were not really Russian, not like by blood, you know? I mean, that's royalty kind of. That's how it works, right? How many English monarchs were French? Yeah. I mean, Queen Victoria is the grandmother of all of the crowned heads of Europe and World

War II, you know? Yeah. Edward Ryzinski in his book The Last Tsar explains, as a result of countless dynastic marriages, by the 20th century, scarcely any Russian blood flowed in the veins of the Russian Romanov Tsars. Nicholas's mother was the Danish princess, his grandmother the Danish queen. He called his grandmother the mother-in-law of all Europe. Her numerous daughters, sons, and grandchildren had allied nearly all the royal houses, uniting the continent in this entertaining manner from England to Greece. So this is a very incestuous family, which there will be some issues for that, for Nicholas II later on here. Yeah, I was going to say, there's going to be some problems when you interbreed that much. Yeah, maybe just being like the guy who gets all of the power and owns

everybody is a complete role of the dice based on the same family marrying each other off to other members of their family for forever, maybe not the best system. Legitimately, one of my favorite things to teach about was the Habsburgs, because I was just like, look how ugly these motherfuckers were. Like, look at this. They had jowls. It's a whole family of emperors with jowls. Yeah, because they're all married to their first cousins and have been for forever, and that's not great for anybody, especially Europe. It ends really bad for like, what, 18 million young men? Roughly. Yeah. But what are we going to apologize for that? Yeah. Yeah, you know, at least there's less traffic. You know, think about how bad the traffic would be in London

if there hadn't been a World War One. I mean, people don't think about that. The M1's already a mess. I was going to say, how much traffic was in World War One? Was there like nine cars? Well, a couple of million boys less worth of it there after the end of it. So, for a while in the Zarovich's household, Nicholas's dad's household, the Crown Prince's household, things are pretty good. Nicholas comes from a rare happy royal home. So this isn't something that starts with him. His parents like really genuinely loved each other, which is again, very uncommon with like most royal marriages, like they have separate castles. They don't talk to each other outside of like dealing with the kids and stuff. It's pretty abnormal for like his dad and his

mom, though, love each other. And that's probably why he winds up marrying for love later in life too, right? Is he like, this is how he's raised. He's not raised with like, well, you're just, you're your partner is whoever is your partner and you see them when you have to make an air. How bummed would they be to look at divorce rates now? And they're like, what, was it, you guys were arranged to be married that way? And be like, no, we did it for love. No, this was all us. Turns out we're just bad at it. Yeah. Turns out we just don't know what that word means at all. Marriage is pretty hard, actually. Yeah. Man, when you're not living in a giant palace with 17 pounds of diamonds just hanging around you at the willy nilly,

things get rough. Yeah. Let me give you advice on marriage. First, be owner of one sixth of world. Yeah. Yeah. Helps a lot. Eat only finest, non-poisoned meats in Jesus. So his family's real happy. His father was faithful to his mother, which everyone at the time found really shocking because when he was, when he was a kid, he was a real horn dog, like most crown princes. He's fucking his way across Russia. But then as far as we know, he meets his wife and he's, that's it for him. So he actually is, I don't know, you know, it's like learning about a monogamous baseball player. Yeah, or a professional cyclist who isn't on a shitload of drugs. Yeah. And you're like, no, no, that's not right. Yeah. Now the

first years of Nicholas's life, very, very happy. He has a bunch of siblings. They spend a lot of time playing outdoors at various vacation palaces with their dad, diary entries from Nicholas's youth that he writes contains passages like this. Papa turned on the hose, then we ran through the jet and caught terribly wet. That's the height of technology. Yeah, they had hoses and they were very excited. Yeah, like that. That's like having a PS5. Yeah, the hose. A hose? Are you Have you heard about the new hose for? It's all out of stock, but I've got one on pre-order and when it comes in, we ordered one from host stop. We got pre-ordering. You can put handover in and it makes different shapes. Oh, yes. He got he got a little adapter that makes it look like a

fan coming out. It's great. It's great. So Nicky's dad, pretty loving, definitely kind of your best case scenario royal upbringing. That said, he's also a czar. He's a very strict guy. Nicholas wrote that his dad could not tolerate weakness, but he also was never physically abusive that we know. The kind of most aggressive story we get from his dad as a parent is one time when Nicholas let a playmate take the blame for something bad that he'd done. His father yelled, you're a girly at him. So that's like the extent to which this guy gets punished as a kid, really. This guy is a better dad than like most of us had. Yeah. Like this guy wasn't beating his kids in the 1870s. Yeah. That is wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. So nailing it as a parent, Alexander the second. Well,

spare the rod. It's going to happen. Spare the rod, but also kill a shitload of peasants. Like not don't spare the rod on the peasants. Spare the rod on your own child so you can use more of the rod on the peasants. Yeah. Spare the rod on your child so they can learn how to use the rod on large, indistinct to them masses of civilians. Yeah. And for the civilians, you spare the hose. Yeah. No, they don't get, they don't get hose. Yeah. No hose. So while his kids played and while Alexander the second is enjoying being the crown prince, revolutionary discontent is building in Russia. One group called the people's will who are like nihilists. So there's definitely, there's a number of influences they have, but they're like Russian

nihilists. That's just being Russian. Yeah. That is just like being Russian. That's not a big stretch. And they're, I think broadly speaking, people who are super into Russian politics will be screaming at me for, for narrowing it down this way, I'm sure. But like they spent a bunch of time early on as an organization trying to organize and radicalize peasants to revolt. And eventually we're like, well, this is hopeless. We're never going to get these people to revolt. We're never going to overthrow the system that way. So let's just murder the czar. And maybe that will send the whole system into a tailspin and we'll get what we want that way. And if we don't, fuck it, at least we killed a czar, right? Like you get the sense that like more than anything,

they're just like, fuck this guy, let's kill him, you know? Yeah. There's a very slot machine vibe to that where it's like, you know, like, we'll just pull that down, maybe something will happen. We have these folks today, right? These people, I think it's more understandable because again, if somebody, if somebody makes you their property, I think it's fine to try to, to try to kill them, you know? Like it's the slave thing. If you're, if somebody makes you their slave and you can kill them, well, okay, good. Oh, you should amistad that shit immediately. Any opportunity you have to do that, you absolutely should. Yeah. And they try a bunch of times, seven times unsuccessfully to kill Alexander II. And he survives, I think like 20 something

assassination attempts. Lots of people are trying to kill the, the liberator, you know? Like if they, people cannot try enough to kill this guy. Yeah. And God, he is just, he's unkillable. He's pretty hard. Well, not quite, but he's pretty hard to kill. You got to give him credit for that. Yeah. So he survives seven. 27 for 28, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. That's a pretty good. So he survives like seven assassination attempts from people's will alone, and he executes 21 of their members as a result of like, you know, people fail and they get captured and whatnot. But, you know, the people's will, despite like the intense death toll taken on their organization from these failed attempts, they were the kind of folks who took Bakunin seriously

when he said the revolutionary is a doomed man. Their attitude is like, we're all already dead. Like, so fuck it, we're going to keep trying. God, this is so Russian. It's very Russian. It's also pretty IRA. Yeah. Yeah. With like a dollop of Sylvia Plath in there. Yeah. You need the poetry. A little bit of that bell jar up in there. Yeah. Yeah. Your fatalism needs to exist in a long-term situation. Yeah. Put some fertilizer in the bell jar and hook it at a czar. I remember, dude, I remember being in like, in like 10th grade and we read like a day in the life of Ivan Divinovich or whatever. And while I was reading this, I was like, why are you making us do this? Like, I was so hurt that they subjected me to something like that.

Aw. Yeah. I need to read more Russian literature. I did read that one poem about the Turk in the Russian, Ivan Petrovsky-Skovar. Pretty good poem about a Turk and a Russian killing each other. Classic. Check it out. I read it on the back of a beer. Trying to find like good Russian literature that isn't about somebody with a gun. Hard to find. It's like trying to find Irish literature that doesn't start with a man masturbating through a hole in his pocket. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then eventually dying of liver failure. Yes. So these guys keep right on their stick-to-itiveness and trying to kill the czar is laudable. And on March 1st, 1881, they get it right. They throw a bunch of bombs. This is,

they kill a lot of people as a general rule. Not a lot of like, you know, you're not discriminating when you're trying to assassinate a head of state with a bomb. You're accepting that like, we're going to kill a shitload of folks. You know, like we're setting off, it's like Stalin robbing banks and killing 70 people with bombs. It's just like how things are back then. It's horrible. It's fucked up. Collateral damage. Yeah. But yeah, it's terrorism. You know, that's how it works. People set off a lot of bombs, kill a shitload of people. It's all pretty ugly. That's how you get things done. They do in this case. They set off one bomb and like the czar Alexander gets out of his like carriage to be like, what the hell is going on?

And then they blow his legs like to pieces. So it's like a gnarly death. He doesn't die immediately. His legs are just like shredded. The whole royal family, including 13 year old Nicholas, who had been ice skating at the time, are like rushed away from ice skating to like see their grandpa bleed to death from a bomb wound. And again, even though these people are like the most privileged folks at the time, it's an ugly period. They have a like they see some shit as kids. You know, it's very Russian. I know we're going to keep going back to that well. But yeah, it is extremely Russian. Yeah, you must see this. Yeah. So Nicholas watches his grandpa bleed to death after he receives last communion.

And then his dad becomes the czar because, you know, that's how czarism works. Nicholas's dad is Alexander the third. And he pretty immediately decides he's going to be a real different kind of czar from his father. From the father that he watched explode, that he watched explode. So he sees his father pass all his liberalizing reforms and then get exploded. And he's like, well, that doesn't seem like the right way to go. I don't want I don't want that specific thing. I don't want to explode like a bad deal. I'm probably going to die, but I'd rather get strangled in my bed than have my legs blown off. Yeah. Yeah. So he two months after his dad's assassination, he issues what's called the manifesto on unshakable authority, which is co-written by one of the

heads of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now, this manifesto said in short that Alexander the liberator had been wrong to push for more liberal attitudes rather than what Alexander the third called unshakable autocracy. Alexander the third argued that unshakable autocracy wasn't just a good form of government, but it was what God commanded. It was their sacred duty as the chosen of the Lord to rule Russia this way. So he cancels a plan right before getting killed. His father had like agreed to create a legislative assembly, a Duma for Russia for the first time. Like they were going, okay, we're going to have like a Congress basically that people have some representation. And Alexander the third is like, oh, that's not fucking happening. Absolutely not.

And yet on that one. Yeah. Yeah. Big old, big old NYET right on that one. Couple of backwards punctuation points and we're good to go. So instead he launches a huge crackdown and I'm going to quote from the Roman ops here. Troops were deployed to restore order and in September, Alexander signed emergency laws to preserve state security followed in May 1882 by temporary regulations on Jews, which banned pogroms, but were more concerned with protecting the interests of the local populace by banning Jews from living in the countryside or outside the pale. The pale of settlement is the area in Russia you're allowed to live as a Jew, which that's really interesting that he's

banning pogroms while also being like, but also you can't like be here. Yeah. Like that's that is in of itself a pogrom. Yeah, it is. It's like no pogroms, but all of these people have to leave immediately. Don't kill them though, but I'm not going to do anything to stop this. And like, there are pogroms, right? There's a there's a wave of violence against Jews because they get they get blamed for this. Jewish people do represent a higher percentage of revolutionary organizations than if the general population. I wonder why I wonder why. I wonder as they're forced on on several diasporas out of Russia. There's some amazing moments. One of Nicholas II, we're going forward in time by decades, but one of his advisors, like his prime minister at

one point is like, motherfucker, if I were a Jew, I'd be throwing bombs too. It's rough for them out there. You've made a bad situation for them. And boy howdy, Alexander III is not a good czar for Jewish people. Tales all this time on that one. Yeah, there's not like there's a lot of great ones. And people around Alexander III note that he also kind of goes mad with power immediately. And I'm going to quote from Simon Montefiore here. When a female political prisoner insulted a gendarme, Alexander ordered, flog her. His minister asked for a lesser sentence than the maximum 100 strokes. She was fragile, but the czar insisted, give her the 100 strokes. They killed her.

He is not wicked, wrote the diplomat, Vladimir Lambsdorf, but he's drunk with power. His war minister, General Vanovsky, joked that he was like Peter the Great with his cudgel, except here is only the cudgel without the great Peter. Alexander's contempt for his own ministers was a futile attitude in the modern world. In his reverence for his autocracy, he failed to see that his own arbitrariness was a flaw. Sire explained one of his advisors, we have a terrible evil, lack of law. But I always stand for compliance with the laws, the czar replied. I'm not talking about you, but about your administration, which abuses its power. Today Russia is like a colossal boiler in which pressure is building. When it gets a hole, people with hammers rivet them, but one day the

gases will blow out a hole that can't be filled and will suffocate. And will explode your goddamn legs off. Yeah. Yeah, dude, did you not watch what happened to your dad? I love that. He's like, I don't think you understand what happened to your father. But also, the way Alexander the third season is like, well, yeah, because he tried to liberalize shit. That's why you got to be consistently a dick. I don't know, man. If I was born with a target on my head, I'd be, I'd be trying to be cool as hell. Let me translate this in a way I think will make sense to our male listeners at least. You know how a lot of times you pretend to not know how to do things because then it'll get done for you? Like making, you know. Oh boy, do I. Oh boy,

do I. Yeah, exactly. It's like that. But it's with murdering people. Where if you if you just let people know that you can be nice, then maybe they won't fuck with you. That's Alexander the third's idea. So he looks very angry. Furious. Are you mad about the murdering part? No, for the fact that I need help cleaning my room. Yeah, I could use some help cleaning my room. So in 1882, Nicholas gets a gift from his mother, a golden edged book of souvenirs bound with wood. This became his first diary. And for the remainder of his life, he would make daily entries in it. For example, began writing in my diary on the 1st of January, 1882. In the morning, drank hot chocolate dressed in my lifeguard reserves uniform. Took a walk in the garden

with papa. We chopped and sawed wood and made a great bonfire. Went to bed at about half past nine. Papa, mama, and I received two deputations. Presented me with a magnificent wooden platter inscribed the peasants of Verona's and those to their Zarevich with bread and salt and a Russian towel. That's like his diary entries. I would like to add that hot chocolate cost $1,000 back then. Yes, yes, this is this is they had they had to just straight up shoot for people to afford that chocolate. Hot chocolate was the thing that stuck out in that entire thing to me. I was like, you know, that's nice that you got some hot chocolate, dude. Yeah, I mean, he owns more of the world than anyone else pretty much ever has. I mean, maybe one of the cons, you know, so it was at one point

owned Russia. Yeah. And also the cons devolved a lot more power to local areas and shit than the Zars did. They were the mob. Yeah, yeah, they were pretty dope. So it was the kind of idyllic childhood for Nicholas that you only get when your father owns like most of the inhabited world or a big chunk of it. It's so wild too. But when you think about that, like hot chocolate, like no peasant has ever had ever had hot chocolate and they never would, they would live their life dying without ever tasting anything sweet. Yeah. And then we think about like some weird sweet thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A date. Yeah. But then we think about I could just go over to my cabinet and eat like a czar in 2022. That's so goddamn wild. Yeah. Yeah. You probably eat a lot better

than a czar because Russian cooking, I don't know, there's some great Russian meals, but hit or miss on some things. Yeah. Yeah. I don't need stroganoff to get me through the day. I'll have some eggs. Exactly. I do eat sort of like in a medieval way. Like I eat a lot of eggs. Yeah. That's pretty medieval. Or it's just like, and then I had nine eggs. And they're like, I remember, I had a fascinating story. I interviewed a guy who he had been the Hitler youth as a kid. He was 14 when World War Two ended. And so he like grew up in, you know, this, this Germany that still had shades of the, of the imperial Germany to it. And his family was Prussian. And his big memory was that like, they didn't have enough money for

everybody to have eggs. So every morning during breakfast, they would get, you know, what stuff they got. And they would all sit around to watch their father eat a single egg. Because that was like the way that you did it, right? Like it was, of course, the father's going to get the egg. He has to go out and like, you know, make things happen for the family. And everyone would watch in awe as he ate this single egg every morning. It's like watching people play video games on YouTube. I'm always like, what are you doing? Don't you want to play the game? No, we just want to see. There's so few eggs that we have access to. We just want to watch it. And then I'll just, I'll just go to a farmer's market and then buy a dozen eggs and then eat

a dozen eggs. It's like how like back in the 40s and stuff, like people used to send around pineapples while they were ripening and like put them out at parties and like brag that like, we have a pineapple and eventually we're going to get to eat it. But until then look at this pineapple, you know, like. Do you ever hear the story of Louis the 14th and the pineapple? No. When they introduced the pineapple to him and sparing what actually he was portrayed in artistically, he did not look like what the pictures did. He was a very, a corpulent man and he was a relatively greedy eater and somebody presented him with a pineapple and he didn't know what it was. So he tried to eat it like, like whole, like an apple and just shredded the shit out of his mouth,

got embarrassed and then like, stupid asshole. And then he like banned pineapples from France because he was a stupid asshole about it. Look, there's some shit that like I can knock down to like, oh yeah, if you, if you're not instructed on how to eat certain things, it's confusing, but a pineapple is not that like you look at a pineapple and you're like, well, I should probably cut into this. Like this doesn't look like a bite into fruit. I forget who did the tweet, but somebody talked about how like pineapple is the most metal food on the planet because it just like, it dissolves your tongue when you eat it and it's covered in like thick bark covered in spice. I love a good pineapple. Now you're making me fiend for pineapple. And the leaves are sharp.

Even the leaves are violent on a pineapple. Can fall down and kill you like a coconut. It is good. Don't they grow on like bushes? Coconut bushes? Yes. Yes. Sure. Let's go with that. Oh, sorry. I'm thinking of a guanis. So yeah, he, the czar has a pretty great childhood. All things considered. One of the few things that's kind of traumatic for him as a kid is that he realizes his parents prefer his brother, Georgie to him. His younger brother is like the favorite. And he like acknowledges as a kid, like they don't really love me. They love my brother. Not in a way that like they're shitty to him because he's the oldest one. He's going to be the czar. They just think Georgie's a better kid. And also he is like Georgie's way smarter. Like

Nicholas sucks. That happens. Georgie will become like the guy who's a voice of reason a lot. Do you have a sibling? Yes. Who's better? Oh, I mean, geez, he might listen to this podcast, but clearly me, right? Obviously. Yeah. If he's listening to your podcast. Yeah, absolutely. Right. He doesn't have a fucking podcast, just has, you know, a good, hasn't gone and traumatized himself for very little reason in random parts of the world, you know, like a, like a jerk. It's like, why don't you go to war? Yeah. Yes. Anyway, no, he's, he's a much better person than me. See, that's, that's the thing is like there's all, there always is a sibling that's a better person. For sure. And in this case, it's Georgie.

Georgie. And Nicholas knows this. And in the Romanovs, Simon Montfiore claims, his adolescent insight did not make him mean, sullen or less obedient. He simply became reticent. So he kind of becomes like hesitant. Like he doesn't like to make decisions or like calls because he, I think he just kind of feels insecure. He doesn't want to like push anything that'll make somebody not like him, which is a problem when you're about to own all of Russia, right? You should really need to be decisive. As we've talked about, it's one of the things that stops you from getting murdered. So the news are Alexander III, Nicholas's dad, picks a tutor for his son, a guy named, oh boy, Pobetanose, Pobetanostov, Pobetanostov,

like, come on people, you expect me to get all these Russian names, right? I can't get English town. Come on Russians, be American. We're going to call him Popo. Okay. So Popo is a traditionalist and he's such a traditionalist that he would have been a fascist in a different country and time. He lectured young Nicholas about how foolish his grandfather's reforms would be. His argument to Nicholas was that Russia was unique, special, and stuff like a free press would lead to inevitable collapse. Like other countries can maybe handle this, but not Russia. We're just not, we're very different. We're different kinds of people. They viewed themselves as Rome. Yeah. Yeah. As the, as the, as the heirs to the Roman

empires, the third Rome. Yeah. Now one of his other tutors, one of Nicholas's other tutors, didn't feel the need to actually educate him. You know, this is the guy who's supposed to be teaching him because he believed, quote, mysterious forces emanating during the sacrament of coronation provided all the practical data required by a ruler. Well, we teach this kid about the world. God's going to tell him how to do his job. He's going to get a ghost learning. That's not everybody. Other tutors of his have a more realistic view of education, but none have a lot of luck teaching Nikki things. He's immature. He's not particularly keen to learn. Popo noted that during one of history lesson, quote, I could only observe that he was completely

absorbed picking his nose, which is a fine normal kid thing to do, right? But also, not a great sign when you're going to rule the world and maybe why people shouldn't rule one six of the world as their personal property. I mean, you know what, that might be just like one time and this guy's just like dwelling on it and he might have had something. It's there in history forever. Yeah. Like we're talking about it like 150 years later. It is pretty funny. It's just like one time this kid had like a little crunchy in there. They had to work his way out. Oh, God. It is really funny. Who else picks their nose? Jeff, I know where you're going with this. And I'm very excited that that's the segue that you're using. It's the Washington

State Highway Patrol and probably. 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 on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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. 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. 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. Two death sentences and 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. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Good ads. Good ads. I put my nose the whole time. I know. I know. It was unsettling. Very satisfying though. Yeah, it did seem good. So as an adolescent, Nicholas joins the army, but he joins the army the way that like Tsar kids joined the army. This doesn't mean like he's not doing like push-ups in the mud or anything. Basically as a teenager, he becomes a member of the

lifeguards, which is the special military unit dedicated to the royal family. When he joins the cadet corps for training, his textbook included this line that gives you an idea of how the Russian military saw itself. Russia as a state is neither commercial nor agricultural, but military and its calling is to be the wrath of the world. Parentheses, pretend we did not get our asses kicked like 14 years ago. Like immediately yesterday, basically. I mean, though that is Russian's history, like the Crimean war is kind of weird because like they lose and then lose as opposed to most of Russian military history is they lose, they lose, they lose, they lose, they win.

Yeah, it's a long game. What it is is the Russians know that they can outlast a battle of attrition. Like they're just like, they will just throw bodies at whatever a problem is. Oh, Germany is invading. We have empty spaces bigger than Germany. Not the problem. How many lives will it cost us? Deal. So in his biography, the last Tsar, Rydzinski explains, quote, the army meant obedience and diligence above all else, both these qualities, which the Shai youth already possessed, the army would foster ruinously. So Nicholas is instantly put in charge of half a company worth of men. But this was fine because

the units only real duties were marching and working out. His regimental boss was the Grand Duke, Sergei Alexandrovich, who's his uncle, so his dad's brother. That's the most Russian ass name I've ever heard. And Sergei is a Russian motherfucker. He is brutal. He loves him some pogroms. He loves him some cracking down violently on socialists. He's hugely religious and he is also very gay. So he hates himself and everything around him because he has these urges that he thinks are sinful. And because he's in the he's leading the lifeguards, like, which is this fundamentally like pretty gay unit, it's this closed military tradition where like

Rydzinski writes that the unit, quote, encouraged pedorasty and heavy drinking, right? Like, all these dudes are fucking and getting wasted all the time. And then Sergei gets really angry because he's super religious and thinks that's wrong. But it's also how he spends all his time. So he's just kind of this very angry, violent man with a lot of power and a lot of repressed issues. Mike Pence energy there. Real Mike Pence energy. Yeah, it's bad. It's a problem. The Crown Prince Sergei becomes an issue. Now, since Nicholas was the Crown Prince and was straight, he probably was not exposed to a lot of like the horniness within the lifeguards, right? I don't think he was involved. I think they probably

were like, well, we don't want we don't want the Zaravich to see. That's probably not like something to do around him. I mean, there certainly is like, but there's there's a difference between sexual preference. Yes, being gay and like that sort of like military or prison. We're in the military. We're all these men kept together. People have this need for intimacy. Yeah, it definitely is one of those things where like the fact that sexuality is a spectrum is very common in all male locations where, you know, there aren't the options for that. People explore that sexuality a lot more willingly. Yeah, this is not a unique kind of military formation in history. This shit happens all the time. I forget what their names it wasn't

the Spartans, but it was somebody like the Spartans. Oh, it was the sacred band of Thebes where they were like explicitly all right in like in homosexual like relationships. It was like 150 couples. And the idea was like, well, nobody's going to like run and abandon their romantic partner on the battlefield. Exactly. And they were like fighting for a while. Yeah, for a while until the till the Macedonians came around, you know, you get your Phillip and your Alexander and that doesn't that breaks up eventually. But like, yeah, they had a pretty really good combat record. So Nicholas probably is not exposed to the horniness, but he definitely took part in the drinking as this quote from his diary makes clear. Yesterday during training, we drank 125 bottles

of champagne. I was sentry for the division at I took my squadron out on the battlefield at five and inspection of military institutes under a pouring rain. So he then gets drunk with the boys that night and he wrote this unintentionally hilarious line woke up and felt as if a squadron had spent the night in my mouth. Maybe he did a little guy. Maybe he did know a little thing. I don't think that's what he means. You don't know, you know, I think he means it tastes my mouth tastes like a bunch of horses shit in it or a whole squadron of dogs. You never know that the leg. Remember, you're interpreting from from the language. You are. And I am certain there's some really horny Zara Nicholas and Duke Sergei fan fiction

out there and more power to you. I would also like to add how funny it is that like it was champagne. Yeah. And I know obviously like alcohol. That's like what they drink. Yeah. But like I expected it to be vodka and then it's like champagne. And I'm like, man, could you imagine that like from somebody in like a desert storm like 1992? Yeah. And like, darling, we got fucked up on like four cases of champagne. And I swear to fucking God, I woke up and in my mouth tasted like pound and brute and the Bradley. It tasted like a whole group of Marines had spent the night in my teeth. I went to fucking town and I swear to God, I got married last night. Yeah. So Grand Duke Sergei was responsible for picking the drinking games.

And he was really good at this for all of his other shortcomings. His favorites were elbows in which a glass the length of a forearm would be filled and drank in one gulp. The staircase, which involved lining a staircase with drinks and pounding them one step at a time until you passed out drunk. And then there was till the wolves in which all of the men would strip naked as a group, run into the frozen outdoors where a servant would bring them a tub of champagne that they would all drink naked together in the freezing cold. That game sucks. That does sound like a shitty trick. That game sucks. I'd be like, can we just play drink the beer? Sergei, because he's got this religious conflict is really angry all the time,

like he'll have these nights of indulgence and then he'll just be like furious at the world. And then he'll suggest that his brother or his nephew do a bunch of violent things. Whereas Nicholas is like pretty even tempered, I think for most of his life. So I just I don't think he's like, I don't think he's repressing anything. It doesn't seem like it. He's not like self-flagellating after doing something he regrets. Yeah, I don't that it just doesn't seem likely that that was like a thing he grappled with. Yeah, now Nicholas drank definitely he does not seem to have had a problem. His father did and became more of an issue as the czar got older. Alexander III had a habit of getting wasted with his friends and according to one witness quote,

would lay on his back and waved his arms and legs about behaving like a child trying to get to his feet and then falling down grabbing the legs of anyone who walked past. And again, this man owns a sixth of the world. So what do you do when he's like that drunk? Dude, he's just a good time and son of a bitch. I would be I would be stoked if you were like if somebody told me that Trump sometimes would have his buddies over, they would get fucked up and just collapse on the ground and just like wail around grabbing people's legs and stuff. I'd be like, well, at least that's kind of cool. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, that's a human thing he did. It's a fun time and thing, you know. Yeah, get that way. Yeah, I get that wasted pretty regularly. So his

binges started to cause health problems by the 1880s and his doctors forbade him from drinking. Um, he but also you can't really stop the emperor of Russia from like doing stuff he wants to. Um, so his wife like keeps enough of a watch on him that he has to hide it. So Alexander, the third orders jackboots made with special compartments that hold flasks loud large enough to fit a whole bottle of cognac. So these must have been big shoes. It looks like kiss. Fucking shoes hold the whole bottle of cognac. Could you imagine like, uh, we have a question about this, uh, about this, uh, this memo you sent out here. Do you really want to eight foot platform heels? Yes, hollow, very hollow with a tube coming out

of them. He's trying to sneak wine into like a baseball game or some shit. Yeah. And they'll do this like the czar and his friends whenever like they're at state functions, like his wife will step out of the room and they'll be like, all right, everybody drink really, really fast. Pound him down, you know, the perfect crime. Yeah. On October 17th, 1888, Nicholas the second has his first close brush with death. He's on the Royal train with his father and family when it has a wreck outside of Karkov and modern Ukraine. And it has a wreck because his dad is drunk and is telling like the, uh, the guy who's in charge of the railway, the director of the railway, this dude named Sergei Witt. Um, he's like, make it go faster, make it go faster. And Sergei's

like, we're already going as fast as he can. And the czar is like, what are you a Jew? Make it go faster. And then it crashes. That's so Russian. Very Russian, very racist. What a great goat. He's like, the guy's just like, you know, this is train. Yeah. We'll be problem if corner comes. I don't know if you know this one railway. Very little steering can do here. I don't know if you remember, but this railway relatively new. We are Russian. We're not great at these yet. And Nikki later wrote in his diary, writes in his diary of this train crash. And this is fun. This gives you some insight into how he grows up viewing the lives of other humans who aren't royals. A fateful day for us all. We might all have been killed, but by the Lord's will, we were

not. During breakfast, our train jumped the rails. The dining car and coach were demolished, but we emerged from it all unscathed. However, 20 people were killed and 16 injured. Kind of burying the lead on that one, isn't it? 20 people dying. He's like, thank God, everyone who matters is fine. It really is like, oh, you deserve to die. We're having that mentality for your whole life. Yeah, that is his entire life. And it's also worth noting that 20 people die because his dad is drunk and like, make it go faster. Yeah, this is suffering from affluenza. Yeah, they have it pretty hard in the Romanov family. So this accident brings Sergei Witt, the director of the railway, into Romanov orbit. After the crash, Witt gets promoted to run the

railways for the whole empire. Then Alexander III decides to make him communications minister. Before he hands him that job, he asks, are you a friend of the Jews? Because again, pretty racist guy. Now Witt, who would go down in history as a campaigner for reforming Russia's anti-Semitic laws, answers, since we can't drown them all in the Black Sea, we should treat them as humans. So for an idea of where anti-Semitism is, this is the good guy. This is the advocate for Jewish liberation, being like, well, we can't drown them all, so we should treat them better. That's the most progressive thing any Russian had said. Yeah. That wasn't Jewish. She's like, well, if we can't, if we can't drown them, we might as well treat them

like humans. If we can kill them, we will treat them okay. Yeah. So for a heads up, pretty bad, pretty bad people in a lot of ways. As both his father's son and the heir to all Russia, Nicholas II had the option to have a lot of casual sex if he really wanted to. Many young Zarevichs, including his father, were playboys in their youth, and often as an adult too. But Nicholas was a deeply religious and dedicated person, and he was dedicated to waiting for love. This next story is based on the recollections of a noble woman named Vera Urineva, and she claims of his first infatuation, quote, he adored walking. There was a rumor that he had met a beautiful Jewess on a walk,

and a romance had sprung up. There was a lot of gossip about that in Petersburg, but his father acted as decisively as ever. The Jewess was sent away along with her entire household. Nicholas was in her home while all this was going on. Only over my dead body, he declared to the governor. Matters did not go as far as dead bodies. However, he was an obedient son, and eventually he was broken and taken away to his father at Anchikov Palace, and the Jewess was never seen in the capital again. So. In the capital. In the capital. Yeah, may have been. I mean, Alexander III would not have been above a little bit of murder. We've moved her to a farm upstairs. Yeah, yeah, it's bleak. So right around the same

time, Uncle Sergei leads a crackdown against Jewish people living in and around the capital, and Alexander III signs off on this crackdown in Moscow. Uncle Sergei closes the great synagogue, and he sends his Cossacks to break into Jewish homes and like beat and rob people. It's a night of it's a night of broken glass kind of shit, right? He expels all Jewish citizens of Moscow. The only exceptions are women who were to agree to register as prostitutes. That seems that's having your cake and eating it too, guys. Come on. Yeah. Well, not for him, actually, but yeah, as a as a matter of jurisprudence, I guess, Jewish immigration in the United States increases to 137,000 people a year. This is like the fival goes west, you know, stuff like this is this is when

you start getting huge waves of Jewish people immigrating to the United States in particular. Some of them do a lot of them do like wind up further west in Europe, but like this these crackdowns are what starts like why you you start to get this like huge Jewish population in New York City and stuff. It's because a lot of people are like, it really doesn't seem like Russia's a great place to be Jewish. We might need to get the fuck out of here. There, you know, maybe Europe and as a whole is probably the best place to get out of there. I don't think this is heading in a good direction. Yeah, I'm hearing some pretty rough stuff out west, too. Let's go to America. Let's go to America. They'll hate us without being too violent about it. Yeah. Yeah. In the early

1890s, the young Kaiser of Germany, Nicholas's cousin, you know, auto or Wilhelm, fires Otto von Bismarck, who'd been the brains of the Reich for a while and had organized a German-Russian defensive alliance. When the Kaiser sacks Bismarck, he also refuses to renew the treaty. And so Alexander III signs an alliance with France instead. The Kaiser, being an idiot, recognizes like, oh, no, I fucked up. I shouldn't have done that. Like he's immediately like, oh, this could go badly for Germany. This is going to be rough in about 24 years. And one of the things you got to realize is all of these royals who are like cousins are texting each other constantly, basically. They have telegrams. So they can actually like basically text with one another.

And as soon as like this happens, he starts sending a bunch of like frantic telegrams to the Russian royal family, inviting them to hang out on his yacht and party with them and like trying to get back into their good books. And Alexander III. If you want to come over, we have cool helmets with spikes on. And Alexander III doesn't really want to hang out with Kaiserville Helm, because nobody, nobody ever wants to hang out with Kaiserville Helm. So he picks Nikki to go do that job. He's like, hey, you're going to be the the the czar one day. Why don't you go hang out with your weird cousin and sail around in circles with his stupid boats. So that's what Nikki does a bunch of when he's a young man. And for a look at how he starts coming together as a

young person, I want to quote again from the Romanovs. The air now 24 wrote the deputy foreign minister Lambsdorf makes a strange impression. Half boy, half man, small of stature, thin and undistinguished, yet also obstinate and thoughtless. His mother had tended to infantilize her boys. He wore his literal sailor suits longer than most boys do noted countess Zizi Narishkina. He was a man with a small horizon and a narrow outlook and for years had barely gone beyond the wall of the Anchicov and then Gachina palace gardens. Even when Nikki was a guards colonel, his mother still addressed him as my dear little soul, my boy. His diary tells of hide and seek, drinking games and contests with conkers and fur cones well into his 20s.

I like the idea of him being dressed like Donald Duck. Yeah, it's like a 20 year old. Yeah, it has very blue energy there. Yeah, because he just gets to be this little boy forever because nobody can ever say like, hey, maybe the little sailor suits might not be the thing to be wearing to this party, 21 year old future emperor. So he just kind of does it, you know? He's flexing. I mean, there's a way you can see that as healthy.

I'm going to add, by the way, I also dress like a child, but it's more just like I wear like, oh, look, I like Spider-Man. I only wear pajamas. I get it. Yeah. So he's kind of a sweet boy. Most people will agree on that, but he's also very much like a boy rather than the kind of person suited to be the iron ruler of all the rushes. Everyone kind of notices, oh, you're not going to be hard enough for this job. Oh, the guy in the little sailor suit? Sailor suit. Yeah, not quite tough enough for this gig.

With the big lollipop and his big floppy blonde curls that he's wearing. Dutty. So he had developed his intellectual talents by this point. He's not an idiot. He's really good at learning languages. And in fact, one of the things people will notice is that his English is perfect. And he writes a lot of letters to and from his wife that are like flawless English. He also falls in love with British romance novels. He spends a lot of time reading romance novels. And if you were a member of the oppressed classes, kind of eyeing this guy from a

scullery or whatever, you might have expected him to be like, well, when this guy gets into power, he'll be better than Alexander the third, you know, the dude who's constantly cracking down on everybody. The guy who just jumped a train. Yeah, the dude who jumped a train because he was wasted. The guy who's got a DUI with a train. But as Simon Montfior makes clear, Lil Nicky definitely took after his father. Quote, Nicky embraced his father's muscovite vision of the throne,

founded on the mystical union of czar and peasants whose devout loyalty was pure and sacred, compared to the filthy decadence of Petersburg, liberal Europe and Jewish modernity. Nicholas II worshipped his imperial father. But czar Alexander the third knew his son had no aptitude for the job awaiting him. When Witt suggested putting Nicholas on the committee organizing construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway so he could get some on the job experience, the czar responded, have you ever tried discussing anything of consequence with his imperial highness the Grand Duke?

Don't tell me you never noticed the Grand Duke is an absolute child. His opinions are utterly childish. How could he could preside over such a committee? And like, that's a bad sign. If your kid is gonna inherit the throne, literally the instant you die and you're like, well, he can't build a railroad. Like, dude. To be fair, I don't know if you should be, you're living in a pretty glass house.

Railroad stones, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Maybe don't be, also maybe don't be shitting on Nicky about railroad stuff, huh, buddy? How much did you black out that night? Yeah, do you remember that? You remember with the train when you killed the 20 people? All the people, the 20 people? Yeah.

So Nicholas did eventually get added to that committee in the end, but he doesn't receive a lot of training on the job from his dad. His dad's the only one who can give him this and his dad, you kind of get the feeling his dad is just irritated by him and like doesn't want him around. So he doesn't teach him a whole lot. He just kind of keeps him at arm's length. Yeah, he's an asshole, you know. This might have been fine, right?

Alexander's young, you know, he had time to gradually learn things and pick them up from ministers. Alexander III was like not old, you know, when Nicky's in his 20s and he was expected to have, like people were generally expecting Nicholas probably wouldn't inherit the throne until he was closing on 40. But that's not quite what happens. So Nicholas meets Alexandra Fyodorovna when he's in his early 20s. She's a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

She's a German and a Protestant. Her childhood had been rough. Her mother was depressed and constantly ill. Her brother had hemophilia, which was called the English disease because it was so common with royalty. And he died from bleeding after he fell out of a window. When she was six, her mom died along with her favorite sister from Diphtheria. So Alexandra's always going to be kind of nervous and scared of losing everyone around

her because that's how her childhood goes. Yeah, because that's what happened. Because that's what happened. Yeah, that's like, oh man, I'm afraid I'm going to vomit because I vomit literally every day. And she grows into an unpleasant person. But like, you know, it's understandable why she does a lot of the things she does. Her background makes it make sense. She's just tense all the time.

Yeah, she's just never okay with anything. Yeah, and so she is though kind of insufferable. She's like a lot to deal with and all of the Romanovs, except for Nicholas, feel this way about her. Like he falls in love immediately. And the rest of his family is like her. We've all been there. Yeah, it is that kind of story.

And there's other reasons. We all know somebody that's like really into the person they're dating and we're all just like, okay, but like, is it like a different person? Yeah, is she completely different every moment that we're not around? Or is she like, or do you have like a different plane of existence? Is she saying different things in the quantum realm that we're not seeing here? Yeah, is he just like hiding everything about himself when he's around us and only plays beer pong when he's around us?

And the rest of the time he has a personality. So there's other reasons why Alexandra isn't popular as a choice for Nicholas's partner. For one thing, she's Protestant, right? All of the Romanovs, you have to be Orthodox. You know, you're like the Russian Orthodox church. You're the head of it as the czar. Your wife can't be a Protestant. And yeah, there's other reasons.

There's like weird royal bloodline reasons. I don't, we need to get into. There's like a lot of reasons people are not happy with this, this, this match. But Nicholas is in love with this woman and she's in love with him. But there's like a years of conflict, right? They don't get their way right away. And it says a lot about how strongly he felt that he goes through the effort. Because there's like years of him trying to convince his father and his father refuses.

Like most love-struck men who can, he decides to go on a road trip to clear his head. And yeah, yeah, he's like, well, I might as well go traveling. Yeah. On the train, because they have bad luck with those. Trains and boats. And they have bad luck on this. He and his brother, Georgie, go to, I think, Greece. And Georgie gets tuberculosis, which eventually kills him.

So he has to head back home to like slowly die of TB. But Nicky gets to go to Japan with his other friend and relative, the Prince of Greece. And this doesn't go great either. So they spend a month in Japan. Really, the Russians usually have great luck with Japan. Nicholas especially. So Nicky reads mostly romance novels and just kind of walks around Nagasaki buying souvenirs while he's in Japan, hangs out with his cousin, the Prince of Greece.

And since Prince George, this is funny, Prince George has a tattoo. And so Nicky decides to get one too of a dragon on his right forearm. I like what a weeb. He's a little bit of a weeb, right? Goes to Japan and gets a dragon tattoo. Comes back wearing like a black trench coat. Yeah. He gets a katana.

Yeah. Why sobbed or better than dubbed. It's very funny. Yeah. He gets real into anime during this period. He's hanging up wall scrolls in the palace. There's rioters at the gates and he's building a Gundam. We'll make a large working Gundam.

It will be great. Right. So he's just kind of there to have a good time, you know. But Japan has, I don't know if you know this about Japan, has a pretty intense right wing. And they start developing all these conspiracy theories that he's secretly in Japan to spy on their weaknesses so Russia can attack. They credit him with being a much more capable person than he is. To be fair, the Japanese not always stoked on outside influence in any way.

Right. Right. Yeah. So a lot of people are real honry about this and they're angry. Like he doesn't, the first thing he does isn't go bow to the emperor. He like goes and does other stuff first because he's kind of on vacation. He's not trying to be disrespectful. He's just like doesn't real, it doesn't know anything about Japan, you know.

Yeah. They weren't written in Britain. There's nothing about the Yamato clan in English romance novels. Yeah, exactly. Which is all he knows. So one of these paranoid right wingers is a cop named Sanso who is supposed to be one of them in guarding the futures are. And I'm going to read a quote from Japan today here.

According to the July 1891 newspaper Eyewitness account, Sanso quote, drew his sword and struck at the prince's neck. His royal highness, who was riding at the head of a long line of rickshaws with two Coolies drawing him, jumped back as Sando cut at him. And the force of the blow was broken by his cap. However, he was cut on the head and it is said that a small piece of the skull was chipped off. Prince George, seeing the attack from afar, jumped out of his rickshaw and ran to after Sando, striking him with his bamboo cane.

It did not bring him down, but fortunately two rickshaw drivers abandoned their strollers and sprinted towards Sando. The attack, which occurred in only a few seconds, rippled across two competing nations. Nicholas suffered all his life from headaches and had been traumatized enough to ask every May 11th that the Russian public pray for his well being. The nine centimeter wound would be a lifelong reminder of how close to death he'd been. This is like a pretty serious incident. That's a that's an assassination attempt.

Yeah. Yeah. A fucking dude tries to kill him with a katana and gets pretty close. I'm not 100% sure how that goes because, you know, 1891, it's you're looking at a sort of slight modernization of death in prison. That's what I was wondering is if he was forced to if he chose to or forced to commit suicide. Yeah. And the two the two rickshaw drivers who save the czar's life, the Japan gives them a it's like $36 a month pension, which I think is is decent at the time. But Nicholas gives them like a fortune like $2,500 like the equivalent of that much at the time

in in rubles, which is like a fortune at $30 million. Yeah. He makes them rich. So at least you do. He is someone who's capable of being like, well, I owe those. Yeah. I should probably I should probably let it be known that you get rich if you stop a czar from getting murdered. Fair. Instead of instead of we get rich. Yeah. When the czar is murdered.

Yeah. So when he gets back from his his trip, he meets a ballerina with a last name. I'm not going to try to pronounce it starts with a K. He feels deeply he falls in love with this girl. He's really conflicted about the fact that he's still in love with Alexandra, but he's now fallen in love with this other girl and he writes in his diary. Would it be right to conclude from this that I am very amorous, which no dude falling in love with two people over the course of your entire life does not make you very amorous. I mean, it's cute though.

He loves love. What can you say about that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's cute. It's just, oh, this must mean I'm a player. I've fallen in love with the second person. They do fuck. This is encouraged by the Romanoff family. They're kind of hoping like his dad seems to be hoping like maybe this will take his mind off of, you know. Encouraged while it was happening. Yeah. They were all around him cheering him on. It's not all that far from that. Like they're not actually in the room,

but like everyone is like really setting this up for him. And yeah, it doesn't stop him from being in love with Alexandra. He does eventually wear the rest of his family down and he gets engaged to marry her. They go back to England to celebrate with the English side of the family. Queen Victoria always liked to see her grandchildren married off and so she hosts a party at one point for the new crown prince and his wife to be. And she invites a rich Jewish man to the party, right? Queen Victoria. Yeah. And everyone, the English relatives are like fine with this.

They don't think much of it, but Nicholas is terrified of him. He won't go near him. Like it becomes obvious that he's treating him like he's got the plague and all of his English relatives make fun of him for being a racist. In a letter home to his mother, Nicholas writes, I tried to keep away as much as I could and not to talk. All right, bro. I know. Again, can't understate how racist this dude is. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he poisoned the punch bowl. How specifically racist? Because one of the weird things about him,

he has his entire, pretty much entire time a czar. He has a guy who's kind of like a body assistant, almost named John Hercules, who is a black American man who like John Hercules. John Hercules. Incredible name. Yeah, unbelievable name. You were just going to go right past that, by the way. They're just breezing over.

John seems to really like this gig. I think he's treated well. He's paid well. He like goes on vacation for months every year and like comes back with jam for the royal family that like they can't get in Russia. There's rumors that like after the monarchy falls, he like spends the rest of his life dressed in like a fading like household uniform wandering around Moscow. Like, I don't know, seems to be like a pretty good situation for him until everything falls apart. So one of the main parts of this person's job was to deliver jam. No, that wasn't his job. That was just what he did.

It's just a bonus. He would go back to the US for like vacation to see his family and he would bring back Guava Jam because all of like the royal kids loved it and he was like part of the household. So he like that he cared about the kids and he wanted to bring him jam, you know. Hopefully it wasn't that jam from the FDA episode you guys know. Yeah, I would think you would be very careful about your jam buying if you're purchasing for the Tsar's kids. So Nicky and family get back from England and the emperor pretty much immediately his dad gets sick. Probably all the drinking didn't help. It's a kidney infection.

Jam poisoning. Jam poisoning. He gets jammed. Got jammed out. Yeah, figured it out. I don't think John Hercules was in the picture at this point. Again, outstanding name. Fantastic. So Alexander III dies on November 9th, 1894 at the age of 49. Nicholas was there, as was his cousin Sandro who later recalled,

he took me by the arm and led me downstairs to his room. We embraced and cried together. Then he exclaimed, Sandro, what am I going to do? What's going to happen to me? To you? To Zinia? To Alex? To mother? To all of Russia? I'm not ready to be Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I've no idea of even how to talk to the ministers. That's not a good sign. Not a great sign. And again, Simon Wattfuhr notes that like it's pretty normal for you to freak out when you're about to become the Tsar, which does make sense, right? Like, you know, but Nikki is convinced from the beginning that like, I'm not going to be a good Tsar.

And by God, he's right. Might be the only time, but he is right. He's going to suck at this. And that story's coming. But you know what's coming first? Your plugables. Oh, plugables. I thought you were, I thought we were doing sponsorships. No, no, no, no, we're done with that. Fuck that shit. Well, well, I don't know. You mentioned this earlier before, but I have cool friends and I have a podcast called Jeff has cool friends. You can check that out at patreon.com slash Jeff May, where I have lots of other stuff like Ugg Fine with Kim Kroll, which is a monthly show. And I got other stuff coming that's going to be really exciting. You can also check out

Tom and Jeff watch Batman on the gamefully unemployed network, as well as unpopular opinion. And you don't even like sports, both on the un pops network. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at, Hey, there, Jeff Rowe, Jeff stock him, bring him into your life. Yeah. I mean, that this is a way better way to do it than the last time that you said my name on a podcast. Yes, I do. Sorry for alleging that you were friends with Gill and Maxwell. I mixed you up with another Jeff. It was so it was, it was very funny. I was reading your Twitter at the time, but trying to think of Jeff Davis. It was, it was so funny because one person did call me an old pedophile in my inbox messages, which means that they are an early adopter of your podcast.

They listen right. That thing was only up for like an hour and then Robert calls me pretty quick. I've made a terrible error. We have to fix this now. I shared a shared listener contact me was like, Hey, I don't know if this is true or not, but you might want to look into this message to me about that one. And then I said the message. I was like, Hey guys, real quick, love the show. Wondering why it's said that I was friends with a billionaire sex pedophile. Yeah, that was a mistake. But everyone, I think I enjoyed Jeff May best friends with Mo Mar Gaddafi, Jeff May who who was he was Daffy. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us now. We will come back with

God. There's so much more as our Nicholas to go. Jesus Christ. A second Nicholas. There were too many nickelizes. Nicholas. I nickel. Nicholson's. No, that's something else. Nope. Nichols son. Nichols sons. Nichols sons of bitches. That's right. We got there. Bam. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time

on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.