Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 138 - The Brutal KGB and Russia's Long History of Secret Police

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

Back to the USSR! Talking about Mother Russia's long history with BRUTAL various secret police agencies terrorizing its own people today on the Suck. Gonna go over the GULAG forced labor camps, gonna talk about the US vs. USSR Cold War spy game, a brief history of spy and secret police agencies in non-Russian parts of the world, and so much more in a Suck that gets about as dark as a show can in various moments. Be glad you don't live in constant fear of the government throwing you in a brutal prison, torturing you, and killing you because they don't like the way you look or think. Hail Nimrod! TedX video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdFDSjo1b4 Happy Murder Tour Standup dates: May 9-11 Boston, MA Laugh Boston Comedy Club CLICK HERE for tix! May 19th Spokane, WA Spokane Comedy Club LIVE ANT HILL KIDS TIMESUCK Click HERE for tix! May 30th-June 1st Jacksonville, FL The Comedy Zone CLICK HERE for tix! June 7-8th Omaha, NE The Funny Bone CLICK HERE for tix! Listen to the best of my standup on Spotify! (for free!) https://spoti.fi/2Dyy41d Help Ruston, Louisiana recover from an F-3 tornado. https://cfnla.org/ruston/ Help Mr. Ramirez recover from losing his family in a flood: https://www.gofundme.com/1ma2zvte9c Timesuck is brought to you by the following sponsors: Indochino! Get ANY PREMIUM INDOCHINO suit for just $379 at Indochino.com when entering TIMESUCK at checkout. The Great Courses Plus! Get 40 Days for FREE when you sign up ONLY at thegreatcoursesplus.com/TIMESUCK Watch the Suck on Youtube: https://youtu.be/rEza2jGMhwI Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Want to try out Discord!?! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG, @timesuckpodcast on Twitter, and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 4500 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

The Komatet Gouzu Dar Nastvenoë Bezapas Nasti aka the KGB of the Soviet Union was established in March 1954 in Moscow. And those are the toughest words I'm going to say all show long. The KGB was the world largest spy in state security machine involved in every aspect of life for the everyday people of the Soviet Union. More than 500,000 people worked within the KGB at its peak, and there were thousands of agents also working as spies abroad. The main duties of the KGB were to gather intelligence. Another nations conduct counterintelligence, maintain the secret police, the KGB military corps, and the border guards, suppress internal resistance, and conduct electronic espionage. The KGB also enforced Soviet morals through torture,

imprisonment, and executions, and promoted Soviet ideology through propaganda and total control over the Soviet media. The KGB fell apart in the late 80s, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, officially dissolved in 1991, but before it crumbled, it made life real, real, real rough for a lot of Russians.

And a lot of other people, and it's foreign agents infiltrated the ranks of the world's other national intelligence agencies, including the CIA in the United States. The KGB also inherited the vast Soviet gulag system of forced labor camps from its Soviet intelligence predecessors. And there were a lot of predecessors. The KGB is one of the long line of Russian secret police acronyms that regardless of the actual words, always represented the same thing to the average Russian person, fear and oppression. Russian secret police tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people during the long reign

of their various organizations. And we're going to look at a lot of those organizations today. You have a brief overview of other nation's secret police programs. Talk about some cool spy shit and so, so much more in a historical suck, not for the squeamish. Looking into the means and methods, secret police agents used to terrorize their targets. Turn this episode into what may be the darkest suck

we've ever done. This is like Unit 731 dark. If you have thought some of the serial colors we covered here have been brutal and they certainly have the cumulative negative effect they've had on humanity. Pales in comparison to the horrific acts carried out by Russian secret police. So strap in for an intense and fascinating ride

through the Soviet Union today on TimeSuck. You will listen to Top Sun. today on TimeSuck. Happy Monday, Suckers. Welcome and quizative members of the Cold Securus. Time's up time. What's this big deal? We're getting real russian today. Hail Nimron, Hail Lucid Fena, Sweet a sweet temptress and sometimes antagonist of Nimrod.

Bojangles and Triple M, they're sitting this one out. They just hate communism so, so much. I'm Dan Kilman, he who sucks on high and you are listening to Time Suck. Recording in the Suck Dungeon on a lovely spring day here in Cordelaine Idaho with Queen of the Suck Lindsey. He's gonna be in the Suck Dungeon, Reverend Dr. Joe, mother fucking Paisley produces the show. And he who does have a nickname now, Zach, script, keeper, flannery, also in the building. Thanks again to everyone who left recent iTunes ratings and reviews, keeping the suck in the charts,

letting us continue to do this and grow this every rating and review helped so much. Except of course, maybe the one-star reviews. They don't help as much, surprisingly. But better than nothing, better than nothing, I guess. You know, at least getting somebody to have a reaction. Thanks to our Patreon supporters who picked out today's topic through voting on the TimeSug app and website. The space lizards always wise with their topic selections.

Those magnificent stewards of the suck. Got a new t-shirt in the Shopify store. You can easily link to from the time suck app or the website or from this episode description. It's got to be my favorite time stock T of 2019 so far. An access design, Ed Camper T, and it's, it's darkly magnificent. Creepy fun, maybe even safe to work, depending on where you work. Zero neck fucking is on this t-shirt. It's a Bella tribe land unit sex three quarter sleeve baseball tee. It's made out of 300% severed candidates that have been stuck on a stick for no less than 72 hours for added softness and 50% mother's neck for just the right amount of breathability and 250% really round up my samples for the

motivation and ability to tackle whatever obstacles getting your spaces away. So enjoy that beauty, Hill Nimrod. Had fun in San Francisco, trying to tighten up some new standard material for the happy murder tour. Man, Saturday shows my guy especially, but I'm going to be shooting a new special soon, hopefully later this year, I think I'll find out this week if we get the date that we want and the city we want. So I hope I can announce that soon, my agent, so I'm locking them to venue right now. Hoping to make it my best album slash special yet. Thanks to everyone who came out, by the way, in San Francisco again, even those of you who came to the Thursday show,

who seemed a little bit horrified by some of the things that were coming to my mouth. San Francisco, it can be a little sensitive Saturday, though Saturday shows, my God, some of the most fun I've ever had on stage. Excited this week for shows at Laf Boston, in Boston, catching a red socks came in Fenway, never been there. I'm very excited for that. Back in Spokane for another Antehill kid suck Sunday May 19th. Then on to the comedy zone in Jacksonville, Florida, May 30th, 31st and June 1st.

And then I'll be in Omaha, June 7th and 8th. And now thanks for all the gifts, by the way, that people brought to San Francisco. So many cool things. We talk about a lot of that stuff on the secret suck. Ticket info for the entire 2019 happy murder stand up tour at Dancomans.tv. Also the TEDx video is that I did the TEDx talk it is now online. I hope you like it. Talking about why I think a lot of American people have lost a lot of faith in various institutions that have historically been trusted a lot more than they are now. Doctors, educators, scientists, and more. Why do more and more people no longer trust experts find out why I think that reason is if you watch that video. Only regret I have about my TEDx talk is I was one word

off of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quote. I memorized the whole thing. Wish I would use a telepronged or better than that one word. I got all my other stats knocked them out of the park. Link in today's yet description for that. Speaking of misinformation, let's dig into the KGB and be glad we don't currently live under the thumb of covert terror and an insanely corrupt totalitarian regime. If you are, you know, staunchly against an armed populist, this suck, I don't know, might change your mind. Maybe when a government is free to do whatever it wants to, as people, whatever it sees fit,

because those loyal to the regime can own and carry firearms, but those not, cannot, well tyranny often ensues. What's the problem? What's the problem? What's the problem? What's the problem? What's the problem? Before we dig into the Soviet Union,

I do want to make it clear that the Soviet Union was not the only nation. Either spy on or a Ruthley monitor its own citizens with a secret police force like the KGB did. I mean, not by a long shot. It's human nature to want to do these things on some level. Like I find it humorous and people are outraged by the notion of spies or the government monitoring its own people. Like how dare they? What an insane invasion of privacy. How moral. Okay, yeah, moral probably.

Invasion of privacy, you bet, but also practical. Mm-hmm. If you're an ambitious dictator, or a hopeful dictator, you know, you generally have two main goals. Take power by any means necessary. Let's go number one. Go number two is to remain in power by any means necessary.

And how do you remain in power? A brutality. It's nice way to start. Get people scared enough and they tend to do what you tell them. Also staying one step ahead of your enemies through intelligence, very important. Who's going to try to topple your regime? Who's a threat?

You find out who's a threat outside of your borders by some form of spying or surveillance. And you find out who's a threat inside of your borders through some form of secret police. There's tremendous incentive to do both if you're trying to's a threat inside of your borders through some form of secret police. There's tremendous incentive to do both if you're trying to run a totalitarian regime like the Soviet Union was doing. And if you think that you would never engage

in an activity akin to what the KGBB did in your own life, you may wanna think again. Let's use the example of opening a small business to kind of illustrate the incentive to do these type of things. Let's say you put all your life savings into opening a family pizza place in some small town you live in. You've decided to open it and call it Cummins on your pepperoni pizza because you have

the same problematic last name that I do and you're really bad at naming businesses. Cummins on your pepperoni pizza is not doing well. It might be the name. And then right after you've opened your now failing business, another family opens their own independent pizza place across the street. In the same small town, maybe they're called, we don't Cummins on any part of your pizza,

and they're fucking crushing it. Still a terrible name, but maybe a little better than yours. Line out the door for lunch every damn day as your business remains empty. Feels like vultures or circling overheads not looking good for you. Do you think that maybe you might want to send one of your employees over there to see what's working out so well for them? Maybe going to help see what people are saying, right? Do you think you'd gossip

about ask questions around town? If you're a smart business owner, you do something. You engage in some form of intelligence gathering. Get some kind of intel. You know, you didn't a sense engage in some form of spine, maybe, or something similar to spine. And when it comes to some form of secret police, corporations do that all the time right now openly. Have you ever heard of a secret shopper? Companies hire people independent evaluators to pose as normal customers, and then those

people after shopping somewhere and taking notes, report back to HQ about how they were treated. Companies do this to find out how good their customer service is. No one has sent to the gulag. If a secret shopper gets some dirt on them, but in principle, it's the same thing as a KGB.

Human resources, internal affairs. There's all kinds of businesses or departments that possess KGB-esque elements. We meet Saxom and Spine on each other since the Donny Humanity. There have been government-run organized KGB type organizations going back at least as far as the Romans. The Roman Empire began to utilize an organized secret police force specifically dedicated to make sure its citizens weren't doing something they considered traitorous for treasonous at least as far back as the second century CE. Prior to this, empires including Rome had used utilized informers and spies or scouts

to gather some form of intel about rivals outside of its walls and sometimes inside. On the second century CE though, Emperor Hadrian gave a group of intelligence officers a name in uniforms, the Frumentari. The Frumentari were tasked with protecting the Roman Empire from insidious forces within its borders. The Frumentari operated out of their headquarters in Kostra, Pedragrina, which translates to camp on the strangers, which sounds like a place straight out of game with thrones. All right. It sounds like somebody place to end out a game of thrones. All right, sounds like somebody

competing for the Iron Throne. Castro, Peregrina was a military barracks located on Caleon Hill. Probably saying that one around one of Rome's seven, or famous seven hills. And this order started out as grain suppliers to the Imperial Army before eventually evolving into the Empire's own secret police force.

Hated by pretty much everyone in Rome, other than the emperor and other members of the Fromontari, this force persecuted Christians, assassinated political opponents deemed by the emperor to be a threat. They trumped up a variety of false charges to punish whoever they felt needed. They needed to punish in order to keep the empire in order, eventually pressured by Rome's people. Emperor Diocletian, disbanded the Roman tarry in the early third century CE.

Frumentari were also proud of their status within or so proud of their status within the within Rome. They had their rank and emblem positioned on a prominent place on their own gravestones. And here's a little of what was written about this order by a Roman historian in the fourth century CE who said, hatred and vigilance was not confined to his own household but extended to those of his friends by any and by means of his private agents From Antares he even pried into all their secrets and so skillfully that they were never aware that the emperor was acquainted with their private lives until he revealed them self in this connection the insertion of an incident will not be unwelcome, showing that he found out much about his friends. The wife of a certain man wrote to her husband complaining that he was so preoccupied by

pleasures and bass that he would not return home to her, and Hadrian found this out through his private agents. And so when the husband asked for a furlough, Hadrian reproached him with his fondness for bass and his pleasures. Whereupon the man exclaimed, what? Did my wife write you just what she wrote to me? Nah, bro, Zeus told me, God's themselves, we're gonna be have to watch every move of every player of my empire, hatred and seas and knows all.

And JK, my spies have been reading your letters. The Ming Dynasty also had its own secret police. Back in the 14th century, the Genoa or the embroidered uniform guard served under the Ming Dynasty also had its own secret police. Back in the 14th century, the Jinuei or the embroidered uniform guard served under the Ming Dynasty for over 250 years in Imperial China. And apologies if I'm butchered in their name, some words much easier to find pronunciation guides on than others.

They were founded by the Hung Wu Emperor, Zhu Wang Shang in 1368 CE. And the Jinuei evolved from the Emperor's bodyguards to become his eyes and ears around the entire empire. Their role was simply to keep the emperor on the throne by nullifying and eliminating if necessary political opponents. And they located these opponents by brutal or via brutal torture and interrogation. They were authorized to overrule judicial proceedings and prosecuting those deemed as enemies

of the state Granted with full autonomy to arrest and terrigate detained without trial and punish whoever they saw fit However they saw fit without going through any kind of due process The height of their power is the emperor had roughly 14,000 Genoa working on his behalf In 1393 the emperor worried that one of his generals the F. In 1393, the emperor worried that one of his generals, Lawn, you, was plotting against him and the Genoay ended up apprehending and executing roughly 40,000 people on what later appeared to be far less incredible intelligence. As a result of some understandably, it angry, you know, people in the public, a little bit of public backlash, the emperor reduced the

number of Genoay and scaled back their ruthless vigilance and then they were disbanded entirely when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown in 1644. So that's a couple other countries, other nations, you know, historically they've had secret police. Long before the KGB would operate in the Soviet Union, long before the Communist Party, known as the Bolsheviks, overthrew the Russian Tsars early the 20th century. Russia also had secret police. Tsar Ivan the Terrible, hopefully a future suck subject, sent the Oprech Niki out to terrify his citizens and keep them under control. Between 1565 and 1572, this antagonistic secret police force ran around the Russian countryside, terrifying peasants in their monk-like robes that displayed an emblem of a severed dog's head with the broom.

For real, severed dog's head in a broom. Kind of a weird logo. Not sure how they came up with that logo. I don't feel like a lot of thought went into it. It feels like a rough draft that should have been maybe edited or replaced. Real quick meeting. It's all right. What should we put on robes yes yes Alexey I like dogs that is good Alexey it's very good can anyone draw a dog yes Vladimir I can draw dogs head okay all right dogs. Hey, did this. Can anyone here draw anything else? Anything at all? Yes, yes, sir. Jay. I can drop broom.

Okay, I I pretty sure everyone here can draw boom boom whatever I pretty sure even toddlers and blind can draw broom. It did basically one long line with few extra lines thrown on top of the end of one line, but I find that's whatever the broom it is dog head and broom, the logo, no importance. Important thing is torture. Important thing is to execute for no reason. Now, let this grab a ball of cold beet soup and stale rock hard bread to celebrate. The O'Preet Sneaky were fucking ruthless. They love torture. Apparently, one of their favorite torture methods was to boil citizens alive Sweet Jesus. They boiled people and not just peasants They boil the boyars the Russian aristocrats

Then they take their land and property I'll teach him for maybe not being loyal enough to iron the terrible who's smirking that the loyal now You still think dog get broomstick pigs. You're a funny posh Little hard to smirk when When you're being boiled alive, yes? I have joke for you Sasha. What did stupid boyard say to Oprich Niki while he's being boiled alive? Oh god, make stuff! Oh god, please kill me now! He has Pasha, that's right, he screamed at Agony. He beg for end of pain. You hear this joke, no? The Oprisniki would also roast people over an open fire on a spit like a fucking rotisserie chicken. Never short on brutality the Russians. The Oprisniki would also occasionally kill and mass and one particularly horrific massacre in the Novgorod. The Oprisniki murdered up to 30,000 Russian

citizens effectively just destroying the city. The Oprisniki murdered up to 30,000 Russian citizens, effectively just destroying the city. The Oprich Niki were so brutal and quickly became so feared and hated and generated so much public backlash that fearing widespread revolts, Ivan the terrible did abolish them in 1572, just seven years after creating them. He then outlawed the name from ever even being spoken again. That's when you know your member of a particularly awful organization, when a man who would become known to history as Ivan the Terrible is like,

okay, you guys are too much. All right, you guys are a little, I can, a little over the top. Let's scale it back. The KGB, we're also not the first group in the Soviet Union or elsewhere to operate as an organization of spies, gathering foreign intelligence, as I'm sure you already know, spies have been around forever. On the fifth

century BCE, roughly 2500 years ago, a book called The Art of War, a book I've been meeting to read my entire adult life, but have not was written by an ancient Chinese military strategist known to history as Sun Zhu or Master Sun and Sun Zoo advised, one who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in 100 engagements. And he talked about numerous different types of spies, ancient Egypt had spies, ancient Hebrews use spies as well. Spies were prevalent in the Greek and Roman empires, basically roughly every single giant empire

in history has had some kind of spies. The Soviet Union took their use of spies and secret police to a level rarely have ever seen before with the KGB and his predecessors. While the KGB didn't arrive on the scene until the fifties, a communist secret police agency was part of the beginning of the communist's sent to power, arriving with the Bolsheviks in 1917, the year that the long reign of the Zars ended with Nicholas II. A lot of internet sites, you know, other sources, well, talking about the atrocities committed

by the KGB are actually talking about the totality of atrocities committed by a variety of Russian secret police organizations. For example, a lot of sites will talk about Stalin's KGB when in fact, the secret police were not organized under the acronym or initials KGB. Technically initialism is what's going on there is our highly intelligent editor Jesse Dovener's pointed out until after the death of Stalin. So that's not a phrase he would have been familiar with. So let's get to know the KGB and his ruthless Soviet predecessors by jumping into the history

of how they came to be with today's time stock timeline right after a quick word from one of today's sponsors. Today's time stock is brought to you by Dan's nanocart. Dan's nanocart provides you with the freshest, tightest hottest wetest sexiest fruit on the produce market today. Honeydew melons, so soft on the inside, so ripe for thrusting, mouthwatering canelopes, you can easily drill a hole in two, soften the edges and get to work. And of course, bananas, the dual gender genitalia combo of the fruit world, right?

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day of the show. You're a new listener, like, what is happening? That's been discussed at length on the secret suck if you're new listener. And I talk about a sexual experience. I once had with Nana in my new hour of standup as well. Let's get to the real sponsor. Times up today is brought to you by Indochino. I've had my custom fitted, how in slow black chinos for about two months now, and they're still not faded, not coming apart of the seams.

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On August 1, 1914, Russia enters World War One. When Germany declares war against them, we cover this in the World War One suck. We've covered someone about to say in the Stalin-Raz Putin and even in the Chikotilo, what is big deal sucks. I'll just briefly recap it here. Things had been going well for Zardinickles too for quite some time and some early fans of the communist teachings of Karl Marx amongst others. We'll use death and economic chaos, the death and economic chaos Russia experiences in the First World War to end the long reign of

Russians ours and place themselves in power and make shit even worse for the Russian people. On March 8th, 1917, International Women's Day, Hailos Daphina. Demonstrators and striking workers, many of whom are women, took the streets to protest against food shortages and the war. Two days later, the strikes spread across Petrograd. On March 15th, 1917, Tsara Nicholas, the second abdicate, the throne also removes his son from succession. The following day, Nicholas's brother Mikhail announces his refusal to accept the throne. A provincial government is formed to replace the Zara's

government. By late 1917, various communist factions, including Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, have taken over Russia, and as Russia winds down, its involvement in World War I, communism takes hold of the country. Initially, people like it a lot better than they do, than they like life under Zara's rule, at least the poor peasant people did. Instead of totally starving, they were now given a measly quarter pound of bread per day, better just to be super hungry than actually starving, I guess, but as you'll soon see, yeah, things actually get much worse for them.

And the new Communist underlending waste zero time setting up a secret police organization to help consolidate their power. Because they're now fighting other communist, you know, socialist factions for the most part for control of what will become the Soviet Union. There's also some anti-communist factions fighting as Russia falls into chaotic civil war for the next several years. On December 5th, 1917, Czecha, or the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, such a nice name for such a horrible organization was established by Polish aristocrat turned communist Felix

Desiernicki. And of course, he was Polish. Only a Polish person could be talked into becoming a communist when they were already in arrest of crap. Unfuckin believable. Czecha was supposed to be a temporary institution, to be abolished once Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. The original Czecha, headed by Felix, was empowered only to investigate counter-revolutionary crimes.

The initial obligations of this commission were to liquidate, to root, to the root, all of the counter-revolutionary and sabotage activities and all attempts to them in all of Russia, to hand over counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs to the revolutionary tribunals, develop measures to combat them, and relentlessly apply them in real world applications. The commission should only conduct a preliminary investigation. In a short time, Checa acquired powers of summary justice, though. Committee members were judge, jury, and executioner, and they began a campaign of terror against

the property class and enemies of the Bolsheviks. In the first months of its existence, Czechoslovakia consisted of only 40 officials. It would quickly grow to a much larger organization, originally based in Petrograd. On February 23rd, 1918, Czechosent a radio telegram to all Soviets with a petition to immediately organize emergency commissions to combat counter revolutionaries, sabotage and speculation. If such commissions had not been yet organized, February 1918 saw the creation of local extraordinary commissions by the many of them.

By the end of 1918 nearly 400 committees had been formed all over Russia. Membership quickly sourced into the tens of thousands after August 30, 1918, when Fanny Kaplan, a member of a competing socialist party, shoots Lenin twice with a browning pistol trying to assassinate him. Felix usheres in the foundation for the KGB's legendary brutality at this point. 15 ton Iron Monument of Descherninsky, dubbed Iron Felix, would later be erected near the Czechas headquarters and the headquarters of the KGB.

And Iron Felix was a ruthless motherfucker. Stalin, who had plenty of ruthlessness in him, loved Felix. He would later dub him a devout knight of the proletariat. He was so passionate about communism, he would get into heated arguments, this Felix would, with Lenin that would lead into actual fist fights. And the rumored atrocities committed by Czech are read like something out of one of the saw movies. If you are eating or have a queasy stomach, you may need to brace yourself for what's

going to be said next here. Depending on Czecha committees in various cities, methods of torture interrogation and murder included being skinned alive, scalped, crowned with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stone to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked and internally nail-studded barrels. My God, man, forced on a Christ-like barbed wire

crown of thorns on people. Can you imagine the pain literally skinning people alive? That's some Vlad the impaled level shit, but somebody to bear with fucking nails in it, just rolling them around. Check this. The term for members of this organization reported the also poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets of Russia until they became living ice statues, not making this shit up. These are human

beans that they're doing this too, right? Just meat sacks. We haven't done anything other than in many cases being on the wrong end of a false accusation or having had the good fortune to own land or just not being a huge fan of communism or their religious, etc. Others reportedly be headed their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. Uh, yeah. Uh, and I thought serial killer Ed Camper was bad. Ed Camper would have made a great checkist, right? Are you a Bolsheviks mother? Because if you are not, if you are some kind of fancy

pants landowner, your head is going to end up on a stick real quick. I'm going to boil it, skin it, twist it off and put on a stick. And now I'm gonna fuck your factory on a neck. Uh, Czecha is also the agency that overselled the first gulags that Lenin created in August of 1918. Uh, originally they weren't called gulags. Gulag is an acronym that roughly translates in English into main administration of corrective labor camps.

The first camps were World War I prisoner of war camps and then Chukka took over and had them converted into concentration camps, labor camps for political dissidents or anyone else Chukka felt like resting. They would quickly become an immense source of cheap disposable labor for the Soviets. Between 1918 and 1921, Chukka under Lenin's guidance carries out what will become known as the red terror. Victim estimates vary all the way from 10,000 to 1.3 million people. Hard to get an exact number because the Bolsheviks weren't exactly advertising to the rest of the world what giant pieces of shit they were. The red terror was originally justified

and rationalized as a wartime campaign against counter-revolutionaries while the Bolsheviks solidified power. Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik who played a major role in the Russian Civil War, they began in 1917 and lasted until 1922. A man, a Russian secret agent of Sassan would kill a 1940 on behalf of Stalin with an ice axe while he lived in exile in Mexico and criticized Stalin had this to say about the red terror in 1920. The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances than the French Revolution. There was one continuous front on the north and south and the east and west.

Besides the Russian white guard armies of Kholchak, Denikin, and others, there are those attacking Soviet Russia simultaneously or in turn, Germans, Austrians, Czechoslovak's, service poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, and a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger. There are conspiracies rising, terrorists, acts, and destructions of roads and bridges. Yeah, following rule number one in the top of the Russian monarchy, the Soviet Union fell into chaos and check it was created in part to beat that chaos into conformity by any means necessary.

There were fighting a war in a lot of fronts. And those, what do they call the whites? No, what was it I just said in there? The Russian white guard armies. Those by the way were the anti-communist forces fighting within Russia. They call the white, what was it I just said in there? The Russian white guard armies. Those by the way were the anti communist forces fighting within Russia. The Bolsheviks had taken over the military and to keep soldiers fighting for them, Czecha would kidnap the families of disordered soldiers, send those families to the Gulag concentration

camps, to keep the factories running. Czecha agents would beat in prison or execute any striking workers. On March 16, 1919, check a agent stormed a factor in St. Petersburg and more than 900 workers who went on strike were arrested, and then more than 200 of them were executed without trial, just in the following days. Also in March of 1919, the city of Astrakhan, strikers and red army soldiers who joined them or in that city, strikers and red army soldiers who join them or in that city, strikers and red army soldiers who join them were loaded into barges and then thrown by the hundreds

into the Volga River with stones around their necks. Anywhere from 2000 to 4000 of these people were drowned that way. Some members of the white movement of the white guard, again, that loose coalition of kind of anti-communist forces, fighting against the Bolsheviks, between 1917 and 1923, were made an example of in the Ukraine when Czech agents captured them, tied them to planks, and slowly fed them into furnaces.

Man, you're not just killing people when you're doing it, you're like, you are sending a strong message to everyone else who's still alive, just do not fuck with us. Or we will make you wish we would just only kill you. Be afraid, be very, very afraid, do as we wish, or you will make you wish we would just only kill you. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Do as we wish or you will suffer dire consequences. On February 6, 1922, check out what changed his name to the state, political, dictatorial, or GPU. And again, like the initials, I know they don't

always match up to the words or actually they, they, they won't because they're based on the Russian words. The GPU would operate under that title with old friendly Felix still in charge until November 15th, 1923. Also in 1922, the Soviet Union formally forms when the Union Treaty formally joins Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Trans-Cocuses, which were divided in 1936 into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan into the Soviet Union.

The fight for the control of the nation and the wake of the fall of the Zars is over and the Bolsheviks have won. And then they just changed their name to basically the Communist Party of Russia, or the Soviet Union. On November 15th, 1923, the state political dictatorial morphs into the OPGU, the joint state political dictatorial, or yeah, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, direct, he oversaw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of perceived enemies of the state, possibly in the low millions even was involved in numerous other atrocities such as what became known as the de-casticization of Russia, the Bolshevik attempt to perform a total genocide on the

Kossaks, a primarily East Slavic-speaking ethnic group in the Soviet Union, early example of social engineering. Man, the Bolsheviks, on par with the Nazis, in my opinion, is one of the most horrific political groups of all time. Rupert Lusk rule cold, terribly misguided people. Contemporaries of Felix remembered him as being a laid back, pretty jovial fella, fond of spending summers on a sailboat, who loved children almost as much as you love puppies. Papa Felix, as he was widely known, always seemed to have his pockets filled with the hard candy dog treats and kind words for humanity,

for anyone lucky to cross his path. Yeah, right. He was a fucking social path. Oh, and Felix died. The secret police fell under the rule of, uh, uh, Viz, Vizcielav Rudolovic, Minsky, another Polish person. Of course, that's what happened. Hard not to hate my wife's stupid Polish guts when I read shit like that.

Of course, I'm kidding about Polish people. For real though, another Polish veletakes over, uh, Mężynski runs the OP GU until 1934 when he was thought to die of natural causes. At first, however, his successor would later claim to have poisoned him. I'm guessing by just the way these people behaved that he was probably poisoned. And it's like that old saying, live by secretly fucking with people die by secretly getting fucked with, or something like that. Before he died,

Mensinski oversaw Operation Trust, among other horrible operations, this one is where the OPGU had his agents pretend to be members of a secret anti-bolshevik group, they was planning to on overthrowing the communists. They would trick people into joining that group and then kill them. And these people weren't just those limited

to the Soviet Union. Operation Trust, lured enemies of the Bolsheviks such as Boris Vyktovich Sevenkov one of the leaders of the socialist revolutionary party who had fought for control of Russia in 1917 against the Bolsheviks. He was working with Sydney George Riley aka the Ace of spies a Man-E in Fleming models his James Bond character after, the A. Suspies were working with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, an Operation Trust agent infiltrated British intelligence and Lord Savankov back to Russia with false information and then killed him. Good old game of spy versus spy ends with the Soviet victory. On April 25th, 1930, the Gulag was officially established,

that system of labor camps officially established under that name under Stalin as Ulog by the OGPU, order 130 slash 63 in accordance with sovereign comm order 22, dated April 7th, 1930. It was renamed as the gulag and November that year, thank God. First title is just pretty, pretty, bureaucratically boring. The Goologs have, by this time,

roughly 300,000 inmates serving sentences for charges real and imagined all across the Soviet Union. One of the first big projects of the Goolog, first big labor projects. One of many was the White Sea Canal. Built in 20 months, started in 1931 and ending in 1933, the 141 mile long, 227 kilometer mile long canal connects Lake Onega to the white sea. The forest labor's dug and extension of 30 miles that would be pretty difficult today with

modern tools. The Soviets had these enemies of the state digging this canal with tools like pickaxes and shovels, wheelbarrows. Needless to say, it took tens of thousands of these slaves to do it. Historians estimate between 12,000, possibly even upwards of 100,000 people lost their lives building this canal. And then most of them were just buried there in mass graves that the water would then cover

over. Just didn't give a shit about these people. No interest in, you know, giving their remains their families so they get a proper burial. Nope. Just disposable labor. Many of these people had done nothing but been born in the wrong ethnicity or raised in the wrong religion or have a different political opinion than the communist. Reminds me of American slavery in 19th century. Now this is happening in the 20th century in Russia. To make things even worse by the time the canal was built, it was already falling apart. To add to the tragedy, the white sea canal quickly became virtually useless.

It was too shallow for large freight trips, shaped large freight ships, and largely frozen for half the year. In 1934, the functions of the OGPU, which included running the forest labor camps or gulags. We're transferred to the new, now called the, the people's, comma, comma, seriet for internal affairs, aka the NKVD. The NKVD had several leaders from the time it began in 1934 until its end in 1946. Between 1941 and 1946, it would restructure itself several times

where a World War II raged on, but whatever the fluctuating initials happened to be, the result was always the same, spies abroad, persecutions, executions at home. And while these changes and reorganizations, by the way, just political bullshit, power being transferred from one ruthless upper ranking communist official who headed some governmental body to another under the whims of a paranoid dictator who kept killing various underlings when he became concerned that they were out to get him Uh that man being former suck subject Joseph Stalin The NKVD with the Soviet secret police during the great purge Which occurred from 1936 to 1938 during the height of this purge in

1937 and 38 Under the leadership of Nikolai Yehshov, anywhere from just over 680,000 to 1.2 million Soviet people were purged in a number of horrific ways. Not only did the great purge, aka the great terror result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russian people, over a million more were estimated to have been sent to the Gulags, more on that soon. Gulags really not a fun place to say if Yelp had existed, the Gulags would have a solid one-star rating.

Terrible accommodations, worst customer service. Uh, Stalin declared himself not just the head of the Communist Party, but dictator in 1929 during Stalin's rise to power. Some members of the former Bolshevik Party, which in 1925 became known as the all-union Communist Party, began to question his authority. By the mid-30s Stalin started to think that anyone who had questioned him on his way up, anyone who was a former Bolshevik brother, which was really the party of Lenin, anyone too loyal to Lenin in his eyes before he rose to power, anyone who questioned him in

any way or someone who he may, you know, or he felt may question him going forward needed to be fucking purged. The first event of the great purge took place in 1934 with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a prominent Bolshevik leader. Kirov was murdered by the Communist Party or at the Communist Party headquarters by a man named Lenid Nikliev, although his role is debated many speculated that Stalin himself ordered the murder of Kirov. After Kirov's death, Stalin launched his purge, claiming that he had uncovered a dangerous

conspiracy of anti-Styl and his communists. The dictator began killing or imprisoning anyone suspected of being a party to center. And he eventually eliminated all of the original Bolsheviks that participated in the Russian revolution with him in 1917. Man, it's been so long since we suck Stalin. I forgot how much of a piece of shit he really was. Killed all his former brothers and arms. Killed all of his fellow revolutionaries, just to consolidate his power, right? Just for his own ego. And the NKVD was there to help him do it every step of the way. The NKVD sent three member committees into the field

to decide who needed to be killed, right? Who wasn't loyal to Stalin. The accused were tried, found guilty on site and executed, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Evidential standards were very low. A tip off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest, trial, and execution. Use of physical means of persuasion, torture was censured by a special decree of the state, which opened the door to numerous abuses, documented in recollections of victims and members of the NKVD itself. Kirov's death led to three widely publicized trials that successfully wiped out most of Stalin's political rivals and critics. Several former high ranking communists, including Lev Kamenyev, Grigory, Zinoziev, Nukheli

Burkhanin, Alexei Rykov, to name a few, were accused of treason. The trials which became known as the Moscow trials were clearly staged events. And I probably butchered a lot of their names there. The accused admitted to being traders and spies. Later historians learned that the defendants agreed to those, these forced confessions only after being interrogated, threatened and tortured. The NKVD also carried out some ethnic purges. For example, the Polish operation of the NKVD in 37 and 38 was carried out to get rid of

Polish spies and theory, but in reality, it was carried out to get rid of pretty much all Polish people. It resulted in the execution of 111,091 Poles. And I will say when I read that, it did make me think that maybe Stalin wasn't quite as bad as I first thought. That's the first cleansing I can really get behind. If they just put a cleanse a little harder, I could be married to a real human being right now.

And again, obviously, Kitty. The Polish operation of the Great Purges, the largest mass murder of Polish people in history outside of actions that have occurred during war, by the way. Russian secret police also love surveillance. In 1945, a group of Soviet children presented the US ambassador to the USSR a gift. A carved wooden plaque of the great seal of the United States as a show of friendship between the two countries.

What they didn't tell the ambassador was that the plaque contained a secret microphone. This little hidden mic was one of the very first audio surveillance devices ever created to use passive technology to transmit audio signals, making it virtually undetectable to time, allowing it to be used for an extended period of time. This bug plaque allowed the KGB to listen in on conversations in the American ambassador's office for nearly seven years. Wouldn't be found until it was accidentally detected in 1952 by a British radio operator. The operator was confused when he heard conversations between Americans coming from a radio channel near the embassy. The radio channel was one being used by the KGB to listen in on private conversations.

In 1946, the NKVD becomes the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. Also, on top of all this, while all this is going on, the Soviet Union also loses as many as 26 million people in World War II. Russia was a fucking terrible place to live for so many people in most of the 20th century. Two World Wars, over 9 million Russians died in World War One, a number of other smaller wars, military conflicts, various purges, and then you have the secret police torturing and killing people left and right, whether war is going on or not. So much death.

The MGB would exist as that under those initials until 1954. In 1953 for roughly a year, some secret police duties would be conducted by the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, more shuffling. For the most part, the MGB would be the precursor to the KGB. After World War II, the MGB was used to bring the newly acquired Eastern block nations under the thumb of Soviet control. The Nazis and Russians had wreaked havoc on Eastern Europe in the latter years of World War II as they fought from Germany all the way up until about 30 miles from Moscow. And Russia had engaged in a scorched earth policy as they retreated back to Moscow to keep military assets from falling into Hitler's hands. See, even more fun for people in Eastern Europe.

As they scorched the earth and kind of set back, you know, like they obviously destroyed a lot of these kind of Eastern block nations. And then the Soviet set up puppet governments loyal to Russia in these nations like East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Canada. No, getting about that. I should have slept in there to be like, does he not know geography? It's not even fucking close to Europe. And the MGB helped keep these nations in line.

Yugoslavia, while it would remain communist for quite some time, would refuse to live under Stalin's control in 1948. But the other nations remained under Stalin, MGB control for decades. When local leaders criticized Mother Russia, they often paid for that criticism with their lives. I'll let you an example. On June 6, 1947, Bulgarian Parliamentary leader, Nikola Petkov, a critic of Soviet rule,

was arrested in the Parliament building, subjected to a kangaroo court show trial, found guilty of espionage, of espionage, some trumped-up charges, sends to death and hanged on September 23, 1947. You stand up, you end up dead. 1953, Joseph Stalin dies, and everything immediately gets better in the Soviet Union. Demetri Smurnov, better known as Deeter the Leader, takes over the Soviet Union and transforms the Gulags into a chain of water parks and laser tag centers. He makes roller skating, the official sport of the Soviet Union. He immediately has Elvis

come to a national tour. He gets rid of state controlled media and late night talk shows and sitcoms immediately flourish. He focuses less on war and more on dog parks, dog parks and malt shops. It is the fucking best. No, it's not the best. Things do get a little better though. Less mass killings of Russian citizens and widespread torture, but the secret police remain so do the gulags. Jorge Malenkov briefly kind of takes over is the kind of premiere of the Soviet Union, but with less dictator-like power. Under his brief convoluted rule, which is too complicated to go into here, in 1954 the KGB comes to be, the Committee for State Security. Malenkov, who would be succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who would rule under the new title

of first Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until 1964. Kruchev denounces Stalin's purges and ruthless policies. However, was the KGB under Kruchev really any less ruthless than its secret police predecessors? Hungary soon finds out, not really. The KGB is still pretty ruthless. In October 1956, thousands of protesters took to the streets and hungry, demanding a more democratic political system

and freedom from Soviet oppression. In response, common party officials are like, fuck yeah, no problem. Don't even worry about it, bros. All you guys had to do is ask, we're not that bad. Best of luck, we'll be rooting for you. Of course, that did not happen. Common party officials appointed Emre Nadia, a former premier who had been dismissed

from the party for his criticisms of Stalinist policies and as the new premier. Nadia tries to restore peace and ask the Soviets to withdraw their troops. The Soviets do so, but then Nadia takes shit too far, tries to push the Hungarian revolt forward by abolishing the one party communist rule of Hungary. He also announces that Hungary is withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, which was a Soviet blox equivalent of NATO. Soviets are not big fans. On November 4th, 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush once and for all the national uprising. At 5.20am, Nadia announces the invasion to the nation in the grim 35 second radio broadcast declaring Nadiya announces the invasion to the nation in the grim 35-second radio broadcast declaring our troops are fighting the government is in place.

Nadiya was soon captured and then executed two years later for not doing what he was fucking told. And then the Soviets put a puppet dictator into power, Yanyash, Kaddar, a man flown in from Moscow, with the KGB keeps close tabs on. Soviet leader Nikita Kruchev had pledged to retreat from the Stalinist policies and repression of the past, but the violent actions in Budapest suggested otherwise. An estimated 2,500 Hungarians died, 200,000 more fledged refugees, sporadic armed resistance strikes and mass arrests follow for months, causing substantial economic disruption,

and the KGB is there for all of it. Making sure anyone who continues to privately resist Soviet rule is quickly and quietly dealt with, aka executed, right? Fall in line or it's death or the gulags, which is then just death. You have only a symbolic government, Hungarian homeboys. Do as you're told, when you're told or the tanks come back. The KGB, just like its American counterpart to CIA, also heavily interfered in various foreign wars, assisting revolutionaries when their victory would put a pro-soviet regime into power.

Right, the KGB was heavily involved in the good old Cold War. We've talked about it on a number of sucks now. The CIA, they're empowering pro-American revolutionaries and the KGB is empowering pro-Soviet revolutionaries as both the US and USSR set up puppet governments around the world. Both afraid that the other will become too powerful and bring their opposing ideology to their doorstep. Around 1964, when Yasser Erifat rose to power as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. He establishes an alliance with the KGB.

The KGB then began to provide secret training to the PLO's militants who were taking up arms to violently achieve Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, the U.S. is back on the Israeli side of this conflict via the CIA. In addition to training, the KGB begins to ship arms to the PLO, gorillas in spite of an embargo placed upon and Palestinian territories. The PLO also got way into airplane hijackings back in the 1960s, thanks to the KGB. Remember how we learned the DB Cooper suck how incredibly common that was. People used to hijack planes all the fucking time in the 60s.

In 1969 alone, the PLO performed 82 airline hijackens around the world and apparently KGB agents showed them how to do it. The head of foreign intelligence for the KGB at that time, Alexander Sarkovsky would claim that airplane hijacking is my own invention. I don't know if he invented it, but he certainly was into it. The KGB also financed another Palestinian militant group, the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, supplying them with rocket launchers and machine guns, a leader of the PLPF, Wadi Haddad was later revealed to be a KGB agent, while Haddad was in charge of the PLPF.

He carried out multiple hijackings of civilian airplanes. One of those hijackings, the Dawson's field hijackings of 1970, provoked what's known as Black September in Jordan, a bloody civil war that lasted from September 1970 until July of 71. The KGB also interacted with another former SUCK subject, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. They reportedly gave 100 machine guns, automatic rifles, pistols and ammunition to the official Irish Republican Army in 1972. The Irish paramilitary group then ushered in some of the most ruthless acts of terrorism and the, uh, terrorism in the northern Irish conflict known as the Troubles. We talked about that in the IRA suck.

One reason that the KGB and USSR took such interest in the IRA was because they had taken on Marxist leanings in the early 70s and had begun to at least entertain the idea of turning Ireland into a communist state. While the CIA was fucking around in central and South America and Asia and the Middle East, so was the KGB. The Cold War really was a war, a war of contrasting ideologies that got a lot of people killed. The KGB turned numerous Americans and despised to help their side of the espionage war We'll never know how many because I'm guessing you know a lot were never caught For all we know Russian intelligence officers could still be working inside the US today

Actually, that is happening talk about that more later one of the most infamous American KGB operatives was John Walker John Walker this piece of shit was a US Navy specialist nicknamed Smiling John. He was born July 28, 1937 in Washington, DC, and passed away August 28, 2014 in prison in Berner, North Carolina. From 1967 to 1935, Walker shared classified military documents with the KGB as a paid informant. Documents that surely got a lot of people killed for almost two full decades. This dude got away with treason and made a lot of money doing so. The documents he shared including Navy code books, reports on submarine and surface ship movements.

Walker began his clad in desktime or clandestine crime spree alone obtaining documents himself on active duty and then he started to drag some friends and family into his dirty dealings, which is the only reason he was eventually caught. Walker's spiring included a close friend, plus his brother and even his own son. He maintained the ring even after his retirement from the military. Walker's spiring was once described by American officials as among the gravest security breaches in the history of the U.S. Navy. Growing up, Johns early years were marred by his father's alcoholism.

His father would lose his job into clear bankruptcy. Perhaps inspired by his father's shortcomings, John would work hard to make his own money from an early age. Quite a little entrepreneur. He had a paper route, sold a house, a little items door to door, and would work as a movie theater usher. At age 16, he had saved up enough money to buy a car. Walker ended up turning his little crime to make some extra dough, and it led to him dropping out of his crant and Pennsylvania high school, uh, during

his junior year after gets caught and charged with attempted burglary. His only options were to either join the military or go to jail. So he joins the Navy and from 1955 to 1976, uh, he served as a radio man on a series of both surface ships and nuclear submarines. By most accounts, John had an exemplary military career. He would raise from a petty officer to a senior warrant officer and would work with encryption codes and devices and was able to collect detailed information about the movements of the Soviets and US fleets. While on shortly in 1957, he met as soon to be wife Barbara Crowley.

She would eventually be the one to bring him down. Walker would make it through submarine school and later he would receive his top secret cryptographic clearance and pass the personnel reliability program, a psychological evaluation to ensure that only the most reliable personnel have access to nuclear weapons. Walker generally impressed his superiors. His efficiency reports were uniformly excellent and he was assigned to the blue crew of the Polaris, ballistic missile submarine Andrew Jackson, and later the gold crew of the Simon Boliver,

Walker had served with some distinction on board half a dozen vessels and was in charge of the radio shop of a nuclear missile submarine. He was on the path to a nice little military retirement pension, but just like when he was younger and tried getting into burglary to make some extra money, he turned a crime again to make some extra dough. In 1967 Walker walked right into the Soviet embassy

in Washington DC and offered to sell them information he had been gathering. Fucking crazy, right? They didn't recruit him. It was his plan. He came up with this all in his own. His arrival came as quite a surprise for the Soviets as the building was under constant

FBI surveillance. The first man to meet Walker in the embassy was an internal security specialist named Yakao, Lucas Eviks or Luca Savix. Yakao had no idea what to do with Walker and would contact a local KGB station chief Boris Salamatin or Salamateen. The Soviets were always weary of what they called walkins, afraid that they were just going to be double agents pretending to work for the KGB when really they were a CIA agent. You know, that kind of stuff that happened all the time. However, they were

impressed with the documents that Walker brought them and they took a chance. Boris and John talked privately for two hours, according to sources, Walker impressed the station chief by saying nothing about his love for communism, which most of the phony defectors apparently emphasized. Walker made it clear he didn't give a fuck about communism. He just wanted money. He was willing to sell out his country for cash. Boris gave him a few thousand dollars on the spot and then he was smuggled out of the embassy in a car. Boris would later be awarded the order of the red banner, some prestigious Soviet war award for recruiting Walker. He even received a promotion to Deputy Chief of Intelligence,

all this because Walker ambled his way into the embassy like a dumbass. Walker's hopes were to reportedly repair his personal financial problems which he hoped would also mend his troubled marriage. The Soviet agreed to work with John and would deliver several substantial payments in return for photographs and photocopied cryptographic keys, technical manuals, and other material. Why did Walker do this?

Was it just about the money? Not entirely. Walker apparently was dissatisfied with American politics. He believed that the assassination of JFK had been committed by our own government. And I, my, myself, have gotten some shit for since I also believe that JFK's killing was a very, the very least condoned by by the CIA if not planned and carried out by them I know I know Walker would later write in his memoir that his mind had changed from being an ultra conservative John

Bertrand supporter in the 1950s to a Cold War denier He believed the US government's hype around the danger of the USSR was just propaganda The farce of the Cold War and the absurd war machine at spawn to come in and we're never growing pathetic joke to me so much it told john walker about the gulags we're gonna we're gonna dive deep on the gulagatrosties here again soon and and that's it was no joke i was no propaganda so it's wanted to spread communism as far as wide as they could and with it pain misery and death would have surely followed

in nineteen seventy six walker would retire for the navy begins own private detective business, where he would continue to obtain sensitive documents from a fellow radioman, Jerry Whitworth. Other contributors to the treason were Walker's brother Arthur, who himself was a retired lieutenant commander, who worked for a defense contractor, and also John Sun Michael, who was a petty officer assigned to a nuclear aircraft carrier. Walker would sometimes meet with Soviet contacts and locations outside of the US and places like Casablanca, Morocco, and Vienna. After almost two decades of treasonous fuckery, John Walker was arrested in May of 1905 after his ex-wife

Barbara and one of his daughters turned him into the FBI. Yeah. Yeah. When your wife knows that you are a communist spy, probably got to stay married or have him killed if you don't want to get cut. He was charged with passing Navy secrets to the Soviets. His entire spiring was rounded up and charged. John agreed to plead guilty and provided detailed account of the materially passed the Soviets in exchange for reduced sends for his son, Michael. Michael was released from prison in 2000. John received a life sentence and died in prison. His brother Arthur was also given a life sentence and a $250,000 fine. Naval radio and witworth did not plead guilty, plead in ignorance. US authorities didn't believe him and send the same to 365 years in prison and find him $410,000. So he

also, you know, he lived out the rest, he was going to live out the rest of his days in prison. After nearly two decades, the FBI was finally able to end the biggest espionage leak in US history. And I got to say stories like that one do make me feel a little more sympathetic to 1950s McCarthyism, which we talked about in Maryland and Rosa, other episodes, right? No wonder there was a red scare going on in America after World War II and politicians were obsessed with communist possibly being amongst us. There really were communist amongst us. And while I do believe in the freedom to have whatever political notions you want to in

this country, also really, really have no interest never living in a communist society. All right, if that ever happens in this country, I am an abound to fuck out the first opportunity. KGB was doing all sorts of spy shit. They had secret agents hidden all over the world that hidden gadgets set up all over the place.

During, and most spy gadgets, by the way, just for some type of camera or or listing device. During the Cold War the KGB became very good at bugging buildings and listing in on conversations. They once bugged an entire floor of a hotel with audio surveillance microphones for 20 years. In the early 1970s tourism began to flourish in the Soviet satellite country of Estonia. the USSR saw this as an opportunity to bring money into the struggling economy of Estonia, and the KGB sought as an opportunity

to spy on capitalist foreigners. In 1972, the KGB took over the entire top floor of Hotel Verou in Estonia, and wired most of the hotel with sophisticated audio surveillance devices. The hotel was an area that was frequently traveled by international businessmen. 60 rooms in the hotel were permanently wired with secret microphones, other rooms could be bugged at a moment's notice. On the outside,

hotel veru appeared to have 22 floors, in truth it had a secret 23rd floor, which housed KGB agents and the technology that they used to spy on all the guests at the hotel. The KGB worked out of that hidden top floor for two decades, until the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the surveillance operation in 1991. Imagine all the shit those KGB agents had to have heard so much hotel sex, so much jerking off, so much. How would you like to be the guy listening to those conversations or those moments, some lonely businessmen know fapping away before he falls asleep there had to have been regular guests that they had inside jokes about. Well it looked like lotion Larry that's checking again for a week. Why you calling lotion Larry? The meter in New Guy want to know why he called lotion Larry. Larry put

more lotion on cock in one night and then wife put on hold body in one year. Man must have smoothest cock with healthier skin than all of Estonia. Okay, let's take a break from spy stuff. To talk about inhumane torture and widespread fear and death in 1973. Now infamous book called the Gulag Archipelago is published. The Gulag Archipelago is a three volume non-fictional nightmare text, written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Alexander Sol Jañitsin. It was first published in 1973, followed by an English translation in the following year, covers life in the Gulags through a narrative constructed from various sources, including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and so Janitsyn's own experience

as a gulag prisoner. Is it true? Probably. Natalia, Reshnosevich, fucking whatever. Natalia, bullshit name. His first wife would later announce it, right, in her memoirs that the gulag archipelago was based on, by the way, that name. Somebody of you guys like, what can you say the names right?

How can you fucking ever see this shit? Anyone who's like, oh, that's so easy to say all these names. Say a bunch of them quickly, you know, out loud. Not just in your head. Don't just read them. Say a loud to a friend, a series of Russian names if you're not Russian or speak Russian. See how good you do. These names are unbelievable R E S H E T O V S K A Y A

WrestleTough Stas Kakatsuki K I I I Fuck a nonsense That's why people Americanized names when they came over to the on the boats too because I'm a little pissed about that. Oh, it's so fucked up to do it America eyes people's names. It wasn't out of ego. It was because none of us over here could fucking say any this shit. Right? Do you want to have the rest of your life be reservations of, uh, uh, we're going to have a, uh, party of three for, uh, God, God, damn it. Party of three for us. Cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts,

cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts. Or do you want to be like party of three for Deeter or Anderson, right? I can make it easy. Um, his first wife though, this guy's first wife would denounce his, uh, Gula Garter, Archipelago. He would say that she would say that it was just based on campfire folklore. Wasn't objective facts. Uh, she said she was perplexed at the Western media and accepted this book as a solemn ultimate truth, saying in significance, it overestimated and wrongly

appraised. Why did she say that though? Well, British intelligence agents would later claim that her memoirs were all part of a KGB propaganda campaign. But she didn't just write this, you know, on her own. It was orchestrated by Soviet leader Yuri and Endropov in 1974 to discredit, uh, soul, fucking whatever, souls, it's in uh... and uh... may feel like the gulags weren't that bad after all you know just but

just please do not take silly book for serious Alexander joke gulags more like summer camps didn't really anything else arts crafts uh... sporting games robots come song is too much fun gulags so much fun it that the real crime should be being able to spend summer camp in Gulag Crime should be having time of life in Gulag holding hands with beautiful young Russians singing songs

Popular Gulag songs like this is your Gulag. It is much fun place from water polo To Hula hoopin. This is fun gulag. We go skin deep in no one say mean words. Everyone eat shrimp fish. Right. It's that kind of kind of vibe. No, it wasn't. It was fucking terrible. Let's look at it. Some of what the good like archipelago described in 1973.

Alexander said that prisoners were literally worked to death all of the time. Many were white color professionals who suddenly found themselves doing hard labor for the first time in their lives. How much is, how terrible is that? One day you're a doctor, which didn't love communism

quite as much as you should, or maybe you had the wrong ethnicity. And then the next day you're digging a canal for 16 hours a day with the fucking shovel and not giving enough food to make it to the rest of the year. Many, if not most of the Goulag prisoners were not guilty of any actual crimes. During the reign of Stalin, Goulag camps would increase in population considerably. The grueling labor prisoners endured was often based on their locations,

like if the Goulag was in a forested area, they'd have to cut a bunch of trees down. If it was near a mine, former teachers and writers and artists would become minors. If it was near a beach, like a, or near like a resort, that would be, that would be okay. Prisoners would end up being forced to become like lifeguards, poolside bartenders, masseuses. Yeah, right. I like the Soviets had beach resorts, right? Beaches out of four mass graves, like all Russian land. There was no safety standards for these workers no human resources departments to complain to they weren't given proper clothing or equipment in

Many cases they were forced to do manual labor and rags in the midst of freezing winners It died from exhaustion or from the cold frequently starvation was a common common problem especially during periods of war Rations would be sent to the front lines and gulag prisoners will be left with almost nothing war, rations will be sent to the front lines and gulag prisoners will be left with almost nothing. They were fed their, their pica or rations based on how much work they were able to do. Since even the hardest working inmates were barely given enough food to keep moving. The weakest prisoners didn't fare well at all and often starved. Viti Shalamov, a former inmate who survived the gulag system for 20 years, over 20 years because he was apparently a tough son of a bitch, Describe the hunger like this in

Koleima, Tails, a series of short stories he wrote. Each time they brought in the soup, it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick, we couldn't believe it and ate as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach, they're remained a sucking pain. We've just been hungry for too long. You can imagine that. Think about like what we can plan about in this country. Like even if you're, you're not making much money at all, odds are you can get as much Taco Bell as you would like, right? And like we make fun of that and that's kind of like fucking Taco Bell. All right, have fun in the bathroom. These

guys would have literally killed for a gordita. They would have fucking killed a close family member if they were given, you know, a week's worth of Mexican pizza or, you know, Chalupas. It's just, I can't even imagine like being so hungry that you're crying, hoping that your shitty fucking soup will be thick. Oh God, that is so much sadness. Oh, I hope soup thick for me. I kill for thick soup.

If one piece of bacon could be in soup, I kill whole family to eat that. Prisoners on the Brinkestarvation, referred to as doggie, the jagas, whatever, or goners, Russian secret police guards and officials who ran the gulags well aware of this. One AKVD chief explained it this way, 1938, saying, among the prisoners, there are some so ragged and lice-reddened that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point

of losing any resemblance to a human being. Lacking food, they collect garbage, and according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs. God, my God. The gulag system was at the height of its scope and brutality under Stalin. Stalin didn't see gulag prisoners as people.

They were just disposable cogs in the Soviet progress machine. Prisoners were called Zix, a slang term for someone considered completely lacking in value. Food was so scarce in Stalin's gulags that it became a catalyst for violence. Prisoners would hoard basic goods like tobacco, so in needles clothing and of course food,

creating a deadly and strict inmate hierarchy. People were murdered over eating utensils, shoes and of course rations. The Soviets had weaponized food itself to make the Google ads even worse. The saddest run of these camps would introduce actual violent criminals in the prison or mix. I mean, it just, why don't you think

like it can't get worse? You're like, oh, then they also made it this much worse. The Soviets would put violent criminals in the prisoner mix. I mean, it's just, why would you think like it can't get worse? You're like, oh, then they also made it this much worse. The Soviets would put violent criminals in with the regular population to do the bidding of the state and just to terrorize prisoners further. These hardened criminals set up prison gangs, found themselves at the top of the prison kind of good like hierarchy, including getting the most food.

These criminal gangs would distinguish themselves with tattoos. Do a little Google search of Russian prison tattoos if you want to see pictures of some of the scariest motherfuckers alive. Hard looking dudes. Women arguably had it worse than the gulags to survive their imprisonment. Women would also have to, would often have to partner with a camp husband and or perform constant sexual favors with guards for better treatment. Women were subjected to the same grueling physical labor as men, the same meager rations, and

then additionally a lot of sexual assault. To get an even better look into life in the gulags before we jump back into the rest of the timeline since we're already kind of deep diving on it right now, I want to talk about another book, Technically the graphic novel called Drawings from the Gouleg by Danzig Baldihev, a retired Soviet prison guard. Danzig, board of 1925, worked for decades in the Gouleg, started in 1948. He died in 2005, and in 2010, a collection of hundreds of his old drawings, or sorry, over a hundred of his old drawings,

documenting Gouleg atrocities was published. Some historians don't consider Danzig's drawings to be historically the most factual source of what happened, but he did work in the system based on everything I've read about the Gulaegs. I wouldn't be surprised if everything he documented did in fact happen. Danzig's visionettes, or vignettes, excuse me, captured all sides of the atrocities committed. He actually drew 130 images with captions describing the scene.

Some sketches are based on what he saw. Some are based on what prisoners told him happened before he worked in the Gulax system. Supposedly, once the KGB found out what he was doing, not only did they not recommend him, they actually supported his documentary of Gulax life for whatever reason. That's what he claimed anyway.

You really have to see them to get the whole story, but I'm gonna try and describe of them a bit for you. And I know we've already spoke of a particularly grotesque event, but this next section is going to be especially dense with graphic descriptions of horrific torture and sexual sadism. So I feel like it warrants the segment we haven't thrown in an episode in a while, super scary stuff, which we will jump right into after a word from today's final sponsor. Time suck is brought to you today by the Great Courses Plus.

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Link in the episode description, button link in the time suck app and on the time suck website. Now we can get into some super scary stuff. Some of the Danzig drawings focus on the horrific treatment of female prisoners. Any of the women and girls were often stripped naked during interrogation. In one of the drawings, the caption reads, women, enemies of the people, were inspected naked before being sent to certain labor. Those who agreed to become sex slaves of the administration were assigned to easier work. Others were sent for logging and other heavy labor were put into cells and tortured with

hunger. Another gruesome cartoon says, women were put into thug cells where they were brutally humiliated in gang raped. Afterwards, most of the victims committed suicide, hang themselves, cut their veins, ate soil, etc. And I have no idea for sure what he means by ate soil, but I'm guessing literally like eating dirt. What a terrible way to off yourself. I did look into it a little further and apparently some people have committed suicide

over, you know, in history in that way. My God, literally eating dirt until I guess you choke yourself out. I can't imagine how much pain and hopelessness like one has to be drowning in to eat dirt in an attempt to kill themselves. The gulags were hell on earth. Another one of the drawings, excuse me, depicts more rape and the caption reveals how female

gulag prisoners had no one to complain to or at least no one who would actually help them. It says, some perverts from the NKVD love to do this with young women and especially girls from enemies and enemy family members. Neither oral nor written complaints had been reviewed by officials, honest and principled state attorney staff members were exterminated. The NKVD had unlimited right to take away any citizen's life while state attorney office became a puppet accomplice of the NKVD with no own rights.

Sexual slavery was common in the gulags. One of the drawings reads prison guards are selling live goods to thugs during the transportation. Women from Germany, Poland, and Baltic states were valued, especially and gang raped. Some kingpins had a property of two to three such women. Another one of Danzig's caption speaks to the immense scope of this treatment, saying with hunger, disease, and slave labor millions of enemy and Kulak women were murdered by Communists. And all this talk apparently really pisses off one of our characters here on the suck.

Uh, I can actually hear him kind of approaching former Houston Pimp of young male prostitute who has somehow transformed into kind of a feminist opponent of certain sexual work and sex trafficking. Uh, chicken Joe would, would like to say something to you all. And Bob, Bob, playboy and Bob-Bob. The Chicken Joe can roll. Everybody knows some strong sexual flow. Chicken Joe is a man with pimping on his resume,

but even he's against Gulaxx sexual slavery. Chicken Joe might have sold some ass for cash, but he never treated these chickens like worn out pieces of trash. Someday Joe may pay for all the pimping Joe's done, but there's still a chance for redemption for my final set of the sun. No such chance for the Gula gangs and guards, the skin sins they committed, don't make the souls to Scott and Ha. That was chicken Joe speak for even a hardened former pimple like himself is shocked by the sexually

violent acts perpetrated by the Soviet secret police in the Gulags and he thinks that their heinous deeds are actually unforgivable. And yes, chicken Joe does talk about himself in the third person sometime. And yes, chicken Joe is apparently retired, at least from the moment from pimping. The one time pimples is more of again, a human sexual rights activist now. And I know shit just got weird for you new listener, but some of us, some of us love getting weird. Most of us here love getting weird. Okay, now we're back to the topic today.

Many of Danzig's drawings revealed specific methods of torture. In one image, there is a man being held down by guards on a table. The caption reads, a prisoner who went on hunger strike is being forcefully, forcefully, forcefully, there we go, fed through his nostril. According to laws of Soviet humanism, only those who had a normal body temperature could be shot. Not totally clear what the Danzig means by this. Exactly. To me, it sounds like some prisoners were fed to strengthen them up just so they

could be executed. How insane is that? Another image features a very bloody man on the floor being stepped on his neck is being stepped on and kicking, kicking the balls. It reads, I am English, French, American, Japanese, Italian, German, and other spy. So they treat it as spies against another drawings of a Russian guard pissing on a tied-up man who's being held down by another guard. The victim looks like he also has a severed penis or possibly fecal matter in his mouth. It reads, sprinkle him with holy water for a better afterlife. I'll give him snow so bulls won't walk into him too soon. Danzig, maybe not so great with the captions, or maybe just the translation gets a little

weird. Maybe some sort of Russian gallows humor is being lost to me with some of these. Just sprinkle holy water upon that man. And by sprinkle holy water, I mean cut dig off and shove it mouth. You get it? I guess joke, not translate well. Danzig describes so many diabolically creative forms of torture through the Council of Survivors and Guards, the NKVD used pumps, soldering irons, electric cushion stabbing

and hanging to reprimand prisoners. Bottles were shoved into vaginas and anuses of people who misbehaved. Red hot crowbars were also said to be shoved into people's orifices. There are also, and this is going to be real bad, as if that stuff wasn't, or I just said, there's also accounts of live rats being placed into a heated bucket under a poor son of a bitches anus to force the rat inside of his butthole to do whatever a rat does in that situation, which I can only imagine has to be extremely unpleasant. I mean, do you have any other thought

when a rat starts to push inside of you other than no, oh, perfect. This is exactly how I wanted to go out. Danzig also draws images of various executions. Some of which are done by beheading. Many of these were decided on not by the guards, but by the court of thieves. Those vicious Russian prison gangs who decided how to torture and who to torture oftentimes. One image of a guy having a burned poker shoved up his ass by the guards, the caption reads, after we'll fuck this scoundrels ass, he'll be quick to remember how to make sabotage against Soviet regime and party in university with his cybernetics.

Again, kind of, kind of strange translation. Sometimes the cold Russian winter weather was used to help torture prisoners. One images of a guard sprained down the prisoners with water outside. It says new arrivals who are waiting in so-called septic were watered with fire host from guard tower. While the outdoor temperature was negative 30 negative 40 after several hours of more waiting covered with ice, they were finally let inside when the administration wanted to. I imagine a lot of them died.

Another caption reads with the most brutal and horrible medieval tortures, the NKVD was beating out of innocence completely absurd confessions like spine for capitalist and trot and died, some made up country name. Most of the NKVD officers were just sadists that were highly valued because, you know, their capability to fight against the enemy. A few of Danzig's drawings were about the origins of the Gulags, one caption reads, during initial construction of the gulag political prisoners, often were embarked in the middle of nowhere in order to build the prison camp right in the spot. They did so at the daytime, sleeping in the pits they dug at night, hardly a quarter of those people managed to survive until spring.

They call these pits wolf pits and sometimes after completion of a job, workers would just be executed in mass and tossed into the pit and then, you know, covered up. One of Danzig's drawings says such mass murders had begun in 1920s in a US, or US, L.O.N. Solvetsk, special camps command, the predecessor of, uh, Guleg, Intelligencia, always was an enemy of the Stalin's, of Stalinism. Sorry, it's such a fucking weird broken grammar. It's hard to read. During 1930s, groups of enemies deceitfully forced to go to middle of wild, wild step or tundra, where shot with machine guns, survivors finished on spot. Sometimes children were taken to the gulags and many were

born there. Kids born or raised from an early age in the gulags were often stunted physically and mentally. Danzig explains that like this, saying because of overpopulation and special orphanages for traders to the motherland, enemy children were executed in many railroad stations, central isolation cell of BAM prison camps. It was considered that after reaching the age of majority, they would become threat to existing system. Another drawing talks about the process

of interrogating children. The NKVD supported interrogation of parents by their own children. Actually, it says deletion of parents by their own children. Collaborators were praised like heroes, but some of them were forced to cooperate through beatings in the entire country. They were a campaign of public parent renunciations. Children were forced to give through beatings. In the entire country, there were a campaign of public parent renunciations.

Children were forced to give public confessions for the mass media and condemn spies on medians. Some teachers forced pupils to write essays like, what do you think about a rest of marshals and others? After giving such essays, many pupils deprived of parents and sent to special orphanage camps. According to Danzig's drawings, guards rewarded for their cruelty. In one picture, the caption says, interrogated enemies were standing at their feet for days without rest, food, water, and sleep, suffering, feet swelling. When victims were falling down unconscious,

they were beaten, forced to stand again. For their efforts, guard butchers were awarded and honorably retired at ages 50 to 60. And the tales of tear just keep coming in common, to avoid digging graves in the Permafrost, the NKVD would supposedly drown inmates in river ice holes and just let them sink. When they had to dig some graves in the frozen lands, they would use dynamites, explosions to make mass graves, and then of course, fill them in. So it's in their secret police, Gouladi guards couldn't have cared less about the average Russian person or just humanity in general. They completely dehumanize these people, just like the Nazis completely dehumanize the Jewish people.

And I keep thinking of the Nazi Holocaust as I read about the Goulai, it feels as though this was a Holocaust, it just went on for decades. Danzig explains various methods Gulaig interrogators used to gather information for prisoners, a common torture method was to cut off oxygen. Danzig reports it like this. During interrogation, special goons called hammers and axes, as well as investigators themselves, often were wrapping victims heads with rubber bags. After a few times, victims suffered mouth, nose, ear bleeding. A couple more than we're done with the shit. The next one requires some especially sadistic and misogynistic prison guards.

One of Dan's Excaption reads, young women that refuse to have sex with gulag butchers were thrown to ant hills or tied to trees for ants and mosquitoes. To let ants eat the victim from the inside, sometimes a pipe made of birch bark or hollow stem was inserted into vagina and legs tied spread. Often female thugs were helping butchers to do this. Can you ever come back to being a decent meat sack, a decent human being after you've done something that shitty? Like, can the human soul ever recover

from going to a place that dark? Did anyone ever go from being like that prison guard to somebody who, you know, helped elderly women cross the street? Sadly, I bet some did. It is amazing how well the human mind can compartmentalize. It's a trotious behavior. Reminds me of Chiquitilo stabbing a raping young girls and coming home to being a loving father and grandfather. I hope hearing about behavior like this is always so much shocking to me. Man, we can be so cruel to each other. A lot of the torture was based on humiliation as much as it was pain.

Danzig writes for humiliation, this intelligent, intelligent C.M.N., so some spy supposedly, was chained, provided with a provd news paper, and forced to defecate in his own bowl. And then one can assume he was forced to literally eat his own shit. Dan Zigg describes the gulag meals that didn't consist of one's own shit here saying bowl of slum gulian and 300 grams of bread where all the man could hope after working entire day outside in cold. Trying to get a fake satiety, prisoners boiled bread and salted water, swelling, tag on foot, and prison graveyard were the result. The inmates were saying Gulag was worse than Nazi concentration camp. And the last drawing I'll mention here today, Danza goes into detail about the severity of

prisoners' starvation, saying, having no possibility to stock up on food in distant northern camps, getaway thugs, often were taking inexperienced inmates with them to kill and eat. In prison slang, such victims were called calves, like a baby cow. Even the approximate number of eaten calves is unknown. Again, my God. I don't know exactly what you're talking about with getaway thugs, but I do understand what you're saying here when people were just literally, you know, put in the gulags almost to be eaten. All of these atrocities the Gulags were.

And the Gulags were, you know, the Russian secret police has made an instrument of punishment for dealing with internal dissension. Now let's talk about what they're doing abroad, you know, during let's jump into the mid 70s, talk about some more spy stuff. This time, let's talk about a KGB agent who worked in the US. Soviet spies regularly embedded themselves all throughout US culture. It's believed that they still do. Um, numerous KGB agents have infiltrated the CIA, FBI, NASA, other important government agencies, stolen billions of dollars worth of important technological and military information. One KGB spy that the American authorities eventually did discover was a man known to the

West as Jack Barsky. Jack's real name was Albert Dietrich, born Germany, and based on him being caught and confessing into how he snuck into America, we're able to get a little bit of insight into how the KGB trained its spies because of him. Dietrich started down the road to espionage in the mid 1970s. He was on track to become a chemistry professor at an East German university, but his talent and intelligence caught the eye of KGB recruits. And he was sent to Moscow to be taught to behave like an American.

It's not like you got to turn the KGB down when they recruited you. Now without a good chance you wouldn't die. Soon after he was sent to the US, this idiotic adventure, as he now calls it, had a lot of appeal to an arrogant young man, a smart young man, pumped up by the idea of traveling around the world and living above the law. So this particular guy, you know, he was kind of excited, I guess he got recruited. I was sent to the United States to establish myself as a citizen and then make contact at the extent possible to highest levels possible of decision makers, particularly political

decision makers, Jack wrote. Dietrich, who is 29 at the time, first was sent to New York in the fall of 1978, posing as a Canadian nationalist because no one suspects a Canadian, I guess. Right? They're called William Dyson. Upon reaching the States, the fictional William Dyson vanished into thin air, only to reemerge as Jack Barsky. Jack arrived with nearly flawless, uh, with the nearly flawless American accent,

high confidence in $10,000 cash in his pocket. According to Dietrich Memoir, deep undercover, the name Jack Barsky was taken from a real person named Jack Barsky who died in 1955 with the age of 10. This fake name had no work educational history, not even a social security number, then Dietrich had to come

up with plausible excuses for all that. To explain his lack of a background, he told people he had a tough start in life, talked to the about how he had to drop out of high school in New Jersey, said that he then worked for years on a remote farm until he decided to give life another chance to move back to New York City. He was able to use this story to get a job, delivering parcels to the New York elite as a bike riding delivery boy in Manhattan. And while he was doing this, he continually updated Moscow on his progress and weekly radio

transmissions, letters written in code, and he would deposit microfilm at drop sites all over New York. He was also given fake passports to help facilitate his trust back to Moscow every two years for debriefings. During his trips, he would line a link back up with his German wife, Galinday, and his young son, Matthias, who had no idea why dad was going away for two years at a time. They were told he was doing top secret, but very well paid work in Kazakhstan. Dietrich was tasked with profiling potential American KGB recruits, putting together accounts

of the mood of the U.S. during U.S. of the US during US versus USSR events like the downing of a Korean airline flight by a Soviet fighter in 1983. He also passed along a treasure trove of stolen software to the Russians over the years. Eventually like a lot of other undercover agents, Dietrich started to rethink what he'd been taught about the US. Started thinking we weren't all evil capitalist monsters. Realize that the communist party line that the west was an evil system on the brink of economic and social collapse was bullshit.

A man named Vasiliy Nikitich Mithroskin eventually discovered the true identity of Jack Barzky. Vasiliy was a KGB defector who left Russia with the treasure trove of Soviet secrets, including Jack's true identity. He informed the FBI and then the FBI watched Jack closely for three years to make sure he was in fact in KGB agent. They even bought the house next door to his house to monitor him and bugged the shit out of Jack's house. And reading stuff like that makes me wonder if my own house or office is bugged or if yours is, I mean, it's possible. I think it'd be foolish to think that these surveillance methods aren't used anymore. I mean, who cares if they're

technically illegal, I'm sure they were technically illegal then, and still employed in the interest of national security. The FBI eventually apprehended Jack after they heard the following argument with his wife, Penelope. By the way, this is what I did. Yeah, because you did eventually get an American wife. By the way, this is what I did. I am a German. I used to work for the KGB and they told me to come home and I stayed here with you and it was quite dangerous for me. That is what I sacrificed. Then the FBI swooped in and arrested him, but Jack was lucky.

And our researcher says he passed the lie detector test and then it was released and not put on trial. And I bet he wasn't put on trial because he made a deal. And because it would make American intelligence look bad, that it took them so long to find him, right? Some kind of don't prosecute me. And I'll tell you all kinds of inside shit about the Soviet type of deal. Not only do the FBI not charge him with anything, they also helped him become a citizen of the US. He still lives in the US today. He is 69 years old right now. Lives in Atlanta with his third wife, Shana, and their daughter Trinity.

Funny twist to the story, the FBI agent who posed a Dietrich's neighbor and interrogated him after he was detained ended up being such a close friend that he is Trinity's godfather. I love that man. Let's balance it with $9.75 now to talk about an American CIA agent, the KGB was able to flip Aldrich Ames. Aldrich Hayes and Ames was born in Wisconsin on May 26, 1941, the son of a CIA analyst, a well-educated man, Aldrich attended the University of Chicago, for two years would later get a degree from George Washington University in 1967.

Ames became a CIA trainee while in school in 1962 would go on to recruit US spies among Soviet nationalists while he was posted in Ngaraturky from 1969 to 1972. He would live in the United States until 1901 then when he was then sent to Mexico City. There he met his second wife, a Colombian named Maria Del Rosario Casa DuPuy. He recruited his future wife to work for the CIA. They married in 1995 while he was based at CIA headquarters in Washington, DC, and then he would be posted a Rome from 1996, 1999. And then in 1995, assisted by his wife, Ames began selling American intelligence secrets

to the Soviets. He retired from the CIA but was still able to get his hands on some of the US's most sensitive information. At least 10 CIA agents working undercover in the USSR were executed as a result of Aldrich's information. How insane is that shit, man? This guy sold out, you know, this country and got at least 10 of his former colleagues killed.

Like, I know we've all worked with people. We might fantasize about having killed, you know, Reverend Dr. Joe, but this son of a bitch basically did that by the end. Uh, Ames had revealed the name of every US agent operating the Soviet Union for their services. The Russians paid Aldergent's wife Maria over 2.7 million. Uh, they were finally arrested in 1994. Uh, this was the most money the Soviets had paid to America, uh, or to an American for spine that we know of all bridges unexplainable increase in wealth is actually what put him on the

fby's investigatory radar after his arrest in february twenty first nineteen ninety four by the fby in arlington virginia all dritch was convicted of espionage given a license uh... he worked for the cia for thirty one years and then worked for the russians for almost a decade maria aims to give in a five-year sense for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit espionage. The 1998 film Aldrich Ames, Trader Within, tells more of their story if you want to watch

it. I have not seen it, but wanted to pass that along. One more KGB related to spy tale here. Let's move to 1988 and talk about Alexander Litzvin, Litzvinenko. Alexander joined the KGB in 1988, worked as a spy until the Soviet Union dissolved. He continued his career by fighting terrorism and organized crime and chechnya as a member of the most secret division of the Russian federal security service or the FSB. Now the FSB is the Russian secret police agency that still exists today. One of them in 1998, Alexander's life started to fall apart after he went public and said

that an FSP official had ordered him to assassinate one of Russia's most powerful men, Boris Barazowski, a Russian billionaire who was staunchly opposed to Vladimir Putin before Boris died in 2013. For taddling on the FSP, they threw him in prison for exceeding his authority at work Alexander escaped during the court process ended up in london he would publish two books including blowing up russia the secret plot to bring back kgb terror uh... his other book was also about him blaming the sfb for ongoing crimes against

the russian public the second book even implements the fsb in training al-Qaeda militants and uh... says that the fsb played a role in 9-11. In 2006, at the age of only 43, uh, little Vinenko died from a mysterious illness, uh, and then we came to find out he was poisoned, not just by any old poison by, by, uh, he was poisoned by a radioactive isotope. Kind of strange, right? Before his death, he just told the New York Times that he thought the FFSB poisoned the Ukrainian presidential candidate Victor Yushenko in 2004 with the set by the same means. Okay, now let's talk about the fall of the KGB. December 25, 1991,

this is the day the Soviet Union officially dissolved. The date of independence given to the republics of the union of Soviet socialist republics. The Soviet Union have been collapsing for years. Now it was official. Nations like Armenia, Ukraine and Belarus now had their independence. With no more Soviet Union, there was no more KGB. The Iron Curtain fell to Cold War to officially ended. New Russian President Boris Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. Communism soon ends in Afghanistan, Albania and Gola, Congo, Kenya, Yugoslavia and other nations. Boris is the first president of the Russian Federation. Again, the KGB ceases to exist. However,

secret police agencies do continue to operate out of Moscow. One is called the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, or as we've said the FSB. The FSB formally established in 1995, but it had already been operating for a couple years. The FSB employed about 66,000 uniform staff, including about 4,000 special forces troops. It also employs a border service of about 200,000 border guards. The BBC has referred to them recently as Putin's Vladimir Putin's elite spy club. The FSB is tasked with tackling perceived threats

to the Russian state. Current Russian leader Vladimir Putin ran this agency before he came to power. Part of the SB's job is to prevent any pro-Western color uprisings in Russia like Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution and Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. In 2002, the assassination of an Arab jihadist commander in Chechnya known as Katov was attributed to the FSB. His check, uh, check in comrades said he'd received a letter laced with poison.

And our most recent presidential election, the FSB is thought to have targeted voters online with disinformation campaigns and spread online propaganda to sway the election Many believe the FSB is Continuing to fuck with America by spreading disinformation online right now creating fake websites You know creating bots that retweet and repost false information aka fake news Some believe the FSB to be behind the entire pizzicate conspiracy we already did a full suck on. Also, the GRU is another current descendant of the KGB. The GRU, aka the main directorate of the general staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian

Federation, is Russia's primary foreign intelligence agency. They do all the overseas spine, well, or most of it. It's very complicated. The GRU is known for its ability to track and neutralize foreign enemies often before a task occur. And again, there are other Russian intelligence agencies. There is a foreign intelligence service or the SVR, the civilian foreign intelligence agency of the Russian Federation. It's the direct successor to the first chief director of the KGB, works with the military foreign intelligence agency of Russia called the main intelligence directorate. KGB, works with the military foreign intelligence agency

of Russia called the main intelligence directorate. The SFR also has foreign spies, also has internet experts and assassin surveillance experts, economic espionage arinos. So even though the KGB is over, even though the iron curtain has fallen, there are still a lot of spies and still a lot of, you know, sneaky shit coming out of Russia. And that takes us out of today's epic time suck timeline. Good job, soldier. You made it back.

Barely. All right, a lot of info, a lot of info. Let's recap. Basically, Russia has been super secretive and ruthless for a very long time. And it was especially ruthless during the reign of the Soviet Union from the time the Bolsheviks revolted in 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. What we actually know, I'd say especially Ruthis, you know, the especially Ruthis part really kind of ended in the 50s with Stalin.

We also learned that secret police had a lot of, or had to do with a lot of agencies, not all called the KGB. I didn't know that. You know, it's just such a, it's so complicated. There's so many different agencies, just easier to refer to all of it kind of as the KGB. We learned here today that there was actually a huge variety of agencies running different secret police type things, running different spy agencies, and actually a lot more agencies than we talked about today. Tons of other complicated acronyms.

Russia loves to be a complicated and mysterious. What I find most interesting about today's suck is that the KGB is actually one of the least ruthless of the Soviet secret police agencies, like they have the most brand name recognition, but they were far less ruthless than their predecessors. Cheka, the NKVD, and Ivan the Terrible's Oprichniki. Russia has a long history of doing terrible, terrible things to its pizza. To its pizza. What's fucking weird. I guess pizza gate, we still stuck them ahead. It does a lot of terrible things its pizza. What's the fucking weird? I guess pizza gate, we still stuck in my head.

It does a lot of terrible things to pizza, you know? It says you're gonna get Canadian bacon, but then it's like, we have no pineapple. Ha ha, enjoy just bacon and cheese. It's not doing really bacon, it's ham. It's, ha ha, you're not getting what you want. No, it's not a lot of terrible things to their people, but so have a lot of countries, I guess.

It just seems that Russia has done more than most. During the reign of Stalin, especially Russian secret police kept Russian people living in fear of being tortured or killed or sent to the Gulags, where they were then most likely to be tortured and killed. Various secret police agencies spied on both the Russian people and the rest of the world and continue to do so. Anyone deemed a threat to whatever current regime has been in power, have been imprisoned, exiled or killed.

While it doesn't appear that anyone has been boiled alive anymore, or it worked to death or having rats sent clon up their ass, Russia's citizens do still live in fear of false imprisonment or worse. Check out this recent Russian tale of Ildar, the dean, a Russian activist opposed to Putin's rule. Ildar and Anastasia Zatova fell in love in Moscow in August 2014, married the next year. By the time they tied the knot,

however, Ildar, a 34 year old opposition activist was behind bars for staging unsanctioned protests against the Kremlin. Anastasia, excuse me Zatova, 25 year old former journalist were white to the wedding ceremony. Their friends toasted the newlyweds with champagne on the street outside, the couple planned on having, you know, two or three kids. Hope the elders would be a boy. And then, you know, life kind of fell apart for a while. September 2016,

Dayton was transferred to a notorious penal colony in a remote region of northwest Russia, where prison staff reportedly still torture inmates. In December of 2015, they didn't become the first person to be jailed under a controversial law that stipulates prison time for anyone who repeatedly is detained at illegal protests. The law approved by Putin in July 2014 effectively outlaws any form of public dissent, even if it's peaceful, like the protest for which Dayton were arrested was arrested. Amid angry scenes at Central Moscow, court houses, Dayton was sentenced to three years in jail,

later reduced to six months on appeal, and missed the international publicly recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Over the next few years, Dayton's wife, Anastasia, would lose track of her husband's whereabouts as he disappeared into Russia's sprawling brutal penitentiary system. Then in early November of 2016, nearly two months after dating's transferred to penal colony number seven, and a stage you received a letter from her husband smuggled out of the prison camp by his lawyer. They didn't have been thrown into solitary confinement upon arrival. They said he'd been hiding two razor blades amongst his possessions. He would claim that they were planted on him by prison guards.

He went on a hunger strike in protests and his defiance was met with violence. The day after his arrival, he said he was beaten a total of four times by 10 to 12 people at once. After the third beating, they stuck his head into a toilet bowl in a punishment cell. He says, he also alleges the beatings were overseen by the penal, I call them administrators or administrators. Then things got worse. He says, I'm September 12th, staff cuffed my hands behind my back and hung me up from the ceiling, being suspended in that way caused a terrible pain in the wrist, twisted out my elbows and brought savage back pain. I was hung up like that for half an hour at least.

Then they pulled off my underwear and said they would bring another prism in to rape me if I didn't call off my hunger strike. After that torture session, one of the administrators warned him that if he didn't accept food, he would be killed and then his body would be buried under the fence. Russia says he's lying, but I doubt it. State media says he's making it all up in order to draw attention to himself. Call me crazy, but I don't trust state controlled media, because even though Russia is not technically communist anymore, it has so many communist elements

to it. It's very totalitarian still. The investigative committee and FBI style organization and answers only to Putin, yet another secret police type organization also said it has no evidence of wrongdoing at the camp. Of course, they're going to say that, slight conflict of interest. The Adenz accusations have been backed up by fellow inmates and also by Pavel Chikov, a leading Russian human rights lawyer who visited the prison camp in early November. According to

Chikov, prisoners who were kept in cells in different parts of the penal colony and had never met each other told almost identical stories of torture. Some spoke of being left almost naked for days on end and freezing punishment cells. Muslim prisoners claimed they were tortured for refusing to eat pork or for praying. If you didn't get beaten more than twice a day, then you were living excellently set another prisoner. Torture is not only a regular occurrence in penal calling number seven, according to the human rights activists.

As the Tova admitted the treatment, meated out to her husband was less severe than the abuse many prisoners face in other penal colonies. Modern Russian prison camps are a direct continuation of the Sulaik. Soviet era Gulaik system says Vladimir Oshankin, the founder of the human rights website GulaGu.net, which translates to no to the gulags. Often they are even located in the very same camps where prisoners were executed. Oshenkin spent four years in the Russian Penitentiary System on fraud charges that he said were revenge for his attempt to expose corrupt prison officials.

Torture takes place in all prisons and all prison camps in Russia, he said. Any person who tries to stand up for his honor or sense of self-worth will be tortured. Rape is commonly used to both punish and blackmail mill prisoners, he says. Prison staff film the raping of inmates, then threaten to send the recorded to their wives or show it to other prisoners if they do not do what they want. Oshetskans claims were echoed by other anti-torture activists in late November, Alexei Kuznostev, a human rights worker posted an online video that showed prisoners being urinated on and sexually abused at three prison camps in Russia's Ural region. According to Kuznostov, the videos were

used by penal colony officials to blackmail wealthy prisoners forcing them to hand over their business and properties. Dayton did end up getting released from prison in February 26, 2017. And then the prison issued an official apology to him on May 31, 2017, and agreed to pay him the equivalent of $35,000 US for unlawful criminal prosecution and imprisonment. Had his case not received internal international attention, would he even be alive today? I doubt it. So Russia, no more KGB, but still a lot of KGB type bullshit going on. Another suck that made me kind of want to visit Russia.

I've actually heard many parts of it are truly beautiful, but for sure, never, ever live there. Now, time to really fully finish the recap with today's top five takeaways. Number one, the Gulag period is one of the worst stains and not only Russia's history, but in the world's history. The KGB inherited and continued a legacy of sadism that has tops only by a few of the world's genocides and sheer death toll China's great leap forward has more deaths estimated between 45 to 70 million people but the Stalin period of the gulags under

you know the secret police regime he had is probably second at least in the 20th century. The Holocaust had upwards of six million dead Camille Rouge accounts for no less than two million dead. The Armenian genocide was just under two million people. Rwanda's bloody genocide left 500,000 to a million dead, but many estimate that in Russia, under Stalin, tens of millions of people may have died. I think we learned a number two. I think we learned just how off the rails, communism can go.

The history of human beings is mainly about fighting to get individual liberties, to reap the fruits of your efforts to own property and start your own business like this one here at Time Suck. Basically humans have always wanted to take care of themselves and their families and communities on their own terms. It's safe to say that few places on earth have experienced a type of freedom in any real

way, but most nations in the 20th century have done a much better job than the Soviet Union did with their long reign of Soviet police or secret police organizations. Number three, through Danzig drawings in the Gulag Archipelago, we are reminded once again that meat sacks can really fucking suck in a non-time suck way. Never forget that people can be monsters and win empowered with the doctrine of state sanction brutality. People can create a literal hell on earth for other people. Number four, spy, spy, spies.

How many are in the United States right now? One of you listening may be a Russian spy. We have listeners in the FBI, Homeland Security, NASA, other governmental agencies we've heard from. At least one of you is probably at the very least working with the Russian spy right now. You know, a non-Russian, the Russians have turned into a spy is probably the very least working with the Russian spy right now. You know, a non-Russian, the Russians have turned into a spy.

It's very least. Maybe one of you is an American spy or former American spy. The US expelled 60 alleged Russian spies in 2018. Then said they kicking them out was unlikely to cripple Russian spy rings in the US because others have warmed and hacked away into American company schools and even the government, an unknown amount of spies. Number five, new info, perhaps the most famous of the KGB's officers and spies is Vladimir Putin. The current president and former prime minister of Russia has been in charge of the giant nations in 1999, Putin studied law at Leningrad State University and then Putin would put in

15 years as one of the KGB's foreign intelligence officers, including six years in Dresden, East Germany. Vladimir Putin retired in 1990 as a lieutenant colonel from the KGB and then worked closely with other Russian secret police organizations. Putin has a reputation for people dying who disagree with him. A lot of people think he's still doing lots of secretive shit today. Definitely a guy he shouldn't trust. Even recent Putin critics like opposition leader Boris Namstaff find themselves getting gunned down after speaking out.

In Boris's case, he was critical of Russian intervention in Ukraine and then he was shot outside the Kremlin on February 27th, 2015. Putin was also implicated in the murder of the Alexander Livy Enkel, said it probably every time I say his name, I feel like I say it slightly differently. This is that former officer for the KGB successor, the FSB, who we talked about getting poison earlier after he escaped and made it out to London, a guy who defected to the UK, but was poisoned and died while drinking tea in a London hotel bar. What secretive shit is Putin up to right now? I got gotta say the media's fixation with possible Russian meddling in American political dealings

does not seem nearly as paranoid to me as it did before this week's research. You know what this big deal? So he spies, so maybe he kills some time, so maybe he rossal. Do you not finally see it? It's just Russian way. Chikotilo not so bad. Chikotilo could have been fine KGB,, Gula Garde would have been rock hard every day and such fun, bloody place. Ah, Tikotilo just a strong Russian. Time suck, top five takeaway. Never guess that would learn so much about Russia

two times. Like the KGB has been sucked. I hope you liked it. Hope you didn't get too hung up by my horrific attempts and moments to describe so many names. I wish they just could have all been like Anderson and Johnson. Demetri Anderson, you know, Sasha Johnson. Little bit a little, little easier.

Big thanks to the time suck team. Thanks to Queen of the Suck, Lindsey Cummins high priestess of the suck Harmony Vella Camp, Jesse Guardian of Gammer, a guardian of Grammar Dobner, Reverend Dr. Joe Paisley, time suck high priest Alex Dugan, the guys at Bitlixer, Danger Brain, Axis Apparel, thanks just to Heather Knowledge, Ninja, Rylander, for kicking off the research. And thanks to, again, he who now has a nickname, Zach Scriptkeeper Flannery. Next week, we have another big sprawling, barely able to be contained topic, Vietnam. The Vietnam War, I know, I know, technically a military conflict in out of war, was

a long costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally the united states. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing cold war between the u.s. and the soviet union more fucking russia. Just won't go away. More than three million people, including over 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam war and yes, I will keep calling it a war because that's what it was in reality. And more than a half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians, opposition to the war in the US, bitterly divided Americans,

even after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of US forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975 and the country was unified as a socialist Republican Vietnam in the following year. Fucking Russia had their hands on that shit for sure. KGB, Medlin, Medlin! Excited to dig into a topic I've heard so much about, as I'm guessing we all have, but really know so little about. That is going to change this next week. So I hope you enjoy it. Now let's mosey on into today's fantastic Times Sucker Updates, get your time, sucker updates. First update is a dickpox update.

You heard me right from Eric Wester talking about some dickpox. Eric writes, hello sir, sucks a lot. My name is Eric and I'm a fairly new listener. I cannot get enough time, suck now, to have been bingeing over, uh, bingeing ever since I started. I was a history teacher for a few years and now work for a space in science educational nonprofit. a new listener. I cannot get enough time stuck now to been bingeing over, uh, bingeing ever since I started. I was a history teacher for a few years and now work for a space in science educational nonprofit. I'm a huge advocate for people becoming lifelong learners, Hale Nimrod. And I've been super impressed with the amount of research and detail you put into each subject

while keeping it super entertaining. Your podcast really helps people enjoy learning. And I believe helps listeners find new perspectives and even better, challenges their own perspectives from time to time. Anyways, thanks for all you do and your team does, heal Nimrod, anyways, enough praise. I wanted to tell you a story that had my wife and I laughing. I've been trying to catch up on episodes and I came across the Andrew, mother fucking Jackson episode, the part where you were talking about tit and dickpot. Had to be dying laughing because I had a similar thing happen to me.

A week before my wife and I got married, I got the chickenpox. Someone we know does not believe in using vaccines, fucking anti-vaxxers. And her kids had thepox. Yeah, of course he did. I thought I was okay because I had the vaccine a long time ago, but I did not realize

I needed a booster vaccine to be immune. It hit me hard and I hadpox everywhere. I severely suffered from dick pox. And it was concerned about our wedding night. So to speak, luckily by the grace of Luciferina, everything cleared up except for a few face pox for the wedding. And all the important parts were in ship shape for the wedding night. Anyways, your dick pox tangent was just about the funniest thing I've ever heard due to this due to some personal experience. Thanks again for all you do, praiseable jangles and keep on sucking.

Thanks for sharing that update, Eric. I will keep on sucking. I'm guessing your dick pox is all totally healed. I mean, sound like it was clear for the wedding night. And I'm sorry that happened, but I'm glad you got a story about it. And now, I wish I wasn't wondering about your dick because I'm wondering like,

do you have chicken pox scars on your dick? Which is a strange thing to wonder about. Well, I hope you don't. I hope you have either a super handsome dick or that your wife loves a battle scar chicken pox dick. Now some words of encouragement in the fight against ignorance from Time Sucker, Emmy. Emmy writes, hello, master sucker.

I know I've written him before, but I had to write again before I left for work for the day. After hearing about the response to your supposed ignorance portrayed in the moon landing conspiracy episode, I did not see anything of that sort throughout that entire episode. If I'm quite honest, I'm glad that you were so passionate about it. I know several people who have dropped out of college who act as though they are more intelligent than doctors out there who believe these kinds of conspiracies and take religion as a thousand percent fact. I'm honestly tired of seeing this kind of thought passed off and tolerated by so many

people. Maybe just me, but it seems that ignorance is becoming just as terrible as hatred, and I hate the whole they have a different opinion thing. Ignorance kills so much potential for intelligence. It's one thing to be dedicated to religion. That is not what makes me upset. What makes me upset is when religion is taken as total fact and science if it conflicts, it's just bogus. This is what will cause people to destroy this planet because of science taken away from being

important. There was a reason why so many people hundreds of years ago would have begged for our modern medicine to help them out and why so many people are glad to be alive now. This includes myself because of my own health when I was born. I would have not lived very long in the past. Thanks to medicine, I was able to recover from jaundice, gain therapy for potential autism. I now have close to 2020 vision with glasses and contacts and most importantly, I have medication. Helps me stay stable mentally to be able to function and have a life. I know I'm rambling, but this is basically I'm saying in the is that ignorance kills all of these wonderful potential things from happening and can be just as harmful as hateful attitudes

towards others like racism, misogyny, et cetera, et cetera. I do feel bad to hear someone that was being so angry. I just wish people could think about it for just a moment. I don't wish to live in a place where medicine and technology never evolved because of people not wanting to believe something so important in our history and to pursue scientific knowledge. Anyway, that's all I have to say. I'm slowly catching up with the secret sucks. So glad to be a space lizard.

Thank you for all you do. Hail Nimrod Emmy. Thank you Emmy. Thanks for your comments. I appreciate them. I do want to say one more thing though about my opinion to take on the moon landing conspiracy episode. I just want to make it clear that while I believe that the Moon landing being faked is

very ignorant, I don't think everyone who believes that is an ignorant person. I think very intelligent people can still have ignorant beliefs, which doesn't furiate me. But again, I don't think that you're stupid. If you believe that, I just think that what you believe in that case, in that instance, is stupid for a lot of the reasons that Amy was just talking about. So, yeah, so if you don't agree with my take, whatever, just know for my own conscious that I don't think you're some complete piece of shit, some idiot. And I am sorry if that's

the way that episode came across to some people. Palmer Gross has some sad news for us, but we can make it positive by using his message to become more of where of our nation's growing opioid crisis. Palma writes, suckers. March 19th, 1919, or on March 19th, 1919, my beautiful loving conflicted and troubled sister, bunny, passed from a heroin overdose. This has been a very hard time for my family as she leaves us and her newly turned 11-year-old daughter,

Tulio behind. My God. I emailed time so I can ask if they would do an episode on addiction and the current opioid crisis in this country. It's bad in Virginia. I was emailed back and informed that addiction is a subject that can be voted for. We all know someone who is struggling. I'm asking spaces or to please vote that subject up.

I know Daniel Crushett and spread awareness. Anyway, keep your loved ones close and safe as you can. Don't turn your back on someone who's battling. Love you all. Hail Nimrod, praiseable Jangels, be gone and stay, Lucifina, and let a lover know that yummobee there. Ooh, yummobee there.

Star for your lost Palmer, man, that is a terrible tragedy. My stepbrother and I weren't very close, but he was addicted to heroin for many years and eventually took his own life. And yes, we need to do that as a future subject. I wrote that on our list of upcoming subjects to make sure we hopefully get to that one this year because I do, we are gonna talk about the homeless epidemic.

That's gonna be a social issue one coming up. And I think opioid, that crisis would be a great follow-up. Another plea for help coming in for others coming from Texas time sucker Dustin who rides Haydor Suckmaster. I'm hoping to call upon the power of the time suck community. My fiance teaches first grade at a small school in rural Texas about an hour and a half away from Abeling. Last week our county got some serious rain that resulted in flash flooding. This would have been a couple weeks ago now. I wasn't working, got a call from the superintendent of the school informing me that one of my fiancee students,

a seven-year-old boy had been killed Wednesday morning. They hadn't told her yet, but asked if I could be there to support her. She never said anything, but growing things about this kid, he was a sweet, thoughtful kid, by all accounts. As more details emerged, we found out that the boy, his name was Jake Ramirez, his three-year-old sister,

and his mother were killed when they tried to drive through some high water, and their car was swept into the creek. We believe while taking their dad to work at a local dairy. The father was the only one who survived and go fund me, go fund me my god, man. Campaign has been set up to help him throughout these hard times. I'm a clear to the link. I want you in the times that community know that my fiance and I stand to gain absolutely nothing from this. I just think that Mr. Ramirez needs some love and support now more than ever. I know the time-side community has done wonderful things for people in need, and I thought I'd put this out there on the off-chance that it gets right on the show and some time-suckers feel inclined to help their fellow meat sack in a time of unthinkable tragedy and hardship.

Much love to you in the time-side community. You've created something beautiful, filled with explicit content, and exceptional people keep on sucking dust and Crawford. Yes, thank you, Dustin. I can put that go fund me link in the episode description. A lot of other go fund me campaigns can be found in the coldest and curious private Facebook group by the way. And I know some of you sometimes get irritated that you know, you can't post those over and over every day, but we just have so many listeners now, which we're so thankful for. And there's so many, you know, people in need that if they were posted always all the time, that's the Facebook group would be nothing but

go find me links. And also, I know some of you guys get frustrated, you don't get your go find me link right in the show. Just know that we get literally hundreds of emails every week now. 10, I don't know, 20, 30 GoFundMe campaigns every week. And again, it would be a three hour episode of just a litany of things. Then they would end up just getting lost in a sea of campaigns, but I am sorry, we can't promote them all. Adam O'Neill does have another update regarding recent devastating tornadoes that have affected members of the time suck community.

He writes, dear, first off, huge fan of the show and your stand up. So much to my wife and I drove to the Dallas show just 24 hours after our hometown, Rustin Louisiana, was hit by an F3 tornado. We got the tree off my house and headed straight to the show. My God, thank you for that dedication. The show was amazing. It was just what we needed to take our minds off the disaster back home. Rustin is a beautiful community filled with amazing people that came together to rebuild out for so much

destruction, but there's still a lot of work needs to be done. If there's any way you could share our story and fundraising program, it would be greatly appreciated. Long live the suck and praise, both jangles, keep on sucking, Adam, and I did include that one as well. And now a powerful personal immigration update. So a little update to the immigration episode from Time Sucker, Nico. Nico writes, a few weeks ago I re-listened the Time Sucker immigration. It's an issue that's always on my mind,

but has been a little more so, I'm a mind recently. So I wanted to refresh myself on your take. You said a lot of great things and gave a lot of great facts and I appreciate the way you handle it. It's a huge topic and there can be some angles to the issue. You just can't get from your point of view. So I hope

my story helps round it out. My name is Nico. I was born and raised in Georgia. I still live here to this day. My dad's family is from El Salvador. My mom's family is from Paraguay. My dad's family moved to Los Angeles back in 1967. He's the youngest of five and the only one to have been born in the US. My mom moved to the Metro Atlanta area in 1997 when she was 16 years old. Didn't know any English when she got here. She loves to remind us that she ate pizza every day at school for at least for her last two years of high school because that's the only thing she knew how to order in a school cafeteria. That is strangely adorable. Yes, pizza. Pizza, pot of art. Yes, pizza. Pizza, mouli, muy bueno, pizza.

That is so fucking cute. My mom has since learned perverted English and speaks it way better than most native speakers. Oh, I'm sure including myself. Sure if you're a mom, listen to this, you'd be like, Jesus Christ, pull it together. Even I can say fucking Russian names.

My mom is a nurse now, saved many lives in her 10 plus years as a nurse. My dad joined the Marines when he was 17. Oh man, thank you, dad for his service. Forced my grandparents to give consent, but he was going, because he was going to join as soon as he turned 18 anyways. My dad was set and following the examples

of his older brothers, my oldest uncle, Romeo, was in the Marines during the tail end of the Vietnam War served for some time over there, spent a little time in the Philippines as well. Their other brother, Joel, also joined the Marines, was a helicopter mechanic in the late 80s and 90s. My father joined the Marines in the early 90s was trained to shoot stinger missiles.

He spent some time overseas during Operation Desert Storm. My parents got divorced a while ago and it both since remarried. They both happened to remarry Mexicans, which is a silly coincidence. One of my stepmons brothers also joined the Marines. And the mid 2000s did a tour overseas on an aircraft carrier.

Can we get an U fucking raw? Urah! I know, I don't think I'm qualified to do that, but you asked. All this sounds great, right? Well, here's some of the ugly stuff that comes in. Two very important people in my life are part of the DACA program. And now, now you did mention this during the Suck on immigration, we're just a quick refresher. People that are eligible for DACA are so because they're brought into this country at a very young age. My stepmom is a DACA,

and so is my fiance more on her in a bit. My stepmom is also a badass. She's currently pursuing her masters in non-profit business. She helped build a non-profit in Metro Atlanta that provides mental health treatment to people without healthcare coverage. My stepmom has also gone through years of red tape

trying to become a US citizen, and let me tell you, it's fucking hard. She's now a resident, but she still can't vote. In the Succane immigration, you mentioned a quote by Donald Trump where he talked about this country's great because it is a country of consequences. The quote was on this whole DACA issue

that's been going on for quite some time now. And I get that, I really do. But holding my stepmom accountable for illegal shortcuts and decisions her parents made doesn't make sense to me. To me, it's the same as holding the child of any thief murderer any kind of criminal accountable for what their parents did that does make really good sense Uh, the child has no authority over the decisions the adult makes Now to tell you a little bit about my fiance juliana Maybe the biggest badass of them all she came to the US from your way when she was three

She didn't know English until the first second grade. I mean, she struggled not just to learn, but socially for those first few years of schooling. She still remembers her only friend, a black girl named Voluntiris, who stood up to Juliana's bullies for her ever since she never understood the kids were even picking on her. Juliana, that's also fucked up, but also kind of adorable.

Or like these kids were saying like horrible shit. And she just like, no say, no say, no say. Juliana's worked so hard throughout her young life to get to where she is. She was a student who also went above and beyond with extracurriculars because she's a DACA, a decent undergrad education, almost seemed like an impossibility for her, but she never let that stop her.

She got accepted to Barry College, one of the most beautiful schools in America and expensive his hell. Another obstacle for her to climb, but again, she pushed ahead, got accepted into a scholarship program called the Bonner Foundation. Juliana became the student leader of the scholarship program, the biggest at her school by her senior year. Throughout her time in school, she has volunteered for over 1,000 hours. She spent all three of her summers doing unpaid internships for nonprofits. This Saturday, she's going to graduate with a $3.5 GPA, $0.00 in student loans. She's my

hero. We don't know what the future holds for her immigration status. We're getting married this fall. We have thousands of dollars for ridiculous amounts of red tape and no guarantees standing in her way to citizenship. A truly scary road lies ahead of us. I will be by her side no matter what happens, but America is all she and I have ever known. It's scary to think that at any moment, after her current DACA status expires, she could be forced to leave the country. The biggest kicker of them all, no matter what the people in my family's story is, regardless of the immigration status, all legally here, by the way, I can tell you countless stories of when my family has gotten treated like

illegals. We all speak perfect English. We all have lived here for most of our lives, but there is one thing we all have brown skin. One look at our skin and our story doesn't matter. And I'm going to stop reading here because I didn't realize you guys had brown skin. And I don't read brown skin messages here on the suck. Thank you guys for listening. That's all for no.

Can you imagine how fucked up that would be? That took a weird turn and all of a sudden we're like, thank you guys very much. Like what? No. Sorry. I know there are a lot of good people in the cold to the curious if not all of you, but I just think it's important to humanize issues and really just think how deep these things go into the lives of people, real people.

The biggest thing being part of this cultist Tommy is to listen first and create my opinion second. I'm always trying to work on being a better example of that by the way. So I hope when it comes to this issue of immigration, more people will do that because based on the experience, I can tell you that it is generally not the case in our society today. Nope, sure the fuck is not. Well, to whoever reads this email, thank you for taking the time to read it, stay curious and keep on sucking with love,

Nico Cardoza, thanks Nico. Thank you so much, man. What beautiful thoughts. What a, I love personal accounts like that because you're right, because I can't speak to that because I don't have that personal story, but I think these stories are great to think about

when you're thinking about issues like this. It's so easy to put everybody in this random group. You don't know shit about them. Look, yeah, fucking get them out of here. Not that simple. Shit is never that simple in the world. Man, black and white thinking is so rarely, rarely useful, right? The world is so gray, so nuanced and complex.

And I think, I think that's why a lot of people go to black and white thinking because it's hard to think in complex terms. It's ears, but no, uh, uh, that bad. This good. Fuck that. Love this. And then stories like, Nico, you know, remind us that, no, man, that's not the case. So thank you, Nika, thank you to everyone who sent in updates to both angles at times like podcasts.com. And again, uh, you know, we don't think your cause or update isn't valuable. If we don't get it in, we just don't have room for everything. That is all for today's time sucker updates. Thanks, time suckers. I need a net. We all did. That's all for today, time suckers and

space. Let's just have a great week. Think of me when you eat your sweet sexy nanals. Put your dick on it. If you come across a time machine, don't go back to earlier mid 20th century Russia unless you're real into massacism. Oh, and there's one of the thing. Keep on sucking. These guys would have literally killed for a gordita.