Behind the Bastards hosts dismantle Tsar Nicholas II's legacy, labeling him incompetent and gullible for trusting unqualified advisors like Bezobrazov and anti-Semitic ministers such as Pleve. They detail his disastrous refusal of Japan's peace terms, leading to a naval defeat where Russia lost two-thirds of its fleet, and his brutal suppression of the 1905 Revolution, which included ordering artillery fire on St. Petersburg that killed 3,000 civilians while inciting 1,622 pogrom deaths in October alone. The episode concludes by analyzing Grigori Rasputin's complex influence over the Romanovs and how the Tsar's isolation from his government ultimately precipitated the regime's collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:17
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We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
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Japan vs China Power Shift00:15:23
Oh, oh, man.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that's just as refreshing as pounding a great Zevia.
Mmm, that's good Zevia.
Jeff May, guest, friend, podcaster, co-host of Tom and Jeff Watch Batman.
Jeff has cool friends and stand-up comedian.
Jeff, this is part three of our series on Tsar Nicholas II.
How are you holding up?
Great.
I'm feeling good.
I'm ready to talk, man.
This guy.
This fucking guy.
This fucking rube.
This fucking guy.
I do love that, like, that's the, like, before this, I think that, like, talking about Philippe, who is his, you know, as we talked about last time, his, his first mystic con man who got into the family and then Ras Buten, there's like this media image of Ras Buton as this like supernaturally charming, like incredible, uh, uh, mysterious sort of like um figure who's just like inhumanly charismatic.
And like, no, the truth is that like literally any con man could have won one over on these people.
They were really stupid.
It's so much that people, it's almost like it's like there, there's a punch card for what con man is going to be in charge at the time.
It's like the Morning Ralph, Morning Sam situation.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's just so funny.
Um, and yeah, this is this is it's important to note that that like that's kind of what you get with monarchy, right?
Like that's the situation where if your thing is ultimate power is invested in a dude, like a decent number of those dudes are going to be the kind of people who would respond to a Nigerian prince email scam.
Like, yeah, like, I don't know if you, like, I think we all have dumb relatives.
So the idea that that, like, inherited divinity in any way or inherited power or intellect or what, that's just the dumbest.
Like, if fucking Nicholas II had been alive and the czar of all Russias today, all of Russia would be owned by a Macedonian 17-year-old who had like managed to fish his email or something.
Yeah, it would be Exxon.
Yeah.
It would be like Exxon would own Russia if that were the case.
Yeah, it would be someone would have gotten to him.
Like, I can just imagine L. Ron Hubbard sliding into the Tsar's court and just complete control in like seven hours.
Yeah, it would have been carved up like 19th century Africa.
It would have just been like just absolutely colonized.
And colonized with like Nikki still on the throne smiling all day about like, oh, my friends from ExxonMobil are here.
Look at my magic friends from ExxonMobil.
They can pull their fingers off.
You see?
Look at that.
They are doing magic.
Look at that.
He pulls quarter from behind my ear.
It's crazy.
So as we start this episode, the situation with Japan is continuing to spiral out of control.
In 1902, Japan had signed a defensive pact with Great Britain, and Nikki's English cousins had forced him to withdraw from Manchuria.
Now, obviously, he was not going to do this, but his ministers got him to at least agree for it, to agree with it for a while.
And, you know, they keep trying to talk him out of this, saying like, hey, like, taking over Tibet, maybe not a great idea.
Probably not going to work all that well.
But Nicholas doesn't really spend a lot of time around his advisors.
He prefers the company of Bezobrazov and his cousin, the Kaiser, who, as we talked about last time, I think, had started calling himself Admiral of the Atlantic and calling Nikki Admiral of the Pacific, right?
Man, that's like giving yourself your own nickname when you go to college.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so sad.
And it's sad because the Kaiser gives them both this nickname and Nikki makes fun of the Kaiser and then Nikki starts using the nickname completely unironically.
He's like, well, you know, it is a cool nickname.
I'm not going to.
Oh, he's good at nicknames.
He may be doofus, but I got to say, this nickname, it fucks.
Look at this idiot coming up with nicknames.
I'm going to steal though.
Absolutely mine.
Is my nickname now.
So one of his ministers, because this is like a source of incredible frustration for these educated and like august ministers and nobles and whatnot who are trying to like run the empire around him, that he's listening.
He's given this cocktail.
It's kind of a theme.
Yeah.
It's kind of a theme.
It's just all these well-read intellectuals with experience in geopolitical theory are just like, what the fuck are you doing, man?
And one of his ministers, a guy named Pleave, who is again a raging anti-Semite, but a much smarter person than the Tsar, explains the Tsar's way of thinking here in a manner that I think is really relevant today.
The distrust of ministers is common to all sovereigns, starting with Alexander I. Autocrats listen to their ministers, outwardly agree with them, but always turn to outsiders who appeal to their hearts and inspire suspicion of their ministers, accusing them of encroaching on autocratic law.
And like, we've seen that, right?
Like, we've all been through that here, right?
How could you question that?
My cool friends don't actually question me.
They think I'm cool.
Yeah, I brought my like wife's boyfriend in and he said, we should try this.
Or like, you know, there's this guy, this lawyer that I was friends with when I was younger.
Like, let's have him make our policy here.
Like, we all lived through a version of this with Trump.
And it's just like to the nth degree with Nikki because there's absolutely no checks on his behavior.
So they kind of settle into this pattern for a while, Russia, for like the next year and a half or so, where Bezo Brazov will like escalate in some wild way.
He'll provoke the Japanese or he'll make a move on Chinese occupied territory.
And there will be like some big war panic and Nikki will back off at the last moment and like pull his troops back because he doesn't really want a war.
Like he talks this big game about like wanting to show Japan what for, but he's also like, there's a part of him that's reasonable enough to know that like, well, if you are the absolute sovereign and you lose a war, that doesn't, that, that can be bad, you know?
It sure asked Japan in 1940.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, asked Japan a minute after this.
It's it's funny too, because we all know this guy, the guy that's like talking shit at the bar.
And then as soon as somebody's like, all right, well, let's go.
And then they're like, ah, nah, it's fine.
It's fine.
Yeah.
And fucking Nikki is that guy because he doesn't really want to fight.
Bezobrazov is the guy who like does that.
And also like he'll throw down.
He's not good at it.
Like he can't throw a punch to save his life.
He's way too drunk to be starting shit, but he will throw that punch if you know his buddy will back him up.
So Nikki, like for a little while, like his ministers are able to get him to pull back, get him to pull back, and then he'll poke at them or Bezo Brazov will poke at him again.
And, you know, this kind of happens a couple of times.
And after a while, the Japanese get really tired of this.
And they give, they present the czar with an incredible offer.
Like, this is actually really quite.
And again, I say generous.
They're offering someone else's land, but like, they're like, hey, czar, I don't want to deal with this like constant like dick measuring game that yours.
How about you get all of Manchuria?
That's yours.
Russia gets all of Manchuria.
We get Korea.
How about that?
Which I'm the Tsar.
I don't have to fight a war.
Really?
I could just take this huge chunk of land longer than any larger, I think, than any country in Western Europe that I get to just add to Russia for free.
Seems like a great deal for me, the czar, right?
Pretty cool.
Nikki says no.
Nikki's like, well, yeah, sure, that would wipe out the stain of defeat in Crimea and make me maybe the greatest expansionist czar of the last century.
Probably would have distracted from all my domestic failures.
But that means I don't get Korea too.
And I really want Korea because I can't get Tibet.
I don't get Korea.
He wants to collect them all.
Yeah, he wants Pokemon.
He's like those cops who got fired for trying to get that Pokemon.
You know, who among us hasn't ignored our civic duty in order to collect the snorlax?
Yeah, I mean, we all have that friend who wasn't able to make rent one month because he bought too many fucking, what are those, what are those nerd bobblehead type things called?
Because he bought too many Funko Pops.
Are you just looking behind me and looking for something to make fun of?
I mean, it's fine when it's a Funko Pop, but because he's the czar of all Russians, his Funko Pops are like entire nations of millions of people in sovereign areas.
Yeah, it's like entire ethnic groups that he wants to collect and put in his little Russia box and probably racially discriminate against.
100%.
Because he is the guy that he is.
So he says no to Japan's, again, very generous offer with other people's territory.
And then he doesn't leave Manchuria.
So he doesn't agree to this.
And he also stays in Manchuria, which is kind of saying to Japan, we're going to try to invade Korea.
Like, we're going to take Korea from you, right?
Like, that's what you're saying.
If you're like, no, I don't want you to give me Manchuria, but I'm not going to leave.
You're saying, well, I'm going to fuck with your shit some more, right?
That's exactly what he's saying.
That's as good as an act of war, really, if you're not unreasonable.
And Japan takes it this way.
Simon Montfiora writes, quote, Bezobrazov had taught the emperor that treaties could be broken.
And Nicholas was convinced that Russia could defeat those macaques.
He's calling them monkeys because Japan was a barbarian country.
And Kuro Potkin told Nicholas that the Japanese army, who's one of his military advisors, that the Japanese army was a colossal joke, but he did not want a war.
The emperor blithely ordered the viceroy, I don't want war between Russia and Japan and will not permit this war.
Take all measures so that there is no war.
Japan made further offers to Russia for a compromise, but wondered if the inconsistent czar was capable of negotiating a treaty, yet alone honoring it.
So he gets every chance in the world to make this work, right?
I think it's interesting to note that we are actually looking at two nations that have just really honestly westernized their militaries.
And when I say westernize, I mean modernized.
Let me rephrase it.
Because, you know, Japan obviously had to make a big leap forward during the mid to late 19th century as well.
And we know we talked about in previous episodes what Russia had to do.
Yeah, Russia has just gotten their military to be kind of in not really in line, as we'll talk about when World War I hits, but they're closer to in line with like Germany and France.
So it's almost like they both got new toys.
That is a fact.
And they're like, you know what?
Yeah.
And that's a big thing.
You know, Japan has just modernized and gotten their military kind of really rolling along at the same point that China is falling apart, which provides this opportunity for Japan to take a whole bunch of China and get a bunch of shit that being from an island, they maybe didn't have access to before.
Russia, it's a little bit like with the Japanese government, this is much more of like a kind of grim realpolitik.
Like we need to take as much as we can.
There's this awareness that like the colonial powers, like they will do that to us, what they're doing to Africa, what they're doing to other parts of Asia, if we don't assert ourselves and get powerful.
And the best way to do this to take enough land that we can continue to build up our military and not be able to be fucked with by them, right?
There's a lot of, it's a lot harsher of an understanding.
With Russia, Nikki's this mix of like, he's got these new toys he does want to play with.
And he has people talking to him about how easy it'll be to beat Japan and an easy victory.
We'll deal with all these domestic troubles.
But he's also, he's like reasonable enough to know that he probably would actually be a bad idea to go to war.
And he has a lot of ministers, like including like Witt and the other kind of the intelligent ministers he has saying like, dude, you're hanging on by a thread right now.
Like people are not happy.
This is there's there's riots and shit all over the country.
What we don't want now is a war because it's probably not going to go great.
And so there's this push and pull for a while.
And for a while, Nikki's kind of in the middle of those sides.
But he eventually kind of sides with the folks who start telling him, and this includes Pleave, his anti-Semite minister buddy, that a small victorious war might distract everybody, right?
So he eventually lines up onti-Semite minister buddy.
Well, he's got the minister buddies who are racist and the ones who are racist, but not in terms of their policy.
Because they're all racist.
Yeah.
Like the best guy in this story thus far is his attitude is like, well, if you can't drown all the Jews, I guess they should have civil rights.
Yeah.
Real subversive statement, I guess.
Yeah.
Now, on New Year's Day, 1904, the Emperor of all the Russians decides to make an ultimatum to Japan.
He tells the Japanese ambassador, Russia was not just a country, but a part of the world.
In order to avoid a war, it was better not to try her patience or it could end badly.
On the 24th of January, Japan breaks off diplomatic relations.
So after like this back and forth, he issues basically like, shut the fuck up, let me do whatever it is I'm going to do.
And if you talk to me again, like I might throw hands.
That's kind of what he's saying.
Don't even.
Yeah.
Don't even fucking talk to me.
Don't even talk to me.
Don't even fucking talk to me.
I swear to God, if you fucking talk to me once, it's over.
And to continue our bar analysis, drunken Nicholas slurs that out to the Japanese, turns around to grab another drink from the bar.
And while his back is turned, they hit him in the back of the head with a bottle of schlitz.
Like we've all been there.
Whatever.
They fuck him up.
The next day, while the Tsar is out at the theater watching a play, the Japanese fleet attacks Port Arthur, which, you know, Russia had taken a little bit earlier.
And they do serious damage, like wipe out a significant chunk of his Asian fleet.
I would add second worst thing to happen in a theater to a ruler.
Oh, man, there was a great, this Halloween.
I think I haven't said this on the show.
This Halloween, we were out taking some friends' kids of mine, trick-or-treating.
And as we were like walking back to the car, there was just this dude dressed up as a dead Lincoln sitting in a chair in front of his house with a bucket of candy, like up stock straight, looked like a statue almost.
And one of my friends asked him, hey, how was the play?
And he, without missing a beat, responded, I left early.
I got to be honest with you, like he probably had like a list of just what he was ready to say.
Yeah.
New, new dead Lincoln features eight.
He's realistic.
Word sounds.
So the Russo-Japanese war kicks off from this, right?
Japan attacks at Port Arthur.
The Russians are very angry and they start fighting.
There's this whole big series of battles.
You know, it's a war.
War stuff occurs.
And on the ground, there's this, you know, land warfare that's largely happening in Manchuria between like these couple hundred thousand troops that Russia has there and the Japanese expeditionary force.
Dead Lincoln Candy Statue00:10:47
And the Russians do okay here.
They lose basically every big battle, but Japan often loses more men in the battle.
So like they're kind of, it's like Pyrrhic victories for the Japanese where they're like, well, yeah, we keep winning these battles, but fuck, there's a lot of Russians and like we can't keep this up for a while.
That is the story of history.
Fuck, there's a lot of Russians.
Japan has the same experience everyone else does fighting Russia, which is, Jesus Christ, there's no end to these people.
I mean, think about the land differences.
They'd be like, oh, so we're like, what, like a 30th of the world?
Yeah, we're like the Moscow suburbs are our entire island, you know?
There's so many of these sapiens.
Yeah.
I think we need the entire island of Volkai just to do anything to these people.
And so this, this, you know, on land, the Russians kind of duke it out with the Japanese until the Japanese are, you know, after repeatedly winning, kind of on the verge of collapse by some sources.
So it's going okay on the land.
It's not going great, obviously, because it never does go great for Russia either.
But like they win a war of the fight.
It's a vaguely sustainable situation.
It's not in the navy.
So Japan starts the war by wiping out one of three Russian fleets, the Pacific Fleet.
And, you know, Nikki has a choice here.
One of them would be like, well, I could kind of potentially give up Port Arthur or at least give up relieving it from the sea.
I could not try to fuck with the in the ocean anymore because I don't need to.
I'm directly connected by land to the battle space, you know?
I can just throw a shitload more dudes into Manchuria and probably eke out, if not like a win, you know, a negotiated settlement that gives me what I could have gotten without fighting a war anyway, but like looks good on paper, you know?
He has kind of that option, but he's, you know, Russia's pride is its navy.
It's not Russia's pride.
It's the Tsar's pride.
And it's this way with all of these guys.
In this same period, Kaiser Wilhelm is like helping to make World War I be a thing by repeatedly tweaking the British by building up the German fleet because that's the thing the British don't want to see is Germany have a fleet that can rival the British fleet because Germany already has an army that Britain can't handle.
But the Britain doesn't like when anybody has a navy.
They don't like when anybody has a navy.
No, they sure don't.
I don't believe I enjoy that.
That's what it is.
I feel like we're the only ones with boats.
Is there a reason you're doing that?
So the Kaiser, and it's like, it's this whole thing of like, it's like Warhammer for the Kaiser.
Like he gets to get these little boats, these boats that he gets to have a say in designing and like, look at all the big guns and he gets to move them around on a map and sail around in his yacht and look at the boats that he owns.
I mean, that sounds dope, right?
It sounds pretty sick.
And it's like that with the Kaiser too.
And Russia, you know, has a traditionally pretty powerful navy.
Their best fleet is their Baltic fleet, though, right?
Because that's like, that's home shores, right?
That's what's going to be fucking with Turkey.
Russia's big enemy for forever is Turkey.
So they've got, they lose their Pacific fleet to the Japanese with like out really getting to fire much of a shot.
So Nikki gets obsessed with the idea of getting revenge and with the idea of proving himself to be the admiral of the Pacific.
You can't be the admiral of the Pacific if your fleet gets sunk and you don't do anything about it.
So he takes this massive Baltic fleet, the pride of the Russian Navy and the linchpin of their territorial power, and he sends the whole thing to fight the Japanese fleet, which takes like a year.
Like it's not easy to get from the Baltic to the coast of China in this period.
Yeah, yeah, they're not flying over.
No, and they can't really, they're not good at boating at this point.
You know, they're steaming slowly ahead there.
Well, they had a rough go.
Yeah.
Recently.
It's exhausting.
They accidentally murder some fishermen on the way that belong to some European country or another.
Yeah, they get panicked and they think that it's a Japanese torpedo boat or whatever.
I mean, that's really funny.
It is really funny.
We all agree that it's while those deaths are tragic, the historical context of the humor in that is awesome.
It is pretty funny to be like a dude on a fishing boat and get murked by the entire Russian Baltic fleet.
Yeah, you're just like, I'm out to catch, you know, Macau.
And it's worth noting, the Russian Baltic fleet will perform a lot better against these unarmed fishermen than they do against the Japanese Navy.
Standard.
Standard move for them.
So while they're motoring their way slowly to Asia, and Russia is kind of having this very mixed, ugly ground war in Manchuria, and the fact that there's a war, there start being more protests, there start being more riots, there start being more strikes among the workers.
While all this is going on, the Tsar's son, Alexi, is born.
This is cause for a lot of good news.
I've got a handle on it.
Now I have a boy.
This couldn't go anywhere but up.
As the empire is crumbling and tens of thousands of men are dying, he's like, good news, everybody.
We're going to be able to keep this thing going for another generation.
Good news, everyone.
One more Romanov for you all to deal with.
So there's this big celebration, right?
Huge state celebration because now there's an heir to the throne.
But then shortly thereafter, the Tsar and his wife realize their boy has hemophilia.
His like, you know, the belly button thing when the thing falls out of it after you pull the baby out.
The umbilical cord?
Yeah, the umbilical cord.
When they cut it, it doesn't stop bleeding, right?
Because he's hemophiliac.
You know, that's the whole thing.
You bleed more than is ideal.
And so there's this suddenly realization that like the Tsar's heir basically has a death sentence.
Because in this period of time, I think there's a bunch of things you can do.
They really don't have medicine back then.
No.
Why would you have medicine?
Yeah, yeah.
You have opium and you have spiritualists.
I mean, you have Khan men.
Yeah.
You have Khanmen and you have doctors who are like 3% better than Kanmen.
But there's nothing really to do about this.
And pretty much everyone but the Tsar and Tsarina accept like, oh shit, well, he's not going to make it to 20.
Like, this kid's not going to last long.
Yeah, this kid's fucked.
Yeah, this kid's fucked.
They cannot take that because at this point, she's kind of worn out.
She's had five kids.
They're not easy pregnancies for her.
She's not as young anymore.
And she's like, I can't have another child.
And because he does love his wife, the czar is not going to force her.
You know, I think a lot of monarchs would have been like, the fuck you say?
Like, we're going to roll these dice again.
I don't care what happens.
I'm sorry.
What was that?
I like how you're like, by the way, it's like, it wasn't an easy pregnancy.
I'm like, yeah, I think that's just because it was in 1904.
It was in 1904 or 1905.
Yeah.
And this, you know, so this is like horribly devastating for the Romanov family because it kind of means like we're going to have to hand over ruling to like one of our cousins or something.
Like this isn't going to keep going.
And that means that's to the czar, even though there's like protests and uprisings and an increasingly disastrous war.
That's what makes Nikki feel like a failure.
Well, yeah.
Because it's a boy.
Because it's a boy, but it's not a boy.
It's a boy who's not going to live long enough to continue making bad decisions that affect the lives of millions.
Dead.
Anyway, Nicholas, while he's trying to deal with this and dealing with the fact that his wife is increasingly having breakdowns over the fact that her son is kind of constantly on the edge of death, which understandable reason to have a breakdown, Russia is kind of breaking down because the war is going poorly.
People are protesting.
Yada, yada, yada.
Nicholas reshuffles his generals and his ministers, basically does this thing of like, well, it has to be someone else's fault that none of this is going well.
So I'm just going to kind of randomly fire and replace people until things start to work better.
The problem can't be with me.
Yeah.
How could it be?
Yeah.
You're so adept, Nick.
So one of the guys he brings on is this new minister Mirsky who points out like, hey, there's this campaign among liberals to create like a Congress, basically, a constitutional representation for the people, you know, which folks have been lobbying for for a while.
His grandpa was about to put one through.
And Mirsky's like, hey, this is really popular.
And because it's really popular, if you do it, a lot of the people who are protesting and striking right now might stop and like you can focus on the other million problems you've created.
And maybe if you don't do this, there's going to be a revolution.
And the Emperor Nicholas II does not take this very well.
His response is, quote, you know, I don't hold autocracy for my own pleasure.
I act in this sense only because it's necessary for Russia.
I'll never agree to a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me.
So hearing this, Minsky's response is, everything has failed.
Let us build jails.
Of course.
Yeah, we're going to have to throw a lot of people in prison or they're going to murder us.
So Minsky, at least, seems to have the lay of the land reasonably well.
On Sunday, January 9th, 1905, as the Russian army launches a huge offensive in Manchuria, a protest march of thousands of workers swarms towards the palace where Nicholas and his family live.
Troops at the palace open fire and charge the protesters on horseback, and they kill more than a thousand people.
This is not like a Kent State sort of deal where like a couple of guys panic and there's, you know, a handful of people die and like everybody like stares in shock.
This is like ranks of men firing en masse into a crowd and then running them down on horseback with sabers.
Classic.
Not to whitewash Kent State, but this is like 300 or so of them at the same time.
Oh, I mean, I'm from Boston where we had a bombing where like three people died.
And we're like, this is the worst thing that has ever happened.
So I understand.
Shit in Russia happens on a different scale.
And on this day, when his troops kill a thousand civilians in order to defend his regime from protest, Nicholas writes this in his diary: A terrible day.
Lord, how painful and sad.
Mama arrived from town, lunched with everyone, went for a walk with Misha.
Mama stayed the night.
Big deal for you, Nick.
Big day for you, huh?
Thousand people died.
Mama came.
What a day.
I think mostly the mama.
A lot on your main thing.
It's very funny how completely sociopathic these people are to like the suffering and death of their subjects on a staggering scale.
From Addiction to Acceleration00:04:02
But you know who really care?
Their subjects and doesn't ignore their horrible demises.
I'm going to guess it's your sponsors.
That's right.
That's right.
When you die, our sponsors, every one of them, genuinely sad.
And they'll write about it in their diaries.
And they've predicted those deaths.
They have.
They know exactly when you're going to die.
So maybe, you know, on this ad, they'll tell you the exact moment that you'll expire.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
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.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Pogroms and Leftist Reactions00:13:15
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh.
Eerily Prescient.
Eerily.
So, Jeff, we're in a dicey time for the Romanov dynasty.
As this is happening, or not that long after this is happening, in like, well, a couple of months.
So May of that year, May 14th, the Baltic fleet reaches the war zone, right?
Reaches Southeast Asia, broadly, right?
You know, it's a big area.
They're kind of trying to get to Port Arthur and they're steaming around all these little, you know, hugging the coast.
And while they're sort of getting into the battle space, the Japanese admiral, a guy named Togo, spots them ahead of time and is smarter than anybody who has ever worked for the Tsar.
But Togo's very good at what he does.
He actually believes he's the reincarnation of Horatio Nelson, the British admiral who won at whatever, that fucking famous sea battle.
He's a bit of a loon, but he's really good at running a navy.
And he spots the Russian Navy and he sets his troops up in an ambush.
And one night, supposedly the reason this all happens is that like some dude on a medical ship in the Russian fleet forgets to close a window and it allows the Japanese fleet to spot them in a flow at night.
And the Japanese fleet ambushes the pride of the Russian Navy and wipes them out.
30 ships sunk to the bottom of the sea in like a day and a half or so, including the flagship of the Russian Navy.
And they don't really lose anybody.
It's like more than a thousand Russian sailors dead and like a hundred Japanese sailors dead or something like that.
It's like, it is a terrible disaster.
It goes as...
That's Japan's music.
Yeah.
It goes as badly as it possibly could have done.
Somebody call the match.
Yeah, yeah.
They are.
This is really like, I don't know.
Who's a boxer who killed somebody?
Emil Griffith.
This is an Emil Griffith situation.
That's Togo.
He's just permanently knocked the Baltic fleet unconscious.
And they are never getting.
Yeah, I have that equation of Stone Cold Steve Austin coming in, ravaging him and just leaving while I'm just laying on the ground.
Yeah, that's kind of what the Japanese fleet does.
So this number one leads very quickly to the Russians capitulating.
You know, they lose the Russo-Japanese war.
And this is kind of the thing.
They have now lost two-thirds of their entire navy, effectively.
Yeah.
Daddy.
Daddy, in my toys.
Daddy, I've lost my base.
And they can't, like, it's one of those things.
Not only is this just the disaster like it would be for any country, but this is also like the first time that a major European power has lost a war, a modern war, to people who are not white.
And that is like, people start flipping out all over the damn world about this shit.
Man, racism will get you.
And this really pisses off everyone in Russia is pissed.
The right wing is pissed because it's like, us, we're the ones who lose a war to the Japanese.
And the people who aren't right-wing are pissed because, like, how many of our guys did you get killed for no reason?
Like, the two different reasons are like, we lost to them.
And the other side is like, wait, we did, my brothers did.
So more protests swell Russia.
The battleship Potimkin mutinies in Odessa, which goes on to be a pretty famous moment.
And Nicholas II, while all this is going on, while the Potimkins mutinying, while large chunks of Russia are no longer under the control of the Russian state, like that's the extent to which the government loses control, Nikki accepts an invitation from his cousin the Kaiser to go hang out on their yachts together.
Classic.
So like the Baltic and Caucasus have overthrown the government and like murdered local officials and are independent principal or independent republics right now.
And Nikki's like, I need to get away from it all.
I'm going to sail on a boat with my cousin.
He's like, hey, I'm going to jet.
You guys, you got this?
Yeah, this seems fine, right?
Yeah.
You got this.
I mean, to be honest, if I was one of his ministers, like, yeah, get him the fuck out of here.
No, I think it's that this is the right move for everyone is to have him be like, I'm going to, I'm going to get the, I'm going to get the fuck out of here.
Yeah, you, why don't you take an extra couple of months, you know, just really clear your head.
Yeah, why don't you go hang out with that dipshit cousin of yours?
So, um, yeah, I'm going to quote now from the Oxford University Press.
In 1905, there were 3,228 agrarian disorders that caused 28,872,759 rubles worth of damage.
Roberta Manning, in her study of the 1905 revolution, stated, Under these conditions of near-total breakdown in government authority and paralysis of the governing elite, which temporarily lost faith in its ability to administer the nation, rural Russia rose up to join its urban partners in the greatest, most destructive series of agrarian uprisings since the Pugachev Rebellion of the 18th century.
So by the end of 1905, there are 13,995 recorded strikes.
There are riots.
There are like thousands of assassinations over this period of time.
Like they are massacring government officials by the fucking football team's worth.
That seems egregious, right?
I mean, I get it, but also at the same time, it's like, I feel like a couple of guys got caught up.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty bad.
Like, it's really ugly.
And it's ugly In part because, like, not to take anything from, like, the ministers or from the terrorists who are in, some of these are acts of where, like, just a guy will shoot this dude who is like a police commissioner, who is like, specifically, like, you did this crackdown, I'm going to fucking kill you.
Some of them are like, we're going to set off 80 pounds of TNT in a crowded neighborhood to like take this guy out, you know?
Riot fever, baby.
Yeah, it's a lot of it is really ugly.
And part of why it's really ugly is the Tsar kind of established back.
I mean, his dad established back in the 1860s when their grandpa was assassinated that, like, well, whenever there's unrest, we kill people in huge numbers.
And that's how we deal with unrest is mass murder.
And the czar has a thousand people killed, you know, at the gates of his palace.
Like, that is the way the Russian state handles unrest.
So when people rise up against the Russian state, where are the stakes?
This is how you fight.
You fight by killing huge numbers of people.
I learned from watching you, dad, you know?
Like, that's pretty, it's a pretty base answer, too.
I mean, that's like the number one thing you go to.
Yeah, this is what I guess this is how this works.
So, yeah, and the government's the first thing they always have to like throw out, obviously, like every other government when there's any kind of popular unrest.
And pogroms are happening in this period.
It's very messy time.
So, you've got obviously.
And some of those pogroms are like these right-wing groups, the black hundreds, which are like czarists.
We'll talk about them in a little bit.
Some of them are being done by like left-wing groups.
I think most of it is from the right, most of these pogroms.
A lot of it, though, probably the bulk of it isn't specifically, it's just like it's reactions to the things that the left are doing.
So, you'll have like a strike or an uprising in Odessa, or you'll have a terrorist attack that kills this minister, and then people will blame it on the Jews, and there will be a pogrom.
And, you know, like that's that's kind of the way this whole thing goes.
It's a very messy period of time.
Um, Russia does not have cops, really.
Like, they have police, and they try to tamp down on unrest, but they don't, there's not, there's like one of them for every several thousand people.
So, whenever they really need to crack heads, it's the army.
Um, but the army's mutinying all over because they've just lost this war, just like the navy.
Um, so the only thing you can really get the army to crack down on is the Bolsheviks, right?
So, when you have these left-wing uprisings, the Tsar can generally get military units in to fight them.
But when you have these pogroms that are responses to these uprisings in some cases, you can't convince the army's not going to go crack down on them because the army's like, well, we're pretty racist too.
And the cops are like actively participating in the pogrom, so they're not going to do anything.
They're like, no, that part's cool.
So, Nicholas also comes to see that, like, well, maybe these pogroms are a good thing because all of the people doing the revolutions are Jews, which is not true.
But they are, a number of them are Jewish people because Jewish people are particularly oppressed by the Tsar.
Is someone lying about Jews so they can do violence towards them?
There's this thing later in life when he gets overthrown.
The fact he spends a lot of time listing out all of the revolutionaries and like their secret Jewish roots, which he's wrong about.
A lot of them were not Jewish, that he just found ways to believe they were Jewish because he comes to believe that all resistance to his regime is rooted in the Jews.
He writes this in a letter to his mom: quote: Nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews.
The people's whole anger turned against them.
That is how the pogroms happened.
It is amazing how they took place in the towns of Russia and Siberia.
Now, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not the Tsar deliberately incited and organized pogroms as a way to regain control and perhaps distract people from attacking the state.
Whether or not he had any sort of plan, the violence often worked out exactly as one assumes he would have wanted.
And I'm going to quote now from an academic study in Monde-Rus.
After the astounding news of the October Manifesto, demonstrations and meetings with red flags began to occur.
Now and then they were accompanied by excesses, insulting to the czarist throne.
This is like the start of the left-wing revolution against the czar.
Portraits of Nicholas II, so revered by monarchists, were taken down by walls and sometimes from walls and sometimes destroyed.
At meetings, money was collected for Nicholas's burial.
On Kiev, on the balcony of the City Duma building, one of those in a meeting cut a hole in a czarist portrait and, sticking his own head through the hole, replacing the czar's face, shouted, Now I am the sovereign.
You have to imagine that guy was pretty drunk.
I got to be honest, man.
That sounds like that's a good timing son of a bitch part.
That does sound fun.
This is the good timing son of a bitch part.
It takes a turn here.
The admirers of autocracy, old customs and order, regarded such events as an outrage, a triumph of Jews and seditious intelligentsia, and came out with a furious protest.
Real cases of offenses to monarchist symbols, similar to that described above, were not ubiquitous.
Sometimes they were exaggerated or just invented from nothing by pre-pogrom rumors, often with preposterous accusations of outrages against Orthodox shrines or czarist portraits.
For example, right before a pogrom in Kiev, rumors circulated about an attack by slur against Jewish people to a monastery.
Black hundreds organized belligerent counter-demonstrations, sometimes under pretext of celebrating the ninth anniversary of the ascension of Nicholas II to the throne, which clashed with left-wing meetings and fights turned into pogroms.
Depending on the possibility or desire of local authorities to restore order, these could continue for days.
Almost inevitably, the Tsar's portrait was present at these disgraceful events.
Black hundred demonstrations were very often physically organized around the emperor's portrait.
It played an important symbolic role, highlighting the assembled crowd's loyalty to the throne, and as if it had provided Tsarist sanction to the pogrom.
Among pogromists, rumors spread wildly that Nicholas II permitted them to wreck and smash and beat the seditious anti-monarchy rebels.
In Tomsk, the following ritual was observed.
A crowd would come up to a store, and the one walking up front would turn to the portrait of Nicholas and ask, Your Majesty, do you allow us to destroy this store?
The one carrying the portrait would answer, I permit it.
So it's...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that's not on the level.
I mean, officially state sanctions.
It is and it isn't because the state's not sending in troops to stop this.
And later on, in the wake of this, Nicholas pardons a lot of the pogromists.
As he just wrote to his mom, like he sees most of the revolutionaries as Jewish.
He sees the people's anger against Jewish folks.
He sees these pogroms as like an expression of honest and fair anger.
So while he's not, he is not saying go out and destroy Jewish businesses, but when these crowds take his portrait and use it to like justify their destruction of Jewish businesses, they're not making that up out of whole cloth, you know?
Fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's pretty ugly.
There is one cool moment in some of this stuff where one of the things that'll happen is these processions, these black hundreds marching with portraits of the czar, will like walk around and they'll demand people on the street remove their caps and like bow to the czar.
Revolutionaries Target Jewish Folks00:05:25
And if you don't do this, you'll get the shit beaten out of you, right?
Like it's kind of like this gang being like, hey, you gotta like the guy in our picture or we're gonna kick the fuck out of you, you know?
Sometimes they murder people.
And there's yeah, we've had that.
We've had that in America pretty recently, and we will again.
There's a beautiful moment.
There's this Bolshevik, V.E. Morozov, who encounters one of these processions, and they're like, hey, you got to take your hat off and you got to declare loyalty to this picture of the Tsar.
And he doesn't do that, V.E. Morozov.
Instead, he calls the Tsar a scoundrel, pulls out a gun, shoots two of the people carrying the portrait to death, and does get beaten so badly that he nearly dies, but he survives.
I mean, he killed two people and a portrait.
That's a pretty good response.
He did get nearly beaten to death, though.
So, you know, so wild.
He made it into the book.
All dead in the story now, but he made it into the book.
We do all, it probably sucked at the time, but we do all know he was a badass now.
Damn right.
Hey, man, ass kickings happen.
That just happened.
That's gonna happen.
This forever.
Yeah, that literally, that's your new MasterCard commercial.
Even though they haven't made those commercials in what, like 15 years?
It is, it is a little dated.
But you know what's not a dated ad?
Is these ads right now?
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
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.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
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.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
The Czar as a Cult Leader00:15:26
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, yeah.
We are back.
So those modern, those modern ads we just had.
Shamefully modern.
So Jews were not the only racial victims of these pro-Czarist mobs.
Right back from A. That's so fucking funny.
Yeah, that was some great.
Anyway, the Jews weren't the only one.
Anyway, there were other races that the czarists hated.
Yeah.
In North and Central Russia, I guess these aren't racial victims, but students and academics are targeted and often murdered.
Like they'll beat up college kids and professors and assassinate them.
The right will, because of their connection to the town.
Yeah, yeah, kind of.
It's also like a lot of the people, often it'll be a case of like, yeah, some like college students who got radicalized will set off a bomb to kill these local officials.
And then as a result, some like people in the town will go murder their professor.
You know, shit like that's happening too.
Oh, fun.
It's ugly, you know?
It's kind of a civil war is going on in Russia right now.
And it's very much a prelude for the civil war that will happen not all that long in the future and kill, what, 4 million people?
I mean, who knows?
Yeah.
There are other targets.
In Baku, Armenians were targeted by the Tsarists.
Getting any kind of comprehensive death toll would be impossible.
But during October of 1905, at least 1,622 people were murdered and 3,444 injured in pogroms alone.
That's just deaths from these kind of like right-wing masses of violence.
Those numbers come from police sources, though, which probably undercounts the death toll.
Shlomo Lambrosa, who's a scholar, calculates more than 3,103 deaths just among Jews during the 1905 pogroms.
Now, historians seem in agreement that Tsar Nicholas II did not have a concerted plan to spark pogroms.
He was kind of okay with them.
He did not devote a lot of effort to stopping them.
But for years afterwards, people would like theorize that he had orchestrated the pogroms.
There really does not seem to be evidence of that, that it was a central plan.
But we do know that anti-Semitism was stoked purposefully by the Tsar's men, whether or not he gave the order.
There was this, this is kind of found out afterwards, that in a corner of the St. Petersburg Police Department, there's a secret printing press, which is putting out pamphlets this entire time, urging people to, quote, kill Jews, to tear them apart into tiny pieces.
Yeah, that's not a lot of like wiggle room there.
Yeah, there's not a lot of room for interpretation.
Just kill them.
It's fine.
He's a joke.
He's a joke.
He's a joke, but please.
Yeah, no, we are kidding.
Don't kill them, but they'll kill them.
The guy printing this is a Jindarm officer named Kamisarov.
And he has a role in spreading the protocols of the Elders of Zion, too.
And he's like, he's funneling them using police resources from St. Petersburg through right-wing organizations who spread them around the country.
And oftentimes these things will spread to an area and then there will be pogroms.
So this is where, like, again, maybe Nikki wasn't explicitly aware of all this, but, like, his dudes were doing it in the city where he was living using his money.
So, the idea that people suspect he had a role in directly inciting pogroms, it doesn't come out of nowhere, you know?
Again, we may have seen something like this relatively recently in our country.
Yeah, thankfully, not with that kind of death toll.
But it is kind of like the plausible deniability of the autocrat, you know, who's like, oh, yeah, I mean, people, it's horrible when people do violent things.
I don't think those violent things are wrong, but like, I'm not organizing it.
They just happen, and I say it's okay, but it's also bad at the same time when anyone pushes me on it, you know?
Like, yeah, we've seen this.
We may have.
I'm not going to lie.
That's something we've seen.
So, the wave of rebellions.
You know, the pogroms kind of burn themselves out after enough people get the murder out of their systems and the stealing out of their systems.
The rebellions, the actual, like, kind of left-wing uprisings against the state, are put down by the military.
And Nikki orders exceptional brutality to be used in defense of his regime.
When the St. Petersburg Workers' District is stormed by Russian troops, he has his soldiers use artillery to pound populated districts of his own capital, killing 3,000 people.
Christ!
A lot, which is like, that's as many ministers, that's as many government officials as the revolutionaries kill in a period of years.
Just like the shelling of his own capital.
The emperor writes in his diary, quote, the armed rebellion in Moscow has been crushed.
The abscess was growing.
Now it's burst.
When one of his generals in the Baltics is not putting down the locals with enough brutality for Nikki's liking, the Tsar sends a man to tell him, quote, the only thing you'll get in trouble for is not being brutal enough.
He then immediately executes a thousand prisoners.
So like he sees this guy, puts down this rebellion, and he's like, you're taking a lot of prisoners alive.
Like, I might get angry at you for that, but if you kill a bunch of them, there's no amount of people you could kill and piss me off.
So this guy kills a thousand people.
And like very rightly being like, well, the Tsar basically just said I should murder more of these folks.
I like that he was like given permission.
He's like, well, let's just go for the whole thing.
Well, I guess we'll try.
Simon Montfior writes, when he heard that a punitive detachment had accepted the surrender of rebellious Livonians, he insisted the town should have been destroyed.
Arrests were celebrated with the word power.
This is Nikki writing in his own diary.
While the summary execution of 26 rebellious railway workers earned an imperial bravo.
Bezo Brazov, brother of Nikki's Far East advisor and one of his favorite guards officers, staged ghoulish public shows of bodies dangling on gibbets.
When Commander Richter, son of Alexander III's crony, now leading a punitive detachment in the Baltics, not only shot his prisoners, but hanged the bodies afterwards, Nicholas wrote another, bravo.
Tripov informed him that Cossacks had overused their whips.
Very well done, applauded Nicholas.
When he heard of more executions, he commented, this really tickles me.
So this is how he writes about like the crimes against humanity.
I'm tickled by the fact that you've executed these people.
Oh, well done.
They whipped people to death.
Bravo.
Yeah, it definitely sees that disconnect when you're raised like the boppish child of privilege and power.
Be like, oh, bravo.
It is really like if you've ever played a game like Civilization or, you know, Age of Wonders or whatever, where you like build an empire and sometimes people rebel and you crack down on these like fake people who don't really exist.
He feels that same way about like the lives of thousands of real people.
It's like he's playing a video game.
He's like looking at his maps and someone's saying, we put them down and we executed a thousand of them.
Or like, how many of us would you like to kill out of these that we've captured?
And he makes a note of how many people he wants killed.
And like, then he goes home feeling like he's winning the game finally.
I mean, I feel like a winner.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're all a winner getting to hear this story.
So in total, the Tsar's men kill 15,000 people at least and deport 45,000 more cracking down on the rebellion.
And this time, it's enough, you know?
Like, this is enough that he is able to hold on to power barely.
Yeah.
In eight years, things aren't going to go so well.
Now, before we roll out today, Jeff, we should probably talk a little bit.
About Rara Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen.
Hellboy villain.
Hellboy villain Rasputin.
Yeah, one of the better Hellboy villains.
Guy I get told I look like on a not irregular basis.
I can see that.
Yeah, well.
And it's one of those things.
He is definitely the single most famous person today in the whole Romanov story.
As a general rule, the only reason people talk about Nicholas II or his wife is either to talk about Anastasia or to talk about Rasputin, and generally both at the same time, like in the Disney movie.
I don't think you look like Rasputin for the record.
There's more love in your eyes.
Thank you, Sophie.
That's very sweet of you.
No, this is Robert.
So it's one of those things.
Pop history is right in that this guy really is as influential as the popular depictions make him seem.
He's a huge part of the regime and why a bunch of stuff happens.
It's also like wrong in some weird ways because he is, like, it always portrays him as this malevolent force and he gives a lot of bad advice.
But he also is like one of the people saying like, you should probably stop being shitty to Jewish people.
You should probably not get into World War I.
Now, that's why people don't like him.
He's also a rapist.
Like, he's not a good person.
We'll do an episode on Rasputin someday in the future.
I'm genuinely surprised you haven't yet.
Well, people keep telling me I look like him, and it makes me self-conscious.
Thank you, Sophie.
So for now, the Cliff's notes are that he was a poor kid from the east of fucking nowhere who got in trouble for like stealing some shit and sleeping around and he gets kicked out of the town he comes from.
He becomes a priest.
He fucks a bunch more people and gradually he turns into this like guru type cult figure.
He's kind of a cult leader.
He's not quite what we would recognize as a cult leader because he doesn't have like this group who have a shared identity and that identity is like worshiping him because like that would be too much for the czar and czarina, right?
The czar is kind of his own cult.
You don't get to be a cult leader like we know of a cult leader in Russia in this period.
No, because that's the czar.
It's his job.
Yeah.
But he's kind of like cult cuckolding the czar because the czar is kind of his follower.
It's an odd situation.
And again, he follows, you know, in the footsteps of Philippe, who really very, very conscientiously seasoned the ground in front of or behind him so that this guy would have an easier time pulling one over on the biggest rube in all of history.
So Rasbutin, you know, as he starts to like develop this cult following, he starts, he claims that he calls himself a healer.
And he begins traveling around wealthy St. Petersburg circles, you know, the families of the nobles and the wealthy, basically like helping.
A lot of times it'll be like a woman has some sort of hysteria.
And obviously his prescription is, well, you should probably fuck Rasputin.
You need that good dick.
And it works a lot at the time, I guess, because he keeps getting word of mouth, you know?
That's not always getting enough.
Well, it's not, yeah.
He winds up having a, making his first connection to the Romanov family through a Romanov named Nikolasha, who's like a cousin of the Tsar.
And Nikolasha is kind of competent.
He's a soldier, and he's one of the few Romanovs who actually isn't just doing that to dress up.
He's not a complete idiot when it comes to military matters.
He's known as the terrible for his temper, and the czar brings him in close to the family in the 1905 uprisings because he thinks he might need to appoint a dictator.
Like, it's going bad enough in 1905 that it's like, I might need to make my cousin the dictator so that I don't have to take the stink on me of doing some of this ugly shit.
It doesn't wind up.
I mean, why not have somebody with the nickname the terrible be in charge?
Hey, cousin, the terrible.
I got this, like, problem.
Yeah, I'll solve it.
Now, Nikolasha, again, competent soldier, kind of a crazy person.
He wanted to be a medieval knight.
He kept a court of dwarves around him, I think, because he read that in a medieval storybook at some point and decided it sounded cool.
That's what he describes them as, a cult of, or a court of dwarves.
I think it's, you know, it's 1906.
And for an example, yeah, I'm not judging the word users at this point in time.
You should judge.
That's a pretty nice thing to say in 1906.
Because another thing he's famous for is he gets really drunk at a party once and he wants to show off his favorite sword.
And the way he does that is by using it to cut his pet dog in half.
All right.
Well, that's not.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not cool.
That's not good.
It's not.
That's probably worse than some questionable linguistic choices he's made.
Now, like most nobles in this period, he believes in what he described as the divine origin of czarist power.
He felt God had given Nicholas II some special secret strength that would lead him out of, that would help him lead Russia out of like its problems.
So obviously he falls immediately for everything Russia's sung.
This guy thinks he's a medieval knight.
He's like very gullible.
He buys into all this right the fuck away.
And this is going to be the way in which Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen, not really, but that's what a lot of Russians believe at this time.
That's how he winds up getting into the family.
And we will talk more about that and more about everything else in our conclusion to the epic saga, Nicholas II.
What a dick.
Jeff, you got any pluggables to plug first?
Yeah, like you mentioned before, I have a great show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, bi-weekly interview show with all of my cool, nerdy compatriots.
And you can find that at patreon.com/slash JeffMay for early uncensored episodes with bonus content.
I also have a great monthly show called Uch Fein with Kim Krall, among others.
You can also check me out on Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network.
We got to have you on one of those episodes, Robert.
Absolutely.
I have myself watched a Batman or two in my time.
We've watched a lot.
We sure have.
You can also check out You Don't Even Like Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the Unpops network.
And you can find me on social media at Hey There JeffRowe on Twitter and Instagram.
Don't find me on Facebook.
Don't be weird.
Don't be weird.
Don't find him on Facebook.
But find him on TikTok.
And if he's not on TikTok, beep fake him.
I'm not.
Should I be?
I feel too old.
I'm too old for TikTok.
Yeah, I think everyone is.
I think the 12-year-olds on TikTok are too old for TikTok.
I'm too old.
I'll be starting an account next week.
Speaking of next week, we'll be back tomorrow or Thursday, whatever, later this week with more episodes about the czar.
And I have a novel.
You can find it and pre-order it and get a signed copy by Googling AK Press After the Revolution.
So go do that.
Do it now.
Do it.
Wait, now.
Do it now.
Okay, good.
Thank you for doing that now, everybody.
Bam.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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