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

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue to discuss Nestor Makhno. Happy Holidays! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, oh-ho, Merry Christmas, Holiday, Happy Day, Oh my God, today actually, it might actually be Christmas when this episode drops. I don't know, we're doing two Christmas episodes this year, so you fuckers should be grateful. It is Christmas Eve when this is dropping, I have a calendar. Well, Happy Mother fucking Christmas Eve, you fucking trash goblins. I love you. Jesus, that was beautiful.

I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I loved it. What is it? It's this fucking, it's this deathwish coffee, two cups, and I'm fucking ripped to the gills. Oh my God. I need to start, I don't think I've been, I don't think I've been this high on stimulants since that time I took methamphetamine to fill up 120 gallons of gasoline. I think that it should, I need to start being more, we're just going to let that slide.

Are we? We're just going to let that slide, I think. That's good. Unless you, unless you don't, are you eating an egg? Mm-hmm. What is happening, Robert? Probably eating an egg. It's Christmas.

No, it's Christmas Eve. It's fucking the 17. It's a Christmas egg. I'm eating a chip. I ate on this show once, two years ago, and I still get messages about it. As you should. I was like, I want to be openly hostile to my podcast listening audience, but people would get mad at me if I eat a goddamn chip.

I say, kill them all and let God sort them out, which is my normal attitude towards my audience. I honestly think that I'm going to watch the last episode of the Jinx Christmas morning, just to get into the right energy, into the right vibe. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, Jamie.

Yeah. Loftus, we are all enjoying what I'm sure will be a wonderful holiday season of hiding alone in our homes from a murderous rampaging plague. Incredible. Very, very exciting. Hopefully no one gets evicted. But if you do get evicted, I hope there's a Nestor Makno out there to build barricades and fight the cops on your behalf.

There will be. I think there will be. There's a lot of little Nestors coming up these days. There will be. I would love to make a baby Einstein-style show of little Nestors. That's nice. There was a fun thing happened in Portland recently where a family was getting evicted and several hundred people, those multiple layers of defensive barricades and like cow

troops to destroy vehicles that tried to drive through and created such a formidable defense that the city backed down. And then the city government voted a week later to extend the eviction moratorium until July. That was fucking thrilling to witness from afar. I allow me to say it was very, we were not as successful here. When there were abrupt, intense evictions for reclaimed houses. And so seeing it work out in Portland was very exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. Nestor would have been proud. Yeah. Although again, if he were alive today, he would be in prison for the rest of his life. But you know, he would still be sending dispatches out. Yeah. No.

He'd be shooting some fire. Yeah. So we ended our last episode on a very positive note, but of course that was never going to last. This is behind the bastards. Even our holiday episodes about a historic hero are legally required to be bleak. Now, I appreciate that. I appreciate that you cut it off while things were nice.

You know, it's kind of like it reminds me of the two VHS's in the movie Titanic where at the end you're like, oh, things could get bad or I could just stop watching. Yeah. At the end of last episode, everybody's free wearing colorful clothes strapped with guns and dancing and fucking in the streets. It's lovely. It's good. That does not last.

So at the time, Nestor is kind of helping to turn and helping his neighbors to turn Gulyaipolyi into something of an anarchist wet dream. Russia is in a real, real not good stage. The revolutionary equivalent of puberty. The country was again technically governed by a guy named Kerinsky in a kind of moderate quasi socialist, democratic socialist regime. There were workers, councils and Soviets and stuff all over the country making attempts to redress inequality.

But at the same time, a lot of the people who had political power, the social democratic types, you know, they didn't like the regime, but they felt that rich people should still get to stay rich and landowners should keep owning most of their land and all that stuff. Now, there were also Bolsheviks who are very powerful in this period and they want to tear all of that shit down, but they also want to institute a pretty strict hierarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat of their own. And the Bolsheviks are very powerful and very organized. And opposed to them are monarchist forces who wanted the Tsar back.

And what some of the monarchists are, so basically there's the Bolsheviks, there's the democratic socialist, and then there's the white Russian armies and the whites are anti-Bolshevik and they all kind of are different. Some of them are monarchists. Some of them, you know, are just nationalists. They all kind of advocate for, they're not like unified ideologically, but they're all very anti-Bolshevik. Some of them are basically Nazis and do a lot of massacring Jewish people.

Some of them are like vaguely democratic. They're complicated shit. The Russian Civil War is incredibly complicated and nightmarishly bloody. Nine million people die. It is a bad time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's good to know what the yardstick for a bad time is.

Yeah. Yeah. To put that into perspective, nine million people die in the Russian Civil War. Another nine million had died because of World War I, which the Tsar got the country into. So like people being like, the revolution was worse. No, it wasn't. Like the revolution happened because the Tsar got nine million people killed and another nine million people died because everyone was so angry and violent and ineared to death

at that point that they kept killing. But to be fair, Robert, he was a white, a wife guy. So, you know, Loved his wife. Loved his wife so much. Makno and his anarchists were at this point very far from the center of shit happening in Russia. You know, Ukraine is considered a backwater by Russians who are pretty racist against

Ukrainians by and large, not comprehensively, but a lot of them. Now, in October of 1917, there'd been a Bolshevik coup d'etat, which had been followed by an anti-Bolshevik rebellion led by Don Cossacks. And this counter-revolution had spread to Ukraine in the form of a Ukrainian nationalist uprising. The Ukrainian nationalists were anti-Russian, so they didn't want any of these white or Bolshevik Russian forces to be in charge of Ukraine, but they were also traditionalists. And after throwing out the Russians, they wanted to reverse all the progressive social

changes and basically re-institute something similar to serfdom, put all the rich people back in charge. So, anti-Russian also still sucks. Now, when the Ukrainian nationalists attacked the forces of the new government, Makno was put in an awkward position because he did not like the government because he's Nestor Makno. But at the same time, the government was like, you guys are allowed to do what the thing that you're doing.

And the Ukrainian nationalists were like, no, no, no, you guys don't get to have this land. You took from the rich people. That's the rich people's land. So, Makno writes, quote, as anarchists, we must paradox or no paradox, make up our minds to form a united front with the governmental forces, keeping faith with anarchist principles. We will find a way to rise above all these contradictions. And once the dark forces of reaction have been smashed, we will broaden and deepen the

course of the revolution for the greater good of an enslaved humanity. So he's like, we got to fight these guys and working with the government is the only way to do it because they're worse than the government, but also fuck the government. And, you know, it's a tough position to be in. There's no good, there's no good choice to make at this point. You can't please everyone in how you toe this line. I respect his approach. Yeah.

On January 4th, his area formed an 800-man detachment of fighters to come to the government's aid, close to half of whom were Nestor's anarchists. His older brother, Sava, commanded the unit, and Makno stayed behind to head up an investigation into imprisoned military officers who'd conspired against the revolution. He found the former prosecutor who'd hired his case in, like, 19, whatever, and handed it, and the guy who had put him in solitary confinement. And Makno had this guy sent to the same cell under identical conditions in order to, like, he gets a little motherfucker.

Yeah. Wow. There's a very nice line. That little shit. Yeah. It's fun. There's a nice little line in Anarchy's Cossack that describes this as, an irony of history that should give all who bear the responsibility for repression good pause for thought.

So a nice little line. So Makno also took advantage of the fact that the government under Kerinsky needed his help and support to hold on. He used his position to demand and secure the release of workers and peasants still incarcerated under the new government. Some of these men had been arrested by the Bolsheviks who'd been worried that they'd revolt against them. Nester also used his position to seize money from the local bank in order to fund the activities

of his communes and to set up an orphanage for war orphans, which he located in the former home of the superintendent of police. So still some cool shit going on. I was like, I'm still, I'm still vibing with him. Yeah, it's hard not to. I'm like trying not to scroll down in his Wikipedia because I'm like, wow, he's like a hot, nice guy who goes to prison a lot. He is pretty hot.

Yeah. Yeah. Now in the middle of all this politicking, a detachment of Cossacks suddenly rode up from the front line where they'd been fighting the Germans to help nationalist forces attack the new government. Nester took command of an attachment of anarchist fighters and ambushed the Cossacks, inflicting enough punishment that they'd surrendered, which brought Makno and his comrades a whole pile of exciting new weapons.

They get like their first machine guns and stuff during this period and they're very excited about that. Now as the spring of, yeah, good for them. So many books at this point. Yeah. Maybe that's like, once you've read like a hundred books in the book club, you get your machine gun. Mm-hmm.

That's good. That makes sense. You got to, you get a kill a bunch of Cossacks first, but yeah, then you get their machine guns. Yeah, there are barriers to entry, but it's not impossible. So as the spring of 1918 dawns, things are going pretty well for Nester and the people of Guliipoli. But on March 3rd, the new new government, which by this point was dominated by the Bolsheviks,

so there's like an election shit, it's very complicated. The Bolsheviks are in charge at this point. They signed an armistice with the Germans, putting it into official Russian participation in World War One. This agreement was considered a stab in the back to Ukrainians like Makno, though as basically the only entire terror. So the government, the new government signs an agreement with the Germans ending the war, the Brest-Litov Treaty.

And part of that agreement is that Germany and Austria-Hungary get Ukraine. So Makno's like, you motherfuckers, we just defended you by like fighting. And now you've given us up to the fucking Germans, like you fucking dicks. And the Red Guards, the Bolshevik army are ordered to go through and either evacuate or disarm Makno and his partisans before like the Austro-Hungarian Empire moves in to occupy the regions. So kind of lame, I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here, guided by their local allies in bringing in their wake, the former great estate owners thrown out the year before by

the revolutionary peasantry, almost a million Austro-German troops occupied the territories ceded by Brest-Litovsk. The extractions and repression of the occupiers and of the Ukrainian oligarchy quickly triggered a popular resistance movement. Dozens of local insurgent detachments sprang up to hairy enemy troops, engaging in a savage war of national liberation. Now Nestor had not been ready for this. He did not expect the government to betray him.

And after a, which he probably should have in fairness. And after a decent, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's useful, useful optimism, I guess. Now after a decent amount of fighting, he found his forces routed and he himself was stuck in a railroad marshaling yard where he learned that Gullye Polje had been occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces. All the members of the local Soviet, the Revolution Committee and the Anarchist group were arrested. Many of them were executed.

Communes were broken up and the land was given back to the wealthy men who had owned it before. And again, a bunch of Nestor's friends get murdered. So this brings us to the uncomfortable subject again of the Ukrainian Mnenites. Now to this day, Makno is considered a war criminal by a number of Mnenite communities on the allegation that his forces massacred peaceful Mnenite settlements. Now for episode one, you know that Mnenites were not pacifists in Ukraine and a major tenant, you know, a major tenant of Mnenite belief is supposed to be the avoidance of the sword, but this was not consistently obeyed prior to the Revolution.

And in the spring of 1918, they just gave up entirely. And I'm going to quote from a write up in libcom.org. From the spring of 1918, Mnenite colonies, though not all individual believers, abandoned any pretense of fascism or of pacifism, sorry, and began to establish an armed force, which they referred to as the Sultschultz. For those who participated in their descendants, this resort to violence presents a problem of conscience. For 400 years, through various persecutions and martyrdoms, Mnenites had, and to an extent

at least, renounced the sword. Now gangs of men armed themselves in zealous support of the invading Austro-German armies. It is worth observing a sort of logical contortions that were necessary to defend this course of action. It was thus argued by Heinrich Johns and Aaron Twebs, for example, that one must differentiate between the principles of the kingdom of God and the principles of this worldly kingdom. In matters of the former one, one must remain non-resistant, of course, but with respect to the latter one, one is obligated to support law and order.

So the rich Mnenites, again, are like, no, no, no, non-violence only means to the kingdom of God. And we don't use violent resistance to the kingdom of God. When it comes to supporting law and order, we can shoot people. Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, I want to emphasize the rich Ukrainian Mnenites, right? So understandably, Mnenite memorists and historians have expended much energy justifying the sultz

schultz, or at least emphasizing the desperate horrors in response to which it emerged. BJ Dick, for example, who's a Mnenite historian, worried that those readers of his account, during decades after those terrible events, would struggle to understand fully the Mnenite situation, to emphasize with their anguish and to judge the matter fairly. The temptation to form an emergency sultz schultz, he states, did not arise suddenly overnight, but grew gradually through months of unbearable and catastrophic experiences and unprecedented terror. And that is broadly fair to say.

I don't really sympathize with wealthy landowners who held thousands of peasants in bondage, but it would be fair to say that those wealthy landowners suffered unprecedented terror in this period. While throughout Ukraine and Russia, there were stories that were documented of peasant mobs burning down landowners' homes, often with the landowner and their family inside, shouting, all of this belongs to us. You know? Right.

That sounds scary, but I just can't get there in terms of radical empathy. I'm sorry. I have to go back to... Did you say the man who wrote the history was named BJ Dick? A Mnenite historian, yeah, it was BJ Dick's. Wait, Dick, like D-I-X? No, no, D-I-C-K. Yeah, it's spelled like a dick, Jamie.

Yeah, okay. It's spelled like a dick. But then to use the name BJ Dick before it, I'm just saying... I know. I know, I know, Jamie. You don't have to go by BJ if your last name is Dick. He had a lot of options and he made a choice. He really, yeah.

He made a choice, okay? Just like the wealthy Mnenite landowners made a choice to have a militia dedicated to massacring the peasants trying to secure their own freedom. That said, yes, that's true. That's the larger issue at hand. Yeah. So obviously, again, there were real reasons for them to be terrified because terrifying things happened to landowners in this period.

And rather ironically, Guliye Polji was one of the places where this mostly did not happen. When Makhnoenist people handled appropriations from the rich, they demanded itemized lists of everything the landowners owned. The Soviet, which was like a governing body made up of peasants, would then divide the land so that the formerly wealthy people had the same resources as the peasants. This was still terrifying for a lot of rich people because they suddenly found themselves laboring in the fields next to men and women they'd whipped, beaten, and mocked for years. But during this period, the areas under Makhnoenist control, like anarchist control, deaths particularly

among Mnenites in this period were very uncommon. There is one case in January of 1918 where people who might have been Makhnoenist killed a family of five. And again, not great, but also let's provide some context to why this was happening. Okay. So don't know if it came on Makhno's orders because again, he's got hundreds and hundreds of like militiamen roaming around the territory, angry and terrified, whose friends are being murdered too.

So it's like, yeah, it's a war. Bad things happen. Quote, there are good reasons to suspect that the executioners were Makhnovists. First, the Schoenfeld region was near to Makhno's hometown of Guliye Polji. Second, it contains some of the most prosperous estates in the whole region. These estates were not part of the original Mnenite colonies, but were built on land purchased in the mid-19th century from a czarist officer who had won it in a game of cards. In the years before World War I, it was a region of such prosperity that several people

owned Schoenfeld automobiles and one man even bought a private airplane. So again, the people who are rich enough that in 1918, some of them had private plane money. And yeah, there's some murdering that gets happening that happens to these people. Sometimes when you own, owning a private plane is a decision that sometimes there's a price. There might be a price, especially if you're also funding a militia that's murdering poor people. Yeah. Fuck off.

One of my favorite hobbies is every time a huge, huge, huge celebrity posts about global warming to just look up if they own a private plane, 100% at the time they do. And it's like, oh, okay. You're just, okay. So, you know. What's really funny, Jamie, is to get on Flight Radar 24 or, I mean, ADSB exchange used to be the best place, but now it doesn't work as well, but get on one of the plane tracking apps, figure out the in numbers, which is basically the plane license plate number,

and figure out the in numbers of rich people's private jets and see how often they take their private jet from one airport to another in the same city. Happens all the time. A lot of JFK to LaGuardia flights from rich people in fucking New York who are yelling about... These motherfuckers. No, right? Fucking assholes.

Why? Oh my God. Because they want to skip traffic. Oh. Oh. Oh. I want to... Oh my God.

Okay. That's like, you know, the scene from Scanners where the head explodes? That's... Yeah. Fuck. Okay. Great stuff. Love that.

So, there is, again, yeah. Again, I don't know that Nestor had anything to do with this. There's certainly no evidence that he had anything to do with this murder. Also though, when you found a large band of armed revolutionaries who occupy a big chunk of territory, some of them are going to do horrible things because it's a war and every single military force and every single war in history has had atrocities tied to its name. You can't not do it.

And it's true of the Makhnovists. And we shouldn't forget that or pretend it didn't happen. But also, if you compare them to all of the other actors in the Russian Civil War, they're of the, like, in a similar way to, you know, sort of the SDF, like, lower on the war crimes totem pole. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Lower on the war crimes totem pole.

Not no war crimes. And again, Nestor, one of the things, it's like, Nestor is a very outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism. He grew up with a lot of Jewish friends and he was very much like constantly haranguing his troops not to do horrible things to Jewish people. Also, anti-Semitism very common in Ukraine and there were times when Makhnovists fucking murdered Jewish people and it's terrible. When you've got 55,000 traumatized militiamen, sometimes horrible things happens.

And he punished, he executed a lot of warlords who were responsible for pogroms against Jewish people. It was a horrible bloody civil war and there's no walking out of it with your hands clean, you know? Not to, like, write over that. But he does, he gives a lot of speeches being like, don't be fucking racist against Jewish people. What's wrong with you?

I mean. He does his best. Yeah. He does his best. Okay. So, this is like, you know, taking a turn, but it's... This is where things get morally complex. He's fighting a war now and there's no doing that and keeping your hands clean.

Again, he's not ordering pogroms, but he's building an army and some of those soldiers do bad things. Not just like to Mennonites too, like there's bad things that the Makhnovists do. We'll also talk about what the people they're fighting do, which is on a completely different scale of mass murder. So, yeah, yeah, there's, anyway, so the Austro-Hungarians come in, they invade, basically, and their arrival empowers the reactionary forces Makhno had been beating up until then. People who wanted to reestablish the old status quo no matter who was in charge.

The Mennonite militia, the Seltschuts, fought with the invading foreign soldiers to reclaim land and property that had been collectivized. BJ Dick, that Mennonite historian that Jamie is a big fan of, describes the occupation as breathing space sent by God, and he's describing that on behalf of the rich Mennonites. But the invading... He just could go by any other name. I know, I know. He had options.

He could go by the B, he could go by the J, but by putting them together, he had... It's horrible. It's horrible. BJ implies that he made a choice. I know. He did. It's just interesting. Yeah.

The invading troops that the Seltschuts fought alongside were as brutal as invading troops tend to be. We have one account from a guy named John Zidius, who was a Russified Greek and a capitalist who lived in Odessa at the time of the occupation, so not an anarchist, not a socialist, like a capitalist guy. This is him reporting on what happened when these troops move in and wealthy landowners get to take their revenge on the peasants. Quote,

The reprisal expeditions were marked by hangings and shootings, executions dispensed with any sort of proceedings, the venom of the landlords cared not a jot for it, and the German officers gladly washed their hands of any show of a trial. They shot and hanged without any pretense of trial, often not even bothering to check the identity of the defendant. The landlord or his agent had merely to declare that such and such a peasant had been involved in confiscation of his estates for the culprit to be summarily executed. This happens on a scale of tens of thousands.

So once Goliapoli was occupied, Nestor Makno's mother was punished in this way. Her house was burned down. I don't think she lives through this. Nestor's brother Emelian, who had been disabled in the war, was executed in front of his children. All over Ukraine, thousands were shot or hanged. Only for the crime of being anarchists. Others were beaten to death in the street by soldiers or reactionaries, including the men of the Selpschutts.

I should note here that the violence was heavily classed base. This Mennonite militia worked with German soldiers to execute and beat peasants. They received training to help the occupiers suppress dissent, but the fighters doing this and the men funding the Selpschutts were rich, or at least well off. There were a lot of poor Mennonites, who they killed, and some of these Mennonites took part in Makno's other revolutionary activity. When we're talking about these different ethnic groups, Mennonites, Russians, Germans, there are poor members of all of these groups who are fighting against the forces of reaction

and stuff. Right, of course. Yeah. And that's a big thing Makno tries to emphasize, is that we're not angry at the Russians or the Germans or the Jews. We're angry at rich people who are murdering us. That's the problem. That's a solid, common enemy.

Yeah. Elaine Inns, a Mennonite historian, writes about this period, many landless Mennonites became servants on wealthy Mennonite estates, and some became so disillusioned that they joined the communists and anarchists to fight for a more just society. So the same social fault lines that led to the Russian Revolution ran right through my grandmother's yard. In most cases, our people were not targeted because they were Mennonite, but because they were wealthy.

So again, very complicated issue, but it is primarily breaking down on class. Now some of the people who are committing murders are doing it based on race, which is like a thing that Makno tries to prevent, but it does happen, and that's terrible. It's generally a terrible war. Now Nestor Makno was forced to flee north to Moscow after his town was taken over, and he meets with Lennon, who basically is like, hey, buddy, you're on your own. And I'm going to read, there's a good write up in his, yeah. So he, sorry, just to clear it, he, so his whole family is dead.

A lot of them. Not all of them. A bunch of them. Not everyone. Okay. Yeah. And he doesn't really know, like he loses his wife and child in this period. He never even learns if they're killed or not.

Like it's, this guy who deals with some shit. So I'm going to read from a write up in history today about his meeting with Lennon. Makno, conscious of his youth and crudeness, was embarrassed by Lennon's magnetism and authority. He found himself beginning to venerate the man, most responsible for the persecution of the anarchists. He was unable to find the words and arguments he needed. At the end of the interview, Lennon gave instructions that his return to the Ukraine

should be assisted by the Bolshevik organization in charge of illegal frontier crossings. Makno was given false papers and set out by the appointed date he was hiding with the peasant friends, some 15 miles from Gulyaipolyi. So he meets with Lennon and Lennon helps him sneak back in, but it's like, we can't really help. And it's kind of the way that this talk is described, Lennon's like, you anarchists are kind of full of shit, but I like you and like, I want you to fight the occupiers of Ukraine, which I, I'm partly responsible for Ukraine being occupied, but like, you

know, this is, yeah, men are so weird. So yeah, he's like, oh, well, you know, you got to hand it to him. He's really charismatic. There's like a couple of where he's like, anarchists are shit, but like, you're an exception. You're all right, Nestor, like, but look at that mustache on you. He, like, yeah, I guess in fairness to Lennon on the whole giving Ukraine to the Austro-Germans, if you're in charge of Russia in late 1918 or an early 1918, there are no good options,

right? Like everything is shit because the Tsar left you in a bit, like Lennon didn't have a lot of good things he could have done there. Like it's understandable that Makno and his friends are furious, but like, I don't know how you get out of World War one. If you just take over Russia at the end of 1917, like, yeah, there's no win. God. Okay.

So the boys are vibing, you know? Sure. They vibe a little bit. They've been persecuting your comrades, but like, we're vibing here. We're vibing. I'm going to help you sneak back into Ukraine to fight the Austro-Germans. So Makno sneaks back in and he starts building up bit by bit, like running around at night and like dressing as a woman sometimes.

He like gathers up all of these sort of like bandits and stuff together, these anarchists who have like fled. Very Robert Durst. Yeah. Very, very Robert Durst. Yes. Wow. So he builds up a little partisan army and they start raiding landlords' homesteads,

you know, killing landlords. And in this case, they did not do that initially after the landlords come back and start mass murdering their friends. They start shooting some landlords, which at this point, it's kind of self-defense. It's like, we tried to do this peacefully. The level of restraint, honestly, with this group seems like there's a lot of restraint at play if it took them this long. We tried to do this peacefully and you started murdering us as soon as you had a chance.

So now we're going to kill some of you and they do that. They don't kill everybody, but they start murdering some people. They steal their shit. They get guns. They start carrying out ambushes on Austro-Hungarian patrols and like killing small patrols of soldiers and taking their weapons and building up their forces. His partisans showed no quarter when they beat a group of like foreign soldiers. They would kill them all.

Their slogan was, death to all who with the help of German, Austrian bayonets, take away from peasants and workers the conquests of their revolution. That's a bit long, but it's a bit long, but again, he could barely read. I'm just saying, you know, the Ukrainian novelty t-shirt industry is going to struggle to get that on a single shirt. That's a hard t-shirt to make for sure. That's difficult. You know, like maybe I killed them all, of course, just to keep pulling inspiration.

So bit by bit, Machno attracted followers and acquired weapons. He began experimenting with guerrilla warfare and in fact innovating. At first, the most his men could do was carry out strikes on small, isolated patrols of soldiers and their allies, including the Seltschulns, that Mennonite militia. As his band and his resources grew, Nestor's mind began to open to new militant possibilities. See, there were these carts, these horse-drawn carts called Netschankas. And they were basically, again, like the horse-drawn equivalent of a pickup truck. So it's a horse-drawn cart with a big, flat bed in the back.

This would have been similar to the thing he would have bought as a young man to help on his brother's farms. These are very common. There's tons of these carts all over the place, and they do have access to a good number of horses. And his partisans start capturing a bunch of heavy machine guns, which were great weapons for carrying out ambushes, but are heavy and they're slow to set up. So they're not great for a, like, a partisan militia because it's hard to move with them.

So Nestor hits upon the brilliant idea of bolting these machine guns to the flat beds of these horse-drawn carts and using them, driving them around and using them to shoot people and move very quickly. And he invents the first technical in world history. Like, these are, you see, it's all over the Middle East now, trucks with machine guns in the bed. This is how that all starts. They're called, yeah, they're called Tachankas.

And yeah, so he uses them both because you can move them into position quickly and immediately start shooting. And if you wind up, like, biting off more than you can true, while you're retreating, because the gun is in the bed, the horse can be moving away from the enemy and you can still be shooting them. Like, it's awesome. I just, I just, I remember when horses were trucks, Robert. Yeah.

Horses are trucks. And Nestor's like, we should get a machine gun involved in this action. We gotta get these horses fucking strapped, baby. Everyone is strapped in Nestor's, oh my God. So the horses are trucks and the trucks are fucking strapped. The straps have Gatling gun type thing. Well, Maxim guns on them. Yeah.

Okay. So Mack knows forces come to rely so heavily on Tachankas for mobile firepower that one of his soldiers starts referring to the anarchist militia as a republic onto Chunky, basically like a mobile republic of gun trucks. Like that's, that's what we have now. They took away our town. So now we're like a traveling republic of machine guns. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah. So in those early days, Mack knows growing anarchist horde was, yeah, basically a moving republic. It was September of 1918 before he finally attacked and recaptured Guliipolyi, but his forces were pushed out again by an Austrian led counterattack. Makno led his men in a tactical retreat as he was able to recognize his opponents had overextended themselves.

And a few days after this, 80 miles away from his hometown, he surrounded, attacked and wiped out a force of 2000 Austrian soldiers and their allies. And this brought his army their first artillery and heavy weapons. By December, the Austrians had withdrawn entirely. Their puppet leaders had been overthrown and Makno's anarchists were, for a brief time, the undisputed protectors of a widening cordon around Guliipolyi. Makno intended this core of free territory to constantly expand, bringing a new egalitarian social and economic order to an ever expanding chunk of eastern Ukraine.

By 1919, hundreds of thousands of people were engaged in experiments with a new anarchist social order. The first time something like this had been done on such a scale. And there was a pamphlet that Makno had published during this time called, what are the Maknovists and what are they fighting for? This was in actually like 1920, but similar stuff was going around in 1918. And yeah, one of the notes on that, like in terms of explaining their beliefs to new people who wound up in their area, what do we mean by emancipation?

The overthrow of the monarchist coalition Republican and social democratic communist Bolshevik party governments, which must give place to a free and independent Soviet order of toilers without rulers and their arbitrary laws. For the true Soviet order is not the rule of the social democratic communist Bolsheviks, which now calls itself the Soviet power, but a higher form of anti-authoritarian and anti-status socialism, manifesting itself in the organization of a free, happy and independent structure for the social life of the toilers, in which all individual toilers, as well as society as a whole, can build by themselves their happiness and well-being, according to the

principles of solidarity, friendship and equality. Okay, this is good. What is sweetie? Yeah. I think that we should start calling ourselves toilers again. Yeah. Yeah. It's an accurate way of splitting up society in a meaningful way.

Yeah. Yeah. Haves and have-nots is over. It's toilers and non-toilers. Yeah. By December, the Austrians had withdrawn entirely from Ukraine, like the war ends and their side loses and they don't get to keep Ukraine anymore. Their puppet leaders were overthrown and Makno's anarchists were for a brief time, like in

charge of this shit. So Makno's territory was not perfectly consistent to his values, obviously the white forces were growing in strength and it was clear that if they reoccupied the now anarchist territories of Eastern Ukraine, mass slaughter would follow to prevent this and army was needed. In general, mobilization was the only real way to build an army. Peasant and workers' councils voted to mobilize, but the fact that the end result was close to conscription has to be acknowledged, like compromises are made from their ideal social

order for the fact that they need as many fighters as possible. These fighters also had famously high morale, so it does suggest that the vast majority of these people, again, who mostly had family members killed by reactionaries, saw military services necessary self-defense. Up to the spring of 1919, the Soviet press had portrayed Makno and his peasants as heroes, but when the central powers retreated from Ukraine and the Red Army started to seep down into the territory, that line changed. The core of the Bolshevik movement had been workers from Russia's industrialized cities,

whereas the Maknovist movement was made up of peasants. Soviets are workers. The Ukrainians are not considered workers. They're peasants. They're not laboring in factories and stuff. There's not a lot of factories in Ukraine. They're farmers and shit. But they're toilers.

Are they not toilers? That's how Makno sees it, but that's not how an awful lot of people in the Soviet chunks of the Union see it. The anarchists were seen to them as temporary allies against reactionaries, but not trustworthy and people who eventually needed to be beaten. By June, though, a white army general named Denekin had amassed a potent force and was in the process of reconquering huge chunks of Ukraine and putting them back in the hands of their ancestral oppressors.

This started happening at the same time as the Red Army and the Maknovists began to integrate, because while the Red Army didn't like the Maknovists, they didn't like Denekin more and they needed to defend themselves against it. It's a confusing time to read about. Trotsky during this time signs an order like Trotsky's in charge of the Red Army and he signs an order forbidding the peasant councils that Makno has formed and ordering him to hand over command of his militia. He may have ordered Makno arrested.

We don't really know, but in any case, Makno ignores Trotsky's orders. He takes a handpick force of cavalry into Chankas and he heads west to battle the whites on his own, all the while ordering his other soldiers to stay embedded with the Red Army for the time being. This really pissed off Trotsky, yeah. Pisses off Trotsky, but the summer of 1919 was a disaster for the Reds and their allies and he couldn't really do anything about it. Denekin and his white forces advanced constantly and they smashed the Red Army multiple times.

Makno's forces at the same time conducted like a very confusing war, because in the east Makno's cavalry army is fighting alongside the Red Army, but in the west Makno and his handpicked force are fighting with both the Red Army and the whites. It's a fucking confusing as civil war. So very, very messy. One of the things they do is when they occupy villages that the Red Army had occupied, they murder commissars and secret police officials, because those people are murdering anarchists. It's a very messy period.

Now late in the summer, the Red Army in the east collapses completely. The whites just shatter them to pieces. Trotsky retreats back into Russia and Makno orders his remaining embedded forces to pull out and to retreat to a place called Kirovograd, where they meet up again with Makno and his cavalry. So the Red Army is kicked out of Ukraine and Makno is the only force fighting the whites left in Ukraine at this period of time, or at least the only organized force. Meanwhile, the Denekinists had conquered Gulyaipol yet again and their army was huge, more than

50,000 well-armed and battle-hardened troops. So yeah, we've come up to a kind of cliffhanger point. So you've got the Red Army has to leave, they get beaten out of Ukraine, Nestor has the largest force still fighting the white army, and they are badly outnumbered. His home village has been taken over by the whites, and he's just got this roaming bandit army of gun trucks and horsemen with short-barreled rifles. Horse asses with machine, truck, gun, horse, horse, gun. It seems like a pretty, I mean, he's in a series of impossible situations.

He's in a bad position to be in. But you know who's not in a bad position to be in, Jamie? People hocking products and services, I'm assuming? That's a great position to be in, so check out products. 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've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to 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. 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.

So before we tell the rest of this story, it's probably worth explaining the kind of world that Denikin and his white army, which did include a lot of Mennonite militia we're fighting for. They included a lot of local reactionary forces. So I'm going to quote again from libcom.org talking about what the Denikinists do in the areas they retake in Ukraine. Insofar as the Denikinists had a political program, it was based on the restoration of landlords in the reestablishment of a single Russian state incorporating Ukraine.

This brought them into conflict with the local population and even one of their own commanders, General Rangel, described pillage and speculation, debauchery, gambling, orgies, looting, violence, and arbitrary acts. Otherwise, sympathetic chroniclers are scathing about the white army's abuses in Ukraine. Richard Lukits, somewhat carelessly in the context, describes something near to anarchy bemoaning the casual brutalities of the Cossacks, the regular pogroms, and other appalling acts of barbarism. They issued proclamations encouraging Russo-Ukrainians to rise up against the Jew communists and were

responsible for hundreds of pogroms and the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews. Many of their victims were beaten, mutilated, raped, hanged, burned, and dumped into wells or thrown from rooftops and buried alive. Arshanov states that in the former free territory, peasants were plundered, violently abused, and killed. Almost all the Jewish women of Guliipolyi were raped. So this is the white army. These are the people that Nestor is fighting against.

And to the extent that he is brutal to them, you kind of have to understand why. Yeah. Yeah. They're pretty bad. That's okay. Yeah. A member of Denikin's special council, his leadership cast, stated that the main features of the Denikin regime were violence, torture, robberies, drunkenness, odious behavior.

The counterintelligence service carried its activities to an unlimited wild arbitrariness, creating, as Denikin put it, a painful mania all over the country. According to General Rangel, at this time the white army hunted down anybody suspected of any contact with opposition groups, even if that contact had been involuntary, a policy he denounced as insane and cruel. They especially victimized the wives and girlfriends of known insurgents. According to diaries attributed to Makno's partner, Gelina Kuzmenko, in summer 1919, the Denikinists' victims included the wife of Makno's elder brother, Sava.

They beat her, stabbed her with their bayonets, cut off one of her breasts, and only then did they shoot her. Since revolutionaries at, yeah, yeah, tens of thousands of people are tortured and killed this way. It is a fucking nightmare. And again, there is brutality from the Maknovist, but it is not on this fucking scale. And it is generally in response to this. Yeah.

Yeah. This is like a fucking pecking paw movie. Yeah. It's the fucking Russian Civil War is one of the worst things that ever happens in history. Not that the Tsarist regime was good or shouldn't have been overthrown, but it's a horrible war. Yeah. And by the way, these guys, we're talking about the whites, are the guys that the U.S.

and Britain are supporting, because they're not communists. Well, they're not, yeah, they would never. They would never. To this day. Because the whites try to ally with Makno at a couple of points because they're like, hey, you hate the Bolsheviks. He's like, no, fuck you guys. And he does go to the West and he's like, look, like these people you're supporting

are even worse than the Bolsheviks. Like support us. We won't fuck with you. Like we're not going to go to war with the West. We just want to live in Ukraine and not like have bosses. Like, but of course they don't, they don't listen to that either because they're scary anarchists. They don't give a shit.

There's not. Yeah. The British send a bunch of guns to the rape gangs. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. On the side of angels. So for months, Denikin's whites seemed unstoppable.

Makno and his forces retreated West for weeks, followed by a constant stream of tens of thousands of refugees running from the white advance for obvious reasons. Makno and his men fought running battles with Denikin's forces, as well as with the Bolshevik 14th Army, who had been fleeing British naval bombardment in Odessa. So again, they're fighting both the Reds and the Whites at periods of time. And yeah, because again, the left has kind of always been the same. So there were few victories during this time, including the capture of a warlord named Gregorov, who had ordered the pogroms of a lot of Jewish people.

So Makno has this guy executed. He does this whenever he can. And by September, Makno's army had been pushed back 600 kilometers from Gulyaipoli. So they have been fleeing for like 400 miles of solid retreat, which is exhausting. Now there was a scholar named Arshanov, who was with Maknovist forces at this time, and he chronicles the retreat. He later wrote, the Maknovist retreat had covered more than 400 miles and had lasted close to four months.

It had been unimaginably difficult. The insurgents lacked clothes and shoes through torrid heat enveloped by clouds of dust under a hail of bullets and shells. They went further and further away from their own region towards an unknown destination. But they were all animated by the idea of victory over the enemy. And they valiantly endured the rigors of the retreat, only occasionally did the least patient among them cry out, turn around toward the kniper. But implacable necessity kept pushing them further and further from the kniper, which

is a river and their birthplace, their proud region with inexhaustible patience with their will stretch to the limit. They rallied around their leader under continual enemy fire. It was impossible to go anywhere else. But Maknov recognized, so they're like, this is about as bad a situation as you can get in a military force. And his people are like, why aren't we turning around and fighting? But Maknov keeps saying, no, no, no, keep retreating, keep retreating, keep retreating.

And eventually he gets to a point where Maknov realizes that the enemy has finally overextended their supply lines. They've been drunk on months of victory and they had neglected to protect themselves properly. So he rouses his exhausted fighters by telling them, hey guys, this whole retreat has just been a play to overextend Denikin's men, and now they're in a position where we can fuck them up. So he orders his soldiers to face the enemy. He leads them in a cry of liberty or death.

And I'm going to quote Antonov again for what happens next. This is a very famous battle. On the evening of September 25th, the Maknovist troops who until then had been marching westward suddenly turned all their forces eastward and marched straight to the main forces of Denikin's army. The first encounter took place late in the evening near the village of Krutenko where the Maknovist First Brigade attacked a Denikinist unit. Denikin's troops retreated to take up better positions and to draw the Maknovists after

them. But the Maknovists did not pursue them. This misled the vigilance of the enemy, who concluded that the insurgents were still moving westward. However, in the middle of the night, all the Maknovist forces stationed in several villages began marching eastward. The enemy's principal forces were concentrated near the village of Peregovnikov. The village itself was occupied by the Maknovists.

The fighting started between 3 and 4 a.m. It kept mounting in intensity and reached its peak by 8 a.m. in a hurricane of machine gun fire on both sides. Makno himself, with his cavalry escort, had disappeared at nightfall, seeking to turn the enemy's flank. During the whole battle that ensued, there was no further news from him. By 9 in the morning, the outnumbered and exhausted Maknovists began to lose ground. They were already fighting on the outskirts of the village.

From all sides, enemy reinforcements brought new bursts of fire to bear on the Maknovists. The staff of the insurrectionary army, as well as everyone in the village who could handle a rifle, armed themselves and joined in the fighting. This was the crucial moment when it seemed that the battle and with it the whole cause of the insurgents was lost. The order was given for everyone, even the women, to be ready to fire on the enemy in the village streets, all prepared for the supreme hour of the battle and of their lives. But suddenly, the machine gun fire of the enemy and their frantic cheers began to grow

weaker and then to recede into the distance. The defenders of the village realized that the enemy was retreating and that the battle was now taking place some distance away. It was Maknohu, appearing unexpectedly, at the very moment when his troops were driven back and were preparing to fight in the streets, had decided the fate of the battle. Covered with dust and fatigued from his exertions, he reached the enemy flank through a deep ravine. Without a cry but with a burning resolve fixed on his features, he threw himself on the Dinnoconus

at full gallop, followed by his escort and broke into their ranks. All exhaustion, all discouragement disappeared from among the Maknovists. Batko is here! Batko is here! Fighting with his saber could be heard everywhere. And with redoubled energy, they all pushed forward, following their beloved leader who seemed doomed to death. A hand-to-hand combat of incredible ferocity, a hacking, as the Maknovists called it, followed.

However brave the Whites may have been, they were thrown into retreat, at first slowly and in an orderly manner, trying to halt the impetus of the Maknovists. But then they simply ran. The other regiments, seized by panic, followed them. And finally, all of Dinnoconus' troops were routed and tried to save themselves by swimming across the Senyukya River. So there's this big battle, Makno disappears at the start of it, and at the very end, it's a fucking Gandalf moment.

As they're about to be overwhelmed, he charges into the enemy's rear, and he charges machine guns with a sword and just starts stabbing the shit out of people. And they all run, like the fucking Whites break. And it's fucking awesome. It's just, like, it is a Gandalf moment, that's so bizarre, like, it sounds like that couldn't possibly be true. It happens, and he gets shot a bunch of times, because it worked, like it was the only thing that could have worked.

He had one chance to win, and it was sneak a force behind them and panic them, right? And it worked. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime. Yeah. That's what that Talking Heads song is about. Oh, I was thinking about Lose Yourself, but that works, yeah, Lose Yourself, too. So in situations like this, panic is contagious, and with their most elite regiment shattered, the rest of Denecan's forces began to break and run.

Hundreds were slain on the banks of the Senyukya River, corpses stretched out from miles. Makno captures thousands, and he kills all of the officers he captures, but he lets the enlisted men live, and has a lot of them join the Maktavist army after this. So this would turn out to be one of the most consequential battles of the entire 20th century, because if the white forces under Denecan had beaten Makno, they would have reinforced the white army at the north, which was marching on Moscow, and might well have beaten the Red Army. They were winning at that point.

Soldiers on the ground at the time understood this. A Denecanist officer named Sakovitch, who survived, later wrote, in a sky blanketed in an autumn cloud, the last puffs of artillery smoke exploded then. All was silent. All of us ranking officers sensed that something tragic had just occurred, though nobody could have had an inkling of the enormity of the disaster which had struck. None of us knew that at that precise moment, nationalist Russia had lost the war. It's over, I said.

I know not why, to Lieutenant Rozov, who was standing alongside me. It's over, he confirmed somberly. So this battle is why the whites don't take Moscow. At least a lot of people will argue that. Now Maknovists had advanced 400 miles east in just 11 days in one of the most rapid counter attacks in the history of warfare. They recaptured town after town, smashing white regiments that hadn't even been informed of Denecan's defeat.

Denecan was forced to withdraw troops from his northern front who were advancing on Moscow to protect their headquarters in Ukraine. Moxnomad, an Austrian Bolshevik and educator, declared Makno the bandit who saved Moscow. Now the reconquest of eastern Ukraine by Makno came with a reckoning. Hundreds and probably thousands were executed. Makno ordered his intelligence forces to track down and kill every soldier and local leader responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms and for massacres of leftists. Bandits and peasants, bandits who'd stolen from peasants were killed and so were all

white officers who were captured. Collaborators and suspected collaborators were killed in revenge for the tens of thousands who'd been murdered by Denecan's men. It is, again, a pretty fucking ugly war. And yeah, some of those people would have been innocents. That's war. It's terrible. It's the worst thing.

It's awful. Also, not a lot of good options, yeah. There's no perfect in a war that's already killed millions of people. And yeah, what separated Makno from the rest of the warlords and bandits rampaging through Russia in this period were his goals, the world he wanted to establish and his sense of accountability. Makno took complaints against his forces seriously. We have one account by a guy named Volin of a student delegation who approached Makno to complain that one of his intelligence units had flogged an intellectual in suspicion

of being a Denecanist spy. Quote, the student recalled approaching Makno's office with trepidation and being surprised at Makno's friendly and attentive audience. After explaining that no Maknovist should ever use the lash for his army either shot people or released them unharmed, Makno promised to look into the matter personally. In this discussion, he also confessed the difficulties he experienced in preventing abuses by those who professed allegiance to his command. Similarly, the report of his intelligence services abuses led the Alexandrov's Congress

to pass resolution number three, establishing an investigative committee. So he's, you know, acknowledges like, yeah, sometimes you can't fucking stop your, uh, your bandit army from murdering the wrong people. It's a real problem. It's fair, fair point. It's an issue. I mean, he's not wrong, you know, it's, it's, this falls under the category. It's, it's quite complicated, isn't it?

There's no perfect when you're fighting a war that again, it kills nine million people. Yeah. Yeah. You have to judge him by his opponents in a lot of cases. Now, when the fighting with the whites was over, Maknovist forces controlled most of Eastern Ukraine, an area encompassing seven million people. Command and worker councils created a document by popular consent that spelled out civil liberties, rights, and duty in the region.

The document advocated for freedom of speech, for freedom of the press, of conscience, of worship, of assembly, and of organization. Bolshevik newspapers, which criticized Maknov and advocated Bolshevik conquest of the region, were allowed to continue publishing. This is some of the last freedom of speech that Ukraine will have for quite a while. Now, throughout late 1919 and early 1920, the bones of a remarkable society were established in Eastern Ukraine. This passage from Anarchy's Cossack gives you an idea of what was being attempted.

Literacy classes were laid on for illiterate adults, followed by courses in politics and economics, given by insurgent peasants and workers who had some grounding in the subjects. Here it is interesting to look at their syllabus, political economy, history, the theory and practice of socialism and anarchism, the history of the French Revolution, the history of the revolutionary insurgent movement in the Russian Revolution. Not that cultural activities were neglected. Daily, there were shows staged in the local theater. The insurgents and their women folk took part in these.

Not only as spectators and actors, but also as dramatists, narrating episodes from recent local events and from the insurgent struggle for all too short a time. That's so wholesome. Yeah, it's nice. They're like, okay, so there were a lot of losses, but we did get really into community theater towards the end. But we got some fucking plays. Was it a wash?

Sweet. I like that. So at his peak in 1920, Makno's army, which had started in 1917 with about 150 guys, numbered 50,000 men. I'm going to quote from history today here, explaining how the army worked. Makno himself, creator and leader of the insurgent army, was a man of remarkable vitality. Tough as were his companions. He could outright outwork and outfight any of them.

He never went to bed till his task was finished and two hours later would tap at the windows of his sleeping staff to bring them back to their jobs. He lived like a peasant and always found time for his peasants. He would talk with them, drink with them, take a hand for an hour with a flail, hence his enormous popularity. He grew ever more engrossed with military matters and spent more and more time at the front. When sick or wounded, he was carried in a cart with the frontline troops till well enough

to ride a horse again. He was daring, resourceful, persistent. He showed no signs of nerves in any crisis. So interesting guy. Now, again, depending on, oh yeah, before we, I guess, talk more about Makno and what happens after this. Full hero. Yeah, we should probably talk about our next folk hero, the products and services that

support this podcast. Oh, wow. Thank you. Yep. Merry Christmas, Raytheon. Merry Christmas, Raytheon. They've got a missile now that can go right down your chimney. Wow.

And best of all, it's a scatterbomb that only takes out your family members and pets while leaving the valuable property unharmed. That's the Raytheon beauty. That's the beauty of Raytheon. That's good shit. That's just good shit. Protecting property by killing people. Raytheon.

I don't like the Ann Pets you added there. Oh yeah, they're going to kill some pets. Absolutely. I mean, there's always going to be some pets that are going to have a floor in these things. That's the other Raytheon guarantee. Yeah. We're going to get some pets killed. All right.

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. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good, bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we're talking about Makno a little bit here and kind of the height of his revolution. And depending on who does the writing, he was almost always a teetotaler or a heavy drinker. There are stories of him doing some pretty terrible things while drunk.

There are also stories by people who generally allege things that seem kind of impossible like him hacking 13 people to death with a saber for no reason. I don't know. It's weird. It would not be as surprising if a man is battered by war and violence as Makno turned into drink and wound up doing terrible things in a rage. It's not impossible. I feel like that's at least 30% of the Bastard's episodes go that way.

But that said, the sources who are not clearly writing propaganda to demonize this guy after he gets defeated don't talk about that stuff. The History Today write-up, which is very fair, it's paywall, but it's a pretty fair write-up that is not at all written by anarchists, implies that rather than talking about his drinking being like making him go into like superhuman murder rages, talks mainly about the fact that it kind of made him unready for what would become the eventual betrayal of the Maknovists by the Bolsheviks. He's lost a lot.

He kind of gets messy and drunk, and he does not anticipate things going as bad as they're going to go. The Red Army re-enters Ukraine late in 1919, and in early 1920, they declare Makno and his movement outside the law after he refused to take his forces to the Polish frontier. They basically try to move him and his army to Poland so that they can separate them from the peasants that support them, because they want to make it easier to beat them later. By the mid of the year, Makno and his men were engaged in often constant, horrific battle with the Red Army, with guya-poje again changing hands multiple times.

The Red Army invades and tries to fight them. Whenever Maknovist towns and cities are retaken, the Czecha, the Bolshevik security force carries out purges and massacres. Most attempts were made to assassinate Makno, but all failed. The fighting went back and forth until late September 1920, when the Red Army made peace with Makno again because they needed him to fight the Whites for them. They signed a treaty with Makno this time, promising peace and a release of all arrested anarchists and Maknovists, but the treaty also promised that peasants would be allowed

to maintain standing armies in Ukraine, and this was of course a lie. Once the Whites were beaten again, the Red Army turns on Makno again, and Nestor's final war with them lasts from around late November 1920 to late August of 1921. It was brutal and grinding, but eventually the peasants of Ukraine… Sensing a pattern here. Yeah, it's bad. And eventually just everyone is too exhausted to continue. Makno succeeds in fighting his way to Poland with a small force of his most loyal fighters,

and he becomes an exile. He winds up in Paris where he would spend his last years, and he was in poor health the entire time, all the wars he'd fought him had left him battered and broken and aged beyond his years. He'd been shot at least six times in a three-year period, including one round through the cheek and another that pierced his thigh and into his appendix. So he's in bad shape, and he was not happy. A friend of his wrote of his…

My name. Yeah. It's hard to… Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's kind of a little bit of a celebrity in Paris in this period among the left, but a friend of his writes that he expresses great difficulty in adjusting himself to circumstances so very different from his former way of life.

The only thing that brings him any joy in the end is going to horse races and watching the horses run. He just likes to watch them run. Now he was bitter and prone to fits of depression. He wrote some memoirs, but the fact that he could still barely write made this a difficult task. He had a lot of intellectual friends who offered to help, but these authors enraged him. He kind of took it as an insult that people were offering to help him write his memoirs.

Folks eventually did. Aida met a young female writer, met him in Paris during this time, and was his friend for the last three years of his life. And it's from her that we get some of the most intimate glances into Nestor's inner life that we're likely to see. Quote from Aida. I remember Makno once telling me of his dream. It was autumn, 1927.

We were walking in the Bois de Vincennes. Perhaps the beauty of nature put him in a poetic mood and made him inclined to tell me his dream. The young Makno would return to his hometown of Gouliaipoli, start work, lead a quiet, clean life, and marry a young peasant girl. He had a good horse and good gear. He and his wife would return home in the evening after a successful day at the market selling the fruits of the harvest.

They also bought presents there. Makno got so carried away with the story that he completely forgot that he was now in Paris and had neither land nor a house nor a young wife. At the time, he and his wife were living apart. He separated many times only to reunite and try to live together again. Heaven only knows why it turned out that way. Makno's wife probably didn't love him anymore, and who knows if she ever did. She was a Ukrainian teacher, and her views were closer to some of his opponent's camps.

She never had anything in common with the revolutionary movement. Makno told me in Paris that at the time of his greatest power, people came and toadied to him, and that he could have had any woman he wished, but in reality he had no time for a private life. Makno told me this to debunk the myth about the drunken orgies he's supposed to have taken part in. Makno was in fact a clean man, one could almost say chaste. It seemed to me that his attitude towards women combined a kind of peasant simplicity

with a respect for the weaker sex characteristic of Russian revolutionary circles around the turn of the century. She's writing this in, again, 1927, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I do think it's funny that she already frames him as not being in a good frame of mind, is like, well, you know, we don't know how this, like these accounts can be taken at face value, and she's like, that said, he told me he could have fucked anyone he wanted.

He did. He did. Yeah. You know. I find it sad. The thing about his dream, that he just like wanted to go be a farmer back home, which he could never do. It's like what my uncle says, libertarians in plows.

Yeah, it's a bummer. Sick and almost alone, Nester Makno died in July of 1935, having lived long enough to see the birth and ultimate success of German fascism, as well as complete Stalinist domination of his homeland and the starvation deaths of millions of Ukrainians. So. God. It's a bleak ass ending. Merry Christmas.

It's like there's not bastards ending I know and hate. And then Jingle Bells just starts fading in and it's like, wow, I think we all learned something today. Stashing through the snow with a machine gun on a plow, shooting at the whites, everyone is. Well, I don't know how to finish this. I was like, this is really nice. I know we were going in a good direction for a little while there.

We got a year, we could figure it out. We'll figure it out for next year. Yeah. So that is the story of Nester Makno, problematic faves. Story and a half. Yeah. I guess that is the category I would put him in. Damn.

You know, an attempt was made. He did his best to make something better out of the worst situation almost anyone's ever been in. Like peasants in Ukraine in 1917, there was no happy ending, but he gave it a real good shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

God. All right. I'll pour one out for Nester tonight. Nester Makno, which he may or may not have drank, depending on whose sources you listen to. Well, he probably did. At least at one point. If I was Nester Makno, I would never be sober.

Yeah. What? I mean, Ida says he didn't really drink as an older man, but also he was probably pretty ill. Right? Like you get older, your body changes, you've been shot through the appendix. Maybe you can't handle drinks like you used to. Yeah.

Yeah. Like who even knows? You know. I was about to say something mean about old Nester. No. Who knows? Who knows? He did his best.

He did his best. And he lived in hard times. He did. Yeah. We can ask for no more. Todd. Yeah. Well, I feel festive.

You feel festive? You're going to go attach a machine gun to a truck bed and fight for liberty? So festive, I'm going to just walk into traffic. Do you have any plugs for us? Yeah, this comes out, Santa University comes out today, if it's Christmas Eve. Robert's reprising his role as second amendment Santa. You've got a song this year. So that's exciting.

I love a good song. You just demonstrated that you're up to the task, so that was a mistake on your part. And yeah, you can listen to Lolita podcast on Mondays, and that is going to be coming out through January. So those are my things. Yay. Hey. Woot, woot.

Woot, woot in the boot. All right. And we'll be back with this podcast the first week of January. We're taking the last week off, guys. We're taking the last week off, all right? Just let us have it. We're so tired. You got two Christmas episodes, you fucking filthy animals.

We're tired. Holy goddamn pagans. And on that note. That's the end of the episode. That was great. That's the end of the episode. I'd like to end there. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. 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.

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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest

person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.