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

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Robert is joined by Jeff May for part three of our four part series on Tzar Nicholas II. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, man. Oh, man. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that's just as refreshing as pounding a great Zebia. That's good Zebia. Jeff May, guest friend, podcaster, co-host of Tom and Jeff, watch Batman, Jeff has cool friends, and stand-up comedian. Jeff, this is part three of our series on Zara Nicholas II.

How are you holding up? Great. I'm feeling good. I'm ready to talk, man. This guy. This fucking guy. This fucking Rube. This fucking guy. I do love that like that's the... Before this, I think they're like talking about Philippe, who is his, you know, as we talked about last time,

his first mystic con man who got into the family and then Rasputin. There's like this media image of Rasputin as this like supernaturally charming, like incredible, mysterious sort of like figure who's just like inhumanly charismatic and like, no, the truth is that like literally any con man could have won one over on these people. They were really stupid. It's so much that people... It's almost like there's a punch card for what con man is going to be in charge at the time. It's like the morning Ralph, morning Sam situation.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just so funny. And yeah, this is... It's important to note that like that's kind of what you get with monarchy, right? Like that's the situation where if your thing is in ultimate power is invested in a dude, like a decent number of those dudes are going to be the kind of people who would respond to a Nigerian prince email scam. Like... Yeah, like, I don't know if you like...

I think we all have dumb relatives. So the idea that like inherited divinity in any way or inherited power or intellect or what, that's just the dumbest thing. If fucking Nicholas II had been alive and the Tsar of all Russia's today, all of Russia would be owned by a Macedonian 17-year-old who had like managed to fish his email or something. Yeah, it would be Exxon. Yeah. It would be like Exxon would own Russia if that were the case.

Yeah, it would be... Someone would have gotten to him. Like I can just imagine Elran Hubbard sliding into the Tsar's court and just complete control in like seven hours. Yeah, it would have been carved up like 19th century Africa. Yeah. It would have been like just absolutely colonized. And colonized with like Nikki still on the throne smiling all day about like, oh, my friends from ExxonMobil are here.

Look at the... My magic friends from ExxonMobil. They can pull their fingers off. You see? Yeah, look at that. They are doing magic. Look at that. He pulls quarter from behind my ear.

It's crazy. So as we start this episode, the situation with Japan is continuing to spiral out of control. In 1902, Japan had signed a defensive pact with Great Britain. And Nikki's English cousins had forced him to withdraw from Manchuria. Now, obviously, he was not going to do this. But his ministers got him to at least agree with it for a while. And they keep trying to talk him out of this saying like, hey, taking over Tibet, maybe not a great idea, probably not going to work all that well.

But Nicholas doesn't really spend a lot of time around his advisors. He prefers the company of Bezo Brasov and his cousin, the Kaiser, who, as we talked about last time, I think, had started calling himself Admiral of the Atlantic and calling Nikki Admiral of the Pacific. Man, that's like giving yourself your own nickname when you go to college. Yeah. Yeah, it's so sad. And it's sad because the Kaiser gives them both this nickname,

and Nikki makes fun of the Kaiser, and then Nikki starts using the nickname completely unironically. He's like, well, you know, it is a cool nickname. I'm not going to. He's good at nicknames. Yeah. He may be doofus, but I got to say, this nickname, it fucks. Look at this idiot coming up with nicknames.

I'm going to steal, though. Absolutely mine. He's my nickname now. So one of his ministers, because this is like a source of incredible frustration for these educated and August ministers and nobles and whatnot who are trying to run the empire around him that he's listening. He's given this comment. It's kind of a theme.

Yeah. It's kind of a theme. It's just all these, like, well-read intellectuals with experience in geopolitical theory are just like, what the fuck are you doing, man? And one of his ministers, a guy named Pleve, who is, again, a raging anti-Semite, but a much smarter person than the Tsar, explains the Tsar's way of thinking here in a manner that I think is really relevant today. That his trust of ministers is common to all sovereigns,

starting with Alexander I. Autocrats listen to their ministers, outwardly agree with them, but always turn to outsiders who appeal to their hearts and inspire suspicion of their ministers, accusing them of encroaching on autocratic law. Like, we've seen that, right? Like, we've all been through that here, right? How could you question me?

My cool friends don't actually question me. They think I'm cool. Yeah. I brought my wife's boyfriend in and he said we should try this. Or like, you know, there's this guy, this lawyer that I was friends with when I was younger. Let's have him make our policy here. Like, we all lived through a version of this with Trump and it's just like to the nth degree with Nikki

because there's absolutely no checks on his behavior. So they kind of settle into this pattern for a while, Russia for like the next year and a half or so, where Bezo Brasov will like escalate in some wild way. He'll provoke the Japanese or he'll make a move on Chinese occupied territory. And there will be like some big war panic and Nikki will back off at the last moment and like pull his troops back because he doesn't really want to war.

Like he talks this big game about like wanting to show Japan what for. But he's also like, there's a part of him that's reasonable enough to know that like, well, if you are the absolute sovereign and you lose a war, that doesn't, that can be bad, you know? It sure asked Japan in 1945. Yeah, exactly. He asked Japan a minute after this. It's funny too because we all know this guy,

the guy that's like talking shit at the bar. And then as soon as somebody's like, all right, well, let's go. And then they're like, ah, nice. Yeah, and fucking Nikki is that guy because he doesn't really want to fight. Bezo Brasov is the guy who like does that and also like he'll throw down. He's not good at it. Like he can't throw a punch to save his life. He's way too drunk to be starting shit, but he will throw that punch if, you know,

his buddy will back him up. So Nikki, like for a little while, like his ministers are like, get him to pull back, get him to pull back. And then he'll poke at them or Bezo Brasov will poke at him again. And, you know, this kind of happens a couple of times. And after a while, the Japanese get really tired of this and they give, they present the czar with an incredible offer. Like this is actually really quite, and again, I say generous,

they're offering someone else's land, but like, they're like, hey, czar, I don't want to deal with this like constant like dick measuring game that year is. How about you get all of Manchuria? That's yours. Russia gets all of Manchuria. We get Korea. How about that? Which I'm the czar.

I don't have to fight a war. Really? I could just take this huge, this chunk of land longer than in larger, I think than any country in Western Europe that I get to just add to Russia for free. Seems like a great deal for me. The czar. Right? Pretty cool.

Nikki says no. Nikki's like, well, yeah, sure. That would wipe out the stain of defeat and Crimea and make me maybe the greatest expansion czar of the last century probably would have distracted from all my domestic failures. But that means I don't get Korea to when I really want Korea. Because I can't get to bed if I don't get Korea. He wants to collect them all. Yeah.

Yeah. He wants poker. He's like those cops who got fired for trying to get that Pokemon. You know, who among us? Hasn't ignored our civic duty in order to collect the Snorlax. Yeah, I mean, we all have that friend who like wasn't able to make rent one month because he bought too many fucking, what are those nerd bobblehead type things called? Funko Pops.

Because he bought too many Funko Pops. Are you just looking behind me and looking for something to make fun of? I mean, it's fine when it's a Funko Pop, but because he's the czar of all Russia's, his Funko Pops are like entire nations of millions of people in Asia. It's like entire ethnic groups that he wants to collect and put in his little Russia box and probably racially discriminate against. 100%. Yeah, because he is the guy that he is.

So he says no to Japan's, again, very generous offer with other people's territory. And then he doesn't leave Manchuria. So he doesn't agree to this and he also stays in Manchuria, which is kind of saying to Japan, we're going to try to invade Korea. We're going to take Korea from you. That's what you're saying. If you're like, no, I don't want you to give me Manchuria, but I'm not going to leave. You're saying, well, I'm going to fuck with your shit some more.

That's exactly what he's saying. That's as good as an act of war, really, if you're not unreasonable. And Japan takes it this way. Simon Montfeor writes, quote, Bezo Brasov had taught the emperor that treaties could be broken. And Nicholas was convinced that Russia could defeat those macaques. He's calling them monkeys because Japan was a barbarian country. And Kuro Patkin told Nicholas that the Japanese army was one of his military advisors, that the Japanese army was a colossal joke, but he did not want a war.

The emperor blithely ordered the viceroy, I don't want war between Russia and Japan and will not permit this war. Take all measures so that there is no war. Japan made further offers to Russia for a compromise, but wondered if the inconsistent Tsar was capable of negotiating a treaty, yet alone honoring it. That's every chance in the world to make this work, right? I think it's interesting to note that we are actually looking at two nations that have just really honestly westernized their militaries. And when I say westernized, I mean modernized. Let me rephrase it, because Japan obviously had to make a big leap forward during the mid to late 19th century as well.

And we know we talked about in previous episodes what Russia had to do. Yeah, Russia has just gotten their military to be kind of in not really in line as we'll talk about when World War One hits, but they're closer to in line with like Germany and France. So it's almost like they both got new toys. That is a factor. And they're like, you know what? Yeah. Fuck it.

And that's a big thing. You know, Japan has just modernized and gotten their military kind of really rolling along at the same point that China is falling apart, which provides this opportunity for Japan to take a whole bunch of China and get a bunch of shit that being from an island, they maybe didn't have access to before. Russia, it's a little bit like with the Japanese government, this is much more of like a kind of grim realpolitik. Like we need to take as much as we can. There's this awareness that like the colonial powers, like they will do that to us, what they're doing to Africa, what they're doing to other parts of Asia.

If we don't assert ourselves and get powerful, and the best way to do this is to take enough land that we can continue to build up our military and not be able to be fucked with by them, right? It's a lot harsher of an understanding. With Russia, Nicky's this mix of like he's got these new toys he does want to play with. And he has people talking to him about how easy it'll be to beat Japan, and an easy victory will deal with all these domestic troubles. But he's also, he's like reasonable enough to know that he probably would actually be a bad idea to go to war. And he has a lot of ministers, including like Witt and the other kind of the intelligent ministers he has,

saying like, dude, you're hanging on by a thread right now. Like people are not happy. There's riots and shit all over the country. What we don't want now is a war, because it's probably not going to go great. And so there's this push and pull for a while, and for a while, Nicky's kind of in the middle of those sides. But he eventually kind of sides with the folks who start telling him, and this includes, please, his anti-Semite minister buddy, that a small victorious war might distract everybody, right?

So he eventually lines up on... I just love the phrase anti-Semite minister buddy. Well, he's got the minister buddies who are racist and the ones who are racist, but not in terms of their policy. Because they're all racist, yeah. Like the best guy in the story thus far is his attitude is like, well, if you can't drown all the Jews, I guess they should have civil rights, you know? Real subversive statement, I guess. Now, on New Year's Day, 1904, the emperor of all the Russias decides to make an ultimatum to Japan.

He tells the Japanese ambassador, Russia was not just a country but a part of the world. In order to avoid a war, it was better not to try her patience or it could end badly. On the 24th of January, Japan breaks off diplomatic relations. So after like this back and forth, he issues basically like, shut the fuck up, let me do whatever it is I'm going to do. And if you talk to me again, like I might throw hands. That's kind of what he says. Don't even...

Yeah. Don't even fucking talk to me. Yeah. Don't even talk to me. Don't even fucking talk to me. It's where to God. If you fucking talk to me once, it's over. And to continue our bar analysis, drunken Nicholas slurs that out to the Japanese,

turns around to grab another drink from the bar, and while his back is turned, they hit him in the back of the head with a bottle of Schlitz. Like... We've all been there or whatever. They fuck him up. The next day, while the Zara's at the theater watching a play, the Japanese fleet attacks Port Arthur, which Russia had taken a little bit earlier,

and they do serious damage, like wipe out a significant chunk of his Asian fleet. I would add second worst thing to happen in a theater to a ruler of state. Oh man, there was a great, this Halloween, I think I haven't said this on the show, this Halloween we were out taking some friends, kids of mine, trick or treating, because we were like walking back to the car. There was just this dude dressed up as a dead Lincoln,

sitting in a chair in front of his house with a bucket of candy, like, up stock straight, looked like a statue almost. And one of my friends asked him, hey, how was the play? And he, without missing a beat, responded, I left early. I gotta be honest with you, like, he probably had like a list of shit he was ready to say. Yeah.

New, new dead Lincoln features eight realistic word sounds. So the Russo-Japanese war kicks off from this, right? Japan attacks at Port Arthur, the Russians are very angry and they start fighting. There's this whole big series of battles, you know, it's a war, war stuff occurs. And on the ground, there's this, you know, land warfare that's largely happening in Manchuria, between like these couple hundred thousand troops that Russia has there and the Japanese expeditionary force.

And the Russians do okay here. They lose basically every big battle, but Japan often loses more men in the battle. So like they're kind of, it's like, Pyrrhic victories for the Japanese where they're like, well, yeah, we keep winning these battles, but fuck, there's a lot of Russians and like, we can't keep this up for a while.

That is the story of history. Fuck, there's a lot of Russians. Japan has the same experience. Everyone else does fighting Russia, which is, Jesus Christ, there's no end to these people. I mean, think about the land differences. Maybe like, oh, so we're like, what, like a 30th of them? Yeah, we're like the, like the Moscow suburbs

are our entire island, you know? Yeah. There's so many of these people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think we need the entire island of Hokkaido, just to do anything to these people. And so this, you know, on land,

the Russians kind of duke it out with the Japanese until the Japanese are, you know, after repeatedly winning, kind of on the verge of collapse by some sources. So it's going okay on the land. It's not going great, obviously, because it never does go great for Russia either. But like, they win a war. It's a vaguely sustainable situation.

It's not in the Navy. So Japan starts the war by wiping out one of three Russian fleets, the Pacific Fleet. And, you know, Nicky has a choice here. One of them would be like, well, I could kind of potentially give up Port Arthur, or at least give up relieving it from the sea. I could not try to fuck with them in the ocean anymore,

because I don't need to. I'm directly connected by land to the battle space, you know? I can just throw a shitlord more dudes into Manchuria and probably eke out, if not like a win, you know, a negotiated settlement that gives me what I could have gotten without fighting a war anyway, but like, looks good on paper, you know?

He has kind of that option. But he's, you know, Russia's pride is its Navy. And it's not Russia's pride. It's the Tsar's pride. And it's this way with all of these guys. Kaiser Wilhelm is like helping to make World War I be a thing by repeatedly, like, tweaking the British by building up the German fleet,

because that's the thing the British don't want to see, is Germany have a fleet that can rival the British fleet, because Germany already has an army that Britain can't handle. But the... Britain doesn't like when anybody has a Navy. They don't like when anybody has a Navy. No, they sure don't. I don't believe I enjoy that. I feel like we're the only ones with boats.

Oh, is there a reason you're using that? So, the Kaiser, and it's like, it's this whole thing of like, it's like Warhammer for the Kaiser. Like, he gets to get these little boats, these boats that he gets to have a say in designing and like, look at all the big guns, and he gets to move them around on a map and sail around in his yacht

and look at the boats that he owns. I mean, that sounds awesome. It does sound dope, right? It sounds pretty sick. It's like that with the Kaiser too. And Russia, you know, has a traditionally pretty powerful Navy. Their best fleet is their Baltic fleet though, right? Because that's like, that's home shores, right? That's what's going to be fucking with Turkey.

Russia's big enemy for forever is Turkey. So, they've got, they lose their Pacific fleet to the Japanese, with like, out really getting to fire much of a shot. So, Nicky gets obsessed with the idea of getting revenge and with the idea of proving himself to be the admiral of the Pacific. You can't be the admiral of the Pacific if your fleet gets sunk and you don't do anything about it. So, he takes this massive Baltic fleet,

the pride of the Russian Navy, and the linchpin of their territorial power, and he sends the whole thing to fight the Japanese fleet, which takes like a year. Like, it's not easy to get from the Baltic to the coast of China in this period. Yeah, yeah, they're not flying over. No, and they can't really, they're not good at boating at this point.

You know, they're steaming slowly ahead there. Well, they had a rough go recently. It's exhausting. They accidentally murder some fishermen on the way that belong to some European country or another. Yeah, they get panicked and they think that it's a Japanese torpedo boat or whatever. I mean, that's really funny though. It is really funny.

You know, we all agree that it's, while those deaths are tragic, the historical context of the humor in that is unmatched. It is pretty funny to be like a dude on a fishing boat and get merked by the entire Russian Baltic fleet. Yeah, you're just like, I'm out to catch, you know, Mackerel. Yeah, and it's worth noting the Russian Baltic fleet will perform a lot better against these unarmed fishermen than they do against the Japanese Navy.

Standard. That's a standard move for them. So, while they're motoring their way slowly to Asia, and Russia is kind of having this very mixed ugly ground war in Manchuria, and, you know, the fact that there's a war, there start being more protests, there start being more riots, there start being more strikes among the workers. Well, all this is going on.

The Tsar's son, Alexei, is born. This is cause for a lot of... Finally, some good news. Finally, some good news. I've got a handle on it. Now I have a boy. This couldn't go anywhere but up. As the Empire is crumbling in tens of thousands of men are dying.

He's like, good news, everybody. We're going to be able to keep this thing going for another generation. Good news, everyone. One more Romanov for you all to deal with. So, there's this big celebration, right? Huge state celebration, cause now there's an heir to the throne. But then, shortly thereafter, the Tsar and his wife realize their boy has hemophilia. His like, you know, the belly button thing,

when the thing falls out of it after you pull the baby out. The umbilical cord? Yeah, the umbilical cord. When they cut it, it doesn't stop bleeding, right? Because he's hemophiliac, you know, that's the whole thing. You bleed more than is ideal. And so, there's this suddenly realization that like, the Tsar's heir basically has a death sentence.

Cause like, in this period of time, I think there's a bunch of things you can do. They really don't have medicine back then. No. Why would you have medicine? Yeah, yeah. You have opium and you have spiritualists. I mean, you have con men. Yeah, you have con men and you have doctors who are like 3% better than con men.

But there's nothing really to do about this and pretty much everyone but the Tsar and Tsarina except like, oh shit, well he's not going to make it to 20. Like this kid's not going to last long. Yeah, this kid's fucked. Yeah, this kid's fucked. They cannot take that because at this point, she's kind of worn out. She's had five kids. They're not easy pregnancies for her.

She's not as young anymore. And she's like, I can't have another child. And because he does love his wife, the Tsar is not going to force her. You know, I think a lot of monarchs would have been like the fuck you say. Like we're going to roll these dice again. I don't care what happens. Yeah, I'm sorry. What was that?

I think how you're like, by the way, it's like it wasn't an easy pregnancy. I'm like, yeah, I think that's just because it was in 1904. It wasn't 1904 or 1905. Yeah. And this, you know, so this is like horribly devastating for the Romanov family because it kind of means like we're going to have to hand over ruling to like one of our cousins or something like this isn't going to keep going. And that means that's to the Tsar, even though there's like protests and uprisings and a,

oh, an increasingly disastrous war. That's what makes Nikki feel like a failure. Well, yeah, because it's a boy, but it's not, it's not right. It's a boy who's not going to live long enough to continue making bad decisions that affect the lives of millions. Daddy. Anyway, Nicholas is while he's trying to deal with this. And dealing with the fact that his wife is increasingly having breakdowns over the fact

that her son is kind of constantly on the edge of death, which understandable reason to have a breakdown. Russia is kind of breaking down because the war is going poorly. People are protesting. Yada, yada, yada. Nicholas reshuffles his generals and his ministers basically does this thing of like, well, it has to be someone else's fault that none of this is going well. So I'm just going to kind of randomly fire and replace people until things start to work

better. The problem can't be with me. Yeah. How could it be? Yeah. You're so adept, Nick. So one of the guys he brings on is this new minister, Mersky, who points out like, hey, there's this campaign among liberals to create like a Congress, basically a constitutional

representation for the people, you know, which folks have been lobbying for for a while. His grandpa was about to put one through and Mersky's like, hey, this is really popular. And because it's really popular, if you do it, a lot of the people who are protesting right now might stop and like you can focus on the other million problems you've created. And maybe if you don't do this, there's going to be a revolution. And the Emperor Nicholas II does not take this very well. His response is, quote, you know, I don't hold autocracy for my own pleasure. I act in this sense only because it's necessary for Russia.

I'll never agree to a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me. So hearing this, Mersky's response is, everything has failed. Let us build jails. Of course. Yeah, we're going to have to throw a lot of people in prison or they're going to murder us. So Mersky at least seems to have the lay of the land reasonably well. On Sunday, January 9th, 1905, as the Russian army launches a huge offensive in Manchuria,

a protest march of thousands of workers swarms towards the palace where Nicholas and his family live. Troops at the palace open fire and charge the protesters on horseback. And they kill more than a thousand people. This is not like a Kent State sort of deal where like a couple of guys panic and there's, you know, a handful of people die and like everybody like stares in shock. This is like ranks of men firing in mass into a crowd and then running them down on horseback with sabers. Classic. Not to whitewash Kent State, but this is like 300 or so of them and at the same time.

Oh, I mean, I'm from Boston where we had a bombing where like three people died and we're like, this is the worst thing that has ever happened. So I understand. Shit in Russia happens on a different scale. And on this day, when his troops kill a thousand civilians in order to defend his regime from protest, Nicholas writes this in his diary. A terrible day. Lord, how painful and sad.

Mama arrived from town, lunched with everyone, went for a walk with Misha. Mama stayed the night. Big, big, big deal for you, Nick. Big day for you, huh? A thousand people died. Mama came. What a day. I think mostly the Mama thing.

A lot on your plate. Mostly that. Yeah, that's the main thing there. It's very funny how like completely sociopathic these people are to like the suffering and death of their subjects on a staggering scale. But you know who loves their subjects and doesn't ignore their horrible demises. I'm going to guess it's your sponsors. That's right. That's right.

When you die, our sponsors, every one of them, genuinely sad. And they'll write about it in their diaries. And they've predicted those deaths. They have. They know exactly when you're going to die. So maybe, you know, on this ad, they'll tell you the exact moment that you'll expire. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Eerily prescient. Eerily. So, Jeff, we're in a dicey time for the Romanov dynasty. As this is happening, or not that long after this is happening in like, well, a couple of months.

So May of that year, May 14th, the Baltic Fleet reaches the war zone, right? Reaches Southeast Asia broadly, right? It's a big area. They're kind of trying to get to Port Arthur. And they're steaming around all these little, you know, hugging the coast. And while they're sort of getting into the battle space, the Japanese admiral, a guy named Togo, spots them ahead of time and is smarter than anybody who has ever worked for the Tsar. Togo's very good at what he does. He actually believes he's the reincarnation of Horatio Nelson, the British admiral who won at whatever, that fucking famous sea battle. He's a bit of a loon, but he's really good at running a navy.

And he spots the Russian navy and he sets his troops up in an ambush. And one night, supposedly the reason this all happens is that like, some dude on a medical ship in the Russian fleet forgets to close a window and it allows the Japanese fleet to spot them in a flow at night. And the Japanese fleet ambushes the pride of the Russian navy and wipes them out. Thirty ships sunk to the bottom of the sea in like a day and a half or so, including the flagship of the Russian navy. And they don't really lose anybody. It's like more than a thousand Russian sailors dead and like a hundred Japanese sailors dead or something like that. It's like, it is a terrible disaster. It goes as bad.

My God, that's Japan's music. Yeah, it is. It goes as badly as it possibly could have done. Somebody call the match. Yeah, yeah, they are. This is really like, I don't know, who's a boxer who killed somebody? Emile Griffith. Yeah, this is an Emile Griffith situation. That's Togo. He's just permanently knocked the Baltic fleet unconscious. And they are never getting out.

Yeah, I have that equation of like that, that like Stone Cold Steve Austin coming in, ravaging them and just leaving while just laying on the ground. Yeah, that's kind of what the Japanese fleet does. So this number one leads very quickly to the Russians capitulating, you know, they lose the Russo-Japanese war. And this is kind of the thing. They have now lost two thirds of their entire navy, effectively. Daddy. Daddy, my toys.

Daddy, I've lost my balance. And they can't like, it's one of those things. Not only is this just the disaster like it would be for any country, but this is also like the first time that a major European power has lost a war, a modern war to people who are not white. And that is like, people start flipping out all over the damn world about this shit. Man, racism will get you. And this really pisses off everyone in Russia's piss.

The right wing is pissed because it's like us, we're the ones who lose a war to the Japanese. And the people who aren't right wing are pissed because like, how many of our guys did you get killed for no reason? I like the two different reasons are like, we lost to them. And the other side is like, wait, we did what now? My brother's dead. So more protests while Russia, the battleship Potemkin, mutinies in Odessa, which is a fate goes on to be a pretty famous moment.

And Nicholas II, well, all this is going on while the Potemkin's mutinying, while large chunks of Russia are no longer under the control of the Russian state, like that's the extent to which the government loses control. Nikki accepts an invitation from his cousin, the Kaiser to go hang out on their yachts together. Classic. So like the Baltic and Caucasus have overthrown the government and like murdered local officials and are independent principle or independent republics right now. And Nikki's like, I need to get away from it all.

I'm going to sail on a boat with my cousin. He's like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to jet. You guys, you got this? Yeah, this seems fine, right? Yeah. Yeah, you got this. I mean, to be honest, if I was one of his, his ministers like, yeah, get the, get him the fuck out of here.

No, I think it's the, this is the right move for everyone is to have him be like, I'm going to, I'm going to get the, I'm going to get the fuck out of here. Yeah. Why don't you take an extra couple of months, you know, just really clear your head. Yeah, why don't you go hang out with that dipshit cousin? So, um, yeah, I'm going to quote now from the Oxford University Press. In 1905, there were 3,228 agrarian disorders that caused 28,872,759 rubles worth of damage. Roberta Manning in her study of the 1905 revolution stated,

under these conditions of near total breakdown in government authority and paralysis of the governmenting elite, which temporarily lost faith in its ability to administer the nation, rural Russia rose up to join its urban partners in the greatest, most destructive series of agrarian uprisings since the Pugachev Rebellion of the 18th century. So by the end of 1905, there are 13,995 recorded strikes. There are riots. There are, there are like thousands of assassinations over this period of time. Like they are massacring government officials by, by the fucking football teams worth.

That seems egregious, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. Like I get, I get it. But also at the same time, it's like, I feel like a couple of guys got caught up. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty bad. Like it's really ugly and, and it's ugly in part because like, not to take anything from

like the ministers or from the terrorists who are in some of these are acts of where like just a guy will shoot this dude who was like a police commissioner who was like specifically like, you did this crackdown. I'm going to fucking kill you. Some of them are like, we're going to set off 80 pounds of TNT in a crowded neighborhood to like take this guy out. You know, riot fever, baby. Yeah.

It's a lot of it is really ugly. And part of why it's really ugly is the czar kind of established bad. I mean, his, his, his dad established back in the 1860s when their grandpa was assassinated that like, well, whenever there's unrest, we kill people in huge numbers. And that's how we deal with unrest is mass murder. And the czar has a thousand people killed, you know, at the gates of his palace. Like that is the way the Russian state handles unrest. So when people rise up against the Russian state, where are the stakes?

This is how you fight. You fight by killing huge numbers of people. I learned from watching you, dad, you know, like that's pretty, it's a pretty base answer to like, I mean, that's like the number one thing you go to. Yeah. This is what I guess this is how this works. So yeah. And the government's the first thing they always have to like throw out obviously like every other

government when there's, you know, any kind of popular unrest and pogroms are happening in this period. It's very messy time. I mean, so you've got. Obviously. And some of those pogroms are like these right wing groups. The black hundreds, which are like czarists. We'll talk about them in a little bit.

Some of them are being done by like left wing groups. I think most of it is from the right, most of these pogroms. A lot of it though, probably the bulk of it isn't specifically, it's just like, it's reactions to the things that the left are doing. So you'll have like a strike or an uprising in Odessa or you'll have a terrorist attack that kills this minister and then people will blame it on the Jews and there will be a pogrom. And you know, like that's, that's kind of the way this whole thing goes. It's a very messy period of time.

Russia does not have cops really like they have police and they try to tamp down on unrest. But they don't, there's not, there's like one of them for every several thousand people. So whenever they really need to crack heads, it's the army. But the army's mutinying all over because they've just lost this war, just like the navy. So the only thing you can really get the army to crack down on is the Bolsheviks, right? So when you have these left-wing uprisings, the Tsar can generally get military units and to fight them. But when you have these pogroms that are responses to these uprisings in some cases, you can't convent, the army's not going to go crack down on them because the army's like,

well, we're pretty racist too. And the cops are like actively participating in the pogroms, so they're not going to do anything. They're like, no, that part's cool. So Nicholas also comes to see that like, well, maybe these pogroms are a good thing because all of the people doing the revolutions are Jews, which is not true. But they are, a number of them are Jewish people because Jewish people are particularly oppressed by the Tsar. Is someone lying about Jews so they can be violent towards them? There's this thing later in life when he gets overthrown, he spends a lot of time listing out all of the revolutionaries

and like their secret Jewish roots, which he's wrong about. A lot of them were not Jewish that he just like found ways to believe they were Jewish because he comes to believe that like all resistance to his regime is rooted in the Jews. He writes this in a letter to his mom, quote, 9 tenths of the troublemakers are Jews. The people's whole anger turned against them. That is how the pogroms happened. It is amazing how they took place in the towns of Russia and Siberia.

Now, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not the Tsar deliberately incited and organized pogroms as a way to regain control and perhaps distract people from attacking the state. Whether or not he had any sort of plan, the violence often worked out exactly as one assumes he would have wanted. And I'm going to quote now from an academic study in Monde Rus. After the astounding news of the October Manifesto, demonstrations and meetings with red flags began to occur. Now and then they were accompanied by excesses insulting to the Tsarist throne. This is like the start of the left-wing revolution against the Tsar. Portraits of Nicholas II, so revered by monarchists, were taken down by walls and sometimes from walls and sometimes destroyed.

At meetings, money was collected for Nicholas' burial. On Kiev, on the balcony of the city Duma building, one of those in a meeting cut a hole in a Tsarist portrait and, sticking his own head through the hole, replacing the Tsar's face, shouted, Now I am the sovereign. You have to imagine that guy was pretty drunk. I've got to be honest, man. That sounds like that because that's a good time and son of a bitch right there. It does sound fun. This is the good timing, son of a bitch part. It takes a turn here. The admirers of autocracy, old customs and order, regarded such events as an outrage. A triumph of Jews in seditious intelligentsia and came out with a furious protest.

Real cases of offenses to monarchists' symbols, similar to that described above, were not ubiquitous. Sometimes they were exaggerated or just invented from nothing by prepagrom rumors, often with preposterous accusations of outrages against orchid orthodox shrines or Tsarist portraits. For example, right before a pogrom in Kiev, rumors circulated about an attack by slur against Jewish people. To a monastery, black hundreds organized belligerent counter demonstrations, sometimes under pretext of celebrating the ninth anniversary of the ascension of Nicholas II to the throne, which clashed with left-wing meetings and fights turned into pogroms. Depending on the possibility or desire of local authorities to restore order, these could continue for days.

Almost inevitably, the Tsar's portrait was present at these disgraceful events. Black hundred demonstrations were very often physically organized around the emperor's portrait. It played an important symbolic role, highlighting the assembled crowd's loyalty to the throne, and as if it had provided Tsarist sanction to the pogrom. Among pogromists, rumors spread wildly that Nicholas II permitted them to reckon smash and beat the seditious anti-monarchy rebels. In Tomsk, the following ritual was observed. A crowd would come up to a store, and the one walking up front would turn to the portrait of Nicholas and ask, Your Majesty, do you allow us to destroy this store?

The one carrying the portrait would answer, I permit it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that's not on the level, officially state sanctioned. It isn't, it isn't, because the state's not sending in troops to stop this. And later on, in the wake of this, Nicholas pardons a lot of the pogromists. As he just wrote to his mom, he sees most of the revolutionaries as Jewish. He sees the people's anger against Jewish folks. He sees these pogroms as like an expression of honest and fair anger. So while he is not saying go out and destroy Jewish businesses,

but when these crowds take his portrait and use it to justify the destruction of Jewish businesses, they're not making that up out of whole cloth, you know? Fair. Yeah. Yeah, and it's pretty ugly. There is one cool moment in some of this stuff where, so one of the things that will happen is these processions, these black hundreds marching with porches of the czar will like walk around

and they'll demand people on the street, remove their caps and like bow to the czar. And if you don't do this, you'll get the shit beaten out of you, right? Like it's kind of like this gang being like, hey, you got to like the guy in our picture or we're going to kick the fuck out of you, you know? Sometimes they murder people. Yeah, we've had that in America pretty recently. And we will again, there's a beautiful moment. There's this Bolshevik, V.E. Morozov,

who encounters one of these processions and they're like, hey, you got to take your hat off and you got to declare loyalty to this picture of the czar. And he doesn't do that. V.E. Morozov instead, he calls the czar a scoundrel, pulls out a gun, shoots two of the people carrying the portrait to death and does get beaten so badly that he nearly dies, but he survives. I mean, he killed two people and a portrait. Yeah, that's a pretty good response.

He did get nearly beaten to death though. So, you know, mileage may vary. He made it into the book. They're all dead in the story now, but he made it into the book. We do all, it probably sucked at the time, but we do all know he was a badass now. Damn right. Hey, man, ass kickings happen.

That's going to happen in life. Ass kicking has happened. Shooting two guys holding a portrait of an asshole is forever. That literally, that's your new mastercard commercial, even though they haven't made those commercials in like 15 years. It is, it is a little dated. But you know what's not a dated ad is these ads right now. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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Oh, yeah. We are back. Those modern ads we just had. Shamefully modern. So Jews were not the only racial victims of these pro-Zarist mobs. So fucking funny. Yeah, that was some great.

Anyway, the Jews weren't the only ones. Anyway, there were other races that the Zarists said it. Yeah. In North and Central Russia, I guess these aren't racial victims, but students and academics are targeted and often murdered. Like, they'll beat up college kids and professors

and assassinate them. The right will. Because of their connection to the wrongness. Yeah, yeah, kind of. It's also like a lot of the people, often it'll be a case of like, yes, some college students who got radicalized will set off a bomb to kill these local officials.

And then as a result, some people in the town will go murder their professor. Shit like that's happening, too. Oh, fun. It's ugly. It's kind of a civil war is going on in Russia right now. And it's very much a prelude for the civil war that will happen, not all that long in the future,

and kill, what, four million people. I mean, who? Yeah. There are other targets. In Baku, Armenians were targeted by the Zarists. Getting any kind of comprehensive death toll would be impossible. But during October of 1905,

at least 1622 people were murdered and 3,544 injured in pogroms alone. That's just deaths from these kind of like, right-wing masses of violence. Those numbers come from police sources, though, which probably undercounts the death toll. Shlomo Lambrosa, who's a scholar, calculates more than 3,103 deaths

just among Jews during the 1905 pogroms. Now, historians seem in agreement that Zar Nicholas II did not have a concerted plan to spark pogroms. He was kind of okay with them. He did not devote a lot of effort to stopping them. But for years afterwards, people would theorize that he had orchestrated the pogroms.

There really does not seem to be evidence of that, that it was a central plan. But we do know that anti-Semitism was stoked purposefully by the Zar's men, whether or not he gave the order. There was this, and this is kind of found out afterwards, that in a corner of the St. Petersburg police department, there's a secret printing press,

which is putting out pamphlets this entire time, urging people to, quote, kill Jews to tear them apart into tiny pieces. Yeah, that's not a lot of wiggle room there. Yeah, it's not a lot of room for interpretation. No, it's irony. Just kill them. It's fine.

He's a joke. He's a joke, but please. No, we are kidding. Please don't kill them, but do kill them. The guy printing this is a gendarme officer named Kamisarov. And he has a role in spreading the protocols of the elders of Zion, too. And he's like, he's funneling them using police resources

from St. Petersburg through right-wing organizations who spread them around the country. And oftentimes, these things will spread to an area, and then there will be pogroms. So this is where, like, again, maybe Nicky wasn't explicitly aware of all this, but, like, his dudes were doing it in the city where he was living using his money.

So the idea that people suspect he had a role in directly inciting pogroms, it doesn't come out of nowhere, you know? Again, we may have seen something like this relatively recently in our country. Yeah, thankfully not with that kind of death toll. But it is kind of like the plausible deniability of the autocrat, you know,

is like, oh, yeah, I mean, people, it's horrible when people do violent things. I don't think those violent things are wrong, but, like, I'm not organizing it. They just happen, and I say it's okay, but it's also bad at the same time when anyone pushes me on it, you know? Like, yeah, we've seen this.

We may have. I'm not gonna lie. That's something we've seen. So the wave of rebellions, you know, the pogroms kind of burn themselves out after enough people get the murder out of their systems and the stealing out of their systems. Rebellions, the actual, like, kind of left-wing uprisings against the state,

are put down by the military. And Nicky orders exceptional brutality to be used in defense of his regime. When the St. Petersburg Workers District is stormed by Russian troops, he has his soldiers use artillery to pound populated districts of his own capital, killing 3,000 people.

Christ. Yeah, a lot, which is like, that's as many minister, that's as many, like, government officials as the revolutionaries kill in a period of years, just like the shelling of his own capital. The emperor writes in his diary, quote, the armed rebellion in Moscow has been crushed.

The abscess was growing. Now it's burst. When one of his generals in the Baltics is not putting down the locals with enough brutality for Nicky's liking, the Tsar sends a man to tell him, quote, the only thing you'll get in trouble for is not being brutal enough.

He then immediately executes 1,000 prisoners. So, like, he sees this guy, puts down this rebellion, and he's like, you're taking a lot of prisoners alive. Like, I might get angry at you for that, but if you kill a bunch of them, there's no amount of people you could kill and piss me off. So this guy kills 1,000 people.

And, like, very rightly being like, well, the Tsar basically just said I should murder more of these folks. I like that he was, like, given permission. He's like, well, let's just go for the whole thing. Yeah, well, I guess we'll try. When he heard that a punitive detachment abducted the surrender of rebellious Livonians,

he insisted the town should have been destroyed. Arrests were celebrated with the word power. This is Nicky writing in his own diary. Well, the summary execution of 26 rebellious railway workers earned an imperial bravo. Bezo Brasov, brother of Nicky's far east advisor

and one of his favorite guards officers, staged ghoulish public shows, shows of bodies dangling on gibbets. When commander Richter, son of Alexander III's crony, now leading a punitive detachment in the Baltics, not only shot his prisoners, but hanged the bodies afterwards, Nicholas wrote another, bravo.

Tripof informed him that Cossacks had overused their whips. Very well done, applauded Nicholas. When he heard of more executions, he commented, this really tickles me. So this is how he writes about like, the crimes against humanity. I'm tickled by the fact that you've executed these people.

Oh, well done, they whipped people to death. Bravo. Yeah, it definitely sees that, that disconnect when you're raised like the boppish child of privilege and power. Bravo.

It is really like, if you've ever played a game like Civilization or, you know, Age of Wonders or whatever, where you like build an empire and there's sometimes people rebel and you crack down on these like fake people who don't really exist. He feels that same way about like the lives of thousands of real people.

It's like he's playing a video game. He's like looking at his maps and someone saying, we put them down and we executed a thousand of them or like, how many of us would you like to kill out of these that we've captured? And he makes a note of how many people he wants killed and like, then he goes home feeling like he's winning the game, finally.

I mean, I feel like a winner. Yeah, we're all a winner getting to hear this story. So in total, the Czar's men killed 15,000 people at least and deport 45,000 more cracking down on the rebellion. And this time, it's enough, you know, like this is enough

that he is able to hold on to power barely. Just, yeah. In eight years, things aren't going to go so well. Now, before we roll out today, Jeff, we should probably talk a little bit about Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen.

Hellboy Villain. Hellboy Villain Rasputin. Yeah, one of the better Hellboy Villains. Um, guy I get told I look like on a not irregular basis. I can see that. Yeah, well. And it's one of those things. He is definitely the single

most famous person today in the whole Romanov story. As a general rule, the only reason people talk about Nicholas II or his wife is either to talk about Anastasia or to talk about Rasputin and generally both at the same time, like in the Disney movie. I don't

think you look like Rasputin for the record. There's more love in your eyes. Thank you, Sophie. That's very sweet of you. No, this is Robert. So it's one of those things. Pop history is right in that this guy really is as influential as as the the popular,

you know, depictions make him seem he's a huge part of the regime and why a bunch of stuff happens. It's also like wrong in some weird ways because he is like it always portrays him as this malevolent force and he gives a lot of bad advice. His advice, but he also is like

one of the people saying like you should probably stop being shitty to Jewish people. You should probably not get into World War One. Now, that's why people don't like he's also a rapist. Like there's he's not a good person. We'll do an episode on Rasputin someday in the future, but I'm

genuinely surprised you haven't. Well, people keep telling me I look like him and it makes me you do not self conscious. Thank you, Sophie. So for now, the cliffs notes are that he was a poor kid from the east of fucking nowhere who got in trouble for like stealing some shit and sleeping around and he gets

kicked out of the town he comes from. He becomes a priest. He fucks a bunch more people and gradually he turns into this like guru type cult figure. He's kind of a cult leader. He's not quite what we recognize as a cult leader because he doesn't have like this group who

have a shared identity and that identity is like worshiping him because like that would be too much for the czar in Zarina, right? The czar is kind of his own cult. You don't get to be a cult leader like we know of a cult leader in Russia in this period. No, because that's the czar. Yeah.

But he's kind of like cult cuckolding the czar because the czar is kind of his follower. It's an odd situation and again, he follows in the footsteps of a Philippe who really very, very

conscientiously seasoned the ground in front of or behind him so that this guy would have an easier time pulling one over on the biggest Rube in all of history. So Rasputin, you know, as he starts to like develop this cult following,

he claims that he calls himself a healer and he begins traveling around wealthy St. Petersburg circles, you know, the families of the nobles and the wealthy basically like helping a lot of times it'll be like a woman has some sort of hysteria and obviously his prescription is well you should probably fuck Rasputin. You need

and it works a lot at the time, I guess because he keeps getting word of mouth, you know. That's not all he's getting of mouth. He winds up having making his first connection to the Romanov family through a Romanov named Nikolasha, who's like a cousin of the czar

and Nikolasha is kind of competent. He's one of he's a soldier and he's one of the few Romanovs who actually like isn't just like doing that to dress up like he's not a complete idiot when it comes to military soldiers. He's known as the terrible for his temper

and the czar brings him in close to the family in the 1905 uprisings because he thinks he might need to appoint a dictator like it's going bad enough in 1905 that it's like I might need to make my cousin the dictator so that I don't have to take the stink on me of doing some of this ugly shit. It doesn't wind up.

Why not have somebody with the nickname the terrible be in charge. Hey cousin the terrible I got this like problem. Now Nikolasha again competent soldier kind of a crazy person he wanted to be a medieval knight. He kept

a court of dwarves around him I think because he read that in a medieval storybook at some point and decided it sounded cool. That's what he describes them as a cult of a court of dwarves I think it's you know

it's 1906 and for an example I'm not judging the word at this point in time. That's a pretty nice thing to say in 1906 because another thing he's famous for is he gets really drunk at a party once and he wants to show off his favorite

sword and the way he does that is by using it to cut his pet dog in half. All right well that's not I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not cool. That's probably worse than some questionable linguistic choices he's made now like most nobles

in this period he believes in what he described as the divine origin of Tsarist power. He felt God had given Nicholas the second some special secret strength that would help him lead Russia out of like its problems. So obviously he falls immediately for everything

Russia's sons. Guy thinks he's a medieval knight he's like very gullible. He buys into all this right the fuck away and this is going to be the way in which Rasputin lover of the Russian queen not really but that's what a lot of Russians believe at this time

that's how he winds up getting into the family and we will talk more about that and more about everything else in our conclusion to the epic saga Nicholas the second what a dick. Jeff you got any plugables to plug first? Yeah like you mentioned before I have a great

show called Jeff has Cool Friends bi-weekly interview show with all my cool nerdy compatriots and you can find that at patreon.com slash for early uncensored episodes with bonus content I also have a great monthly show called a fine with Kim Kroll among others you can also

check me out on Tom and Jeff watch Batman on the gameplay and employee network we got to have you on one of those episodes Robert absolutely I have I have my watch a Batman or two in my time we sure we've watched the lock we sure have you can also check out you don't even like

sports and unpopular opinion both on the unpops network you can find me on social media at heytherejeffro on Twitter and Instagram don't find me on Facebook don't be weird don't find him on Facebook but find him on tiktok and if he's not on tiktok deepfake him I'm not should I

be I feel too old I'm too old for tiktok I think everyone is I think the 12 year olds on tiktok are too old for tiktok yeah I'm too old I'll be starting an account next week speaking of next week we'll be back tomorrow or Thursday whatever later this week with

more episodes about the czar and I have a novel you can find it and pre-order it and get a signed copy by googling akpress after the revolution so go do that do it now do it wait now do it now okay good thank you

we're doing that now everybody 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 want to get your podcasts listen to the last soviet on the I heart

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