Speaker 1: Ah, what's mummified my persons? This is Robert Evans, host
Speaker 1: of Behind the Bastards, here with some exciting news from
Speaker 1: the world of museums. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art
Speaker 1: and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have adopted the
Speaker 1: term mummified remains and mummified persons to refer to mummies.
Speaker 1: So we're good, everybody. Finally, the long problem of people
Speaker 1: not respecting mummies is over. Uh. We we did it, everybody.
Speaker 1: I just I know there's a lot of activists out
Speaker 1: there in the streets who have been fighting for mummy
Speaker 1: rights for a long time, and I just wanted to
Speaker 1: let you all know it was all worth it. Jeff May,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about mummified persons? I'm calling them
Speaker 1: mummies and I don't care. Let the woke mob come
Speaker 1: from me. All right, they are mummies, They've always been mummies.
Speaker 1: I'm not Are they going to go back and change
Speaker 1: the classic horror film to the mummified person? Absolutely not, nonsense.
Speaker 1: Is it the m word now? Yeah? Horrible. If anyone
Speaker 1: ever calls it a mummified person to me, I am
Speaker 1: I am going to read from the Book of the dead,
Speaker 1: and I know from the movie The Mummy how badly
Speaker 1: that can go. I would give somebody a d d T.
Speaker 1: If somebody was just like, um, do you mean mummified persons?
Speaker 1: I would immediately just jake the snake Roberts d d
Speaker 1: T them into the ground. Now, I know you're talking
Speaker 1: about a martial arts term, but I assumed you were
Speaker 1: talking about the pesticide that was made famous in the
Speaker 1: book Silent Spring. And now I assume that you always
Speaker 1: carry a full canister of DDT on you it all. Yes,
Speaker 1: I gotta take I gotta fight malaria. Now it's I
Speaker 1: would say martial arts term is that's loose? Is that
Speaker 1: I would say a professional wrestling term. That's where you
Speaker 1: put somebody in sort of like a like a headlock
Speaker 1: is kind of a thing here, and then you just
Speaker 1: kind of catapult the top of their head into the ground. Well,
Speaker 1: that wrestling is the only martial art I respect um.
Speaker 1: So there, it's the only one you can do while
Speaker 1: you dressed like a like a garbage manner. Yeah, Jeff,
Speaker 1: this is Behind the Bastards. It's a podcast about you know,
Speaker 1: people who aren't great um in in history. Speaking of which,
Speaker 1: today are subject in part two is still Nikolai Cechesco.
Speaker 1: How are you feeling about Nikki as we as we
Speaker 1: go into to part two? We love a bastard nick
Speaker 1: on this show with with you and I together here. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's he's something, he's something, He's something,
Speaker 1: all right, he's he's he earned the name. I know
Speaker 1: we were building up to it last episode. It's fun
Speaker 1: to see that it's going to build up to the
Speaker 1: crescendo that we're going to see here. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of background last episode. Gotta you
Speaker 1: gotta cover the background. Um, the you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like how if you really want to understand the
Speaker 1: humanity of a mummified person, you have to understand I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: what did you say? You son of a bit? Also
Speaker 1: a side note here that the Chicago Studies what was
Speaker 1: the name of the place, the Chicago, Plicago Institute of
Speaker 1: Oriental Study something like that, is that it's it's referring
Speaker 1: to the region. I know, I get it seems like
Speaker 1: it's a way to work. Okay, you know what you
Speaker 1: do kind of you do kind of want to know
Speaker 1: when they started calling at that and like, yeah, I wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder Chicago anyway, whatever, I'm sure it's fine. I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's fine. You know who's not fine, Marshall Antonescu.
Speaker 1: So this guy winds up and again Marshall Antonescu. He's
Speaker 1: this interesting character because he's ideologically he is not a
Speaker 1: guy who is particularly interested in fascism. Um, but he
Speaker 1: winds up in bed with these fascists and becomes like
Speaker 1: one of the worst of them in terms of like
Speaker 1: his actual death toll for a stump of fascism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's weird. He's he's he's he's a fascinating, geting figure
Speaker 1: because yeah, he's the forest gump of of of the
Speaker 1: Axis powers. So under Antonescuu Romania again when kind of
Speaker 1: you know, there's this whole World War thing that starts
Speaker 1: up again. And the last time Romania had gone with uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Britain, France, Russia, uh and and and sided
Speaker 1: with them, and it had gone terribly for Romania. Right,
Speaker 1: the war kind of ends and they get some land,
Speaker 1: but they don't do well. All of their oil fields
Speaker 1: are lit on fire, all of their young men get killed. Um.
Speaker 1: And under Antonescu they're going to back the opposite side
Speaker 1: and the next World War. And you know what, Jeff,
Speaker 1: it doesn't go well for them either. World Wars not
Speaker 1: a good call for Romania. Yeah, they're not. They're not
Speaker 1: the champions of World Wars. No, it only really goes
Speaker 1: well for us in Switzerland. But um, you know that's
Speaker 1: a story for another day. So Romania, and again, the
Speaker 1: kind of the reason Antonescu sides with the Nazis, there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff going on, but one of
Speaker 1: the big ones is that he wants to get back
Speaker 1: best Arabia, which based on the treaty that the Nazis
Speaker 1: its side with the Soviets. The Soviets got to take
Speaker 1: from Romania just a little bit earlier. So the Romanians
Speaker 1: side with the Nazis, who would agreed to give up
Speaker 1: this territory that now the Nazis are saying, hey, if
Speaker 1: you side with us, you can get this territory back,
Speaker 1: which may seem like a shitty deal to you, Um,
Speaker 1: maybe not trustworthy of the Nazis. I know, this is
Speaker 1: going to like blow a lot of people's mind historically speaking,
Speaker 1: this is really going to cause some people's tops to
Speaker 1: pop here. Yeah, wild stuff. So Romanian troops fight alongside
Speaker 1: the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa, which works really well for
Speaker 1: a little while, right for there's a couple of months
Speaker 1: there where it seems like, hey, maybe a good call
Speaker 1: back in the Nazis. We're taking a lot of territory.
Speaker 1: Romania is suddenly much bigger. What a cool time. Um.
Speaker 1: So it goes really well for a little while. But
Speaker 1: then the bulk of Antonescue's military, the pride of Romania's army,
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of their young male population, winds up
Speaker 1: in a in an interesting position. They are put watching
Speaker 1: the flanks of the German I believe it's the sixth
Speaker 1: Army as it encircles Stalingrad. Now, jeff right, you think
Speaker 1: that's gonna play out? I don't know if anybody's ever
Speaker 1: heard of Stalingrad, but it's pretty well known as far
Speaker 1: as battles go. It's in like I would say, as
Speaker 1: far as battles go, that's a top three historically probably, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably a top three, very fair. Yeah. And if you're
Speaker 1: going to pick a position to be in in World
Speaker 1: War Two, there's a lot of bad ones, but one
Speaker 1: of the worst is watching the flanks of the German
Speaker 1: Army is the circle Stalin hard to get much worse
Speaker 1: than that, trying to get famed sniper ed Harrison to
Speaker 1: take out Jude Law. Yeah, Jude Law is fucking running
Speaker 1: rough shot over these Romanians. Um, it doesn't go well
Speaker 1: for them. Romanian military gets its ass handed to them
Speaker 1: shortly before the German military gets its ass handed to them,
Speaker 1: and things only get worse after that point. It doesn't
Speaker 1: go well after Stalingrad. Yeah yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: land war in Asia and all that beyond them too,
Speaker 1: Like the Russians. This is like the guy at the
Speaker 1: bar that tries to pick a fight with the bouncer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the friends like, I don't think that's a good idea. Man,
Speaker 1: This guy, you know, he got the job for a reason.
Speaker 1: And it's like I've taken a couple of mm A classes.
Speaker 1: I think I's like three times your size. Man. There
Speaker 1: is a scar on his face bigger than your fists,
Speaker 1: not a real tooth in his mouth at that point
Speaker 1: in time. Yeah. Um so yeah, thanks go downhill from there. Um.
Speaker 1: And despite being again on paper, Antonescu, he is not
Speaker 1: a guy that has a long history of like anti
Speaker 1: Semitic agitation. He's not a guy who I think under
Speaker 1: his own devices, would have cared much in either way
Speaker 1: about kind of Nazi policies in that regard more of
Speaker 1: a hobbyist. But his policies against Romania's Jewish population lead
Speaker 1: to an unprecedented level of mass death in Romania. Um
Speaker 1: and this is not the subject for this episode today.
Speaker 1: We will talk about this at some point. Antonescue probably
Speaker 1: deserves his own episode. But more Jews are murdered by
Speaker 1: the Romanian government, but then by the government of any
Speaker 1: other acts as state besides Germany itself. Um, it is
Speaker 1: it is a japan didn't have a lot of options there,
Speaker 1: although there are a couple of interesting cases. I mean
Speaker 1: there's there's there's a couple of interesting cases of Japanese
Speaker 1: officials who saved Jews, um and parts of the world
Speaker 1: from the Nazis, and at least one interesting case of
Speaker 1: a Nazi who saves Chinese citizens from rampaging Japanese troops.
Speaker 1: That's why World War Two lots of lots of neat
Speaker 1: interesting history moments there. Yeah, it's like each country of
Speaker 1: doing horrendous things is like these other guys need to
Speaker 1: call down. Kind of seems like there's some got bad
Speaker 1: guys on the Axis side, they're massacring the wrong people. So, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Antonescu, nightmare monster. UM kills about three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: Romanian Jews. I think something like that UM. Now. Supporters
Speaker 1: of Antonescu, because he's kind of been rehabilitated by some
Speaker 1: corners of Romanian culture recently, will note that he also
Speaker 1: saved three hundred thousand Jewish lives by refusing to deport
Speaker 1: those people to people to Poland when the Nazis asked
Speaker 1: what he could kill them himself. I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: you get credit for saving three hundred thousand Jewish lives
Speaker 1: when you've just killed three hundred and eighty thousand or
Speaker 1: so Jewish people. I don't know that. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to really give you credit. In Vegas terms, they
Speaker 1: call that a push. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that's UM.
Speaker 1: I feel I feel weird being like, look at all
Speaker 1: these lives he's saved. Does he's massacring um like a
Speaker 1: city's worth of human beings. We're not gonna we're not
Speaker 1: gonna be doing that here on this show. That said,
Speaker 1: we're also not going to be getting that into the
Speaker 1: Holocaust in Romania. Not that obviously it's a worthwhile topic,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to just like, you know, we
Speaker 1: should just I'm just trying to acknowledge the extent of
Speaker 1: how bad it was. We'll talk about it more detail
Speaker 1: at some other point. So they don't know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Um, Jeff, we may need to sit down
Speaker 1: and talk about that after class. Don't you have a
Speaker 1: history degree? I'm like, I don't know how I got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's from Florida, so they're not allowed to have
Speaker 1: books Diaria and Frank hasn't gotten approved by De Santis yet. Yeah. Um. So,
Speaker 1: as the war unraveled, resistance to Antonescue coalesced behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: and there's this alliance of like liberals and royalists led
Speaker 1: by the new King Michael and a guy named Giulio
Speaker 1: Manu who's the head of the National Peasants Party we
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode, and they decide we're
Speaker 1: going to do a coup and get Antonescu out of here.
Speaker 1: But it's kind of useless for them to do a
Speaker 1: coup if the Allies aren't going to lie stop doing
Speaker 1: a war on Romania, right, Like, there was no real
Speaker 1: point in getting this guy out if they're just gonna
Speaker 1: have to fight the war more. Um, I mean, to
Speaker 1: be fair, historically speaking, we've seen it happen where people
Speaker 1: do a coup and then they pull out of the
Speaker 1: war and they're like, yeah, but it's also they're trying
Speaker 1: to like make it less messy than it's other one,
Speaker 1: because like this, the Russians do that, right, and in
Speaker 1: World War One, you get your revolution and then the
Speaker 1: revolutionary government kind of awkwardly winds up still at war
Speaker 1: with Germany for a while and it's it's it doesn't
Speaker 1: doesn't go great. Um. So they have this back channel
Speaker 1: to the Allies and the Brits, who is the people
Speaker 1: they're talking with directly, are like, look, we'd love it
Speaker 1: if you get Antonescu out, be real great for us.
Speaker 1: But Stalin's really the guy you got to talk to
Speaker 1: because your romania. Um so we are not going to
Speaker 1: be your main point of contact. They're like, hey, you
Speaker 1: know who you need to talk is too, is our
Speaker 1: very stable friend, are sane and totally reason bold buddy
Speaker 1: Jason to send guy now ja Stall To be fair,
Speaker 1: it's not an unreasonable thing. He says, Hey, look, you know,
Speaker 1: if you want to work something out with us and
Speaker 1: coup this guy, that's great, it will save me some trouble.
Speaker 1: But you gotta bring the Romanian Communist Party into the
Speaker 1: coup government, right, They've got to be part of it,
Speaker 1: which is again not an inherently unreasonable thing, except for
Speaker 1: the fact that again there's like seven hundred Romanian communists, right,
Speaker 1: so it's not a major party that will take an
Speaker 1: afternoon to get me. Yeah, exactly, so, man, you the
Speaker 1: National Peasants Party guy is like, of course, look, man,
Speaker 1: we're this is a bad situation. I'm not gonna fight
Speaker 1: you over this matter. Um. But he is like, there's
Speaker 1: not really a whole lot of communists in Romania, Joseph Stalin,
Speaker 1: who do you recommend? We put In? And Stalin and
Speaker 1: the Soviets recommend a law professor named Lucres Patronascano, patresh Canoe.
Speaker 1: Sorry Lucres, you, I'm sorry. I did look these names up.
Speaker 1: It's hard to keep them all straight. Lucreshu, petrash Canoe, Um,
Speaker 1: and he and Menu. They plan to basically take Antonescue
Speaker 1: down by inviting him over for dinner and having the
Speaker 1: king be like, hey, Antonescue, you're under arrest now. Funk
Speaker 1: off um, which is kind of a funny way to
Speaker 1: do it. Yea exactly on party. Come over, No, no,
Speaker 1: it's fine. We just want to all hang out together
Speaker 1: in a room. It's gonna be totally cool. How do
Speaker 1: you don't agree on a lot of stuff? Come on
Speaker 1: over to my house, Come on in a room. Leave
Speaker 1: your guards, leave your guards, um. And it's very funny.
Speaker 1: The coup actually works great. And there's this moment where
Speaker 1: like they're like, hey, Antonescue, do you have a gun?
Speaker 1: And he's like, I don't need a gun. You know,
Speaker 1: my authority doesn't derive from a gun. Um. And then
Speaker 1: they're like, okay, cool, well you're under arrest and then
Speaker 1: we're gonna have you executed and they do. It works
Speaker 1: out great, This part works out really good for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: brought that gun and and the National Peasants Party guy
Speaker 1: Manu is kind of an old man at this point.
Speaker 1: He's like, look, man running a coup government, that's young
Speaker 1: man's work. So this communist petresh Canoe winds up being
Speaker 1: kind of the first person to take a public role
Speaker 1: in the new government. And he's actually a pretty reasonable
Speaker 1: dude all things considered, Like I think he handles this
Speaker 1: about as well as it could have been handled. Um. So.
Speaker 1: One of the things that happens, though, is because this
Speaker 1: guy is kind of your public facing dude, and the
Speaker 1: National Peasants Party, all of the Liberals who are much
Speaker 1: more numerous, and the royal like folks who are much
Speaker 1: more numerous and actually in like the you would suspect
Speaker 1: be the people who would wind up in charge are
Speaker 1: all kind of scared, right because they're they've just cooed
Speaker 1: the other leader. There's still a bunch of German soldiers
Speaker 1: in the country, so they don't want to make too
Speaker 1: much of a public stink. Meanwhile, the Communists, even though
Speaker 1: there's not many of them, these guys have been beaten
Speaker 1: and in prisoned and starved. They're all like hard sons
Speaker 1: of bitches. So the Communists are like, why don't we
Speaker 1: just immediately take power? Um, which they do, and it
Speaker 1: works pretty well for them. They they get in and
Speaker 1: they basically like put themselves in a lot of positions
Speaker 1: that are going to to to kind of give them
Speaker 1: the ability to control the direction of Romania at least
Speaker 1: help with that. Obviously, the fact that the Soviets are
Speaker 1: so nearby helps too, and the Romanian or the Red
Speaker 1: Army enters Romania soon after that. So the Communists kind
Speaker 1: of despite the fact that up until this point there
Speaker 1: had been very few of them and they'd had no power,
Speaker 1: when World War two wins, they're kind of the preeminent
Speaker 1: power in Romania. Um and Stalin. Yeah they stepped up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they stepped up. And they have an election and show
Speaker 1: Cescu gets to practice his faking at election skills, um
Speaker 1: and and goes about making sure that the Communists win
Speaker 1: that election, even though again there've been about seven hundred
Speaker 1: of them in the company prior in the country prior
Speaker 1: to to World War Two. To be fair, if the
Speaker 1: people that actually stepped up to rule are running for something,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be the worst to be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I'll vote for the guys that actually said
Speaker 1: they yeah no again. And it's it's not an unreasonable
Speaker 1: thing that as as Romanians in World War Two, you
Speaker 1: would see the Communists taking over, given everything that happened
Speaker 1: with the Nazis, and be like, maybe this will work
Speaker 1: out better. Hey, not like anything else had been working
Speaker 1: very well. It's the opposite of a Nazi economist. Nothing
Speaker 1: could go wrong. Let's let's try it. Um So Georgiu
Speaker 1: Day that that um, that peasant who had been like
Speaker 1: the uh the leader of that railroad union, um that
Speaker 1: had done all those strikes that chess Cou had helped support.
Speaker 1: He becomes one of the leaders of the country. Um.
Speaker 1: Now there's a bunch of this is it's more complicated
Speaker 1: than that Anna Poker. That other lady is also kind
Speaker 1: of one of the people who's running Romania initially after
Speaker 1: the communist kind of take over. But you know, you
Speaker 1: know how it goes. You get your show trials, you
Speaker 1: get your people start getting put in jail and locked
Speaker 1: up on bullshit charges, and over the course of time,
Speaker 1: George you Day kind of consolidates his power. One of
Speaker 1: the things that this means is that he executes this
Speaker 1: guy pro trash Canu who got the king out, who
Speaker 1: helped overthrow or who not the gout the king out,
Speaker 1: who got um antonescu at who like overthrew the dictator.
Speaker 1: They they come after this guy on bullshit charges and
Speaker 1: they kill his ass um It's so crazy when it's
Speaker 1: just such a throwaway thing and like and then they
Speaker 1: executed that guy. Let's move on. That cool dude you
Speaker 1: know that cool dude who was the communist that Stalin
Speaker 1: picked to take over and they fucking killed his ass. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and Parker, they get rid of Poker. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's as ugly as it usually is when
Speaker 1: a guy consolidates power. Um, it's it's a real end
Speaker 1: of the Godfather energy when that ship happens. And it's
Speaker 1: a gradual process. Um. And Nikolai Chachescu is a quiet
Speaker 1: figure for most of this. He does not stick his
Speaker 1: neck out, He does not try to take any big
Speaker 1: fancy jobs for himself. He sticks close today and he
Speaker 1: he kind of like just sort of keeps him as
Speaker 1: happy as possible. And I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
Speaker 1: quote from journalist cattle and Gruya here under the protective
Speaker 1: wing of day, whose favorite he had become. While in prison,
Speaker 1: Chauchescu struggled, flattered, adapted, worked and raised himself up step
Speaker 1: by step, tenaciously, stubbornly and with a real instinct for power.
Speaker 1: At seven, he was the leader of the Communist Youth
Speaker 1: Organization and later of the Central Committee of the Romanian
Speaker 1: Workers Party. At twenty eight, party instructor in Constanta and
Speaker 1: Olinia at twenty nine deputy in the Grand National Assembly,
Speaker 1: after he had mobilized motorized troops in the electoral precinct
Speaker 1: to convince electors to place ballots in the urns which
Speaker 1: had already been filled by the communists ahead of time.
Speaker 1: His meteoric rise continued, culminating with his election at age
Speaker 1: thirty seven to the Politbureau as Minister of the Interior. Now,
Speaker 1: this gave him a lot of control over what's called
Speaker 1: the Securitat, which is Romania's answer to the k g B,
Speaker 1: which means he is in a position to put people
Speaker 1: into the Securitat, the organization that is surveilling everybody in
Speaker 1: the country, um sweeping out corruption. Good position to be
Speaker 1: in if you're a guy like this and everyone's kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, yeah, we want like, you want someone
Speaker 1: dumb and pliable in that job if you're not going
Speaker 1: to be running that if you're someone with power in
Speaker 1: the Romanian communist infrastructure and you can't be doing that job,
Speaker 1: you want a dumb person in that job, right, You
Speaker 1: want somebody who, like you feel like it's controllable, and
Speaker 1: everyone kind of feels like Chowchesku is just sort of
Speaker 1: this like not a very serious person, right, So they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: give him the job. You know, what's the worst that
Speaker 1: could happen. He's not that, he's not that dangerous. Um. Uh,
Speaker 1: the worst that could happen is pretty rough. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: worst that could happen is about to occur. Um. But
Speaker 1: for a while, everyone's like, yeah, you know, at least,
Speaker 1: you know, if someone's going to have that job and
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be me, we might as well have
Speaker 1: it be this lick spell who kisses everybody's ass and
Speaker 1: who wasn't very threatening. He's not, you know, really worth fearing,
Speaker 1: and he's not worth fearing as long as George you
Speaker 1: day is is healthy and and doing good. Um. And
Speaker 1: given that he is an old time communist street fighter
Speaker 1: who smokes like a chimney, surely he's going to live forever. Yep.
Speaker 1: That's classic. Yeah yeah. Um. So, as Nikolai climbed the
Speaker 1: ranks of the Romanian Communist Party, there's this combination of
Speaker 1: as kissing and convincing everyone else that he's too dumb
Speaker 1: to be a threat. His wife Elena experienced numerous career
Speaker 1: benefits as well. All of the different wonderful things that
Speaker 1: nepotism can provide to you. He's a plus wife guy.
Speaker 1: By the way, Oh my god, you have never wifed
Speaker 1: a guy as hard as this guy. Wife's that shout
Speaker 1: out to this guy for just being just like a
Speaker 1: He's like the Rob Zombie of wife guys of Romania,
Speaker 1: just being like, I don't care what you can or
Speaker 1: can't you. I'm still giving you opportunities. I wish, I
Speaker 1: wish I could. Given that this is Romania, I should
Speaker 1: have been able to make a Dragula joke, but um,
Speaker 1: I'm really not sure how to work it out. I
Speaker 1: threw your curveball with that. It's not it's not coming
Speaker 1: to me, Jeff. It's not coming to me, And I
Speaker 1: feel ashamed for that. Um, But you at home make
Speaker 1: your own, make your own joke about Rob Zombies, hit song,
Speaker 1: Dracula and the Romanian historical figure Dracula. Well, Jeff, and
Speaker 1: I listen to some ads, Jeff, that that all got
Speaker 1: me pumped up. I'm gonna be honest, man, I'm going
Speaker 1: to consume all of the things that were just advertised,
Speaker 1: gonna slam them in the back of my Dracula was
Speaker 1: that his car was that Rob Zombies car. Well, it's
Speaker 1: the monster's car, isn't it. Are you serious? Is that
Speaker 1: song about the monsters? Yeah? I think Dracula is the
Speaker 1: name of their car. That's cool. It's cool because he
Speaker 1: wrote a cool, heavy song about Are you serious? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a reason, oh my god. And it
Speaker 1: is based on the drag racer Dracula for the Munsters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't know how I know that really well, aside
Speaker 1: from the fact that I'm I I study this ship,
Speaker 1: the pinball machine, the munsters pinball machine has a dragula thing. Wow. Wow,
Speaker 1: uh that's right. That's kind of a baffling piece of
Speaker 1: pop culture. Why did that song go so hard if
Speaker 1: it's about the Munsters? Because Rob Zombie did it. I
Speaker 1: guess that makes sense. It does make sense that Rob
Speaker 1: Zombie would do a song about the munsters and he
Speaker 1: would go hard. Yeah, and he would, he would he
Speaker 1: would go baffling lee hard with it. Speaking of baffling
Speaker 1: Lee hard, Nikolai is baffling Lee hard for his wife Elena,
Speaker 1: who sucks. Ass um. That actually worked out pretty well,
Speaker 1: so nailed it. There we go. As Nikolai climbs the
Speaker 1: ranks of the party, He's he starts putting his wife
Speaker 1: in jobs. Now, at first, she's just kind of like
Speaker 1: raising their kids and stuff while he's in you know,
Speaker 1: moving on his way up to the polit bureau. But
Speaker 1: she's got this ambition to be a chemist from the
Speaker 1: time when she worked in a legal pill mill um.
Speaker 1: She thinks it would be really cool to be to
Speaker 1: be in chemistry, So she takes starts taking college classes
Speaker 1: in chemistry, hoping that she can achieve her lifelong dream
Speaker 1: of being a serious scientist. Now, in most cases, that's
Speaker 1: a perfectly respectable thing to do. In fact, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of any any woman who could raise three kids,
Speaker 1: support her powerful husband in his career, and get a
Speaker 1: complex degree in science, that's incredibly impressive. Yeah. Absolutely. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Elena was nearly illiterate, and she had no interest in
Speaker 1: actually being taught anything by the tutors that Nikolai got
Speaker 1: for her, who become increasingly desperate with the fact that like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we have to we have to teach
Speaker 1: her how to be a chemist, and she does not
Speaker 1: want to read anything or like chemist. Yeah, she wants
Speaker 1: to put on a white coat and poor things and beakers. Really,
Speaker 1: isn't it like that? I think it's a Romanian textbook.
Speaker 1: There's like a Roman or there's a textbook I forget
Speaker 1: what country it's in that has Jesse Pinkman on the
Speaker 1: cover of their chemistry thing of him. Uh, I'm looking
Speaker 1: that up right now. Um. Yeah, Jesse Pinkman textbook cover
Speaker 1: should give you exactly worth if it's from Romania. That's
Speaker 1: the symmetry for that is unbelievable. Yeah, because it is
Speaker 1: just satisfying to see because you know, it's just a
Speaker 1: cursory Google image search for chemist and that one clearly
Speaker 1: has the best look because it was, you know, directed
Speaker 1: by this I think that language is Romanian. Um, it's
Speaker 1: definitely not Romane. Oh Sri Lanka Okay, Okay, that's just shame.
Speaker 1: Um that that would have been beautiful Jesse Pinkman. Jesse
Speaker 1: Pinkman actually is objectively a better chemist than Elena czechesscu Um,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunate because of the job she's about to have.
Speaker 1: So these tutors who are just struggling to teach her
Speaker 1: something get a brief reprieve because she's caught cheating on
Speaker 1: her exams and expelled from university in the mid nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: But By nineteen six, Nikki is in the polit bureau.
Speaker 1: So you can't keep her out of university just because
Speaker 1: she's cheating in a danger to herself and everyone else
Speaker 1: around her. So he forces the Scientific Establishment of Romania
Speaker 1: to give his wife a job. She's made a junior
Speaker 1: technician at the Central Institute for Chemical Research, and then
Speaker 1: she gets promoted to run the institute five years later.
Speaker 1: Now again, her credentials are was kicked out of college
Speaker 1: for cheating on her exams at this point, so five
Speaker 1: years it's time to learn r Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can.
Speaker 1: You learn that. You learn most of that ship on
Speaker 1: the jet, like Jesse Pinkman. Actually, you're gonna learn most
Speaker 1: of that ship on the job anyway, right. He didn't
Speaker 1: do good in school either, he flunked out. And look
Speaker 1: at how Jesse did. Yeah, exactly. So she was as
Speaker 1: bad at this as you would expect. When her scientists
Speaker 1: would request supplies of ethyl alcohol, which is needed for
Speaker 1: a lot of experiments, she would turn them down with
Speaker 1: a note that said she knew they just wanted the
Speaker 1: alcohol to get drunk with. Now I'm gonna say this
Speaker 1: for al I'm gonna I'm sure she wasn't wrong a
Speaker 1: hundred percent of the time. This is this, this is
Speaker 1: the easter in block right, Like I'm sure of the
Speaker 1: time she wasn't wrong. Um. But what's really funny is
Speaker 1: the researchers realized that, like, Okay, if we request ethyl alcohol,
Speaker 1: she's gonna like really drill us and turn us down,
Speaker 1: turn it down because she thinks we're gonna drink. So
Speaker 1: they put in the exact same request, but they used
Speaker 1: the chemical name for ethyl alcohol, and Elena would grant
Speaker 1: it every time because she doesn't know anything about chemistry
Speaker 1: because she's a dumb guy. Yeah yeah, yeah. And now
Speaker 1: over time she she is aware that she doesn't know
Speaker 1: anything about chemistry, and she has impostor syndrome because she's
Speaker 1: an impostor, because she's actually a look, impostor syndrome is
Speaker 1: not always wrong. Some people who have impostor syndrome are impostors.
Speaker 1: And Elena starts avoiding actual chemists, you know, the people
Speaker 1: she's managing, because conversations with them would inevitably reveal she
Speaker 1: had no idea what she was doing. My favorite example
Speaker 1: of this was how she pronounced c O two, calling
Speaker 1: it coutu or doi in in Romanian, right, so she
Speaker 1: she wouldn't call it kutu, but like she called it kudi,
Speaker 1: which is the equivalent of calling c O to couto, right,
Speaker 1: because she's just kind of sounding it out because she
Speaker 1: doesn't know how you're supposed to read um chemical names. Now,
Speaker 1: Cody in Romanian is a slang term, or it's at
Speaker 1: least close to a slang term for someone who has
Speaker 1: a huge ass, right, Like it's it's like a dump
Speaker 1: truck ass like cody. That's kind of what that means.
Speaker 1: So since Elena herself has kind of a big butt,
Speaker 1: again this is what historians will say, her scientists started
Speaker 1: calling her kudi behind her back, like big ass. Basically, um,
Speaker 1: she got that, Yeah, she's she is caked up uranium baby. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: please don't let her around the urane. That would have
Speaker 1: gone very badly for everybody. Yeah, we could have had
Speaker 1: a Chernobyl incident. Yeah. So, like most incompetent people who
Speaker 1: wind up at the heads of large complex organizations, Elena
Speaker 1: decided to focus her efforts on the one thing she
Speaker 1: knew how to do, which was deny people resources in
Speaker 1: order to save money. Right with bile as Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you swagger in with that big butt and start cutting money. Um.
Speaker 1: It is kind of the thing that if you don't
Speaker 1: know anything about an organization and you're promoted to lead it,
Speaker 1: just start trimming the budget, you know. Um, you can
Speaker 1: always make it look like you know what you're doing then,
Speaker 1: and you can funk with the people who are actually
Speaker 1: good at their jobs. This is not a thing that
Speaker 1: you or I or any of the people we've ever
Speaker 1: worked with have had experience with ever in our careers.
Speaker 1: Not It only happens in communist states. So that's good.
Speaker 1: It's good that we are immune from that here. Now,
Speaker 1: this basically drives all Romanian efforts in the chemical sciences
Speaker 1: into the ground, and it's stymies basically all of their
Speaker 1: progress on chemistry and ship. But her institute did spend
Speaker 1: less money over time, so that's good. Um, probably probably
Speaker 1: worthwhile now that the chemistry labs that look making it
Speaker 1: at a low budget. You say that, but I'm waiting
Speaker 1: for the James Cameron uh to to appear in this story.
Speaker 1: There's that we We still don't have that here, probably
Speaker 1: because Elina would have had him purged. Yeah, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: that would have been for the best. Would a would
Speaker 1: a would have saved us that whole period of time
Speaker 1: and which everyone thought three D tv s were going
Speaker 1: to be a thing. Sorry, but I will not sacrifice
Speaker 1: true lies. No, yeah, that is that is true lies. Uh.
Speaker 1: Strange Days films. Oh, he was involved in those. Huh
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Um, I wonder if people know that James Cameron. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was just yeah, I'm really confused, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: did I say a wrong name? No, David Fincher, And
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know he did Terminator too. I do
Speaker 1: kind of want to see David Fincher's Terminator too, would
Speaker 1: be something, right. Yeah. So, in person, Elena was extremely
Speaker 1: anti social and quick to anger. She was jealous of
Speaker 1: any of the other polit bureau wives she thought were
Speaker 1: more attractive than her, and she preferred to spend her
Speaker 1: time avoiding social engagements. Altogether, she was disgusted with the
Speaker 1: other wives because they were traditional homemakers, whereas she had
Speaker 1: a career of her own. Now, the fact that her
Speaker 1: career was an absolute sham does not seem to have
Speaker 1: upset Alda. It is also worth noting that she was
Speaker 1: a pretty piss poor mother. Um. Look some people with
Speaker 1: with well, with a large ass um that's that everything
Speaker 1: like that's all up to up to personal up to
Speaker 1: personal judgment. Um. So, Nikko cho Chesku, her son born
Speaker 1: in ninety one, was the baby of the family and
Speaker 1: from the jump seemed to realize that his parents position
Speaker 1: made him untouchable. He was disruptive in school, He threatened
Speaker 1: teachers and classmates. No one could discipline him. He would
Speaker 1: just start punching teachers and students whenever he got angry.
Speaker 1: Because you know, his dad is helping to run the country,
Speaker 1: nobody can actually punish him. It's a good situation. We
Speaker 1: call this like the U We call this the day
Speaker 1: and Kusa route. Right, that's kind of where if you
Speaker 1: believe now, I'll say this. A lot of our sources
Speaker 1: on Niku chow Chesku come from a guy who defects
Speaker 1: from the country after running the secret police. So there's
Speaker 1: some debate over how accurate all this is because maybe
Speaker 1: he has a vested interest in making the family sound
Speaker 1: worse than they were at that. That said, the idea
Speaker 1: that Nikko chow Chesko would be a violent asshole um
Speaker 1: not a not a big stretch either. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, grain assault m According to this guy who
Speaker 1: later defects who we will talk about later. At age fourteen,
Speaker 1: Nikko rapes one of his classmates. Um. At age fifteen,
Speaker 1: he gets his first boat and he drunk drives it
Speaker 1: before he gets his first car at sixteen, at which
Speaker 1: point he becomes one of the leading causes of car
Speaker 1: accidents in the capital of Bucharest. Um, because he is
Speaker 1: just a you know, he's he's he's a dictator's son, right,
Speaker 1: This is all pretty standard dictator's good stuff. Go than
Speaker 1: golden weapons and and you know side palace isn't ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he doesn't have the panash of Uday and kusay, So
Speaker 1: he's not I don't know, firing a golden machine gun
Speaker 1: and do a crowd at a party. Um. But he
Speaker 1: is crashing his car constantly, so he's got that. He's
Speaker 1: got that good Assad energy, the Assad kid who fucking
Speaker 1: killed himself in his car drunk driving. Um, he's he's
Speaker 1: that kind of dictator's son as opposed to more of
Speaker 1: the more of the days dash day esque variety. So
Speaker 1: for the first decade or so that Communist Romania is
Speaker 1: doing its thing, the Soviet Union keeps a bunch of
Speaker 1: soldiers in country, right, because you know, they want to
Speaker 1: make sure things keep going, keep going in a direction
Speaker 1: they're comfortable with. Now, this means that for a while
Speaker 1: Romania's Communist Party is a subservient branch of the party
Speaker 1: in Moscow. George U. Day, who's running the country, and
Speaker 1: his polit bureau are not happy about this, especially once
Speaker 1: Stalin dies and Khrushchev takes power, because Cruise have kind
Speaker 1: of repudiates some of the stuff that Stalin had done. Right,
Speaker 1: he gives the speech where he's like, hey, you know
Speaker 1: what everything Stalin did wasn't perfect. Um, you know what
Speaker 1: it was George you Day? Where I oh, oh, George
Speaker 1: U Day. Yeah, George you Day, Georgie. That's that is
Speaker 1: my personal headcanon, like fantasy fiction mash up between George
Speaker 1: Bush and Uday Husain Um mainly or actually, no, you
Speaker 1: know that's that. Yeah, that's the that's that's what I'm
Speaker 1: shipping them together, right, that's what you'd call it. We
Speaker 1: shipped them. Yeah, we should, Yeah, ship George Bush and
Speaker 1: Uday Hussein somebody somebody gets some fan art going, use
Speaker 1: that chat GPT, make it real horny and make sure
Speaker 1: they're both caked up in honor of Elena. Just just
Speaker 1: huge asses on both Day and George Bush and just
Speaker 1: sweaty against each other. Get him in there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then you would have George H. W. Bush and Saddam
Speaker 1: Hussein looking down on them both from heaven, smiling, smiling,
Speaker 1: proud George as George Bush paints Day done up like
Speaker 1: the chick from Titanic, but instead of the heart of
Speaker 1: the ocean, it's a golden ak forty seven. Somebody do this.
Speaker 1: You know you've got, You've got. It's perfect, perfect opportunity
Speaker 1: for giving you God. Yeah, and do it. Do it? Aii.
Speaker 1: So everyone has really fucked up, unsettling hands. George Bush
Speaker 1: has like three long fingers painting it'll be great. Oh
Speaker 1: so I'll be able to call you a loser on
Speaker 1: the internet for doing that. Let's let's get a T
Speaker 1: shirt out. I mean that's up to Sophie. Sophie make
Speaker 1: the merch. Yeah, I think I think this will She's
Speaker 1: still there. I'm here only if the people demand it.
Speaker 1: I think the people are going to demand it, not
Speaker 1: want you demand Yeah. So um yes. As a Stalinist,
Speaker 1: Day is not thrilled by the fact that Kruschev has
Speaker 1: repudiated uh some of the stuff that Stalin did Um.
Speaker 1: So they're all kind of figuring, how can we get
Speaker 1: a little bit more autonomy from the U. S. S R.
Speaker 1: How can we get these soldiers out of our country,
Speaker 1: How can we kind of like take actual control for ourselves.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty six, protests and Hungary boil up into
Speaker 1: an uprising, which is again right next to Romania. Now
Speaker 1: that includes the destruction. Like in these protests and Hungary,
Speaker 1: they destroy a bunch of statues of Stalin and Budapest.
Speaker 1: Unrest spreads widely from there and it reaches Romania by
Speaker 1: October of that year. You know the way protests do.
Speaker 1: You get protests in one capital, they move over to
Speaker 1: the other soon. And I'm gonna quote in a right
Speaker 1: from a rite up by the Wilson Center here. On
Speaker 1: the twenty ninth of October, railwaymen in Bucharest held a
Speaker 1: protest meeting calling for improved conditions of work, and in
Speaker 1: the asse there were street demonstrations in supportive better's food
Speaker 1: supplies and exceptionally poor harvest had drastically cut food production
Speaker 1: and cues, and Bucharest and the other main towns were commonplace.
Speaker 1: Georgia Day and a Romanian delegation cut short of visit
Speaker 1: to Yugoslavia in the October to address the crisis. Thousands
Speaker 1: of arrests were made in the centers of protest, especially
Speaker 1: among students who participated in meetings in the Transylvanian capital
Speaker 1: of Clues and tim Assura. One of the largest meetings
Speaker 1: took place in Bucharest on the thirty of of October.
Speaker 1: The Timnasaura, Radia and the Assy regions were placed under
Speaker 1: military rule as Soviet troops were brought in across the
Speaker 1: Romanian border in the east and concentrated on the frontier
Speaker 1: with Hungary in the west. Important question did that postpone
Speaker 1: trick or treating? I don't think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: trick or treating going on in Georgia Day's Romania, So
Speaker 1: that's the time for draculas. It would have been perfect.
Speaker 1: It would have been perfect, um. But I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting here. One of the things you're seeing Georgiu Day
Speaker 1: is a railway man like running like was the guy
Speaker 1: organizing in a legal railway union and spent a shipload
Speaker 1: of his life in prison for doing so, And now
Speaker 1: that he's in charge, he's cracking down on protests by
Speaker 1: railwaymen and throwing a bunch of them in prison. Always fun.
Speaker 1: How that keeps happening? It's the circle of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's beautiful. It's beautiful in its own way. Um we
Speaker 1: are yeah yeah, or it's the flat circle thing. So
Speaker 1: the Hungarian crisis concludes when Soviet sent tanks into Budapest
Speaker 1: to crush the crush the uprising. And this actually, the
Speaker 1: Romanian Communist Party is going to benefit from this hugely
Speaker 1: because Soviet troops helped them stop protests in their own
Speaker 1: capital from turning into an uprising. And the fact that
Speaker 1: the Romanian regime is so supportive of crushing these protests
Speaker 1: means the USSR is like, well, we can't trust Hungary
Speaker 1: because we just had to send in tanks here, but
Speaker 1: we can trust Romania. And so now the Romanian Communist
Speaker 1: Party and Georgiu Day are like, hey, you know, we
Speaker 1: don't need all these troops in our country. Khrushchev, you
Speaker 1: know you guys, you guys need those dudes in Hungary.
Speaker 1: Why don't you send all those troops to Hungary and
Speaker 1: and we'll take care of Romania. You know, we can.
Speaker 1: We can keep a lock on things ourselves. Um So
Speaker 1: in this works, the Soviets withdraw troops from Romania, and
Speaker 1: as a result, Romania is going to have a lot
Speaker 1: more autonomy than other country. These who are kind of
Speaker 1: in the Warsaw Pact in the region are going to
Speaker 1: have in this period of time. So in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: Georgio Day gets sick with lung cancer, which is a
Speaker 1: huge surprise for a for a communist dictator in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties to have lung cancer just absolutely shocking stuff
Speaker 1: because because that was back when cigarettes were really good
Speaker 1: for you. Yeah, this is back when doctors recommended them.
Speaker 1: You know, he's he's smoking the good ones, he's smoking
Speaker 1: the lucky strikes, which which I'm sure every yeah, every
Speaker 1: dum listening. The air quality was general, like the air
Speaker 1: quality was roughly the same as like a cigar lounge. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The way they would do it is they would just
Speaker 1: light giant piles of lead on fire every time you
Speaker 1: bought gasoline and celebration. Uh, that's what we were all doing.
Speaker 1: It's why everyone liked brain. Like, we found these rocks
Speaker 1: that radiate heat, so we've been just hovering around them
Speaker 1: like that one episode of Star Trek. Yeah. Um, so
Speaker 1: org you day gets his ask some lung cancer, um and,
Speaker 1: and it's he's the whoever it becomes clear that like
Speaker 1: whoever is going to inherit power from him, is going
Speaker 1: to inherit a really centralized, strong state in Romania that's
Speaker 1: more independent than basically any of the other countries in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Block other than Yugoslavia. I mean, whether or
Speaker 1: not you want anyway whatever, it's it's it's a lot
Speaker 1: of power. Who that who coming into whoever takes over
Speaker 1: for this guy? Um And because he had been such
Speaker 1: a private man, effectively, right, he was number one in
Speaker 1: total power. But he was also because he was in
Speaker 1: power able to hide the fact that he was sick
Speaker 1: until the signs of the fact that he had terminal
Speaker 1: cancer got too obvious to ignore. Like you read that
Speaker 1: like a baseball stat you like, you know, he was
Speaker 1: actually number one in total power. Yeah, he was Mark McGuire,
Speaker 1: he was the Mark McGuire of of of the Warsaw Pact.
Speaker 1: A lot of people right down to the well, I mean,
Speaker 1: cigarette were steroids for for for dictators. But yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're a member of a of a of a communist dictatorship,
Speaker 1: you're yeah, you're really the performance enhancing cigarettes really get
Speaker 1: through you. I guess we'd probably say that Tito was
Speaker 1: the Nolan Ryan, just because I think he probably could
Speaker 1: have cold cocked anybody else in the Warsaw Pact if
Speaker 1: he had to. Yeah. Yeah, and longevity, Yeah, and longevity.
Speaker 1: He really did stay in there a while. And Ryan
Speaker 1: throwing a hundred three four years old, that's something that
Speaker 1: is Tito energy. Yeah. So chow Chessco, you know the
Speaker 1: fact that so first off, like all of these other guys,
Speaker 1: because everyone in the polit bureau right either has someone
Speaker 1: else that they want to take over for Georgie you
Speaker 1: day or once that job themselves. Um, but they don't
Speaker 1: realize he's sick until he's very close to death. Now,
Speaker 1: chow Chesscu again, he's the ass kisser. So he's in
Speaker 1: there daily. He's seeing Georgiu day all the time. He's
Speaker 1: talking to him all the time. How you doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're looking like you're losing white man and hair and
Speaker 1: some skin. Yeah, you seem to be wasting away more.
Speaker 1: You want to sign this piece of paper real quick,
Speaker 1: don't ask about it. Yeah, you're good. So, um, all
Speaker 1: of these other guys kind of suddenly find themselves scrambling
Speaker 1: to figure out how to set themselves up for the
Speaker 1: post George you Day world, whereas Chachesko knows exactly what's
Speaker 1: going on. And I'm gonna quote from Paul Kinyon again here.
Speaker 1: The list of possible successors was short. The nine member
Speaker 1: polit bureau was hardly overburdened with talent. Five of them
Speaker 1: had barely completed elementary school, and three were former rail
Speaker 1: workers from George you Day's union days who had been
Speaker 1: elevated for loyalty, not literacy. Not only had George you
Speaker 1: Day purged the upper echelance of the party, he had
Speaker 1: impoverished the entire country with his anti intellectual policies. Children
Speaker 1: of political detainees were denied a university education, their extended
Speaker 1: families were considered stigmatized. Schools were barred from teaching critical thought.
Speaker 1: Academics were regularly arrested and detained. All this was designed
Speaker 1: to eradicate opposition, but had inadvertent starved the Romanian Communist
Speaker 1: Party of even moderately capable minds. You know, so maybe
Speaker 1: don't purge people who know how to do things um
Speaker 1: from your although it does make it easier to stay
Speaker 1: in power. So it really, it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a tough situation that they were in. Um yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: that that kind of happens when somebody withers away and
Speaker 1: dies it is surrounded by morons. Yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is actually a version. I mean it's interesting because Georgie
Speaker 1: Day is a stolidist. This is basically the same kind
Speaker 1: of thing that happens. It's a little less severe, right,
Speaker 1: the pollit Bureau that kind of stalin uh leaves behind
Speaker 1: are more capable than the guys that Georgie Day had
Speaker 1: around him. Um, but yeah, it is. It's interesting kind
Speaker 1: of some of the similarities here. But you know who
Speaker 1: else has carried out a series of anti intellectual purges
Speaker 1: in order to ensure that no one capable can force
Speaker 1: them from their position of power. Pot pol Pot who
Speaker 1: is the primary sponsor of this podcast? Oh wow yeah yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: we got the big pol pot coickwork company, pol pots Pots. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He's selling cast iron skillets and you do not want
Speaker 1: to see what happens if you wash one of them
Speaker 1: with soap. It's either that or it's like some clever
Speaker 1: weed brand. M yeah. Um, it'll make you so stupid,
Speaker 1: you'll be anti intellectual. Just go ahead, and if you've
Speaker 1: got some of this weed, just throw your glasses away.
Speaker 1: You don't need them. Um, it'll I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know how to keep making pull. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: smoking fields. Everybody that's a boy, yeah, will be stoned
Speaker 1: out of your skull. Let's let's get let's break two ads. Now. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're we're talking poll pot um. Well,
Speaker 1: no we're not. We're talking the end of George you
Speaker 1: Day's time in charge of the Romanian Communist Party, So
Speaker 1: joking about pol pot we're talking about just like this
Speaker 1: episode isn't horrible enough plot? Yeah yeah, yeah, bring a
Speaker 1: little bit of pol pot in there. So let's have
Speaker 1: a holiday in Romania. Yeah yeah. Now, there are only
Speaker 1: three veteran members of the Pollit Bureau who had any
Speaker 1: degree of competence um, but all of them had with
Speaker 1: the party considered to be unhealthy origins. One of them
Speaker 1: is German, another's Ukrainian, and the third is Bulgarian. And
Speaker 1: as Catalan Gruia notes, the three prerequisites for the future
Speaker 1: leader were one to be Romanian, two to be an activist,
Speaker 1: and three to be part of the working class. So
Speaker 1: no one in power likes Nikolai or considers him a
Speaker 1: good choice to replace Georgie. But Nikki had maneuvered himself
Speaker 1: into an incredible position um and it was one that
Speaker 1: surprised his colleagues. His job in the Pollit Bureau at
Speaker 1: this point was secretary for organization in Cadras, and this
Speaker 1: is kind of a boring job. It's pretty low prestige
Speaker 1: within the pullet bureau jobs, but it provides them with
Speaker 1: this opportunity to make a lot of little decisions about
Speaker 1: who's in position where, who's booking the boss's schedule every day, right,
Speaker 1: who gets to like set George you day schedule, all
Speaker 1: these different people, who's working in his house. He's kind
Speaker 1: of picking all of these low level functionaries. And it
Speaker 1: turns out when that's your job, when your job is
Speaker 1: to hook a bunch of people up with these little
Speaker 1: jobs that determine everything about the boss's life, you kind
Speaker 1: of control the boss's life, especially when he's dying of
Speaker 1: cancer and doesn't have as much wherewithal as he used
Speaker 1: to have. Um So, because Nikki is in charge of
Speaker 1: the people making the boss's schedule, Nikki effectively has control
Speaker 1: over who gets to visit George you Day every day,
Speaker 1: and once the man gets sick, Nikki is able to
Speaker 1: exercise near total control over who sees the boss and win.
Speaker 1: The last weeks of George you Day's life where a
Speaker 1: constant series of pullar bureau members trying to get him
Speaker 1: to confirm his successor, and Shochesco being like, now he's
Speaker 1: sick today, he doesn't want to talk politics. Don't come
Speaker 1: around another day. You know, you just gotta let him,
Speaker 1: let him chill out um. And Ko is doing this
Speaker 1: because he knows he's in the best position. He's a Romanian,
Speaker 1: you know, he's got peasant credentials. He's the best positioned
Speaker 1: to take over for for for George you Day. And
Speaker 1: so if you can just kind of keep the others
Speaker 1: away from him and stop them from getting him to
Speaker 1: agree to make someone else's successor, he's got a pretty
Speaker 1: good shot of getting the job. Now, George you Day,
Speaker 1: despite his illness, realizes what Nikki is doing and he
Speaker 1: sees it as a major threat to the country. And
Speaker 1: this is kind of a thing that happens with Lenin
Speaker 1: and Stalin. Right when Lennon's on his last legs, He's like,
Speaker 1: I don't really think this Stalin guy is a good
Speaker 1: job to follow me up. I think this could go badly.
Speaker 1: He's like, excellent point, I'm going to Mexico. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how that went. So in snatched conversations with old comrades,
Speaker 1: he warns of Nicolai's feverish maneuver rings, but the boss
Speaker 1: has already been out maneuvered himself. While half the Pullet
Speaker 1: Bureau was angling to try and get Georgie to make
Speaker 1: it a selection, Nikolai is getting the other half to
Speaker 1: line up behind him, and he promises them, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: you know me, I'm a blank slate, right, you could
Speaker 1: just make me do whatever. I'll do anything you want.
Speaker 1: You know, It's fine. Yeah, I'll be your guy. I'm
Speaker 1: a I'm a fun time guy. I just want the title.
Speaker 1: You know, you guys will be the power behind the throne.
Speaker 1: I just want the title. Um, just a fun time
Speaker 1: and guy, ain't nothing wrong with me again. Georgiu Day
Speaker 1: has pretty systematically purged anyone most of the people who
Speaker 1: are good at things, so all of the other Pollet
Speaker 1: Bureau guys are like, well, this seems reasonable. Why would
Speaker 1: he lie about this? Why would somebody in a position
Speaker 1: of power. Lie, It's like, dude, what what war do
Speaker 1: you think you just lived through by wild wires? Uh?
Speaker 1: So this works incredibly well for chat CHESSCO. The Boss
Speaker 1: dies on Mark nineteenth, nineteen sixty five, and CCO is
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter confirmed as Prime Secretary of the Romanian Socialist Republic,
Speaker 1: which is a new term. They've been using other terms
Speaker 1: for their leaders before that. He decides, I'm going to
Speaker 1: pick a new title, you know, new guy at forties seven,
Speaker 1: I think he's the youngest leader in Europe at the
Speaker 1: time when he when he gets power out there is it? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's doing good. These guys. Everyone else kind of running
Speaker 1: communist countries in Europe at this point time is a
Speaker 1: lot older. He's he's young, he's considered handsome, he's a
Speaker 1: he's the JFK of communism, right. That is actually kind
Speaker 1: of how he's viewed when he takes power. Um yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: And and to be fair, he does pretty well at first.
Speaker 1: You actually wouldn't be there were not initially warning signs
Speaker 1: that like this was gonna be worse than kind of
Speaker 1: anything going on around him. Right, It's like, hey, this guy,
Speaker 1: he's not going to do like like a genocide or anything, right,
Speaker 1: like yeah, not per pussfully. So despite being essentially he
Speaker 1: is an old fashioned stalidist, and he's pretty consistent about
Speaker 1: being a stalinist, particularly like economically most of his career. Um,
Speaker 1: but he supports a lot more liberalization than Georgia Day
Speaker 1: had allowed. He opens up some space for private enterprise.
Speaker 1: Mostly what he does is he kind of opens up
Speaker 1: space for foreign trade, which means Western music is getting
Speaker 1: in right. People are getting to listen to like rock
Speaker 1: and roll in that kind of stuff, which is cool.
Speaker 1: Some movies and some TV is getting in um and
Speaker 1: that makes people really happy. He also provides a little
Speaker 1: bit more space for public speech. He allows newspapers you
Speaker 1: can't criticize the system, but you can kind of poke
Speaker 1: around edges of like certain programs that might not work. Well.
Speaker 1: It's a lot more than they've had right under George
Speaker 1: you Day, because it's a pretty pretty strict system under him.
Speaker 1: So he he liberalizes quite a lot. And people are
Speaker 1: really optimistic. This is actually considered a lot of Romanians.
Speaker 1: It was like it was not a bad time, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: there's there's plenty of food. Uh. People are like the
Speaker 1: state was actually doing a decent job of taking care
Speaker 1: of people. It's it, It seems it seems good everything.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's just the pretty cool breeze of a dude.
Speaker 1: None of these guys ever stopped there, um, And part
Speaker 1: of why things are good is that he kind of
Speaker 1: wants he's part of part of One of the things
Speaker 1: Chichisco is doing is like, like anyone who takes power
Speaker 1: in a system like this, you gotta consolidate it, Nicks, right,
Speaker 1: you gotta push out your rivals, you gotta jail some people.
Speaker 1: You've got to force them out of their jobs so
Speaker 1: you can take total power. And you don't want to
Speaker 1: be cracking down on the people well that's going on, right.
Speaker 1: You want to keep them happy while you're taking power.
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of part of what he's doing
Speaker 1: in this period of time, and in fairly short order,
Speaker 1: he forces out all of these guys who'd agreed to
Speaker 1: vote for him to take power. He pushes them out
Speaker 1: of their jobs, right, Um, some of us he does.
Speaker 1: He opens an investigation into the purchase that had been
Speaker 1: carried out by George you Day, that dude Petronascu who
Speaker 1: had forced the who had taken out Antonescu. He he
Speaker 1: doesn't investigation into that guy's execution, and obviously Chowchescu had
Speaker 1: helped with that, right, he had been a part of
Speaker 1: killing that guy and purging all of these people. But
Speaker 1: now he's being like, yeah, we're gonna look into this.
Speaker 1: That was really bad. We gotta get these bad actors
Speaker 1: out of here. You know. It's like when the police
Speaker 1: are like, we're going to have an internal on this
Speaker 1: massacre that we did. Well, it turns out we found
Speaker 1: out we did nothing wrong. So yeah, it was just
Speaker 1: those five guys who happened to be rivals to my power.
Speaker 1: Dollars more please, Yeah, yeah, this is it's it's very
Speaker 1: much that sort of thing. Um. And while he does this,
Speaker 1: he also supports a drive towards Romanian nationalism, and he's
Speaker 1: he's gonna back anything that he thinks will make people
Speaker 1: feel an identity separate from the Soviet Union and one
Speaker 1: of them. Because again, while he's he is a strong
Speaker 1: communist by this point, and and so is obviously the
Speaker 1: Romanian Communist Party is a communist party. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there like I want to be part of Russia, right,
Speaker 1: This is actually a big thing for a lot of
Speaker 1: countries in the Warsaw Act, and Romania has this, as
Speaker 1: we've talked about, this kind of long history of being
Speaker 1: oppressed and attacked by their neighbors. So they don't he
Speaker 1: doesn't want and obviously it's bad for his own personal
Speaker 1: power to if everyone in Romania feels like we're just
Speaker 1: a satellite of Russia. So he starts backing. He starts
Speaker 1: like really supporting a series of like books and uh uh,
Speaker 1: kind of questionable historical tracts about guys like vlad Dracula
Speaker 1: and the Emperor traction, who he kind of turns into
Speaker 1: a Romanian um. And what's really funny is like, while
Speaker 1: they while he's kind of backing guys like Dracula and
Speaker 1: Emperor Trajan, they have to be framed as proto socialist right.
Speaker 1: They're not communists obviously because communism didn't exist back when
Speaker 1: Draculas walking around. But you have to say that like
Speaker 1: Dracula actually, when you think about it, was like a
Speaker 1: pre socialist leader. You know, he had a lot of
Speaker 1: these tendencies that we that we've now figured out as commune.
Speaker 1: This So like the Emperor Trasian, classic proto socialist right
Speaker 1: really was big about redistribution of wealth. What a weird
Speaker 1: what a weird person to try to reframe the the
Speaker 1: emperor Trasian socialist here the people's hero. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know who actually was a good person, Elizabeth Battery.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about how great she was. She loved unions,
Speaker 1: couldn't get enough of unions. She was just the union darling.
Speaker 1: Really yeah. Um, so obviously all of this was was
Speaker 1: very questionable from historic standpoint, But again, why is anyone
Speaker 1: going to complain for one thing? At least you're getting
Speaker 1: to read more books now, you know more the papers
Speaker 1: are out there, You're getting some music. Um, life is
Speaker 1: pretty good. What do you think the most popular song
Speaker 1: was when they're hitting what? Um? I know, I don't
Speaker 1: think I know if it's in sixty five quite yet,
Speaker 1: but the fucking Stones were pretty popular in Romania. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean obviously, um, the Romanian stonesiction it's just like
Speaker 1: the beach Boys. Because it is the sixties. I'm sure
Speaker 1: the beach boys are fucking blowing up out there. U
Speaker 1: s in big popular. Yes, Romania's famous surf culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they really get heavily until like that you Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: so Romania had been one of the major bread baskets
Speaker 1: of the region. Um. It was actually the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: back when they were still kind of occupying the country.
Speaker 1: Their pitch to the Romanian Communist Party was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: we'll do all this industrializing you guys basically grow all
Speaker 1: of the food for the Warsaw Pact, right, that'll why
Speaker 1: don't we just do it that way? And the Georgia
Speaker 1: Day had kind of been like, well, no, i'm a
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a railway union man. I want to
Speaker 1: industrialize too. I don't want us to just be your
Speaker 1: garden base. Sickly, So he had industrialized the company the
Speaker 1: country pretty rapidly. And one of the reasons why a
Speaker 1: lot of Romanians suspected that he had been because because
Speaker 1: there's this this conspiracy theory develops that he had gotten
Speaker 1: cancer because the Russians had poisoned him because he was
Speaker 1: so independent. I don't know how likely this is. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons why George you Day might have
Speaker 1: gotten cancer. Um, but anyway, there's a myriad that hard
Speaker 1: to get cancer being that guy. Um, though I would
Speaker 1: I will add that Romania. I looked up some of
Speaker 1: their number one songs and they it looks like they
Speaker 1: only charted like the international stuff around that I saw quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah that makes sense. You are not alone by Michael Jackson.
Speaker 1: Oh that's nice. It's like mostly American stuff. It's it's
Speaker 1: surprisingly it's surprisingly close to what you would think of
Speaker 1: because like it was like the top charts in the
Speaker 1: United States. I know that Chowchesku's favorite TV show is
Speaker 1: Kojack um, because yeah, Kojack can just shoot anybody who
Speaker 1: wants and ask you identifies with that. There's um. Telly
Speaker 1: Savalis wrote a book I Think about Getting Asked, which
Speaker 1: I think is just really hilarious, like it's just a
Speaker 1: way to get ass wait when I'm I'm super into that.
Speaker 1: The idea that Ko Jack was writing a how to
Speaker 1: pick up women? Um, yeah, it's interesting. It's always interesting,
Speaker 1: like when you look at kind of these countries while
Speaker 1: they are under communism. What American TV shows are really popular?
Speaker 1: I think it was Hungry where um what's its name?
Speaker 1: The Peter Folks show, Um, Colombo Colombo. Colombo was like huge,
Speaker 1: I believe in Hungary where it was like people were
Speaker 1: absolutely out of their fucking minds for Colombo, which makes
Speaker 1: sense against Colombo isn't that weirdly enough? I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the main points of WandaVision. Oh is it
Speaker 1: so like if you saw wand Division on Disney Plus,
Speaker 1: the whole point of it was that she, you know,
Speaker 1: where she grew up was clearly the Eastern Bloc, and
Speaker 1: they just like they had these old DVDs of old sitcoms.
Speaker 1: I've talked to a couple of people, like there were um,
Speaker 1: like folks who grew up in countries where like The
Speaker 1: Simpsons was illegal, who would get like smuggled Simpsons DVDs
Speaker 1: where like one person you would just have some like
Speaker 1: random lady who would read in the local language like
Speaker 1: over who would basically do these like underground dubs of
Speaker 1: shows like The Simpsons. And how it's like, even now
Speaker 1: that they have access to the show as it actually is,
Speaker 1: the voices sound wrong because it's like, well, no, I
Speaker 1: grew up with like like Vlad from the village over
Speaker 1: was the guy who did the voice. It was like this,
Speaker 1: there's a documentary about the world. It's fascinating stuff. It's
Speaker 1: all It's I love this kind of like weird culture
Speaker 1: bits like that. It's always really interesting. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like how you had. I mean, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: stories from Castro's Q but is that during the aid's outbreak, Um,
Speaker 1: there was like there were basically punks who you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of there was heavy restrictions and what music
Speaker 1: you could listen to and what music you could play,
Speaker 1: and so you had these punks who realize that like, well,
Speaker 1: if we get AIDS, the government will put us in
Speaker 1: these like basically medical facilities where because we're all dying,
Speaker 1: there's not the same kind of restrictions. So if we
Speaker 1: just infect each other with HIV, we can play and
Speaker 1: listen to whatever music we want. Um, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a fucking There was an NPR documentary about it. That
Speaker 1: is not the most far sighted way. I think that's
Speaker 1: about the most punk rock anything could be. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying I wouldn't say punk rock is something that is
Speaker 1: not shortsighted. Well, yeah, that's probably fair given the lifespans
Speaker 1: of a lot of those guys. Yeah, like the crust
Speaker 1: punk lifestyle is not designed to make it to to
Speaker 1: you know, you're not gonna die of old age if
Speaker 1: if you're like really, but you know who I love
Speaker 1: g Allen. Important to note Chow Chessco through none of
Speaker 1: this period is not listening to to punk music. He is, however,
Speaker 1: watching Kojack. It is interesting that, like the dictator of
Speaker 1: Romania's favorite TV show is a fucking cop show. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: Greek car Perhaps not surprising, um so yeah. Chow Chesscu
Speaker 1: has this plan to continue Georgiu Day's policy of industrializing Romania.
Speaker 1: He wants to build it into this consumer goods mecca.
Speaker 1: His plan is to turn Romania. Instead of it being
Speaker 1: a breadbasket, and Romania is very well suited to produce
Speaker 1: a shipload of high quality food, he wants it producing
Speaker 1: consumer goods, appliances, refrigerators, and televisions, all sorts of electronics
Speaker 1: that can then be sold all throughout Europe, including Western Europe. Now,
Speaker 1: doing this, Romania not a huge country. He's gonna need
Speaker 1: a bigger population. If you want to be an industrial nation,
Speaker 1: you need a lot of workers. So in order to
Speaker 1: p vide this needed base of industrial workers, Nikolai and
Speaker 1: Elena calculate that the country should shoot for a population
Speaker 1: of twenty million people. Now, what's the best way to
Speaker 1: incentivize basically doubling the population of your country. Well, first
Speaker 1: you've got to make sure people don't have condoms, and
Speaker 1: then you have to ban abortion, and you know what,
Speaker 1: you might as well just make it illegal to provide
Speaker 1: much of anything in the way of sex set or contraceptives.
Speaker 1: But just just get rid of all that and people
Speaker 1: will naturally make more of themselves. Now, there's some consequences
Speaker 1: to this, UM. For example, the fact that over time
Speaker 1: a huge number of Romanian women seek abortions anyway, but
Speaker 1: they don't have access to decent medical care or information
Speaker 1: about their bodies that would allow them to do that
Speaker 1: in anything that even approaches a safe way. And so
Speaker 1: during the time that Nikolae and Elena are in power,
Speaker 1: between ten and twenty thousand Romanian women die due to
Speaker 1: botched abortions. UM. So that's pretty bad. You're not going
Speaker 1: to help the population well overall, I mean, they do
Speaker 1: reach their population goal. We will talk more in another
Speaker 1: episode about the other things that happened as they that.
Speaker 1: His goal was just like, you know, why don't we
Speaker 1: become like Japan? Yeah, and it's like just I don't.
Speaker 1: I think they got a lot of assistance from America
Speaker 1: in that regard that you're not getting in Romania. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get that in Romania, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have there's a lot of things that like,
Speaker 1: maybe you shouldn't immediately assume that you can go from
Speaker 1: zero to like producing everybody's televisions when there's a lot
Speaker 1: of competition for that role. And yeah, getting a Magna
Speaker 1: box or a Sorny you know, Um, it's not going
Speaker 1: to work out well, a lot of none of this
Speaker 1: is going to work out well. But you know, in
Speaker 1: the early kind or in the mid to late sixties,
Speaker 1: while you still have this, I mean this, this abortion
Speaker 1: policies pretty nightmarish and that's going to cause a lot
Speaker 1: of suffering. You could be forgiving. Yeah, yeah, if you're
Speaker 1: living in Romania, you could be forgiven for thinking, well, ship,
Speaker 1: this is actually kind of working out, okay, right, um,
Speaker 1: And that's that's the point at which we're going to
Speaker 1: end right now. On an up note, aside from the
Speaker 1: ten to twenty people who die in a nightmarish totalitarian
Speaker 1: anti abortion policy, that's called dipping your toes into the pool, baby, Yeah,
Speaker 1: dipping your toes into the pool. And we will come
Speaker 1: back and we will talk about what happens when Chowchesco
Speaker 1: dips a little bit more of himself into the pool.
Speaker 1: But first, Jeff, you you who do you? Who are you? Jeff?
Speaker 1: Where do you come from? Where did you come from?
Speaker 1: The cotton? Jeff? Well, you know, I'm I'm a comedian podcaster.
Speaker 1: The one thing I will say is that if you
Speaker 1: are in the New England area and you want to
Speaker 1: see me performing live, I'm going to be doing one
Speaker 1: show uh Wednesday, February twenty second at Redemption Rock Brewery
Speaker 1: in Western Massachusetts. It's my one show that I do
Speaker 1: out there. Limited tickets, but it's a great stand up
Speaker 1: show and I love doing stand up and I get
Speaker 1: I don't get to do it enough, so I'm very
Speaker 1: happy to do that. You can also see me live
Speaker 1: the second Friday of every month at Blast from the
Speaker 1: Past on Magnolia and Beautiful Burbank, California for my show
Speaker 1: Mint on card Love Burbank. Podcast wise God, you can
Speaker 1: hear I got a lot of good ones I got
Speaker 1: Jeff has cool friends, which you can hear for free anywhere.
Speaker 1: But you can get early access to uncensored episodes with
Speaker 1: bonus content at Patreon dot com slash Jeff May one Word.
Speaker 1: You also have access to shows like Nerd with Drey Alvarez,
Speaker 1: which is a nerdy deep dive podcast. You can do
Speaker 1: shows like ug Find Me with Kim Crawl that's monthly.
Speaker 1: You can go to Game Fully Unemployed, and you can
Speaker 1: hear Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Tom Riman, who's
Speaker 1: been a guest of the show a million times. Um,
Speaker 1: you can check that out. You can also check out
Speaker 1: you Don't Even Like Sports, a sports podcast for people
Speaker 1: that hate sports, and Unpopular Opinion, both on the un
Speaker 1: Pops Network with Adam Todd Brown. Um. Other than that,
Speaker 1: I'm around. You can find me on social media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can find Jeff. That was very thorough. That is
Speaker 1: what happens when you do these plugs seven times a week.
Speaker 1: And you can find me next to Jeff waiting for
Speaker 1: him to get sick and die so that I can
Speaker 1: take over for him. Been much. I'm gonna be the
Speaker 1: chow chesscoo of Jeff may Um. Yeah, it's gonna be good.
Speaker 1: And then I'm going to turn Jeff's apartment into a
Speaker 1: manufacturing hub for southern California. We're getting up all my toys.
Speaker 1: We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna melt him down and
Speaker 1: turn him into those big old style TVs made like
Speaker 1: seven pounds in the back. Oh yeah, oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: ones that are like of a nuclear bomb, like you
Speaker 1: basically have a dirty bomb if the TV goes out.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of TV that has that fizzy static
Speaker 1: on it when it's been off for the whole time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one that glows at night and you just wonder,
Speaker 1: is it is there something always going on in there?
Speaker 1: I miss old TV. There's something in this TV humming
Speaker 1: all the time, unplugged, still humming. Yeah, the one that
Speaker 1: could kill a family of four if it fell over
Speaker 1: while you were eating your fucking uh TV Swanson dinners.
Speaker 1: Um God, things were so much better in the nineties. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll be back on Thursday. Everybody Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.