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Speaker 1: Welcome back, go ho, Merry Christmas Holiday, Happy day. Oh

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Speaker 1: my god today, Actually it might actually be Christmas when

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Speaker 1: this episode drops. I don't I don't know to Christmas

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Speaker 1: episodes this year. So you Christmas it is Christmas Eve

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Speaker 1: when this is dropping. I have well, happy motherfucking Christmas Eve.

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Speaker 1: You fucking trash goblins. I know, I'm sorry. I love it.

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Speaker 1: What is it? It's Nail. It's this death wish coffee

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Speaker 1: and two cups, and I'm fucking ripped to the gills.

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Speaker 1: Oh my god, I need to start. I don't think

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Speaker 1: I've been I don't think I've been this high on

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Speaker 1: stimulants since that time I took math amphetamine to fill

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Speaker 1: up a hundred and twenty gallons of gasoline. I think

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Speaker 1: that it should. I need to start being more. We're

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Speaker 1: just gonna let that slide, are we? I think? Unless

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Speaker 1: you Unless you don't, are you eating an egg? M hmm?

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Speaker 1: What does happened? Robert? It's Christmas? No, not that fucking

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Speaker 1: the seventeen I'm eating a chip. But I ate on

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Speaker 1: this show once two years ago, and I still get

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Speaker 1: messages about it. As you should, I can't. I was like,

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Speaker 1: I want to be openly hostile to my podcast listening audience.

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Speaker 1: But people will get mad at me if I eat

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Speaker 1: a goddamn chip. I say kill them all and let

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Speaker 1: God sort them out, which is my normal attitude towards

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Speaker 1: my audience. I honestly think that I'm gonna watch the

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Speaker 1: last episode of The Jinks Christmas Morning just to get

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Speaker 1: into the right energy, into the right vibe. Yah. Hell yeah,

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Speaker 1: hell yeah, Well Jamie, yet us we are, we are

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Speaker 1: all enjoying when I'm I'm sure will be a wonderful

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Speaker 1: holiday season of hiding alone in our homes from a murderous,

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Speaker 1: rampaging plague. Um, very very exciting. Um. Hopefully no one

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Speaker 1: gets evicted. Um, but if you do get evicted, I

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Speaker 1: hope there's a Nestor mac Now out there too. Um.

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Speaker 1: Bill barricades and uh and fight the cops on your behalf.

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Speaker 1: There will be I think there will be. And I

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Speaker 1: thought there these days. That's I would love to make

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Speaker 1: a Baby Einstein style show, Little Nesters. That's nice. There

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Speaker 1: was a fun thing happened in Portland recently where a

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Speaker 1: family was getting evicted and several hundred people built multiple

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Speaker 1: layers of defensive barricades and like cow trips to destroy

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Speaker 1: vehicles that tried to drive through and created such a

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Speaker 1: formidable defense that the city back down, and then the

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Speaker 1: city government voted a week later to extend the eviction

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Speaker 1: moratorium until July. That was fucking thrilling to witness from Afar.

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Speaker 1: I allow me to say it was very We were

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Speaker 1: not as successful here when when there were abrupt, intense

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Speaker 1: evictions for reclaimed houses, and so seeing seeing it where

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Speaker 1: can work out in Portland was very exciting. Yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Nestor would have been would have been proud. Although again,

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Speaker 1: if he were alive today, he would be in prison

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Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. Um so, but you

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Speaker 1: know he would still be sending dispatches out. Yeah, No,

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Speaker 1: he'd be writing, he'd be he'd be shooting some fire. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So we ended our last episode on a very positive note,

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Speaker 1: but of course that was never going to last. This

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Speaker 1: is behind the Bastards, and even our holiday episodes about

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Speaker 1: a historic hero are legally required to be bleak. Now.

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Speaker 1: I appreciate the I appreciate that you cut it off.

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Speaker 1: All things were nice. You know, it's kind of like

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Speaker 1: it reminds me of the two vhs is in the

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Speaker 1: movie Titanic we're at the end, You're like, oh, things

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Speaker 1: could get bad or I could just stop watching. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: at the end of last episode, everybody's free, wearing colorful clothes,

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Speaker 1: strapped with guns and dancing and fucking in the streets.

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Speaker 1: It's lovely. Um that does not last. So at the time,

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Speaker 1: Nestor is kind of helping to turn and helping his

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Speaker 1: neighbors to turn Gulia Polly into something of an anarchist

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Speaker 1: wet dream h. Russia is in a real, real, not

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Speaker 1: good stage, the revolutionary equivalent of puberty. The technically the

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Speaker 1: country was again technically governed by a guy named Kerensky

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Speaker 1: and a kind of moderate quasi socialist democratic e socialist regime. Um.

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Speaker 1: There were workers councils and soviets and stuff all over

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Speaker 1: the country making attempts to redress inequality. But at the

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Speaker 1: same time, a lot of the people who had political power,

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Speaker 1: the social democratic types, you know, they didn't like the regime,

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Speaker 1: but they felt that rich people should still get to

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Speaker 1: stay rich, and landowners should keep owning most of their

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Speaker 1: land and all that stuff. Um. Now, they were also Bolsheviks,

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Speaker 1: who are very powerful in this period, and they want

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Speaker 1: to tear all of that ship down, but they also

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Speaker 1: want to institute a pretty strict hierarchy, a dictatorship of

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Speaker 1: the proletariat of their own um. And the Bolsheviks are

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Speaker 1: very powerful and very organized, and opposed to them are

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Speaker 1: monarchist forces who wanted the czar back um and what

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Speaker 1: some of the monarchists are. So basically the there's the Bolsheviks,

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Speaker 1: there's the Democratic Socialists, and then there's the White Russian armies.

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Speaker 1: And the Whites are anti Bolshevik, and they all kind

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Speaker 1: of are different. Some of them are monarchists, some of them,

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Speaker 1: you know, are just nationalists. They all kind of advocate

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Speaker 1: for they're not they're not like unified ideologically, but they're

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Speaker 1: all very anti Bolsheviks. Some of them are basically Nazis

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Speaker 1: and do a lot of massacreing Jewish people. Some of

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Speaker 1: them are like vaguely democratic. They're complicated. Ship the Russian

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Speaker 1: Civil War is incredibly complicated and nightmarishly bloody. Nine million

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Speaker 1: people die. It is a bad time. Yeah, yeah, that's all.

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Speaker 1: It's good to know what the yardstick for a bad

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Speaker 1: time is. Yeah. Yeah. And again to put that into perspective,

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Speaker 1: nine million people die in the Russian Civil War. Another

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Speaker 1: nine million had died because of World War One, which

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Speaker 1: the Czar got the country into. So like people being

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Speaker 1: like the revolution was worse. No, it wasn't like the

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Speaker 1: revolution happened because there's are got nine million people killed

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Speaker 1: and another nine million people died because everyone was so

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Speaker 1: angry and violent and neared to death at that point

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Speaker 1: that they kept killing. Like but to be air Robert,

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Speaker 1: he was a white, a wife guy, so you know,

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Speaker 1: loved his wife, mind loved his wife so much. So

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Speaker 1: Makno and his anarchists were at this point very far

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Speaker 1: from the center of ship happening in Russia. You know,

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Speaker 1: Ukraine is considered a backwater by Russians, who were pretty

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Speaker 1: racist against Ukrainians by and large, not comprehensively, but a

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Speaker 1: lot of them. Now, in October of nineteen seventeen, there'd

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Speaker 1: been a Bolshevik Kutta which had been followed by an

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Speaker 1: anti Bolshevik rebellion led by Don Cossacks, and this counter

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Speaker 1: revolution had spread to Ukraine in the form of a

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Speaker 1: Ukrainian Nationalist uprising. Now, the Ukrainian nationalists were anti Russian,

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Speaker 1: so they didn't want any of these white or Bolshevik

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Speaker 1: Russian forces to be in charge of Ukraine, but they

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Speaker 1: were also traditionalists, and after throwing out the Russians, they

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Speaker 1: wanted to reverse all the progressive social changes and basically

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Speaker 1: reinstitute something similar to serfdom. But all the rich people

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Speaker 1: back in charge. So anti Russian also still sucks. Um Now,

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Speaker 1: when the Ukrainian nationalists attacked the forces of the new government,

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Speaker 1: Makno was put in an awkward position. Is he did

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Speaker 1: not like the government because he's Nestor mak No, But

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Speaker 1: at the same time, yeah, the government was like, you

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Speaker 1: guys are allowed to do what the thing that you're doing,

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Speaker 1: And the Ukrainian nationalists like, no, no, no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: you guys don't get to have this land you took

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Speaker 1: from the rich people. That's the rich people's land. So

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Speaker 1: mak No writes quote, as anarchists, we must, paradox or

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Speaker 1: no paradox, make up our minds to form a united

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Speaker 1: front with the governmental forces, keeping faith with anarchist principles,

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Speaker 1: we will find a way to rise above all these contradictions,

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Speaker 1: and once the dark forces of reaction have been smashed,

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Speaker 1: we will broaden and deepen the course of the revolution

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Speaker 1: for the greater good of an enslaved humanity. So He's like,

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Speaker 1: we gotta fight these guys, and working with the government

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Speaker 1: is the only way to do it, because they're worse

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Speaker 1: than the government, but also funk the government. And you know,

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Speaker 1: it's a tough position to be and there's no good

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Speaker 1: there's no good choice to make at this point. I

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Speaker 1: can't please everyone in how you you tow this line.

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Speaker 1: I respect his approach. Yeah, Now, on January four, his

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Speaker 1: area formed an eight hundred man detachment of fighters to

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Speaker 1: come to the government's side, close to half of whom

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Speaker 1: were Nestor's anarchists. His older brothers Sava commanded the unit

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Speaker 1: and Makno stayed behind to head up an investigation into

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Speaker 1: imprisoned military officers who had conspired against the revolution. He

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Speaker 1: found the former prosecutor who had hired his case in

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Speaker 1: like nineteen whatever and handed him the guy who had

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Speaker 1: put him in solitary confinement, and Makno had this guy

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Speaker 1: sent to the same cell under identical conditions in order

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Speaker 1: to like he gets a little motherfucker. Yeah, yeah, there's

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Speaker 1: a very nice line, and yeah, it's fun. There's a

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Speaker 1: nice little line in Anarchy's Cossack that describes this as

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Speaker 1: an irony of history that should give all who bear

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Speaker 1: the responsibility for repression good pause for thought. So a

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Speaker 1: nice little line. So Makno also took advantage of the

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Speaker 1: fact that the government under Kerensky needed his help and

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Speaker 1: support to hold on. He used his position to demand

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Speaker 1: and secure the release of workers and peasants still incarcerated

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Speaker 1: under the new government. Some of these men had been

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Speaker 1: arrested by the Bolsheviks, who had been worried that they'd

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Speaker 1: revolt against them. Nestor all. He used his position to

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Speaker 1: seize money from the local bank in order to fund

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Speaker 1: the activities of his communes, and to set up an

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Speaker 1: orphanage for war orphans, which he located in the former

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Speaker 1: home of the Superintendent of police. So still some cool

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Speaker 1: ship going on. I was like, I'm still I'm still

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Speaker 1: vibing with him. Yeah, it's hard not to. I'm like

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Speaker 1: trying not to scroll down in his Wikipedia because I'm like, Wow,

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Speaker 1: he's like a hot, nice guy who goes to prison

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Speaker 1: Alize it's pretty hot. Yeah. Now, in the middle of

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Speaker 1: all this politicking, a detachment of Cossacks suddenly wrote up

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Speaker 1: from the front line where they've been fighting the Germans

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Speaker 1: to help nationalist forces attack the new government. Nestor took

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Speaker 1: command of an attachment of anarchist fighters and ambushed the Cossacks,

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Speaker 1: inflicting enough punishment that they'd surrendered, which brought Macno and

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Speaker 1: his comrades a whole pile of exciting new weapons. They

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Speaker 1: get like their first machine guns and stuff during this period,

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Speaker 1: and they're very excited about that. Now, so many books

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Speaker 1: at this point. Yeah, but maybe that's like once you've

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Speaker 1: read like a hundred books in the book club, you

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Speaker 1: get your you get your a machine gun. That's good,

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Speaker 1: that makes sense. You gotta you gotta kill a bunch

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Speaker 1: of Cossacks first, but yeah, then you get their machine guns. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there are barriers to entry, but it's not impossible. So

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Speaker 1: as the spring of nineteen eighteen dawns, things are going

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Speaker 1: pretty well for Nestor and the people of Gouldyaipoli. But

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Speaker 1: on March third, the new new government, which by this

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Speaker 1: point was dominated by the Bolsheviks, there's like an election ship.

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Speaker 1: It's very complicated. The Bolsheviks are in charge. At this point,

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Speaker 1: they signed an armistice with the German's, putting an into

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Speaker 1: official Russian participation in World War One. This agreement was

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Speaker 1: considered a stab in the back to Ukrainians like Makhno

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Speaker 1: though as basically the only entire terror so the government.

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Speaker 1: The new government signs in a groom with the Germans,

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Speaker 1: ending the war the Breslato Treaty, and part of that

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Speaker 1: agreement is that Germany and Austria Hungary get Ukraine. Um

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Speaker 1: so mak is like you, motherfucker's we just defended you

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Speaker 1: by like fighting, and now you've given us up to

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Speaker 1: the fucking Germans like you fucking dicks and the Red Guards.

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Speaker 1: The Bolshevik army are ordered to go through and either

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Speaker 1: evacuate or disarm Makhno and his partisans before like the

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Speaker 1: Austro Hungarian Empire moves in to occupy the regions. So

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Speaker 1: kind of lame, I'm gonna quote from anarchy's cossack here,

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Speaker 1: guided by their local allies and bringing in their wake

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Speaker 1: the former great estate owners thrown out the year before

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Speaker 1: by the revolutionary peasantry. Almost a million Austro German troops

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Speaker 1: occupied the territories seated by brest Latowski. The extractions and

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Speaker 1: repression of the occupiers and of the Ukrainian oligarchy quickly

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Speaker 1: triggered a popular resistance movement. Dozens of local insurgement detachment

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Speaker 1: detachment sprang up to harry enemy troops engaging in a

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Speaker 1: savage war of national liberation. Now Nestor had not been

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Speaker 1: ready for this, He did not expect the government to

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Speaker 1: betray him. And after a which he probably should have

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Speaker 1: been fairness and after a decent youthful optimism, I guess now,

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Speaker 1: after a decent amount of fighting, he found his forces

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Speaker 1: routed and he himself was stuck in a railroad marshaling yard,

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Speaker 1: where he learned that Guya Poli had been occupied by

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Speaker 1: Austro Hungarian forces. All the members of the local Soviet

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Speaker 1: the Revolution Committee in the anarchist group were arrested, many

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Speaker 1: of them were executed. Communes were broken up, and the

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Speaker 1: land was given back to the wealthy men who had

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Speaker 1: owned it before. And again a bunch of Nestor's friends

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Speaker 1: get murdered. So this brings us to the uncomfortable subject

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Speaker 1: again of the Ukrainian Mennonites. Now, to this day, Makno

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Speaker 1: is considered a war criminal by a number of Mennonite

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Speaker 1: communities on the allegation that his forces massacred peaceful Mennonite settlements.

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Speaker 1: Newver Episode one. You know that Mennonites were not pacifists

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Speaker 1: in Ukraine, and a major tenant, you know, a major

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Speaker 1: tenant a Mennonite belief is supposed to be the avoidance

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Speaker 1: of the sword, but this was not consistently obeyed prior

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Speaker 1: to the revolution, and in the spring of nineteen eighteen

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Speaker 1: they just gave up entirely. And I'm gonna quote from

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Speaker 1: a write up in libcom dot org from the spring

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Speaker 1: of nineteen eighteen, Mennonite colonies, though not all individual believers,

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Speaker 1: abandoned any pretense of fascism and of pacifism sorry, and

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Speaker 1: began to establish an armed force, which they referred to

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Speaker 1: as the soap Schultz for those who participated in their descendants,

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Speaker 1: this resort to violence presents a problem of conscience. For

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Speaker 1: four years, through various persecutions and martyrdoms, Mennonites had and

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Speaker 1: to an extent at least renounced the sword. Now gangs

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Speaker 1: of men armed themselves and zealous support of the invading

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Speaker 1: Austro German armies. It is worth observing as sort of

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Speaker 1: logical contortions that were necessary to defend this course of action.

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Speaker 1: It was thus argued by Heinrich John's and Erin Twebbs

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Speaker 1: for example, that one must differentiate between the principles of

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Speaker 1: the Kingdom of God and the principles of this worldly kingdom.

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Speaker 1: Matters of the former one one must remain non resistant,

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Speaker 1: of course, but with respect to the latter one, one

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Speaker 1: is obligated to support law and order. So the Mennonite,

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Speaker 1: the rich Mennonites again are like, no, no, no, non

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Speaker 1: violence only means to the Kingdom of God. We don't.

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Speaker 1: We don't use violent resistance to the Kingdom of God.

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Speaker 1: When it comes to supporting law and order, we can

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Speaker 1: shoot people. That's like again, I want to emphasize the

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Speaker 1: rich Ukrainian Mennonites, right. So understandably, Mennonite memorists and historians

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Speaker 1: have expended much energy justifying the self Scholtz, or at

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Speaker 1: least emphasizing the desperate horrors in response to which it emerged. B. J. Dick,

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Speaker 1: for example, who's a Mennonite historian, worried that those readers

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Speaker 1: of his Yeah, worried that those readers of his account

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Speaker 1: born decades after those terrible events would struggle to understand

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Speaker 1: fully the Mennonite situation, to emphasize with their anguish, and

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Speaker 1: to judge the matter fairly. The temptation to form an

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Speaker 1: emergency selped Shultz. He states, did not arise suddenly overnight,

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Speaker 1: but grew gradually through months of unbearable and catastrophic experiences

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Speaker 1: and unprecedented terror. And that is broadly fair to say.

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Speaker 1: I don't really sympathize with wealthy landowners who held thousands

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Speaker 1: of peasants in bondage, but it would be fair to

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Speaker 1: say that those wealthy landowners suffered unprecedented terror in this period.

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Speaker 1: All throughout Ukraine and Russia, there were stories that were

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Speaker 1: documented of peasant mobs burning down landowners at homes, often

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Speaker 1: with the landowner in their family inside, shouting, all of

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Speaker 1: this belongs to us, you know, right, that's scary. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that sounds scary. But I just can't get there in

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Speaker 1: terms of radical empathy. I'm sorry. I had to go

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Speaker 1: back to Did you say the man wrote the history

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Speaker 1: was named B. J. Dick, a Mennonite historian. Yeah, it

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Speaker 1: was b J. Dicks? Did wait dick like d I

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Speaker 1: X no no d I c K. Yeah, it's spelled

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Speaker 1: like a dick, Jamie, It's spelled like a dick. But

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Speaker 1: and then to use the name by before it, I'm

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Speaker 1: just saying I know, I know, I know, Jamie, I

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Speaker 1: change you could You don't have to go by b

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Speaker 1: J if your last name is Dick. He had a

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Speaker 1: lot of options, and he made a choice, and he

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Speaker 1: really yeah, he made a choice, Okay, just like the

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Speaker 1: wealthy Mennonite landowners made a choice to have a militia

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Speaker 1: dedicated to massacring the peasants trying to secure their own freedom.

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Speaker 1: That said, yes, that's true, that's the larger issue at hand. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So obviously, again, there were real reasons for them to

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Speaker 1: be terrified, because terrifying things happen to landowners in this period,

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Speaker 1: and rather ironically, Guy Poldy was one of the places

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Speaker 1: where this mostly did not happen. When mak known as people,

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Speaker 1: handled appropriations from the rich, they demanded itemized lists of

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Speaker 1: everything the landowners owned. The Soviet, which was like a

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Speaker 1: governing body made up of peasants, would then divide the

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Speaker 1: land so that the formerly wealthy people had the same

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Speaker 1: resources as the peasants. This was still terrifying for a

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Speaker 1: lot of rich people because they suddenly found themselves laboring

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Speaker 1: in the fields next to men and women they'd whipped, beaten,

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Speaker 1: and mocked for years. But during this period. The areas

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Speaker 1: under mack Noivist control. Like anarchist control, deaths, particularly among

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Speaker 1: men and knits in this period were very uncommon. There

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Speaker 1: is one case in January of nineteen eighteen where people

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Speaker 1: who might have been Macknivis killed a family of five

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Speaker 1: um and again not great, but also let's provide some

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Speaker 1: context to why this was happening. We also don't know

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Speaker 1: if it came on Makno's orders, because again he's got

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Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of like militiamen roaming around a territory,

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Speaker 1: angry and terrified whose friends that are being murdered too,

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Speaker 1: So it's like, yeah, it's it's a war. Bad things happen. Quote.

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Speaker 1: There are good reasons to suspect that the executioners were Magnivists. First,

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Speaker 1: the Shoonefeld region was near to Makno's hometown of Gulai Poli. Second,

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Speaker 1: it contains some of the most prosperous estates in the

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Speaker 1: whole region. These estates were not part of the original

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Speaker 1: Mennonite colonies. But we're built on land purchased in the

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Speaker 1: mid nineteenth century from a Czarist officer who had won

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Speaker 1: it in a game of cards. In the years before

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Speaker 1: World War One, it was a region of such prosperity

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Speaker 1: that several people own chauffeur to automobiles and one man

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Speaker 1: even bought a private airplane. So again, the people who

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Speaker 1: are rich enough that in nineteen eighteen they had some

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Speaker 1: of them had private plane money. Um, so there's some

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Speaker 1: murdering that gets happening that happens to these you know,

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Speaker 1: is sometimes when you own, owning a private plane is

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Speaker 1: a decision that you know, sometimes there's there's a price.

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Speaker 1: There's a price on owning. There might be a price,

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Speaker 1: especially you're also funding a militia that's murdering poor people. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: like funk Off, One of my favorite hobbies is every

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Speaker 1: time like a huge, huge, huge celebrity posts about global warming,

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Speaker 1: to just look up if they own a private plane

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Speaker 1: at the time they do, and it's like okay, you're

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Speaker 1: just okay. So you know what's really funny, Jamie is

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Speaker 1: to get on flight Radar twenty four or I mean

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Speaker 1: a D S B exchanged to be the best place,

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Speaker 1: but now it doesn't work as well. But get on

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Speaker 1: one of the plane tracking apps, figure out the in numbers,

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Speaker 1: which is basically the plane license plate number UH and

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Speaker 1: figure out the end numbers of rich people's private jets

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Speaker 1: and see how often they take their private jet from

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Speaker 1: one airport to another in the same city. It happens

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Speaker 1: all the time, a lot of JFK to LaGuardia flights

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Speaker 1: from rich people in fucking New York who were bucket asshole,

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Speaker 1: Oh my god, because they want to skip traffic. Oh

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Speaker 1: I wanna, Oh my Okay, that's like you know the

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Speaker 1: scene from Scanners where the head explodes. That's fuck oat stuff.

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Speaker 1: So there is again yeah again. I don't know that

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Speaker 1: Nestor had anything to do with this. There's certainly no

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Speaker 1: evidence that he had anything to do with this, this

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Speaker 1: murder um. Also, though, when you found a large band

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Speaker 1: of armed revolutionaries who occupy a big chunk of territory,

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Speaker 1: some of them are going to do horrible things because

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Speaker 1: it's a war, and every single military force in every

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Speaker 1: single war in history has had atrocities tied to its name.

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Speaker 1: You can't not do it. And it's true of the Macnivists,

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Speaker 1: and we shouldn't forget that or pretend it didn't happen.

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Speaker 1: But also, if you compare them to all of the

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Speaker 1: other actors in the Russian Civil War, there of the

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Speaker 1: like like like in a similar way to you know,

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Speaker 1: sort of the SDF like lower on the war crimes,

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Speaker 1: totem pole, Yeah, yeah, lower on the war crimes. Totem

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Speaker 1: totem pole, not no war crimes. And again Nestor one

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Speaker 1: of the things like Nestor is a a very outspoken

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Speaker 1: opponent of anti Semitism. Um. He grew up with a

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Speaker 1: lot of Jewish friends, and he was very much like

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Speaker 1: constantly haringing his troops not to do horrible things to

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Speaker 1: Jewish people. Also, anti Semitism very common in Ukraine, and

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Speaker 1: there were times when Macknivists fucking murdered Jewish people. And

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Speaker 1: it's terrible. Um, when you've got fifty five thousand uh,

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Speaker 1: traumatized militiamen, sometimes horrible things happens. And he punished. He

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Speaker 1: executed a lot of war lords who were responsible for

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Speaker 1: programs against Jewish people. It was a horrible, bloody civil

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Speaker 1: war and there's no walking out of it with your

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Speaker 1: hands clean, you know. Um, not to like right over that,

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Speaker 1: but he does. He gives a lot of speeches being like,

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Speaker 1: don't be fucking racist against Jewish people. What's wrong with you? Um?

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Speaker 1: He does his best yeah, yeah, he does his best. Okay,

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Speaker 1: so this is like you know, taking it, taking a turn.

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Speaker 1: This is where things get morally complex. He's fighting a

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Speaker 1: war now, and there's doing that and keeping your hands clean. Again.

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Speaker 1: He's not bordering programs, but he's he's building an army,

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Speaker 1: and some of those soldiers do bad things, not just

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Speaker 1: like to Mennonites too, Like there's bad things that the

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Speaker 1: Macnivists do. Um, we'll also talk about what the people

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Speaker 1: they're fighting do, which is on a completely different scale

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Speaker 1: of mass murder. So yeah, uh yeah, there's there's anyway.

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Speaker 1: So the Austro Hungarians come in, they invade basically, and

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Speaker 1: their arrival empowers the reactionary forces Makno had been beating

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Speaker 1: up until then, people who wanted to re establish the

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Speaker 1: old status quot. No matter who was in charge the

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Speaker 1: Mennonite militia, the Salts should fought with the invading foreign

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Speaker 1: soldiers to reclaim land and property that had been collectivized. B. J. Dick,

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Speaker 1: that Mennonite historian that Jamie is a big fan of,

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Speaker 1: describes the occupation as breathing space sent by God. And

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Speaker 1: he's describing that on behalf of the rich Mennonites, but

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Speaker 1: the invading like any other names. I know, I know

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Speaker 1: he had options. He could go by the B, go

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Speaker 1: by the J, but like by putting them together, he's horrible.

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Speaker 1: It's horrible. B J implies that he made a choice.

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Speaker 1: I know he did. It's interesting the invading troops that

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Speaker 1: the selp Shoulds fought alongside were as brutal as invading

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Speaker 1: troops tend to be. We have one account from a

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Speaker 1: guy named John Zidius, who was a rucified Greek and

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Speaker 1: a capitalist who lived in Odessa at the time of

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Speaker 1: the occupation, so not an anarchist, not a socialist, like

408
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Speaker 1: a capitalist guy. This is him reporting on what happened

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Speaker 1: when these troops move in and wealthy landowners get to

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Speaker 1: take their revenge on the peasants. Quote. The reprisal expeditions

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Speaker 1: were marked by hangings and shootings, executions dispensed with any

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Speaker 1: sort of proceedings. The venom of the landlords cared not

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Speaker 1: a jot for it, and the German officers gladly washed

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Speaker 1: their hands of any show of a trial. They shot

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Speaker 1: and hanged without any pretense of trial, often not even

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Speaker 1: bothering to check the identity of the defendant. The landlord

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Speaker 1: or his agent had merely to declare that such and

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Speaker 1: such a peasant had been involved in confiscation of his

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Speaker 1: estates for the culprit to be summarily executed. This happens

420
00:22:24,960 --> 00:22:28,359
Speaker 1: on a scale of tens of thousands, so one school

421
00:22:28,440 --> 00:22:31,600
Speaker 1: Yepoe was occupied. Mr. Makno's mother was punished in this way.

422
00:22:31,640 --> 00:22:34,119
Speaker 1: Her house was burned down. I don't think she lives

423
00:22:34,119 --> 00:22:37,439
Speaker 1: through this. Nestor's brother, Emilian, who had been disabled in

424
00:22:37,440 --> 00:22:40,280
Speaker 1: the war, was executed in front of his children. All

425
00:22:40,320 --> 00:22:43,359
Speaker 1: over Ukraine, thousands were shot or hanged, many for the

426
00:22:43,400 --> 00:22:46,760
Speaker 1: crime of being anarchists. Others were beaten to death in

427
00:22:46,800 --> 00:22:49,280
Speaker 1: the street by soldiers or reactionaries, including the men of

428
00:22:49,320 --> 00:22:51,840
Speaker 1: the Selt shuts Um. I should note here that the

429
00:22:51,960 --> 00:22:55,399
Speaker 1: violence was heavily class base. This Mennonite militia worked with

430
00:22:55,400 --> 00:22:58,760
Speaker 1: German soldiers to execute and beat peasants. They retreat received

431
00:22:58,800 --> 00:23:01,639
Speaker 1: training to help the occupy suppressed descent. But the fighters

432
00:23:01,720 --> 00:23:03,840
Speaker 1: doing this and the men funding the self shoots were

433
00:23:03,960 --> 00:23:05,879
Speaker 1: rich or at least well off. There were a lot

434
00:23:05,920 --> 00:23:08,440
Speaker 1: of poor Mennonites who they killed, and some of these

435
00:23:08,440 --> 00:23:12,560
Speaker 1: Mennonites took part in Machno's revolutionary other revolutionary activity. And

436
00:23:12,560 --> 00:23:14,320
Speaker 1: I want to note that, like when we're talking about,

437
00:23:14,400 --> 00:23:17,800
Speaker 1: you know, these different ethnic groups Mennonites, Russians, Germans, there

438
00:23:17,800 --> 00:23:19,680
Speaker 1: are poor members of all of these groups who are

439
00:23:19,720 --> 00:23:25,119
Speaker 1: fighting against like the forces of reaction and stuff. Yeah,

440
00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:28,200
Speaker 1: and and that's a big thing Makno tries to emphasize,

441
00:23:28,240 --> 00:23:30,119
Speaker 1: is that, like, we're not angry at the Russians or

442
00:23:30,119 --> 00:23:32,720
Speaker 1: the Germans or the Jews, were angry at rich people

443
00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:36,520
Speaker 1: who are murdering us. Like that's the problem that a

444
00:23:36,800 --> 00:23:41,560
Speaker 1: solid common enemy. Yeah. Elaine Ends, a Mennonite historian, writes

445
00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:45,240
Speaker 1: about this period, many landless Mennonites became servants on wealthy

446
00:23:45,240 --> 00:23:48,160
Speaker 1: Mennonite estates, and some became so disillusioned that they joined

447
00:23:48,200 --> 00:23:50,960
Speaker 1: the communists and anarchists to fight for a more just society.

448
00:23:51,240 --> 00:23:53,200
Speaker 1: So the same social fault lines that led to the

449
00:23:53,240 --> 00:23:56,800
Speaker 1: Russian Revolution ran right through my grandmother's yard. In most cases,

450
00:23:56,840 --> 00:23:59,320
Speaker 1: are people were not targeted because they were Mennonite, but

451
00:23:59,359 --> 00:24:04,800
Speaker 1: because they were wealthy. So again, very complicated issue, but

452
00:24:04,960 --> 00:24:07,720
Speaker 1: is primarily breaking down on class. Now some of the

453
00:24:07,760 --> 00:24:10,240
Speaker 1: people who are committing murders are doing it based on race.

454
00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:12,399
Speaker 1: Which is like a thing that Makno tries to prevent,

455
00:24:12,440 --> 00:24:15,840
Speaker 1: but it does happen, and that's that's terrible. It's generally

456
00:24:15,880 --> 00:24:18,840
Speaker 1: a terrible war. Now, Nestor Makna was forced to flee

457
00:24:18,920 --> 00:24:21,280
Speaker 1: north to Moscow after his town is taken over, and

458
00:24:21,320 --> 00:24:24,320
Speaker 1: he meets with Lennon, who basically is like, hey, buddy,

459
00:24:24,320 --> 00:24:26,800
Speaker 1: you're on your own. Um and I'm gonna read there's

460
00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:29,520
Speaker 1: a good write up in his Yeah, so he sorry,

461
00:24:29,920 --> 00:24:33,399
Speaker 1: just to clar he is, so his whole family is dead,

462
00:24:35,080 --> 00:24:39,919
Speaker 1: not all of them, almost everyone, okay, Yeah, and he

463
00:24:39,960 --> 00:24:42,119
Speaker 1: doesn't really know, like he loses his wife and child

464
00:24:42,160 --> 00:24:43,639
Speaker 1: in this period. He is he never even learns if

465
00:24:43,680 --> 00:24:47,439
Speaker 1: they're killed or not. Um. Like, it's this guy who

466
00:24:47,520 --> 00:24:50,919
Speaker 1: deals with some ship. Um. So I'm gonna read from

467
00:24:50,920 --> 00:24:53,720
Speaker 1: a write up in History Today about his meeting with Lenin. Makno,

468
00:24:53,880 --> 00:24:57,119
Speaker 1: conscious of his youth and crudeness, was embarrassed by Lenin's

469
00:24:57,119 --> 00:24:59,960
Speaker 1: magnetism and authority. He found himself beginning to venerate the

470
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:02,840
Speaker 1: man most responsible for the persecution of the anarchists. He

471
00:25:02,920 --> 00:25:05,119
Speaker 1: was unable to find the words and arguments he needed.

472
00:25:05,359 --> 00:25:07,439
Speaker 1: At the end of the interview, Lennon gave instructions that

473
00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:09,600
Speaker 1: his return to the Ukraine should be assisted by the

474
00:25:09,640 --> 00:25:13,399
Speaker 1: Bolshevik organization in charge of illegal frontier crossings. Makno was

475
00:25:13,440 --> 00:25:15,680
Speaker 1: given false papers and set out by the appointed date.

476
00:25:15,720 --> 00:25:18,119
Speaker 1: He was hiding with the peasant Friends some fifteen miles

477
00:25:18,119 --> 00:25:22,080
Speaker 1: from guy Poy, So he meets with Lennon. Lennon helps

478
00:25:22,119 --> 00:25:24,320
Speaker 1: him sneak back in, but it's like, we can't really help.

479
00:25:24,640 --> 00:25:27,000
Speaker 1: And it's kind of the way that this talk has described.

480
00:25:27,040 --> 00:25:30,000
Speaker 1: Lennon's like, you anarchists are kind of full of ship,

481
00:25:30,080 --> 00:25:31,919
Speaker 1: but I like you and like I want you to

482
00:25:32,000 --> 00:25:36,720
Speaker 1: fight the occupiers of Ukraine, which I'm partly responsible for

483
00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:40,840
Speaker 1: Ukraine being occupied, but like, you know, this is yeah,

484
00:25:41,040 --> 00:25:43,480
Speaker 1: men are so weird. He's so yeah. He's like, oh, well,

485
00:25:43,520 --> 00:25:47,680
Speaker 1: you know, you gotta hand it to him. He really cares.

486
00:25:47,680 --> 00:25:50,240
Speaker 1: There's like a couple of where he's like anarchists or ship,

487
00:25:50,280 --> 00:25:52,840
Speaker 1: but like you're an exception. You're all right, nestor like

488
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:58,480
Speaker 1: but look at that mustache. Yeah, I guess in fairness

489
00:25:58,480 --> 00:26:01,280
Speaker 1: to Lennon on the whole giving Ukraine to the austro Germans,

490
00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:04,560
Speaker 1: if you're in charge of Russia. In late nineteen eighteen,

491
00:26:04,680 --> 00:26:07,440
Speaker 1: or in early nineteen eighteen, there are no good options, right,

492
00:26:07,520 --> 00:26:10,040
Speaker 1: Like everything is shipped because the czar left. You would

493
00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:12,359
Speaker 1: have been like there, Lynnen didn't have a lot of

494
00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:15,240
Speaker 1: good things he could have done there. Like it's understandable

495
00:26:15,280 --> 00:26:16,920
Speaker 1: that Makno and his friends are furious, but like, I

496
00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:19,320
Speaker 1: don't know how you get out of World War one

497
00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:21,439
Speaker 1: if you just take over Russia at the end of

498
00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:26,800
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen, Like, yeah, there's no win. God, Okay. So

499
00:26:26,840 --> 00:26:33,760
Speaker 1: the boys are vibing, you know, yeah, yeah, persecuting your comrades,

500
00:26:33,840 --> 00:26:36,320
Speaker 1: but we're vibing here, we're vibing. I'm gonna help you

501
00:26:36,359 --> 00:26:39,439
Speaker 1: sneak back into Ukraine to fight the austro Germans. So

502
00:26:39,520 --> 00:26:41,800
Speaker 1: mak No sneaks back in and he starts building up

503
00:26:41,840 --> 00:26:43,800
Speaker 1: bit by a bit, like running around at night and

504
00:26:43,840 --> 00:26:46,720
Speaker 1: like dressing as a woman. Sometimes he like gathers up

505
00:26:46,920 --> 00:26:49,399
Speaker 1: all of these sort of like bandits and stuff together,

506
00:26:49,440 --> 00:26:55,160
Speaker 1: these anarchists who have yeah, very very Robert Durst. Yes. Um.

507
00:26:55,200 --> 00:26:57,440
Speaker 1: So he builds up a little part as an army,

508
00:26:57,520 --> 00:27:01,520
Speaker 1: and they start raiding landlords homesteads, killing landlords. And in

509
00:27:01,560 --> 00:27:03,919
Speaker 1: this case they did not do that initially. After the

510
00:27:04,000 --> 00:27:06,479
Speaker 1: landlords come back and start mass murdering their friends. They

511
00:27:06,480 --> 00:27:09,440
Speaker 1: start shooting some landlords, which at this point it's kind

512
00:27:09,440 --> 00:27:11,440
Speaker 1: of self defense. It's like, we we tried to do

513
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:15,680
Speaker 1: this peacefully, the level of the level of restraint, and honestly,

514
00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:17,639
Speaker 1: with this group seems like there's a lot of restraint

515
00:27:17,680 --> 00:27:19,919
Speaker 1: at play. If I took them this long. We tried

516
00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:23,040
Speaker 1: to do this peacefully, and you started murdering us as

517
00:27:23,040 --> 00:27:24,520
Speaker 1: soon as you had a chance. So now we're going

518
00:27:24,560 --> 00:27:26,000
Speaker 1: to kill some of you. And they do that. They

519
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:28,640
Speaker 1: don't kill everybody, but they start murdering some people, They

520
00:27:28,640 --> 00:27:32,160
Speaker 1: steal their ship, they get guns, they start carrying out

521
00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:36,280
Speaker 1: ambushes on Austro Hungarian patrols and like killing small patrols

522
00:27:36,280 --> 00:27:39,080
Speaker 1: of soldiers and taking their weapons and building up their forces.

523
00:27:39,600 --> 00:27:43,000
Speaker 1: His partisans showed no quarter when they beat a group

524
00:27:43,080 --> 00:27:45,679
Speaker 1: of like foreign soldiers, they would kill them all. Uh.

525
00:27:45,720 --> 00:27:48,240
Speaker 1: Their slogan was death to all who, with the help

526
00:27:48,280 --> 00:27:51,480
Speaker 1: of German Austrian bayonets, take away from peasants and workers

527
00:27:51,480 --> 00:27:55,520
Speaker 1: the conquests of their revolution. It's a bit long, bit

528
00:27:55,560 --> 00:28:00,280
Speaker 1: long again, he could barely read. I've been saying, you know,

529
00:28:00,600 --> 00:28:03,080
Speaker 1: you're crating a novelty t shirt industry is going to

530
00:28:03,160 --> 00:28:06,480
Speaker 1: struggle together. That's a hard T shirt to make for sure.

531
00:28:06,600 --> 00:28:09,000
Speaker 1: That's difficult, you know, like maybe I killed them all

532
00:28:09,040 --> 00:28:12,960
Speaker 1: of course, to keep pulling inspiration. So bit by bit,

533
00:28:13,040 --> 00:28:16,800
Speaker 1: Makno attracted followers and acquired weapons. He began experimenting with

534
00:28:16,840 --> 00:28:20,040
Speaker 1: guerrilla warfare and in fact innovating. At first, the most

535
00:28:20,040 --> 00:28:22,240
Speaker 1: his men could do was carry out strikes on small,

536
00:28:22,320 --> 00:28:25,760
Speaker 1: isolated patrols of soldiers and their allies, including the salts

537
00:28:25,800 --> 00:28:27,960
Speaker 1: that men and I militia. As his band and his

538
00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:32,400
Speaker 1: resources grew, Nestor's mind began to open to new militant possibilities. See,

539
00:28:32,440 --> 00:28:35,320
Speaker 1: there were these carts, these horse drawn carts called nitty

540
00:28:35,480 --> 00:28:38,160
Speaker 1: nit chankas, and they were basically again like the horse

541
00:28:38,240 --> 00:28:40,040
Speaker 1: drawn equivalent of a pickup truck. So it's a horse

542
00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:41,960
Speaker 1: drawn cart with a big flat bed in the back.

543
00:28:42,680 --> 00:28:44,280
Speaker 1: This would have been similar to the thing he would

544
00:28:44,280 --> 00:28:45,960
Speaker 1: have bought as a young man to help on his

545
00:28:46,000 --> 00:28:48,480
Speaker 1: brother's farms. These are very common. There's tons of these

546
00:28:48,480 --> 00:28:50,840
Speaker 1: carts all over the place, and they do have access

547
00:28:50,880 --> 00:28:53,520
Speaker 1: to a good number of horses. And his partisans start

548
00:28:53,560 --> 00:28:56,120
Speaker 1: capturing a bunch of heavy machine guns, which were great

549
00:28:56,120 --> 00:28:58,920
Speaker 1: weapons for carrying out ambushes, but are heavy and they're

550
00:28:58,960 --> 00:29:01,840
Speaker 1: slow to set up, so they're not great for a

551
00:29:01,400 --> 00:29:04,400
Speaker 1: a a like um a partisan militia because it's hard

552
00:29:04,440 --> 00:29:06,960
Speaker 1: to move with them. So Nestor hits upon the brilliant

553
00:29:06,960 --> 00:29:10,120
Speaker 1: idea of bolting these machine guns to the flat beds

554
00:29:10,120 --> 00:29:13,680
Speaker 1: of these uh, these horse drawn carts and using them

555
00:29:13,760 --> 00:29:15,760
Speaker 1: driving them around and using them to shoot people and

556
00:29:15,800 --> 00:29:19,320
Speaker 1: move very quickly. And he convinced the first technical in

557
00:29:19,360 --> 00:29:21,520
Speaker 1: world history, like these are you see this all over

558
00:29:21,560 --> 00:29:23,440
Speaker 1: the Middle East now, trucks with machine guns in the bed.

559
00:29:23,520 --> 00:29:26,800
Speaker 1: This is how that all starts. They're called Yeah, they're

560
00:29:26,800 --> 00:29:30,840
Speaker 1: called tachankas um and yeah, so he uses them both

561
00:29:30,840 --> 00:29:32,960
Speaker 1: because you can move them into position quickly and immediately

562
00:29:33,040 --> 00:29:35,880
Speaker 1: start shooting. And if you wind up like biting off

563
00:29:35,880 --> 00:29:38,120
Speaker 1: more than you can true while you're retreating because the

564
00:29:38,120 --> 00:29:40,240
Speaker 1: gun is in the bed, the horse can be moving

565
00:29:40,280 --> 00:29:42,640
Speaker 1: away from the enemy and you can still be shooting them.

566
00:29:42,880 --> 00:29:51,360
Speaker 1: Like it's awesome. I just I just I remember when

567
00:29:51,440 --> 00:29:55,840
Speaker 1: horses were trucks. Robber horses are trucks. And Nestor's like,

568
00:29:56,640 --> 00:29:58,800
Speaker 1: we should get a machine gun involved in this action.

569
00:29:59,440 --> 00:30:03,160
Speaker 1: We got a these horses fucking strapped, babe. Not everyone

570
00:30:03,240 --> 00:30:09,120
Speaker 1: is strapped. And oh so those sources are trucks, and

571
00:30:09,160 --> 00:30:13,360
Speaker 1: the trucks are fucking strapped. The strumps have gatling gun

572
00:30:13,400 --> 00:30:17,200
Speaker 1: type thing, well maxim guns on them. Yeah, okay, So

573
00:30:17,680 --> 00:30:20,760
Speaker 1: Macno's forces come to relie so heavily onto chankas for

574
00:30:20,880 --> 00:30:24,000
Speaker 1: mobile firepower that one of his soldiers starts referring referring

575
00:30:24,000 --> 00:30:27,680
Speaker 1: to the anarchist militia as a republic onto Chunky, basically

576
00:30:27,680 --> 00:30:31,000
Speaker 1: like a mobile republic of gun trucks. Like that's that's

577
00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:33,440
Speaker 1: what we have. Now. They took away our town, so

578
00:30:33,480 --> 00:30:39,400
Speaker 1: now we're like a traveling republic of machine guns. Um. Yeah, yeah,

579
00:30:39,840 --> 00:30:42,960
Speaker 1: So in those early days, mock No's growing anarchist horde

580
00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:45,360
Speaker 1: was yeah, basically a moving republic. It was September of

581
00:30:45,440 --> 00:30:49,480
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen before he finally attacked and recaptured Gohougyapoly, but

582
00:30:49,560 --> 00:30:52,760
Speaker 1: his forces were pushed out again by an Austrian lad counterattack.

583
00:30:53,120 --> 00:30:55,760
Speaker 1: Mock No led his men in a tactical retreat as

584
00:30:55,760 --> 00:30:58,640
Speaker 1: he was able to recognize his opponents had over extended themselves,

585
00:30:58,720 --> 00:31:01,040
Speaker 1: and a few days after this, eighty miles away from

586
00:31:01,040 --> 00:31:04,400
Speaker 1: his hometown, he surrounded attacked and wiped out a force

587
00:31:04,400 --> 00:31:07,400
Speaker 1: of two thousand Austrian soldiers and their allies, and this

588
00:31:07,480 --> 00:31:11,200
Speaker 1: brought his army their first artillery and heavy weapons. By December,

589
00:31:11,240 --> 00:31:14,600
Speaker 1: the Austrians had withdrawn entirely, their puppet leaders had been overthrown,

590
00:31:14,640 --> 00:31:18,280
Speaker 1: and Machno's anarchists were, for a brief time the undisputed

591
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:22,640
Speaker 1: protectors of a widening cordon around Ghuyaipoli. Makno intended this

592
00:31:22,760 --> 00:31:25,640
Speaker 1: core of free territory to constantly expand, bringing a new

593
00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:29,000
Speaker 1: egalitarian social and economic order to an ever expanding chunk

594
00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:32,440
Speaker 1: of eastern Ukraine. By nineteen nineteen, hundreds of thousands of

595
00:31:32,480 --> 00:31:36,040
Speaker 1: people were engaged in experiments with a new anarchist social order,

596
00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:38,640
Speaker 1: the first time something like this had been done on

597
00:31:38,720 --> 00:31:42,320
Speaker 1: such a scale. And there was a pamphlet that Makno

598
00:31:42,440 --> 00:31:44,920
Speaker 1: had published during this time called what are the Machnovists

599
00:31:44,960 --> 00:31:46,960
Speaker 1: and what are they fighting for? This wasn't actually like

600
00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:49,560
Speaker 1: a nineteen twenty, but similar stuff was going around in

601
00:31:49,640 --> 00:31:54,080
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen, and yeah, one of the notes on that like,

602
00:31:54,120 --> 00:31:56,320
Speaker 1: in terms of explaining their beliefs to new people who

603
00:31:56,360 --> 00:31:59,040
Speaker 1: wound up in their area, what do we mean by emancipation?

604
00:31:59,640 --> 00:32:02,520
Speaker 1: The o the throw of the monarchist coalition, Republican and

605
00:32:02,600 --> 00:32:06,480
Speaker 1: social democratic Communist Bolshevik party governments, which must give place

606
00:32:06,520 --> 00:32:09,760
Speaker 1: to a free and independent Soviet order of toilers without

607
00:32:09,840 --> 00:32:12,880
Speaker 1: rulers and their arbitrary laws. For the true Soviet order

608
00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:15,760
Speaker 1: is not the rule of the social democratic Communist Bolsheviks,

609
00:32:15,760 --> 00:32:18,360
Speaker 1: which now calls itself the Soviet Power, but a higher

610
00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:22,680
Speaker 1: form of anti authoritarian and anti status socialism, manifesting itself

611
00:32:22,680 --> 00:32:25,400
Speaker 1: in the organization of a free, happy and independent structure

612
00:32:25,400 --> 00:32:27,600
Speaker 1: for the social life of the toilers, in which all

613
00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:30,400
Speaker 1: individual toilers as well as society as a whole, can

614
00:32:30,440 --> 00:32:33,240
Speaker 1: build by themselves their happiness and well being according to

615
00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:38,680
Speaker 1: the principles of solidarity, friendship and equality. Okay, this is good,

616
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:42,720
Speaker 1: what is sweetie? Yeah? I think that we should start

617
00:32:42,720 --> 00:32:47,080
Speaker 1: calling ourselves toilers again. Yeah. Yeah, it's an accurate way

618
00:32:47,120 --> 00:32:51,320
Speaker 1: of of of you know, splitting up society in a

619
00:32:51,400 --> 00:32:55,520
Speaker 1: meaningful way. Yeah, haves and have nots of toilers and

620
00:32:55,560 --> 00:33:00,480
Speaker 1: non toilers. By December, the Austrians had withdrawn entirely from Ukraine.

621
00:33:00,520 --> 00:33:02,880
Speaker 1: Like the war ends and their side loses and they

622
00:33:02,880 --> 00:33:06,280
Speaker 1: don't get to keep Ukraine anymore. Their puppet leaders were overthrown,

623
00:33:06,360 --> 00:33:08,960
Speaker 1: and Makno's anarchists were for a brief time like in

624
00:33:09,080 --> 00:33:12,440
Speaker 1: charge of this ship. So Um, Maknoah's territory was not

625
00:33:12,600 --> 00:33:16,560
Speaker 1: perfectly consistent to his values. Obviously, the White forces were

626
00:33:16,560 --> 00:33:18,280
Speaker 1: growing in strength, and it was clear that if they

627
00:33:18,280 --> 00:33:22,200
Speaker 1: reoccupied the now anarchist territories of eastern Ukraine, mass slaughter

628
00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:24,760
Speaker 1: would follow. To prevent this, an army was needed, and

629
00:33:24,920 --> 00:33:27,920
Speaker 1: general mobilization was the only real way to build an army.

630
00:33:28,440 --> 00:33:31,280
Speaker 1: Peasant and workers councils voted to mobilize, but the fact

631
00:33:31,280 --> 00:33:33,560
Speaker 1: that the end result was close to conscription has to

632
00:33:33,560 --> 00:33:38,040
Speaker 1: be acknowledged, like compromises are made from their ideal social order,

633
00:33:38,040 --> 00:33:39,760
Speaker 1: for the fact that they need as many fighters as

634
00:33:39,800 --> 00:33:43,840
Speaker 1: possible right um. Now, these fighters also had like famously

635
00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:46,160
Speaker 1: high morale, so it does suggest that the vast majority

636
00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:49,360
Speaker 1: of these people, again who mostly had family members killed

637
00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:54,440
Speaker 1: by reactionaries, saw military services necessary self defense. Now, up

638
00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:56,719
Speaker 1: to the spring of nineteen nineteen, the Soviet press had

639
00:33:56,720 --> 00:33:59,640
Speaker 1: portrayed makno and his peasants as heroes. But when the

640
00:33:59,640 --> 00:34:02,160
Speaker 1: the Center powers retreated from Ukraine and the Red Army

641
00:34:02,240 --> 00:34:05,200
Speaker 1: started to seep down into the territory that line changed.

642
00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:07,640
Speaker 1: The core of the Bolshevik movement had been workers from

643
00:34:07,720 --> 00:34:11,000
Speaker 1: Russia's industrialized cities, whereas the Maknivus movement was made up

644
00:34:11,000 --> 00:34:14,720
Speaker 1: of peasants. So right, the Soviets are workers. The Ukrainians

645
00:34:14,760 --> 00:34:17,000
Speaker 1: are not considered workers. They're peasants. They're not laboring in

646
00:34:17,000 --> 00:34:19,400
Speaker 1: factories and stuff. There's not a lot of factories in Ukraine.

647
00:34:19,480 --> 00:34:22,399
Speaker 1: You know, they're farmers and ship but their toilers are

648
00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:25,319
Speaker 1: they not to That's how Makno sees it. But that's

649
00:34:25,360 --> 00:34:28,600
Speaker 1: not how an awful lot of people in the Soviet

650
00:34:28,680 --> 00:34:31,799
Speaker 1: chunks of of of the Union see it. Um The

651
00:34:31,880 --> 00:34:35,520
Speaker 1: anarchists were seen to them as temporary allies against reactionaries,

652
00:34:35,560 --> 00:34:38,200
Speaker 1: but not trustworthy and people who eventually needed to be

653
00:34:38,560 --> 00:34:42,120
Speaker 1: like beaten. By June, though, a White Army general named

654
00:34:42,160 --> 00:34:44,319
Speaker 1: Denikin had amassed a potent force and was in the

655
00:34:44,360 --> 00:34:47,440
Speaker 1: process of reconquering huge chunks of Ukraine and putting them

656
00:34:47,480 --> 00:34:50,000
Speaker 1: back in the hands of their ancestral oppressors. Now this

657
00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:52,160
Speaker 1: started happening at the same time as the Red Army

658
00:34:52,160 --> 00:34:54,520
Speaker 1: and the Machnivists began to integrate. Because while the Red

659
00:34:54,600 --> 00:34:57,839
Speaker 1: Army didn't like the Machnivists, they didn't like Denikin more,

660
00:34:57,920 --> 00:35:00,520
Speaker 1: and they needed to defend like themselves against its confusing

661
00:35:00,560 --> 00:35:04,120
Speaker 1: time to read about um. Trotsky during this time signs

662
00:35:04,120 --> 00:35:06,239
Speaker 1: an order like Trotsky's in charge of the Red Army,

663
00:35:06,280 --> 00:35:09,000
Speaker 1: and he signs an order forbidding the peasant councils that

664
00:35:09,080 --> 00:35:11,640
Speaker 1: Makno has formed and ordering him to hand over command

665
00:35:11,680 --> 00:35:14,799
Speaker 1: of his militia. He may have ordered Makno arrested Um,

666
00:35:15,120 --> 00:35:17,320
Speaker 1: we don't really know, but in any case, Makno ignores

667
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:20,799
Speaker 1: Trotsky's orders. He takes a handpick force of cavalry into

668
00:35:20,840 --> 00:35:23,279
Speaker 1: Chankas and he heads west to battle the Whites on

669
00:35:23,320 --> 00:35:25,840
Speaker 1: his own, all the while ordering his other soldiers to

670
00:35:25,880 --> 00:35:27,919
Speaker 1: stay embedded with the Red Army for the time being.

671
00:35:28,320 --> 00:35:32,000
Speaker 1: Now this really piste off Trotsky. Yeah, this is off Trotsky.

672
00:35:32,080 --> 00:35:34,799
Speaker 1: But the summer of nineteen nineteen was a disaster for

673
00:35:34,840 --> 00:35:36,480
Speaker 1: the Reds and their allies, and he couldn't really do

674
00:35:36,560 --> 00:35:40,080
Speaker 1: anything about it. Dinnikin and his White forces advanced constantly

675
00:35:40,080 --> 00:35:43,600
Speaker 1: and they smashed the Red Army multiple times. Makno's forces

676
00:35:43,640 --> 00:35:46,759
Speaker 1: at the same time conducted like a very confusing war

677
00:35:46,880 --> 00:35:50,319
Speaker 1: because in the east mak No's cavalry army is fighting,

678
00:35:50,400 --> 00:35:52,759
Speaker 1: or Makno's army is fighting alongside the Red Army. But

679
00:35:52,800 --> 00:35:55,200
Speaker 1: in the rest in the west, Makno and his handpicked

680
00:35:55,239 --> 00:35:57,960
Speaker 1: force are fighting with both the Red Army and the Whites.

681
00:35:58,239 --> 00:36:01,520
Speaker 1: Gives a fucking confusing s C ofvil war, so very

682
00:36:01,640 --> 00:36:03,960
Speaker 1: very messy. One of the things they do is when

683
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:06,759
Speaker 1: they occupy villages that the Red Army had occupied, they

684
00:36:06,840 --> 00:36:10,080
Speaker 1: murder commissars and secret police officials because those people are

685
00:36:10,120 --> 00:36:13,640
Speaker 1: murdering anarchists. It's a very messy period. Now, late in

686
00:36:13,680 --> 00:36:16,719
Speaker 1: the summer, the Red Army in the east collapses completely.

687
00:36:16,760 --> 00:36:20,239
Speaker 1: The Whites just shatter them to pieces. Trotsky retreats back

688
00:36:20,239 --> 00:36:23,640
Speaker 1: into Russia and Makno orders his remaining embedded forces to

689
00:36:23,680 --> 00:36:26,560
Speaker 1: pull out and to retreat to a place called Kirova Grad,

690
00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:28,760
Speaker 1: where they meet up again with Makno and his cavalry.

691
00:36:29,080 --> 00:36:31,120
Speaker 1: So the Red Army is kicked out of Ukraine and

692
00:36:31,160 --> 00:36:35,120
Speaker 1: Makno is the only force fighting the the the Whites

693
00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:38,000
Speaker 1: left in Ukraine at this period of time, um or

694
00:36:38,000 --> 00:36:41,719
Speaker 1: at least the only like organized force. Meanwhile, the Dinnichanists

695
00:36:41,800 --> 00:36:45,040
Speaker 1: had conquered Guapolia, yet again, and their army was huge,

696
00:36:45,080 --> 00:36:47,720
Speaker 1: more than fifty thousand well armed and battle hardened troops.

697
00:36:48,080 --> 00:36:50,239
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're we're, we're, We've come up to like

698
00:36:50,360 --> 00:36:52,440
Speaker 1: a a kind of cliffhanger points. So you've got the

699
00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:54,680
Speaker 1: Red Army has to leave, they get they get beaten

700
00:36:54,719 --> 00:36:58,400
Speaker 1: out of Ukraine. Nestor has the largest force still fighting

701
00:36:58,400 --> 00:37:01,160
Speaker 1: the White Army, and they are badly outnumbered. His home

702
00:37:01,239 --> 00:37:03,359
Speaker 1: village has been taken over by the Whites, and he's

703
00:37:03,400 --> 00:37:07,040
Speaker 1: just got this roaming banded army of like gun trucks

704
00:37:07,080 --> 00:37:11,279
Speaker 1: and horsemen with short barreled rifle, horse horse asses with

705
00:37:11,440 --> 00:37:16,279
Speaker 1: machine truck gun, horse horse gun. It seems like a

706
00:37:16,320 --> 00:37:19,399
Speaker 1: pretty I mean, he's in a series of impossible situations.

707
00:37:19,560 --> 00:37:22,880
Speaker 1: He's in a bad position to be in, um, But

708
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:24,480
Speaker 1: you know who's not in a bad position to be

709
00:37:24,520 --> 00:37:29,200
Speaker 1: in Jamie people hawking products and services. I'm assuming that's

710
00:37:29,200 --> 00:37:34,400
Speaker 1: a great position to be in, so check out products.

711
00:37:41,440 --> 00:37:44,799
Speaker 1: So before we tell the rest of this story, it's

712
00:37:44,800 --> 00:37:47,319
Speaker 1: probably worth explaining the kind of world that Dinnikin and

713
00:37:47,360 --> 00:37:50,000
Speaker 1: his White Army, which did include a lot of Mennonite militia.

714
00:37:50,239 --> 00:37:53,480
Speaker 1: We're fighting for included a lot of just like local

715
00:37:53,560 --> 00:37:56,600
Speaker 1: reactionary forces. So I'm gonna quote again from lipcom dot

716
00:37:56,719 --> 00:37:59,360
Speaker 1: org talking about what the Dinnickanists do in the areas

717
00:37:59,360 --> 00:38:04,200
Speaker 1: they retake Ukraine. Insofar as the Dinniicanists had a political program,

718
00:38:04,200 --> 00:38:06,360
Speaker 1: it was based on the restoration of landlords in the

719
00:38:06,360 --> 00:38:10,200
Speaker 1: re establishment of a single Russian state incorporating Ukraine. This

720
00:38:10,280 --> 00:38:12,799
Speaker 1: brought them into conflict with the local population and even

721
00:38:12,840 --> 00:38:19,400
Speaker 1: one of their own commanders, General Wrangel, described pillage and speculation, debauchery, gambling, orgies, looting,

722
00:38:19,480 --> 00:38:23,919
Speaker 1: violence and arbitrary acts. Otherwise sympathetic chroniclers are scathing about

723
00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:27,440
Speaker 1: the White Army's abuses in Ukraine. Richard Lukat, somewhat carelessly

724
00:38:27,480 --> 00:38:30,880
Speaker 1: in the context, describes something near to anarchy, bemoaning the

725
00:38:30,920 --> 00:38:34,560
Speaker 1: casual brutalities of the Cossacks, the regular pagrams, and other

726
00:38:34,600 --> 00:38:39,239
Speaker 1: appalling acts of barbarism. They issued proclamations encouraging Roussou Ukrainians

727
00:38:39,440 --> 00:38:42,719
Speaker 1: to rise up against the Jew communists, and we're responsible

728
00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:44,799
Speaker 1: for hundreds of programs and the deaths of tens of

729
00:38:44,840 --> 00:38:48,840
Speaker 1: thousands of Jews. Many of their victims were beaten, mutilated, raped, hanged,

730
00:38:48,880 --> 00:38:51,239
Speaker 1: burned and dumped into wells or thrown from rooftops and

731
00:38:51,280 --> 00:38:54,600
Speaker 1: buried alive. Are Shanov states that in the former Free Territory,

732
00:38:54,800 --> 00:38:57,719
Speaker 1: peasants were plundered, violently, abused, and killed. Almost all the

733
00:38:57,760 --> 00:39:00,560
Speaker 1: Jewish women of ghulia I Poly were raped. So this

734
00:39:00,640 --> 00:39:02,520
Speaker 1: is the White Army. These are the people that Nestor

735
00:39:02,600 --> 00:39:06,080
Speaker 1: is fighting against, and to the extent that he is

736
00:39:06,120 --> 00:39:10,919
Speaker 1: brutal to them, you kind of have to understand why. Yeah,

737
00:39:11,040 --> 00:39:16,320
Speaker 1: they're pretty bad. Yeah yeah. A member of Dinnikan's Special

738
00:39:16,360 --> 00:39:19,760
Speaker 1: Counsel his his leadership casts stated that the main features

739
00:39:19,760 --> 00:39:24,200
Speaker 1: of the Dinnikin regime were violence, torture, robbery's, drunkenness, odious behavior.

740
00:39:24,680 --> 00:39:28,920
Speaker 1: The counter Intelligence Service carried its activities to an unlimited, wild, arbitrary,

741
00:39:28,960 --> 00:39:31,600
Speaker 1: and as creating, as Dinnakin put it, a painful mania

742
00:39:31,719 --> 00:39:34,959
Speaker 1: all over the country. According to General Wrangel, at this time,

743
00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:37,840
Speaker 1: the White Army hunted down anybody suspected of any contact

744
00:39:37,840 --> 00:39:40,799
Speaker 1: with opposition groups, even if that contact had been involuntary,

745
00:39:40,960 --> 00:39:44,600
Speaker 1: a policy he'd denounced as insane and cruel. They especially

746
00:39:44,680 --> 00:39:47,520
Speaker 1: victimized the wives and girlfriends of known insurgents. According to

747
00:39:47,560 --> 00:39:51,520
Speaker 1: diaries attributed to Makno's partner Galina Kuzmenko in summer nineteen nineteen.

748
00:39:51,560 --> 00:39:55,280
Speaker 1: The Denniicanists victims included the wife of Makno's elder brother Sava.

749
00:39:55,680 --> 00:39:58,000
Speaker 1: They beat her, stabbed her with their bayonets, cut off

750
00:39:58,040 --> 00:40:00,239
Speaker 1: one of her breasts, and only then did they shoot her.

751
00:40:00,560 --> 00:40:05,120
Speaker 1: Since revolutionaries, yeah yeah, uh, tens of thousands of people

752
00:40:05,160 --> 00:40:07,960
Speaker 1: are tortured and killed this way. It is a fucking nightmare.

753
00:40:08,280 --> 00:40:11,800
Speaker 1: And again there is brutality from the Macknivists, but it

754
00:40:11,920 --> 00:40:14,279
Speaker 1: is not on this fucking scale. Um, And it is

755
00:40:14,360 --> 00:40:18,920
Speaker 1: generally in response to this. Yeah, yeah, this is like

756
00:40:18,920 --> 00:40:22,240
Speaker 1: a fucking pecking pal movies. Yeah, it's it's the fucking

757
00:40:22,320 --> 00:40:24,600
Speaker 1: Russian Civil Wars. One of the worst things that ever

758
00:40:24,680 --> 00:40:28,720
Speaker 1: happens in history. Um. Not that the Czarist regime was

759
00:40:28,719 --> 00:40:30,520
Speaker 1: was good or shouldn't have been overthrown, but it's a

760
00:40:30,560 --> 00:40:34,080
Speaker 1: horrible war. And by the way, these guys were talking

761
00:40:34,080 --> 00:40:35,880
Speaker 1: about the whites are the guys that the US and

762
00:40:35,920 --> 00:40:40,560
Speaker 1: Britain are supporting mhm because they're not Communists. Well they're not.

763
00:40:40,920 --> 00:40:45,360
Speaker 1: Yeah there, they would never to this day because the

764
00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:47,440
Speaker 1: whites try to ally with Makno at a couple of

765
00:40:47,440 --> 00:40:49,040
Speaker 1: points because they're like, hey, you hate the bullshe because

766
00:40:49,080 --> 00:40:50,920
Speaker 1: he's like, no, fuck you guys, and he does go

767
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:53,200
Speaker 1: to the Western he's like, look, like, these people you're

768
00:40:53,200 --> 00:40:57,000
Speaker 1: supporting are even worse than the Bolsheviks, like support us.

769
00:40:57,040 --> 00:40:59,040
Speaker 1: We won't funk with you, Like, we're not going to

770
00:40:59,080 --> 00:41:00,960
Speaker 1: go to war with the West. We just want to

771
00:41:00,960 --> 00:41:04,560
Speaker 1: live in Ukraine and not like have bosses like But

772
00:41:04,800 --> 00:41:06,439
Speaker 1: of course they don't. They don't listen to that either,

773
00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:12,520
Speaker 1: and so they the British send a bunch of guns

774
00:41:12,560 --> 00:41:18,160
Speaker 1: to the rape gangs. Um, yeah, good stuff on the

775
00:41:18,320 --> 00:41:22,839
Speaker 1: side of angels. So for months, Denikin's Whites seemed unstoppable.

776
00:41:23,120 --> 00:41:25,960
Speaker 1: Makno and his forces retreated west for weeks, followed by

777
00:41:25,960 --> 00:41:28,800
Speaker 1: a constant stream of tens of thousands of refugees running

778
00:41:28,800 --> 00:41:31,719
Speaker 1: from the White advance for obvious reasons. Makno and his

779
00:41:31,760 --> 00:41:34,920
Speaker 1: men fought running battles with Denikins forces as well as

780
00:41:34,920 --> 00:41:37,600
Speaker 1: with the Bolshevik fourteenth Army, who had been fleeing British

781
00:41:37,719 --> 00:41:40,080
Speaker 1: naval bombardment in Odessas. So again they're fighting both the

782
00:41:40,120 --> 00:41:44,040
Speaker 1: Reds and the Whites at periods of time. Um and yeah,

783
00:41:44,160 --> 00:41:46,120
Speaker 1: because again the left is kind of always been the same.

784
00:41:46,440 --> 00:41:49,719
Speaker 1: So there were few victories during this time, including the

785
00:41:49,760 --> 00:41:52,319
Speaker 1: capture of a warlord named Grigorrev who had ordered the

786
00:41:52,320 --> 00:41:54,920
Speaker 1: pugroms of a lot of Jewish people. So Makno has

787
00:41:54,960 --> 00:41:58,240
Speaker 1: this guy executed. He does this whenever he can um

788
00:41:58,320 --> 00:42:00,960
Speaker 1: And by September Makno's army had been pushed back six

789
00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:04,000
Speaker 1: hundred kilometers from Guglia Polly. So they've they have been

790
00:42:04,040 --> 00:42:08,120
Speaker 1: fleeing for like four hundred miles um of solid retreat,

791
00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:11,200
Speaker 1: which is exhausting. Now. There was a scholar named Archanov

792
00:42:11,239 --> 00:42:13,600
Speaker 1: who was with mak Novus forces at this time, and

793
00:42:13,640 --> 00:42:17,680
Speaker 1: he chronicles the retreat. He later wrote the Maknovs retreat

794
00:42:17,719 --> 00:42:19,760
Speaker 1: had covered more than four hundred miles and had lasted

795
00:42:19,760 --> 00:42:23,000
Speaker 1: close to four months. It had been unimaginably difficult. The

796
00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:26,000
Speaker 1: insurgents lacked clothes and shoes. Through torre it heat, enveloped

797
00:42:26,040 --> 00:42:28,520
Speaker 1: by clouds of dust, under a hail of bullets and shells,

798
00:42:28,719 --> 00:42:30,920
Speaker 1: they went further and further away from their own region

799
00:42:30,960 --> 00:42:34,040
Speaker 1: towards an unknown destination. But they were all animated by

800
00:42:34,080 --> 00:42:36,640
Speaker 1: the idea of victory over the enemy, and they valiantly

801
00:42:36,719 --> 00:42:39,719
Speaker 1: endured the rigors of the retreat. Only occasionally that the

802
00:42:39,800 --> 00:42:42,760
Speaker 1: least patient among them cry out turn around towards the niper,

803
00:42:43,320 --> 00:42:46,400
Speaker 1: but implacable necessity kept pushing them further and further from

804
00:42:46,440 --> 00:42:48,759
Speaker 1: the niper, which is a river and their birthplace, their

805
00:42:48,800 --> 00:42:52,120
Speaker 1: proud region. With the inexhaustible patients, with their will stretched

806
00:42:52,120 --> 00:42:54,600
Speaker 1: to the limit, they rallied around their leader under continual

807
00:42:54,719 --> 00:42:57,960
Speaker 1: enemy fire. It was impossible to go anywhere else. But

808
00:42:58,160 --> 00:43:01,600
Speaker 1: Makno recognized, so they're like, this is about as bad

809
00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:03,600
Speaker 1: as situation as you can get in a military force.

810
00:43:03,640 --> 00:43:05,480
Speaker 1: And as people are like, why aren't we turning around

811
00:43:05,480 --> 00:43:08,040
Speaker 1: and fighting, but Makna keeps saying no, no no, no, keep retreating,

812
00:43:08,120 --> 00:43:10,880
Speaker 1: keep retreating, keep retreating, And eventually he gets to a

813
00:43:10,880 --> 00:43:14,319
Speaker 1: point where Makno realizes that the enemy has finally overextended

814
00:43:14,360 --> 00:43:17,120
Speaker 1: their supply lines. They've been drunk on months of victory

815
00:43:17,160 --> 00:43:20,080
Speaker 1: and they had neglected to protect themselves properly. So he

816
00:43:20,200 --> 00:43:22,759
Speaker 1: rouses his exhausted fighters by telling them, hey, guys, this

817
00:43:22,800 --> 00:43:26,239
Speaker 1: whole retreat has just been a play to overextend Denikin's men,

818
00:43:26,560 --> 00:43:28,439
Speaker 1: and now they're in a position where we can funk

819
00:43:28,520 --> 00:43:31,120
Speaker 1: them up. So he orders his soldiers to face the enemy.

820
00:43:31,200 --> 00:43:33,840
Speaker 1: He leads them in a cry of liberty or death.

821
00:43:34,120 --> 00:43:36,560
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote Antonov again for what happens next

822
00:43:36,680 --> 00:43:40,479
Speaker 1: is a very famous battle. On the evening of September twenty,

823
00:43:40,760 --> 00:43:43,160
Speaker 1: the Magnifus troops, who until then had been marching westward,

824
00:43:43,239 --> 00:43:45,920
Speaker 1: suddenly turned all their forces eastward and marched straight to

825
00:43:45,960 --> 00:43:48,920
Speaker 1: the main forces of Denikin's army. The first encounter took

826
00:43:48,920 --> 00:43:51,160
Speaker 1: place late in the evening near the village of Krutenko,

827
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:54,680
Speaker 1: where the Maknivus first brigade attacked to Denikanist unit. Denikins

828
00:43:54,760 --> 00:43:57,160
Speaker 1: troops retreated to take up better positions and to draw

829
00:43:57,160 --> 00:44:00,000
Speaker 1: the Magnifus after them, but the Magnifus did not pursue them.

830
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:02,320
Speaker 1: This misled the vigilance of the enemy, who concluded that

831
00:44:02,360 --> 00:44:05,080
Speaker 1: the insurgents were still moving westward. However, in the middle

832
00:44:05,120 --> 00:44:07,560
Speaker 1: of the night, all the Macnivist forces stationed in several

833
00:44:07,600 --> 00:44:11,320
Speaker 1: villages began marching eastward. The enemy's principal forces were concentrated

834
00:44:11,360 --> 00:44:14,400
Speaker 1: near the village of Peregovnica. The village itself was occupied

835
00:44:14,400 --> 00:44:17,600
Speaker 1: by the Macknivists. The fighting started between three and four am.

836
00:44:17,719 --> 00:44:20,080
Speaker 1: It kept mounting in intensity and meached It reached its

837
00:44:20,080 --> 00:44:22,319
Speaker 1: peak by eight am, in a hurricane of machine gun

838
00:44:22,360 --> 00:44:25,720
Speaker 1: fire on both sides. Makno himself with his cavalry escort,

839
00:44:25,760 --> 00:44:28,680
Speaker 1: had disappeared at nightfall, seeking to turn the enemy's flank.

840
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:31,200
Speaker 1: During the whole battle that ensued, there was no further

841
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:33,640
Speaker 1: news from him. By nine in the morning, the outnumbered

842
00:44:33,680 --> 00:44:36,920
Speaker 1: and exhausted Macnivists began to lose ground. They were already

843
00:44:36,920 --> 00:44:39,320
Speaker 1: fighting on the outskirts of the village. From all sides,

844
00:44:39,400 --> 00:44:41,799
Speaker 1: enemy enforcements brought new bursts of fire to bear on

845
00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:44,719
Speaker 1: the Macnivists. The staff of the insurrectionary army, as well

846
00:44:44,760 --> 00:44:46,600
Speaker 1: as everyone in the village who could handle a rifle,

847
00:44:46,960 --> 00:44:49,239
Speaker 1: armed themselves and joined in the fighting. This was the

848
00:44:49,239 --> 00:44:51,319
Speaker 1: crucial moment when it seemed that the battle and with it,

849
00:44:51,360 --> 00:44:53,879
Speaker 1: the whole cause of the insurgents, was lost. The order

850
00:44:53,960 --> 00:44:56,000
Speaker 1: was given for everyone, even the women, to be ready

851
00:44:56,040 --> 00:44:58,200
Speaker 1: to fire on the enemy in the village streets, all

852
00:44:58,239 --> 00:45:00,560
Speaker 1: prepared for the supreme hour of the attle end of

853
00:45:00,560 --> 00:45:03,239
Speaker 1: their lives. But suddenly the machine gun fire of the

854
00:45:03,320 --> 00:45:05,480
Speaker 1: enemy and their frantic cheers began to grow weaker and

855
00:45:05,520 --> 00:45:07,880
Speaker 1: then to recede into the distance. The defenders of the

856
00:45:07,960 --> 00:45:10,319
Speaker 1: village realized that the enemy was retreating and that the

857
00:45:10,360 --> 00:45:13,040
Speaker 1: battle was now taking place some distance away. It was

858
00:45:13,120 --> 00:45:16,160
Speaker 1: Makno who, appearing unexpectedly at the very moment when his

859
00:45:16,160 --> 00:45:18,200
Speaker 1: troops were driven back and were preparing to fight in

860
00:45:18,239 --> 00:45:21,000
Speaker 1: the streets, had decided the fate of the battle. Covered

861
00:45:21,040 --> 00:45:23,560
Speaker 1: with dust and fatigued from his exertions, he reached the

862
00:45:23,640 --> 00:45:26,239
Speaker 1: enemy flank through a deep ravine without a cry, but

863
00:45:26,280 --> 00:45:28,640
Speaker 1: with a burning resolve fixed on his features. He threw

864
00:45:28,719 --> 00:45:31,200
Speaker 1: himself on the dinnic and ass at full gallop, followed

865
00:45:31,200 --> 00:45:34,279
Speaker 1: by his escort, and broke into their ranks. All exhaustion,

866
00:45:34,360 --> 00:45:38,000
Speaker 1: all discouragement disappeared from among the Macnivists. But Coo is here,

867
00:45:38,080 --> 00:45:40,120
Speaker 1: But Coo is here. Fighting with his saber could be

868
00:45:40,160 --> 00:45:43,120
Speaker 1: heard everywhere, and with redoubled energy, they all pushed forward,

869
00:45:43,320 --> 00:45:46,080
Speaker 1: following their beloved leader, who seemed doomed to death. A

870
00:45:46,080 --> 00:45:49,239
Speaker 1: hand to hand combat of incredible ferocity, a hacking, as

871
00:45:49,239 --> 00:45:52,319
Speaker 1: the Magnifs called it, followed. However brave the Whites may

872
00:45:52,360 --> 00:45:55,000
Speaker 1: have been, they were thrown into retreat, at first, slowly

873
00:45:55,040 --> 00:45:57,400
Speaker 1: and in an orderly matter, trying to halt the impetus

874
00:45:57,440 --> 00:46:00,200
Speaker 1: of the magnivists, but then they simply ran. The other

875
00:46:00,239 --> 00:46:03,000
Speaker 1: regiments seized by panic, followed them, and finally all of

876
00:46:03,040 --> 00:46:05,920
Speaker 1: Dinnikins troops were routed and tried to save themselves by

877
00:46:05,920 --> 00:46:10,520
Speaker 1: swimming across the Sinukia River. So there's this big battle.

878
00:46:10,640 --> 00:46:12,920
Speaker 1: Macnow disappears at the start of it, and at the

879
00:46:13,000 --> 00:46:15,279
Speaker 1: very end, like it's a fucking Gandolf moment, like as

880
00:46:15,280 --> 00:46:18,280
Speaker 1: they're about to be overwhelmed, he charges into the enemy's

881
00:46:18,360 --> 00:46:22,560
Speaker 1: rear music, Yeah they've got like he charges machine guns

882
00:46:22,560 --> 00:46:25,040
Speaker 1: with a sword and just starts stabbing the ship out

883
00:46:25,040 --> 00:46:27,080
Speaker 1: of people and it fucking they all run like the

884
00:46:27,120 --> 00:46:33,560
Speaker 1: fucking whites break and it's yeah, it's fucking awesome. It's

885
00:46:33,719 --> 00:46:38,520
Speaker 1: just like it is a Gandolf moment that's so bizarre,

886
00:46:38,719 --> 00:46:41,960
Speaker 1: Like is that it sounds like that couldn't possibly be.

887
00:46:42,480 --> 00:46:45,560
Speaker 1: It happens and he gets shot a bunch of times

888
00:46:45,640 --> 00:46:47,840
Speaker 1: because it worked, like it was the only thing that

889
00:46:47,920 --> 00:46:50,960
Speaker 1: could have worked, Like he had one chance to win,

890
00:46:51,080 --> 00:46:53,600
Speaker 1: and it was sneak a force behind them and panicked

891
00:46:53,680 --> 00:46:56,160
Speaker 1: them right, and it soon as he comes. Once in

892
00:46:56,160 --> 00:47:00,640
Speaker 1: a lifetime, Yeah, that's what that talking heads is about.

893
00:47:01,000 --> 00:47:08,000
Speaker 1: So I was thinking that about lose yourself, but too so.

894
00:47:09,000 --> 00:47:12,520
Speaker 1: In situations like this, panic is contagious, and with their

895
00:47:12,560 --> 00:47:15,640
Speaker 1: most elite regiment shattered, the rest of dinnikins forces began

896
00:47:15,680 --> 00:47:18,280
Speaker 1: to break and run. Hundreds were slaying on the banks

897
00:47:18,280 --> 00:47:22,000
Speaker 1: of the Sinyukia River. Corpses stretched out for miles uh

898
00:47:22,120 --> 00:47:24,960
Speaker 1: mak No capture all of the captures, thousands and all

899
00:47:24,960 --> 00:47:27,480
Speaker 1: of the off He kills all of the officers he captures,

900
00:47:27,480 --> 00:47:30,279
Speaker 1: but he lets the enlisted men live and has a

901
00:47:30,280 --> 00:47:33,040
Speaker 1: lot of them joined the Mocknovist army after this. So

902
00:47:33,520 --> 00:47:35,200
Speaker 1: this would turn out to be one of the most

903
00:47:35,200 --> 00:47:38,360
Speaker 1: consequential battles of the entire twentieth century, because if the

904
00:47:38,360 --> 00:47:41,040
Speaker 1: White forces under Dennikin had beaten mak No, they would

905
00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:43,160
Speaker 1: have reinforced the White army at the north, which was

906
00:47:43,200 --> 00:47:46,400
Speaker 1: marching on moscow Um, and might well have beaten the

907
00:47:46,400 --> 00:47:49,120
Speaker 1: Red army they were winning at that point. Soldiers on

908
00:47:49,160 --> 00:47:51,600
Speaker 1: the ground at the time understood this. A Dinnachanist officer

909
00:47:51,680 --> 00:47:54,920
Speaker 1: named Sakovich, who survived, later wrote, and a sky blanketed

910
00:47:55,040 --> 00:47:58,200
Speaker 1: in autumn cloud, the last puffs of artillery smoke exploded,

911
00:47:58,200 --> 00:48:01,239
Speaker 1: then all was silent. All of ranking officers since that

912
00:48:01,320 --> 00:48:03,799
Speaker 1: something tragic had just occurred. Though nobody could have had

913
00:48:03,840 --> 00:48:06,400
Speaker 1: an inkling of the enormity of the disaster which had struck,

914
00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:09,000
Speaker 1: none of us knew that at that precise moment, Nationalist

915
00:48:09,080 --> 00:48:11,920
Speaker 1: Russia had lost the war. It's over, I said, I

916
00:48:11,960 --> 00:48:14,799
Speaker 1: know not why to Lieutenant Rozov, who was standing alongside me.

917
00:48:15,160 --> 00:48:20,879
Speaker 1: It's over, he confirmed somberly. So this battle is why

918
00:48:21,000 --> 00:48:24,120
Speaker 1: the Whites don't take Moscow. At least a lot of

919
00:48:24,120 --> 00:48:28,440
Speaker 1: people will argue that now Maknivis had advanced four hundred

920
00:48:28,440 --> 00:48:30,640
Speaker 1: miles east in just eleven days, and one of the

921
00:48:30,640 --> 00:48:33,360
Speaker 1: most rapid counter attacks in the history of warfare. They

922
00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:36,600
Speaker 1: recaptured town after town, smashing White regiments that hadn't even

923
00:48:36,640 --> 00:48:39,720
Speaker 1: been informed of Denikin's defeat. Denikin was forced to withdraw

924
00:48:39,719 --> 00:48:42,120
Speaker 1: troops from his northern front who were advancing on Moscow

925
00:48:42,160 --> 00:48:45,839
Speaker 1: to protect their headquarters in Ukraine. Max nomad Uh, an

926
00:48:45,880 --> 00:48:51,399
Speaker 1: Austrian bolshevik and educator, declared Makno the bandit who saved Moscow. Now,

927
00:48:51,560 --> 00:48:54,880
Speaker 1: the reconquest of eastern Ukraine by Makno came with a reckoning.

928
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:58,880
Speaker 1: Hundreds and probably thousands were executed Makno ordered his intelligence

929
00:48:58,880 --> 00:49:01,280
Speaker 1: forces to track down and killed every soldier and local

930
00:49:01,560 --> 00:49:05,520
Speaker 1: leader responsible for anti Jewish programs and for massacres of leftists,

931
00:49:05,840 --> 00:49:08,959
Speaker 1: ban and peasants. Bandits who'd stolen from peasants were killed,

932
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:12,120
Speaker 1: and so were all white officers who were captured. Collaborators

933
00:49:12,120 --> 00:49:14,600
Speaker 1: and suspected collaborators were killed in revenge for the tens

934
00:49:14,600 --> 00:49:17,240
Speaker 1: of thousands who've been murdered by denikins men. It is again,

935
00:49:17,440 --> 00:49:21,239
Speaker 1: a pretty fucking ugly war. Um And Yeah, some of

936
00:49:21,280 --> 00:49:23,640
Speaker 1: those people would have been innocence. That's war. It's terrible,

937
00:49:23,920 --> 00:49:27,319
Speaker 1: it's the worst thing. It's awful. Um. Also, not a

938
00:49:27,320 --> 00:49:31,480
Speaker 1: lot of good options. Yeah, No, there's no perfect in

939
00:49:31,520 --> 00:49:35,680
Speaker 1: a war that's already killed millions of people. Um And Yeah.

940
00:49:35,760 --> 00:49:38,120
Speaker 1: What separated Makno from the rest of the war lords

941
00:49:38,160 --> 00:49:41,440
Speaker 1: and bandits rampaging through Russia in this period were his goals,

942
00:49:41,760 --> 00:49:44,480
Speaker 1: the world he wanted to establish, and his sense of accountability.

943
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:47,880
Speaker 1: Makno took complaints against his forces seriously. We have one

944
00:49:47,880 --> 00:49:50,839
Speaker 1: account by guy named Volin of a student delegation who

945
00:49:50,880 --> 00:49:54,040
Speaker 1: approached Makno to complain that one of his intelligence units

946
00:49:54,200 --> 00:49:58,640
Speaker 1: had flogged an intellectual and suspicion of being a Denickanist spy. Quote.

947
00:49:58,640 --> 00:50:01,879
Speaker 1: The student recalled approaching Makno's office with trepidation and being

948
00:50:01,880 --> 00:50:05,319
Speaker 1: surprised at Makno's friendly and attentive audience. After explaining that

949
00:50:05,360 --> 00:50:07,799
Speaker 1: no Machnivus should ever use the lash for his army

950
00:50:07,840 --> 00:50:10,960
Speaker 1: either shot people or release them unharmed, Makno promised to

951
00:50:10,960 --> 00:50:13,520
Speaker 1: look into the matter personally. In this discussion, he also

952
00:50:13,560 --> 00:50:16,680
Speaker 1: confessed the difficulties he experienced and preventing abuses by those

953
00:50:16,680 --> 00:50:19,960
Speaker 1: who professed allegiance to his command. Similarly, the report of

954
00:50:20,000 --> 00:50:23,479
Speaker 1: his intelligence services abuses led the Alexandrov's Congress to pass

955
00:50:23,520 --> 00:50:27,960
Speaker 1: Resolution number three establishing an investigative committee. So he's you know,

956
00:50:29,040 --> 00:50:33,120
Speaker 1: acknowledges like, yeah, sometimes you can't fucking stop your your

957
00:50:33,160 --> 00:50:38,760
Speaker 1: banded army from murdering the wrong people. It's a real problem. Fair,

958
00:50:39,080 --> 00:50:44,640
Speaker 1: fair point, It's an issue. I mean, he's not wrong,

959
00:50:44,960 --> 00:50:48,320
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's this falls under the category. It's

960
00:50:48,360 --> 00:50:52,319
Speaker 1: it's quite complicated, isn't it. There's no perfect when you're

961
00:50:52,360 --> 00:50:57,000
Speaker 1: fighting a war that again kills nine million people. Um, yeah,

962
00:50:57,239 --> 00:50:59,440
Speaker 1: you have to judge him by his opponents. In a

963
00:50:59,440 --> 00:51:02,799
Speaker 1: lot of case is um now. When the fighting with

964
00:51:02,840 --> 00:51:06,280
Speaker 1: the whites was over, Maknivst forces controlled most of Eastern Ukraine,

965
00:51:06,280 --> 00:51:10,200
Speaker 1: an area encompassing seven million people. Peasant and worker councils

966
00:51:10,200 --> 00:51:13,800
Speaker 1: created a document by popular consent that spelled out civil liberties,

967
00:51:13,880 --> 00:51:16,759
Speaker 1: rights and duty in the region. The document advocated for

968
00:51:16,840 --> 00:51:19,360
Speaker 1: freedom of speech, for freedom of the press, of conscience,

969
00:51:19,400 --> 00:51:23,000
Speaker 1: of worship, of assembly and of organization. Bolshevik newspapers which

970
00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:26,759
Speaker 1: criticized Makno and advocated Bolshevik conquest of the region were

971
00:51:26,800 --> 00:51:30,200
Speaker 1: allowed to continue publishing um This is some of the

972
00:51:30,239 --> 00:51:32,520
Speaker 1: last freedom of speech that Ukraine will have for quite

973
00:51:32,520 --> 00:51:36,800
Speaker 1: a while now. Throughout late nineteen nineteen, in early nineteen twenty,

974
00:51:36,840 --> 00:51:40,200
Speaker 1: the bones of a remarkable society were established in eastern Ukraine.

975
00:51:40,520 --> 00:51:43,160
Speaker 1: This passage from Anarchy's Cossack gives you an idea of

976
00:51:43,200 --> 00:51:46,520
Speaker 1: what was being attempted. Literacy classes were laid on for

977
00:51:46,560 --> 00:51:50,080
Speaker 1: a literate adults, followed by courses in politics and economics

978
00:51:50,120 --> 00:51:52,720
Speaker 1: given by insurgent peasants and workers who had some grounding

979
00:51:52,760 --> 00:51:54,960
Speaker 1: in the subjects. Here it is interesting to look at

980
00:51:55,000 --> 00:51:59,280
Speaker 1: their syllabus political economy, history, the theory and practice of socialism,

981
00:51:59,320 --> 00:52:02,880
Speaker 1: and anarchism, the history of the French Revolution, the history

982
00:52:02,920 --> 00:52:06,160
Speaker 1: of the revolutionary insurgent movement in Russian. In the Russian Revolution,

983
00:52:06,480 --> 00:52:09,360
Speaker 1: not that cultural activities were neglected. Daily there were shows

984
00:52:09,400 --> 00:52:11,719
Speaker 1: staged in the local theater. The insurgents and their women

985
00:52:11,719 --> 00:52:14,520
Speaker 1: folk took part in these, not only as spectators and actors,

986
00:52:14,560 --> 00:52:17,920
Speaker 1: but also as dramatists, narrating episodes from recent local events

987
00:52:17,920 --> 00:52:21,600
Speaker 1: and from the insurgent struggle for all too short a time. Yeah,

988
00:52:21,920 --> 00:52:24,759
Speaker 1: it's nice, They're like, okay, So you know, there were

989
00:52:24,760 --> 00:52:27,000
Speaker 1: a lot of losses, but we did get really into

990
00:52:27,080 --> 00:52:32,960
Speaker 1: community theater. We got some was it a wash? That's sweet?

991
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:36,200
Speaker 1: I like that. So at his peak in nineteen twenty,

992
00:52:36,239 --> 00:52:39,200
Speaker 1: Makno's army, which had started in nineteen seventeen with about

993
00:52:39,239 --> 00:52:42,920
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty guys, numbered fifty thousand men. Um.

994
00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:45,320
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from history today here explaining how the

995
00:52:45,400 --> 00:52:49,279
Speaker 1: army worked. Makno, himself, creator and leader of the insurgent Army,

996
00:52:49,400 --> 00:52:52,759
Speaker 1: was a man of remarkable vitality. Tough as were his companions,

997
00:52:52,760 --> 00:52:55,319
Speaker 1: he could outride, outwork, and outfight any of them. He

998
00:52:55,400 --> 00:52:57,480
Speaker 1: never went to bed till his task was finished, and

999
00:52:57,520 --> 00:52:59,480
Speaker 1: two hours later would tap at the windows of his

1000
00:52:59,520 --> 00:53:01,840
Speaker 1: sleeping have to bring them back to their jobs. He

1001
00:53:01,920 --> 00:53:04,640
Speaker 1: lived like a peasant and always found time for his peasants.

1002
00:53:04,760 --> 00:53:06,480
Speaker 1: He would talk with him, drink with them, take a

1003
00:53:06,520 --> 00:53:09,360
Speaker 1: hand for an hour with a flail. Since hence his

1004
00:53:09,600 --> 00:53:13,480
Speaker 1: enormous popularity. He grew ever more engrossed with military matters

1005
00:53:13,520 --> 00:53:15,640
Speaker 1: and spent more and more time at the front. When

1006
00:53:15,680 --> 00:53:17,640
Speaker 1: sicker wounded, he was carried in a cart with the

1007
00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:19,960
Speaker 1: frontline troops, too well enough to ride a horse again.

1008
00:53:20,120 --> 00:53:23,000
Speaker 1: He was daring, resourceful, persistent. He showed no signs of

1009
00:53:23,040 --> 00:53:28,080
Speaker 1: nerves in any crisis. So interesting guy now again depending

1010
00:53:28,120 --> 00:53:31,000
Speaker 1: on Oh yeah, before we, I guess talk more about

1011
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:34,320
Speaker 1: mack now and what happened that? Yeah, we should probably

1012
00:53:34,800 --> 00:53:37,239
Speaker 1: we should probably talk about our next folk hero. The

1013
00:53:37,280 --> 00:53:44,240
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast. Ye make Christmas Ryeon, Merry,

1014
00:53:44,320 --> 00:53:48,000
Speaker 1: Christmas Ryleon. Uh. They've got a missile now that can

1015
00:53:48,040 --> 00:53:52,080
Speaker 1: go right down your chimney. Wow. And best of all,

1016
00:53:52,440 --> 00:53:55,080
Speaker 1: it's a scatter bomb that only takes out your family

1017
00:53:55,080 --> 00:53:58,640
Speaker 1: members and pets while leaving the valuable property unharmed. That's

1018
00:53:58,640 --> 00:54:01,680
Speaker 1: the ray Theon be. That's a beauty of Raytheon that's

1019
00:54:01,719 --> 00:54:06,080
Speaker 1: good ship. That's just good protecting property by killing people

1020
00:54:07,360 --> 00:54:12,120
Speaker 1: and added there, Oh, yeah, they're going to kill some pets, absolutely,

1021
00:54:12,480 --> 00:54:14,360
Speaker 1: I mean there's always going to be some pets that

1022
00:54:14,520 --> 00:54:19,320
Speaker 1: that's the other guaranteed. Yeah, we're gonna get some pets killed,

1023
00:54:20,760 --> 00:54:29,719
Speaker 1: are right, and we're back. So we're talking about mak

1024
00:54:29,800 --> 00:54:31,439
Speaker 1: No a little bit here and kind of the height

1025
00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:34,160
Speaker 1: of his revolution, And depending on who does the writing,

1026
00:54:34,160 --> 00:54:37,439
Speaker 1: he was almost always a teetotaler or a heavy drinker. Uh.

1027
00:54:37,480 --> 00:54:40,239
Speaker 1: There are stories of him doing some pretty terrible things

1028
00:54:40,280 --> 00:54:43,400
Speaker 1: while drunk. Um. They're also stories by people who generally

1029
00:54:43,440 --> 00:54:47,280
Speaker 1: allege things that seemed kind of impossible, like him hacking

1030
00:54:47,320 --> 00:54:50,840
Speaker 1: thirteen people to death with a saber um for no reason.

1031
00:54:51,520 --> 00:54:54,359
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's weird, it's it would not be

1032
00:54:54,400 --> 00:54:57,280
Speaker 1: as surprising if a man is battered by war and violences,

1033
00:54:57,320 --> 00:55:00,440
Speaker 1: mak No turned to drink and wound up doing terrible

1034
00:55:00,440 --> 00:55:03,040
Speaker 1: things in a rage. It's not impossible. I feel like

1035
00:55:03,080 --> 00:55:06,680
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's at least of the Bastards episodes go

1036
00:55:06,800 --> 00:55:10,320
Speaker 1: that way. But that said, the actually like the sources

1037
00:55:10,360 --> 00:55:14,319
Speaker 1: who are not like clearly writing propaganda to demonize this

1038
00:55:14,360 --> 00:55:17,760
Speaker 1: guy after he gets defeated. Don't talk about that stuff

1039
00:55:18,040 --> 00:55:20,680
Speaker 1: the history today right up, which is very fair. Um,

1040
00:55:20,719 --> 00:55:22,920
Speaker 1: it's paywall, but it's it's a pretty fair right up

1041
00:55:22,920 --> 00:55:26,400
Speaker 1: that that is not at all written by anarchists, implies

1042
00:55:26,440 --> 00:55:28,759
Speaker 1: that his rather than talking about his drinking being like

1043
00:55:28,840 --> 00:55:32,560
Speaker 1: making him go into like superhuman murder rages, talks mainly

1044
00:55:32,560 --> 00:55:35,280
Speaker 1: about the fact that it kind of made him unready

1045
00:55:35,360 --> 00:55:38,040
Speaker 1: for what would become the eventual betrayal of the Magnatus

1046
00:55:38,160 --> 00:55:41,279
Speaker 1: by the Bolsheviks. Like he's lost a lot, He kind

1047
00:55:41,320 --> 00:55:44,440
Speaker 1: of gets messy and drunk, and he does not anticipate

1048
00:55:44,520 --> 00:55:46,960
Speaker 1: things going as bad as they're going to go. So

1049
00:55:47,000 --> 00:55:50,120
Speaker 1: the Red Army re enters Ukraine late nineteen nineteen, and

1050
00:55:50,120 --> 00:55:52,800
Speaker 1: in early nineteen twenty they declaire Maknow in his movement

1051
00:55:52,880 --> 00:55:55,560
Speaker 1: outside the law after he refused to take his forces

1052
00:55:55,560 --> 00:55:58,000
Speaker 1: to the Polish frontier. They basically try to move him

1053
00:55:58,000 --> 00:56:00,200
Speaker 1: in his army to Poland's that they can separate them

1054
00:56:00,239 --> 00:56:03,239
Speaker 1: from the the peasants that support them, because they want

1055
00:56:03,239 --> 00:56:05,759
Speaker 1: to make it easier to beat them later. Um. By

1056
00:56:05,760 --> 00:56:07,920
Speaker 1: the mid of the year, Makno and his men were

1057
00:56:07,960 --> 00:56:11,080
Speaker 1: engaged and often constant horrific battle with the Red Army

1058
00:56:11,600 --> 00:56:14,640
Speaker 1: with Guglia Poe again changing hands multiple times, so the

1059
00:56:14,640 --> 00:56:18,080
Speaker 1: Red Army invades and tries to fight them. Whenever Maknivist

1060
00:56:18,160 --> 00:56:20,960
Speaker 1: towns and cities are retaken, the check at the Bolshevik

1061
00:56:21,040 --> 00:56:24,560
Speaker 1: security Force carries out purges and massacres. Numerous attempts were

1062
00:56:24,560 --> 00:56:27,640
Speaker 1: made to assassinate Makno, but all failed. The fighting went

1063
00:56:27,680 --> 00:56:30,200
Speaker 1: back and forth until late September nineteen twenty, when the

1064
00:56:30,280 --> 00:56:32,799
Speaker 1: Red Army made peace with Makno again because they needed

1065
00:56:32,840 --> 00:56:35,120
Speaker 1: him to fight the Whites for them, so they signed

1066
00:56:35,160 --> 00:56:37,440
Speaker 1: a treaty with Makno, this time promising peace and a

1067
00:56:37,520 --> 00:56:40,600
Speaker 1: release of all arrested anarchists and Maknivists. But the treaty

1068
00:56:40,640 --> 00:56:43,160
Speaker 1: also promised that peasants would be allowed to maintain standing

1069
00:56:43,280 --> 00:56:45,120
Speaker 1: armies in Ukraine, and this was of course a lie.

1070
00:56:45,480 --> 00:56:47,760
Speaker 1: Once the Whites were beaten again, the Red Army turns

1071
00:56:47,760 --> 00:56:51,000
Speaker 1: on Makno again, and Nestor's final war with them last

1072
00:56:51,040 --> 00:56:54,920
Speaker 1: from around uh late November nineteen to late August of nine.

1073
00:56:55,560 --> 00:56:58,759
Speaker 1: It was brutal and grinding, but eventually the peasants of

1074
00:56:58,840 --> 00:57:02,879
Speaker 1: Ukraine a pattern. Yeah it's bad um and eventually just

1075
00:57:02,960 --> 00:57:06,799
Speaker 1: everyone is too exhausted to continue, mak No succeeds in

1076
00:57:06,880 --> 00:57:08,960
Speaker 1: fighting his way to Poland with a small force of

1077
00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:12,080
Speaker 1: his most loyal fighters, and he becomes an exile. Uh.

1078
00:57:12,160 --> 00:57:14,120
Speaker 1: He winds up in Paris, where he would spend his

1079
00:57:14,239 --> 00:57:17,080
Speaker 1: last years. And he was in poor health the entire time.

1080
00:57:17,360 --> 00:57:19,280
Speaker 1: All the wars he'd fought him had left him battered

1081
00:57:19,280 --> 00:57:22,040
Speaker 1: and broken and aged beyond his years. He'd been shot

1082
00:57:22,080 --> 00:57:24,480
Speaker 1: at least six times in a three year period, including

1083
00:57:24,520 --> 00:57:26,520
Speaker 1: one round through the cheek and another that pierced his

1084
00:57:26,560 --> 00:57:30,120
Speaker 1: thigh and into his appendix. Um, so he's in bad shape,

1085
00:57:30,360 --> 00:57:33,160
Speaker 1: and he was not happy. A friend of his rote

1086
00:57:33,160 --> 00:57:38,240
Speaker 1: of his Yeah, it's hard to yeah. Uh, you know,

1087
00:57:38,440 --> 00:57:40,400
Speaker 1: he's kind of a little bit of a celebrity in

1088
00:57:40,440 --> 00:57:42,400
Speaker 1: Paris in this period among the left, but his a

1089
00:57:42,400 --> 00:57:45,760
Speaker 1: friend of his rights that he's He expresses great difficulty

1090
00:57:45,760 --> 00:57:48,600
Speaker 1: in adjusting himself to circumstances so very different from his

1091
00:57:48,640 --> 00:57:50,960
Speaker 1: former way of life. The only thing that brings him

1092
00:57:50,960 --> 00:57:53,160
Speaker 1: any joy in the end is going to horse races

1093
00:57:53,200 --> 00:57:56,560
Speaker 1: and watching the horses run. Um, he just likes to

1094
00:57:56,560 --> 00:57:59,400
Speaker 1: watch them run. Now. He was bitter and prone to

1095
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:01,600
Speaker 1: fits of depress, and he wrote some memoires, but the

1096
00:58:01,640 --> 00:58:03,640
Speaker 1: fact that he could still barely write made this a

1097
00:58:03,680 --> 00:58:05,920
Speaker 1: difficult task. He had a lot of intellectual friends who

1098
00:58:05,920 --> 00:58:08,520
Speaker 1: offered to help, but these offers authors enraged him. Like

1099
00:58:08,600 --> 00:58:10,240
Speaker 1: he was, he kind of took it as an insult

1100
00:58:10,520 --> 00:58:13,360
Speaker 1: that people were offering to help him write his memoirs folks.

1101
00:58:13,400 --> 00:58:16,560
Speaker 1: Eventually did um Ida met a young female writer met

1102
00:58:16,600 --> 00:58:18,800
Speaker 1: him in Paris during this time and was his friend

1103
00:58:18,840 --> 00:58:20,760
Speaker 1: for the last three years of his life. And it's

1104
00:58:20,800 --> 00:58:22,560
Speaker 1: from her that we get some of the most intimate

1105
00:58:22,560 --> 00:58:25,720
Speaker 1: glances into Nestor's inner life that were likely to see

1106
00:58:26,200 --> 00:58:30,280
Speaker 1: quote from Ida. I remember mak No once telling me

1107
00:58:30,320 --> 00:58:33,640
Speaker 1: of his dream. It was autumn n we were walking

1108
00:58:33,680 --> 00:58:36,200
Speaker 1: in the Boa d Vincens. Perhaps the beauty of nature

1109
00:58:36,240 --> 00:58:38,200
Speaker 1: put him in a poetic mood and made him inclined

1110
00:58:38,240 --> 00:58:40,919
Speaker 1: to tell me his dream. The young mak No would

1111
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:43,960
Speaker 1: return to his hometown of Ghulla Poly, start work, lead

1112
00:58:44,000 --> 00:58:46,439
Speaker 1: a quiet, clean life, and marry a young peasant girl.

1113
00:58:46,720 --> 00:58:48,440
Speaker 1: He had a good horse and good gear. He and

1114
00:58:48,480 --> 00:58:50,360
Speaker 1: his wife would return home in the evening after a

1115
00:58:50,360 --> 00:58:52,880
Speaker 1: successful day at the market selling the fruits of the harvest.

1116
00:58:53,200 --> 00:58:56,080
Speaker 1: They also bought presents there. Macno got so carried away

1117
00:58:56,120 --> 00:58:58,000
Speaker 1: with the story that he completely forgot that he was

1118
00:58:58,080 --> 00:59:00,520
Speaker 1: now in Paris and had neither land, nor house nor

1119
00:59:00,520 --> 00:59:02,560
Speaker 1: a young wife. At the time, he and his wife

1120
00:59:02,560 --> 00:59:05,600
Speaker 1: were living apart. They separated many times, only to reunite

1121
00:59:05,600 --> 00:59:07,880
Speaker 1: and try to live together again. Heaven only knows why

1122
00:59:07,880 --> 00:59:10,440
Speaker 1: it turned out that way. Makno's wife probably didn't love

1123
00:59:10,520 --> 00:59:12,680
Speaker 1: him anymore, and who knows if she ever did. She

1124
00:59:12,760 --> 00:59:15,160
Speaker 1: was a Ukrainian teacher, and her views were closer to

1125
00:59:15,280 --> 00:59:17,560
Speaker 1: some of his opponent's camps. She never had anything in

1126
00:59:17,640 --> 00:59:20,920
Speaker 1: common with the revolutionary movement. Makno told me in Paris

1127
00:59:20,960 --> 00:59:23,080
Speaker 1: that at the time of his greatest power, people came

1128
00:59:23,120 --> 00:59:24,560
Speaker 1: and toadied to him, and that he could have had

1129
00:59:24,560 --> 00:59:26,880
Speaker 1: any woman he wished, but in reality he had no

1130
00:59:26,960 --> 00:59:29,240
Speaker 1: time for a private life. Makno told me this to

1131
00:59:29,280 --> 00:59:31,600
Speaker 1: debunk the myth about the drunken orgies he's supposed to

1132
00:59:31,640 --> 00:59:34,240
Speaker 1: have taken part in. Makna was, in fact a clean man,

1133
00:59:34,320 --> 00:59:36,280
Speaker 1: one could almost say chased. It seemed to me that

1134
00:59:36,320 --> 00:59:39,000
Speaker 1: his attitude towards women combined to combine a kind of

1135
00:59:39,040 --> 00:59:42,280
Speaker 1: peasant simplicity with a respect for the weaker sex characteristic

1136
00:59:42,280 --> 00:59:45,120
Speaker 1: of Russian revolutionary circles around the turn of the century.

1137
00:59:45,280 --> 00:59:49,520
Speaker 1: She's writing this in again nineteen you know, yeah, I did.

1138
00:59:49,600 --> 00:59:53,320
Speaker 1: I do think it's funny that she she already frames

1139
00:59:53,360 --> 00:59:55,479
Speaker 1: him as not being in a good frame of mind.

1140
00:59:55,560 --> 00:59:57,440
Speaker 1: Is like, well, you know, we don't know how this,

1141
00:59:57,760 --> 01:00:00,480
Speaker 1: like these accounts can be taken at face value. And

1142
01:00:00,520 --> 01:00:03,400
Speaker 1: she's like that said, he told me he could have

1143
01:00:03,480 --> 01:00:08,360
Speaker 1: sucked anyone he wanted he in then you know, I'd

1144
01:00:08,400 --> 01:00:12,680
Speaker 1: find it sad, sad his dream that they just wanted

1145
01:00:12,720 --> 01:00:16,280
Speaker 1: to go be a farmer back home, um, which he

1146
01:00:16,320 --> 01:00:20,000
Speaker 1: could never do. Um. It's like what my uncle says

1147
01:00:20,080 --> 01:00:25,000
Speaker 1: libertarians and plows. Yeah, it's a bummer, sick and almost alone.

1148
01:00:25,160 --> 01:00:29,040
Speaker 1: And Ester Maknow died in July of nineteen, having lived

1149
01:00:29,080 --> 01:00:31,200
Speaker 1: long enough to see the birth and ultimate success of

1150
01:00:31,280 --> 01:00:34,200
Speaker 1: German fascism, as well as complete Stalinist domination of his

1151
01:00:34,280 --> 01:00:38,920
Speaker 1: homeland and the starvation deaths of millions of Ukrainians. So God,

1152
01:00:40,920 --> 01:00:47,640
Speaker 1: weak ass ending. Merry Christmas, faster ending, I know, and

1153
01:00:47,680 --> 01:00:50,520
Speaker 1: then jingle bells just starts fading in. It's like, wow,

1154
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:55,600
Speaker 1: I think we all learned something today. Dashing through the

1155
01:00:55,680 --> 01:01:00,320
Speaker 1: snow with a machine gun on a plow shoe eating

1156
01:01:00,520 --> 01:01:05,920
Speaker 1: at the whites. Everyone is well, I don't know how

1157
01:01:05,960 --> 01:01:08,520
Speaker 1: to finish that. I was like, there, I know, we

1158
01:01:08,520 --> 01:01:12,240
Speaker 1: were good. We're in a good direction for a little while. There. Um,

1159
01:01:12,400 --> 01:01:13,920
Speaker 1: we got a year. We can figure it out. We'll

1160
01:01:13,960 --> 01:01:16,720
Speaker 1: figure it out for next year. Yeah. So that is

1161
01:01:16,760 --> 01:01:23,000
Speaker 1: the story of Nestor Mack no problematic fame and a half. Yeah, yeah,

1162
01:01:23,040 --> 01:01:26,320
Speaker 1: I guess that is a category I would put him in. Damn.

1163
01:01:26,640 --> 01:01:31,040
Speaker 1: You know, an attempt was made. He did his best

1164
01:01:31,200 --> 01:01:34,760
Speaker 1: to make something better out of the worst situation almost

1165
01:01:34,760 --> 01:01:38,080
Speaker 1: anyone's ever been in, like Pete Peasants in Ukraine in

1166
01:01:38,200 --> 01:01:42,120
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen. Yeah, there was no happy ending, but he

1167
01:01:42,800 --> 01:01:47,360
Speaker 1: gave it a real good shot. Yeah yeah, yeah, God,

1168
01:01:47,400 --> 01:01:49,720
Speaker 1: all right, I'll pour one out for Nestor tonight, one

1169
01:01:49,760 --> 01:01:52,480
Speaker 1: out for knock macknow, which he may or may not

1170
01:01:52,600 --> 01:01:56,200
Speaker 1: have drank, depending on whose sources she listened to. Well,

1171
01:01:56,240 --> 01:02:01,320
Speaker 1: he probably did at least at one point. Like's Nestor mugdo,

1172
01:02:01,400 --> 01:02:04,240
Speaker 1: I would never not I would never be sober. What

1173
01:02:04,880 --> 01:02:07,080
Speaker 1: I mean. Ida says he didn't really drink as an

1174
01:02:07,080 --> 01:02:09,480
Speaker 1: older man, but also he was probably pretty ill, right,

1175
01:02:09,560 --> 01:02:12,160
Speaker 1: Like you get older, your body changes. You've been shot

1176
01:02:12,200 --> 01:02:17,040
Speaker 1: through the appendix, maybe you can face Yeah, yeah, like

1177
01:02:17,320 --> 01:02:20,600
Speaker 1: who even knows? You know? I was about to say

1178
01:02:20,600 --> 01:02:23,840
Speaker 1: something mean about old Nestor. No, he who knows? He

1179
01:02:23,920 --> 01:02:26,520
Speaker 1: did his best. He did his best and he lived

1180
01:02:26,520 --> 01:02:30,040
Speaker 1: in hard times. He didn't. Yeah, we can ask for

1181
01:02:30,120 --> 01:02:36,720
Speaker 1: no more. Um. Yeah, well I feel festive. You feel festive.

1182
01:02:36,760 --> 01:02:39,000
Speaker 1: You're gonna go attach a machine gun to a truck.

1183
01:02:39,680 --> 01:02:47,600
Speaker 1: So festive, I'm going to just walk into traffic anyone. Yeah,

1184
01:02:47,640 --> 01:02:51,640
Speaker 1: this comes out, Santa University comes out today. If it's

1185
01:02:52,800 --> 01:02:56,320
Speaker 1: Robert's reprising his role as Second Amendment Santa. You've got

1186
01:02:56,320 --> 01:03:00,600
Speaker 1: a song this year, so that's exciting, a good song.

1187
01:03:00,960 --> 01:03:03,520
Speaker 1: You just demonstrated that you're up to the task. So

1188
01:03:03,640 --> 01:03:08,400
Speaker 1: that was a mistake on your part. And and uh yeah,

1189
01:03:08,440 --> 01:03:11,320
Speaker 1: you can listen to Alita podcast on Monday's. Um, and

1190
01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:14,200
Speaker 1: that you're going to be coming out through January. So

1191
01:03:14,360 --> 01:03:21,320
Speaker 1: those are those are night things. Woot woot in the boot.

1192
01:03:21,800 --> 01:03:24,040
Speaker 1: All right, and we'll go and we'll be back with

1193
01:03:24,120 --> 01:03:28,720
Speaker 1: this podcast the first week of January. We're taking we're

1194
01:03:28,760 --> 01:03:31,200
Speaker 1: taking the last week off, guys, we're taking the last

1195
01:03:31,240 --> 01:03:35,680
Speaker 1: week off. All right, let us have it got you

1196
01:03:35,800 --> 01:03:39,960
Speaker 1: got to Christmas episodes, you've fucking filthy animals. We're tired.

1197
01:03:40,680 --> 01:03:44,960
Speaker 1: You got damn pagans. And on that note, that's the

1198
01:03:45,000 --> 01:03:47,840
Speaker 1: end of the end to end there