Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Nestor Makhno: Anarchist Warlord and Book Club Aficionado
Aired: 2020-12-24
Duration: 01:17:28


=== Evicting the Con Artist (05:11) ===

[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, 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.
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[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.
[00:01:07]  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.
[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, I 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]  Welcome back, go-ho!
[00:02:31]  Merry Christmas holiday!
[00:02:33]  Happy day!
[00:02:34]  Oh my God!
[00:02:35]  Today, actually, it might actually be Christmas when this episode drops.
[00:02:38]  I don't know.
[00:02:39]  Two Christmas episodes this year.
[00:02:41]  So you fuckers should be great.
[00:02:43]  It is Christmas Eve when this is dropping.
[00:02:45]  I have a calendar.
[00:02:46]  Well, happy motherfucking Christmas Eve, you fucking trash goblins.
[00:02:50]  I love you.
[00:02:51]  Jesus, I know.
[00:02:52]  I'm sorry.
[00:02:53]  I loved it.
[00:02:54]  What is it?
[00:02:54]  It's milk.
[00:02:55]  It's this death wish coffee.
[00:02:57]  I had two cups and I'm fucking ripped to the gills.
[00:02:59]  Oh my God.
[00:03:00]  I need to start.
[00:03:02]  I don't think I've been.
[00:03:03]  I don't think I've been this high on stimulants since that time I took methamphetamine to fill up 120 gallons of gasoline.
[00:03:10]  I think that it should...
[00:03:11]  I need to start being more.
[00:03:13]  We're just going to let that slide.
[00:03:15]  Are we?
[00:03:16]  We're just going to let that slide, I think.
[00:03:19]  Unless you don't.
[00:03:19]  Are you eating an egg?
[00:03:22]  What is happening?
[00:03:23]  Robert?
[00:03:24]  Robert.
[00:03:24]  Are you eating an egg?
[00:03:25]  It's Christmas.
[00:03:27]  No, it's not.
[00:03:28]  It's fucking the 17th.
[00:03:30]  Christmas egg.
[00:03:31]  I'm eating a chip.
[00:03:32]  I ate on this show once two years ago, and I still get messages about it.
[00:03:38]  As you should.
[00:03:39]  I got.
[00:03:40]  I was like, I want to be openly hostile to my podcast listening audience, but people would get mad at me if I eat a goddamn chip.
[00:03:47]  I say, kill them all and let God sort them out, which is my normal attitude towards my audience.
[00:03:54]  I honestly think that I'm going to watch the last episode of the Jinx Christmas morning just to get into the right energy, into the right vibe.
[00:04:02]  Hell yeah.
[00:04:06]  Well, Jamie, Loftus, we are all enjoying what I'm sure will be a wonderful holiday season of hiding alone in our homes from a murderous rampaging plague.
[00:04:20]  Incredible.
[00:04:20]  Very, very exciting.
[00:04:23]  Hopefully no one gets evicted.
[00:04:27]  But if you do get evicted, I hope there's a Nestor Machno out there to build barricades and fight the cops on your behalf.
[00:04:36]  There will be.
[00:04:37]  I think there will be.
[00:04:39]  There's a lot of little nestors coming up these days.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, there will be.
[00:04:44]  I would love to make a baby Einstein style show of little nestors.
[00:04:49]  That's nice.
[00:04:50]  There was a fun thing happened in Portland recently where a family was getting evicted and several hundred people built multiple layers of defensive barricades and like cow trups to destroy vehicles that tried to drive through and created such a formidable defense that the city backed down.
[00:05:05]  And then the city government voted a week later to extend the eviction moratorium until July.

=== Bolshevik Terror and Landowners (16:02) ===

[00:05:11]  That was fucking thrilling to witness from afar.
[00:05:16]  Allow me to say it was very, we were not as successful here when there were abrupt, intense evictions for reclaimed houses.
[00:05:25]  And so seeing it work out in Portland was very exciting.
[00:05:30]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  Yeah.
[00:05:30]  Nestor would have been, would have been proud.
[00:05:33]  Although, again, if he were alive today, he would be in prison for the rest of his life.
[00:05:40]  But he would still be sending dispatches out.
[00:05:44]  Yeah, no, he'd be writing, he'd be shooting some fire.
[00:05:47]  Yeah.
[00:05:48]  So we ended our last episode on a very positive note.
[00:05:51]  But of course, that was never going to last.
[00:05:53]  This is behind the bastards.
[00:05:54]  And even our holiday episodes about a historic hero are legally required to be bleak.
[00:05:58]  Now, I appreciate that you cut it off while things were nice.
[00:06:03]  You know, it's kind of like it reminds me of the two VHSs in the movie Titanic, where at the end, you're like, oh, things could get bad, or I could just stop watching.
[00:06:12]  Yeah.
[00:06:12]  At the end of last episode, everybody's free, wearing colorful clothes, strapped with guns, and dancing and fucking in the streets.
[00:06:19]  It's lovely.
[00:06:21]  That does not last.
[00:06:23]  So at the time, Nestor is kind of helping to turn and helping his neighbors to turn Guliyapolyi into something of an anarchist wet dream.
[00:06:32]  Russia is in a real, real not good stage.
[00:06:36]  The revolutionary equivalent of puberty.
[00:06:39]  The country was again technically governed by a guy named Kerensky in a kind of moderate, quasi-socialist, democratic-y socialist regime.
[00:06:47]  There were workers' councils and Soviets and stuff all over the country making attempts to redress inequality.
[00:06:53]  But at the same time, a lot of the people who had political power, the social democratic types, you know, they didn't like the regime, but they felt that rich people should still get to stay rich and landowners should keep owning most of their land and all that stuff.
[00:07:06]  Now, there were also Bolsheviks who are very powerful in this period, and they want to tear all of that shit down, but they also want to institute a pretty strict hierarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat of their own.
[00:07:17]  And the Bolsheviks are very powerful and very organized.
[00:07:19]  And opposed to them are monarchist forces who wanted the Tsar back.
[00:07:24]  And what some of the monarchists are, so basically there's the Bolsheviks, there's the Democratic Socialists, and then there's the white Russian armies.
[00:07:31]  And the whites are anti-Bolshevik, and they all kind of are different.
[00:07:35]  Some of them are monarchists.
[00:07:36]  Some of them, you know, are just nationalists.
[00:07:39]  They all kind of advocate for, they're not like unified ideologically, but they're all very anti-Bolshevik.
[00:07:45]  Some of them are basically Nazis and do a lot of massacring Jewish people.
[00:07:49]  Some of them are like vaguely democratic.
[00:07:51]  They're complicated shit.
[00:07:52]  The Russian Civil War is incredibly complicated and nightmarishly bloody.
[00:07:56]  9 million people die.
[00:07:58]  It is a bad time.
[00:07:59]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  Oh, that's well.
[00:08:01]  It's good to know what the yardstick for a bad time is.
[00:08:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:04]  And again, to put that into perspective, 9 million people die in the Russian Civil War.
[00:08:08]  Another 9 million had died because of World War I, which the Tsar got the country into.
[00:08:12]  So like people being like, the revolution was worse.
[00:08:15]  No, it wasn't.
[00:08:16]  Like, the revolution happened because the Tsar got 9 million people killed and another 9 million people died because everyone was so angry and violent and neared to death at that point that they kept killing.
[00:08:26]  But to be fair, Robert, he was a wife guy.
[00:08:29]  So, you know, loved his wife.
[00:08:32]  Loved his wife so much.
[00:08:34]  So Makhno and his anarchists were at this point very far from the center of shit happening in Russia.
[00:08:39]  You know, Ukraine is considered a backwater by Russians who are pretty racist against Ukrainians by and large.
[00:08:45]  Not comprehensively, but a lot of them.
[00:08:47]  Now, in October of 1917, there'd been a Bolshevik coup d'état, which had been followed by an anti-Bolshevik rebellion led by Don Cossacks, and this counter-revolution had spread to Ukraine in the form of a Ukrainian nationalist uprising.
[00:09:00]  Now, the Ukrainian nationalists were anti-Russian, so they didn't want any of these white or Bolshevik Russian forces to be in charge of Ukraine, but they were also traditionalists.
[00:09:08]  And after throwing out the Russians, they wanted to reverse all the progressive social changes and basically reinstitute something similar to serfdom, put all the rich people back in charge.
[00:09:17]  So anti-Russian also still sucks.
[00:09:21]  Now, when the Ukrainian nationalists attacked the forces of the new government, Makhno was put in an awkward position because he did not like the government because he's Nestor Makhno.
[00:09:30]  But at the same time, yeah, the government was like, you guys are allowed to do the thing that you're doing.
[00:09:37]  And the Ukrainian nationalists are like, no, You guys don't get to have this land you took from the rich people.
[00:09:42]  That's the rich people's land.
[00:09:44]  So Makhno writes, quote, as anarchists, we must, paradox or no paradox, make up our minds to form a united front with the governmental forces.
[00:09:52]  Keeping faith with anarchist principles, we will find a way to rise above all these contradictions.
[00:09:57]  And once the dark forces of reaction have been smashed, we will broaden and deepen the course of the revolution for the greater good of an enslaved humanity.
[00:10:04]  So he's like, we got to fight these guys.
[00:10:07]  And working with the government is the only way to do it because they're worse than the government, but also fuck the government.
[00:10:12]  And, you know, it's a tough position to be in.
[00:10:15]  There's no good.
[00:10:16]  Yeah.
[00:10:16]  There's no good choice to make at this point.
[00:10:19]  You can't please everyone in how you toe this line.
[00:10:23]  I respect his approach.
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:25]  Now, on January 4th, his area formed an 800-man detachment of fighters to come to the government's aid, close to half of whom were Nestor's anarchists.
[00:10:33]  His older brother, Sava, commanded the unit, and Makno stayed behind to head up an investigation into imprisoned military officers who'd conspired against the revolution.
[00:10:41]  He found the former prosecutor who'd hired his case in like 19 whatever and handed him the guy who had put him in solitary confinement.
[00:10:48]  And Makhno had this guy sent to the same cell under identical conditions in order to like, he gets a little motherfucker.
[00:10:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:55]  Wow.
[00:10:56]  There's a very nice line in.
[00:10:58]  Yeah, it's fun.
[00:10:59]  There's a nice little line in Anarchy's Cossack that describes this as an irony of history that should give all who bear the responsibility for repression good pause for thought.
[00:11:08]  So a nice little line.
[00:11:11]  So Makhno also took advantage of the fact that the government under Kerensky needed his help and support to hold on.
[00:11:16]  He used his position to demand and secure the release of workers and peasants still incarcerated under the new government.
[00:11:22]  Some of these men had been arrested by the Bolsheviks, who'd been worried that they'd revolt against them.
[00:11:26]  Nestor also used his position to seize money from the local bank in order to fund the activities of his communes and to set up an orphanage for war orphans, which he located in the former home of the superintendent of police.
[00:11:37]  So still some cool shit going on.
[00:11:40]  I was like, I'm still vibing with him.
[00:11:42]  Yeah, it's hard not to.
[00:11:44]  I'm like trying not to scroll down in his Wikipedia because I'm like, wow, he's like a hot, nice guy who goes to prison a lot.
[00:11:51]  He is pretty hot.
[00:11:52]  Yeah.
[00:11:52]  Yeah.
[00:11:54]  Now, in the middle of all this politicking, a detachment of Cossacks suddenly rode up from the front line where they'd been fighting the Germans to help nationalist forces attack the new government.
[00:12:03]  Nestor took command of a detachment of anarchist fighters and ambushed the Cossacks, inflicting enough punishment that they'd surrendered, which brought Makhno and his comrades a whole pile of exciting new weapons.
[00:12:13]  They get like their first machine guns and stuff during this period.
[00:12:15]  And they're very excited about that.
[00:12:17]  Now, as the spring of good for them, so many books at this point.
[00:12:22]  Yeah.
[00:12:22]  Maybe that's like once you've read like a hundred books in the book club, you get your machine gun.
[00:12:28]  That's good.
[00:12:29]  That makes sense.
[00:12:30]  You gotta kill a bunch of Cossacks first, but yeah, then you get their machine guns.
[00:12:35]  Yeah, there are barriers to entry, but it's not impossible.
[00:12:39]  So as the spring of 1918 dawns, things are going pretty well for Nestor and the people of Gulyai Poli.
[00:12:45]  But on March 3rd, the new new government, which by this point was dominated by the Bolsheviks, so there's like an election shit.
[00:12:50]  It's very complicated.
[00:12:52]  The Bolsheviks are in charge at this point.
[00:12:53]  They sign an armistice with Zermans, putting an end to official Russian participation in World War I.
[00:12:59]  This agreement was considered a stab in the back to Ukrainians like Makhno, though as basically the only entire terror.
[00:13:05]  So the government, the new government, signs an agreement with the Germans ending the war, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
[00:13:11]  And part of that agreement is that Germany and Austria-Hungary get Ukraine.
[00:13:16]  So Makhno's like, you motherfuckers.
[00:13:20]  We just defended you by like fighting, and now you've given us up to the fucking Germans.
[00:13:26]  Like, you fucking dicks.
[00:13:29]  And the Red Guards, the Bolshevik army, are ordered to go through and either evacuate or disarm Makhno and his partisans before like the Austro-Hungarian Empire moves in to occupy the regions.
[00:13:39]  So kind of lame.
[00:13:41]  I'm going to quote from Anarchy's Cossack here.
[00:13:43]  Guided by their local allies and bringing in their wake the former great estate owners thrown out the year before by the revolutionary peasantry, almost a million Austro-German troops occupied the territories ceded by Brest-Litovsk.
[00:13:55]  The extractions and repression of the occupiers and of the Ukrainian oligarchy quickly triggered a popular resistance movement.
[00:14:01]  Dozens of local insurgent detachments sprang up to harry enemy troops, engaging in a savage war of national liberation.
[00:14:08]  Now, Nestor had not been ready for this.
[00:14:11]  He did not expect the government to betray him.
[00:14:13]  And after a which he probably should have, in fairness, and after a decent youthful optimism, I guess.
[00:14:21]  Now, after a decent amount of fighting, he found his forces routed and he himself was stuck in a railroad marshalling yard where he learned that Gulyaipolyi had been occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces.
[00:14:31]  All the members of the local Soviet, the Revolution Committee, and the anarchist group were arrested.
[00:14:36]  Many of them were executed.
[00:14:37]  Communes were broken up and the land was given back to the wealthy men who had owned it before.
[00:14:42]  And again, a bunch of Nestor's friends get murdered.
[00:14:44]  So, this brings us to the uncomfortable subject again of the Ukrainian Mennonites.
[00:14:48]  Now, to this day, Makhno is considered a war criminal by a number of Mennonite communities on the allegation that his forces massacred peaceful Mennonite settlements.
[00:14:56]  Now, for episode one, you know that Mennonites were not pacifists in Ukraine, and a major tenant, you know, a major tenant of Mennonite belief is supposed to be the avoidance of the sword, but this was not consistently obeyed prior to the revolution.
[00:15:08]  And in the spring of 1918, they just gave up entirely.
[00:15:11]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in libcom.org.
[00:15:14]  From the spring of 1918, Mennonite colonies, though not all individual believers, abandoned any pretense of fascism and pacifism, sorry, and began to establish an armed force, which they referred to as the Selktschultz.
[00:15:25]  For those who participated and their descendants, this resort to violence presents a problem of conscience.
[00:15:29]  For 400 years, through various persecutions and martyrdoms, Mennonites had, and to an extent at least, renounced the sword.
[00:15:36]  Now, gangs of men armed themselves in zealous support of the invading Austro-German armies.
[00:15:40]  It is worth observing a sort of logical contortions that were necessary to defend this course of action.
[00:15:45]  It was thus argued by Heinrich Johns and Aaron Twebbs, for example, that one must differentiate between the principles of the kingdom of God and the principles of this worldly kingdom.
[00:15:53]  In matters of the former one, one must remain non-resistant, of course.
[00:15:57]  But with respect to the latter one, one is obligated to support law and order.
[00:16:01]  So the Mennonite, the rich Mennonites, again, are like, no, no, no, non-violence only means to the kingdom of God.
[00:16:08]  We don't use violent resistance to the kingdom of God.
[00:16:11]  When it comes to supporting law and order, we can shoot people.
[00:16:15]  Jesus.
[00:16:16]  So that's like...
[00:16:17]  Again, I want to emphasize the rich Ukrainian Mennonites, right?
[00:16:21]  So, understandably, Mennonite memorists and historians have expended much energy justifying the Seltzchulz, or at least emphasizing the desperate horrors in response to which it emerged.
[00:16:31]  B.J. Dick, for example, who's a Mennonite historian, worried that those readers of his, yeah, worried that those readers of his account, born decades after those terrible events, would struggle to understand fully the Mennonite situation, to emphasize with their anguish and to judge the matter fairly.
[00:16:45]  The temptation to form an emergency Seltzchulz, he states, did not arise suddenly overnight, but grew gradually through months of unbearable and catastrophic experiences and unprecedented terror.
[00:16:55]  And that is broadly fair to say.
[00:16:58]  I don't really sympathize with wealthy landowners who held thousands of peasants in bondage, but it would be fair to say that those wealthy landowners suffered unprecedented terror in this period.
[00:17:07]  All throughout Ukraine and Russia, there were stories that were documented of peasant mobs burning down landowners' homes, often with the landowner and their family inside, shouting, all of this belongs to us.
[00:17:17]  You know, right.
[00:17:18]  That's scary.
[00:17:19]  Yeah.
[00:17:20]  That sounds scary, but I just can't get there in terms of radical empathy.
[00:17:24]  I'm sorry.
[00:17:25]  I have to go back to, did you say the man who wrote the history was named B.J. Dick?
[00:17:29]  A Mennonite historian.
[00:17:31]  Yeah, it was B.J. Dick.
[00:17:33]  Wait, Dick, like DIX?
[00:17:35]  No, no, D-I-C-K.
[00:17:37]  Yeah, it's spelled like a dick, Jamie.
[00:17:38]  Yeah.
[00:17:39]  It's spelled like a dick.
[00:17:40]  But and then to use the name B.J. Dick before it.
[00:17:43]  I'm just saying.
[00:17:44]  I know, I know, I know, Jamie.
[00:17:46]  You could change.
[00:17:47]  You don't have to go by BJ if your last name is Dick.
[00:17:50]  He had a lot of options and he made a choice.
[00:17:52]  He really, yeah.
[00:17:53]  He made a choice, okay?
[00:17:55]  Just like the wealthy Mennonite landowners made a choice to have a militia dedicated to massacring the peasants trying to secure their own freedom.
[00:18:02]  That said, yes, that's true.
[00:18:04]  That's the larger issue at hand.
[00:18:06]  Yeah.
[00:18:06]  So obviously, again, there were real reasons for them to be terrified because terrifying things happen to landowners in this period.
[00:18:12]  And rather ironically, Guglyai Polgi was one of the places where this mostly did not happen.
[00:18:18]  When Makhno and his people handled appropriations from the rich, they demanded itemized lists of everything the landowners owned.
[00:18:24]  The Soviet, which was like a governing body made up of peasants, would then divide the land so that the formerly wealthy people had the same resources as the peasants.
[00:18:32]  This was still terrifying for a lot of rich people because they suddenly found themselves laboring in the fields next to men and women they'd whipped, beaten, and mocked for years.
[00:18:39]  But during this period, the areas under Makhnovist control, like anarchist control, deaths, particularly among Mennonites in this period, were very uncommon.
[00:18:48]  There is one case in January of 1918 where people who might have been Makhnovists killed a family of five.
[00:18:54]  And again, not great, but also let's provide some context to why this was happening.
[00:19:01]  Okay.
[00:19:01]  We also don't know if it came on Makhno's orders because again, he's got hundreds and hundreds of like militiamen roaming around a territory angry and terrified whose friends are being murdered too.
[00:19:12]  So it's like, yeah, it's a war.
[00:19:14]  Bad things happen.
[00:19:16]  Quote, there are good reasons to suspect that the executioners were Makhnovists.
[00:19:20]  First, the Schoenfeld region was near to Makhno's hometown of Gulyai Poly.
[00:19:23]  Second, it contained some of the most prosperous estates in the whole region.
[00:19:26]  These estates were not part of the original Mennonite colonies, but were built on land purchased in the mid-19th century from a czarist officer who had won it in a game of cards.
[00:19:34]  In the years before World War I, it was a region of such prosperity that several people owned chauffeured automobiles, and one man even bought a private airplane.
[00:19:42]  So again, the people who are rich enough that in 1918, they had some of them had private plane money.
[00:19:48]  So there's some murdering that gets happening, that happens to these people.
[00:19:52]  You know what?
[00:19:53]  Sometimes when you owning a private plane is a decision that, you know, sometimes there's, there's a price.
[00:19:59]  There's a price on owning a private plane.
[00:20:01]  There might be a price, especially if you're also funding a militia that's murdering poor people.
[00:20:07]  Yeah, like fuck off.
[00:20:09]  One of my favorite hobbies is every time like a huge, huge, huge celebrity posts about global warming to just look up if they own a private plane.
[00:20:17]  100% of the time they do.
[00:20:19]  And it's like, oh, okay, you're just, okay, so, you know.
[00:20:21]  What's really funny, Jamie, is to get on Flight Radar 24 or, I mean, ADSB Exchange used to be the best place, but now it doesn't work as well.
[00:20:29]  But get on one of the plane tracking apps, figure out the in numbers, which is basically the plane license plate number, and figure out the end numbers of rich people's private jets and see how often they take their private jet from one airport to another in the same city.
[00:20:43]  Happens all the time.
[00:20:45]  A lot of JFK to LaGuardia flights from rich people in fucking New York who are fucking fucking assholes.
[00:20:54]  Oh my God.
[00:20:56]  Because they want to skip traffic.
[00:20:58]  Oh.
[00:21:01]  I want to.
[00:21:02]  Oh, my God.
[00:21:02]  Okay.
[00:21:03]  That's like, you know, the scene from scanners where the head explodes.
[00:21:06]  That's fuck.
[00:21:08]  Okay.
[00:21:09]  Great stuff.
[00:21:10]  So there is, again, yeah.

=== Moral Complexity in War (15:28) ===

[00:21:13]  Again, I don't know that Nestor had anything to do with this.
[00:21:15]  There's certainly no evidence that he had anything to do with this murder.
[00:21:19]  Also, though, when you found a large band of armed revolutionaries who occupy a big chunk of territory, some of them are going to do horrible things because it's a war.
[00:21:28]  And every single military force in every single war in history has had atrocities tied to its name.
[00:21:33]  You can't not do it.
[00:21:34]  And it's true of the Machnovists.
[00:21:36]  And we shouldn't forget that or pretend it didn't happen.
[00:21:38]  But also, if you compare them to all of the other actors in the Russian civil war, they're of the, like, like, like in a similar way to, you know, sort of the SDF, like lower on the war crimes totem pole.
[00:21:51]  Yeah.
[00:21:52]  Yeah.
[00:21:53]  Lower on the war crimes totem pole.
[00:21:55]  Not no war crimes.
[00:21:56]  And again, Nestor, one of the things, so like Nestor is a, a, a very outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism.
[00:22:03]  Um, he grew up with a lot of Jewish friends and he was very much like constantly haranguing his troops not to do horrible things to Jewish people.
[00:22:10]  Also, anti-Semitism, very common in Ukraine.
[00:22:13]  And there were times when Maknavists fucking murdered Jewish people and it's terrible.
[00:22:18]  Um, when you've got 55,000 traumatized militiamen, sometimes horrible things happens.
[00:22:25]  And he punished, he executed a lot of warlords who were responsible for pogroms against Jewish people.
[00:22:30]  It was a horrible, bloody civil war, and there's no walking out of it with your hands clean, you know?
[00:22:36]  Not to like write over that, but he does, he gives a lot of speeches being like, don't be fucking racist against Jewish people.
[00:22:43]  What's wrong with you?
[00:22:46]  He does his best.
[00:22:46]  Yeah.
[00:22:47]  Yeah, he does his best.
[00:22:48]  Okay, so this is like, you know, taking it taking a turn.
[00:22:52]  This is where things get morally complex.
[00:22:54]  He's fighting a war now.
[00:22:55]  And there's doing that and keeping your hands clean.
[00:22:58]  Again, he's not ordering pogroms, but he's building an army.
[00:23:02]  And some of those soldiers do bad things.
[00:23:04]  Not just like to Mennonites too.
[00:23:06]  Like there's bad things that the Maknavists do.
[00:23:09]  We'll also talk about what the people they're fighting do, which is on a completely different scale of mass murder.
[00:23:16]  So, yeah.
[00:23:18]  Yeah, there's anyway.
[00:23:20]  So the Austro-Hungarians come in, they invade, basically, and their arrival empowers the reactionary forces Makno had been beating up until then, people who wanted to reestablish the old status quo no matter who was in charge.
[00:23:30]  The Mennonite militia, the Seltz Schutz, fought with the invading foreign soldiers to reclaim land and property that had been collectivized.
[00:23:37]  BJ Dick, that Mennonite historian that Jamie is a big fan of, describes the occupation as breathing space sent by God.
[00:23:44]  And he's describing that on behalf of the rich Mennonites.
[00:23:46]  But the invading...
[00:23:47]  Go by any other names.
[00:23:49]  I know, I know.
[00:23:49]  He had options.
[00:23:51]  He could go by the B, he could go by the J, but like by putting them together, he's horrible.
[00:23:55]  It's horrible.
[00:23:56]  BJ implies that he made a choice.
[00:23:58]  I know, he did.
[00:23:59]  Which is interesting.
[00:24:00]  Yeah.
[00:24:01]  The invading troops that the Selbschutz fought alongside were as brutal as invading troops tend to be.
[00:24:06]  We have one account from a guy named John Zidius, who was a rucified Greek and a capitalist who lived in Odessa at the time of the occupation.
[00:24:13]  So not an anarchist, not a socialist, like a capitalist guy.
[00:24:17]  This is him reporting on what happened when these troops move in and wealthy landowners get to take their revenge on the peasants.
[00:24:25]  Quote, the reprisal expeditions were marked by hangings and shootings.
[00:24:28]  Executions dispensed with any sort of proceedings.
[00:24:31]  The venom of the landlords cared not a jot for it, and the German officers gladly washed their hands of any show of a trial.
[00:24:37]  They shot and hanged without any pretense of trial, often not even bothering to check the identity of the defendant.
[00:24:42]  The landlord or his agent had merely to declare that such and such a peasant had been involved in confiscation of his estates for the culprit to be summarily executed.
[00:24:51]  This happens on a scale of tens of thousands.
[00:24:54]  So once Guliaipoli was occupied, Nestor Makno's mother was punished in this way.
[00:24:58]  Her house was burned down.
[00:25:00]  I don't think she lives through this.
[00:25:02]  Nestor's brother Emilian, who had been disabled in the war, was executed in front of his children.
[00:25:07]  All over Ukraine, thousands were shot or hanged, many for the crime of being anarchists.
[00:25:12]  Others were beaten to death in the street by soldiers or reactionaries, including the men of the Selpschutz.
[00:25:18]  I should note here that the violence was heavily class-based.
[00:25:21]  This Mennonite militia worked with German soldiers to execute and beat peasants.
[00:25:24]  They received training to help the occupiers suppress dissent.
[00:25:28]  But the fighters doing this and the men funding the Selpschutz were rich, or at least well-off.
[00:25:32]  There were a lot of poor Mennonites who they killed, and some of these Mennonites took part in Makhno's revolutionary other revolutionary activity.
[00:25:39]  And I want to note that when we're talking about these different ethnic groups, Mennonites, Russians, Germans, there are poor members of all of these groups who are fighting against the forces of reaction and stuff.
[00:25:50]  Right, of course.
[00:25:52]  Yeah.
[00:25:53]  And that's a big thing Makno tries to emphasize is that like we're not angry at the Russians or the Germans or the Jews.
[00:25:58]  We're angry at rich people who are murdering us.
[00:26:01]  Like that's the problem.
[00:26:02]  That's a solid common enemy.
[00:26:05]  Yeah.
[00:26:06]  Elaine Inns, a Mennonite historian, writes about this period.
[00:26:09]  Many landless Mennonites became servants on wealthy Mennonite estates, and some became so disillusioned that they joined the communists and anarchists to fight for a more just society.
[00:26:18]  So the same social fault lines that led to the Russian Revolution ran right through my grandmother's yard.
[00:26:23]  In most cases, our people were not targeted because they were Mennonite, but because they were wealthy.
[00:26:28]  So again, very complicated issue, but is primarily breaking down on class.
[00:26:34]  Now, some of the people who are committing murders are doing it based on race, which is like a thing that Makhno tries to prevent, but it does happen, and that's terrible.
[00:26:42]  It's generally a terrible war.
[00:26:44]  Now, Nestor Machno was forced to flee north to Moscow after his town has taken over, and he meets with Lenin, who basically is like, hey, buddy, you're on your own.
[00:26:53]  And I'm going to read, there's a good write-up in his.
[00:26:55]  Yeah.
[00:26:55]  So he, sorry, just to clarify, so his whole family is dead.
[00:27:01]  A lot of them.
[00:27:02]  Not all of them.
[00:27:03]  Not everyone.
[00:27:03]  A bunch of them.
[00:27:04]  Almost everyone.
[00:27:05]  Okay.
[00:27:06]  Yeah, and he doesn't really know.
[00:27:07]  Like, he loses his wife and child in this period.
[00:27:10]  He never even learns if they're killed or not.
[00:27:13]  Like, it's, he's a guy who deals with some shit.
[00:27:17]  So I'm going to read from a write-up in History Today about his meeting with Lenin.
[00:27:20]  Makhno, conscious of his youth and crudeness, was embarrassed by Lenin's magnetism and authority.
[00:27:25]  He found himself beginning to venerate the man most responsible for the persecution of the anarchists.
[00:27:30]  He was unable to find the words and arguments he needed.
[00:27:32]  At the end of the interview, Lenin gave instructions that his return to the Ukraine should be assisted by the Bolshevik organization in charge of illegal frontier crossings.
[00:27:40]  Makhno was given false papers and set out.
[00:27:42]  By the appointed date, he was hiding with the peasant friends some 15 miles from Guljaipoly.
[00:27:47]  So he meets with Lenin.
[00:27:48]  Lenin helps him sneak back in, but is like, we can't really help.
[00:27:51]  And it's kind of the way that this talk is described, Lenin's like, you anarchists are kind of full of shit, but I like you and like, I want you to fight the occupiers of Ukraine, which I'm partly responsible for Ukraine being occupied.
[00:28:05]  But like, you know, this is men are so weird.
[00:28:09]  So, yeah, he's like, oh, well, you know, you got to hand it to him.
[00:28:13]  He really cares about it.
[00:28:14]  Yeah, there's like a couple of where he's like, anarchists are shit, but like, you're an exception.
[00:28:18]  You're all right, Nestor.
[00:28:20]  Like, but look at that mustache on you.
[00:28:23]  Yeah.
[00:28:24]  I guess in fairness to Lenin on the whole giving Ukraine to the Austro-Germans, if you're in charge of Russia in late 1918 or in early 1918, there are no good options, right?
[00:28:34]  Like everything is shit because the czar left you in a bit.
[00:28:37]  Like Lenin didn't have a lot of good things he could have done there.
[00:28:41]  Like it's understandable that Makhno and his friends are furious, but like, I don't know how you get out of World War I if you just take over Russia at the end of 1917.
[00:28:49]  Like, yeah, there's no win.
[00:28:53]  God.
[00:28:53]  Okay.
[00:28:53]  So the boys are vibing.
[00:28:55]  You know, sure, we have persecuting your comrades, but like, we're vibing here.
[00:29:02]  We're vibing.
[00:29:03]  I'm going to help you sneak back into Ukraine to fight the Austro-Germans.
[00:29:06]  So Makhno sneaks back in and he starts building up bit by bit, like running around at night and like dressing as a woman sometimes.
[00:29:12]  He like gathers up all of these sort of like bandits and stuff together, these anarchists who have like Robert Durst.
[00:29:19]  Yeah, very, very Robert Durst.
[00:29:21]  Yes.
[00:29:22]  So he builds up a little partisan army and they start raiding landlords' homesteads, you know, killing landlords.
[00:29:28]  And in this case, they did not do that initially.
[00:29:30]  After the landlords come back and start mass murdering their friends, they start shooting some landlords, which at this point, it's kind of self-defense.
[00:29:37]  It's like, we tried to do this peacefully.
[00:29:40]  The level of restraint, honestly, with this group seems like there's a lot of restraint at play if it took them this long.
[00:29:46]  We tried to do this peacefully and you started murdering us as soon as you had a chance.
[00:29:51]  So now we're going to kill some of you.
[00:29:52]  And they do that.
[00:29:53]  They don't kill everybody, but they start murdering some people.
[00:29:55]  They steal their shit.
[00:29:56]  They get guns.
[00:29:58]  They start carrying out ambushes on Austro-Hungarian patrols and like killing small patrols of soldiers and taking their weapons and building up their forces.
[00:30:06]  His partisans showed no quarter.
[00:30:09]  When they beat a group of like foreign soldiers, they would kill them all.
[00:30:13]  Their slogan was, death to all who with the help of German-Austrian bayonets take away from peasants and workers the conquests of their revolution.
[00:30:20]  That's a bit long, but it's a bit long, bit long.
[00:30:23]  Again, he could barely read.
[00:30:26]  I'm just saying, you know, the Ukrainian novelty t-shirt industry is going to struggle to get that.
[00:30:31]  That's a hard t-shirt to make for sure.
[00:30:33]  That's difficult.
[00:30:34]  You know, like maybe I killed them all, of course, just to keep pulling inspiration.
[00:30:39]  So bit by bit, Makhno attracted followers and acquired weapons.
[00:30:42]  He began experimenting with guerrilla warfare and in fact, innovating.
[00:30:46]  At first, the most his men could do was carry out strikes on small, isolated patrols of soldiers and their allies, including the Selpschulz, that Mennonite militia.
[00:30:54]  As his band and his resources grew, Nestor's mind began to open to new militant possibilities.
[00:30:59]  See, there were these carts, these horse-drawn carts called Netchankas.
[00:31:03]  And they were basically, again, like the horse-drawn equivalent of a pickup truck.
[00:31:06]  So it's a horse-drawn cart with a big flat bed in the back.
[00:31:09]  This would have been similar to the thing he would have bought as a young man to help on his brother's farm.
[00:31:14]  So these are very common.
[00:31:15]  There's tons of these carts all over the place.
[00:31:17]  And they do have access to a good number of horses.
[00:31:19]  And his partisans start capturing a bunch of heavy machine guns, which were great weapons for carrying out ambushes, but are heavy and they're slow to set up.
[00:31:27]  So they're not great for A partisan militia because it's hard to move with them.
[00:31:32]  So, Nestor hits upon the brilliant idea of bolting these machine guns to the flat beds of these horse-drawn carts and using them, driving them around and using them to shoot people and move very quickly.
[00:31:44]  And he invents the first technical in world history.
[00:31:47]  Like, these are, you see, these all over the Middle East now, trucks with machine guns in the bed.
[00:31:50]  This is how that all starts.
[00:31:52]  They're called, um, yeah, they're called tachankas.
[00:31:55]  Um, and yeah, so he uses them both because you can move them into position quickly and immediately start shooting.
[00:32:01]  And if you wind up like biting off more than you can true while you're retreating because the gun is in the bed, the horse can be moving away from the enemy and you can still be shooting them.
[00:32:10]  Like, it's awesome.
[00:32:13]  I just, I just, I remember when horses were trucks, Robert.
[00:32:20]  Yeah, remember when horses are trucks, and Nestor's like, we should get a machine gun involved in this action.
[00:32:26]  We gotta get these horses fucking strapped, baby.
[00:32:30]  Everyone is strapped in Nestor's truck.
[00:32:33]  Oh my god, so the horses are trucks, and the trucks are fucking strapped.
[00:32:39]  The strucks have gatling gun type thing.
[00:32:41]  Well, maxim guns on them.
[00:32:43]  Yeah, okay.
[00:32:44]  So Makhno's forces come to rely so heavily on Tachankas for mobile firepower that one of his soldiers starts referring to the anarchist militia as a republic on Tachanki, basically like a mobile republic of gun trucks.
[00:32:57]  Like that's that's what we have now.
[00:32:59]  They took away our town, so now we're like a traveling republic of machine guns.
[00:33:05]  Yeah, nice.
[00:33:06]  Yeah.
[00:33:07]  So in those early days, Makhno's growing anarchist horde was, yeah, basically a moving republic.
[00:33:12]  It was September of 1918 before he finally attacked and recaptured Guglyaipoli, but his forces were pushed out again by an Austrian-led counterattack.
[00:33:20]  Makhno led his men in a tactical retreat as he was able to recognize his opponents had overextended themselves.
[00:33:26]  And a few days after this, 80 miles away from his hometown, he surrounded, attacked, and wiped out a force of 2,000 Austrian soldiers and their allies.
[00:33:34]  And this brought his army their first artillery and heavy weapons.
[00:33:37]  By December, the Austrians had withdrawn entirely.
[00:33:40]  Their puppet leaders had been overthrown, and Makhno's anarchists were, for a brief time, the undisputed protectors of a widening cordon around Gulyaipoli.
[00:33:48]  Makhno intended this core of free territory to constantly expand, bringing a new egalitarian social and economic order to an ever-expanding chunk of eastern Ukraine.
[00:33:57]  By 1919, hundreds of thousands of people were engaged in experiments with a new anarchist social order.
[00:34:03]  The first time something like this had been done on such a scale.
[00:34:07]  And there was a pamphlet that Makhno had published during this time called What Are the Makhnovists and What Are They Fighting For?
[00:34:13]  This was in actually like 1920, but similar stuff was going around in 1918.
[00:34:18]  Okay.
[00:34:18]  And yeah, one of the notes on that, like in terms of explaining their beliefs to new people who wound up in their area, what do we mean by emancipation?
[00:34:26]  The overthrow of the monarchist coalition republican and social democratic communist Bolshevik party governments, which must give place to a free and independent Soviet order of toilers without rulers and their arbitrary laws.
[00:34:38]  For the true Soviet order is not the rule of the social democratic communist Bolsheviks, which now calls itself the Soviet power, but a higher form of anti-authoritarian and anti-statist socialism, manifesting itself in the organization of a free, happy, and independent structure for the social life of the toilers, in which all individual toilers, as well as society as a whole, can build by themselves their happiness and well-being according to the principles of solidarity, friendship, and equality.
[00:35:04]  Okay, this is good.
[00:35:06]  What is sweetie?
[00:35:08]  Yeah.
[00:35:08]  I think that we should start calling ourselves toilers again.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:13]  It's an accurate way of, you know, splitting up society in a meaningful way.
[00:35:19]  Yeah.
[00:35:20]  Yeah.
[00:35:20]  Haves and have-nots is over.
[00:35:22]  It's toilers and non-toilers.
[00:35:24]  By December, the Austrians had withdrawn entirely from Ukraine, like the war ends and their side loses and they don't get to keep Ukraine anymore.
[00:35:31]  Their puppet leaders were overthrown and Makhno's anarchists were for a brief time like in charge of this shit.
[00:35:37]  So Makhno's territory was not perfectly consistent to his values.
[00:35:42]  Obviously, the white forces were growing in strength and it was clear that if they reoccupied the now anarchist territories of eastern Ukraine, mass slaughter would follow.
[00:35:50]  To prevent this, an army was needed, and general mobilization was the only real way to build an army.
[00:35:55]  Peasant and workers' councils voted to mobilize, but the fact that the end result was close to conscription has to be acknowledged.
[00:36:02]  Like compromises are made from their ideal social order for the fact that they need as many fighters as possible, right?
[00:36:09]  Now, these fighters also had like famously high morale, so it does suggest that the vast majority of these people, again, who mostly had family members killed by reactionaries, saw military service as necessary self-defense.
[00:36:21]  Now, up to the spring of 1919, the Soviet press had portrayed Makhno and his peasants as heroes.
[00:36:26]  But when the central powers retreated from Ukraine and the Red Army started to seep down into the territory, that line changed.
[00:36:32]  The core of the Bolshevik movement had been workers from Russia's industrialized cities, whereas the Makhnovist movement was made up of peasants.
[00:36:39]  So, right?
[00:36:39]  The Soviets are workers.

=== Trotsky vs. The Makhnovists (03:27) ===

[00:36:41]  The Ukrainians are not considered workers.
[00:36:42]  They're peasants.
[00:36:43]  They're not laboring in factories and stuff.
[00:36:45]  There's not a lot of factories in Ukraine, you know?
[00:36:47]  They're farmers and shit.
[00:36:48]  But they're toilers.
[00:36:49]  Are they not toilers?
[00:36:50]  That's how Makhno sees it, but that's not how an awful lot of people in the Soviet chunks of the Union see it.
[00:36:58]  The anarchists were seen to them as temporary allies against reactionaries, but not trustworthy and people who eventually needed to be beaten.
[00:37:06]  By June, though, a white army general named Dinikin had amassed a potent force and was in the process of reconquering huge chunks of Ukraine and putting them back in the hands of their ancestral oppressors.
[00:37:17]  Now, this started happening at the same time as the Red Army and the Makhnovists began to integrate, because while the Red Army didn't like the Makhnovists, they didn't like Dinikin more and they needed to defend themselves against it.
[00:37:27]  It's a confusing time to read about.
[00:37:29]  Trotsky, during this time, signs an order, like Trotsky's in charge of the Red Army, and he signs an order forbidding the peasant councils that Makhno has formed and ordering him to hand over command of his militia.
[00:37:39]  He may have ordered Makhno arrested.
[00:37:42]  We don't really know, but in any case, Makhno ignores Trotsky's orders.
[00:37:45]  He takes a handpicked force of cavalry into Chankas, and he heads west to battle the whites on his own, all the while ordering his other soldiers to stay embedded with the Red Army for the time being.
[00:37:55]  Now, this really pissed off Trotsky.
[00:37:57]  Yeah.
[00:37:58]  This is off Trotsky, but the summer of 1919 was a disaster for the Reds and their allies, and he couldn't really do anything about it.
[00:38:04]  Dinikin and his white forces advance constantly, and they smashed the Red Army multiple times.
[00:38:09]  Makhno's forces at the same time conducted like a very confusing war because in the East, Makhno's cavalry army is fight, or Makhno's army is fighting alongside the Red Army, but in the rest, in the West, Makhno and his handpicked force are fighting with both the Red Army and the Whites.
[00:38:25]  It's a fucking confusing-ass civil war.
[00:38:28]  So very, very messy.
[00:38:29]  One of the things they do is when they occupy villages that the Red Army had occupied, they murder commissars and secret police officials because those people are murdering anarchists.
[00:38:38]  It's a very messy period.
[00:38:40]  Now, late in the summer, the Red Army in the East collapses completely.
[00:38:44]  The whites just shatter them to pieces.
[00:38:46]  Trotsky retreats back into Russia, and Makhno orders his remaining embedded forces to pull out and to retreat to a place called Kirovograd, where they meet up again with Makhno and his cavalry.
[00:38:56]  So the Red Army is kicked out of Ukraine, and Makhno is the only force fighting the whites left in Ukraine at this period of time, or at least the only organized force.
[00:39:07]  Meanwhile, the Dinikinists had conquered Guljaipolya yet again, and their army was huge, more than 50,000 well-armed and battle-hardened troops.
[00:39:15]  So yeah, we've come up to like a kind of cliffhanger point.
[00:39:19]  So you've got the Red Army has to leave.
[00:39:21]  They get beaten out of Ukraine.
[00:39:23]  Nestor has the largest force still fighting the white army, and they are badly outnumbered.
[00:39:28]  His home village has been taken over by the whites, and he's just got this roaming bandit army of like gun trucks and horsemen with short-barreled rifles.
[00:39:36]  Horse, horse asses with machine truck, gun, horse, horse, gun.
[00:39:42]  It seems like a pretty, I mean, he's in a series of impossible situations.
[00:39:46]  He's in a bad position to be in.
[00:39:49]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  But you know who's not in a bad position to be in, Jamie?
[00:39:53]  People hawking products and services, I'm assuming.
[00:39:56]  That's a great position to be in.
[00:39:58]  Yeah.
[00:39:59]  Check out products.

=== A Dangerous Cliffhanger (04:03) ===

[00:40:09]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:40:10]  City hall building.
[00:40:12]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:40:16]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:40:22]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:40:24]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:40:25]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:40:26]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:40:33]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:40:36]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:40:44]  Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
[00:40:48]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:40:50]  Those are shots.
[00:40:51]  Those are shots.
[00:40:52]  Get down.
[00:40:52]  A charismatic politician.
[00:40:54]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:40:56]  I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
[00:41:02]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:41:04]  He alleged you.
[00:41:05]  A victim of flat down.
[00:41:06]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:41:08]  That may have been about sex.
[00:41:10]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:41:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:41:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:41:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:41:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:41:37]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:41:41]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:41:44]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:41:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:41:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:41:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:41:55]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:41:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:42:00]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:42:02]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:42:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:42:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:42:10]  Trust me, babe.
[00:42:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:42:21]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:42:27]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:42:34]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:42:40]  From power to parenthood.
[00:42:42]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:42:46]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:42:48]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:42:50]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:42:55]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:43:01]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:43:04]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:43:10]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:43:12]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:43:15]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:43:23]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:43:29]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:43:33]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:43:39]  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.
[00:43:49]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Kara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:43:54]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:43:57]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:44:00]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:44:02]  That's so funny.
[00:44:03]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.

=== Panic During Retreat (14:54) ===

[00:44:12]  Say you love me.
[00:44:14]  You know I.
[00:44:16]  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.
[00:44:26]  So, before we tell the rest of this story, it's probably worth explaining the kind of world that Dinikin and his white army, which did include a lot of Mennonite militia, were fighting for.
[00:44:36]  It included a lot of just like local reactionary forces.
[00:44:39]  So I'm going to quote again from libcom.org talking about what the Dinikinists do in the areas they retake in Ukraine.
[00:44:46]  Insofar as the Dinikinists had a political program, it was based on the restoration of landlords and the reestablishment of a single Russian state incorporating Ukraine.
[00:44:55]  This brought them into conflict with the local population, and even one of their own commanders, General Wrangel, described pillage and speculation, debauchery, gambling, orgies, looting, violence, and arbitrary acts.
[00:45:06]  Otherwise, sympathetic chroniclers are scathing about the White Army's abuses in Ukraine.
[00:45:10]  Richard Lukitz, somewhat carelessly in the context, describes something near to anarchy, bemoaning the casual brutalities of the Cossacks, the regular pogroms, and other appalling acts of barbarism.
[00:45:21]  They issued proclamations encouraging Russo-Ukrainians to rise up against the Jew communists and were responsible for hundreds of pogroms and the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.
[00:45:31]  Many of their victims were beaten, mutilated, raped, hanged, burned, and dumped into wells or thrown from rooftops and buried alive.
[00:45:37]  Arshinov states that in the former free territory, peasants were plundered, violently abused, and killed.
[00:45:42]  Almost all the Jewish women of Guyaipoli were raped.
[00:45:45]  So this is the white army.
[00:45:46]  These are the people that Nestor is fighting against.
[00:45:49]  And to the extent that he is brutal to them, you kind of have to understand why.
[00:45:55]  Yeah.
[00:45:55]  Yeah, they're pretty bad.
[00:45:59]  Yeah.
[00:45:59]  A member of Dinikin's special council, his leadership cast, stated that the main features of the Dinikin regime were violence, torture, robberies, drunkenness, odious behavior.
[00:46:09]  The counterintelligence service carried its activities to an unlimited wild arbitrariness, creating, as Dinikin put it, a painful mania all over the country.
[00:46:18]  According to General Wrangel, at this time, the White Army hunted down anybody suspected of any contact with opposition groups, even if that contact had been involuntary, a policy he denounced as insane and cruel.
[00:46:28]  They especially victimized the wives and girlfriends of known insurgents.
[00:46:32]  According to diaries attributed to Makhno's partner, Galena Kuzmenko, in summer 1919, the Dinikinists' victims included the wife of Makhno's elder brother, Sava.
[00:46:40]  They beat her, stabbed her with their bayonets, cut off one of her breasts, and only then did they shoot her.
[00:46:45]  Since revolutionaries, yeah, yeah, tens of thousands of people are tortured and killed this way.
[00:46:51]  It is a fucking nightmare.
[00:46:53]  And again, there is brutality from the Makhnovists, but it is not on this fucking scale.
[00:46:58]  And it is generally in response to this.
[00:47:01]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:47:03]  This is like a fucking pecking paw movie.
[00:47:06]  Yeah, it's the fucking Russian Civil War.
[00:47:08]  It's one of the worst things that ever happens in history.
[00:47:10]  Yeah.
[00:47:12]  Not that the Tsarist regime was good or shouldn't have been overthrown, but it's a horrible war.
[00:47:17]  And by the way, these guys we're talking about, the whites, are the guys that the U.S. and Britain are supporting.
[00:47:23]  Because they're not communists.
[00:47:25]  Well, they're not.
[00:47:26]  Yeah, they would never.
[00:47:28]  And Makhno.
[00:47:30]  Because the whites try to ally with Makhno at a couple of points because they're like, hey, you hate the Bolsheviks.
[00:47:34]  He's like, no, fuck you guys.
[00:47:35]  And he does go to the West and he's like, look, like, these people you're supporting are even worse than the Bolsheviks.
[00:47:40]  Like, support us.
[00:47:42]  We won't fuck with you.
[00:47:43]  Like, we're not going to go to war with the West.
[00:47:45]  We just want to live in Ukraine and not, like, have bosses.
[00:47:48]  Like, but, of course, they don't, they don't listen to that either because they're scared of shit.
[00:47:52]  There's not.
[00:47:53]  Yeah, they're not.
[00:47:54]  And so they, so the British send a bunch of guns to the rape gangs.
[00:48:00]  Yeah, good stuff.
[00:48:02]  Good stuff.
[00:48:03]  On the sight of angels.
[00:48:04]  So for months, Dinikin's whites seemed unstoppable.
[00:48:08]  Makhno and his forces retreated west for weeks, followed by a constant stream of tens of thousands of refugees running from the white advance for obvious reasons.
[00:48:16]  Makhno and his men fought running battles with Dinikin's forces, as well as with the Bolshevik 14th Army, who had been fleeing British naval bombardment in Odessa.
[00:48:24]  So again, they're fighting both the Reds and the Whites at periods of time.
[00:48:28]  And yeah, because again, the left has kind of always been the same.
[00:48:31]  So there were few victories during this time, including the capture of a warlord named Grigorev, who had ordered the pogroms of a lot of Jewish people.
[00:48:39]  So Makhno has this guy executed.
[00:48:41]  He does this whenever he can.
[00:48:43]  And by September, Makhno's army had been pushed back 600 kilometers from Gulyaipoli.
[00:48:48]  So they have been fleeing for like 400 miles of solid retreat, which is exhausting.
[00:48:54]  Now, there was a scholar named Arshinov who was with Makhnovist forces at this time, and he chronicles the retreat.
[00:49:00]  He later wrote, The Makhnovist retreat had covered more than 400 miles and had lasted close to four months.
[00:49:05]  It had been unimaginably difficult.
[00:49:07]  The insurgents lacked clothes and shoes.
[00:49:09]  Through torrid heat, enveloped by clouds of dust, under a hail of bullets and shells, they went further and further away from their own region towards an unknown destination.
[00:49:17]  But they were all animated by the idea of victory over the enemy, and they valiantly endured the rigors of the retreat.
[00:49:23]  Only occasionally did the least patient among them cry out, turn around toward the Niper.
[00:49:28]  But implacable necessity kept pushing them further and further from the Niper, which is a river and their birthplace, their proud region.
[00:49:34]  With inexhaustible patience, with their will stretched to the limit, they rallied around their leader under continual enemy fire.
[00:49:40]  It was impossible to go anywhere else.
[00:49:42]  But Makhno recognized, so they're like, this is about as bad a situation as you can get in a military force.
[00:49:48]  And his people are like, why aren't we turning around and fighting?
[00:49:51]  But Makhno keeps saying, no, no, no, keep retreating, keep retreating, keep retreating.
[00:49:54]  And eventually he gets to a point where Makhno realizes that the enemy has finally overextended their supply lines.
[00:50:00]  They've been drunk on months of victory and they had neglected to protect themselves properly.
[00:50:04]  So he rouses his exhausted fighters by telling them, hey, guys, this whole retreat has just been a play to overextend Dinikin's men.
[00:50:11]  And now they're in a position where we can fuck them up.
[00:50:14]  So he orders his soldiers to face the enemy.
[00:50:16]  He leads them in a cry of liberty or death.
[00:50:19]  And I'm going to quote Antonov again for what happens next.
[00:50:21]  This is a very famous battle.
[00:50:24]  On the evening of September 25th, the Makhnovist troops, who until then had been marching westward, suddenly turned all their forces eastward and marched straight to the main forces of Dinikin's army.
[00:50:32]  The first encounter took place late in the evening near the village of Krutenko, where the Makhnovist 1st Brigade attacked a Dinikinist unit.
[00:50:39]  Dinikin's troops retreated to take up better positions and to draw the Makhnovists after them, but the Makhnovists did not pursue them.
[00:50:45]  This misled the vigilance of the enemy, who concluded that the insurgents were still moving westward.
[00:50:49]  However, in the middle of the night, all the Makhnovist forces stationed in several villages began marching eastward.
[00:50:54]  The enemy's principal forces were concentrated near the village of Peregovnika.
[00:50:58]  The village itself was occupied by the Makhnovists.
[00:51:00]  The fighting started between 3 and 4 a.m.
[00:51:02]  It kept mounting in intensity and reached its peak by 8 a.m. in a hurricane of machine gun fire on both sides.
[00:51:08]  Makhno himself, with his cavalry escort, had disappeared at nightfall, seeking to turn the enemy's flank.
[00:51:14]  During the whole battle that ensued, there was no further news from him.
[00:51:17]  By nine in the morning, the outnumbered and exhausted Maknovists began to lose ground.
[00:51:21]  They were already fighting on the outskirts of the village.
[00:51:23]  From all sides, enemy enforcements brought new bursts of fire to bear on the Maknovists.
[00:51:27]  The staff of the insurrectionary army, as well as everyone in the village who could handle a rifle, armed themselves and joined in the fighting.
[00:51:33]  This was the crucial moment when it seemed that the battle and with it the whole cause of the insurgents was lost.
[00:51:38]  The order was given for everyone, even the women, to be ready to fire on the enemy in the village streets.
[00:51:43]  All prepared for the supreme hour of the battle and of their lives.
[00:51:46]  But suddenly, the machine gun fire of the enemy and their frantic cheers began to grow weaker and then to recede into the distance.
[00:51:52]  The defenders of the village realized that the enemy was retreating and that the battle was now taking place some distance away.
[00:51:57]  It was Makhno who, appearing unexpectedly at the very moment when his troops were driven back and were preparing to fight in the streets, had decided the fate of the battle.
[00:52:05]  Covered with dust and fatigued from his exertions, he reached the enemy flank through a deep ravine.
[00:52:10]  Without a cry, but with a burning resolve fixed on his features, he threw himself on the Dinikinists at full gallop, followed by his escort, and broke into their ranks.
[00:52:18]  All exhaustion, all discouragement disappeared from among the Makhnovists.
[00:52:22]  Botko is here!
[00:52:23]  Batko is here!
[00:52:24]  Fighting with his saber could be heard everywhere.
[00:52:26]  And with redoubled energy, they all pushed forward, following their beloved leader, who seemed doomed to death.
[00:52:30]  A hand-to-hand combat of incredible ferocity, a hacking, as the Maknovists called it, followed.
[00:52:36]  However, brave the whites may have been, they were thrown into retreat, at first slowly and in an orderly manner, trying to halt the impetus of the Makhnovists, but then they simply ran.
[00:52:44]  The other regiments, seized by panic, followed them, and finally all of Dinikin's troops were routed and tried to save themselves by swimming across the Sinyukya River.
[00:52:53]  So there's this big battle.
[00:52:55]  Makhno disappears at the start of it, and at the very end, like it's a fucking Gandalf moment, like as they're about to be overwhelmed, he charges into the enemy's rear.
[00:53:05]  They've got, like, he charges machine guns with a sword and just starts stabbing the shit out of people.
[00:53:10]  And it fucking they all run.
[00:53:11]  Like the fucking whites break.
[00:53:13]  And it's, yeah, it's fucking awesome.
[00:53:17]  This, it's just, I like, it is a Gandalf moment.
[00:53:22]  That's so bizarre.
[00:53:23]  Like, is that?
[00:53:25]  It sounds like that couldn't possibly be it happens, and he gets shot a bunch of times because it worked.
[00:53:31]  Like, it was the only thing that could have worked.
[00:53:34]  Like, he had one chance to win, and it was sneak a force behind them and panic them, right?
[00:53:39]  And it worked.
[00:53:40]  Opportunity comes once in a lifetime.
[00:53:42]  Yeah.
[00:53:43]  That's what that talking head song is about.
[00:53:46]  So.
[00:53:46]  Oh, I was thinking that about lose yourself, but that works out.
[00:53:49]  Yeah, I was thinking, lose yourself too.
[00:53:53]  So in situations like this, panic is contagious.
[00:53:57]  And with their most elite regiment shattered, the rest of Dinikin's forces began to break and run.
[00:54:01]  Hundreds were slain on the banks of the Sinyukya River.
[00:54:04]  Corpses stretched out for miles.
[00:54:07]  Makhno captures thousands, and all of the off, he kills all of the officers he captures, but he lets the enlisted men live and has a lot of them join the Maknovist army after this.
[00:54:18]  So this would turn out to be one of the most consequential battles of the entire 20th century.
[00:54:22]  Because if the white forces under Dinikin had beaten Makhno, they would have reinforced the white army at the north, which was marching on Moscow and might well have beaten the Red Army.
[00:54:32]  They were winning at that point.
[00:54:33]  Soldiers on the ground at the time understood this.
[00:54:35]  A Dinikinist officer named Sakovich, who survived, later wrote, In a sky blanketed in autumn cloud, the last puffs of artillery smoke exploded.
[00:54:43]  Then all was silent.
[00:54:44]  All of us ranking officers sensed that something tragic had just occurred, though nobody could have had an inkling of the enormity of the disaster which had struck.
[00:54:51]  None of us knew that at that precise moment, nationalist Russia had lost the war.
[00:54:55]  It's over, I said.
[00:54:56]  I know not why, to Lieutenant Rozov, who was standing alongside me.
[00:55:00]  It's over, he confirmed somberly.
[00:55:03]  Wow.
[00:55:04]  So, this battle is why the whites don't take Moscow.
[00:55:08]  At least a lot of people will argue that.
[00:55:10]  Now, Makhnovists had advanced 400 miles east in just 11 days in one of the most rapid counter-attacks in the history of warfare.
[00:55:18]  They recaptured town after town, smashing white regiments that hadn't even been informed of Dinikin's defeat.
[00:55:23]  Dinikin was forced to withdraw troops from his northern front who were advancing on Moscow to protect their headquarters in Ukraine.
[00:55:29]  Mox Nomad, an Austrian Bolshevik and educator, declared Makhno the bandit who saved Moscow.
[00:55:36]  Now, the reconquest of eastern Ukraine by Makhno came with a reckoning.
[00:55:40]  Hundreds and probably thousands were executed.
[00:55:42]  Makhno ordered his intelligence forces to track down and kill every soldier and local leader responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms and for massacres of leftists and peasants.
[00:55:51]  Bandits who'd stolen from peasants were killed, and so were all white officers who were captured.
[00:55:56]  Collaborators and suspected collaborators were killed in revenge for the tens of thousands who'd been murdered by Dinikin's men.
[00:56:01]  It is, again, a pretty fucking ugly war.
[00:56:05]  And yeah, some of those people would have been innocent.
[00:56:07]  That's war.
[00:56:08]  It's terrible.
[00:56:09]  It's the worst thing.
[00:56:09]  It's awful.
[00:56:11]  Also, not a lot of good options.
[00:56:13]  Yeah.
[00:56:15]  No, there's no perfect in a war that's already killed millions of people.
[00:56:19]  And yeah, what separated Makhno from the rest of the warlords and bandits rampaging through Russia in this period were his goals, the world he wanted to establish, and his sense of accountability.
[00:56:29]  Makhno took complaints against his forces seriously.
[00:56:32]  We have one account by a guy named Volin of a student delegation who approached Makhno to complain that one of his intelligence units had flogged an intellectual in suspicion of being a Dinikinist spy.
[00:56:43]  Quote, the student recalled approaching Makhno's office with trepidation and being surprised at Makhno's friendly and attentive audience.
[00:56:49]  After explaining that no Makhnovist should ever use the lash for his army either to shot people or release them unharmed, Makhno promised to look into the matter personally.
[00:56:57]  In this discussion, he also confessed the difficulties he experienced in preventing abuses by those who professed allegiance to his command.
[00:57:03]  Similarly, the report of his intelligence services' abusives led the Alexandrovsk Congress to pass resolution number three, establishing an investigative committee.
[00:57:12]  So he's, you know, acknowledges like, yeah, sometimes you can't fucking stop your bandit army from murdering the wrong people.
[00:57:20]  It's a real problem.
[00:57:23]  It's a fair point.
[00:57:25]  It's an issue.
[00:57:26]  I mean, he's not wrong.
[00:57:30]  You know, this falls under the category.
[00:57:33]  It's quite complicated, isn't it?
[00:57:35]  There's no perfect when you're fighting a war that, again, kills 9 million people.
[00:57:40]  Yeah.
[00:57:41]  Yeah.
[00:57:42]  You have to judge him by his opponents in a lot of cases.
[00:57:46]  Now, when the fighting with the whites was over, Makhnovist forces controlled most of eastern Ukraine, an area encompassing 7 million people.
[00:57:53]  Peasant and worker councils created a document by popular consent that spelled out civil liberties, rights, and duty in the region.
[00:58:00]  The document advocated for freedom of speech, for freedom of the press, of conscience, of worship, of assembly, and of organization.
[00:58:06]  Bolshevik newspapers, which criticized Makhno and advocated Bolshevik conquest of the region, were allowed to continue publishing.
[00:58:14]  This is some of the last freedom of speech that Ukraine will have for quite a while.
[00:58:18]  Now, throughout late 1919 and early 1920, the bones of a remarkable society were established in eastern Ukraine.
[00:58:25]  This passage from Anarchy's Cossack gives you an idea of what was being attempted.
[00:58:29]  Literacy classes were laid on for illiterate adults, followed by courses in politics and economics given by insurgent peasants and workers who had some grounding in the subjects.
[00:58:38]  Here it is interesting to look at their syllabus: political economy, history, the theory and practice of socialism and anarchism, the history of the French Revolution, the history of the revolutionary insurgent movement in the Russian Revolution.
[00:58:51]  Not that cultural activities were neglected.
[00:58:53]  Daily, there were shows staged in the local theater.
[00:58:55]  The insurgents and their women folk took part in these, not only as spectators and actors, but also as dramatists, narrating episodes from recent local events and from the insurgent struggle for all too short a time.

=== Building Anarchist Society (06:24) ===

[00:59:06]  Yeah, it's nice.
[00:59:08]  They're like, okay, so you know, there were a lot of losses, but we did get really into community theater.
[00:59:13]  We got some fucking plays.
[00:59:15]  Yeah.
[00:59:15]  Was it a wash?
[00:59:16]  Yeah.
[00:59:17]  That's sweet.
[00:59:18]  I like that.
[00:59:19]  So at his peak in 1920, Makno's army, which had started in 1917 with about 150 guys, numbered 50,000 men.
[00:59:28]  I'm going to quote from History Today here explaining how the army worked.
[00:59:31]  Machno himself, creator and leader of the insurgent army, was a man of remarkable vitality.
[00:59:36]  Tough as were his companions, he could outride, outwork, and out-fight any of them.
[00:59:40]  He never went to bed till his task was finished, and two hours later would tap at the windows of his sleeping staff to bring them back to their jobs.
[00:59:46]  He lived like a peasant and always found time for his peasants.
[00:59:49]  He would talk with them, drink with them, take a hand for an hour with a flail, hence his enormous popularity.
[00:59:56]  He grew ever more engrossed with military matters and spent more and more time at the front.
[01:00:00]  When sick or wounded, he was carried in a cart with the frontline troops till well enough to ride a horse again.
[01:00:05]  He was daring, resourceful, persistent.
[01:00:07]  He showed no signs of nerves in any crisis.
[01:00:10]  So, interesting guy.
[01:00:12]  Now, again, depending on, oh, yeah, before we, I guess, talk more about Machno and what happens after this.
[01:00:18]  Yeah, we should probably, we should probably talk about our next folk hero, the products and services that support this podcast.
[01:00:24]  Oh, wow.
[01:00:26]  Yep.
[01:00:27]  Merry Christmas, Raytheon.
[01:00:28]  Merry Christmas, Raytheon.
[01:00:31]  They've got a missile now that can go right down your chimney.
[01:00:35]  Wow.
[01:00:36]  And best of all, it's a scatter bomb that only takes out your family members and pets while leaving the valuable property unharmed.
[01:00:43]  That's the Raytheon beauty.
[01:00:44]  That's the beauty of Raytheon.
[01:00:46]  That's good shit.
[01:00:47]  That's just good shit.
[01:00:49]  Protecting property by killing people.
[01:00:51]  I don't want the and pets you added there.
[01:00:54]  Oh, yeah, they're going to kill some pets.
[01:00:56]  Absolutely.
[01:00:57]  I mean, there's always going to be some pets that are.
[01:00:59]  That's the other Raytheon guarantee.
[01:01:01]  Yeah.
[01:01:02]  We're going to get some pets killed.
[01:01:05]  All right.
[01:01:12]  10-10 shots fired.
[01:01:14]  City Hall building.
[01:01:15]  A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[01:01:19]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[01:01:23]  This is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
[01:01:26]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:01:27]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:01:28]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[01:01:30]  July 2003.
[01:01:32]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[01:01:36]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[01:01:39]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[01:01:48]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[01:01:51]  A shocking public murder.
[01:01:52]  I scream, get down, get down.
[01:01:54]  Those are shots.
[01:01:55]  Those are shots.
[01:01:56]  Get down.
[01:01:56]  A charismatic politician.
[01:01:58]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[01:02:00]  I still have a weapon.
[01:02:02]  And I could shoot you.
[01:02:05]  And an outsider with a secret.
[01:02:07]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[01:02:10]  That may or may not have been political.
[01:02:12]  That may have been about sex.
[01:02:14]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:27]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:02:31]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:02:34]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:02:37]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:02:40]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:02:44]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[01:02:48]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:02:50]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:02:55]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:02:57]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:02:58]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:03:01]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:03:03]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:03:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:03:08]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:03:12]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:03:14]  Trust me, babe.
[01:03:15]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:24]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:03:30]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:03:35]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:03:40]  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.
[01:03:50]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:03:55]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:03:58]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:04:01]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:04:03]  That's so funny.
[01:04:04]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:04:13]  Say you love me.
[01:04:16]  You know I.
[01:04:17]  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.
[01:04:25]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:04:31]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:04:37]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[01:04:44]  From power to parenthood.
[01:04:46]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:04:49]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:04:51]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:04:54]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[01:04:58]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[01:05:05]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:05:07]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[01:05:14]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[01:05:16]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
[01:05:18]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:05:30]  And we're back.

=== Machno's Messy Memoirs (11:57) ===

[01:05:31]  So, we're talking about Machno a little bit here and kind of the height of his revolution.
[01:05:35]  Now, depending on who does the writing, he was almost always a teetotaler or a heavy drinker.
[01:05:40]  There are stories of him doing some pretty terrible things while drunk.
[01:05:44]  There are also stories by people who generally allege things that seem kind of impossible, like him hacking 13 people to death with a saber for no reason.
[01:05:54]  I don't know.
[01:05:54]  It's weird.
[01:05:56]  It would not be as surprising if a man as battered by war and violence as Machno turned to drink and wound up doing terrible things in a rage.
[01:06:04]  It's not impossible.
[01:06:05]  I feel like that's, yeah, that's at least 30% of the bastards episodes go that way.
[01:06:10]  But that said, the sources who are not like clearly writing propaganda to demonize this guy after he gets defeated don't talk about that stuff.
[01:06:20]  The History Today write-up, which is very fair.
[01:06:23]  It's paywalled, but it's a pretty fair write-up that is not at all written by anarchists, implies that his, rather than talking about his drinking being like making him go into like superhuman murder rages, talks mainly about the fact that it kind of made him unready for what would become the eventual betrayal of the Machnavists by the Bolsheviks.
[01:06:42]  Like he's lost a lot.
[01:06:43]  He kind of gets messy and drunk and he does not anticipate things going as bad as they're going to go.
[01:06:49]  So the Red Army re-enters Ukraine late in 1919, and in early 1920, they declare Makhno and his movement outside the law after he refused to take his forces to the Polish frontier.
[01:06:59]  They basically try to move him and his army to Poland so that they can separate them from the peasants that support them because they want to make it easier to beat them later.
[01:07:08]  By the mid of the year, Makhno and his men were engaged in often constant horrific battle with the Red Army, with Gulyai Poly again changing hands multiple times.
[01:07:17]  So the Red Army invades and tries to fight them.
[01:07:19]  Whenever Maknovist towns and cities are retaken, the Cheka, the Bolshevik security force, carries out purges and massacres.
[01:07:26]  Numerous attempts were made to assassinate Makhno, but all failed.
[01:07:29]  The fighting went back and forth until late September 1920 when the Red Army made peace with Makhno again because they needed him to fight the whites for them.
[01:07:37]  So they signed a treaty with Makhno this time, promising peace and a release of all arrested anarchists and Makhnovists.
[01:07:42]  But the treaty also promised that peasants would be allowed to maintain standing armies in Ukraine, and this was, of course, a lie.
[01:07:48]  Once the whites were beaten again, the Red Army turns on Makhno again, and Nestor's final war with them lasts from around late November 1920 to late August of 1921.
[01:07:58]  It was brutal and grinding, but eventually the peasants of Ukraine.
[01:08:03]  Yeah, it's bad.
[01:08:04]  And eventually, just everyone is too exhausted to continue.
[01:08:08]  Makhno succeeds in fighting his way to Poland with a small force of his most loyal fighters, and he becomes an exile.
[01:08:14]  He winds up in Paris where he would spend his last years.
[01:08:17]  And he was in poor health the entire time.
[01:08:20]  All the wars he'd fought him had left him battered and broken and aged beyond his years.
[01:08:24]  He'd been shot at least six times in a three-year period, including one round through the cheek and another that pierced his thigh and into his appendix.
[01:08:31]  So he's in bad shape, and he was not happy.
[01:08:34]  A friend of his wrote of his, yeah.
[01:08:37]  It's hard to, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:40]  You know, he's kind of a little bit of a celebrity in Paris in this period among the left, but a friend of his writes that he's he expresses great difficulty in adjusting himself to circumstances so very different from his former way of life.
[01:08:52]  The only thing that brings him any joy in the end is going to horse races and watching the horses run.
[01:08:58]  He just likes to watch them run.
[01:09:00]  Now, he was bitter and prone to fits of depression.
[01:09:03]  He wrote some memoirs, but the fact that he could still barely write made this a difficult task.
[01:09:07]  He had a lot of intellectual friends who offered to help, but these authors enraged him.
[01:09:11]  Like he kind of took it as an insult that people were offering to help him write his memoirs.
[01:09:15]  Folks eventually did.
[01:09:17]  Ida met a young female writer, met him in Paris during this time, and was his friend for the last three years of his life.
[01:09:23]  And it's from her that we get some of the most intimate glances into Nestor's inner life that we're likely to see.
[01:09:28]  Quote from Ida.
[01:09:31]  I remember Makno once telling me of his dream.
[01:09:33]  It was autumn 1927.
[01:09:35]  We were walking in the Bois de Vincennes.
[01:09:37]  Perhaps the beauty of nature put him in a poetic mood and made him inclined to tell me his dream.
[01:09:42]  The young Makhno would return to his hometown of Gugliaipolyi, start work, lead a quiet, clean life, and marry a young peasant girl.
[01:09:49]  He had a good horse and good gear.
[01:09:51]  He and his wife would return home in the evening after a successful day at the market, selling the fruits of the harvest.
[01:09:56]  They also bought presents there.
[01:09:57]  Makhno got so carried away with the story that he completely forgot that he was now in Paris and had neither land nor a house nor a young wife.
[01:10:04]  At the time, he and his wife were living apart.
[01:10:06]  They separated many times only to reunite and try to live together again.
[01:10:09]  Heaven only knows why it turned out that way.
[01:10:11]  Makhno's wife probably didn't love him anymore, and who knows if she ever did.
[01:10:15]  She was a Ukrainian teacher, and her views were closer to some of his opponents' camps.
[01:10:19]  She never had anything in common with the revolutionary movement.
[01:10:22]  Makhno told me in Paris that at the time of his greatest power, people came and toadied to him and that he could have had any woman he wished, but in reality, he had no time for a private life.
[01:10:31]  Makhno told me this to debunk the myth about the drunken orgies he's supposed to have taken part in.
[01:10:35]  Makhno was in fact a clean man, one could almost say chaste.
[01:10:38]  It seemed to me that his attitude towards women combined a kind of peasant simplicity with a respect for the weaker sex characteristic of Russian revolutionary circles around the turn of the century.
[01:10:48]  She's writing this in again, 19, like 27, you know?
[01:10:50]  Yeah.
[01:10:51]  Yeah.
[01:10:52]  I do, I do think it's funny that she already frames him as not being in a good frame of mind.
[01:10:58]  It's like, well, you know, we don't know how this, like, these accounts can be taken at face value.
[01:11:03]  And she's like, that said, he told me he could have fucked anyone he wanted.
[01:11:08]  He did.
[01:11:08]  He did.
[01:11:08]  Yeah.
[01:11:09]  In the, you know, I find it sad.
[01:11:12]  It makes me sad.
[01:11:13]  His dream that he just like wanted to go be a farmer back home, which he could never do.
[01:11:21]  It's like what my uncle says: libertarians and plows.
[01:11:25]  Yeah, it's a bummer.
[01:11:26]  Sick and almost alone, Nestor Makno died in July of 1935, having lived long enough to see the birth and ultimate success of German fascism, as well as complete Stalinist domination of his homeland and the starvation death of millions of Ukrainians.
[01:11:40]  So, God, it's a bleak ass ending.
[01:11:45]  Merry Christmas.
[01:11:46]  There's not a bastard's ending, I know, and hate.
[01:11:50]  Then jingle bells just starts fading in.
[01:11:52]  It's like, wow, I think we all learned something today.
[01:11:57]  Dashing through the snow with a machine gun on a plow, shooting at the whites.
[01:12:05]  Everyone is finished.
[01:12:09]  I was like, this is me going.
[01:12:11]  I know we were in a good direction for a little while there.
[01:12:15]  We got a year.
[01:12:15]  We could figure it out.
[01:12:16]  We'll figure it out for next year.
[01:12:18]  Yeah.
[01:12:18]  So that is the story of Nestor Machno.
[01:12:21]  That is a problematic phase.
[01:12:25]  Yeah.
[01:12:25]  Yeah.
[01:12:25]  I guess that is a category I would put him in.
[01:12:28]  Damn.
[01:12:29]  You know, an attempt was made.
[01:12:32]  He did his best to make something better out of the worst situation almost anyone's ever been in.
[01:12:38]  Like peasants in Ukraine in 1917.
[01:12:42]  Yeah.
[01:12:43]  There was no happy ending, but he gave it a real good shot.
[01:12:48]  Yeah.
[01:12:49]  God.
[01:12:50]  All right.
[01:12:50]  I'll pour one out for Nestor tonight.
[01:12:52]  Pour one out for Nak Makno, which he may or may not have drank, depending on whose sources you listen to.
[01:12:58]  Well, he probably did.
[01:13:01]  At least at one point.
[01:13:03]  Even as Nestor Makno, I would never not, I would never be sober.
[01:13:06]  Yeah.
[01:13:07]  What?
[01:13:07]  I mean, Ida says he didn't really drink as an older man, but also he was probably pretty ill, right?
[01:13:12]  Like you get older, your body changes.
[01:13:14]  You've been shot through the appendix.
[01:13:16]  Maybe you can't handle drinks like you used to.
[01:13:18]  Yeah.
[01:13:19]  Yeah.
[01:13:19]  Like, who even knows?
[01:13:21]  You know, yeah.
[01:13:22]  No, I was about to say something mean about old Nestor.
[01:13:25]  No, he, who knows?
[01:13:26]  He did his best.
[01:13:27]  He did his best.
[01:13:28]  And he lived in hard times.
[01:13:30]  He did.
[01:13:31]  Yeah.
[01:13:32]  We can ask for no more.
[01:13:36]  Well, I feel festive.
[01:13:38]  You feel festive?
[01:13:39]  You're going to go attach a machine gun to a truck bed and fight.
[01:13:42]  I feel so festive.
[01:13:43]  I'm going to just walk into traffic.
[01:13:46]  You have any ones for us?
[01:13:50]  Yeah, this comes out.
[01:13:51]  Santa University comes out today if it's Christmas Steve.
[01:13:55]  Robert's reprising his role as Second Amendment Santa.
[01:13:58]  You've got a song this year, so that's exciting.
[01:14:02]  I love a good song.
[01:14:03]  You just demonstrated that you're up to the task.
[01:14:06]  So that was a mistake on your part.
[01:14:08]  And yeah, you can listen to Lolita podcast on Mondays.
[01:14:14]  And that is going to be coming out through January.
[01:14:16]  So those are my things.
[01:14:19]  Yay.
[01:14:20]  Hey.
[01:14:22]  Woot, woot in the boot.
[01:14:24]  All right.
[01:14:25]  And we'll be back with this podcast the first week of January.
[01:14:31]  We're taking the last week off, guys.
[01:14:33]  We're taking the last week off.
[01:14:34]  All right.
[01:14:35]  Just let us have it.
[01:14:37]  We're so you got two Christmas episodes, you fucking filthy animals.
[01:14:42]  We're tired.
[01:14:43]  You goddamn pagans.
[01:14:46]  And on that note, that's the end of the episode.
[01:14:48]  And on that note, that was great.
[01:14:49]  I would like to end there.
[01:14:53]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:15:01]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:15:04]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:15:06]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:15:08]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:15:12]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:15:14]  Trust me, babe.
[01:15:15]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:15:24]  What's up, everyone?
[01:15:25]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:15:26]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:15:30]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:15:34]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:15:35]  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.
[01:15:42]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:15:44]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:15:52]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:15:53]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:15:54]  There's a lot in life.
[01:15:56]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:16:04]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:16:14]  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?
[01:16:20]  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.
[01:16:29]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:16:35]  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.
[01:16:46]  Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
[01:16:51]  We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
[01:16:55]  They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
[01:16:57]  This guy's 2 a.m.
[01:16:58]  2 a.m. Whatever time it is.
[01:17:00]  Lizzie McGuire and I'm Wild Bat Sheer Way.
[01:17:03]  It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
[01:17:08]  No, no, no.
[01:17:08]  I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
[01:17:12]  I'm not like, but.
[01:17:14]  Listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:17:24]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:17:27]  Guaranteed human.