Rev Left Radio - Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies. She returns to Rev Left to discuss her newest book "Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women". Check out more Rev Left episodes with Kristen: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=ghodsee  Check out Kristen's work here: https://kristenghodsee.com/ Check out AK-47, Kristen's podcast dedicated to Alexandra Kollontai here: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast Outro Song: "Highwomen" by The Highwomen Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show a fan favorite, one of my personal favorite guests, Dr. Kristen Gatsy, author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, and previous guests, I think, on five other episodes of Rev Left, if not maybe four. But she's back on this time to talk about her newest book, highlighting five communists, socialists, feminist women throughout history, specifically in Russia, you know, Eastern Europe, the Soviet blocker areas of expertise, and we talk about that. And these figures are maybe known about, like certainly like the sniper's, you know, the Soviet sniper who killed 309 Nazis is known. Alexander Collentai, we did a full episode on, which I'll link to in the show notes, but others are less known. And so we get to kind of learn more about figures we might be

somewhat aware of and learn about figures that I think most people on the left probably haven't heard of it all. And Kristen is always just an amazing guest. You can tell that the stuff that she writes about and studies means a lot to her personally and she infuses her work and her interviews with me and everything she does with a genuine sense of passion and commitment. And it really is a beautiful thing to see. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Kristen Gotzi on her newest book, Red Valkyries, feminist lessons from five revolutionary women. My name is Kristen Godzi, and I'm a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm the author of 11 books.

Most recently, the book we'll be talking about today. Red Valkyrie's feminist lessons from five revolutionary women, but I also previously wrote a book. that I think we've talked about, a couple books that we've talked about on this podcast, but probably the most well known of which is why women have better sex under socialism and other arguments for economic independence. Absolutely. I think this might be your fifth time on the show. You're certainly a fan favorite and certainly one of my personal favorite guests. As we as this show develops over the years and we have these repeat guests, I try more and more to link to the previous times we've had a guest on. So I'll try to do that as well, at least a couple of our previous

episodes. But I think our, the most famous one and maybe the first one you ever came on for was the the Red Hangover episode. That's right. Yeah. Which to this day is among our best. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was very early on. That was before the crazy op-ed in the New York Times and everything kind of blew up in my face. It's wild. Yeah, I'm actually looking right now, we, we released that episode in January of 2018. Wow. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yeah. So thank you so much. for being along on the ride of this basically the entire time the show's been on the air it's really awesome thank you yeah it's been really fun to to be a part of this and to you know reach out to your listeners and get to talk about my work i'm always and you like to talk about fabulous and

interesting people like alexander colentai we did an episode on her just on her right absolutely yep we did it we did and i will a link to that as well we'll talk about her again in this episode but yes you and i did a full episode on colentai which i will link so as you said this time we are talking about your newest book, Red Valkyrie's feminist lessons from five revolutionary women. It's a wonderful book, and it's really accessible and relatively short. I mean, this is not a 400-page book. I think it clocks in somewhere around 175 pages. So I deeply, you know, encourage people to go get the book, and hopefully this episode will be just like a little inspiration to go out and get it. So with all of that said, let's go ahead and dive

into it. So I guess the place to start is where I always like to start. When and why did you decide to write this book? What inspired you to do it? And what made the figures that you covered in this text socialist feminists as opposed to liberal ones, which you detail in the intro in particular? Yeah. So I think when why women have better sex under social, had better. Wait a minute. I can't remember. It's half. Yeah. have, right? Because the op-ed was titled Had, and sometimes in my brain I still get those things confused because it's all a blur. But that book had a really weird success in ways that I could never have imagined in the sense that it's been translated into 14 different languages. It's had 15

foreign editions, and it just sort of keeps chugging along. People are coming to it, even though it came out four years ago now, people are still discovering it. And it's been a really interesting experience for me. And one of the things that I hear from readers who read that book and that I heard even early on was that they really wanted more details of the women in the book that I talk about that they've never heard of. So I mentioned a lot of socialist feminists who are really important to the story of socialist feminism in the 20th century. And I got a lot of emails from people saying, wait, where can I read more about Kripskaya or, you know, somebody like Alana like Adenova or Collentai or some of the other figures that I discussed in that book?

And it really got me thinking, wow, wouldn't it be nice to do a kind of collected or collective biography of some of these women? And for a while, I played around with the idea of doing a much more capacious book, a book of, you know, eight or nine or even ten different women from different walks of life from the global north and the global south to talk about the diversity and the importance of socialist feminism in the 20th century and then the pandemic hit. And the pandemic really limited my ability not only obviously to travel, but also to do things like get books out of libraries or access certain kinds of archival resources. So then I really paired the book down to these five key women.

And I also thought it's a very short book. You know, it's 174 pages, but that includes a lot of pictures and kind of blank space. So I think in the end, the book, the actual text of the book was only 50,000 words. So it's a really fast read. And I thought that that was a good model because a lot of young people don't have have a lot of time to sit down with a big fat tome. And so having these short biographies would kind of wet the appetite of people. And then there's a big list of suggested reading, you know, suggestions for further reading

so that people can go and dive into the biographies of these women, which are out there, if they're really interested in learning more. So that was the inspiration was really to kind of follow up on in why women have better sex under socialism. There were just pictures with little captions about these women. and quite a few readers said that they wanted more. And why I focused on socialists instead of liberal feminists was really quite obvious. It's because I think that liberal feminism in many ways has failed women.

And that especially during the pandemic, it became very apparent that all of the care work was, you know, really devolving back into the private household and all the sort of hashtag girl boss, you know, liberal feminism. and pantsuit nation sort of feminism really hadn't dealt with the realities of social reproduction in the home. And so I really thought that this was an opportunity not only to talk about the importance of this alternative history of feminism, especially socialist feminism, but also to explain a little bit about why liberal feminism has just really done a disservice to a lot of women by focusing only on women's professional accomplishments in the workplace, rather than thinking critically about the ways our societies really rely on the unpaid labor of caregivers in the home. Yeah, beautifully said, and definitely a core feature of a lot of your work and a lot of the stuff you focus on

is this socialist feminism and this critique of liberal feminism as really, as you put it, you know, failing women in so many ways, which I 100% agree with. So that's fascinating. And I actually shared that impulse myself in the previous book of wanting like those little picks. It was very alluring, you know, ooh, I want to learn more. And so this book is perfect for that. And you're right, the fact that it's so,

it's relatively small and accessible and quickly readable, but it has a bunch of other texts and resources for people to follow up with if they're genuinely interested, I think is the perfect doorway into these figures. So before we get into the figures themselves, I have one more question about the book itself, which is the title, Red Valkyries. And this may be my own, you know, Philistine ignorance, but I'm not even sure what a Valkyreary.

is. So why did you title the book that and what exactly is a Valkyrie? Right. Yeah. So if you know anything about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you would have heard of Valkyrie. I didn't even realize this until after I had chosen the title because in that universe, she's one of, you know, she's a superhero like, you know, in Thor's orbit. And it's because Valkyries are, they are sort of immortal figures from old Norse myths. And they're women, they're warriors. They apparently choose men, warrior men who die in battle to and escort them to Odin's realm of Palhalla. So it's this, they're often represented as these sort of warrior women on winged steeds and with large swords.

And for the popular press in the early 20th century, when you first have this sort of Bolshevik championing of women's liberation, women's emancipation, women who were associated with these movements for women's rights were often called, and not necessarily, generously, Valkyries. So it could be seen as an insult. Sometimes it was meant as an insult, but in our contemporary political moment, I think because of the Marvel movies, and because of just, you know, the popularity of Norse myths more generally, it's become a much more positive thing for a very kind of powerful, somewhat supernatural woman. Fascinating. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I kind of do appreciate the double-edged sword, if you will, it being both a compliment and sometimes used in a disparaging way because, you know, that's what women throughout history sort of have to deal with and even when certain women rise to the top of, you know, certain events or whatever, there's still an attempt, especially historically, to kind of dismiss them or, you know, pass over them in favor of emphasizing

certain men in their contributions. Another aspect of this text is that all the women that you cover in this text are, you know, Eastern European with Slavic names, Russian, etc. Is that simply just a product of your area of expertise and what you're interested in, or is there another reason why you particularly honed in on them? Yeah. So I think, you know, in the first place, it definitely had to do with my area of expertise and the resources that I had available to me during the pandemic. I have, as you know, had a podcast about Collin Tai for about three, over three years now. I have been writing and thinking about Elena Lagadinova, who I actually knew personally before she died in October 2017.

And the other, two of the other women were comrades of Colontize, Inessa Armand and Nadejda Krupskaya. And then the other woman, Ludmila Pavlichenko, was also a really interesting and famous figure that I had been teaching about in my classrooms and who my students always felt kind of compelled to learn more about because she was this sort of awesome sniper, which we'll talk about in a minute. But in the, in the introduction to this book, I do include a list of names of women, particularly from the Global South, who I think would have been really ideal to include in a kind of collective biography of socialist women. But given the realities of the pandemic, it was just impossible for me to do the kind of careful research.

necessary in order to tell their stories in the same kind of detailed way as I do for the five women that I ultimately chose. So part of it was the pandemic decision and part of it was, look, I'm a professor of Russian East European Studies. I've been teaching about these women in the classroom for over 20 years. And so I really felt conversant in their biographies. I tended to have all of the materials that I needed in order to write their stories with me either at home or accessible through online databases or through the library at my university. So it was a it was a decision that was made out of the necessity of the pandemic, but it was also something that I thought, look, I should stay without writing a big humongous

book, I need to stay in the place where I feel like I am the best able to tell those stories. Absolutely. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know, getting into to the figures themselves and you're talking, about why you chose the phrase Red Valkyries and the connotation of warrior women, you know, that connotation fits exactly precisely perfectly with the first woman that we're going to cover. So we're going to take them each in turn, starting with the sniperess. And you give each of these figures a sort of nickname as well as their real name.

And I myself am terrible with other languages. So I'll just say that up front. Pardon me if I mess up these names. but that's okay yeah the first one is the the snipers uh ludmilla pavliceenko is that right yeah ludmila pavlitsenko yeah she is so you know again it's really funny because i wrote this book well in advance of the russian invasion of ukraine and and ludmila pavlitschenka herself was Ukrainian she was a sharpshooter who volunteered in the soviet maritime army to basically kill Nazis and the legend is you know the official military tally of her kills is

309 and she you know it's fair to say that she kind of became a bit of a propaganda figure because she was just so incredible but she was such an incredible shot not only was she a sniper but she eventually became a counter sniper which is a sniper who hunts other snipers which is one of the most difficult things that a sniper can do. And, I mean, she was just bad ass. There is no way around it. And why she was particularly of interest to me has to do with the fact that she was wounded three times.

After her third wound, you know, she was taken off the front lines. and she was sent to the United States in 1942 to try to drum up support for a second front in Western Europe. And she ends up staying at the White House and becomes very good friends with then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. And as part of a kind of impromptu almost propaganda tour, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ludmila Padlitschenko go on a kind of national speaking tour. She ends up touring all around the United States. She also goes to Canada and the UK before returning to the Soviet Union. And one of the most fascinating things about that tour is that there are a lot of contemporary press accounts of what a sensation it was when she showed up talking about her time in the military and on the front line.

Remember, this is at a time when although there are American women kind of working in the factory, sort of, you know, the rosy, the riveters of the Second World War, there's still a real sense in the United States that women are just not capable of fighting on the front lines. And here comes this young, quite charming, 26-year-old Russian, Ukrainian, you know, Soviet woman, who is not only is she fighting on the front lines, She's been given, you know, various medals, and she's got wound stripes on her uniform. And she's incredibly hardcore and yet at the same time, very feminine and very charming. And the American journalists who are interviewing her and she's interviewed quite widely, they just don't know what to do with her.

It's really a fascinating song. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her. It's called Miss Pavlichenka. You could look it up. It's quite a, you know, quite a little nice folk tune that he wrote kind of spontaneously when he met her. Fell by your gun, fell by your gun, 300 Nazis fell by your gun. Chaplin kneeled down and kissed every one of her fingers to, to, you know, sort of celebrate how wonderfully, you know, skilled she was at taking out Nazis. Miss Pavlachinko, well on to fame, Russia's your country, fighting's your game.

The world will always love you for all time to come. Fell by your gun Fell by your gun Fell by your gun For than 300 Nazis Fell by your gun Fell by your gun Fell by your gun

For the 300 Nazis Fell by your gun In the mountains and canyons Quiet as a deer Down in the forest north knowing no fear, lift up your sight, down comes a hun, 300 masses fell by your gun. Felt by your gun, 300 masses fell by your gun, fell by your gun. Three hundred masses fell by your gun, fell by your gun, fell by your gun, moment, 300 masses fell by your gun.

summer's heat or the cold winter's snow, all kinds of weather you track down the fold. Your face is as bright as the new morning sun, but more than 300 nights is fell by your gun. Fell by your gun, fell by your gun, more than 300 nights is fell by your gun. They'll buy your gun for the three hundred And lucky strike, the cigarettes wanted to pay her some, god, awful amount of money in order to use her face in an advertising campaign. So she really was kind of an amazing sensation when she came to the United States. And I think really importantly, for the argument that I try to develop in the book,

I think she had a really profound impact on Eleanor Roosevelt, who many years later in 1963 would be appointed as the chairwoman of the first presidential commission on the status of women. Actually, I think that's 1961. It was 61. She was appointed the first chairwoman of that commission, which was really the first kind of government commission in the United States to look at the situation of women's rights. And I do think that Roosevelt had some important kind of background about what women could and couldn't do if given the opportunity because of the time that she spent with probably checka traveling around the country yeah that is so interesting and i just want to read a little bit from from the text itself um this is like from the first page of of the first chapter she's she's talking to an audience of americans i'll just read from the text quote every german nazi who remains alive will kill women children and old folks she told a crowd of incredulous American journalists. Dead Nazis are harmless.

Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives. When asked how she felt about shooting in cold blood the men she could see clearly through the sight of her rifle, she merely replied, how can a human being feel when killing a poisonous snake? When the Soviet military honored her for her 257th confirmed kill, Pavlashenko told her superiors, I'll get more. And she kept her promise. Between the age of only 24 and 26, Pavlashenko officially racked

up 309 confirmed kills, the highest tally of any woman sniper in all of history. So I just think that is absolutely fascinating for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the fact that she was so young and racking up, you know, really just protecting her country, protecting the world against the Nazi menace. It's really, really profound. Yeah. And, you know, and she, thankfully, she has a memoir called Lady Death. That was her nickname, Lady Death, and it has been translated into English. And it's a really interesting read. So I, you know, relied on her own memoir quite extensively because she had so many interesting observations, not only about her time on the front lines, but also about her time in the United

States. And it's, you know, it's actually kind of a sad story. So she did have a husband who she married on the front who was killed during the Second World War. And later in life, she really struggled with what we now know to be post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, they just sort of called it shell shock. And it was very difficult for her. You know, she saw real action on the front lines. And as you point out, she was so young. She was so young. But she did really come to represent something really profound, I think, in the idea that Soviet women were the equals of men. And Soviet men, to be quite honest, she talks a lot about this in her memoir. They didn't always believe that. It took them a while to really understand how profound and brave these women,

the, you know, how skilled they were, right? How profound their skills were on the front line. It's, you know, being a sniper is, is, it takes a particular kind of aptitude to be a sharpshooter of that caliber. And I do think, you know, I imagine that during the Second World War, there were probably, you know, a good percentage of women who had they had the training, they could have also contributed to the war effort in a way that would have been, really profound and important, but because they were women, they were never given that training. Whereas in the Soviet Union, yes, it was very difficult for Pavlichenko to join the front lines when she went to enlist. They immediately tried to put her in a medical battalion because she was a woman. And she dumped all of her sharpshooter medals on the table. And she said,

no, I want to be a sniper. Give me a gun and let me kill some Germans. And the Soviets looked at her medals and they looked at all the certificate she had from winning all of these various sharpshooter competitions and the training that she had had, she had been a university student and she had gone for kind of weekend hobbyist training and shooting. And they said, okay, let's get this woman on the front line. And she really did prove herself, I think. It's, it's not only her, there were many, many Soviet women who were fighting on the front lines. We tend to forget that. In fact, even now, I think in the current situation in Ukraine, there are many Ukrainian women who are also fighting on the front lines,

volunteers who have military capabilities and skills that we, you know, we don't, we don't tend to realize that there are many, many aptitudes that are equitably distributed among men and women that they are. And for a long time in the United States, we just overlooked the possibility that women might have those aptitudes. Yeah, absolutely. An important point. And another important point is what you said about her struggling with PTSD because, you know, that's kind of the thing with historical figures, particularly in a tradition that we care about, like the socialist one, where we see these people as symbols. And it can be very easy to kind of see them merely as a sort of, you know, platonic ideal of a human being, you know, in these pictures and the stories we

tell about these people. But they are human beings. And in this case especially, there is a huge sacrifice, not only the immediate acute sacrifice of willing to literally put your life on the line at the age of 24, 25, 26 to defend your community, your country, your people from the fascist menace, but the sacrifice of her own mental and emotional well-being after the fact, because nobody that has really intense experiences in combat come out emotionally unscathed, you know. And in that time, we don't even have words for it, let alone diagnostic treatments and medicine to try to help people and still to this very day we struggle with treating the problem of PTSD. So that's one thing that you do really well is bring the human element

forward. You know, respect the symbol, what they stand for, while also kind of peeling that back a little bit and say, there's a real human being underneath here. And they suffered and they sacrificed for this tradition and for in this case, you know, for her people and for the fight against fascism. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on to the next one. And And the next one is Alexander Collentai, aka the Communist Valkyrie. And of course, as we've mentioned, we have a full episode about Collentai that I did with you a while back. I'll link to it in the show notes. So if this sort of whets your appetite a bit about learning more about Collentai, we have a full episode ready for you to dive into.

But, you know, there probably are some people that don't know who Collentai is or never listen to that episode. Can you kind of just remind us who she is and just talk about what you brought out about. her in this new book. Yeah. So I definitely think listeners should go to our special Colin Tai episode because we really did a deep dive. But really briefly, Colentai was the first commissar of social welfare in the Soviet Union. She was appointed by Lenin. She was very instrumental in sort of creating the legal infrastructure that allowed for women's emancipation and the socialization of care work, which is usually done at home. She was really profoundly, what's the word, like she was a,

and I'm struggling still with this long COVID brain fog. So I'm really, you know, it's so frustrating to lose your, lose your thoughts in the middle of a sentence. But, but Collin Thai was one of those people who she had Lenin, ear and Lenin empowered her very early on in the revolution and for quite a number of years before she ends up off in Norway and then in Mexico and ultimately in Sweden starting a diplomatic career. She was really at the center of the Bolshevik government and she was really the figure in charge of implementing women's rights, of supporting women's rights and doing the socialization

of things like child care and, you know, funding camps. canteens and cafeterias and creating public laundries. She was really, probably of the women that I write about in the book, together with the two comrades that we're going to talk about in the moment, Anessa Armand and Nadej de Krupskaya, she was really probably one of the most important socialist feminist figures of the 20th century. And many of the gains that women, even in the West, have today,

are really the direct result of choices that Alexandra Colentai made between 1917 and 1923. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that is just a prelude to a prelude of the full Colin Thai story. But just for the sake of time, and so we can cover some of these other figures that we haven't covered in depth, definitely go check out the full episode. I will link to it in the show notes. And as an aside, your point about brain frog, I just kind of want to linger on that

for a bit because I dealt with it after COVID. You're dealing with it. I know millions of people out there right now are dealing with various forms of what we're now calling long COVID. but you know the the brain fog was one of my only lingering symptoms and it actually really is scary especially for someone who you know kind of I define myself and my job is really about being able to think clearly and fluently and you know speak extemporaneously um and the brain fog is scary when all of a sudden just the rug is pulled out from underneath you and you're like wait what was I talking about it's almost like you know like being high on marijuana and not being able to finish a sentence um but but when you're when you're not high on marijuana it's scary you know like oh Oh, God. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, look, I'm a professor. I have to stand up in front of a classroom full of students and actually talk and answer questions. You know, they pepper me with questions. I'm currently teaching a first year seminar, which means that these are students just their very first fall of university. And they have so many questions that I have to be really on my toes. And, you know, it's what you were just saying about PTSD and Ludmila Pavlichenka and how we, We tend to forget, you know, we can idealize people and we can put them on a pedestal, but we tend to forget that they're human, right?

And that you can, yeah, you can get something like COVID and then it lingers. And it really lingers in ways that can be quite debilitating. I think there are, I imagine millions of people around the world at this point who in one way or another are still being affected by the COVID pandemic. And yet I can tell you, at least where I'm teaching. and the world in which I inhabit, people are just pretending like it's not there anymore. Like, it's just over, you know. So it's really important, I think, to be sensitive and compassionate to people who are still

struggling with the after effects of what is, let's face it, like the COVID pandemic, COVID-19 is going to be a humongous collective trauma for many of us. I mean, obviously, probably not as traumatic as, being Ludmila Pavlacca fighting, you know, during the Second World War on the front lines. But nevertheless, it is a real trauma. And whether you're dealing with, you know, lingering effects like brain fog or fatigue or whatever, long COVID, or whether you lost a loved one to the pandemic or whether your life, you know, you lost a job or your life was otherwise upended, I do think this is an important thing.

And I know this is a bit of an aside, but it's something that I've been thinking a lot about because I feel like in some ways, our society is being really heartless about how much trauma and anxiety and depression and dislocation this whole pandemic has caused. And the way that we're all just expected to kind of go on with our lives now without really stopping to take a breath and process what has collectively happened to us over the last two years. I could not agree more. And yeah, there's the there's the lingering effects and the mental health fallout, which has hit my family in particular. I have a teenage niece who after the pandemic has really continues to struggle with with depression in particular and that is very common among young people but not only that just how it scares me how quickly we became

accustomed and accepting of mass death and how quickly we were able to move on a million Americans died that is more than the Americans died in both world wars that's more Americans than died in the civil war and we just blow past it half the country thinks it barely even happened and then we're just stumbling forward into whatever horrific crises come next and it is just it is really a profound moment of like yeah just crippling sort of fear like if this is what they do in the face of the pandemic what are they going to do with the next pandemic what are they going to do in the face of climate change the rise of fascism i mean it's really scary how quickly humans can just adapt to horrific circumstances and move on from horrific events exactly exactly and

And I will say, right, I think that that was probably, if we come back to Pavlichanga, that was probably one of the most difficult things for women, for anybody who fought in the Second World War, that after, you know, they were demobilized and they went back home and they were sort of expected to just fit into ordinary civilian life. But that's almost impossible to do if you've had that kind of experience. And I definitely think that we're in some ways, the same mistake here in the United States. As you point out, over a million Americans have died, which is massive amount of loss in a very short period of time. You know, we are now just seeing the American life expectancy has shrunk by two years, right? And that's the aggregate. But in some

populations, it's even more severe. And we're seeing, as you said, you know, all sorts of depression and anxiety. People are making life choices because they feel. fear the instability of another pandemic, of the climate crisis, of the rise of fascism, of all sorts of things. And it's immobilizing people. It's hurting people's relationships. It's hurting people's ability to function. And, you know, all of this is in some ways related to the book because at the end of this, we're going to get to my lessons, right? These 10, nine lessons at the end of the book. And I do think that we are so callous if we are going to pretend that this pandemic is not going to have lingering effects on all of us in one way or another and more profoundly on our

society. But it's it's just hard, I think, for people to process that because we're still in the middle of it, right? We're still seeing people getting sick. And we're still being told that we need to get new booster shots. And we're still being told that maybe we should mask or shouldn't mask depending on where you are in the country. And I just think that there's a lot of chaos and uncertainty and that when human beings are faced with chaos and uncertainty, they can often shut down. Absolutely. Yeah.

And on that level, it's almost understandable why people want to just like look down and move on because the horror show is so dark. But I'll just say before we move on quickly, I hope you get well and this goes away. And from my research into long COVID, anybody out there suffering with any symptoms, I have read, I'm no expert, but I've read that these things do eventually go away. So if you're kind of going through it right now, kind of keep your head up, you know, take care of yourself and, you know, don't convince yourself that this is a permanent state of affairs, because in almost every case that I've read about, they eventually do tend to get better. So I just kind of put that out there

with a little optimism for people struggling. But yeah, let's go ahead and move on. And this is a figure next that I'm really fascinated with and, you know, to my, my shame have not studied in depth like I should. And that is, of course, Nadezda Krupskaya, aka the radical pedagogue and wife of Lenin. So can you talk about who Krupskaya was and why she was an important figure in socialist and feminist history? Okay, so yeah, she's like really, you know, one of the one when i went into writing that chapter i a lot of what we know about her is because she wrote a series of reminiscences about lennon and she also was sort of the keeper of the memory of her colleague enessa armand and so she's a figure who's often in the background

she and Lenin married quite strategically for political reasons very early on and it's unclear the nature of their relationship they were both quite circumspect about their romance if there was one and but they were really comrades and she was a committed Marxist before she met Lenin it was obviously one of the reasons I think Lennon was so attracted to her. She was teaching in the working class neighborhood. She was teaching workers in the working class neighborhood in St. Petersburg. She had been a very fervent follower of Tolstoy in her youth. And then she came to Marxism. She was the daughter of impoverished nobles. And she and Lennon really kind of hit it off. And they basically end up married because of the fact that they were both arrested and they were both being sent to exile.

And Lenin was being sent to exile in Siberia. Krupskaya was being sent into exile in European Russia. But basically, if she said that she was Lenin's fiancé, then she could also go to exile in Siberia with Lenin and spend time with Lenin, which. she did. And then they spent all of their years in exile together. And she was, she's a really interesting figure. And my initial impression of her was that she was just sort of like kind of Lenin's wifey in the fact that she did everything for him. She was his secretary. She was his nurse. She kept his house. She cooked his meals. She edited his papers. You know, she was this person who basically, it sounds like Lenin could not have functioned without.

And yet, in the background, in her very limited spare time, as far as I could tell, she was also an incredible autodidact. She was teaching herself languages. She was teaching herself the pedagogies of all of the Western European countries in which they spent their years in exile. She was reading pedagogical texts from some of the most prominent. educational theorists of her day. And all of that comes to be really important to the creation of the Soviet education system after the revolution. And also, interestingly, to the foundations of

Soviet librarianship, which tends to be overlooked in terms of the infrastructure of education in the Soviet Union, the massive spread of libraries and librarians who were really these sort of frontline workers who helped recently peasants who had only recently become literate find reading materials that were appropriate to their level of literacy and also helped radicalize those peasants and workers. So these librarians were sort of the frontline shock workers of the revolution and they were all being trained by Kripskaya. She was also very instrumental in the creation of Soviet youth organizations, both the pioneers and then this thing that was the Comsumol. So there was a youth organization for younger

children, and then there was a youth organization for older children. And Krupskaya had her hands in every single one of these projects. And she outlived Lenin. She also lived a very, very difficult life. She really disliked Stalin. Stalin kept her under constant surveillance. She actually lived with him in the Kremlin. And she died a very kind of broken woman because, you know, she just saw the revolution become something completely different than what she and she believed Lennon had fought for. And people who wrote obituaries of her, including Trotsky and Kalentai, were extremely sympathetic to Krupskaya, who was in all respects an incredible revolutionary in her own right, but who had the humility to never really put herself in the

center of things. What was most important for her was that the work got done. And whether or not she got credit for it was just irrelevant to whether or not she was going to work for the revolution. Yeah. A fascinating figure. Can you talk a little bit more about the, you mentioned the beef, more or less with Stalin or the personal dislike between the two. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, so Stalin was a very rude to her, especially towards the end of Lenin's life, as Lenin was increasingly incapacitated by a series of strokes. You know, Lenin had this last testament where he basically said that he did not want Stalin to be in charge. And Krupskaya was, you know, desperate to get that into the press. she had a great personal risk to herself.

She snuck it out of the Soviet Union. And it was, in fact, published in the New York Times, but it didn't make a difference. You know, Stalin took charge because he was Stalin, and he very successfully played off, you know, the remaining Bolsheviks against each other and then ended up purging most of the old Bolsheviks in the 30s. But she was very suspicious of Stalin and especially. because he was in fact quite rude to her and she just thought that he represented sort of the worst the worst aspects of of you know the culture of the old bolsheviks the secrecy and the

pettiness and the aggressiveness so she she had very difficult time with stalin who also feared because stalin of course wanted to be seen as the true heir of lennon of really parrying on the spirit of the revolution. And he purged almost all of the old Bolsheviks, except for Kalentai, who was somewhat safe because she was out of the country during this entire period of time in diplomatic missions serving as ambassadors.

But Krupskaya was really under Stalin's thumb. And she couldn't publish anything without it going through him. She didn't have much of a life. She couldn't really meet with anybody. she was constantly being followed and surveilled. She lived, like I said, a very, a very difficult life in her later years because Stalin feared her. He feared what she knew about him and what she knew about, you know, what had happened in the 20s

and the 30s. And so he kept her on a very tight lead, so to speak, and she suffered greatly for that. So specifically, the question of the legacy of Lenin, you've have Krupskaya who is incredibly close, you know, a wife, a friend, a comrade, an editor to Lenin, and is suspicious of Stalin. So that makes her doubly a threat because, you know, as you said, Stalin is trying to promote this idea that he is the proper legacy of Lenin and there's nobody with more detailed information about what Lenin actually thought, believed in, and did in his day-to-day life than Krupskaya. And then there was, I think there was this famous phone

call where Stalin was rude to her and pissed Lenin off. Yes. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's all hearsay, right? But yes, there is this famous situation where, you know, I don't think Kripzkaya and Stalin got along very well. And, you know, Stalin was trying to get in touch with Lenin and Krupskaya, you know,

Lenin was ill. And Krupskaya was nursing him. And, you know, she, you know, again, this is all somewhat hearsay. But definitely there was a bit of an altercation with them on the phone and she told Lennon about it and Lennon was really very upset by it. Like you could get away with a lot, but you could not be rude to Krupskaya because she was sort of this incredibly powerful person behind the scenes and she was really looking out for Lennon's best interest. She was nursing him and trying to take care of him and have him not be troubled by matters of state in his very sensitive condition. at that time. So, yeah, you know, there was basically a lot of interpersonal beef between them. And I think that that, you know, again, we think of these figures sometimes as kind of wooden icons,

but in fact, they were human beings and they had opinions and emotions and they had, you know, petty scuffles with each other over sometimes little things over sometimes very big things. But I definitely, in fact, I think that Stalin apologized to her, but it didn't help, right? I mean, the damage was done, particularly because I think that Krupskaya did feel that Stalin was a bit uncultured and brutish and that he would, as she correctly predicted, basically murder most of their common comrades at that particular period of time. I mean, Krupskaya personally during the 30s, during the purges, begged Stalin to save the lives of some of their comrades. She intervened as much as she could. But if you read, you know, Trotsky's obituary of her, you will see clearly that she often failed. She felt extremely powerless in the face of Stalin's paranoia, as did many people.

But Kribskaya was really on the front lines of that. So one more follow-up question, just because I'm personally interested in this, with the Stalin purges, there's lots of talk about this. And, you know, we try not to overemphasize this great man of history idea where this one man is in charge of every decision being made. But what's your sense of the actual role Stalin played in the purges? Did he have to personally sign off on every sort of execution? Or was there more factions or more people involved such that it's not completely fair necessarily to lay all the blame of the purges at the feet of Stalin? And what's your take on that? I mean, I don't think it's fair to lay all of the blame on Stalin because there were certainly, you know, purges and murders before he was in charge. And there, you know, and there were a lot of people involved in this process. But I definitely think that, look, Stalin's paranoia about, you know, being outflanked by machinations within the party, especially among those Bolsheviks, when we say,

Bolsheviks. We mean the Bolsheviks who were Bolsheviks around Lenin before the 1917 revolution. He was very, very, very worried about being displaced. And, you know, and it's important here because there were many people who would have been with the appropriate types of expertise that would have made the Soviet Union far less vulnerable to Hiller if he hadn't purged the ranks in the way that he did. But I certainly think certainly he had accomplices that there were people who went along with it. But I do think that Stalin was the one driving it. He was very, very nervous about what was happening in the 30s. He was truly, I mean, he was right to say that Hitler, that the rise of fascism was a threat to the Soviet Union. He was certainly paranoid about an invasion. We obviously

turned out to be right about that. But I think the way that manifested itself really was quite catastrophic to the leadership of the Soviet Union at a time when they really could have used those people to fight off the Nazis. Yeah, I agree with that, absolutely. And it needs to be said and it needs to be wrestled with in the truth of the matter and not, you know, made into apologia or something where, you know, some people on the left because of all the oftentimes hysterical cartoonish denunciations of figures like Stalin will overcorrect in their, you know, attempts to defend him against sometimes legitimate slander, but can sometimes fall off the other side of the cliff into Apologya, which, you know, I think anybody with any intellectual honesty, and anybody really cares about the socialist tradition and its failures and success should take seriously. Absolutely. You have to, you cannot, I mean, look, you know, the 30s were a really unfortunate time in the same. Soviet Union. And I think, I mean, while I understand the impulse to try to excavate as much

as possible of the positive sides of the Soviet experiment in the 20th century, you have to be honest about how ugly it did get. You know, and, you know, there are some very moving passages in the Kalentai chapter where, you know, two of the men whom she was romantic with were purge. Her doctor was purged. She lived in great fear for the safety of her son. And, you know, Colin Tai really struggled during the 30s. Again, she was also powerless to do anything at this particular time she was abroad in Sweden as ambassador. But, but, you know, look, we have those people who were around that time and saw what was happening felt incredibly powerless, powerless, you know. And yes, I mean, I don't want to get into the thick weeds of Soviet historiography because there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages written about this.

But, you know, when Khrushchev gives the secret speech and he talks about the cult of personality around Stalin, this is somebody from within, right, who saw what was happening. And also, you know, by the way, did nothing. And certainly people question his motives. But I do think that, you know, we have to be very honest about Stalin. And we have to be really clear that Lennon himself in this last testament was very uncomfortable with the idea that Stalin would take over. Kruvskia was incredibly nervous about this. And like I said, at great personal risk, she tried to smuggle Lenin's last testament. She did successfully smuggle it out of the country.

And it was published. but it just didn't make a difference at the end of the day because Stalin had consolidated power around himself and there was really no one else to oppose him. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating chapter in history and a fascinating chapter in the socialist tradition, a tragic one as well. But the last thing I'll say is I just wish I could be a fly on the wall

between some of the personal conversations between Krupskaya and Lenin on Stalin, but on many other issues that never made it into print. I think that would be fascinating to kind of lean in hear some of their conversations, especially around that time. So fascinating stuff. Yeah, yeah. And again, if you're interested, you can read Kripzkaya's memoir, my reminances of Lenin, which is really interesting because it covers, you know, a lot of the time that they were together in exile. The other thing that I didn't say, which I should say, is that Kribskai was also, from a feminist

perspective, really the first Bolshevik to write a very important pamphlet called the one. woman worker. It was published under a pen name and I think it was published in 1903. So it's very, very early. And in the woman worker, she really tries to make an argument for why women need to embrace socialism. It's just recently been reprinted by a sort of leftist British press. And that's also something that I really think everybody who's interested in the history of socialist feminism should go and read. Okay, absolutely. Yeah. Important recommendation there. So let's go ahead and move on to the next figure. We have two more figures to cover. And in chapter four, you cover Anessa Armand, nicknamed the hot Bolshevik in your book. So who was Anessa? How did she get that wonderful

nickname? And what were her contributions to socialist feminism? Yeah. So I'll cover her quickly because there's not a whole lot that we have of her because she was maybe it's unclear Lenin's lover Lenin's mistress there's actually a biography of her written in English with that title and she was

also a very very dear friend of Krupskaya who called her a hot Bolshevik it sometimes transferred sorry it's sometimes translated as an ardent Bolshevik but the word is actually hot Bolshevik like she was

really really committed to the cause. I also have some suspicions based on the way that Krupskaya writes about Armand that there was a little bit of, you know, passionate friendship going on between these two women as well. The evidence for the affair with Lenin, there are, you know, you can really spend a lot of time in the weeds on this one because there are lots of people who put forth evidence supporting both positions, either she was or she wasn't. But I think that the more interesting thing to me is her relationship with Kruskaya. So she was a polyglot. She was also a very committed revolutionary who spent a lot of time in exile. She was constantly in and out of jail. She was fascinatingly a mother of five children

and four of whom she had with her first husband, a gentleman called Alexander Armand, and the fifth which she had with her second quote-unquote husband, Vladimir Armand, who was her husband's youngest brother. And her husband basically was okay with this. So she sort of had an openly polyandrous relationship with two brothers, which resulted in five children. But she also spent most of her adult life, you know, fighting for the revolution.

And she is on the train, you know, the sealed train that goes from Switzerland through Germany into Finland, and she arrives with Khrushkaia and Lenin in Petersburg. So she was a very, very close associate with them. And the reason she's so important for the history of socialist feminism is because she is the first leader of this thing called the Jean-Ottel, which is the women's section of the Communist Party. And she, together with Kolentai and Krupskaya, really launches the Soviet women's organization. And she's very responsible for creating sections of the Jeannot-Del all across the Soviet Union, trying to get women motivated and politically active.

unfortunately she dies of cholera in 1920 she's she's actually quite young and so she doesn't live the sort of long life of people like cripskaya and colentai so we don't have and the few pamphlets that she did write particularly about women's rights we have evidence of her sending copies to lennon for his comments and apparently lennon hated them and so armand destroyed them and never published them. So we don't have a lot of her own original writing, which is unfortunate. We have some official things that she published in the newspapers, but we really know most about her obliquely through Krupskaya's memoirs. And also after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were some letters between Armand and Lenin that were subsequently published. And it's from those letters because Lenin addresses Armand with the informal that we

that some people believe that they were lovers. I see. So they had a close working relationship, but the question of whether they actually had a romantic or sexual relationship is sort of ambiguous? It's ambiguous, yeah. So Armand represented Lenin at big international socialist conferences before 1917. She translated all of his writings into multiple languages and then translated things that he needed to read into Russian. And, you know, sometimes she, you know, I think one of the biographers that I read called her, you know, Lenin's Girl Friday, like basically she was a very close working comrade of his, absolutely.

And she often resented this. And towards the end of their time in exile, she really kind of distanced herself from Lenin. And she was trying to start her own writings and things like that. But in 1917, she ends up back in, you know, Russia for the, for the revolutions, February and October. And then she, she becomes that she's a member of the Moscow Soviet. She's the leader of the Jean-Ottel. And then, you know, and then unfortunately, you know, her life is cut short. So we don't have a lot on her afterwards.

Yeah, fascinating stuff. So let's go ahead and move on to the final figure. and this figure is particularly interesting because you, I believe you said you had a personal relationship with her. She died in 2017, and that is Elena Lagadanova, aka, as you put in the book, The International Amazon. So who was she? Why is she an important figure? And can you talk about your personal relationship with her? Yeah, absolutely. So she was the youngest female partisan to fight against the Nazi allied Bulgarian government during the Second World War. She was 14 when she took up arms. She was only 11 when she was helping the

partisans, but she was 14 when she actually joined them in the mountains, and she got her first gun. So I thought that it would be a nice bookend with Ludmila Pavliceenko, who starts off, right? So we start with Pelvichenko in the Second World War, and then we go back in time, and we talk about Kalentai and Krupskaya and Armand, and then we come back to the Second World War, and we talk about Legadinova, who I met for the first time. in 2010 when I was doing research for, well, the book that I was doing research for was a book that is called Second World Second Sex, which is about global socialist women's activism during the Cold War. But before that, I got so fascinated by Elena Lagadinova's story during the Second World War

that I also wrote a book called The Left Side of History, World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. And both of those books really kind of had Elena Lagadinova as a fairly central protagonist. She was somebody who was not only involved as a partisan during the Second World War, but she was also somebody who was very active on the international scene during the UN decade for women between 1975 and 1985. She was the leader of a group of socialist countries that were really advocating for sort of socialist feminist policies at the international level at the United Nations. And so I met her in 2010. And we became, very close for seven years. She died in October of 2017. I actually flew to Bulgaria

just very briefly in May of 2017 to see her because she had taken ill and I was really desperate to see her. And then she got better. And I thought she was, you know, sort of on the men. She was 87 at that time. And then she died peacefully in her sleep, thankfully. But in some ways, the thing that was really interesting was that Elena Lagadinova, after the Second World War, she had gone to the Soviet Union and she had actually studied agrobiology at a time when both Kalentai and Pavlichenko were living in Moscow. And so there was this way in which I sort of felt like Lagadenava was a personal, even though she never actually met them, obviously she knew about them. They were kind of heroes to her. There was a way in which

I sort of felt like Lagadenava connected me to these other women and this really interesting. interesting way and that there was this kind of genealogy of socialist feminism that was the torch kind of being passed from one generation to the next. And Legadinova was a great inspiration to me as a human being. She was somebody who had fought for causes that she believed in and at the very end of her life, despite much, much hardship, similar to the case with Pavlychenka and Krupskaya, I felt like she was still so optimistic and I was so moved by her optimism and her sort of militant hope that if people kept fighting and if people joined arms, you know, locked arms and stood up to the forces of fascism and greed and rapacious capitalism

that we could actually build a better world. And I really feel like she she believed that until the very end of her life. And given how difficult it is to be optimistic in these circumstances, I just really admired her. And there was something about that optimism that I felt like I needed to capture and preserve, which is why I really wanted her story to be included in this book. Yeah. And this was my first introduction to her and her fascinating life.

So it was really a wonderful way to sort of wrap up the figures that you covered. And there's a really beautiful, you know, picture. this in this book in the introduction of with her and Angela Davis in Bulgaria in 1972 and they both have this incredibly authentic smile on their faces and it just is a really touching moment and shows I think her commitment to like this sort of internationalism and you know her commitment to feminism even with figures you know figures from oppressed nationalities figures from the global south really you know this international global struggle that that she saw herself a part of Is that fair to say that that's how she envisioned her struggle?

Yes, you know, the book that I mentioned, Second World, Second Sex, is precisely about the kind of solidarity connections that the Bulgarian Women's Committee had with particularly the Women's Committee in Zambia, but also more broadly, women in Africa and Asia. During the Cold War, the Bulgarians actually had sort of a training center. They called it the School for Knowledge, Solidarity, and Friendship, which they ran in Sofia, and they brought women from the global south to Bulgaria to kind of educate them about not only working at the United Nations, which is, you know, there's some important technical

information about how to submit resolutions and how the vote is taken and how to do amendments and things like that. But it was also education on how to run a socialist women's organization. And these socialist women in the Eastern Bloc were really trying to forge alliances with women in the global South. And it turned out that. Legadinova in particular forged really strong personal relationships with many Southern African women's activists. And she was really committed to the fight against apartheid. You know, she was really committed to the idea that political issues could not be separated from women's issues. And so she really did see herself as a bridging figure trying to reach out to women of oppressed nationalities.

in even in Western countries, but also, you know, post-colonial women who are just, you know, shoving off the chains of imperialism for the first time during this era. And she did have connections with women like Angela Davis. When Angela Davis, this was after Angela Davis got out of jail, she did a brief solidarity tour to these Eastern Bloc countries. She went to the Soviet Union. She went to East Germany and she went to Bulgaria because these countries had ordered organized a massive international letter writing campaign to free her. And so as part of kind of

saying thank you for the solidarity that she had been shown by these Eastern Bloc women, she visited. And yeah, I think that she, you know, I don't think they spent a lot of time together because obviously Angela Davis was sort of touring around. But the time that they did spend together, I think was really important to Lagadenava, because again, it connected her to this sense that, you know, the United States could say that it was a freedom, you know, a beacon of freedom and democracy and talk about human rights and things. But the way that it treated its own minority populations at home was absolutely abysmal and abhorrent. And it allowed the Eastern Bloc countries to sort of take a moral high ground on issues of particularly race, because

they were the ones who were really supporting a lot of anti-imperialist struggles in the global South. And so Legadinova saw herself as, you know, what's the word, like supporting the soft side of that anti-imperialism by organizing women, by getting women to participate in the United Nations, by equipping them with the kinds of knowledges and technical tools that they needed in order to work in international organizations in order to put pressure on the West. And I think she was very successful at doing that. Yeah, deeply impressive. And we salute, you know, her, her life and her contributions.

And she's certainly honored within the pages of this book. So a fascinating figure, absolutely. And in the final concluding chapter of your book, you kind of lay out these nine lessons that we can learn from the text and these five figures in particular. So if you're down for it, we can kind of do a lightning round. Well, I'll just, you know, say the lesson and you can kind of elaborate quickly on it. And we can move to the next one. there's no reason to necessarily linger on each one of these i just kind of want to do a bullet

point um addressing of these i think it's a wonderful way to to end this book as well and this this conversation so are you down with that sure sounds good okay the first one is comrades can you elaborate on you need them you need lots of them um and you and and you need to do um it's it's a give and take and it's all of the women in this book were incredibly good at surrounding themselves by people who supported them politically, emotionally, and psychologically, and they did the same for their comrades. So you need them. You need a lot of them.

Go out there, find them, and nurture those relationships. Amen. The next one is humility. Yeah. We are all working for the same thing. If we're trying to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable world, we are a part of a larger fight. We should not always be thinking about ourselves.

and hoping that we get recognized for our little contributions to this fight. Yeah, that's incredibly important, particularly in a hyper-individual society like ours and one that has now moved into the Internet age, in which people even on the left, and there's more and more of these people all the time, are clearly careerists and opportunists who are fundamentally functioning off their ego and putting their ego forward as sort of an individual person that you want people to crowd around. and that is always sort of appalled me and is sort of antithetical to the deepest values I hold as a socialist.

So I think that's incredibly important. The next one is autodidactism. Always be learning new stuff. Teach yourself. Use the internet. Use books. Use podcasts. Use whatever resources you have available to always be learning new things.

Every single woman in this book and many of the others that I didn't profile in this book, have had autodidacticism as a core component of their personalities. And a life dedicated to continual learning is really a life where the mind is kept up and is kept invigorated. And I've seen people, and I'm sure we all have, who have given up that. They basically cemented in their beliefs they had at 27 or 30, and the intellectual life is dead well before the biological life is dead.

So that's incredibly important. The next one is receptivity. totally related to the autodidacticism because you have if you're reading new things you need to be open to new ideas and none of us wants to be you know frozen in time intellectually no none of us wants to stagnate intellectually but it happens because thinking is hard work sometimes you know and and receptivity means keeping an open mind it means being able to be convinced that the way that you believe the world works may not be the way the world works and opening your eyes to other people's point of view and willing to walk a mile in their shoes. Absolutely. And it prevents

dogmatism, which is the death of the thinking mind. And so we have to always keep that in mind as well. I read widely. I read conservatives. I read liberals. I read people across the spectrum, even people on the far, far right, who I find, you know, absolutely horrific. I read them just out of a genuine curiosity and a need to understand them, as well as just a constant dedication to really genuinely keeping an open mind while also staying fully principled. And I think that's the line you have to walk. If you have so much of an open mind that your brain falls out and you're just kind of shoved around from idea to idea, that's bad. And if you don't do it at all, you kind of solidify into dogmatism, which is also an error and terrible. So that's important. The next one is aptitude. Yes, exactly.

aptitude is exactly like Ludmila Pavlchenka's ability to fire a damn gun, right? We cannot be good at everything. We have to find the contributions that we are the best suited to making. I find that too many young people get overwhelmed by not being able to do everything. And what we really all need to be doing is finding the particular aptitudes that we have and how those aptitudes can contribute to the larger cause. For Inessa Armand, it was her incredible aptitude with languages. For Elena Lagadinova, it was her ability to connect with people across the political spectrum.

For Nadejda Krupskaya, it was her capacious knowledge of pedagogy, as well as her organizational skills. And for Kolentai, it really was her diplomatic skills, her charm, her ability to move within a very complicated social universe and represent the Bolsheviks as a former aristocrat. She was really, really good at what she did and she focused on her strengths. She didn't try to be everything to everybody and she didn't let people criticize her for not doing the things that she wasn't good at. And I think that we could all really learn a lot from focusing on our aptitudes and each doing what we do best and allowing other people to contribute to.

of the fight by doing what they do best. Couldn't have said it better. The next one is coalition. Again, sometimes we find ourselves with strange bedfellows. And, you know, it can be odd where you end up in a kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend situation. As you said with receptivity, you don't want to form coalitions with everybody. You need to be strategic about those coalitions.

but sometimes the ability to form or forge a coalition is really essential to the success of a cause. And again, all of the women I talk about in the book were very good at strategically forging coalitions that furthered their cause. Yes, it's real politics and any puritanical sectarianism that destroys coalitions is anti-politics and works against our interests. Of course, these coalitions should be principled. They should be very clear about what the goal is of a given coalition, but to reject coalition because they don't share your ideas or because you're a purist, I think is an error politically in the broadest sense. The next one is tenacity.

Yeah, just don't give up. The world is mean. People can be mean. The world can be apathetic and cruel and soul-crushing. And I think that one of the things, that really stands out in these stories, which we talked about earlier, is how human every single one of these women are or were in their lives, how things wound them. They allowed themselves to feel wounded or they dealt with the criticism, the approbation, they dealt with the disappointments

and the failures, but they were tenacious. They didn't give up. And I think that that is, that's like that that's something that everybody who's involved in any kind of political movement really has to cultivate and and deploy as often as possible is that the spirit and the you know the gumption to just stand up for your beliefs and principles in the face of opposition because that opposition is always going to be there absolutely and they lived through a particularly rough period of time and we are entering and have been living in for several years now, another separate, but, you know, in a lot of ways, equally as crisis prone and chaotic of a time. And tenacity is absolutely required in the face of what's coming at us in the next few years to a few decades. The last two I'll combine, and you can kind of take them in whatever direction you want.

The last two are engagement and repose. Yes. So basically, engagement just means that you should engage. don't withdraw. This is related to the tenacity because in that wonderful pamphlet that Krupskaya wrote, the woman worker, she says that many times people come to their political commitments through engagement. Like you may go to a protest and not even really know what you're doing there, but in the protest, as you're together with other people who are fighting for a common cause, you can find strength. And we get strength by being engaged. And by,

being engaged we get strength so it's a virtuous cycle and the last one is we also got to rest we got to take time you know to to nurture our lateral relationships to recharge our batteries to be with the people that we love and who are our comrades all of these things are only possible if we don't allow ourselves to get burnt out and i think too many activists they burn brightly and then they just completely fade away. And what we want is candles of the revolution that will burn for a really long time. And that means taking some times occasionally to just take a deep breath, look at the sunset, eat some cookies, do whatever it takes to get you to that happy place. And so you can go back out there and live to fight another day. Absolutely. The perfect way to end

this episode. Thank you so much, Kristen. I love every time you come on the show. I learn every time you come on the show. It's a true honor, a true pleasure. The book is Red Valkyrie's feminist lessons from five revolutionary women by the one and only, Kristen Gatsy. Before I let you go, do you have any final words? And can you let listeners know where they can find you in this book online? Yeah. So, you know, as always, it's such a pleasure to be back on. It's one of my favorite, favorite podcasts. And you can find me at christen gaudsie.com. It's kind of a boring website, but my books are there.

I have a podcast on Collin Tye, which is AK-47. buzzsprout.com, and, you know, you can buy the book. Adverso Books' website, I believe right now, they have a 40% discount going or something like that. But, yeah, Verso Books is the publisher, and, you know, it's pretty available widely.

So thank you so much for having me on the show again. And it's always a pleasure to be back. I was a high woman and a mother from my youth. From my children, I did what I had to do. My family left Honduras when they killed the Sandinistas. We followed our coyote through the dust of Mexico. Every one of them except for me survived. and I am still alive

I was a healer I was gifted as a girl I laid hands upon the world someone saw me sleeping naked in the noon sun I heard witchcraft in the whispers and I knew my time had come The bastards hung me at the Salem Gallows Hill, but I am living still.

I was a freedom rider when we thought the South had won. Virginia in the spring of 61. I sat down on the greyhound that was bound for Mississippi. my mother asked me if that ride was worth my life and where the shots rang out I've never heard the sound but I am still around and I take that ride again and again and again and again and again and again

I was a preacher My heart broke for all the world But teaching was a righteous for a girl In the summer I was baptized in a mighty Colorado In the winter I heard the hounds And I knew I had been found And in my Savior's name I laid my weapons down

But I am still around we're the high women but sing a story is still unto we carry the sons you can only hold we are the daughters of the silent generations you send our hearts to die alone in foreign nations they may return to us this tiny drive We will still remain

And we'll come back again And again and again and again and again We'll come back again and again and again And again and again POMAYOR. Thank you.