Speaker 1: Oh, it's Behind the Bastards again. The podcast that is
Speaker 1: every week, but it's also this week, and we'll be
Speaker 1: the next week until the heat death of the universe
Speaker 1: or the end of my contract. This is a podcast
Speaker 1: where we talk about the worst people in all of
Speaker 1: history and folks, we got a banger for you this week,
Speaker 1: and to help me deliver give birth to this banger,
Speaker 1: the midwife of of several hours of of of Russian history.
Speaker 1: Jeff consider right now, like I'm gonna get your hands
Speaker 1: up in They're gonna get all do it really get
Speaker 1: in there, just get all the placenta of information all over.
Speaker 1: We do male placenta to every one of our guests.
Speaker 1: Don't ask where it comes from that it's I take
Speaker 1: it from my vitality. It is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: moments traveling was in Japan, going to like a pharmacy
Speaker 1: to get contact solution and stumbling onto an entire aisle
Speaker 1: of placina based products, mostly horse um, but I had
Speaker 1: not been aware that it was used for that until
Speaker 1: that point. It was a fun moment. Are you gonna
Speaker 1: get strong erna? Exactly? If you're not taking horse Place
Speaker 1: center to get you going? That's why I run so fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I run like, you know, forty five miles an hour
Speaker 1: when I read now, Jeff, Jeff May, you are a
Speaker 1: stand up comedian. You are also a podcaster. UM. You
Speaker 1: do a podcast on the game Fully Unemployed Network Friends
Speaker 1: of the Pods, Tom and Dave have both also been
Speaker 1: on the show where you talk about Batman. Tom and
Speaker 1: Jeff watch Batman. You also have the Jeff May Has
Speaker 1: Cool Friends podcast Jeff has called Friends, Jeff Has Cool Friends. Um.
Speaker 1: Anything else you want to plug up here at the top. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I also do a show called You Don't Even Like
Speaker 1: Sports with Adam Todd Brown, sports podcast for people that
Speaker 1: hate sports, um, and which is most of my fan
Speaker 1: base because I am a professional nerd specifically, as well
Speaker 1: as you have a Batman podcast, I do. Well. It's
Speaker 1: funny too because Jeff Has Well Friends used to be
Speaker 1: a corporate podcast for a big nerdy company and then
Speaker 1: we we split up, and I was just like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to change the name and keep doing
Speaker 1: what I was doing. Mm hmm. Well, Jeff, speaking of
Speaker 1: what you were doing, were you having a good day
Speaker 1: up until this point? No? No, no, no no no.
Speaker 1: For two years, that's that's good because we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about somebody really unpleasant. How do you how do
Speaker 1: you feel about czars? Well, I don't know. I mean
Speaker 1: I think you knew this about me, but I am.
Speaker 1: Before I got into stand up and this, I was
Speaker 1: a teacher, taught world history, including Russian history. Uh. And Buddy,
Speaker 1: let me tell you there's a few of them that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you got a favorite, are or at least favorite. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say that if we're if we're going through
Speaker 1: like the entire history of up since the inception of
Speaker 1: the words, are up towards Nicholas the Second, I gotta
Speaker 1: be honest. Peter the Great is fascinating to me. He
Speaker 1: was pretty great because people were like, this man is
Speaker 1: a seven foot tall giant monster that toward Europe and
Speaker 1: came back and decided to just shave everyone's beards or
Speaker 1: tax them on it. And that's just wild to me.
Speaker 1: What a life. Yeah, Pete the Great's a fun one.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about a fun one today, Jeff. You're
Speaker 1: talking about the least impressive of the czar's Nicholas the Second.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah yeah. And it's so it's one of
Speaker 1: those things like there's this weird thing Americans kind of
Speaker 1: have with royalty sometimes. Right, there's a lot of Americans
Speaker 1: who love the British royal family FETs your thing, like whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a weird number of Americans thereout history who've gotten
Speaker 1: really obsessed with the Romanoffs since you know, they were
Speaker 1: all killed by the Bolsheviks. Right, there's like movies and
Speaker 1: that's really comes down to, Right, it's like Anastasia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got a bad rap and they It's one of
Speaker 1: those things where there's this attitude people have. Obviously the
Speaker 1: kids got a bad rap, right, kids never deserved to
Speaker 1: be machine well gunned down by a variety of forms
Speaker 1: in a basement. That's always bad. Um. But Nicholas and
Speaker 1: Alexandra get who's the czar and the arena, get a
Speaker 1: lot of like slack from people. They're they're nearly always
Speaker 1: portrayed even when like they're shown to be incompetent. You
Speaker 1: can't really show Nicholas is being anything but incompetent um.
Speaker 1: But you know, like, well, he was a good man,
Speaker 1: he loved his wife and his kids. He was you know,
Speaker 1: he was you know, broken down by the weight of
Speaker 1: this impossible job, and like he was a terrible person.
Speaker 1: He loves a monster. I love what people are like,
Speaker 1: he's a good person. He loves his family. It's like,
Speaker 1: that is not the criteria for being a good person.
Speaker 1: I hate to break it to you, but that's just biology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people love their families and manned concentration camps.
Speaker 1: There's pictures of them with their kids outside Auschwitz. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, you know. But he said, it's just a
Speaker 1: horrible crap. Yeah, yeah, it's it's um. He's like, he's
Speaker 1: he gets way more slack than he deserves. And this
Speaker 1: is going to be an episode about trying to put
Speaker 1: him in his proper context, because I think if you've
Speaker 1: seen Nicholas the Second and Alexander accurately, they're like Bashar
Speaker 1: al Assad, they're like Hitler, They're like like they're they're
Speaker 1: real bad people who kill a lot of folks to
Speaker 1: stay in power. They there's a reason that they finished
Speaker 1: the way they did. Ye not for nothing. I think
Speaker 1: we put Resputant, we give We were like, well, Resputin
Speaker 1: was bad and he victimized these people. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where like if you actually
Speaker 1: read the history, Resputin is not not the most objectionable person,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's times when he's the guy being
Speaker 1: like boy seems like, yeah, I'm pretty anti Semitic. I'm
Speaker 1: not down with that. It's this is I have a
Speaker 1: feeling because obviously it's been a while. I've I've been
Speaker 1: retired for almost a decade now, and i haven't been
Speaker 1: in college in twenty years. But at this point in time,
Speaker 1: like it seems like a story that's not going to
Speaker 1: have a lot of heroes in it. No, no, um,
Speaker 1: not none at all really now, um, And I think
Speaker 1: that's that is really the overarching story when we talk
Speaker 1: about like the murder of the entire Romanov family, when
Speaker 1: we talk about the tragedies that came in the Russian
Speaker 1: Civil War and the millions that died in that Um,
Speaker 1: part of why everything was so ugly and so violent
Speaker 1: was that the system that the Romanovs perfected over the
Speaker 1: course of generations was inherently brutalizing, and when it collapsed,
Speaker 1: there was nowhere for things to go but really badly.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's Russia. That's Russia. Baby. Let's tell you
Speaker 1: that there's so many there's so much retroactive like, well,
Speaker 1: they did what they could they say things were different.
Speaker 1: It was bad time. Yeah, you know what Ivana people
Speaker 1: on giant frying pan. It's just what you do when
Speaker 1: you have power. Is intense part of world. You know,
Speaker 1: he's crazy. He did the next Siberia. Granted he killed
Speaker 1: many people there, but he didn't exit. And you do
Speaker 1: have when you go over to that part of the
Speaker 1: world to have conversations with people. They are often very
Speaker 1: phlegmatic like that where it's like, you know, it was
Speaker 1: a rough time. Everyone did what they could. We tried
Speaker 1: to do what we want, but you know, things that
Speaker 1: sometimes your rule or cut your head off. There's nothing
Speaker 1: you can do about that. You just move forward. It's
Speaker 1: all like Russian literature is so depressing. Yeah, like all
Speaker 1: the happiest stories are like and then he died in prison,
Speaker 1: isn't that nice? Yeah, it finally was over. So UM,
Speaker 1: I think we need to start by noting that because
Speaker 1: number one, monarchy thankfully has has mostly passed um, although
Speaker 1: it's getting its little resurgence in some areas. UM people
Speaker 1: tend to forget how successful monarchism wasn't a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: and how successful the Romanov version of monarchism was. This
Speaker 1: is by by any reasonable if you're looking at this
Speaker 1: as a historian, by any reasonable judgment of you know, success,
Speaker 1: the Romanov dominated monarchy in Russia was one of the
Speaker 1: most successful governments in human history. The Romanov family came
Speaker 1: to power in sixteen thirteen after a civil war and
Speaker 1: like ten years of fighting and stuff in the death
Speaker 1: of the previous are and they stayed in power for
Speaker 1: more than three hundred years. That's longer than the United
Speaker 1: States has existed. This one family ruled Russia. UM. While
Speaker 1: the Romanovs were in charge of the Russian Empire, it
Speaker 1: grew consistently by an average of fifty five square miles
Speaker 1: per day twenty thousand miles per year. By the end
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds and the events of the story
Speaker 1: we're talking about this week, the Russian Empire ruled one
Speaker 1: sixth of the land mass of planet Earth. Um. They
Speaker 1: were good at this. I like how they're basically like
Speaker 1: you can describe their monarchy like the blob. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: people are just like and then within three months look
Speaker 1: at what we've predicted. It's like that scene in the
Speaker 1: Thing where they used the apple too to show you
Speaker 1: what's going to happen to the world. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what That's what the Romanovs were doing for like a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries without a whole lot of pushback that
Speaker 1: was effective. You know, you get your moments. There's always
Speaker 1: you know, military successes and reversals, but like they really
Speaker 1: kept chugging along. And the benefit that they always have
Speaker 1: is that, like, yeah, their military is usually not the
Speaker 1: best or the most easiest to maneuver into place, and
Speaker 1: their their navy, you know, waxes and wains and its efficacy.
Speaker 1: But there's just so much Russia that that you never
Speaker 1: want to start a fight with them. No, you never
Speaker 1: get into land war in Asia. I think we've learned
Speaker 1: that very specifically. Yeah, now, yeah, yeah, well, but before
Speaker 1: they came to power, czar was more or less before
Speaker 1: the Romanovs, um czar was just kind of an interchangeable
Speaker 1: word for king, right, Like it didn't being a zar
Speaker 1: wasn't wildly different than being a king and a lot
Speaker 1: of other parts of like the feudalist Europe in that period.
Speaker 1: But it means right, yeah, it comes from Caesar's same
Speaker 1: root word as kaiser, right, Both kaiser and tsar come
Speaker 1: from Caesar, which is you want to talk about having
Speaker 1: an influence on history that used to just be a family,
Speaker 1: Like that's the last name that became our by word
Speaker 1: for billions of people for king. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: influence right there, that's that's influenced baby's. Yeah. And actually
Speaker 1: you could say czar has kind of had its own
Speaker 1: journey like that because like especially, I think people say
Speaker 1: it less now, it really in like the eighties and
Speaker 1: early nineties, constantly you would hear like, oh, the president
Speaker 1: has appointed a drugs are you know, someone to like
Speaker 1: oversee the specific aspect of the government or a trade
Speaker 1: gaps are or whatever. Um, So it's you know, the
Speaker 1: Romanovs are really responsible for that because by the modern era,
Speaker 1: being a czar is not like being a king kings
Speaker 1: and most of Europe there's constitutional monarchies, there's limits on
Speaker 1: their power. The nobles will hold. Even in a lot
Speaker 1: of areas where there's not really democracy, it's still ceremonial
Speaker 1: because the nobles are the ones in charge and the
Speaker 1: king is more of a figurehead, um. And it's not
Speaker 1: that way with the czar's and they are really um,
Speaker 1: they're totalitarian rulers in a way that very few government
Speaker 1: in history have ever really been. The czar is in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds very close
Speaker 1: to an absolute autocrat um. That means no real checks
Speaker 1: on their power, no real influence from the people. This
Speaker 1: starts to change in Nicholas period, but um czars maintained
Speaker 1: total power long after pretty much every other crowned head
Speaker 1: of Europe has been either turned into a figurehead or
Speaker 1: reduced to just another organ of the government. And that's
Speaker 1: that's significant. That says a lot about what the Romanov
Speaker 1: family valued that they maintained that kind of absolute power. UM.
Speaker 1: You could probably argue that Russian the Tsarism was kind
Speaker 1: of the most controlling sort of feudalism practiced on the
Speaker 1: largest scale, at least in Europe UM, and you can
Speaker 1: make a case for worldwide, because again it's a sixth
Speaker 1: of the world's land mass. For most of the history
Speaker 1: that the Romanovs are in charge, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people in Russia are serfs. They're pretty close to slaves.
Speaker 1: They are bound to the land. They are kind of
Speaker 1: the property of the noble that controls that land. UM.
Speaker 1: And the way the whole system works is the nobles
Speaker 1: maintained the peace in their little area, and they pay
Speaker 1: taxes to the czar. In an exchange, the czar uses
Speaker 1: those taxes to build an army, to take more land,
Speaker 1: to exercise more power, and to maintain this absolute structure.
Speaker 1: So these are let's the nobles have total control over
Speaker 1: their little area, and in exchange, he's the absolute monarch
Speaker 1: of the entire country. It's like an MLM scheme. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a lot. I mean, yeah, feudalism absolutely is right.
Speaker 1: When I used to teach feudalism, I used to teach
Speaker 1: it based on like the kids working their desks. I
Speaker 1: was like that, you're the surf, this is your plot
Speaker 1: of land you have to work. I am your noble,
Speaker 1: I have a noble my principle that I have to
Speaker 1: answer to, and then he has a superintendent that he
Speaker 1: has to answer to. And it all kind of like
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's all. It's all a similar structure
Speaker 1: to to most things. When you read break down what
Speaker 1: feudalism is. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yes, we could talk
Speaker 1: a lot about the way our system works, um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah that's that's a fair point. Um. But this is
Speaker 1: obviously a more hints a version because you don't have.
Speaker 1: You don't have you don't have the ability to like
Speaker 1: move around. Um. And this is one of those things
Speaker 1: that works pretty well when kind of everybody's doing it. Um.
Speaker 1: As things modernize, you suddenly have this problem of like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you industrialize if somebody is a part of
Speaker 1: the land that they live on, as opposed to an
Speaker 1: individual who can move to a city and get training
Speaker 1: to be a machinist or um. And in fact, oftentimes
Speaker 1: when zars were overthrown or killed and these are romanovs
Speaker 1: was we're talking about, it wasn't because they'd been super brutal.
Speaker 1: It was because they had used a mix of brutality
Speaker 1: and like liberalizing things. So they had given people some
Speaker 1: power and then not liked what they did with it
Speaker 1: and like tried to crack down. And that often leads
Speaker 1: to like the kind of upset that gets as are killed. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not Simon Montfiore, who was a historian who wrote
Speaker 1: a great book called the Romanovs um describes it as
Speaker 1: like the problem a lot of Tsars have as not
Speaker 1: being consistently harsh. Right, Um, that's the thing that will
Speaker 1: get you killed as czar. And that's the thing when
Speaker 1: you're a kid, if you're going to inherit the Romanov dynasty,
Speaker 1: that's what's drilled into your head throughout childhood is you
Speaker 1: have to be consistently harsh. Um, And it's a dangerous gig.
Speaker 1: Six of the last twelve Romanovsars are assassinated in office. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's not that bad. Yeah, Like I feel like
Speaker 1: I could make it through, you know, yeah I could.
Speaker 1: I feel like I could have been a great czar.
Speaker 1: I bet I would have been. Yeah, I know I
Speaker 1: would have been killed. Yeah, I don't think I would
Speaker 1: have a great czar. I'm pretty chill. Yeah, so, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd be like, you guys can do that.
Speaker 1: You're gonna kill me, Okay, I guess I saw this
Speaker 1: one coming. If the way I played video games with
Speaker 1: confidence not a job for you, I think I'd be
Speaker 1: a great czar. Hey, again, it's just consistent brutality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Iphie would be better. Usually when tsars were assassin senated.
Speaker 1: In fact, all of the times ours were assassinated up
Speaker 1: to the modern period, it's never the peasants, right, There's
Speaker 1: not that you don't have successful peasant revolutions in Russia. Um,
Speaker 1: like not during the time the Romanovs are in power,
Speaker 1: it's the noble. It's the nobility who murders them, like
Speaker 1: it's someone sums are does something that pisces off these
Speaker 1: nobles that are also powerful, and they kill the czar
Speaker 1: and others are winds up in charge, you know, tail
Speaker 1: as old as time. That's that's like that happens every
Speaker 1: time you see some kind of assassination. It's very rare
Speaker 1: that somebody bumps into an archduke or you know, successfully
Speaker 1: breaks through the walls of the Imperial Palace or whatever.
Speaker 1: Not counting you know, recent events in American history. The
Speaker 1: populace will have access to people at that level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you do not, um. And in fact, part of why
Speaker 1: Tsars actually really tend to be at least most historians
Speaker 1: tend to think that the Csars were beloved generally by
Speaker 1: the peasants. And this is because of the distance they
Speaker 1: have it because the peasants don't ever get to see
Speaker 1: this are really uh. They referred to him as the
Speaker 1: literal the little Father Um God is you know, the
Speaker 1: big Father Um and he was kind of this benevolent
Speaker 1: but almost ethereal force because the nobles who ruled them directly,
Speaker 1: were the ones they had issues with. Right, That's kind
Speaker 1: of the brilliance of this system. All the peasants are
Speaker 1: gonna hate the noble who's telling them what to do.
Speaker 1: But the tzarre like you never see that motherfucker, Like
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what's going on. Right, he make life
Speaker 1: easier for you. But the nobles, you know, they got
Speaker 1: to do their thing, and I'm I try to be
Speaker 1: hands off. You know. Yeah, you actually hear this story.
Speaker 1: If you read people talking about like like kind of
Speaker 1: political discontent with the Nazi Germany. A lot of Nazis
Speaker 1: would when when members of the Nazi high command would
Speaker 1: do ship that like even Nazis thought was fucked up.
Speaker 1: They'd be like, well, Hitler must not know about this, right, Like,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't do this to us. He must just not
Speaker 1: be aware of what's going on. Classic good guy Hitler, Hitler,
Speaker 1: he just got again. I'm good. I'm doing I've been
Speaker 1: paintings this whole time. Just Hitler fumbling with papers like
Speaker 1: Chevy Chase at his desk. I'm just playing with my
Speaker 1: my good German shepherd here. Why would I be doing
Speaker 1: anything evil? Allav There's this very common phrase among the peasantry. Um,
Speaker 1: that is the czar is good. The nobles are wicked, right,
Speaker 1: so he is he is beloved. Often at least that's
Speaker 1: what you're not getting Gallops, not rolling through the Russian
Speaker 1: steps and being like how do you feel about this? Right?
Speaker 1: There's I think and I do tend to think that
Speaker 1: this is so consistent. I'm not gonna obviously, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna second guess a bunch of historians who write stuff
Speaker 1: like this, but it's also consistent enough that I think, well,
Speaker 1: the czar believe this, and maybe that's why that went
Speaker 1: down in history, but maybe a lot of peasants would
Speaker 1: have been like, well, actually funk that, dude. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: definitely you definitely see the cult of personality in situations
Speaker 1: like that where you where you see you know, the
Speaker 1: person that's on a annable up at the top, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're great. He's the champion. And the people that I
Speaker 1: actually have to deal with our assholes. Yeah. And part
Speaker 1: of why I do think this is probably still broadly
Speaker 1: accurate is that you see this today, right, you see
Speaker 1: a lot of like a conservatives who will be like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't like this thing that happened under Trump, but
Speaker 1: I don't like I like Trump, and like he probably
Speaker 1: just like couldn't do anything about this, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just how human beings work, you know, like Russian
Speaker 1: serfs and Americans in Kentucky or or California are all
Speaker 1: the same people. Basically, they're just in different circumstances. Um
Speaker 1: at the table, you don't know what's happening at the table, right,
Speaker 1: And it's easy to just pretend that this guy that
Speaker 1: you've been conditioned to like by a shipload of propaganda,
Speaker 1: and there has a lot of propaganda. It's very easy
Speaker 1: to just be like, oh, he's like God, you know,
Speaker 1: like I don't have to think about him as a
Speaker 1: person because he's not a person, you know, he's this
Speaker 1: like semi divine figure. And there are really is they
Speaker 1: would not say it that way. Desires did not pretend
Speaker 1: to be divine, but they are chosen by God. Like
Speaker 1: that's the whole thing about this. Are they are picked
Speaker 1: by God to absolutely rule Russia. And so there's this
Speaker 1: attitude that like if you question those are or if
Speaker 1: people want to have input in their own ruling, that
Speaker 1: is satanic because God has set down this this system. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this happens other parts of the world, you know, the
Speaker 1: Mandate of Heaven, YadA, YadA, YadA. Um. This is not
Speaker 1: the only time this sort of thing happens. But what's
Speaker 1: unique kind of about Russia is that up until the
Speaker 1: modern era, the tzar is owns everything in Russia. He
Speaker 1: is the personal owner of basically a sixth of the
Speaker 1: world's land mass. Like, we can talk about who the
Speaker 1: richest person in history was, it's almost certainly whatever the
Speaker 1: last Tsar was, because he was the personal owner of
Speaker 1: all of Russia effectively. Um, Like, it doesn't get much
Speaker 1: wealthier than that, Jeff Bezos doesn't, can't pretend to that ship. Um,
Speaker 1: And like, well, wealthy enough that when they tried to
Speaker 1: gun down the Tsar's family, it was it took a
Speaker 1: ton of bullets and a ton of time because people
Speaker 1: bullets kept getting stopped by all of the diamonds sewn
Speaker 1: into their clothing. They removed set and teen pounds of
Speaker 1: diamonds from from the dead Romanov family. Um, they could
Speaker 1: have done better. That's just what they could get out
Speaker 1: of the palace, you know, Like that's how fucking rich
Speaker 1: these people are. Um. Yeah, And so this is a
Speaker 1: really totalitarian system um and probably the most totalitarian system
Speaker 1: could be in an era before modern technology, and being
Speaker 1: the center of that as the czar, like fox with
Speaker 1: your head and I want to read a quote from
Speaker 1: the book The Romanovs by Simon Montfior which describes kind
Speaker 1: of how what this does to a person? Then this
Speaker 1: is him kind of giving a broad overview of czarism.
Speaker 1: All of the monarchs were dutiful and hard working, and
Speaker 1: most were charismatic, intelligent and competent. Yet the position was
Speaker 1: so daunting for the normal mortal that no one sought
Speaker 1: the throne anymore. It was a burden that had ceased
Speaker 1: to be enjoyable. How can a single man manage to
Speaker 1: govern Russia and correct its abuses? Asked the future Alexander
Speaker 1: the First. This would be impossible, not only for a
Speaker 1: man of ordinary abilities like me, but even for a genius.
Speaker 1: He fantasized about running off to live on a farm
Speaker 1: by the Rhine. His successors were all terrified of the
Speaker 1: crown and avoided it if they could. Yet when they
Speaker 1: were handed the throne, they had to fight to stay alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not good to be the king, like it really is.
Speaker 1: Not all it's great to be a noble, it's great
Speaker 1: to be like the younger brother of this r or whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot like those guys get up
Speaker 1: to some ship and exercise a lot of power. But
Speaker 1: being the czar kind of, especially in the last hundred
Speaker 1: years of the Romanov monarchy, is a fucking trash gig.
Speaker 1: Some could say heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Speaker 1: That quote me on that we could we could turn
Speaker 1: that into like a soap brand. Yeah, don't google it,
Speaker 1: just just take my word for it. Don't google anything
Speaker 1: in this show as a rule. Um, we are the Google. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we did it for you. Don't need to learn
Speaker 1: anymore than what we give you. That's part of what
Speaker 1: makes it a good cult. Um. You know what else
Speaker 1: is a good culture of the cult of personality. But
Speaker 1: the cult of the products and services that support this
Speaker 1: podcast all have cult followings, especially the Washington State Highway Patrol.
Speaker 1: Real culty. Motherfucker's there. Oh we're back, So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: involve myself and all those things. Yeah, yeah, it's during
Speaker 1: the cult of all of those sponsors. So the thing
Speaker 1: to keep in mind when we're talking about these are
Speaker 1: is that this is a job people hate. It is
Speaker 1: a job that like destroys you over time. It's it's
Speaker 1: an incredible amount of like effort and labor you have
Speaker 1: to do. You're the head of the church. Effectively, you're
Speaker 1: the head of the military. You're the head of state,
Speaker 1: like you're kind of the pope and the commander in chief. Um,
Speaker 1: And like all of Congress at the same time, and
Speaker 1: think about like like all of our presidents, even the
Speaker 1: really really bad ones, uh, think of like what eight
Speaker 1: years in office does to them, how much they age.
Speaker 1: Most Czar's rule more than twenty years, Like like you're
Speaker 1: out of your mind by the end of this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that that that has to be just
Speaker 1: so like try doing two things. Yeah, when you're when
Speaker 1: it was like when I when I started moving more
Speaker 1: to podcasting, I'm like, well, stand up is going to
Speaker 1: have to take a huge step back, and those are
Speaker 1: both easy jobs. And I'm like, no, no, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine if you had to do stand up podcasting and
Speaker 1: reform the Russian military while leading every major state religious
Speaker 1: service every single year. I mean I feel like I
Speaker 1: could do that. I do feel like you could do that. Um,
Speaker 1: especially given your experience reforming national militaries. Jeff, A lot
Speaker 1: of people don't know this. You're the guy who reformed
Speaker 1: the El Salvadorian military. Yeah, you know, I don't like
Speaker 1: to brag, but yeah, it's just like it's a side gig. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody needs like stand up. Doesn't pay all
Speaker 1: the bills every now and then you got to go
Speaker 1: like overseas and you know, use a lot of US
Speaker 1: AID money to arm paramilitaries. It's just what, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very it's a very Jeff of Arabia existence that
Speaker 1: I'm having over here. Yet. So the thing about this
Speaker 1: is like fucked up. As this is the system works
Speaker 1: pretty good for like two hundred and fifty years or so,
Speaker 1: um like time too as old at time, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're dealing with right now. This formal government works pretty
Speaker 1: good for up to yeah, up to but not past.
Speaker 1: I've never when when when the Czaris system really starts
Speaker 1: to show its age in a calamitous way. Is the
Speaker 1: Crimean War which happens in like the eighteen fifties, and
Speaker 1: this is a battle. This is some people will say
Speaker 1: this is kind of like the First World War in
Speaker 1: some ways, there's like five or six wars people say,
Speaker 1: are the First World War, you know, um, but this
Speaker 1: is like this is basically everybody and fighting Russia. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's like Russia trying to take the Crimea, which
Speaker 1: they took recently from Ukraine, but we're trying to take
Speaker 1: it back then and like Turkey gets involved in the
Speaker 1: British get involved in the French get involved. Um. I
Speaker 1: think there's Austrians up in that bitch. Like it's this
Speaker 1: whole fucking thing. Um. And it doesn't go really well
Speaker 1: for Russia. It's it's a fucking disaster for Russia. And
Speaker 1: a big part of why is that their army is
Speaker 1: hideously outdated. Not just like their guns aren't modern. Um,
Speaker 1: they don't have an advanced rail system in the country
Speaker 1: so and they don't have like their navy isn't as
Speaker 1: as nimble as it needs to be. So everyone's running
Speaker 1: circles around him. You know, who needs a system. They're
Speaker 1: such a compact and tight. There's so little Russia. Why
Speaker 1: would you need ray Town, you know, That's what that's
Speaker 1: what everyone says about Russia, the smallest country. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: five whole sixth of the rest of the world that's
Speaker 1: not Russia. Come on, it's one is the smallest number,
Speaker 1: that's right, less than one. So so this this is
Speaker 1: a fucking ship show for Russia. Um, they kind of
Speaker 1: get their butts kicked. There's also a pretty good poem
Speaker 1: that comes out of it, Charge of the lie Brigade,
Speaker 1: which which you know you can you can like or
Speaker 1: see his problematic depending on how you feel about men
Speaker 1: charging into lines of guns on horseback. I think it's
Speaker 1: rad and we should do more of it, but other
Speaker 1: people have different opinions. Crimean war, Yeah, so like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we can give problematic a bit of a
Speaker 1: bit of a push on something written years ago. Well yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so yeah this is uh, Russia gets its butt kicked
Speaker 1: and like that bums everybody out in Russia. Um. And
Speaker 1: so there's this big drive to modernize, right every it's
Speaker 1: it's you're kind of made aware of how flawed the
Speaker 1: whole system is. And so Russia really rapidly industrializes, and
Speaker 1: they do this by going hideously into debt to a
Speaker 1: bunch of Western nations. And the Czar who takes another
Speaker 1: tale is all this time right, yeah, everybody does this
Speaker 1: ship um and the Czar who takes charge during this period,
Speaker 1: he actually comes to power, like in the last year
Speaker 1: of the Crimean War eighteen fifty five. This is our
Speaker 1: is a guy named Alexander the Second and he's Nicholas's
Speaker 1: and Paul. He's the grandfather of the Last Star. Um.
Speaker 1: So he walks out of that war dedicated to reforming things.
Speaker 1: And he's like a bold dude. This is not one
Speaker 1: of those like Joe Biden kind of nothing will fundamentally
Speaker 1: change guys. Um. Alexander the Second is a very courageous
Speaker 1: person because it is not easy to make big reforms
Speaker 1: in Russia. Um and the spoilers it doesn't end well
Speaker 1: for him. No, No, there's always there's always there's always
Speaker 1: people pushing back. Generally, half the time it's the Orthodox Church, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that pushes back, and they have a lot of influence
Speaker 1: as well. And then half the time it's the nobility. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he fights with all of that. But that's actually
Speaker 1: not who's gonna wind up being his undoing um So,
Speaker 1: his number one, Alexander the Seconds number one, claimed to fame.
Speaker 1: The biggest thing that he does, and this is a
Speaker 1: pretty titanic change, is he abolishes serfdom in eighteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: Um So, the start of the U. S. Civil War
Speaker 1: is when Russia decides every single person basically in the
Speaker 1: country is no longer part of the land that someone
Speaker 1: else owns. Um So, that's a good move. I would say,
Speaker 1: do you think somebody's like, uh, there's something going on
Speaker 1: over in the United States? Seems like it doesn't. There's
Speaker 1: something about house divided? Very Ugo. President has big problems
Speaker 1: over there. Long beard, though we have complex history, good
Speaker 1: Russian beard on that guy, which is also very Russian.
Speaker 1: Um So, Obviously, abolishing serfdom, like every other massive social
Speaker 1: change in every other country in history, is not like
Speaker 1: a super even process. It's not like one day everything
Speaker 1: is different. You know. We talked about this somewhat in
Speaker 1: our two part or on nestor mak No. It's it's
Speaker 1: a messy thing. It's a really big change. Um but
Speaker 1: it does lead to like an enormous, unthinkable social to
Speaker 1: Everything that happens in the Soviet Union is possible in
Speaker 1: part because serfdom starts being a thing. Right. That's why
Speaker 1: Russia is able to industrialize, It's why they develop a proletariat,
Speaker 1: It's why everything else that happens happens, you know, um,
Speaker 1: and Alexander becomes known as the Czar Liberal Raider for
Speaker 1: for freeing the serfs. Um. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: feel pretty good about Czar Alexander the Second. A lot
Speaker 1: of peasants feel pretty good about this dude, but not
Speaker 1: all of them. He is not popular everywhere, particularly among
Speaker 1: the kind of this is when Russia is starting to
Speaker 1: have a socialist movement and all pretty much all these
Speaker 1: early socialists are like rich or nobles, right, Like, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of this early period of like Russian socialism
Speaker 1: is guys who are like very highly born, because that's
Speaker 1: who has access to like education and gets to read
Speaker 1: books and stuff. You know. Um, not a lot of people,
Speaker 1: like a lot of peasants aren't coming into contact with
Speaker 1: the communist manifesto in eighteen fifty you know whatever, m
Speaker 1: or my uncle would disagree, Okay, so Alexander, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: So the socialists really don't like Alexander the Second because
Speaker 1: they see fundamentally his reforms are conservative. He's freed the serfs,
Speaker 1: but he's done it to maintain this system of absolute autocracy.
Speaker 1: He just wants to have a government that a country
Speaker 1: that works a little bit better. But he doesn't want
Speaker 1: to up end any of the social or class relationships. Um,
Speaker 1: he just wants to really be able to like more
Speaker 1: efficiently use the people that he still owns, which is accurate.
Speaker 1: The Socialists are not misreading this situation like, well, he's
Speaker 1: not He's not trying to make anything better. He's just
Speaker 1: trying to make the country work better for the ship
Speaker 1: that the rich people want to do, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: which is true. Yeah, I mean, not for nothing, but
Speaker 1: like if I was in that position, I'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would like to also solidify my power prevent myself
Speaker 1: from being murdered. Yeah. Yeah, And they they fundamentally like
Speaker 1: see through what he's doing. He also adds a bunch
Speaker 1: of capitalistic elements to the Russian economy, which hadn't really
Speaker 1: been in place before. That's how he wants to like
Speaker 1: fund the reformation of the military. He's trying to make
Speaker 1: the state more efficient economically. This also pisces off the
Speaker 1: Marxists for you know, obvious reasons. They're not not huge
Speaker 1: on capitalism, the Marxists. This is surprising to a lot
Speaker 1: of people now hold the phone bold statements about ideology
Speaker 1: behind bastards state communists. I need a refund on my
Speaker 1: education because that is not what I remember. So on
Speaker 1: April fourth, eighteen sixties six, a guy named Dmitri Kara
Speaker 1: CAUs Off attempts to shoot Alexander the Second in the
Speaker 1: middle of the capital uh St Petersburg. He's a socialist, obviously,
Speaker 1: he misses and is arrested and executed. Um And this
Speaker 1: is a huge moment in Russian history. And I want
Speaker 1: to quote now from the English Historic Review. Russian emperors
Speaker 1: were no strangers to attempts on their life. Indeed, Paul
Speaker 1: the First had been strangled to death in his own
Speaker 1: bedroom in eighteen o one. But Paul had been murdered
Speaker 1: by a group of noblemen, and these palace coups had
Speaker 1: been the principal threat to the tsar's before mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Karakozov's assassination attempt was the first occasion in which an
Speaker 1: ordinary Russian had tried to kill the monarch, motivated by
Speaker 1: a desire to bring down the Russian regime. So that's
Speaker 1: a big moment, right, Suddenly there's forces in part maybe
Speaker 1: because like we we we freed us some motherfucking surfs.
Speaker 1: Now the people are going to play an increasing role
Speaker 1: in like Badge it happening Tasaars. I would like to
Speaker 1: add they said ordinary Russian, he was extraordinary. He was extraordinary,
Speaker 1: not quite extraordinary enough, but no, no, his aim wasn't extraordinary.
Speaker 1: His name was was not extraordinary, but his his his
Speaker 1: go get itness. Yeah, I really, I really admire the
Speaker 1: way he tried to shoot the Tsar to death. You know,
Speaker 1: can't you can't teach that, you know, can't teach HERT. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't teach HERT. That's the key. He would have
Speaker 1: been an incredible baseball player. So this brings us to
Speaker 1: May six, eight sixty eight, when Nikolai the second Alexandrovitch
Speaker 1: Romanov was born in the Alexander Palace south of St. Petersburg.
Speaker 1: He was the first child of the Crown Prince or
Speaker 1: Zarevitch Alexander Alexandrovitch and his wife, Prince Princess Dagmar of
Speaker 1: Denmark Um, which brings up an interesting point. The Tsars
Speaker 1: of all Russia, we're not really Russian, not like by blood,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, royalty kind of that's how it works.
Speaker 1: How many I'm an English monarchs were French, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Queen Victoria is the grandmother of all of
Speaker 1: the crowned heads of Europe at World War Two, you know, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Edward Razinski in his book The Last Star explains, as
Speaker 1: a result of countless dynastic marriages, by the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: scarcely any Russian blood flowed in the veins of the
Speaker 1: Russian romanovs Rs. Nicholas. His mother was the Danish Princess,
Speaker 1: his grandmother the Danish Queen. He called his grandmother the
Speaker 1: mother in law of all Europe. Her numerous daughters, sons
Speaker 1: and grandchildren had allied nearly all the royal houses. You know,
Speaker 1: I need the continent in this entertaining manner, from England
Speaker 1: to Greece. So this is a very incestuous family, which
Speaker 1: will there will be some issues for that for Nicholas
Speaker 1: the second later on here. Yeah, I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be some problems when you interbreed that much.
Speaker 1: But maybe just being like the guy who gets all
Speaker 1: of the power and owns everybody is a complete roll
Speaker 1: of the dice based on the same family marrying each
Speaker 1: other off to other members of their family for forever.
Speaker 1: Maybe not the best system. Legitimately, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: things to teach about was the Habsburgs, because I was
Speaker 1: just like, these motherfucker's were like, look at this they had.
Speaker 1: They had jowls. The whole family of of of emperors
Speaker 1: with jowls. Yeah, because they're all married to their first
Speaker 1: cousins and they have been for forever. And that's not
Speaker 1: great for anybody, especially Europe. It ends really bad for
Speaker 1: like what eighteen million young men roughly. Yeah, but what
Speaker 1: are we gonna apologize for that? Yeah? Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: at least there's less traffic. You know. I think about
Speaker 1: how bad the traffic would be in London if there
Speaker 1: hadn't have been a World War One. I mean, so
Speaker 1: don't think about that. The m one is already a mess.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say how much traffic was in World
Speaker 1: War One? Was there like nine cars? A couple of
Speaker 1: million boys? Less worth of it after the end of it.
Speaker 1: So for a while in the in the the Tzarevitch's household,
Speaker 1: Nicholas's dad's household, the Crown Prince's household, things are pretty good.
Speaker 1: Nicholas comes from a rare, happy royal home, so this
Speaker 1: isn't something that starts with him. His parents, like really
Speaker 1: genuinely loved each other, which is again very uncommon with
Speaker 1: like most royal marriages, like they have separate castles. They
Speaker 1: don't talk to each other outside of like dealing with
Speaker 1: the kids and stuff. Um, it's pretty abnormal for like
Speaker 1: his dad and his mom though, love each other, and
Speaker 1: that's probably why he winds up marrying for love later
Speaker 1: in life too. Write is he like this is how
Speaker 1: he's raised. He's not raised with like, well, you're just
Speaker 1: your your your partners, whoever is your partner, and you
Speaker 1: see them when you have to make an air. How
Speaker 1: bummed would they be to look at divorce rates now
Speaker 1: and they're like, what was it you guys were arranged to?
Speaker 1: And like, no, we we did it for this was
Speaker 1: all us. It turns out we're just bad at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it turns out we just don't know what that word
Speaker 1: means at all. Very just pretty hard. Actually, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: when you're not living in a giant palace with seventeen
Speaker 1: hounds of diamonds just hanging around yet the willy nilly
Speaker 1: things good, rob Let me give you advice on marriage. First,
Speaker 1: be owner of one sixth of the world helps a lot.
Speaker 1: It's only finest non poisoned meats and Jesus. So his
Speaker 1: family is real happy. His father was faithful to his mother,
Speaker 1: which everyone at the time found really shocking because when
Speaker 1: he was when he was a kid, he was a
Speaker 1: real horn dog like most crown princes. He's fucking his
Speaker 1: way across Russia. But then, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: he meets his wife and he's that that that's it
Speaker 1: for him. Um, so he actually is. I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like learning about a monogamous baseball player. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're a professional cyclist who isn't on a shipload of
Speaker 1: drugs and you're like, no, no, that's not right. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the first years of Nicholas's life very very happy. He
Speaker 1: has a bunch of siblings. They spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time playing outdoors at various vacation palaces with their dad.
Speaker 1: Die Airy. Entries from Nicholas's youth that he writes contains
Speaker 1: passages like this, Papa turned on the hose. Then we
Speaker 1: ran through the jets and caught terribly wet. That's the
Speaker 1: height of technology. Yeah, they had hoses. They were very excited.
Speaker 1: Yeah like that, that's like having a PS five. These
Speaker 1: are have you heard about the new hose? Four. It's
Speaker 1: all out of stock, but I've got one on pre
Speaker 1: order and when it comes in. We ordered one from
Speaker 1: hose Stop. We got the pre ordinary. You can put
Speaker 1: handover in then it makes different shapes. Oh, yes, he
Speaker 1: got he got a little adapter that makes it look
Speaker 1: like a fan coming out is great. It's great. So. Um,
Speaker 1: Nikki's dad pretty loving, definitely kind of your best case scenario.
Speaker 1: Royal upbringing that said, he's also a czar. He's a
Speaker 1: very strict guy. Nicholas wrote that his dad could not
Speaker 1: tolerate weakness. Um, but he also was never physically abusive
Speaker 1: that we know. Um. The kind of most aggressive story
Speaker 1: we get from his dad as a as a parent
Speaker 1: is one time when Nicholas let a playmate take the
Speaker 1: blame for something bad that he'd done. His father yelled,
Speaker 1: you're a girly at him. Um. So that's like the
Speaker 1: extent to which this guy gets punished as a kid. Really,
Speaker 1: this guy is a better dad than like most of
Speaker 1: us had. Yeah, this guy wasn't beating his kids in
Speaker 1: the seventies. Yeah that is wild to me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so nailing it as a parent. Alexander the second dare
Speaker 1: the Rod, but also kill a shipload of peasants, like not,
Speaker 1: don't spare the rod on the peasants. Spare the rod
Speaker 1: on your own child so you can use more of
Speaker 1: the rod on the peasants. Yeah, spare the rod on
Speaker 1: your child so they can learn how to use the
Speaker 1: rod on large indistinct to them masses of civilians. And
Speaker 1: to the civilians, you spare the hose. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: They don't get they don't get hoses. Uh So, while
Speaker 1: his kids played, um, and while Alexander second is enjoying
Speaker 1: being the crown prince, revolutionary discontent is building in Russia.
Speaker 1: One group called the People's Will, who are like nihilists. Um. So,
Speaker 1: there's definitely there's a number of influences they have, but
Speaker 1: they're like Russian nihilists being Russian. Yeah, it's just like
Speaker 1: being Russian. Um, that's not a big stretch. And there
Speaker 1: I think, broadly speaking, people who are super into Russian
Speaker 1: politics will be screaming at me for for narrowing it
Speaker 1: down this way, I'm sure. But like they spend a
Speaker 1: bunch of time early on as an organization trying to
Speaker 1: organize and radicalize peasants to revolt um and eventually We're like, well,
Speaker 1: this is hopeless. We're never going to get these people
Speaker 1: to revolt. We'reever we're gonna overthrow the system that way.
Speaker 1: So let's just murder the czar and maybe that will
Speaker 1: send the whole system into a tailspin and we'll get
Speaker 1: what we want that way, and if we don't fuck it,
Speaker 1: at least we killed as are right, Like, you get
Speaker 1: the sense that, like more than anything, they're just like,
Speaker 1: funk this guy, Let's kill him. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: very slot machine vibe to that where it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: like happen. We we have these folks today, right, Um,
Speaker 1: these people. I think it's more understandable because again, if somebody,
Speaker 1: if somebody makes you their property, I think it's fine
Speaker 1: to try to try to kill them, you know, like
Speaker 1: it's the slave thing if if you're if somebody makes
Speaker 1: you their slave and you can kill them, well okay, good,
Speaker 1: Oh you should amistad that ship immediate. You have to
Speaker 1: do that, you absolutely should. Yeah. Um. And they try
Speaker 1: a bunch of times, seven times unsuccessfully to kill Alexander
Speaker 1: the second and he survives. I think like twenty something
Speaker 1: assassination attempts. Lots of people are trying to kill the liberator.
Speaker 1: You know, like the people cannot try enough to kill
Speaker 1: this guy. And god, he is just he's unkillable. He's
Speaker 1: pretty hard, well quite, but he's pretty hard to kill.
Speaker 1: You gotta give him credit for that. So he survives, Yeah, right, right, right,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. Um. So he survives like seven assassination
Speaker 1: temps from people's will alone, and he executes twenty one
Speaker 1: of their members as a result ofly, you know, people
Speaker 1: have failed and they get captured whatnot. Um, but you know,
Speaker 1: the people's will, despite like the intense death toll taken
Speaker 1: on their organization from these failed attempts. They were the
Speaker 1: kind of folks who took bacun In seriously when he
Speaker 1: said the revolutionary is a doomed man. Their attitude is like,
Speaker 1: we're all already dead, like, so fuck it, We're gonna
Speaker 1: keep trying. God, this is so Russian. It's very Russian.
Speaker 1: It's also pretty I ra a yeah, yeah with with
Speaker 1: with like a dollarp of Sylvia Plath in there by
Speaker 1: the poetry a little bit of that up in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your fatalism needs to exist in a long term situation.
Speaker 1: Put some fertilizer in the bell jar and hook it
Speaker 1: at his are. I remember, dude, I remember being in
Speaker 1: like in like tenth grade and we read like a
Speaker 1: Day in the Life of Ivan Dvinovich or whatever. And
Speaker 1: while I was reading this, I was like, why are
Speaker 1: you making us do this? Like I was so I
Speaker 1: was so hurt they may they subjected me to something
Speaker 1: like that. Ah, yeah, I need to read more Russian literature.
Speaker 1: Um I did. I did read that. That one poem
Speaker 1: about the Turk in the Russian Ivan Petrovsky scove are
Speaker 1: pretty good poem that a Turk in a Russian killing
Speaker 1: each other? Um classic, check it out. I read it
Speaker 1: on the back of a beer. Try trying to find
Speaker 1: like good Russian literature that isn't about somebody with a
Speaker 1: gun hard to find. It's like trying to find Irish
Speaker 1: literature that doesn't start with a man masturbating through his
Speaker 1: hole in his pocket, right yeah yeah yeah, and then
Speaker 1: and then eventually dying of liver failure. Yes. So um,
Speaker 1: these guys keep right on their stick tuitiveness and trying
Speaker 1: to kill the czar is laudable. And on March one
Speaker 1: one they get it right. Uh, they throw a punch
Speaker 1: of bombs. This is they kill a lot of people
Speaker 1: as a general rule, not a lot of Like you know,
Speaker 1: you're not discriminating when you're trying to assassinate ahead of
Speaker 1: state with a bomb. You're accepting that, Like we're gonna
Speaker 1: kill a shipload of folks, you know, like we're setting
Speaker 1: off It's like Stalin robbing banks and killing seventy people
Speaker 1: with bombs. It's just like how things are back then.
Speaker 1: It's horrible, it's fucked up damage. But yeah, it's terrorism,
Speaker 1: you know. That's how it works. People set off a
Speaker 1: lot of bombs, kill a shipload of people. It's all
Speaker 1: pretty ugly. Um, you get things done. They do. In
Speaker 1: this case, they they set off one bomb and like
Speaker 1: the Czar Alexander gets out of his like carriage to
Speaker 1: be like what what the hell is going on? And
Speaker 1: then they blow his legs like two pieces. Um, so
Speaker 1: it's like a gnarly death. He doesn't die immediately, his
Speaker 1: legs are just like shredded. The whole Royal family, including
Speaker 1: thirteen year old Nicholas, who had been ice skating at
Speaker 1: the time, are like rushed away from ice skating to
Speaker 1: like see their grandpa bleed to death from a bomb wound.
Speaker 1: Um and again even though these people are like the
Speaker 1: most privileged folks at the time, it's an ugly period.
Speaker 1: They have a like they see some ship as kids.
Speaker 1: Know you're going to keep going back to that. Well,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it is extremely Russian. You know you must
Speaker 1: see this. Yeah, So Nicholas watches his grandpa bleed to
Speaker 1: death after he receives last communion Um and then his
Speaker 1: dad becomes the czar because you know that's how Zarism works.
Speaker 1: Nicholas's dad is Alexander the third Um, and he pretty
Speaker 1: immediately decides he's going to be a real different kind
Speaker 1: of ore from his father, uh, from the father that
Speaker 1: he watched explode. That he watched explode. So he sees
Speaker 1: his father pass all his liberalizing reforms and then get exploded,
Speaker 1: and he's like, well, that doesn't seem like the right
Speaker 1: way to go. I don't want I don't want that
Speaker 1: specific thing. I don't want to explode. It looks like
Speaker 1: a bad deal. I'm probably gonna die, but I'd rather
Speaker 1: get strangled in my bed than have my legs blown off.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um. So he two months after his dad's assassination,
Speaker 1: he issues what's called the Manifesto on Unshakable Authority, which
Speaker 1: is co written by one of the heads of the
Speaker 1: Russian Orthodox Church. Now, this manifesto said, in short, that
Speaker 1: Alexander the Liberator had been wrong to push for more
Speaker 1: liberal attitudes rather than what Alexander the Third called unshakable autocracy.
Speaker 1: Alexander the Third argued that unshakable autocracy wasn't just a
Speaker 1: form of government, but it was what God commanded. It
Speaker 1: was their sacred duty as the chosen of the Lord
Speaker 1: to rule Russia this way. So he cancels a plan
Speaker 1: right before getting killed. His father had like agreed to
Speaker 1: create a legislative assembly a Duma for Russia for the
Speaker 1: first time. Like they were gonna, okay, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: like a congress basically that people have some representation. And
Speaker 1: Alexander the Third is like, oh, that's not fucking happening,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. Um and that one yeah yeah, big old,
Speaker 1: big old in y e t right on that one.
Speaker 1: A couple of backwards punctuation points and we're good to go. Um.
Speaker 1: So instead he launches a huge crackdown and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from the romanofs here, troops were deployed to restore
Speaker 1: order and in September, Alexander's signed emergency laws to preserve
Speaker 1: state security, followed in eighty two by temporary regulations on Jews,
Speaker 1: which banned pogroms. But we're more concerned with protecting the
Speaker 1: interests of the local populace by banning Jews from living
Speaker 1: in the countryside or outside the pale. The Paliff settlement
Speaker 1: is the area in Russia you're allowed to live as
Speaker 1: a Jew. Which, uh, it's really interesting that he's banning
Speaker 1: pogroms while also being like you can't be here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like that's that is in of itself. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It's like, no programs, but all of these people have
Speaker 1: to leave immediately. Don't kill him though, But I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do anything to stop this. And like there
Speaker 1: are programs, right, there's a there's a wave of violence
Speaker 1: against you because they get they get blamed for this.
Speaker 1: Jewish people do represent a higher percentage of revolutionary organizations
Speaker 1: than of the general population. I wonder why. I wonder why.
Speaker 1: I wonder as they're forced on several diasporas out of Russia,
Speaker 1: and there's some amazing moments, one of Nicholas the seconds
Speaker 1: we're going forward in time by decades. But one of
Speaker 1: his advisers, like his prime minister at one point, is like, motherfucker,
Speaker 1: If I were a Jew, I'd be throwing bombs too.
Speaker 1: It's rough for them out there. You've made a bad
Speaker 1: situation for them. Um and boy, howdy, Alexander the Third
Speaker 1: is not a good czar for Jewish people. Um that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not like there's a lot of great ones and
Speaker 1: people around Alexander the Third. Note that he also kind
Speaker 1: of goes mad with power immediately. Uh. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Simon montfior here. When a female political prisoner
Speaker 1: insulted a gendarme, Alexander ordered flog her. His minister asked
Speaker 1: for a lesser sentence than the maximum hundred strokes, since
Speaker 1: she was fragile, but the Czar insisted give her the
Speaker 1: hundred strokes. They killed her. He is not wicked, wrote
Speaker 1: the diplomat Vladimir Lambsdorf, but he's drunk with power. His
Speaker 1: war minister, General Vanowski, joked that he was like Peter
Speaker 1: the Great with his cudgel, except here is only the
Speaker 1: cudgel without the Great Peter. Alexander's contempt for his own
Speaker 1: ministers was a feudal attitude in the modern world and
Speaker 1: his reverence for his autocracy. He failed to see that
Speaker 1: his own arbitrary nous was a flaw. Sire explained one
Speaker 1: of his advisers. We have a terrible, evil lack of law,
Speaker 1: but I always stand for compliance with the laws. The
Speaker 1: Czar replied, I'm not talking about you, but about your administration,
Speaker 1: which uses its power today. Russia is like a colossal
Speaker 1: boiler in which pressure is building. When it gets a hole,
Speaker 1: people with hammers rivet them. But one day the gases
Speaker 1: will blow out a hole that can't be filled and
Speaker 1: will suffocate, and we'll explode your goddamn legs off. Yeah, yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: did you not watch what Happened to your dad? I
Speaker 1: love that he's like, I don't think you understand what happened. Also,
Speaker 1: the way Alexander the third season is like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because he tried to liberalize it. That's why you've got
Speaker 1: to be consistently a dick. I don't know, man, if
Speaker 1: I was born with a target on my head, i'd
Speaker 1: be I'd be trying to be cool as hell. Let
Speaker 1: me translate this in a way I think will make
Speaker 1: sense to our male listeners. At least you know how.
Speaker 1: A lot of times you pretend to not know how
Speaker 1: to do things because then it will get done for you, like,
Speaker 1: oh boy, do it. Yeah, exactly, It's like that. But
Speaker 1: it's with murdering people where if you if you just
Speaker 1: don't let people know that you can be nice, then
Speaker 1: maybe they won't funk with you. That's Alexander the Third's idea.
Speaker 1: So if he looks very angry furious, are you mad
Speaker 1: about the murdering part. No, for the fact that I
Speaker 1: need help cleaning my room. Yeah, I could use some
Speaker 1: help cleaning my room. So in eighteen eighty two, Nicholas
Speaker 1: gets a gift from his mother, a golden edged book
Speaker 1: of souvenirs bound with wood. This became his first diary,
Speaker 1: and for the remainder of his life he would make
Speaker 1: daily entries in it. For example, began writing in my
Speaker 1: diary on the first of January eighteen eighty two. In
Speaker 1: the morning, drank hot chocolate, dressed in my life Guard
Speaker 1: reserves uniform, took a walk in the garden with Papa.
Speaker 1: We chopped and sawed wood and made a great bonfire.
Speaker 1: Went to bed at about half past nine. Papa, Mama
Speaker 1: and I received two deputations, presented me with a magnificent
Speaker 1: wooden platter inscribed the peasants of Verona's and there's to
Speaker 1: the Tsarevich with bread and salt and a Russian towel.
Speaker 1: That's like his diary injuries. I would like to add
Speaker 1: that hot chocolate cost a thousand dollars back then. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this is. This is they had. They had to just
Speaker 1: straight up shoot four people to afford that. Hot chocolate
Speaker 1: was the thing that's stuck out in that entire thing.
Speaker 1: To me, I was like, you know, that's nice that
Speaker 1: you've got some hot chocolate. Dude. Yeah, I mean, he
Speaker 1: owns more of the world than anyone else pretty much
Speaker 1: ever has. I mean maybe one of the cons, you know,
Speaker 1: So it was kind of one on Russia. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also the cons devolved a lot more power to local
Speaker 1: areas and ship than the czars did. They were a
Speaker 1: mom yeah, yeah, they were pretty dope. So it was
Speaker 1: the kind of idyllic childhood for Nicholas that you only
Speaker 1: get when your father owns like most of the inhabited
Speaker 1: world or a big chunk of it. It's so wild too,
Speaker 1: But when you think about that, like hot chocolate, like
Speaker 1: no peasant has had ever had hot chocolate, and they
Speaker 1: never would. They would live their life dying without ever
Speaker 1: tasting anything sweet. Yeah, and then we think about it's
Speaker 1: like some weird sweet thing. Yeah, yeah, a date, that's
Speaker 1: But then we think about I could just go over
Speaker 1: to my cabinet and eat like a czar two. That's
Speaker 1: so goddamn wild. Yeah yeah, you you you probably eat
Speaker 1: a lot better than Bazar because Russian cook I don't know,
Speaker 1: there's some great Russian meals, but hit or miss on
Speaker 1: some things. Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't need stroke
Speaker 1: enough to get me through the day exactly. I do
Speaker 1: eat sort of like in a medieval way, Like I
Speaker 1: ate a lot of eggs. Yeah, it's pretty medieval. Or
Speaker 1: it's just like and then I had nine eggs and
Speaker 1: they're like, I remember, I had a fascinating story, And
Speaker 1: I get a guy who he had He had been
Speaker 1: the Hitler youth as a kid. He was fourteen when
Speaker 1: World War two ended, and so he grew up in uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this this Germany that still had shades of
Speaker 1: the of the Imperial Germany to it, and his family
Speaker 1: was Prussian and his big memory was that like they
Speaker 1: didn't have enough money for everybody to have eggs. So
Speaker 1: every morning during breakfast, they would get you know what
Speaker 1: stuff they got, and they would all sit around to
Speaker 1: watch their father eat a single egg because that was
Speaker 1: like the way that you did it right, Like it
Speaker 1: was of course the father is going to get the egg.
Speaker 1: He has to go out and like you know, make
Speaker 1: things happen for the family, and everyone would watch in
Speaker 1: awe as he ate this single egg every morning. It's
Speaker 1: like watching people play video games on YouTube. What are
Speaker 1: you doing? Don't you want to play the game? No,
Speaker 1: we just want to see. There's so few eggs that
Speaker 1: we have access to. We just want to watch it.
Speaker 1: And I'll just go to a farmer's market and then
Speaker 1: buy a dozen eggs and then eat a dozen eggs.
Speaker 1: It's like how like back in the forties and stuff,
Speaker 1: like people used to send around pineapples while they were
Speaker 1: ripening and like put them out at parties and like
Speaker 1: brag that, like we have a pineapple and eventually we're
Speaker 1: gonna get to eat it. But until then, look at
Speaker 1: this pineapple. You know they do you ever hear the
Speaker 1: story of Louis and the Pineapple? Know when they introduced
Speaker 1: the pineapple to him and sparing what actually he was
Speaker 1: portrayed in artistically. He did not look like what the
Speaker 1: pictures did. He was a very corpulent man, and he
Speaker 1: was a relatively greedy eater. And somebody presented him with
Speaker 1: a pineapple and he didn't know what it was, so
Speaker 1: he tried to eat it like like whole like an apple,
Speaker 1: and just shredded the ship out of his mouth. Got
Speaker 1: embarrassed and then like stu ass like and then he
Speaker 1: like banned pineapples for France because he was a stupid
Speaker 1: asshole about it. Look, there's some ship that like I
Speaker 1: can knock down to like, oh yeah, if you if
Speaker 1: you're not instructed on how to eat certain things, it's confusing.
Speaker 1: But a pineapple is not that. Like you look at
Speaker 1: a pineapple and you're like, well, I should probably cut
Speaker 1: into this, Like this doesn't look like a bite into fruit.
Speaker 1: I forget who did the tweet, but somebody talked about
Speaker 1: how like pineapple is the most metal food on the
Speaker 1: planet because it just like it dissolves your tongue when
Speaker 1: you eat it, and it's covered in like thick bark
Speaker 1: of pineapple. Now you're making the fiend for pineapple and
Speaker 1: the leaves are sharp, even the leaves are violent on
Speaker 1: a pineapple can fall down and kill you like a coconut.
Speaker 1: It is good. Don't they grow on um like bushes,
Speaker 1: coconut bushes. Yes, yes, sure, let's go with that. Oh sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of iguanas. So yeah, he the Czar has
Speaker 1: a pretty great childhood. All things can sidered. One of
Speaker 1: the few things that's kind of traumatic for him as
Speaker 1: a kid is that he realizes his parents prefer his
Speaker 1: brother Georgie to him. His younger brother is like the favorite. Um,
Speaker 1: and he like acknowledges as a kid, like they don't
Speaker 1: really love me. They love my brother, not in a
Speaker 1: way that like they're shitty to him because he's the
Speaker 1: oldest one. He's going to be the czar. They just
Speaker 1: think Georgie is a better kid. And also he is
Speaker 1: like Georgie's way smarter, like Nicholas sucks. Georgie will become
Speaker 1: like the guy who's a voice of reason. Um a lot.
Speaker 1: Do you have a sibling, yes, who who's better? Oh?
Speaker 1: I mean geez i I he might listen to this podcast, um,
Speaker 1: but clearly me right obviously if he's listening to your podcast, Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely right, he doesn't have a fucking podcast just has
Speaker 1: you know, a good hasn't gone and traumatized himself for
Speaker 1: very little reason in random parts of the world, you know,
Speaker 1: like a like a jerk. It's like, why don't you
Speaker 1: go to war? Yeah, asked anyway, Um No, he's he's
Speaker 1: a much better person than me. Um. You see. That's
Speaker 1: that's the thing is like there's all there always is
Speaker 1: a sibling that's a better person for sure. And in
Speaker 1: this case it's Georgie um and and Nicholas knows this.
Speaker 1: And in the Romanovs, Simon Montfior claims his adolescent insight
Speaker 1: did not make him mean, sullen or less obedient. He
Speaker 1: simply became reticent. So he kind of becomes like hesitant,
Speaker 1: like he doesn't like to make decisions or like calls
Speaker 1: because he I think he just kind of feels insecure.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to like push anything that will make
Speaker 1: somebody not like him, which is a problem when you're
Speaker 1: about to own all of Russia, right, you should really
Speaker 1: need to be decisive. Um. As we've talked about, it's
Speaker 1: one of the things that stops you from getting murdered.
Speaker 1: So the news are Alexander the third Nicholas. His dad
Speaker 1: picks a tutor for his son, a guy named oh
Speaker 1: Boy Pabetta notes Papetta, notes of Pabetta, notes of like,
Speaker 1: come on, people, you expect me to get all these
Speaker 1: Russian names, right, I can't get English towns America. We're
Speaker 1: gonna call him Popo. Okay. So Popo is a traditionalist,
Speaker 1: and he's such a traditionalist that he would have been
Speaker 1: a fascist in a different country and time. Um. He
Speaker 1: lectured young Nicholas about how foolish his grandfather's reforms would be.
Speaker 1: His argument to Nicholas was that Russia was unique, special
Speaker 1: and stuff like a free press would lead to inevitable collapse.
Speaker 1: Like other countries can maybe handled this, but not Russia.
Speaker 1: We're just not. We're very different. We're different kinds of people. Um.
Speaker 1: They viewed themselves as as Rome. Yeah, yeah, as the
Speaker 1: as the as the heirs to the Roman Empires, the
Speaker 1: third Rome. Yeah. Um. Now one of his other tutors,
Speaker 1: when of Nicholas's other tutors didn't feel the need to
Speaker 1: actually educate him. You know, this is the guy who's
Speaker 1: supposed to be teaching him, because he believed quote mysterious
Speaker 1: forces emanating during the sacrament of coronation, provided all the
Speaker 1: practical data required by a ruler. Well, we teach this
Speaker 1: kid about the world, God's gonna tell him how to
Speaker 1: do his job. He's going to get a ghost learning.
Speaker 1: That's not everybody. Other tutors of his have a more
Speaker 1: realistic view of education. Um, but none have a lot
Speaker 1: of luck teaching Nikki things. He's immature, he's not particularly
Speaker 1: keen to learn. Popo noted that during one of history
Speaker 1: lesson quote, I could only observe that he was completely
Speaker 1: absorbed picking his nose. Um, which is a fine, normal
Speaker 1: kid thing to do, right, but also not a great
Speaker 1: sign when you're going to rule the world. And maybe
Speaker 1: why people shouldn't rule one six of the world as
Speaker 1: their personal property. I mean, you know what that might
Speaker 1: be just like one time and this guy is just
Speaker 1: like dwelling on it, and he might have had something
Speaker 1: sits there for history in history forever. Yeah, like we're
Speaker 1: talking about it and like a hundred and fifty years later.
Speaker 1: It is pretty funny. It's just like one time this
Speaker 1: kid had like a little crunchy in there. They had
Speaker 1: to work his way out. God picks their nose, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. Where you're going with this, And I'm very
Speaker 1: excited that that's the segway that you're using. It's the
Speaker 1: Washington State Highway Patrol and probably and we're bad. Ah,
Speaker 1: look at the ads. Good ads knows the whole time.
Speaker 1: I know, I know it was. It was unsettling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it did seem good. So as an adolescent, Nicholas joins
Speaker 1: the army, but he joins the army the way that
Speaker 1: like czar kids joined the army. This doesn't mean like
Speaker 1: he's not doing like push ups in the mud or anything. Basically,
Speaker 1: as a teenager, he gets to he becomes a member
Speaker 1: of the Lifeguards, which is the special military unit dedicated
Speaker 1: to the royal family. When he joins the Cadet Corps
Speaker 1: for training, his textbook included this line that gives you
Speaker 1: an idea of how the Russian military saw itself. Russia
Speaker 1: as a state is neither commercial nor agricultural, but military,
Speaker 1: and it's calling is to be the wrath of the world.
Speaker 1: Parentheses pretend we did not get our asses kicked like
Speaker 1: like immediately yesterday. Basically, I mean, though that is Russia's history,
Speaker 1: Like the Crimean War is kind of weird because like
Speaker 1: they lose and then lose as opposed to most of
Speaker 1: Russian military history. Is they lose, they lose, they lose,
Speaker 1: they lose, they win. Yeah, it's it's a long game.
Speaker 1: What it is is the Russians know that they can
Speaker 1: outlast a battle of attrition. M like they're just like
Speaker 1: they will just throw bodies at whatever. A problem is, Oh,
Speaker 1: Germany is invading. We have empty space is bigger than Germany.
Speaker 1: Multi problem? How many lives will it cost us? Deal? So,
Speaker 1: in his biography, the Last Czar Radzinsky explains quote the
Speaker 1: armyment obedience and diligence above all else, both these qualities
Speaker 1: which the shot youth already possessed, the army would foster ruinously.
Speaker 1: So Nicholas is instantly put in charge of half a
Speaker 1: company worth of men. But this was fine because the
Speaker 1: unit's only real duties were marching and working out. His
Speaker 1: regimental boss was the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovitch, who's his
Speaker 1: his uncle, so his dad's brother, the Russian ass name
Speaker 1: I've ever and Sergey is a Russian motherfucker. He is brutal,
Speaker 1: he loves him some programs, he loves him some crack
Speaker 1: down violently on on on socialists. Uh, he's hugely religious
Speaker 1: and he is also very gay, so he hates himself
Speaker 1: and everything around him because he has these urges that
Speaker 1: he thinks are sinful, and because he's in the he's
Speaker 1: leading the Lifeguards, like, which is this fundamentally like pretty
Speaker 1: gay unit. It's this closed military tradition where like Radzinski
Speaker 1: writes that the unit quote encouraged pederasty and heavy drinking, right, like,
Speaker 1: all these dudes are fucking and getting wasted all the time.
Speaker 1: And then Surge gets really angry because he's super religious
Speaker 1: and thinks that's wrong. But it's also how he spends
Speaker 1: all his time. So he's just kind of this very angry,
Speaker 1: violent man with a lot of power and a lot
Speaker 1: of repressed issues. Mike Penn's energy there, real, Mike Penn's energy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad. It's a problem. The Crown Prince Sergey becomes
Speaker 1: an issue. Um, Now, since Nicholas was the Crown Prince
Speaker 1: and was straight, he probably was not exposed to a
Speaker 1: lot of like the horny nous within the Lifeguards, right.
Speaker 1: I don't think he was involved. I think they probably
Speaker 1: were like, well, we don't want we don't want this
Speaker 1: are of itch to see. That's probably not like something
Speaker 1: to do around him. I mean, there certainly is, like,
Speaker 1: but there's there's a difference between sexual preference, yes, being
Speaker 1: gay and and like that sort of like military or prison.
Speaker 1: Within the military, where all these men kept together, people
Speaker 1: have this need for intimacy. Yeah, it definitely is one
Speaker 1: of those things where like the fact that sexuality is
Speaker 1: a spectrum is very common in all male locations where
Speaker 1: you know, there aren't the options for that, people explore
Speaker 1: that sexuality a lot more willingly. Yeah, this is not
Speaker 1: a unique kind of military formation in history. The ship
Speaker 1: happens all the time. I forget with their names. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the Spartans, but it was somebody like the Spartans.
Speaker 1: It was the sacred Band of Thebes where they were
Speaker 1: like explicitly all right in like in homosexual like relationships.
Speaker 1: It was like a hundred and fifty couples and the
Speaker 1: idea was like, well, nobody's gonna like run and abandon
Speaker 1: their romantic partner on the battlefield. And they were like
Speaker 1: for a while, yeah, for a while, until then till
Speaker 1: the macadone came around. You know, you get your your
Speaker 1: Philip and your Alexander and that doesn't that breaks up eventually,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, they had a pretty really good combat record. Um.
Speaker 1: So Nicholas probably is not exposed to the horny nous um,
Speaker 1: but he definitely took part in the drinking, as this
Speaker 1: quote from his diary makes clear. Yesterday during training, we
Speaker 1: drank a hundred and twenty bottles of champagne. I was
Speaker 1: sentury for the division at I took my squadron out
Speaker 1: on the battlefield at five an inspection of military institutes
Speaker 1: under a pouring rain. So he then gets drunk with
Speaker 1: the boys that night, and he wrote this unintentionally hilarious line.
Speaker 1: Woke up and felt as if a squadron had spent
Speaker 1: the night in my mouth. Maybe he did know a
Speaker 1: little thing, figured I don't think that's what he means,
Speaker 1: you know, I think he means it taste my mouth
Speaker 1: tastes like a bunch of horses ship in it, or
Speaker 1: a whole squadron. You never know the lemember you're you're
Speaker 1: interpreting from from the language you are. And I am
Speaker 1: certain there's some really horny are Nicholas and Dukes Sergey
Speaker 1: fan fiction out there, and more power to you. I
Speaker 1: would also like to add, how funny it is, um
Speaker 1: that like it was champagne. I know, obviously like alcohol,
Speaker 1: it's like what they drink, but like I expected it
Speaker 1: to be vodka, and then it's like champagne, And I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: could you imagine that like from somebody like a desert
Speaker 1: storm like Darlan. We got fucked up on like four
Speaker 1: cases of champagne. And I swear to fucking god, I
Speaker 1: woke up and in my mouth tasted like hounded brute
Speaker 1: and the Bradley. It tasted like a whole group of
Speaker 1: marines that spent the night in my teeth. I went
Speaker 1: to fucking town and I swear to god, I got
Speaker 1: married last night. Yeah, so Grand Dukes Sergey was responsible
Speaker 1: for picking the drinking games, and he was really good
Speaker 1: at this, for all of his other shortcomings. His favorites
Speaker 1: were Elbows, in which a glass the length of a
Speaker 1: forearm would be filled and drank in one gulp, The Staircase,
Speaker 1: which involved lining a staircase with drinks and pounding them
Speaker 1: one step at a time until you passed out drunk.
Speaker 1: And then there was Till the Wolves, in which all
Speaker 1: of the men would strip naked as a group run
Speaker 1: into the frozen outdoors, where a servant would bring them
Speaker 1: a tub of champagne that they would all drink naked
Speaker 1: together in the freezing cold. Sucks. That does sound like
Speaker 1: a shitty drink. Sucks. I can we just play drink
Speaker 1: the beer, Sergey. Because he's got this religious conflict, is
Speaker 1: really angry all the time, Like he'll have these nights
Speaker 1: of indulgence and then he'll just be like furious at
Speaker 1: the world, and then he'll suggest that his brother or
Speaker 1: his nephew do a bunch of violent things. Whereas Nicholas
Speaker 1: is like pretty even tempered. I think for most of
Speaker 1: his life. Um, so I just I don't think he's
Speaker 1: like I don't think he's repressing anything. Um it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like it seems to do something he regrets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't that. It just doesn't seem likely that that
Speaker 1: was like a thing he grappled with. Um. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: Nicholas drank definitely. He does not say people had a
Speaker 1: p problem. His father did, and became more of an
Speaker 1: issue as the czar got older. Alexander the Third had
Speaker 1: a habit of getting wasted with his friends, and, according
Speaker 1: to one witness quote, would lay on his back and
Speaker 1: waved his arms and legs about, behaving like a child,
Speaker 1: trying to get to his feet and then falling down,
Speaker 1: grabbing the legs of anyone who walked past. And again,
Speaker 1: this man owns a sixth of the world. So what
Speaker 1: do you do when he's like that drunk. You know,
Speaker 1: he's just a good time and son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: I would be I would be stoked if you're like,
Speaker 1: if if somebody told me that Trump sometimes would have
Speaker 1: his buddies over, they would get fucked up and just
Speaker 1: collapse on the ground and just like wail around grabbing
Speaker 1: a people's legs and stuff, I'd be like, well, at
Speaker 1: least that's kind of cool. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a human thing he did. It's a fun time and thing,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, get that wet, Yeah, I get that
Speaker 1: wasted pretty regularly. Um. So, his binges started to cause
Speaker 1: health problems by the eighteen eighties, and his doctors forbade
Speaker 1: him from drinking um. He but also, you can't really
Speaker 1: stop the Emperor of Russia from like doing stuff he
Speaker 1: wants to. Um, So his wife like keeps enough of
Speaker 1: a watch on him that he has to hide it.
Speaker 1: So Alexander the third orders jack boots made with special
Speaker 1: compartments that hold flasks large enough to fit a whole
Speaker 1: bottle of konyak. So these must have been big shoes.
Speaker 1: It looks like kiss fucking shoes hold the whole bottle
Speaker 1: of kneak? Could you imagine that? Like, Uh, we have
Speaker 1: a question about this, Uh about this this memo you
Speaker 1: sent out here? Do you really want an eight foot
Speaker 1: platform heels? Yes, hollow, very hollow with a tube coming
Speaker 1: out of them, trying to sneak wine into like a
Speaker 1: baseball game or soon ship. Yeah. And they'll do this
Speaker 1: like the Czar and his friends whenever, like they're at
Speaker 1: state functions, Like his wife will step out of the
Speaker 1: room and be like, all right, everybody drank really really fast,
Speaker 1: pound him down, you know, the perfect crime. Yeah. On October,
Speaker 1: Nicholas the second has a first close brush with death.
Speaker 1: He's on the Royal train with his father and family
Speaker 1: when it has a wreck outside of Kharkoff and modern Ukraine.
Speaker 1: And it has a wreck because his dad is drunk
Speaker 1: and is telling like the the guy who's in charge
Speaker 1: of the railway, the director of the railway, This dude
Speaker 1: named Sergey Witt um, he's like, make it go faster,
Speaker 1: make it go faster. And Serge is like, we're already
Speaker 1: going as fast as he can, and these oars like
Speaker 1: what are you? Would you make it go faster? And
Speaker 1: then it crashes. Russian, very Russian, very god. He's like,
Speaker 1: the guy's just like, you know this is train, yeah, comes,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this one railway. Very
Speaker 1: little steering can do here. Remember, but this railway relatively
Speaker 1: new building. We are Russian, We're not great at these yet.
Speaker 1: And Niki later wrote in his diet writes in his
Speaker 1: diary of this train crash and this is fun. This
Speaker 1: gives you some insight into how he grows up viewing
Speaker 1: the lives of other humans who aren't Royals. A fateful
Speaker 1: day for us all. We might all have been killed,
Speaker 1: but by the Lord's will, we were not. During breakfast,
Speaker 1: our train jump, the rails, the dining car and coach
Speaker 1: were demolished, but we emerged from it all unscathed. However,
Speaker 1: twenty people were killed and sixteen injured. Kind of burying
Speaker 1: the lead on that one, isn't it Twenty people die
Speaker 1: and he's like, thank god, everyone who matters is fine.
Speaker 1: It really is like, oh, you deserve to die for
Speaker 1: having that mentality for your whole life. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: is his entire life. And it's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: like twenty people die because his dad is drunk and
Speaker 1: like make it go faster. Yeah, this is uh what
Speaker 1: what is it suffering from affluenza? Yeah, they have it
Speaker 1: pretty hard in in the Romanov family. So this accident
Speaker 1: brings Sergey with the director of the railway into Romanov
Speaker 1: orbit after the crash, which gets promoted to run the
Speaker 1: railways for the whole empire. Then Alexander the third decides
Speaker 1: to make him communications minister. Before he hands in that job,
Speaker 1: he asks, are you a friend of the Jews? Because again,
Speaker 1: pretty racist guy? Uh now, wit who would go down
Speaker 1: in history as a campaigner for reforming Russia's anti Semitic
Speaker 1: laws answers, Since we can't drown them all in the
Speaker 1: Black sea, we should treat them as humans. So for
Speaker 1: an idea of where anti semitism is, this is the
Speaker 1: good guy, this is the advocate for Jewish liberation, being like, well,
Speaker 1: we can't drown them all, so we should treat him better.
Speaker 1: That's the most progressive thing any Russian had said. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't Jewish. Well if we can't, well, if we
Speaker 1: can't drown them, we can. Yeah, So for a heads up,
Speaker 1: pretty bad, pretty bad people in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Um As both his father's son and the heir to
Speaker 1: all Russia, Nicholas the second had the option to have
Speaker 1: a lot of casual sex if he really wanted to.
Speaker 1: Many young tsarovitch Is, including his father, were playboys, you know,
Speaker 1: in their youth and often as an adult to you know.
Speaker 1: But Nicholas was a deeply religious and dedicated person, and
Speaker 1: he was dedicated to waiting for love. This next story
Speaker 1: is based on the recollections of a noble woman named
Speaker 1: vera Uran neva Uh and she claims of his first
Speaker 1: like infatuation quote, he adored walking. There was a rumor
Speaker 1: that he had met a beautiful Jewis on a walk
Speaker 1: and a romance had sprung up. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of gossip about that in Petersburg, but his father acted
Speaker 1: as decisively as ever. The Jewis was sent away along
Speaker 1: with her entire household. Nicholas was in her home while
Speaker 1: all this was going on. Only over my dead body,
Speaker 1: he declared to the governor. Matters did not go as
Speaker 1: far as dead bodies. However, he was an obedient son
Speaker 1: and eventually he was broken and taking away to his
Speaker 1: father at Anchikov Palace. And the Jewis was never seen
Speaker 1: in the capital again. So in the capital, in the capital,
Speaker 1: yeah it may have been. I mean, Alexander the Third
Speaker 1: would not have been above a little bit of murder. Um.
Speaker 1: So we've moved out to a farm upstairs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's bleak um. So right around the same time,
Speaker 1: Uncle Sergey leads a crackdown against Jewish people living in
Speaker 1: and around the capital, and Alexander the Third signs off
Speaker 1: on this crackdown. In Moscow, Uncle SERGEI closes the Great
Speaker 1: Synagogue and he sends his Cossacks to break into Jewish
Speaker 1: homes and like beat and rob people. It's a knight
Speaker 1: of It's a knight of broken glass kind of ship. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: He expels all Jewish citizens of Moscow. The only exceptions
Speaker 1: are women who were togree to register as prostitutes. That
Speaker 1: seems that's having your cake and eating it. Two guys,
Speaker 1: come on, yeah, um, well not for him actually, but yeah,
Speaker 1: as a as a matter of jurisprudence, I guess um,
Speaker 1: Jewish immigration in the United States increases to one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty seven thousand people a year. This is like
Speaker 1: the five will goes west, you know. Stuff like this
Speaker 1: is this is when you start getting huge waves of
Speaker 1: Jewish people immigrating to the United States in particular. Um,
Speaker 1: some of them do, a lot of them do like
Speaker 1: wind up further western Europe. But like this, these crackdowns
Speaker 1: are what starts. Like why you you start to get
Speaker 1: this like huge Jewish population in York City and stuff,
Speaker 1: It's because a lot of people are like, it really
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like Russia is a great place to be Jewish.
Speaker 1: We might need to get the funk out of here.
Speaker 1: You know what, maybe Europe and as a whole is
Speaker 1: probably the best place to get out of there. I
Speaker 1: don't think this is heading in a good direction. I'm
Speaker 1: hearing some pretty rough stuff out west to Let's go
Speaker 1: to America. Let's go to America, Bill, they'll hate us
Speaker 1: without being too violent about yeah. Yeah. In the early
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties, the young Kaiser of Germany, Nicholas's cousin, uh
Speaker 1: you know, auto or Wilhelm fires Otto von Bismarck, who
Speaker 1: had been the brains of the Reich for a while
Speaker 1: and had organized a German Russian defensive alliance. When the
Speaker 1: Kaiser sacks Bismarck, he also refuses to renew the treaty,
Speaker 1: and so Alexander the Third signs and alliance with France instead.
Speaker 1: The Kaiser, being an idiot, recognizes like, oh, no, I
Speaker 1: fucked up. I shouldn't have done that. Like it's immediately like, oh,
Speaker 1: this could go badly for Jerremany is this is gonna
Speaker 1: be rough in about twenty four years. And one of
Speaker 1: the things you got to realize is all of these
Speaker 1: these royals who are like cousin are texting each other constantly.
Speaker 1: Basically they have telegrams so they can actually like basically
Speaker 1: text with one another. And as soon as like this happens,
Speaker 1: he starts sending a bunch of like frantic telegrams to
Speaker 1: the Russian royal family inviting them to hang out on
Speaker 1: his yacht and party with him and like trying to
Speaker 1: get back into their good books. Um. And also, we
Speaker 1: have cool helmets with spikes on the baby check it out, um.
Speaker 1: And Alexander the Third doesn't really want to hang out
Speaker 1: with kaiserville helm because nobody, nobody ever wants to hang
Speaker 1: out with Kayserville Helm No. Um, so he picks Nikki
Speaker 1: to go do that job. He's like, Hey, you're you're
Speaker 1: gonna be the bizarre one day. Why don't you go
Speaker 1: hang out with your weird cousin and sail around in
Speaker 1: circles with his stupid boats. Um. So that's what Nikki
Speaker 1: does a bunch of when he's a young man. Um
Speaker 1: And for a look at how he starts coming together
Speaker 1: as a young person, I want to quote again from
Speaker 1: the Romanovs. The Air Now twenty four, wrote the Deputy
Speaker 1: Foreign Minister Lambsdorff makes a strange impression. Half boy, half
Speaker 1: man's all of stature, thin and undistinguished. He had also
Speaker 1: obstinate and thoughtless. His mother had tended to infantilize her boys.
Speaker 1: He wore his literal sailor suits longer than most boys do,
Speaker 1: noted Countess zz Naryshkina. He was a man with a
Speaker 1: small horizon and a narrow outlook, and for years had
Speaker 1: barely gone beyond the wall of the Anchikov and then
Speaker 1: Gecina Palace gardens. Even when Nikki was a guard's colonel,
Speaker 1: his mother still addressed him as my dear little soul,
Speaker 1: my boy His diary tells of hide and seek, drinking games,
Speaker 1: and contests with conkers and fur cones well into his twenties.
Speaker 1: So he's like being dressed like Donald Duck. He's like
Speaker 1: a twenty year old. It has um, it has very
Speaker 1: blueth energy there. Yeah, because like he's just gets to
Speaker 1: be this little boy forever, because nobody can ever say, like, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the little sailor suits might not be the
Speaker 1: thing to be wearing to this party twenty one year
Speaker 1: old future emperor. So he just kind of does it.
Speaker 1: You know, he's flexing mm hmm. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: way you can see that as as as healthy. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna add, by the way, I also dressed like a child,
Speaker 1: but it's more just like I wear like, oh look,
Speaker 1: I like Spider Man and I only wear pajamas. I
Speaker 1: get it. Yeah. So, uh, he's kind of a sweet boy.
Speaker 1: Most people will agree on that. But he's also very
Speaker 1: much like a boy rather than the kind of person
Speaker 1: suited to be the iron ruler of all the rushes.
Speaker 1: You know, like he does he everyone kind of notices, oh,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be hard enough for this job.
Speaker 1: A little sailor sailor suit. Yeah, I'm not not quite
Speaker 1: tough enough for this big lollipop and floppy blonde curls
Speaker 1: and duty. Um. So he had developed his intellectual talents
Speaker 1: by this point. He's not an idiot. He's really good
Speaker 1: at learning languages. And in fact, one of the things
Speaker 1: people will notice is that his English is perfect, and
Speaker 1: he writes a lot of letters to and from his
Speaker 1: wife that are like flawless English. Um. He also falls
Speaker 1: in love with British romance novels. He spends a lot
Speaker 1: of time reading romance novels. Um. And if you were
Speaker 1: a member of the oppressed classes kind of eyeing this
Speaker 1: guy from a scullery or whatever, you might have expected
Speaker 1: him to be like, well, when this guy gets into power,
Speaker 1: he'll be better than Alexander the Third. You know, the
Speaker 1: dude who's constantly cracking down on everybody but a Simon who, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the dude who jumped to train because wasted d u
Speaker 1: I with a train. But as Simon Montfior makes clear,
Speaker 1: little Niki definitely took after his father, uh quote. Nikki
Speaker 1: embraced his father's Muscovite vision of the throne, founded on
Speaker 1: the mystical union of Czar and peasants whose devout loyalty
Speaker 1: was pure and sacred compared to the filthy decadence of Petersburg,
Speaker 1: Liberal Europe and Jewish modernity. Nicholas the second worship his
Speaker 1: imperial father, but Tzar Alexander the Third knew his son
Speaker 1: had no aptitude for the job awaiting him. When Wit
Speaker 1: suggested putting Nicholas on the committee organizing construction of the
Speaker 1: Trans Siberian Railway so we could get some on the
Speaker 1: job experience, the Zar responded, have you ever tried discussing
Speaker 1: anything of consequence with his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke?
Speaker 1: Don't tell me you never noticed. The Grand Duke is
Speaker 1: an absolute child. His opinions utterly childish. How could he
Speaker 1: preside over such a committee? And like, that's a bad
Speaker 1: sign if your kid is gonna inherit the throne literally
Speaker 1: the instant you die and you're like, well, he can't
Speaker 1: build a railroad, like, dude, to be fair, I don't
Speaker 1: know if you should be living in a pretty glass
Speaker 1: house railroad stones, buddy, Yeah, yeah, maybe it'll be Also,
Speaker 1: maybe it'll be shipping on Nikki about railroad stuff. How buddy,
Speaker 1: how much did you black out that night? Yeah? Do
Speaker 1: you remember that, remember the people people. Yeah, so Nicholas
Speaker 1: did eventually get added to that committee in the end,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't receive a lot of training on the
Speaker 1: job from his dad. His dad's the only one who
Speaker 1: can give him this, and his dad, you kind of
Speaker 1: get the feeling his dad is just irritated by him
Speaker 1: and like doesn't want him around, so he doesn't teach
Speaker 1: him a whole lot. Um. He just length, Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: an asshole. You know. Um, this might have been fine, right,
Speaker 1: Alexander's young, you know, he had time to gradually learn
Speaker 1: things and pick them up from ministers. Um, Alexander the
Speaker 1: Third was like not old, you know, when Nicki's in
Speaker 1: his twenties and he was expected to have like people
Speaker 1: are generally expecting. Nicholas probably wouldn't inherit the third Throat
Speaker 1: until he was closing on forty. Um, but that's not
Speaker 1: quite what happens. So, Uh, Nicholas meets Alexandra Fyodorovna when
Speaker 1: he's in his early twenties. She's a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Speaker 1: She's a German and a Protestant. Her childhood had been rough.
Speaker 1: Her mother was depressed and constantly ill. Her brother had hemophilia,
Speaker 1: which was called the English disease because it was so
Speaker 1: common with royalty. Um, and he died bleeding from bleeding
Speaker 1: after he fell out of a window. When she was six,
Speaker 1: her mom died along with her favorite sister, from diphtheria.
Speaker 1: So Alexandra is always going to be kind of nervous
Speaker 1: and scared of losing everyone around her because that's how
Speaker 1: her childhood goes, because that's what happened, because that's what
Speaker 1: happened obviously. Yeah, that's like being like, oh man, I'm
Speaker 1: afraid I'm going to vomit because I vomit literally every day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's and she she grows into an unpleasant person, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's understandable, like why she does a lot
Speaker 1: of the things she does. Her background makes it makes sense.
Speaker 1: Tense all the time. Yeah, she's just never okay with anything. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and so she's she is, though kind of insufferable.
Speaker 1: She's like a lot to deal with. And all of
Speaker 1: the Romanovs except for Nicholas, feel this way about her,
Speaker 1: like he falls in love immediately and the rest of
Speaker 1: his family's like her. We've all been there. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is that kind of story. Somebody that's like really into
Speaker 1: the person they're dating, and we're all just like okay,
Speaker 1: But like, is it like a different person? Yeah? Is
Speaker 1: she completely different every moment that we're not around? Um?
Speaker 1: Or is she like, are do you have like a
Speaker 1: different plane of existence? Is she's saying different things in
Speaker 1: the quantum realm that we're not seeing here? Yeah? Is
Speaker 1: he just like hiding everything about himself when he's around
Speaker 1: us and only plays beer pong when he's around us
Speaker 1: and the rest of the time he has a personality? Um.
Speaker 1: So there's other reasons why Alexandra isn't popular as a
Speaker 1: choice for Nicholas's partner. For one thing, she's Protestant, right,
Speaker 1: all of the Romanovs you have to be Orthodox, you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're like the Russian Orthodox Church. It's you're the
Speaker 1: head of it, as these are. Your wife can't be
Speaker 1: a Protestant um. And Yeah, there's other reasons. There's like
Speaker 1: weird royal bloodline reasons, I don't we need to get into.
Speaker 1: There's like a lot of reasons people are not happy
Speaker 1: with this, this this match. Um. But Nicholas is in
Speaker 1: love with this woman, um, and she's in love with him. UM.
Speaker 1: But there's like a years of conflict, right, they don't
Speaker 1: get their way right away. Um, And it says a
Speaker 1: lot about how strongly he felt that he goes through
Speaker 1: the effort because there's like years of him trying to
Speaker 1: convince his father and his father refuses. Um. Like most
Speaker 1: love struck men, who can he decides to go on
Speaker 1: a road trip to clear his head. Um and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, well, I might as well go traveling, yeah,
Speaker 1: on the train, because they have bad luck with those
Speaker 1: trains and boats, and they have bad luck on this.
Speaker 1: He and his brother Georgie go to I think Greece,
Speaker 1: and Georgie gets tuberculosis, which eventually he kills him. Um,
Speaker 1: So he has to head back home to like slowly
Speaker 1: die of tv um. But Nikki gets to go to
Speaker 1: Japan with his other friend and relative, the Prince of
Speaker 1: Greece uh and this doesn't go great either, so they
Speaker 1: spent up. The Russians usually have great luck with Japan,
Speaker 1: Nicholas especially, so Nikki reads mostly romance novels and just
Speaker 1: kind of walks around Nagasaki buying souvenirs. While he's in Japan,
Speaker 1: Um hangs out with his cousin the Prince of Greece,
Speaker 1: and since Prince George this is funny. Prince George has
Speaker 1: a tattoo, and so Nikki decides to get one too,
Speaker 1: of a dragon on his right floe arm. What a web.
Speaker 1: This is a little bit of a weep. Right, goes
Speaker 1: to Japan and gets a dragon tattoo, comes back there
Speaker 1: in like a like a black trench coat. He gets katana. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are better than dubbed? It's very funny. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: gets real into anime during this period of wall scrolls
Speaker 1: in the palace. There's there, there's there's rioters at the
Speaker 1: gates that he's building a gunda. It's just we'll make it.
Speaker 1: So he's just kind of there to have a good time,
Speaker 1: you know. But Japan has, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this about Japan has a pretty intense right wing
Speaker 1: um and they start developing all these conspiracy theories that
Speaker 1: he's secretly in Japan to spy on their weaknesses so
Speaker 1: Russia can attack. They credit him with being a much
Speaker 1: more capable person than he is. The Japanese not always
Speaker 1: stoked on outside influence in any right, right. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: a lot of people are real honory about this and
Speaker 1: they're angry, like he doesn't The first thing he does
Speaker 1: isn't go about or the emperor. He like goes and
Speaker 1: does other stuff first because he's kind of on vacation.
Speaker 1: He's he's not trying to be disrespectful, he's just like
Speaker 1: doesn't really doesn't know anything about Japan. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: there's nothing about the Yamato clan. Yeah in English, Uh,
Speaker 1: romance novels, Yeah, exactly, which is all he knows. So
Speaker 1: one of these paranoid right wingers is a cop names Sanzo,
Speaker 1: who was supposed to be one of them in guarding
Speaker 1: the futures are And I'm going to read a quote
Speaker 1: from Japan today here. According to the Julypaper eyewitness account,
Speaker 1: Sanzo quote drew his sword and struck at the Prince's neck.
Speaker 1: His Royal Highness, who was writing at the head of
Speaker 1: a long line of rickshaws with two coolies drawing him,
Speaker 1: jumped back as Sando cut at him, and the force
Speaker 1: of the blow was broken by his cap. However, he
Speaker 1: was cut on the head, and it is said that
Speaker 1: a small piece of the skull was chipped off. Prince George,
Speaker 1: seeing the attack from Afar, jumped out of his rickshaw
Speaker 1: and ran to after Sando, striking him with his bamboo cane.
Speaker 1: It did not bring him down, but fortunately two rickshaw
Speaker 1: drivers abandoned their strollers and sprinted towards Sando. The attack,
Speaker 1: which occurred in only a few seconds, rippled across two
Speaker 1: competing nations. Nicholas suffered all his life from headaches and
Speaker 1: had been traumatized enough to ask every May eleven that
Speaker 1: the Russian public prey for his well being. The nine
Speaker 1: centimeter wound would be a lifelong reminder of how close
Speaker 1: to death he'd been. This is like a pretty serious incident.
Speaker 1: That's an assassination attempt. Yeah. Yeah, a dude tries to
Speaker 1: kill him with a katana um and get pretty close.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how that goes because it's you're you're
Speaker 1: looking at a sort of likely starts himself to death
Speaker 1: in prison. That's what I was wondering, is if he
Speaker 1: was forced to, if he chose to or force to
Speaker 1: commit su and the to the two rickshaw drivers who
Speaker 1: saved the Czar's life, the Japan gives them a it's
Speaker 1: like thirty six dollar a month pension, which I think
Speaker 1: is is decent at the time. Um, but Nicholas gives
Speaker 1: them like a fortune, like dollars, like the equivalent of
Speaker 1: of of that much at the time in in roubles,
Speaker 1: which is like a fortune dollars. Yeah, he makes them rich. Um,
Speaker 1: so at least you do. He he has someone who's
Speaker 1: capable of being like, well, I owe, yeah, I should probably,
Speaker 1: I should probably let it be known that you get
Speaker 1: rich if you stop Bazar from getting murdered instead of
Speaker 1: we get rich. Yeah when there is murdered. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So when he gets back from his his his trip,
Speaker 1: he meets a ballerina with the last name I'm not
Speaker 1: going to try to pronounce it starts with the kuh.
Speaker 1: He feels deeply he falls in love with this girl.
Speaker 1: He's really conflicted about the fact that he's still in
Speaker 1: love with Alexandra, but he's now fallen in love with
Speaker 1: this other girl. And he writes in his diary, would
Speaker 1: it be right to conclude from this that I am
Speaker 1: very amorous? Which no, dude, falling in love with two
Speaker 1: people over the course of your entire life does not
Speaker 1: make you very amorous. I mean it's cute though he
Speaker 1: loves love. What can you say about that? You know? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's cute. Um, it's oh, this must mean I'm a player,
Speaker 1: I've I've fallen in love with the second person. Um,
Speaker 1: they do. Fuck. This is encouraged by the Romanov family.
Speaker 1: They're kind of hoping, like his dad seems to be hoping,
Speaker 1: like maybe this will take his mind off of you know,
Speaker 1: encouraged while it was happening, We're all around him cheering
Speaker 1: him on. It's it's not all that far from that,
Speaker 1: like they're not actually in the room, but like everyone
Speaker 1: is like really setting this up for him. Um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't stop him from being in love with Alexandre.
Speaker 1: He does eventually wear the rest of his family down
Speaker 1: and he gets engaged to marry her. They go back
Speaker 1: to England to celebrate with the English side of the family.
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria always liked to see her grandchildren married off,
Speaker 1: and so she hosts a party at one point for
Speaker 1: the new you know, crown Prince and his his uh,
Speaker 1: his wife to be um and she invites a rich
Speaker 1: Jewish man to the party, right, Queen Victoria, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: everyone the English relatives are like fine with this, they
Speaker 1: don't think much of it, but Nicholas is terrified of him.
Speaker 1: He won't go near him, like, it becomes obvious that
Speaker 1: he's treating him like he's got the plague, and all
Speaker 1: of his English relatives make fun of him for being
Speaker 1: a racist. In a letter home to his mother, Nicholas writes,
Speaker 1: I tried to keep away as much as I could
Speaker 1: and not to talk. Alright, bro, I know again can
Speaker 1: understand how racist this dude is. I'm pretty sure he
Speaker 1: poisoned the punch bowl. How specifically racist? Because one are
Speaker 1: the weird things about him. He has his tire pretty
Speaker 1: much entire time. Azar. He has a guy who's kind
Speaker 1: of like a body assistant almost named John Hercules, who
Speaker 1: is a black American man who like Hercules incredible name, Yeah,
Speaker 1: unbelievable name. It's going to go right past that. By
Speaker 1: the way, John seems to really like this gig. You
Speaker 1: think I think he's treated well, he's paid well. He
Speaker 1: like goes on vacation for months every year and like
Speaker 1: comes back with jam for the royal family that like
Speaker 1: they can't get in Russia. Um. There's rumors that like
Speaker 1: after the monarchy falls, he like spends the rest of
Speaker 1: his life dressed in like a fading like household uniform,
Speaker 1: wandering around Moscow, Like I don't know. It seems to
Speaker 1: be like a pretty good situation for him until everything
Speaker 1: falls apart. One of the main parts of this person's
Speaker 1: job was to deliver jam. No, that wasn't his job,
Speaker 1: that was just what he did. He would go back,
Speaker 1: he would go back to the US for like vacation
Speaker 1: to see his family, and he would bring back guava
Speaker 1: jam because all of like the royal kids loved it,
Speaker 1: and he was like part of the household, so he
Speaker 1: like he cared about the kids and he wanted to
Speaker 1: bring him jam. You know, hopefully it wasn't that jam
Speaker 1: from the f d A episode you got. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think you would. You would be very careful
Speaker 1: about your jam buying if you're purchasing for the Czars kids.
Speaker 1: Um So, Nikki and family get back from England, um
Speaker 1: and the Emperor. Pretty much immediately his dad gets sick.
Speaker 1: Um probably all the drinking didn't help. It's a kidney
Speaker 1: infection jam jam poisoning. He gets jammed. Yeah, m Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think John Hercules was in the picture at
Speaker 1: this point. Again, outstanding name. Um So. Alexander the Third
Speaker 1: dies on November nine at the age of forty nine
Speaker 1: h Nicholas was there, as was his cousin Sandro, who
Speaker 1: later recalled he took me by the arm and led
Speaker 1: me downstairs to his room, whom we embraced and cried together.
Speaker 1: Then he exclaimed, Sandro, what am I going to do?
Speaker 1: What's going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia,
Speaker 1: to Alex to Mother, to all of Russia. I'm not
Speaker 1: ready to be czar. I never wanted to become one.
Speaker 1: I have no idea of even how to talk to
Speaker 1: the ministers. It's a good sign, not a great sign.
Speaker 1: And again Simon wat Fior notes that, like, it's pretty
Speaker 1: normal for you to freak out when you're about to
Speaker 1: become the r which does make sense, right, Like you
Speaker 1: know not, but but Nikki is convinced from the beginning
Speaker 1: that like, I'm not going to be a good czar,
Speaker 1: and by god, he's right. Might be the only time,
Speaker 1: but he is right. He's gonna suck at this ah
Speaker 1: and that story is coming. But you know what's coming. First,
Speaker 1: you're plug dobles, Oh plugable, So I thought you were.
Speaker 1: I thought we were doing um sponsorships. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: We're done with that funk. That ship well, I don't
Speaker 1: know you mentioned this earlier before, but I have cool
Speaker 1: friends and I have a podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends.
Speaker 1: Can check that out at picture on dot com slash
Speaker 1: Jeff May where I have lots of other stuff like
Speaker 1: ug Fine with Kim Crawl, which is a monthly show,
Speaker 1: and I got other stuff coming that's going to be
Speaker 1: really exciting. You can also check out Tom and Jeff
Speaker 1: watch Batman on the game Fully Unemployed network, as well
Speaker 1: as Unpopular Opinion and you Don't Even Like Sports, both
Speaker 1: on the un pops Network. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram and hey there, Jeff Row. That's fun,
Speaker 1: Like Jeff stalk him. I mean that this is a
Speaker 1: way better way to do it than the last time
Speaker 1: that you said my name on a podcast. Yes, I
Speaker 1: do sorry for alleging that you were friends with Gil
Speaker 1: and Maxwell. I mixed you up with another Jeff. It
Speaker 1: was so it was it was was reading me Twitter
Speaker 1: at the time, but trying to think of Jeff Davis.
Speaker 1: It was. It was so funny because one person did
Speaker 1: call me an old pedophile in my um inbox messages,
Speaker 1: which means that they are an early adopter of your podcast. Right.
Speaker 1: That thing was only up for like an hour and
Speaker 1: then Rob, Yeah, we fixed that pretty quick. I've made
Speaker 1: a terrible error. Deed, we have to fix this now.
Speaker 1: We shared a shared listener contact me was like, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is true or not, but
Speaker 1: you might want to look into this. Yeah, I write
Speaker 1: your message to me about that one. And then I
Speaker 1: said I was like, hey, guys, real quick, love the show,
Speaker 1: wondering why it's said that I was friends with a
Speaker 1: billionaire sex pedophile. Yeah, that was a mistake. Um, but
Speaker 1: everyone I think I enjoyed Jeff May best friends with
Speaker 1: Momarkaddafi Jeff May who Yeah he was daffy. Al Right,
Speaker 1: well that's gonna do it for us. Now we will
Speaker 1: come back with God, there's so much more z O
Speaker 1: Nicholas to go, Um, Jesus Christ, a second Nicholas. There
Speaker 1: were too many Nicholaises, Nichols, Nicholson's No, that's something else.
Speaker 1: Nichols son, Nickels, sons of them, nickelsons of bitches. That's
Speaker 1: right there. Bam h