Behind the Bastards - Part One: Nestor Makhno: Anarchist Warlord and Book Club Aficionado
Aired: 2020-12-22
Duration: 01:38:27


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:10) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you.
[00:00:32]  I got you.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:08]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:01:25]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:01:32]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:01:41]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:01:46]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:57]  You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
[00:01:59]  He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
[00:02:01]  But did you know he was a spy?
[00:02:04]  Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.

=== Princesses Swap Jobs (03:30) ===

[00:02:10]  All episodes are out now.
[00:02:12]  Was this before he wrote his stories?
[00:02:14]  It must have been.
[00:02:15]  What?
[00:02:16]  Okay, I don't think that's true.
[00:02:17]  I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
[00:02:19]  Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:29]  Ho, ho, ho.
[00:02:31]  Fuck the po, I mean, Mary Chris.
[00:02:34]  Hi.
[00:02:35]  I liked where that was going.
[00:02:36]  I liked where that was going.
[00:02:37]  I didn't hate it.
[00:02:39]  It's the holidays.
[00:02:41]  Yeah.
[00:02:44]  I'm Robert Evans.
[00:02:44]  This is Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about the worst people in all of history, but not today, because today is the Christmas episode.
[00:02:52]  And with me to help present our Christmas episode is my erstwhile producer, Sophie Lichterman.
[00:02:58]  Hi.
[00:02:59]  Give him a bow, Sophie.
[00:03:00]  No.
[00:03:02]  Okay, well, Sophie didn't want to bow to you.
[00:03:04]  That's kind of mean.
[00:03:07]  You can bow to me, Robert.
[00:03:08]  The inestimable Jamie Loftus.
[00:03:11]  Hi.
[00:03:14]  How's everybody doing this holiday season?
[00:03:16]  Everyone feeling Yule and tied?
[00:03:19]  I'm feeling good.
[00:03:20]  I've been consuming a lot of Christmas content.
[00:03:23]  Oh, good.
[00:03:26]  Santa University's good to go.
[00:03:28]  I feel, you know, I feel as good as I possibly could in this moment.
[00:03:33]  I am.
[00:03:33]  I think I won't last.
[00:03:35]  No, no, of course not.
[00:03:36]  I mean, maybe a little.
[00:03:37]  We got a festive story this year.
[00:03:39]  But yeah, Christmas is a wonderful season.
[00:03:42]  I've been doing a whole lot of Christmas content.
[00:03:44]  I did my yearly viewing of White Christmas, which was the first movie filmed in color.
[00:03:48]  It predates Alaska being a state.
[00:03:52]  And it has very subtle racism, which is always a hoot.
[00:03:58]  The fact that it was even subtle is a surprise.
[00:04:02]  Yeah, I didn't notice it.
[00:04:03]  I watched it every year as a kid with my family, and I didn't notice until I was an adult that, like, oh, the only black characters in the entire movie are like working behind the bar on a train and they don't talk.
[00:04:14]  That tracks.
[00:04:15]  Yeah.
[00:04:16]  Tracks.
[00:04:17]  What year did it come out in?
[00:04:18]  Like 52.
[00:04:19]  Like it is, or 54, maybe.
[00:04:22]  It's like, you know, it's back in the day, and it's got old bingo.
[00:04:29]  I watched, Robert, you should watch.
[00:04:30]  I would love your takes on the new Princess Switch movie.
[00:04:33]  What?
[00:04:34]  I think you have some.
[00:04:36]  Like, when you say Switch, are we talking like Switch or are we talking like.
[00:04:41]  So here's the runda.
[00:04:43]  So there's a princess.
[00:04:46]  That would be a really good sequel is the princess Switch.
[00:04:51]  But these are just simply princesses who switch with each other.
[00:04:55]  And they're all played by Viness.
[00:04:56]  Princesses who take each other's jobs.
[00:04:59]  Yes.
[00:05:00]  It's kind of like the holiday, that Nancy Myers movie.
[00:05:03]  There's nothing kinky about it.
[00:05:04]  Although I think that there's room in the franchise for that to change.
[00:05:08]  And all of the princesses are played by Vanessa Hudgens.
[00:05:11]  We're up to three Vanessa Hudgens.
[00:05:13]  He doesn't.
[00:05:14]  I know who Vanessa Hudgens is, but she plays.
[00:05:17]  So she's like Meet the Clumpsing, a princess movie.
[00:05:21]  Yeah, she's literally like Veris Harden.
[00:05:24]  You absolutely know who Vanessa Hudgens is.
[00:05:26]  What does he do?
[00:05:26]  Yeah, she's an actress.
[00:05:27]  She knows.
[00:05:28]  Wow.
[00:05:29]  I don't know.
[00:05:30]  Movies.
[00:05:30]  Doesn't she do some Disney shit?
[00:05:33]  She did.
[00:05:33]  Kind of.
[00:05:34]  You're kind of in the ballpark.
[00:05:36]  Yeah, like I couldn't pick her face out, but like, I've seen Vanessa Hudgens and things.

=== Land Wars and Hitler (16:06) ===

[00:05:40]  It's familiar.
[00:05:41]  Like, she's as real a human being to me as, I don't know, I've forgotten all of the names of every other person who's ever been in movies.
[00:05:54]  She's as real as Bingo, at least, if not more.
[00:05:57]  No, no, no.
[00:05:57]  She famously.
[00:05:59]  Early in quarantine, she went live on Instagram and said she didn't care.
[00:06:03]  She said that, you know, in a pandemic, people are going to die and we should just accept that.
[00:06:07]  She's a really hardened person.
[00:06:10]  She sounds like a real hero.
[00:06:12]  You know, speaking of hardened people who are heroes.
[00:06:19]  Well, the person we're talking about today, every Christmas season, every Yule tide, we switch around, you know, the premise of this show and go from talking about the worst people in all of history to talking about one of the best people in all of history.
[00:06:33]  And, you know, this is, I think, a pretty beloved tradition.
[00:06:36]  We're on year three of it now.
[00:06:38]  And, you know, our first pick was someone who is, I think, is as pure a human being as ever existed, Raul Wallenberg, who really, you can't get any better than Raul.
[00:06:48]  And, you know, the next year we did a very flawed man who nevertheless rose to the occasion of history and became a glorious beacon of moral courage, Mr. John Brown.
[00:06:58]  Solid guy, solid hero.
[00:07:00]  And this year we're doing yet another kind of different sort of hero.
[00:07:03]  This guy's a messy figure.
[00:07:04]  He had a dark side, and he's a man who in the end failed in his ultimate goals.
[00:07:09]  But he's someone I find inspiring nevertheless.
[00:07:11]  And after a messy year of darkness and failure, I think that he's the right person to talk about today because today we're chatting about Nestor Machno.
[00:07:21]  Okay.
[00:07:22]  As you know, I have no fucking clue who this person is.
[00:07:27]  But he's coming in strong with a, I mean, this is, this is honestly my Nestor Machno.
[00:07:33]  Yeah, Nestor Machno.
[00:07:35]  He's Ukrainian as fuck.
[00:07:37]  He's Ukrainian as fuck.
[00:07:38]  Okay, so this is kind of a situation of like this is Vanessa Hudgens to you is Nestor Machno to me.
[00:07:45]  So who is he?
[00:07:47]  Nestor Machno was an anarchist warlord and one of the most successful guerrilla commanders in all of history.
[00:07:53]  Without him, we probably would never have had a Soviet Union, which is a mixed bag.
[00:07:58]  And he was not trying to make a Soviet Union.
[00:08:01]  I should note that.
[00:08:02]  He actually really didn't want it to happen.
[00:08:04]  Not everyone can say that.
[00:08:07]  But he's a fascinating guy.
[00:08:09]  He's a really influential person.
[00:08:11]  I think a guy who in one of the worst periods and places in human history was as good a person as you could possibly be.
[00:08:22]  And he's also kind of rad.
[00:08:23]  So we're going to talk about motherfucking Nestor Machno.
[00:08:26]  And yeah, yeah.
[00:08:28]  And, you know, if we're going to talk about Nestor, before we get into his life, we're going to have to talk about Ukraine a little bit.
[00:08:34]  Do you know much about Ukraine, Jamie?
[00:08:36]  I really don't.
[00:08:37]  I got to tell you, I don't.
[00:08:39]  Yeah, almost no one does for good reason.
[00:08:42]  See, Ukraine, I think in a lot of Americans, they kind of think of Ukraine as like any other European country, like Germany or fucking Denmark or Russia or whatever.
[00:08:51]  And that's not really the right way to think about it.
[00:08:54]  Ukraine is a colonized land.
[00:08:56]  And Ukrainians, like the Irish, are victims of colonization, kind of like the Sicilians, too, right?
[00:09:04]  Like the things that happened to them, the things we're going to talk about happening to Ukraine are not entirely dissimilar to things that happened to the Congolese or to indigenous North Americans.
[00:09:12]  Not to say that like all of those are the same either, but there's a lot of similarities.
[00:09:16]  They are victims of colonialism, right?
[00:09:20]  And they weren't considered white by a lot of people until fairly recently.
[00:09:24]  Hitler, right?
[00:09:26]  Took over Ukraine to take over.
[00:09:28]  Okay, it was eight minutes, eight minutes before we hit Hitler.
[00:09:31]  Yeah, well, that's a fun game to play with every episode of the show.
[00:09:37]  Okay, Hitler wanted their land because it's good growing land, but his plan was basically to genocide them all slowly over time to make way for white people, right?
[00:09:47]  And like he was not the only person to have had a broadly similar plan with Ukraine.
[00:09:53]  Yeah, so the Russia we know today actually got its name from Ukraine.
[00:09:58]  Russia comes from the Kievan Rus'.
[00:10:00]  The capital of Ukraine is Kiev.
[00:10:02]  You know, pretty obvious math.
[00:10:04]  The top one things I know about Ukraine.
[00:10:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:08]  So that's the thing people tend to know.
[00:10:10]  For most of modern history, native Ukrainians have been pretty oppressed from 1775 to 1782.
[00:10:16]  Catherine II, who is generally known as an enlightened despot, which maybe isn't a term we should use.
[00:10:24]  I was like, is that an oxymoron?
[00:10:28]  That's for sure an oxymoron.
[00:10:30]  She was really good at making painters and shit like her, but she was also like a brutal tyrant.
[00:10:36]  Okay, so you know there's pros and cons.
[00:10:41]  We all contain multitudes.
[00:10:43]  She's enlightened because people with fancy coats like her, but also she rules thousands of what are essentially slaves with an iron fist.
[00:10:51]  You know, an enlightened despot.
[00:10:54]  Yeah.
[00:10:55]  She's a despot with clout, some serious clout.
[00:10:58]  She had some serious clout, and she used that clout, Jamie, to give away 5 million hectares of Ukrainian land to Russian nobles.
[00:11:05]  She didn't ask the people who were already occupying it first.
[00:11:10]  That's where the despot comes in.
[00:11:11]  Yeah, that's the despot part.
[00:11:12]  The enlightened part was giving it away.
[00:11:15]  She also gave a bunch of land to German colonizers who'd moved into the area with her blessing.
[00:11:20]  And a lot of these people that she gave all this land to didn't actually wind up living on the land.
[00:11:24]  They were basically absentee landlords, kind of like what the Irish dealt with, right?
[00:11:28]  Like you give the land to your loyal noble followers and they use it to make money for themselves, but they don't go there.
[00:11:35]  They're not going to leave Moscow or whatever.
[00:11:39]  Everyone else was displaced from the land.
[00:11:42]  Generally, they just became serfs who were the property of the people who owned the land, right?
[00:11:47]  Like that's usually more how it went.
[00:11:49]  Terrifying.
[00:11:50]  Yeah, it's awful.
[00:11:51]  Now, whenever you have colonization, and that's really what's occurring to Ukraine in the 1700s, you have resources that the colonizers are trying to plunder.
[00:11:58]  And in Ukraine's case, it's the infamous black earth.
[00:12:01]  Ukrainian soil is incredibly fertile.
[00:12:03]  It's the breadbasket of Europe, right?
[00:12:05]  A lot of Europe, it's hard to like grow food on.
[00:12:07]  Ukraine grows a fuckload of food.
[00:12:10]  It's like where your fucking sunflower oil comes from today, but like a lot of shit grows in Ukraine.
[00:12:14]  People have been fighting over it for a long time as a result.
[00:12:17]  People in Ukrainian products.
[00:12:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:20]  They make some good sausages, some good soups.
[00:12:23]  I had the worst calamari of my life there, but it was in a war zone, so I'm not going to blame them too much.
[00:12:30]  I'm seeing, yeah, I'm seeing soup.
[00:12:32]  I'm seeing t-shirts that say, I'm Ukrainian, you couldn't handle me with instructions.
[00:12:38]  Yeah, that was the most popular.
[00:12:42]  That's what everyone was fighting over in 1803, was the novelty novelty t-shirts.
[00:12:48]  Actually, all of Europe's novelty t-shirts are grown in Ukrainian soil.
[00:12:51]  So this is secret histories.
[00:12:55]  That's why Hitler and Stalin fought over the land.
[00:12:58]  That's what really decided World War II.
[00:13:04]  I had to try it.
[00:13:06]  That's fair.
[00:13:08]  And it was as bad as I expected Warzone Calamari to be.
[00:13:14]  One day I'll go back to Konstantinivka and see if I can get better calamari.
[00:13:19]  So after Catherine II in 1803, the Tsar of Russia assigned a thousand hectares of Ukrainian land to every retired Russian officer and 500 to every retired NCO.
[00:13:29]  And what he was doing with his retired soldiers and what Catherine did with the Germans was the same idea, basically.
[00:13:34]  Like you have this land that's rebellious and filled with people you don't trust.
[00:13:38]  So you give it to people, you have people that either you trust or that have to be loyal to you move there.
[00:13:43]  Like you say, hey, Germans, I'll give you land here if you'll help me oppress the local, like the native Ukrainians, right?
[00:13:49]  Like your, your job is going to be to keep this shit on lock for me.
[00:13:52]  It's the same thing with her retired soldiers, right?
[00:13:55]  This happens all over the world.
[00:13:56]  The Romans did it a shitload.
[00:13:59]  Now, one of the main groups of foreigners brought into Ukraine in this period to help the Tsars and Tsarinas maintain control were the Mennonites.
[00:14:06]  Now, Ukraine's Mennonites came over from Germany in the late 1700s when Catherine the Great gave, again, gave them a shitload of land that she'd stolen from indigenous Cossack and Nogai tribespeople.
[00:14:16]  Now, each family, each Mennonite family was given 175 hectares and granted immunity to taxes for 30 years.
[00:14:22]  This generous deal made sense because Mennonites were famously hard workers, and the Empress saw this as an investment.
[00:14:28]  As a result, many Mennonites in Ukraine were wealthy.
[00:14:31]  They owned serfs.
[00:14:32]  And when serfdom was abolished, they basically owned people who were pretty much sharecroppers.
[00:14:36]  So serfdom is like you are, you are not, it's not as bad as being like a chattel slave in like the American South, but it's on that same scale.
[00:14:46]  You are part of the land.
[00:14:48]  So if a nobleman owns land that serfs are on, he owns you and you're bound to that land.
[00:14:54]  Okay.
[00:14:54]  This is a very bleak chart that you're describing.
[00:14:59]  It's the way all of Europe works in the medieval period, right?
[00:15:03]  And it's the way Ukraine continues to work and Russia continues to work into the 1860s.
[00:15:09]  Got it.
[00:15:09]  So everywhere else in Europe is like, oh, this is a terrible way to have a society.
[00:15:13]  And Russia's like, why change?
[00:15:15]  It could be so much worse.
[00:15:17]  Yeah.
[00:15:18]  There's steam engines when Russia's like, yeah, we should probably not have serfs.
[00:15:23]  That might be bad.
[00:15:24]  Russia's so stressful.
[00:15:27]  God.
[00:15:27]  All right.
[00:15:28]  Incredibly stressful.
[00:15:29]  So it's just.
[00:15:31]  Yeah.
[00:15:32]  It's bleak.
[00:15:33]  Now, given what most Americans know about Mennonites, you might assume that being a peasant for a Mennonite overlord would be like your best case scenario of being like a serf or a peasant, you know, if you have to be.
[00:15:42]  Unlike the disenfranchisement scale.
[00:15:44]  Okay.
[00:15:45]  Yeah.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:46]  Because Mennonites are pacifists, right?
[00:15:48]  They don't use violence.
[00:15:49]  They're supposed to be like our Mennonites are pretty chill folks.
[00:15:53]  You know, Mennonites have a big factor in like the American anti-war movements for a long time.
[00:15:59]  They're supposed to be pretty chill.
[00:16:01]  That has not always been the case and was not the case in Ukraine.
[00:16:03]  Ukrainian Mennonites were not pacifist in any way that you would recognize as pacifist.
[00:16:10]  And I found a heavily researched and citation full write-up of all of this on a site called libcom.org, which is a libertarian communalist sort of information warehouse or whatever.
[00:16:20]  And it's speaking of stressful sounding.
[00:16:23]  It used to be.
[00:16:24]  I believe it's good shit.
[00:16:26]  And it notes, quote, those who labored on these estates included Russo-Ukrainian peasants and landless Mennonites.
[00:16:32]  In their treatment of laborers and serfs, the Mennonite landlords were indistinguishable from their Russo-Ukrainian peers.
[00:16:38]  A representative incident: a Mennonite landowner caught a Russo-Ukrainian laborer stealing grain.
[00:16:42]  So he pushed the laborer into the grain bin and nailed down the lid.
[00:16:46]  He waited two days and then called the mayor to have the captive flogged.
[00:16:50]  Many Mennonite landlords practiced collective punishment.
[00:16:52]  When theft was suspected, all the potential suspects were flogged so as to teach a lesson to both the guilty and the innocent.
[00:16:58]  The principle of pacifism had therefore been abandoned by wealthy Mennonites long before the Russian Revolution.
[00:17:04]  Holy shit.
[00:17:06]  It sucks to be in Ukraine for a long time.
[00:17:10]  And it's not easy now, you know, what with the invasion.
[00:17:15]  That's, I mean, even for a landlord, that is, you know, that's bad.
[00:17:19]  And I'm pointing out that the Mennonites are doing this because of some stuff that comes later.
[00:17:22]  But that's everyone who has land in Ukraine, right?
[00:17:26]  That's that's the Mennonites, that's the Germans, that's that's Jewish people.
[00:17:29]  That's which, like, some of them.
[00:17:31]  Like there, it's about 1% of landlords.
[00:17:33]  But like everyone who is rich in Ukraine is that kind of terrible to the people who are bound to the land.
[00:17:40]  That is fucked.
[00:17:41]  I like Russians.
[00:17:42]  I've had bad landlord experiences, but yeah, that's that's new.
[00:17:46]  That's new.
[00:17:46]  These are like hyper landlords, right?
[00:17:49]  Because these are landlords that also own you.
[00:17:52]  Yeah.
[00:17:53]  Yeah.
[00:17:55]  So again, most of the Ukrainian peasantry were serfs up until serfdom was abolished in 1861.
[00:18:02]  Oh, and I should also note that like we're like there were wealthy Mennonite and Jewish and Russian and German landlords.
[00:18:08]  There were poor people of all who were also basically owned by their landlords too, right?
[00:18:12]  Oh, good.
[00:18:13]  This is not a religion or an ethnicity thing.
[00:18:15]  This is a the way rich people are in Ukraine thing, you know?
[00:18:19]  Okay.
[00:18:19]  Yeah.
[00:18:20]  So, uh, Jesus.
[00:18:22]  Yeah.
[00:18:22]  Basically, everyone who isn't rich is a serf up until like 1861.
[00:18:26]  Now, before abolition, again, serfs were basically enslaved, um, pretty close to that at least.
[00:18:32]  Uh, and when the serfs were freed, they were given tiny parcels of their native land, three hectares per family on average.
[00:18:38]  Uh, and they generally had to buy that land back from the person who had owned them previously.
[00:18:43]  The best lands in Ukraine were given to the Tsar.
[00:18:45]  These were called crown lands.
[00:18:47]  Uh, other good lands were given to his nobles, the clergy, and favored foreigners, like the Mennonites and the Germans.
[00:18:53]  Uh, for one example of kind of how the breakdown of land ownership in Ukraine went in 1891 in the province of Ekaterinoslav, German planters who were 4% of the population controlled 9.46% of the land.
[00:19:06]  Greeks, who were 2% of the population, controlled nearly 7% of the land, and Ukrainian peasants who made up 70% of the population controlled only 37.5% of the land.
[00:19:16]  So, wow, okay, that's honestly a higher number than I expected, but that's not good.
[00:19:21]  Because again, serfdom was abolished and they were given a chunk of land, but in many cases, they were still, it was the worst land and they were still paying it off to the people who had owned their parents, you know?
[00:19:33]  I mean, when you put it that way, it still sounds like a pretty bad deal.
[00:19:36]  It's a raw deal.
[00:19:37]  Again, it's a raw deal.
[00:19:39]  There are not a lot of points in modern history where you would have wanted to live in Ukraine.
[00:19:45]  Sounds pretty fucking awful there.
[00:19:47]  Oh, man.
[00:19:48]  Yeah, I mean, like, Ukraine is a beautiful country.
[00:19:50]  I've enjoyed the people.
[00:19:51]  They've just like been continuously fucked over by everyone around them.
[00:19:54]  They're like, if you look at the position of Ukraine in Europe, they're in the worst case because they have the best land and they're in between Germany and Russia and Poland.
[00:20:03]  Like, it's a horrible place to be.
[00:20:05]  In the crossfires of like bleak places that could colonize your land.
[00:20:11]  Well, that explains the whole I'm Ukrainian.
[00:20:13]  You couldn't handle me with instructions novelty t-shirt.
[00:20:16]  You know, there are quarrels coming together.
[00:20:18]  They've had to be.
[00:20:19]  Yeah.
[00:20:20]  It makes sense for survival-based purposes.
[00:20:23]  Now, the other native peoples of Ukraine are called Cossacks.
[00:20:28]  And Cossacks are complicated as hell.
[00:20:30]  They're a nomadic horse-riding warrior people who traditionally live by a mix of shepherding, banditry, and selling their services as mercenaries.
[00:20:37]  They're famous warriors.
[00:20:38]  They're like Mongols, right?
[00:20:39]  It's like pretty dramatic sounding.
[00:20:42]  Yeah, they're fucking, they are dramatic.
[00:20:44]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  It's like, is there like a fashion element to this?
[00:20:46]  Because it just sounds like there are a lot.
[00:20:48]  Yeah, there's some.
[00:20:49]  There are some amazing pictures.
[00:20:50]  I will Google.
[00:20:51]  There's a great painting of Cossacks that is fucking cool as hell, Jamie.
[00:20:57]  It's one of the raddest pictures in all of the history of pictures.
[00:21:02]  And I'll send it along to you in a second.
[00:21:04]  So the term Cossack was applied by Europeans as like kind of a broad term to encompass all the different groups of these people, even though every Cossack band and tribe was different.
[00:21:14]  And you'll hear them described differently.
[00:21:16]  A lot of people will describe them as different tribes, different bands.
[00:21:20]  It's not entirely based on like family ties or ethnicity, because in a lot of cases, like Cossack bands will adopt anyone who wants to come in as a Cossack, which also like actually some Native American tribes did at certain periods, too.
[00:21:33]  So it's not, I don't know, it's, I'm not an expert on the, on the Cossacks, but they did a lot of, like, different Cossack bands did a lot of different stuff.
[00:21:42]  There were Cossack groups who sold their services to the Tsar and were basically the Tsar's shock troopers.

=== Cossack Community Secrets (04:53) ===

[00:21:47]  Like when there was a rebellion, the Tsar would send in his Cossacks to fucking murder everybody.
[00:21:53]  And when Napoleon invaded Russia, his fleeing army, like he got, he got beaten and he wound up fleeing from Moscow.
[00:22:00]  His army was harried and massacred by Cossacks, you know?
[00:22:03]  They're fast and they're terrifying.
[00:22:05]  They're like the Mongols and they come from a similar area.
[00:22:07]  Like you have all these different peoples who live on horseback in the Asian steppes and they're really good at fighting.
[00:22:12]  The Cossacks are one of those groups.
[00:22:14]  Okay.
[00:22:14]  Okay.
[00:22:15]  Back in the 1600s, when Ukraine was owned by Poland and Poland was the one fucking around in Ukraine, there was a mass uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against the Poles that succeeded in kicking Poland out of Ukraine and also bringing Poland into Russian control because there weren't enough Cossacks left alive after beating off Poland to run the country, basically.
[00:22:35]  Well, sure.
[00:22:36]  Well, sure.
[00:22:36]  Yeah.
[00:22:37]  There was also a genocide that occurred during this that the Cossacks committed against Jewish people called the Kalnitsky Massacre that might have been the largest massacre of Jewish people prior to the Holocaust.
[00:22:47]  Some, some, some, like, anyway, complicated history here.
[00:22:51]  So now I sent you a picture.
[00:22:52]  So if you're playing the bastards bingo, that was about 21 and a half minutes till genocide.
[00:22:58]  Yeah.
[00:22:59]  Yeah.
[00:23:00]  Wow.
[00:23:01]  One of these guys looks like Santa in the picture you sent.
[00:23:06]  Wow.
[00:23:07]  I love it.
[00:23:08]  So the Cossacks in this famous painting, there's this famous painting of a bunch of Cossacks looking like rad dudes, smoking and drinking and covered in weapons and like, yeah, writing a letter back to the con.
[00:23:19]  Yeah, there's a Santa looking motherfucker.
[00:23:21]  It's a very famous painting.
[00:23:23]  He's got the head motion.
[00:23:26]  And it's a painting of a group of Cossacks called the Zaporogs.
[00:23:30]  And the Zaporog Cossacks are the group who led that rebellion against Poland.
[00:23:35]  They're the Cossack community who kind of like was native to eastern Ukraine.
[00:23:41]  And they were the same Cossack community who would one day produce a little baby named Nestor Makno.
[00:23:47]  So that's this is this is that's everything has been sort of laying the groundwork for where this guy comes from.
[00:23:53]  But like the people in that painting are like Nestor's ancestors.
[00:23:58]  Literally one of them looks like Santa.
[00:24:00]  Yeah, one of them does a heavily armed Santa.
[00:24:04]  Are you implying that Santa at present is not heavily armed?
[00:24:10]  I'll tell you, he's not heavily armed enough to come into my house.
[00:24:13]  Wow.
[00:24:13]  Oh, shit.
[00:24:14]  Okay.
[00:24:16]  I shoot to kill on Christmas.
[00:24:18]  So, so, yeah, I'm going to quote now from a very fun book about Makhno called Anarchy's Cossack that talks a little bit about what the Cossacks were like and kind of what the political tradition was in the area where Makhno grew up before the Tsar took over.
[00:24:37]  Okay.
[00:24:38]  They clung to their republican traditions, what was known as Cossack freedoms, namely the practice of settling all their problems in general assembly, the Krug, and of appointing their own Ottoman, an elected and revocable military leader.
[00:24:50]  The Zaporogs were free men or men whose ambition was to be such.
[00:24:54]  They welcomed many outsiders to their ranks, Russians fleeing their despotic rulers or serfdom, retainers, peasants, townsfolk, vagabonds of various origins fleeing taxation, constraint, and all manner of servitude, and lured by the Zaporogs' manner and free way of life, their Volnitsya.
[00:25:09]  They could stay permanently or just sample Cossack life for a spell.
[00:25:12]  In principle, every free Ukrainian was a Cossack while retaining his land and could be mobilized at a moment's notice.
[00:25:18]  So the Cossacks have like a long kind of democratic tradition.
[00:25:21]  Like a lot of, like a lot of tribes, like a lot of hunter-gatherers, they don't like, you know, if your reputation is we're all really good at killing, it's kind of hard to have a very like strict leader in charge of you because everyone's got weapons and is good at murdering each other.
[00:25:35]  So yeah, that's the and Ukrainian peasants had some democratic traditions too that go back a pretty long way that were kind of like they weren't powerful enough for the czar to really care about cracking down on them.
[00:25:48]  But there are some self-government traditions that exist in this region, even underneath the czar's oppression.
[00:25:54]  So the Zaporogs had been mostly like wiped out by the Russian government back in the 1700s.
[00:25:58]  A lot of them had been turned into serfs, their homes and lands despoiled, but they were kind of still around and most more or less baked into the scenery by October 27th, 1888, when a little baby boy named Nestor Makhno was born.
[00:26:10]  The Zaporogs is such a good name for hardcore name games in the process.
[00:26:14]  So good.
[00:26:16]  It sounds like a college band as a compliment.
[00:26:18]  That's one of the reasons I love kind of Eastern European history because everything is just rad as fuck.
[00:26:25]  It all sounds very like punk rock.
[00:26:28]  Yeah, it's an incredibly punk rock region of the globe.
[00:26:32]  So Nestor was the fifth son of his parents who had been serfs to a guy named Shabelsky back in the days before getting their freedom.
[00:26:38]  Now, the land that they'd been given was too small to feed them.

=== Punk Rock Eastern Europe (06:33) ===

[00:26:41]  And so Nestor's dad spent the rest of his life working for the guy who used to own him, which sucks.
[00:26:48]  I wouldn't.
[00:26:49]  I don't imagine you'd want to do that.
[00:26:50]  That's not the vibe I'm trying to pursue.
[00:26:54]  Yeah, you don't want that.
[00:26:56]  Nestor was a very good student with a particular gift for arithmetic and reading, but he only got about two truncated school years' worth of education before his dad died and his family was poor enough that at age 10, he had to start working full-time.
[00:27:09]  Wait, how old is he when he's taking full-time?
[00:27:12]  10.
[00:27:12]  Okay.
[00:27:13]  He's a 10-year-old man.
[00:27:15]  He's, wow, I love that.
[00:27:16]  Well, double digits, you know, grow the fuck up, Nestor.
[00:27:20]  What's his job?
[00:27:21]  You know what else is a 10-year-old man, Jamie?
[00:27:24]  But no, where is this going?
[00:27:26]  The products and services that support this podcast.
[00:27:28]  This is so inaccurate.
[00:27:30]  A hard 10.
[00:27:31]  Little entrepreneurs.
[00:27:34]  This is not Shark Tank, Robert.
[00:27:37]  It could be.
[00:27:38]  What if we're not going to be able to do that?
[00:27:38]  He's never been a child on Shark Tank.
[00:27:41]  100%.
[00:27:42]  That's so fucked up.
[00:27:44]  It's cable television.
[00:27:46]  I know what we've been talking about is fucked up.
[00:27:48]  There was a little kid on once and his pitch was terrible.
[00:27:51]  So Mark Cuban put a cigar out on him.
[00:27:54]  Wow.
[00:27:55]  That's good.
[00:27:56]  It was good TV.
[00:27:58]  That'll teach Rob.
[00:27:59]  Dad has told me that sound very true.
[00:28:03]  It could be true.
[00:28:05]  I mean, I feel like an adult putting a cigarette out on you, that'll teach you to never do things.
[00:28:10]  Yeah, and an adult putting a cigar out on you.
[00:28:13]  That'll keep you bound to the land.
[00:28:14]  That is absurd.
[00:28:15]  That's a career change.
[00:28:16]  That is a career change.
[00:28:18]  All right.
[00:28:19]  Here's products that probably won't put a cigar out on you.
[00:28:28]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:28:32]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:28:35]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:28:38]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:28:42]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:28:45]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:28:49]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:28:51]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:28:56]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:28:58]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:29:00]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:29:02]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:29:05]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:29:06]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:29:09]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:29:13]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:29:15]  Trust me, babe.
[00:29:16]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:26]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:29:31]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:29:36]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:29:42]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:29:51]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:29:56]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:29:59]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:30:02]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:30:04]  That's so funny.
[00:30:06]  Share, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:30:14]  Say you love me.
[00:30:17]  You know I.
[00:30:19]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:30:26]  What's up, everyone?
[00:30:27]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:30:28]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:30:35]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:30:39]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:30:42]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:30:47]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:30:50]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:30:51]  I know it's a place they come.
[00:30:52]  Look for up and coming talent.
[00:30:54]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:30:59]  Yeah.
[00:30:59]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:31:02]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:31:03]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:31:12]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:31:14]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:31:20]  Just hang in there.
[00:31:22]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:31:23]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:31:25]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:31:26]  Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:31:35]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:31:41]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:31:46]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:31:50]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:31:53]  I doctored the test once.
[00:31:55]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:31:58]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:32:02]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:32:05]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:32:07]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:32:09]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marincini.
[00:32:11]  My mind was blown.
[00:32:13]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:32:15]  This is Love Trap.
[00:32:16]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:32:18]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:32:23]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:32:29]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:32:34]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:44]  We're back.
[00:32:45]  Yes.
[00:32:46]  So I have almost finished my first full cup of Deathwish coffee, which is reportedly the strongest coffee in the world.
[00:32:53]  And I guess I have a severe caffeine addiction because you have a severe caffeine addiction.
[00:32:58]  I just like rush-ordered sugar-free pear Red Bull to my house.
[00:33:04]  Yeah.
[00:33:05]  I mean, it's pretty good coffee, actually.
[00:33:07]  It's nice.
[00:33:08]  I got sugar-free pear Red Bull is the one that you also like, Roberts.
[00:33:12]  The sugar-free Pear Red Bull is very tasty.
[00:33:14]  It is.

=== Botko Ivan's Revolt Signal (14:28) ===

[00:33:15]  I got a real shit yourself brand of iced coffee today.
[00:33:20]  I got like, it's got too much dairy in it.
[00:33:22]  I think I've talked about it with you before.
[00:33:24]  It's the TikTok stars coffee order.
[00:33:28]  I wish there was a brand with the courage to just be called shit yourself iced coffee.
[00:33:33]  It's just like, this coffee will make you shit yourself.
[00:33:36]  You need to get your day started.
[00:33:38]  Like, we will fucking ruin your pants.
[00:33:42]  You will never sleep again, but you better wear a pair of pants.
[00:33:46]  You're not too attached.
[00:33:47]  You got the kind of stuff you're telling me, Jamie.
[00:33:50]  Yeah, I got the Charlie at Dunkin' Donuts.
[00:33:53]  Robert doesn't know who Charlie is and just screaming.
[00:33:56]  I think that's honestly for the picture.
[00:33:58]  I would be so worried.
[00:33:59]  He doesn't even know.
[00:34:00]  He doesn't know.
[00:34:00]  No.
[00:34:01]  Don't learn Harry Potter.
[00:34:01]  Well, we're not talking about any Charlie here.
[00:34:04]  We're talking about Nestor Mackno.
[00:34:06]  So Nestor was a good student as a little boy.
[00:34:09]  He had a gift for arithmetic and reading.
[00:34:11]  Yeah, he only got about two years of school before at age 10, he has to help provide for his family.
[00:34:15]  He worked full-time from 10 onwards, generally for other wealthy property owners, like the man who had once owned his parents.
[00:34:21]  Nestor later wrote that this experience awoke in him a sort of rage, resentment, and even hatred for the wealthy property owner.
[00:34:29]  I think we can all identify with that.
[00:34:31]  I mean, I think that that's a very relatable in for us and Lil.
[00:34:35]  He's a relatable guy.
[00:34:37]  He's a cool relatable.
[00:34:39]  I feel like, okay, I am picturing 10-year-old Nestor with the facial hair that I'm seeing in all the Google images.
[00:34:46]  All these Cossacks.
[00:34:47]  Yeah, he had a full beard by age seven.
[00:34:49]  Absolutely.
[00:34:50]  That's when you become a little man.
[00:34:51]  That's what happens.
[00:34:52]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  So more than anything, Nestor hated the wealthy children of these rich people.
[00:34:58]  He particularly hated when these...
[00:35:00]  That is very relatable.
[00:35:02]  He called them young idlers.
[00:35:03]  And more than anything, he hated when they would walk near him, quote, and this is from Nestor's biography.
[00:35:09]  All fresh and neat with full bellies in the cleanest clothes, reeking of perfume, while he, filthy and in rags, barefooted and stinking of dung, scattered bedding for the calves.
[00:35:18]  See, from an early age, Nestor, like he was working in like the, he was like fucking cleaning up after the cow.
[00:35:23]  So he smelled like shit all the time.
[00:35:25]  And he was extremely aware from an early age that his circumstances were unjust and that the situation was crooked.
[00:35:31]  He also felt it was more or less hopeless.
[00:35:33]  He told himself that, yeah, yeah, like you fucking get to smell nice because I have to clean up shit for your family.
[00:35:40]  like I fucking hate you people.
[00:35:42]  I love a child with deep-seated class issues from like the jump.
[00:35:46]  That is like a very powerful energy.
[00:35:49]  He's like the fucking jump.
[00:35:51]  Yeah, he goes from zero to fucking stat.
[00:35:55]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  It's like the, I'm like, damn.
[00:35:59]  It reminds me of all the, Sophie, do you remember those weird, those weird little juice bar perfumes that like rich girls in Wire High would have?
[00:36:08]  Why yes?
[00:36:09]  They had pictures of gummy bears on them.
[00:36:11]  They all went to fucking soccer camp.
[00:36:13]  It was disgusting.
[00:36:14]  I'm with I'm with Nestor.
[00:36:16]  Meanwhile, I smell like a goddamn hot dog.
[00:36:18]  Yeah.
[00:36:18]  I mean, I absolutely did not own because I was not hip or rich, but yes.
[00:36:24]  Yes.
[00:36:24]  You know, you brought this up in our Mark Zuckerberg episode, Jamie.
[00:36:27]  That time you were drunk and hucked a bottle at a rich Stanford kid who was, or Harvard kid who was, who was in.
[00:36:36]  He was rowing.
[00:36:37]  He was rowing.
[00:36:37]  Yeah.
[00:36:38]  Nestor has strong hucking a beer bottle at a rowing Ivy League college student energy.
[00:36:44]  It's sick.
[00:36:45]  It's sick.
[00:36:46]  I like him so far.
[00:36:47]  I hope he doesn't fuck up.
[00:36:50]  He doesn't.
[00:36:51]  I mean, he doesn't succeed in his ultimate goals, but they're pretty ambitious.
[00:36:55]  Yeah.
[00:36:56]  So, yeah, he felt that like, as fucked up as the situation were, it was pretty much unhealthless.
[00:37:01]  This is how things are.
[00:37:02]  And he, you know, he had, it was his lot in life to work for his landowning masters, and they would pay him a pittance to reek of animal shit so that they didn't have to reek of animal shit.
[00:37:12]  So Nestor went on with life, showing enough talent that as he grew up, he was promoted from taking care of cows to taking care of horses, which is the podcasting of the taking care of animals game.
[00:37:21]  I think we can all agree.
[00:37:23]  I like that.
[00:37:24]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  Now, it was in this job that he would witness one of the defining experiences of his young life.
[00:37:30]  He walked into the stable one day to see the landlord's sons beating several of the young peasant boys who worked in the stable for some minor fuck up.
[00:37:37]  He was enraged by this, but the dark recesses of his mind, as he wrote it, made him accept it.
[00:37:43]  And like a real slave, he strove, just like the others about him, to avert his eyes and pretend he saw and heard not a thing.
[00:37:50]  So he's saying like mentally in this period, he was so enslaved that like he couldn't even resist this.
[00:37:55]  Like he knew it was fucked up, but there was nothing to do.
[00:37:58]  He'd grown up hearing stories about his parents being beaten.
[00:38:00]  His mom had been a serf, and she had there's this thing called the corvée, which is this old tradition under serfdom where you have to do free forced labor in lieu of taxes for your master.
[00:38:10]  And she'd refused to do it at one point after being freed when she didn't have to.
[00:38:14]  And she'd been whipped 15 times for doing so.
[00:38:17]  So he'd grown up hearing stories like this, that like, if you don't do what they want, they just beat you.
[00:38:21]  And that's the way life is.
[00:38:23]  But he also had this, he'd also, he was, came from Cossack ancestry.
[00:38:26]  So his mom had also told him stories of the battles of his free ancestors who had like fought for their liberty, you know, with fucking swords.
[00:38:34]  So he grows up with both of these things in his, in his mind, you know?
[00:38:37]  And I'm assuming his mom omitted the genocide.
[00:38:41]  I mean, moms tend to do that.
[00:38:43]  That's a classic mom move.
[00:38:45]  Yeah.
[00:38:48]  So, you know, Nestor grows up like kind of consumed with this mixture of rage at what his mom had endured and the sense that he had ancestors who wouldn't have taken this shit, which is kind of warring in him when he's 12, 13, 14 years old.
[00:39:02]  And eventually, the same situation came round again where he sees kids being beaten by the children of his master.
[00:39:09]  I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here.
[00:39:11]  One summer's day in 1902, the young Nestor, 13 years old, was present at a run-of-the-mill scene.
[00:39:17]  The landlord's sons, his manager and his assistants, set about insulting and then raining blows on the second stableboy in the presence of all the other stable hands.
[00:39:25]  Half dead from fear at the wrath of their masters, that's Nestor's words.
[00:39:29]  Nestor could take no more, and he ran off to alert the head stableboy, Botko Ivan, who was busy in a cowshed trimming the horses' tails.
[00:39:37]  Learning of what was afoot, Botko Ivan, an elemental force, burst like a man possessed into the room where the chastisement was underway, pitched into the young nobles and their acolytes, and sent them rolling in the dirt with swathing punches and kicks.
[00:39:50]  The attackers, attacked, fled in disarray, some through the window, some through the nearest doorway.
[00:39:55]  This was the signal for revolt.
[00:39:57]  All of the day laborers and stable boys were outraged and went off in a body to demand an explanation.
[00:40:02]  The old landlord took fright and in conciliatory tone besought them to forgive the idiocy of his young heirs to remain in his service and even undertook to see that nothing of the sort would ever happen again.
[00:40:13]  Botko Ivan related the episode to young Nestor, treating him to the first words of rebellion he had ever heard in his life.
[00:40:19]  This is Botko Ivan.
[00:40:20]  Botko's like boss, basically.
[00:40:22]  Oh, okay.
[00:40:22]  Hi, everybody.
[00:40:23]  Robert Evans here.
[00:40:25]  And I need to admit something.
[00:40:27]  I lied to Jamie just then.
[00:40:29]  Botko does not mean boss, it means daddy.
[00:40:32]  And if you know anything about Jamie Loftus, you understand why I had to lie to her about what that word meant because we would not have gotten through the episode otherwise.
[00:40:42]  No one here should countenance the disgrace of being beaten.
[00:40:45]  And as for you, little Nestor, if one of your masters should ever strike you, pick up the first pitchfork you lay hands on and let him have it.
[00:40:53]  This advice, once poetic and brutal, left a terrible mark upon Nestor's young soul and awakened him to his dignity.
[00:40:59]  Henceforth, he would keep a fork or some other tool within reach, meaning to put it to good use.
[00:41:04]  So after this, he keeps like a fork on him at all times in case he's going to stab a rich kid, which fucking rules.
[00:41:10]  The way that this is written is, first of all, very like cinematic.
[00:41:15]  It's epic the way it's written, because it's all there all he's saying is, and then the guy beat the shit out of a bunch of rich kids and it was awesome.
[00:41:23]  And now I always carry a fork with me.
[00:41:26]  Yeah.
[00:41:26]  Like, because I'm weird.
[00:41:28]  But that is so, it sounds like a superhero origin story.
[00:41:32]  He, when you hear this guy's life, there's a bit of that.
[00:41:36]  Like, he, he has a, he's a fucking, and he's, you know, there's a lot of uh people who hate this guy.
[00:41:41]  We'll talk a little bit about some of the allegations against him because he was he wound up being anti-Soviet.
[00:41:47]  You know, he fought against the Reds and the whites during the Soviet, the Russian Civil War.
[00:41:51]  Um, so there's a lot of to like anybody on this podcast.
[00:41:56]  I'd hard to hold up for it, Rari.
[00:41:58]  And then I'll tell you about this fucked up shit that happened later.
[00:42:02]  We don't know if it actually happened because there's a lot of like he he fought against when he realized what the Soviet Union was going to be, he fought against the Bolsheviks as well as the fascists and the monarchists.
[00:42:13]  Um, because he was like an advocate of liberty and like, yeah, there are a bunch of stories that he already know.
[00:42:20]  He we said he already had a beard by the time that this happened, but I imagine actually at the end of this story, a beard explodes out of his face because he's had just this revelatory moment when when Botko Ivan tells him to just stab rich people, he like a beard explodes out of his beard.
[00:42:38]  That was his second beard.
[00:42:40]  Yeah, yeah, it's you're a man in Ukraine when you get your second beard.
[00:42:45]  Yeah, first beard, that's kid shit.
[00:42:48]  Yeah.
[00:42:48]  Have a beard because he hasn't lost his baby beard yet.
[00:42:54]  At age 14, Nestor quit his stable job and got a gig as an apprentice at a local foundry.
[00:42:59]  He made wheels for harvesting machines, and this improvement in his own quality of life corresponded to a similar improvement among the rest of his family.
[00:43:06]  His three older brothers got married and left the home to set up households of their own, which meant things were a bit less tight for Nestor and his mother and his younger brother.
[00:43:14]  Eventually, Nestor moved on from foundry work to being the sales assistant for a wine merchant, but he found this job disgusting.
[00:43:20]  He couldn't stand doing it and he quit after just a couple of months.
[00:43:23]  Too busy.
[00:43:23]  Now, this is too busy for Nestor.
[00:43:25]  Too bougie.
[00:43:26]  And so the book Anarchy's Cossack, which is definitely a very well-sourced biography.
[00:43:32]  You keep saying anarchy is Kossak, but I'm hearing Gravity's Rainbow each and every time.
[00:43:37]  It's a way better book than fucking Thomas Pynchon's bullshit.
[00:43:40]  This is an anti-pension podcast.
[00:43:43]  I appreciate that.
[00:43:45]  Yeah.
[00:43:46]  And it's available for free online, too.
[00:43:48]  You can buy a copy from AK Press, but there's also the whole thing is hosted on libcom.org.
[00:43:52]  But yeah, there's a lot of debate because, again, this guy was extremely controversial.
[00:43:59]  And a lot of people will claim that he was an outrageous drunk, that he flew into violent rages and like murdered people while drunk.
[00:44:05]  And it's possible, like, obviously, the Ukrainian peasants are a hard-drinking people.
[00:44:10]  Soldiers who spend multiple years straight without break fighting tend to drink heavily.
[00:44:15]  Totally possible he got up to some shit while drinking.
[00:44:18]  Also, a lot of these stories tend to involve him like tearing 13 people apart with a knife or something, like crazy shit that like just didn't happen.
[00:44:26]  I thought his weapon was a fork.
[00:44:28]  Yeah, that's what I was about to say.
[00:44:29]  Fake news.
[00:44:30]  Fake news.
[00:44:30]  Yeah, there's, there's, it's hard to say.
[00:44:33]  There's also claims that he was not a drinker at all.
[00:44:36]  And Anarchy's Cossack takes the aim that he was like not at all a drinker and that he he he more or less avoided alcohol.
[00:44:43]  I don't think that's entirely true either.
[00:44:45]  I'm like, that doesn't sound likely given the environment, right?
[00:44:50]  We do have an account from a woman who knew him in his last years in Paris who knew him for like three years and knew him fairly well and saw him drink occasionally, but he would never drink more than about a glass of wine and he would kind of be fucked up after a glass of wine and not able to take more.
[00:45:07]  And she was like, he was very temperate.
[00:45:09]  And she noted she assumed that he like drank as much as normal peasants drank, but she saw no evidence that he was like a hardcore alcoholic or that he got violent when he was intoxicated.
[00:45:20]  He was definitely prone to depression, but I don't know.
[00:45:23]  Again, there is so much, there are so many hit pieces out about this guy that were written at the time.
[00:45:29]  It's kind of hard to tell exactly what happened.
[00:45:32]  Who's a hater and who's reporting the facts?
[00:45:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:35]  Now, yeah, but there's one of the claims is that like he developed a distaste for wine in particular and alcohol in general working for this wine merchant.
[00:45:44]  He wasn't much of a drinker.
[00:45:45]  I don't really know what the case was.
[00:45:47]  I never met the guy because he died in 1935.
[00:45:50]  Oh, wow.
[00:45:51]  Yeah.
[00:45:52]  So for the next few years after quitting the wine business, Machno mostly helped his mom keep up their small property, take care of their one horse, and did odd jobs around town to make ends meet.
[00:46:02]  He spent time working as a house painter and a decorator until he'd saved up enough money to buy a cart for his brother's small farm.
[00:46:08]  They used it to transport heat.
[00:46:10]  He did like interior design for what?
[00:46:12]  Yeah, he was a home decorator for a while.
[00:46:15]  I would love to see his portfolio.
[00:46:19]  I am very curious as well.
[00:46:22]  What kind of spaces is Nestor Curie?
[00:46:24]  He's like, here is the dining table.
[00:46:26]  No forks.
[00:46:28]  I am the only one that can have the forks.
[00:46:30]  He's strapped with forks like a fucking terrorist with a bomb vest.
[00:46:35]  It's just all property brothers, but with a lot of forks.
[00:46:39]  I really hate that straw.
[00:46:41]  Yeah, he was a guy who had a wide range of gigs as a young man.
[00:46:47]  Things were seemingly going well for his family, broadly speaking, until 1904, when Russia went to war with Japan for no reason, really.
[00:46:55]  This is the Russo-Japanese War, one of the dumbest wars that ever happened.
[00:46:59]  And Russia gets its ass handed to it.
[00:47:03]  Like this war is why Japan becomes a major thing on the international stage because like white people up to 1905, which is when like the fighting starts, are all like, nobody can fuck with white people.
[00:47:14]  Like we're the fucking.
[00:47:15]  And then the Japanese just destroy an entire Russian fleet and everyone's like, whoa!
[00:47:20]  And that's...
[00:47:21]  Maybe do that noise one more time.
[00:47:24]  Yeah, that's what Europe says after the Russo-Japanese war.
[00:47:29]  I feel like that'd be a great alarm sound.
[00:47:32]  So obviously, when Russia goes to war with Japan, they conscript a bunch of people.
[00:47:37]  And Nestor's older brother Sava was sent to the front, and he gets horribly injured in this war.

=== Nicholas the Invalid Tsar (05:22) ===

[00:47:43]  He's what's called by people at the time an invalid the rest of his life.
[00:47:46]  He's like badly wounded in this and not fully, yeah.
[00:47:51]  He never comes back in a lot of ways.
[00:47:53]  Now, that war was followed by a failed revolution in 1905 and 1906 of the socialist variety.
[00:47:58]  So Russia enters into a dumb war, gets their ass kicked, and there's a revolt, like you do.
[00:48:04]  Now, I want to pause here to talk a little bit about Tsar Nicholas II.
[00:48:07]  You know, he's the Tsar who, after in 1917, gets overthrown.
[00:48:11]  His whole family gets killed by the Bolsheviks.
[00:48:13]  And because he and his young children get massacred in captivity, I think he's become a figure a lot of people find sympathetic.
[00:48:21]  You know, the Romanovs are like, there's a lot of, they were brutal dictators, right?
[00:48:26]  Like, like even Nicholas, who there, if you read like his letters to his wife and stuff, he's a guy.
[00:48:31]  There are definitely sympathetic things about him.
[00:48:33]  He's a dude who really legitimately loved his wife, which is rare among royalty.
[00:48:36]  He had a sick, terminally ill child.
[00:48:39]  You know, there's some sick, but I am so sick of the.
[00:48:42]  Yeah, they were horrible.
[00:48:43]  They're actually fucking monsters.
[00:48:46]  They were fucking monsters.
[00:48:48]  And I am no apologist for the Bolsheviks, but I will say if there's ever a justified case to murder an entire family, it's when they owned you.
[00:48:56]  They fucking suck.
[00:48:57]  Like, they, I, I don't know.
[00:49:00]  I have, I've, I've cracked open my Russian biography again recently.
[00:49:04]  I'm like, they were fucking monsters.
[00:49:05]  I, and also trash.
[00:49:07]  Yeah.
[00:49:07]  I hate that argument that whenever people make, they're like, well, yeah, sure, he was a brutal, horrible ruler who hated his people, but he was kind of a wife guy.
[00:49:17]  And you're like, well, I don't care if he's a wife guy.
[00:49:20]  I don't care if he's a wife guy.
[00:49:22]  So he was a guy who like, he, he would, he was very, he constantly expressed, you know, loving his people and wanting to like be known by them and want to like talk to them and stuff.
[00:49:33]  But whenever they would express opinions that he, he, he didn't hold or that he didn't think they should hold, then the dictator came out again, right?
[00:49:40]  Like he loved the idea of being loved by his people, but he didn't actually like, he also thought that he he was like, he thought he was divinely appointed to rule them, you know?
[00:49:50]  Yeah.
[00:49:51]  You can't be a good guy and think that.
[00:49:53]  So to give a little bit of like context to how brutal Nicholas himself was, we've talked a lot about the brutality of the Russian regime, but let's talk specifically about Nicholas here for a second.
[00:50:01]  On January 22nd, 1905, a massive crowd of thousands of working men gathered outside the Tsar's main palace in St. Petersburg to protest all the bullshit.
[00:50:11]  And the Tsar orders a crackdown on them.
[00:50:14]  And a correspondent from the London Times was there.
[00:50:16]  And here's what he wrote: The first trouble began at 11 o'clock when the military tried to turn back some thousands of strikers at one of the bridges.
[00:50:22]  The same thing happened almost simultaneously at the other bridges, where the constant flow of workmen pressing forward refused to be denied access to the common rendezvous in the palace square.
[00:50:30]  The Cossacks at first used their knouts, wooden clubs, and then the flat of their sabers, and finally they fired.
[00:50:35]  The passions of the mob broke loose like a bursting dam.
[00:50:38]  The people, seeing the dead and dying carried away in all directions, the snow on the streets and pavements soaked with blood, cried aloud for vengeance.
[00:50:45]  Meanwhile, the situation in the palace was becoming momentarily worse.
[00:50:48]  The troops were reported to be unable to control the vast massage which were constantly surging forward.
[00:50:53]  Reinforcements were sent.
[00:50:54]  And at two o'clock, the order was given to fire.
[00:50:57]  The order was given by the Tsar.
[00:50:58]  Men, women, and children fell at each volley and were carried away in ambulances, sledges, and carts.
[00:51:03]  And by the time it was over, as many as 500 people had been shot dead on Nicholas's orders.
[00:51:07]  Like, that was like one thing that he did.
[00:51:11]  And, you know, the uprising in 1905 is put down brutally.
[00:51:15]  Number one, like hundreds of different czarists institute pogroms against Jewish people and leftists who they see as the same in order to defend their monarch.
[00:51:24]  Nicholas sends troops into the Baltic provinces and Georgia and orders them to massacre everyone who resists.
[00:51:29]  By the time it's over, he kills about 13,000 people putting down this rebellion.
[00:51:33]  Well, here's my question.
[00:51:34]  Then why is he made out to be such a nice guy in the animated Anastasia, my favorite movie?
[00:51:39]  Because he seems really nice and he gives her a little kiss on the forehead.
[00:51:42]  So I just have some questions about that because I'm pretty sure that cartoon is a documentary.
[00:51:46]  Yeah, it's very accurate to how he was with his kids.
[00:51:50]  He just had other people's kids shot by mercenaries.
[00:51:53]  They should have shown that in the movie, maybe.
[00:51:55]  It could have been fun.
[00:51:56]  It might have been nice.
[00:51:56]  You know, they're only always completely truthful and historically accurate on everything that they do ever.
[00:52:03]  I was like, fuck documentary on fucking...
[00:52:06]  It might have been Netflix recently about the Romanovs.
[00:52:09]  It's like a live-action one.
[00:52:10]  And it does leave out some of the brutality.
[00:52:15]  People love to cut the Romanovs slack.
[00:52:18]  They love it.
[00:52:19]  I want to talk about the Rasputin daughters who got, you know, sent to Siberia when they were teenagers for just being related to Rasputin.
[00:52:28]  And then what about all the kids that got shot?
[00:52:31]  What about Rah Ra Rasputin himself, lover of the Russian queen?
[00:52:35]  Yeah, the king of disco.
[00:52:37]  He was the king of disco.
[00:52:39]  Remember when they were like, we found his dick, and then they were like, wait a second, this is a pickle.
[00:52:44]  Some other giant dick.
[00:52:47]  There is a giant penis out there that's been preserved that is reputed to be Rasputin's, but it's probably not.
[00:52:52]  But there is a big mummified Wang out there.
[00:52:55]  I don't know if you've, but I would like you to make that into an ad break transition.
[00:52:59]  Yeah.
[00:53:00]  You know who else mummifies penises?
[00:53:03]  Tell me, please tell them.

=== Rasputin King of Disco (03:24) ===

[00:53:05]  Products and services that support this podcast.
[00:53:16]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:53:20]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:53:23]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:53:26]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:53:30]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:53:33]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:53:37]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:53:39]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:53:44]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:53:46]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:53:48]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:53:50]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:53:53]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:53:54]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:53:57]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:54:01]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:54:03]  Trust me, babe.
[00:54:04]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:13]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:54:19]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:54:24]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:54:30]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:54:39]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:54:44]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:54:47]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:54:50]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:54:52]  That's so funny.
[00:54:53]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:55:02]  Say you love me.
[00:55:05]  You know I.
[00:55:06]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:55:14]  What's up, everyone?
[00:55:15]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:55:16]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:55:23]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:55:27]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:55:30]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:55:35]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:55:38]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:55:39]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:55:42]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:47]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:55:50]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:55:51]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:56:00]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:56:02]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:56:09]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:56:11]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:56:12]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:56:14]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:56:22]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.

=== Lighting Fields on Fire (15:12) ===

[00:56:29]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:56:34]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:56:38]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:56:41]  I doctored the test once.
[00:56:43]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:56:46]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:56:50]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:56:53]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:56:55]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:56:57]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marincini.
[00:56:59]  My mind was blown.
[00:57:01]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:57:02]  This is Love Trap.
[00:57:04]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:57:06]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:57:11]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:57:17]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:57:22]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:57:32]  So the revolution didn't really touch Makno's hometown of Gugliai Poli, which is where he grows up.
[00:57:38]  But news of the brave attempts of the revolutionaries to overthrow the Tsar inspire Makno.
[00:57:42]  So he grows up hearing about this and he likes it, it sets his imagination aflame.
[00:57:47]  And he starts to believe that perhaps people like him are not destined to be ruled by kings and landlords and the like.
[00:57:53]  Nestor starts reading forbidden literature.
[00:57:55]  And since he was just a baby leftist at this point, that meant social democratic propaganda.
[00:58:00]  He was initially thrilled by their quote socialist phraseology and their phony revolutionary ardor.
[00:58:06]  As the word phony in that last sentence probably keyed you in on, he fell out of the social democratic spell pretty quickly.
[00:58:11]  So he basically becomes a Democrat for a little while and then is like, oh, these people don't actually want to change things the way that I want to change things.
[00:58:19]  Wow.
[00:58:20]  Ben there, baby.
[00:58:22]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  A lot of people can identify with Nestor's genius.
[00:58:25]  Yeah, it's like he's actually, he's a very relatable guy I've found so far.
[00:58:29]  So for a year or so, he's a heart, he's hardcore into the social democratic scene.
[00:58:33]  And one of the things you'll come to understand about Nestor is that when he gets into politics, he gets into politics.
[00:58:38]  He starts handing out thousands of pamphlets about like social democratic literature to everyone who will take them.
[00:58:44]  And then in 1906, after like a year of this, he meets some anarchist peasants who had a little reading circle in Gugliai Poly, and he found himself attracted to their ideology.
[00:58:53]  Now, the most educated member of the group was a guy named Voldemar Antony, the son of an immigrant Czech worker and a lathe worker.
[00:59:00]  Voldemar took Nestor under his wing and Nestor claims rid his soul once and for all of the lingering remnants of the slightest spirit of servility and submission to any authority.
[00:59:11]  Okay.
[00:59:12]  Nestor gets pilled.
[00:59:13]  Yeah, it's like he literally, okay, so Nestor, there's a bunch of like daddy figures in Nestor's life that keep pilling him.
[00:59:21]  So now he's got a third beard on top of his every time he's radicalized, he gets another beard.
[00:59:25]  Bursts out.
[00:59:28]  Now, when I say anarchist reading circle, that means one thing in the United States today.
[00:59:34]  What Nestor and his friends were doing was profoundly illegal.
[00:59:38]  Revolutionaries had just tried to overthrow the government.
[00:59:41]  All of Russia, and that included Ukraine at this point, was under a state of siege, as had been proclaimed by the Tsar.
[00:59:47]  Talking about like social democrat shit was illegal.
[00:59:49]  Anarchist books were like meth to the Tsar's police.
[00:59:53]  People alleged to have radical political opinions had just been shot to death en masse by cops.
[00:59:58]  So, like, this is risky shit.
[01:00:03]  Yeah, a bunch of Dawn Cossacks who were loyal to the Tsar had been stationed at Gugliaipoli to beat the shit out of anyone who so much as whiffed of socialism.
[01:00:10]  One local writer later described seeing a teacher dragged through the streets by two Dawn Cossacks with sabers, while a third Cossack beat him with a rifle butt, screaming, take that, you wastrel, for your revolution.
[01:00:22]  Oh my God.
[01:00:23]  Okay.
[01:00:24]  Okay.
[01:00:24]  And again, the Dawn Cossacks are another group of Cossacks that are like the Tsar's stormtroopers, basically.
[01:00:30]  So Nestor and his friends took some serious risks to sit around and talk about books.
[01:00:35]  They met once a week in a group of 10 to 15 people, and they would talk for hours about the idea that it might be possible to live without Tsar someday.
[01:00:42]  Makhno later recalled, For me, such nights, we most often would gather to meet by night, were filled with light and joy.
[01:00:48]  We peasants, with our meager learning, would assemble in winter at the home of one of us, in summer in the fields, near a pond, on the green grass, or from time to time in the broad daylight, like young folks out for a stroll, we would meet to debate the issues that move us.
[01:01:02]  He remembers this positively all his life.
[01:01:04]  Like, this is that's that's really pleasant.
[01:01:07]  He's he's in a book club.
[01:01:09]  Yeah, he's in a nice book club.
[01:01:12]  This book club goes to some pretty intense places.
[01:01:15]  So it was just a book club for a little while.
[01:01:19]  But after six months of study and careful vetting, conversational vetting, they make Nestor a full member of the group.
[01:01:26]  So he starts to help his friends.
[01:01:28]  They graduate from just reading books to handing out propaganda and giving lectures to their fellow peasants.
[01:01:33]  And Nestor was eager to do more than that.
[01:01:35]  In the wake of the Tsar's terror, prominent anarchists in Russia had urged their fellows into a period of black terror against czarism itself.
[01:01:43]  Being poor peasants, Makhno and his friends had few options when it came to terror.
[01:01:47]  In order to give themselves some options, and options here means guns, they embarked on a campaign of what they would call expropriation and what the law called simple theft.
[01:01:55]  They would target the homes and property of the wealthy, steal shit, and use it to buy weaponry.
[01:02:00]  Makhno and his fellow libertarian communists, as they called themselves at this point, drew the ire of local law enforcement quickly.
[01:02:07]  I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here.
[01:02:10]  On September 5th, 1906, in Gugliaipoly, an attack upon the home of the businessman Plechinger by three individuals armed with revolvers with faces blackened.
[01:02:18]  On October 10th, a fresh attack in Gugliaipoli upon another businessman, Bruk, by four individuals, faces concealed by paper masks, who, brandishing revolvers and bombs, demanded 500 rubles for the starving.
[01:02:30]  A little later, a third attack upon a wealthy local industrialist, Kerner, by four individuals, with three more acting as lookouts.
[01:02:36]  In August 1907, in the nearby village of Geicher, a fourth attack upon yet another businessman, Gurevich, by four individuals wearing sunglasses.
[01:02:43]  And it was this last attack that would get Makhno and his friends in trouble because they wound up shooting it out with the local cops in order to escape.
[01:02:50]  So it also has a little reservoir, dogs.
[01:02:53]  It's a proletariat, you know?
[01:02:55]  Yeah.
[01:02:56]  And again, Nestor's like 17 at this point when he gets into his first shootout with the cops.
[01:03:02]  Yeah.
[01:03:03]  Grew up fast.
[01:03:06]  Fourth beard.
[01:03:07]  So after this, as this like this fucking crime spree is going, another I want to talk about one other thing they got into was lighting fields on fire en masse because there was this plan in the wake of the 1905 revolution.
[01:03:20]  The czar decides that he wants to create a class of peasants who have money, more money than other peasants, like middle class basically, to separate the peasants because they were like one of the things that scared him is that all of the peasants were kind of the same sort of poor together, and that might mean they would rebel together.
[01:03:37]  So he tries to create this group of like peasants who own more land and property than the others called kulaks in order to divide them.
[01:03:44]  And Nestor and his friends, like their response to that is to light all of the land of the rich people on fire as much as they possibly can.
[01:03:51]  Yeah.
[01:03:51]  Right, right.
[01:03:52]  I mean, that's just logic that makes sense.
[01:03:55]  So a police superintendent named Kariachinsev, who's generally described as like Gugliya Poli's Sherlock Holmes, starts trying to unravel this anarchist ring, like tries to catch them.
[01:04:06]  And through I want this movie, this is good.
[01:04:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:10]  He basically tortures people until he can identify the people who are responsible for the attacks, but he doesn't have any hard evidence.
[01:04:16]  And so he doesn't want to arrest them.
[01:04:17]  In 1907, he gets his opportunity, though.
[01:04:20]  A member of a political group called the Social Revolutionaries, and this guy was a friend of Machno's, borrows Machno's gun.
[01:04:26]  And unfortunately, it turns out he borrowed it to murder his fiancée and then shoot himself.
[01:04:30]  And this happens like in the middle of a small town.
[01:04:32]  So like Machno runs up to provide medical aid and he gets arrested immediately.
[01:04:37]  And then one of his friends is arrested for trying to send messages to him in jail.
[01:04:41]  And it's like this whole, anyway, they wind up in jail.
[01:04:44]  And this Sherlock Holmes dude starts interrogating them and trying to break them.
[01:04:48]  But they...
[01:04:49]  I love that there's an anarchist Sherlock Holmes.
[01:04:52]  Oh, no, he's not an anarchist.
[01:04:53]  He's the czar's man.
[01:04:55]  He's the czar's an.
[01:04:57]  No, okay.
[01:04:57]  So he's the czar's Sherlock.
[01:04:59]  Did the anarchists get a Sherlock?
[01:05:01]  No.
[01:05:02]  No.
[01:05:02]  Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
[01:05:04]  They do.
[01:05:05]  Well, we'll talk about what happens to Sherlock in a little bit here.
[01:05:08]  But here's what he writes after trying to interrogate Nestor Machno and his friend.
[01:05:12]  I have never before seen men of this metal.
[01:05:14]  I have plenty of evidence on which to state that they are dangerous anarchists, but although I have put their flesh through a little suffering, I have extracted nothing from them.
[01:05:21]  Machno seems like a peasant dolt when one looks at him, but I have very conclusive evidence for claiming that it was he who shot at the gin d'arms on August 26th, 1907.
[01:05:30]  Well, now I have done all I was able to extract admissions, but to no effect.
[01:05:34]  On the contrary, he supplied me with facts, which I have checked out and which I have been forced to acknowledge is correct, demonstrating he was not even in Gugliyah Poly on that day.
[01:05:42]  As for the other one, Antony, when I interrogated him, having him beaten at will, he dared declare to me, you dead meat, you'll never get anything out of me.
[01:05:49]  And yet I gave him a good taste of the swing.
[01:05:52]  So he's like, these motherfuckers won't talk even though I beat the shit out of them.
[01:05:56]  Okay, so it's so he's, I mean, you have to admire that, right?
[01:06:00]  If you're, I'm trying, I'm trying to get into Sherlock's head.
[01:06:03]  I don't like that Sherlock's a government guy.
[01:06:05]  He is, he's a hard guy.
[01:06:06]  I mean, the other, the actual Sherlock is a government guy.
[01:06:10]  That's true, but at least he did drugs.
[01:06:12]  He did do drugs.
[01:06:13]  I don't know.
[01:06:14]  Maybe this guy did drugs.
[01:06:15]  I hope he did drugs.
[01:06:17]  So Makno and his friends spend 10 months in jail.
[01:06:20]  He turns 18 in jail, and this would not be his last day inside of a cell.
[01:06:24]  He was eventually bailed out by, oddly enough, a well-off industrialist who was like a friend of his family who had hired his family members.
[01:06:31]  And by the time Machno was released, the heat was on his friends, and it was declared for a while that he would avoid breaking the law in order to continue to radicalize and recruit more peasants.
[01:06:40]  So he gets another job as a decorator, and he founds an anarchist study group of his own.
[01:06:44]  25 peasants.
[01:06:45]  He keeps becoming a property brother when he needs to do that.
[01:06:48]  He loves decorating.
[01:06:49]  I love that.
[01:06:50]  I love that.
[01:06:51]  Nestor Machno loves two things, shooting it out with the cops and putting together a nice living room set.
[01:06:57]  I love that Nestor is out here being like, okay, I know that we're anarchists, but like we need to do something with this space.
[01:07:03]  That doesn't mean our throw rugs have to clash with the couch, you know?
[01:07:08]  I feel like people associate too often anarchists with clashing patterns, and I just think that that doesn't need to happen.
[01:07:15]  No, why not?
[01:07:16]  Like we can look nice and get into gunfights with the police.
[01:07:20]  Okay, even more so than I want the czar Sherlock Holmes.
[01:07:23]  Want the anarchist property brothers.
[01:07:26]  I do want the anarchist because the anarchist property brothers is only squatted properties, too.
[01:07:31]  Like a big half of the show is fighting the police off to stop an eviction and then like decorating the interior.
[01:07:38]  It's not nice.
[01:07:39]  Yeah.
[01:07:39]  Yeah.
[01:07:39]  Let's do that.
[01:07:40]  And then this happens very like relaxed decoration of the squatting spaces.
[01:07:45]  Yeah.
[01:07:46]  So unfortunately, Nestor failed to do, you know, he starts running his own book club and he fails to do the same kind of strict vetting that his previous group had done for him.
[01:07:55]  And his reading circle quickly discovers that two of its members are czarist infiltrators and they kill them both.
[01:08:00]  Like the reading circle murders two people who are informing the cops.
[01:08:06]  My mom's circle did that too.
[01:08:08]  It's just pretty common among book clubs.
[01:08:10]  Look, if you, if this happens in book clubs all the time, if you are not doing like the correct canonical read of Eat Pray Love, you're fucked.
[01:08:19]  Yeah, they will fucking shoot you.
[01:08:21]  You're fucked.
[01:08:21]  Bury you in a shallow grave.
[01:08:23]  That's how book clubs work.
[01:08:25]  Have you seen the movie?
[01:08:27]  That's what happens.
[01:08:28]  Yeah, that's the Joy Luck Club, if I'm not mistaken.
[01:08:31]  Also, that happens in the Joy Luck Club, and it definitely happens in the Jane Fonda one.
[01:08:37]  I got so drunk at that screening of book club that I got kicked out of the movie theater.
[01:08:42]  That's the only time that's ever happened to me.
[01:08:44]  That's the only time.
[01:08:45]  Is that it is?
[01:08:48]  It is.
[01:08:48]  There's times I should have been, but I wasn't.
[01:08:50]  But this time, you really can't fuck with it.
[01:08:52]  You can't fuck with a movie that old people are going to that they want that you can't be loud.
[01:08:57]  They're going to get you kicked out.
[01:08:59]  I have a good vomiting in a movie theater story, but there's aspects of that story that there's still a statute of limitations on.
[01:09:04]  So we'll continue.
[01:09:06]  So yeah, the group holds a general meeting to talk things out after, you know, killing two dudes.
[01:09:12]  But it turns out they still had a police infiltrator in their midst, and the meeting was surrounded by heavily armed Dawn Cossacks and members of the local Okrana, which are like the czar's secret police.
[01:09:22]  Now, the traitor in their midst, a guy named Lavodny, suggested everyone give themselves up.
[01:09:26]  But Nestor and the actual anarchists in the room decided to have a giant gunfight with the cops.
[01:09:31]  It was dark and they all had pistols.
[01:09:33]  So they ran out shooting and they actually like surprised the cops surrounding their house enough that they killed the second in command of the local police, several Cossacks, and several detectives.
[01:09:42]  One of Makno's friends, a guy named Simon Yutta, is wounded in the leg during the escape and his brother Alexander tries to carry him, but they quickly realize that he was slowing them down too much.
[01:09:53]  So the wounded guy volunteers to stay behind, shooting until he has one bullet left and using the last on himself in order to buy time for his friends.
[01:10:01]  Again, hardcore book club.
[01:10:03]  Yeah.
[01:10:05]  What movie did you throw up at?
[01:10:08]  Huh?
[01:10:09]  Sorry.
[01:10:09]  What movie was it?
[01:10:11]  Oh, God.
[01:10:12]  It was a midnight movie.
[01:10:14]  It was like a showing of, I think it was a showing of the, what is it?
[01:10:19]  What is it?
[01:10:19]  The fucking Jim Henson movie with the Skexis and shit.
[01:10:22]  Why is that?
[01:10:23]  Wait, like Labyrinth?
[01:10:24]  No, no, no, not Labyrinth.
[01:10:25]  No, the other one.
[01:10:27]  Dark Crystal?
[01:10:29]  Dark Crystal.
[01:10:29]  That's the one.
[01:10:30]  Yes.
[01:10:30]  Dark Crystal.
[01:10:32]  Wow.
[01:10:32]  I don't know if it was the alcohol or the acid.
[01:10:35]  I was not going to be able to focus until I had an answer there.
[01:10:38]  Okay.
[01:10:38]  Okay.
[01:10:39]  It was a long time ago.
[01:10:40]  It was a different.
[01:10:41]  The book club is heating up.
[01:10:43]  So the book club is heating up.
[01:10:46]  Like nine people have died.
[01:10:49]  So kill town issues.
[01:10:51]  This is good.
[01:10:53]  It's an intense book club.
[01:10:55]  Not a lot of people save the last bullet for themselves in a book club.
[01:11:00]  That's true.
[01:11:00]  No.
[01:11:02]  So, of course, so this guy who dies buying time for the other members of the book club, his brother has to avenge his death.
[01:11:09]  And Machno wasn't about to let his friend avenge his brother's death alone.
[01:11:13]  So after they escape, they figured that since they just killed a bunch of cops, they might as well assassinate the governor.
[01:11:20]  Fair enough.
[01:11:22]  When you're on a hot streak like that, you know, I get it.
[01:11:25]  Now, and again, everyone involved in this is a teenager.
[01:11:28]  So we are not talking about the best decisions being made at the time, but they're committed.
[01:11:35]  So I like that they're able to channel their horny rage into some productive, some productive anarchy.

=== Libertarian Intellectual Prisoners (15:52) ===

[01:11:41]  And for, again, several of the people they kill in the shootout are members of the Okhrana.
[01:11:45]  And for a little bit of knowledge about the Tsar's secret police, the... protocols of the elders of Zion, like the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda piece, was created by the Okhrana.
[01:11:54]  So like, shitty dudes.
[01:11:57]  So like, it's not like they don't sort of have a book club massacre coming.
[01:12:03]  They absolutely deserve a book club massacre.
[01:12:06]  You can tie millions of deaths to that document.
[01:12:08]  Okay.
[01:12:09]  Yeah.
[01:12:09]  Anyone who's in the Okrana, you know, I got no sympathy.
[01:12:13]  So they decide to assassinate the governor.
[01:12:17]  But the scheme runs into a hitch, which is that because of all of these anarchist teens running around, it had been made illegal for young people to be near the governor.
[01:12:25]  So.
[01:12:27]  So it's like Eric Garcetti.
[01:12:33]  So Makno and his friends keep trying to find out ways to get close to the governor.
[01:12:38]  And while they're scouting out, they get caught by another patrol of Cossacks.
[01:12:41]  And again, Makno being Makno, when they realize they've been surrounded by Cossacks, they have another gunfight, and they manage to shoot their way out of a line of cops yet again.
[01:12:51]  They escape, but not for long.
[01:12:53]  Nestor and his friend are arrested at home soon later.
[01:12:56]  This wound up actually being good for him because if he'd stayed free, he would have absolutely kept trying to kill the governor and he probably would have gotten shot to death doing so.
[01:13:05]  Instead, he just winds up in jail for a while.
[01:13:07]  Now, this sparks another crackdown on Gugliai Polgi anarchists.
[01:13:11]  And the only two who escape were Antony, Makno's mentor, and Alexander, the brother of the guy who died buying time for them.
[01:13:18]  The police considered Makhno to be the most dangerous of the young men that they'd actually caught, and they charged him with a fuckload of crimes, some of which he definitely committed.
[01:13:26]  Now, all of the incarcerated anarchists were taken to prison again while the state prepared the case against them.
[01:13:31]  And this took over a year.
[01:13:33]  And like during this period of time, like Makno spends a bunch of time in solitary confinement in like a cell called the hole.
[01:13:41]  Like it's a terrible place to be.
[01:13:43]  He's not, it's not a nice prison.
[01:13:45]  Yeah.
[01:13:45]  In the meantime, Alexander sneaks back into Ukraine.
[01:13:48]  He like flees to Belgium, but he immediately comes back and he sends a letter to the head detective before he leaves Belgium being like, you're never going to catch me.
[01:13:56]  I'm like to the Sherlock Holmes guy, you're never going to catch me.
[01:13:58]  I'm in Belgium now, motherfuckers.
[01:13:59]  And then he immediately sneaks back into Ukraine with two loaded revolvers.
[01:14:03]  And he sort of starts stalking the head of the head detective and waits until he goes into a theater and he walks into the theater where the detective is with two loaded revolvers in his pocket.
[01:14:13]  Now, he doesn't shoot him during the play because he doesn't want to hit any innocent people.
[01:14:16]  But as the detective's leaving the play, he shoots him three times and kills him and then gets killed in a shootout himself.
[01:14:23]  Wow.
[01:14:23]  That's the end of the Sherlock Holmes guy.
[01:14:26]  I sure.
[01:14:27]  Well, I mean, you know, it was, he was a supernova.
[01:14:30]  He lived briefly, burned brightly.
[01:14:32]  Yeah, burned brightly, king.
[01:14:35]  So, yeah.
[01:14:37]  Now, Alexander was never able to.
[01:14:39]  He was trying, he was planning to spring his friends from prison after killing this detective, but obviously he doesn't get a chance to do that.
[01:14:44]  But his sacrifice and his dedication to the cause inspired Nestor for the rest of his life.
[01:14:49]  Makno's day in court eventually came, and he refused to beg for mercy, telling his defense lawyer, we have no intention of asking anything for this good-for-nothing czar.
[01:14:58]  These rascals have sentenced us to death, so let them hang us.
[01:15:01]  And of course, he was sentenced.
[01:15:02]  Initially to death, Makno and his comrades spent months on death row.
[01:15:06]  Nestor wrote at the time, once inside these cells, one half feels that one has climbed down into the grave.
[01:15:11]  One has the feeling that only one's straining fingertips are clinging to the surface.
[01:15:16]  And then one thinks of all who, being yet at large, cling to their belief and their hopes, intent upon doing something good and useful in the struggle for a better life.
[01:15:24]  Having sacrificed oneself for this future, one feels flooded by a quite profound and very heartfelt love for one's comrades in the struggle.
[01:15:31]  They seem so near, so dear.
[01:15:33]  One wholeheartedly hopes that they may hold on to their faith and their hopes to the very end and take their love of the oppressed and their hatred of the oppressors further.
[01:15:41]  Wow.
[01:15:42]  Good prison leather.
[01:15:43]  He's good prison.
[01:15:44]  I was like, he's a good fucking writer.
[01:15:45]  Yeah, he's a great writer.
[01:15:47]  He can make stuff that's very depressing and boring sound very motivating.
[01:15:52]  He's a guy.
[01:15:52]  He's a great writer for a guy who never fully learns to read or write.
[01:15:57]  Yeah.
[01:15:57]  Like he's, I'm, I like this guy.
[01:16:00]  I like this guy.
[01:16:01]  He's a likable dude.
[01:16:02]  So Nestor's best friend and comrade on death row was a guy named Igor Bondarenko, which is another fucking incredible Ukrainian name.
[01:16:10]  Yeah.
[01:16:10]  No notes.
[01:16:11]  Now, for some reason, Igor suspected Nestor's sentence might get commuted.
[01:16:15]  He claimed he had a premonition.
[01:16:17]  And he basically is like, I've had this premonition that we're all going to get executed.
[01:16:20]  You're not going to get executed.
[01:16:22]  You're going to get out and you're going to lift the black flag of anarchy all over this land.
[01:16:27]  You, my brother, Nestor, you are to live.
[01:16:29]  I shall surely die.
[01:16:30]  I know that you will regain your freedom.
[01:16:33]  And like Nestor's other friends in jail are like, that's never good.
[01:16:35]  Nestor's too dumb.
[01:16:36]  Like he's not smart enough to like win it.
[01:16:38]  Like, you're a great guy, Nestor.
[01:16:40]  You're really good at shooting at the cops, but you're not smart enough to like lead a revolution.
[01:16:43]  Like, it couldn't be him.
[01:16:47]  That's a great way to motivate someone to just do that.
[01:16:50]  Yeah.
[01:16:50]  Okay.
[01:16:51]  They're negging him a little bit.
[01:16:53]  Now, this may or not be, may not be true.
[01:16:55]  We're reliant on Nestor's account that all this happened because all of his other friends get executed.
[01:16:59]  So he might have made this up.
[01:17:01]  I don't know.
[01:17:02]  In any case, after 52 days on death row, Makhno was informed that at the pleading of his mother, his sentence had been commuted to hard labor for life.
[01:17:09]  He was dragged off to prison where he would spend nine years.
[01:17:12]  And this actually wound up being a good thing.
[01:17:15]  See, prisons in Tsarist Russia were basically the equivalent of a graduate degree for revolutionaries because all of the people who got, there were prisons just for revolutionaries.
[01:17:23]  Stalin spent a bunch of time in one of them.
[01:17:26]  Bingo, bingo, bingo, boom.
[01:17:27]  An hour, 10 minutes for Stalin.
[01:17:30]  Yep.
[01:17:31]  Yep.
[01:17:32]  Okay, that's actually pretty far.
[01:17:33]  Wow.
[01:17:34]  Yeah.
[01:17:34]  Pretty far.
[01:17:35]  Okay.
[01:17:36]  Pretty far for talking about, you know, Ukraine.
[01:17:38]  So Stalin at the same time is in a prison for a bunch of bank robberies.
[01:17:44]  And all of these prisons are the same.
[01:17:45]  They're filled with prisoners who are all revolutionaries and these massive libraries of revolutionary literature that people build up over the years, that inmates build up.
[01:17:54]  And so Makhno gets to read a bunch.
[01:17:56]  Like he spends, he also gets horribly ill, gets pneumonia and shit, like gets permanent lung damage.
[01:18:01]  So he's in the infirmary a lot and he just spends all of his time reading books about like anarchist political theory.
[01:18:08]  The number one book that he encounters during this time is by a guy named Kropotkin.
[01:18:12]  And it's a book called Mutual Aid, which is a book about mutual aid.
[01:18:16]  And he falls in love with the concept.
[01:18:18]  And the book Mutual Aid never left Makno's side for the rest of his life.
[01:18:22]  He went in and out of the prison infirmary.
[01:18:24]  You know, he was very sick all of the time.
[01:18:27]  And he gets very frustrated at the inner prison hierarchy because there were two kinds of political prisoners in Russia.
[01:18:33]  There were intellectual prisoners who were like students and sons of noblemen and stuff who got like, who found themselves drawn to left-wing politics, but were also rich kids.
[01:18:42]  And the guards treated them very well because class was really baked into everything in Russia.
[01:18:46]  And like these guys were prisoners, but they were still rich.
[01:18:48]  So like you shake their hands and you show them respect.
[01:18:51]  And then there were the poor revolutionaries like Makhno who get the shit kicked out of them.
[01:18:56]  Right.
[01:18:56]  And Makhno noticed that these like rich intellectual revolutionaries would like shake hands with the guards and be friendly to like the same people who were beating up Makno and his friends.
[01:19:04]  And he was like, well, fuck these guys.
[01:19:06]  Like I don't care if they're saying the right shit.
[01:19:09]  Like, yeah.
[01:19:11]  Yeah, that's okay.
[01:19:12]  Okay.
[01:19:12]  So he doesn't like, he doesn't like performative politics.
[01:19:16]  We like that for him.
[01:19:17]  Like performative politics.
[01:19:21]  He would be really intense online.
[01:19:23]  Sorry, I'm just thinking about this.
[01:19:24]  He would be in prison.
[01:19:25]  He would not be online.
[01:19:27]  He would be in prison already.
[01:19:29]  I was just cooking on it.
[01:19:30]  It was like, what would Nestor's online presence be like?
[01:19:34]  It would be pretty aggressive.
[01:19:36]  He would have been in prison for things he did this summer.
[01:19:39]  Yes.
[01:19:39]  Yes.
[01:19:41]  Yeah.
[01:19:42]  So 1914 came and the prisoners were split again by those who still supported Russia in her war with Germany and the internationalists who thought that the war, World War I, was just a bunch of rich assholes making poor kids die for politics and neither Russia or Germany were in the right.
[01:19:56]  Like it was just a dumb war and it shouldn't be fought, period.
[01:19:59]  And Makno was an internationalist.
[01:20:01]  He thought it was stupid for Ukrainian peasants to die fighting German peasants on behalf of kings.
[01:20:05]  He was like, why would we do that?
[01:20:08]  Okay.
[01:20:09]  Yeah.
[01:20:10]  And then in 1917, while Makno was still behind bars, the revolution happened.
[01:20:14]  The Tsar is overthrown.
[01:20:15]  A vaguely kind of vaguely socialist social democratic interim government under a guy named Kerensky is formed and all the political prisoners are freed.
[01:20:24]  Because there's this period before like the Bolsheviks take over where there's like a social democrat-y, kind of like a socialist quasi-thing in charge, and there's social democrats and there's Bolsheviks and there's anarchists and they're all arguing about Russia's going to be.
[01:20:37]  But during this period, the Tsar is overthrown and all political prisoners are freed, or at least a bunch of them are.
[01:20:43]  And Makno gets out of jail.
[01:20:46]  Now, on release, he sees a doctor because he's sick as hell.
[01:20:49]  And the doctor's like, you should head to the Crimea, have your lungs treated.
[01:20:52]  Like, you're very ill.
[01:20:53]  And Makno's like, the only thing that's going to like cure my lungs is to take part in the revolution.
[01:20:59]  You know, his exact statement is that.
[01:21:03]  I appreciate the spirit behind that, but I see him hitting a wall.
[01:21:08]  Yeah, I mean, the revolution was not good for my lungs, but there was less tear gas in those days.
[01:21:13]  That's true.
[01:21:13]  That's true.
[01:21:14]  Definitely should have been counting their fucking blessings.
[01:21:18]  All you had to deal with was machine guns.
[01:21:23]  I mean, this period is taking place during the anime movie Anastasia.
[01:21:28]  And so while this is all going on, it's, I think, historically important to consider that the Big Fat Kelsey Grammar cartoon is switching out Meg Ryan Anastasia.
[01:21:39]  And meanwhile, Rasputin lives in hell with his bat.
[01:21:43]  That's just important to say.
[01:21:45]  Rasputin is living in hell with a band at this point.
[01:21:48]  Yeah.
[01:21:49]  So, yeah.
[01:21:51]  So he Makno kind of considered throwing himself into the revolution, you know, or throwing himself into the Moscow part of the revolution.
[01:21:59]  And he spends a little bit of time with Moscow-based anarchists, but he keeps getting these letters from his mom who's like, you know, you're out of prison.
[01:22:07]  You should come see your family.
[01:22:09]  And he eventually decides, all right, I'll go home and I'll do a revolution there.
[01:22:12]  So he's 27 years old when he finally sets foot in his hometown again for the first time in a decade or nearly a decade.
[01:22:19]  His neighbors showed up in Moss to greet him, calling him a man back from the dead.
[01:22:23]  Somehow, Makno sensed that this was a moment he could use and he started questioning his fellow villagers about their receptiveness to libertarian ideas.
[01:22:31]  Now, in modern terms, that sounds like he's trying to talk to them about how age of consent law should be lowered.
[01:22:37]  But libertarian meant a different thing back then.
[01:22:40]  Okay, yeah, unpack that for me.
[01:22:42]  Yeah, the word libertarian started out as an anarchist term, a left-leaning term.
[01:22:47]  Like if you were a libertarian in 1917, you were a leftist.
[01:22:51]  If you weren't an anarchist, you were like very close to one.
[01:22:55]  That stopped thanks to a guy, like that stopped thanks to a dude named Muray Rothbard, who brought the term libertarian into American politics in order to make it a right-wing term.
[01:23:07]  And Murray Rothbard is why the word libertarian now means a guy with a collection of fedoras and another collection of gas station katanas.
[01:23:14]  I was like, how did this, how did this thing I agree with become my uncle preaching the gospel of Gary Johnson at every available opportunity?
[01:23:24]  That's Murray Rothbard.
[01:23:25]  He's what turns libertarian from shooting it out with the czar's secret police to gas station katana collection.
[01:23:32]  So Rothbard is basically a corporate fascist.
[01:23:35]  He believed the state should be dissolved and all of its services should be provided for profit by corporations.
[01:23:40]  He was trash.
[01:23:40]  And he carried out a very successful campaign to convince dudes who liked guns and not being told what to do that licking the boots of billionaires was true freedom.
[01:23:48]  In his book, The Betrayal of the American Right.
[01:23:50]  Yeah, it really does.
[01:23:52]  In his book, The Bortrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard wrote, One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that for the first time in my memory, we, our side, has captured a crucial word from the enemy.
[01:24:04]  Libertarians had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists.
[01:24:08]  That is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety.
[01:24:12]  But now we had taken it over.
[01:24:15]  He's very conscious about what he's done.
[01:24:17]  And that's why Makno considers himself a libertarian, but Makno is not what we would consider a libertarian today.
[01:24:26]  He's what some folks in Northeast Syria might consider a libertarian.
[01:24:30]  I honestly, I still to this day have such a struggle understanding what libertarianism means, depending on who's talking to me about it.
[01:24:38]  Yeah, totally.
[01:24:40]  But I grew up being told and like, oh, libertarians, they're just fucking weirdos that think everyone should have a plow.
[01:24:47]  That's how I, that's what I learned libertarian.
[01:24:49]  That is the kind of libertarian Makno is.
[01:24:52]  It's like everyone should work for themselves and for their community and no one should have.
[01:24:58]  That's good.
[01:25:01]  But then, yeah.
[01:25:02]  Okay.
[01:25:02]  Okay.
[01:25:02]  I've got, I've got a, I guess I have to learn more about libertarians.
[01:25:05]  That doesn't sound good to say out loud.
[01:25:07]  Yeah, I mean, there's good, these libertarians are good to learn about because these, so modern libertarians are like, the state's bad.
[01:25:15]  We shouldn't have the state telling us things.
[01:25:17]  Rich people should tell us what to do.
[01:25:18]  And Makno's like.
[01:25:19]  The book club libertarians are good.
[01:25:21]  No one.
[01:25:21]  Yeah.
[01:25:21]  The book club libertarians are, no one should tell you what to do.
[01:25:24]  And if they tell you what to do, you should shoot them in the face.
[01:25:27]  Like sick.
[01:25:28]  Yeah.
[01:25:29]  Let's do it.
[01:25:29]  Yeah.
[01:25:30]  Yeah.
[01:25:30]  So Makno meets all of his old friends and neighbors and he's like, have you guys heard about libertarianism?
[01:25:37]  And instead of following up by again ranting about age of consent laws like Murray Rothbard would have done, Makhno starts explaining his newly educated analysis of their situation.
[01:25:45]  As he told his fellow peasants, the libertarian movement nationwide was weak and not cohesive.
[01:25:50]  The social democrats and the Bolsheviks were by far the most organized, and that was not good because they were just going to recreate some form of oppressive hierarchy that Ukrainians would have to live under.
[01:25:59]  Anarchists needed to be the vanguard of mass revolutionary action.
[01:26:03]  And Nestor figured, why not start that in Guliai Poly?
[01:26:07]  Now, it's a mark of how charismatic he was that basically everyone in his hometown who turns out to see him is like, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
[01:26:13]  Like we just got rid of the czar.
[01:26:15]  Why not make sure nobody else tells us what to do?
[01:26:17]  Now, Makhno has no army at this point, and his old comrades are all dead.
[01:26:21]  By pure force of personality, he convinces his neighbors to establish a local peasants' union with delegates to represent them.
[01:26:27]  This inspired different groups within the village to organize, and soon the metal workers and the woodworkers had unions of their own.
[01:26:33]  Someone suggested the peasants should pool their money to set up a contingency fund to help members of the community who had accidents or fell into misfortune.
[01:26:40]  Now, all this happened.
[01:26:42]  Yeah, it's very quickly, too.
[01:26:44]  This is great.
[01:26:45]  Yeah.
[01:26:45]  Yeah.
[01:26:46]  And before long, the village decides to elect a chairman.
[01:26:48]  And Makno tells them this is a bad idea and he doesn't want the job, but they elect him anyway.
[01:26:52]  And basically, he accepts the position because he's like, if I, if someone else gets this, we'll start having political parties form and then everything's going to go to shit.
[01:27:00]  So I'll just take the job and not do it.
[01:27:03]  And that's his reasoning, at least.
[01:27:06]  So within a few weeks, he pushes through a vote to have the estates of all the large local landowners handed back to the peasants with no payment or compensation to the rich people.
[01:27:15]  Now, this pisses off the social democrats in the big city near Gulyaipoly, a place called Alexandrovsk.
[01:27:20]  They supported a buyback policy, not wildly different from the one the serfs had been granted.
[01:27:24]  The peasants, though, love Nestor Makhno, and many of them decided that if anarchism meant they got to run their own lives and not have landlords, well, fuck, maybe they were anarchists.

=== Radical Land Redistribution (06:14) ===

[01:27:33]  Now, it's worth noting how different Nestor's tactics were from most of the other anarchist organizers in Russia at the time.
[01:27:40]  They tended to devote their efforts to creating committees and clubs and debating with one another rather than traveling out to the peasant masses and converting them by doing.
[01:27:47]  Nestor couldn't stand intellectuals.
[01:27:49]  He preferred to get his hands dirty and actually change things.
[01:27:51]  When he was young, that change had come from, you know, shooting out with the police.
[01:27:55]  Now that he was nearing 30, he was working alongside his neighbors to transform their home into something better.
[01:28:00]  Makhno and his comrades, who now made up most of the town, disarmed the local militia and de-deputized the police force.
[01:28:06]  They're just like, go up to the cops and like, you're not the police anymore.
[01:28:10]  Give us your guns.
[01:28:11]  And the police go, oh no, his beard's so big.
[01:28:13]  We better listen to what he says.
[01:28:15]  Well, basically, so the cops that he did, the cops that people don't have a problem with get to stay on as unarmed town criers.
[01:28:22]  Because they're like, hey, you guys who weren't shitty, you don't get guns anymore, but like you can be town criers.
[01:28:27]  Like we've got some use for you.
[01:28:28]  We're not going to just murder everybody that we used to have an issue with because that doesn't seem like a good thing to start doing.
[01:28:35]  And the arms of the police and the militia that are confiscated get handed to citizens who started to form what would become a democratic militia geared towards self-defense rather than beating people for reading the wrong books.
[01:28:47]  Right.
[01:28:47]  Now, while all this is happening, Russia's still in a very bad position because this is that awkward period where they've had their, they've overthrown the Tsar and they're kind of in the start of a civil war, but they're also still in World War I fighting the Germans, even though nobody who overthrew the Tsar still wanted to really be fighting the Germans.
[01:29:04]  And in August of 1917, a guy named General Kornilov, who's an anti-Bolshevik general intent on overthrowing the socialist regime that had taken over from the Tsar and replacing it with probably the monarchy or something again, he starts like advancing on Alexandrovs, the big, the capital city near Guliaipolyi.
[01:29:22]  And committees for self-defense start being created all over Russia and Ukraine.
[01:29:25]  And of course, Makhno became chairman of the committee for self-defense of Gulyaipolyi.
[01:29:30]  Now, his solution to stopping the counter-revolution was, quote, disarming the entire local bourgeoisie and abolishing its rights over the people's assets, estates, factories, workshops, printing works, theaters, cinemas, and other public enterprises, which would henceforth be placed under collective control of the workers.
[01:29:47]  His defense committee is like, yeah, we'll do this.
[01:29:49]  So they all vote to do this.
[01:29:51]  But then General Kornilov gets defeated and the moderate regime that was in charge of Russia and Ukraine at the time was like, hey, guys, that's too radical.
[01:29:59]  You can't take all of the rich people's stuff.
[01:30:00]  Like, we're Democrats.
[01:30:02]  We don't want the Tsar, but we're not going to let you take all the rich people's stuff.
[01:30:05]  So what year are we in at this point?
[01:30:07]  This is 1917.
[01:30:09]  Okay, okay.
[01:30:10]  A lot of shit is happening.
[01:30:11]  This is starting to like overlap with some of the Nabokov history that I cover.
[01:30:16]  Okay, cool.
[01:30:16]  Interesting.
[01:30:17]  Yeah, Nabokov isn't in all this shit.
[01:30:18]  Like he's alive for a lot of this, right?
[01:30:20]  He's around.
[01:30:21]  Yeah, he's around until he ends up going to Germany in, I think, 1918.
[01:30:26]  But he's around.
[01:30:28]  And then in this story, a bunch of Germans come here, and then Nestor has to shoot them.
[01:30:32]  Yeah.
[01:30:33]  Synergy.
[01:30:34]  Synergy.
[01:30:35]  So like Makhno gets told by the government after this general gets defeated, like, hey, your plan to take all of the weapons and property from the rich people is too radical.
[01:30:43]  And Makhno's like, well, fuck you.
[01:30:45]  So he organizes his fellow peasants to have a rent strike.
[01:30:49]  And so they just stop paying rent.
[01:30:50]  They're like, this is our land now.
[01:30:52]  And we're going to take all of your livestock and equipment from the landlords.
[01:30:56]  Acting on their own.
[01:30:59]  He's fucking, he's fucking cool.
[01:31:01]  Acting on their own, the peasants of Gugly Polyi collectivized the enormous estates of the wealthy and started forming farming communes, each of around 200 people.
[01:31:09]  Communal life was seen by Makhno as the highest form of social justice, and some landowners even came around to the idea and joined communes.
[01:31:17]  Others were less than pleased with the changes, and we'll talk about them later.
[01:31:20]  Probably most of them were less than pleased, but there were some people who were like, okay, you're taking my land and giving it to everyone else.
[01:31:26]  But like, yeah, this actually is fine.
[01:31:28]  Again, a minority, but it does happen.
[01:31:31]  And it's important to note that he is not like, we're going to murder the landlords.
[01:31:34]  He's like, we don't need to kill them.
[01:31:35]  We're just taking everything from them.
[01:31:37]  And they can be part of society or not if they want to.
[01:31:40]  Right?
[01:31:41]  Okay.
[01:31:42]  This is, yeah, it's like, there's, there's less lenient policies than that.
[01:31:46]  Yep, yep.
[01:31:47]  Especially in Russia in this period.
[01:31:49]  I was about to say, I'm like, well, I guess, yeah, that's a pretty chill approach.
[01:31:54]  Yeah, so as 1918 rolls around, life in Gugliaipolyi has changed massively, as this write-up from an article in libcom.org describes.
[01:32:03]  In addition to his political work, he was based on a collective farm, working a type of plow called a buker.
[01:32:08]  His co-workers at the time, he states, included German colonists and former landowners who had accepted the redistribution of land.
[01:32:14]  Makhno's memoir describes the administrative and political machinations of the Ukrainian Revolution with a detail that suggests veracity.
[01:32:21]  Under the direction of the Revcom, the revolutionary-like committee, he explains, ex-soldiers from the front began moving all the implements and livestock from the estates of the rich and large farms to a central holding area.
[01:32:33]  The idea was not to exact revenge upon the wealthy, but to equitably distribute wealth.
[01:32:37]  Landlords and wealthier farmers were, quote, left with two pairs of horses, one or two cows, depending on the size of the family, one plow, one seeding machine, one mower, one winnowing machine, etc.
[01:32:47]  Needless to say, this equitable redistribution was not voluntary.
[01:32:50]  So again, you don't have a choice.
[01:32:51]  We're taking your stuff, but we're not trying to starve your family.
[01:32:55]  Like, you get what everyone else has.
[01:32:57]  Yeah, it's just healthy redistribution.
[01:33:00]  Okay.
[01:33:00]  Now, again, was not voluntary, but was not bloody either.
[01:33:04]  While there were mass killings in parts of Russia during this period of landowners, Gugliaipoli was so far quite peaceable, as were most of the surrounding areas.
[01:33:13]  One contemporary newspaper article describes how the village looked during this first flowering of anarchy.
[01:33:18]  It was, quote, like a painting by Repin, exotic, gouty, unusual.
[01:33:22]  The Makhnovists wore colorful shirts, wide pants, and wide red belts, which reached down to the ground.
[01:33:27]  All of them were armed to the teeth.
[01:33:29]  The property brothers could never.
[01:33:32]  Okay.
[01:33:34]  Another writer who hated Makhno and what he turned Gugliaipoli into adds that, quote, all night there was music and dancing mixed with the shrieks of gay women.
[01:33:45]  Okay, no matter which way you spin it, that sounds like a fucking blast.

=== Colorful Makhnovist Shirts (04:38) ===

[01:33:48]  It sounds fucking blast.
[01:33:51]  Everybody's fucking strapped and dancing.
[01:33:54]  Pretty cool town.
[01:33:55]  Yeah, sounds like these writers are absolute haters who don't know how to have fun.
[01:34:00]  Yeah, a lot of haters in the Makno story.
[01:34:02]  And that is part one.
[01:34:04]  Part two is going to be a lot more violent, but yeah.
[01:34:08]  Well, part one I had a blast.
[01:34:10]  I'm glad.
[01:34:11]  Yeah.
[01:34:11]  Blast in part one.
[01:34:13]  Yeah, part one, hard not to be on Machno's side at this, you know, really most stages of this.
[01:34:21]  Vibes are good.
[01:34:22]  Vibes are good.
[01:34:24]  So, Jamie, you got any things to plug before we take a quick break and then part two?
[01:34:30]  Yeah, I got some, I got some holiday plugs.
[01:34:34]  If you want a happy option, you can listen to Santa University that comes out on Christmas Eve.
[01:34:40]  I think it's the Daily Zeitgeist feed.
[01:34:42]  And if you want to have a terrible Christmas and cry, cry, cry, you can listen to Lolita podcast, which covers a different area of the same portion of history.
[01:34:54]  This Christmas, celebrate being separated from your family by listening to a story about a book about child molestation.
[01:35:01]  Isn't that, I mean, it's a great podcast.
[01:35:04]  Why not?
[01:35:04]  I am caught up currently and very angry that you don't have another episode for me today.
[01:35:11]  Well, you're, I mean, you're performing the hell out of Nabokov.
[01:35:15]  Thank you.
[01:35:16]  Thank you, except for I mispronounced that lion horse.
[01:35:19]  Of course you did.
[01:35:20]  It is spelled L-Y-O-N, like fucking hell.
[01:35:23]  It is, but you combined it to sound like it was like you were saying Beyonce.
[01:35:27]  I was saying Beyond, like the city in France.
[01:35:30]  Oh, okay.
[01:35:30]  See, that's fancier.
[01:35:32]  It's spelled the same way.
[01:35:33]  Okay.
[01:35:34]  I maintain she pronounced her own name wrong.
[01:35:37]  Well, it's episode three if you want to hear it.
[01:35:41]  When Robert absolutely demolished this poor dead woman's name, there's a place for you to go.
[01:35:47]  If you want to demolish a poor dead woman's name, follow us on Twitter.
[01:35:54]  Have a good Christmas.
[01:35:55]  The episode's fucking over.
[01:36:01]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:36:09]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:36:12]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:36:14]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:36:16]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[01:36:20]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:36:22]  Trust me, babe.
[01:36:23]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:36:32]  What's up, everyone?
[01:36:33]  I'm Ego Modern.
[01:36:34]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:36:39]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:36:42]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:36:43]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:36:50]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:36:52]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:37:00]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:37:01]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:37:03]  There's a lot in life.
[01:37:04]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:37:12]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:37:22]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:37:28]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[01:37:37]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:37:43]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:37:54]  You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
[01:37:56]  He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
[01:37:58]  But did you know he was a spy?
[01:38:00]  Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
[01:38:07]  All episodes are out now.
[01:38:09]  Was this before he wrote his stories?
[01:38:11]  It must have been.
[01:38:11]  What?
[01:38:12]  Okay, I don't think that's true.
[01:38:14]  I'm telling you, I was a spy.
[01:38:16]  Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:38:23]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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