This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I thought about singing that in some sing song voice because I want to try new ways of introducing the show. But then I realized I can't sing it in a sing song voice because you just listen to the beautiful composition written specifically for the show by Unwoman. And it wouldn't really work because this introduction probably overlapped with that. It might even still be overlapping with it. I don't even know. This is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Your reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things. And your reminder that everyone is morally compromised. Nothing is actually always cool. Everything cool is also secretly uncool. And I am your host who's always cool. Margaret Kiljoy. This is part four of a four-parter, which means it's the last episode. It is the last episode talking about Peter the Painter. I promise you, he gets away in the end. He does. He gets away in the end. The street cleaner. No, that's not what he's called, but I want him to be called. I'm just going to call him the street cleaner. He gets away, the land surveyor. He gets away. The bulldog does not. I already told you that in one of the earlier parts. But now where we last left our heroes, they're out West. They're committing some crimes. Some of them are good crimes. Some of them are bad crimes. That's the thing. Crime morally neutral. Law morally neutral. Both used for good and bad things. It's almost like you have to make your own decisions. So. Not every revolutionary and anarchist in London was involved in expropriations in this particular form of rebellion. And even when I'm like, oh, the Latvian anarchists in London did this. Probably about like 12 Latvian anarchists in London out of hundreds did this. At one point, a Latvian in London, he's talking to his new friends and he's like, well, we're the workers at this factory. We're going to go on strike. It's been pretty tough and the new friends are like, cool. We got a bunch of guns. You want us to show up, finish off that boss man for you. And the guy's like, what? No, we're just on strike. Don't go kill my boss. Everything will get worse. I'm paraphrasing here. Actually, paraphrasing is when you make things shorter. I'm putting words in his mouth with a general idea because basically for some people, especially the people who had been in London longer, this was a social struggle and it had real stakes. But for some of the recent arrivals, this was social war. Pretty much every one of the folks that I have read about and I'm going to be talking about today has been tortured like fingernails ripped off and shit, imprisoned, seen comrades shot in front of them, watched their brothers die, raided soldiers who are stockpiling weapons to use against peasants. People's families are dead. It is just they're at war. Right. So in the summer of 1909, some of Peter's friends form a group called Leesma, a flame and continue their work of trying to keep shit going in Latvia somehow. It's interesting because you can look back and be like, oh, it was desperate and doomed because they had already lost. But like actually it was people who kept the flame alive that allowed for the Revolution of 1917. Even though it wasn't a specific individual act of insurrection that caused the Revolution of 1917, it was a women's strike for women's day. This is what kept the social struggle, the social war going, right? Like a little flame underground. There's better metaphors people have come up with. Anyway, Peter himself, he's not in London yet at this point. He's in France working and I think he's coordinating with the London friends, but he's not running the show or anything. Although I have read some people saying like they got their instructions from France, which would imply that it might be him being like, hey, what if you all did this? But I don't know. The London anarchist Latvians, they team up with an old Narodnik and you're like, Margaret, stop giving new adjectives. This is not a new adjective. Thank you. One of the very first episodes we ever did was on the Russian nihilists. Oh, there's a word that has a million different meanings. But one word that only has a couple meanings is Narodnik. There are these crew of basically anarcho-communist hippies called the Narodniks. In the 1860s and 1870s, they did this whole back to the land movement where they left the cities to go live in villages and try and convert everyone to anarchist communism. This mostly gets written about as one big naive failure, again, partly because of who writes leftist history, but it actually wasn't a big naive failure. It was big and naive, but it was a big naive mixed bag. Plenty of city kids humbled themselves to learn from the people that they were living with. And it deepened the ties between rural and urban workers that later helped pave the way for the various revolutions. You don't have to accomplish your wildest dreams in order to accomplish something. And it scared the shit out of the czar that basically people were spreading class consciousness to the peasants in Russia. So a lot of them killed or imprisoned or sent to Siberia. Some of them got to Siberia anyway. And a lot of them had to flee the country. The czar came after the hippie kids hard. So you have these old 60s radicals, 1860s radicals in this case. Oh, my God, the comparisons are so overwhelming. They were colored sunglasses and I think they wore wide leg pants, but I can't remember off the top of my head. It's been a while and they wore their hair long and like anyway. So this old 60s radical decades after his heyday, he starts meeting up with these young anarchists and turns his London and Arco Communist group towards the task of helping them smuggle guns, bombs and literature back to Russia. Unfortunately, the same as anarchists can coordinate against country line like national lines. So did the police. When one of the smugglers was caught and divulged information after torture, the czarist police had the London police put ships under watch and smuggling got harder. And the flame, the specific affinity group was seen basically as the people who get the money to fund the anarchist movement. There's a bunch of them. I'm not going to have all their names. There was Vars, the bulldog who had broken out of prison at least twice. And the one who had made his arresting officer shake in his boots. He also didn't drink like Peter. So many revolutionaries in history have decided that drinking gets in the way. Then there was Joseph, a Jewish watchmaker and jewel thief. Then there was Nina, who had been sentenced to death in Russia and could never go back and claim to be Ukrainian, but was probably Latvian. And then there was Marx. Marx was there. This is a different Marx. This guy is a family man who was wanted in Crimea for stealing jewels and furs. And his name was Max, but people called him Marx. His last name was not Marx. I think they were calling the Marx to be funny, but I'm not sure. Then there was Hartmanus Koch, the quiet man who never spoke about his past and had a reputation for getting things done. The bulldogs of ours held the sort of social gravity and things tended to orbit around him. But it was Hartmanus who planned shit and got shit done. And then there was a guy who's not part of their crew, but gets swept up in it as part of the story in a tragic way and in a different tragic way than you're probably thinking. Svars's social democratic cousin, Peters, is going to be swept up into it much to his dismay. He was fiercely sectarian and likely never forgave his cousin for abandoning the party for anarchism. Now, Svars, the bulldog, he wanted out by like 1909, 1910. Early, so he says. He's like, it's very going to do a couple more jobs to help the Rev. And then I'm done, you know, I'm dreaming of Australia. Going to get my wife over here. Finally, we're going to start a new life. And then he fell for another anarchist woman and started cheating on his wife. Whatever. Actually, I can't even say cheated because he was real in style. The same as a lot of people didn't drink. There was a lot of free love happening as well. I don't know what his wife had to say about it. I don't even know his wife's name. That one might be my fault. I try to always include women's names when they're otherwise left out of history. But I also try to not include names whenever possible. If someone's only going to show up once in a story, I don't include their name because I'm not writing for the historical record. I'm writing narratives to try and entertain. And I struggle to keep track of a lot of names when I'm reading. And so I try to only add names if it's useful for the reader to pay attention to. I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's what I do. Anyway, I do know the name of the woman that the bulldog fell for. Luba Milstein, who joined the gang and suddenly he was all in again. And the gang robbed jewelry place after jewelry place with a fairly simple and effective M.O. They would rent a place next door or underneath or presumably above like a jewelry shop or a place that cuts diamonds. And then they would drill an 18 inch hole in the wall, like big enough for a person to crawl through. And then they would go through that with a blowtorch and get into the safe at night. And they would usually have kind of the trappings of like, hello, we are a normal people who are just happened to have rented this new place. And, you know, they set up all alibi style and everything. And they are active for a year and a half and they're like, fancy. They're all wearing gold watches and shit. October 1910, Peter, the painter shows up in London and he's like, all right, join in the crew. He rents an apartment with Luba and the bulldog. And the couple gets the big room and he takes the small room. They have lives. The house is full of instruments. Peter plays violin and Anarchist Mandolin teacher is coming over every day to teach the bulldog. They're working in the local theater. Peter does the painting of the backdrops. The bulldog was going to play a police sergeant in an upcoming play. And Luba's interests weren't included in the history because why would anyone care about her? She's a woman. Historians are terrible people or are working with terrible primary sources that don't bother to explain what women are up to. Often she's literally just referred to as the bulldog's mistress in most sources, even though she is the woman who gets Peter the painter out of the fucking country. Anyway, why would anyone care what Luba Milstein is doing? Their apartment on Grove Street became a social hub, not just for their gang of criminals, but for all the Latvian revolutionary exiles. Like later, a bunch of people are going to kind of be in trouble because they were all hanging out at a party before the robbery. And it's just because they were all hanging out there. That's like what people did. Now, Peter, he moves there. He's a humble man with humble plans. He doesn't think big. His humble plan is that he's going to unite all the Latvian Anarchists in London to a single anarchist organization that's centered in London, but has local branches everywhere, so they can better coordinate their activity of getting guns and literature over to Russia and financially support all their prisoners so that they can overthrow the Tsar and create an anarchist communist society in Latvia. Oh, and he also wants to build an anarchist library. He's also the treasurer of the special committee to raise funds by, you know, robbery. Most important, perhaps of all, was that he figured if he had a solid stable home base, his wife, Lydia, could finally join him. She wrote to say she'd be coming March 1, 1911, no matter what happened. But then a bunch of people got shot and the famous jewelry heist got in wrong. But much like Lydia and Peter's plans were interrupted, so, too, is this narrative cut through with the unmistakable sounds of gunshots, robbery. And advertisements. The ones who get it done. And we're back. So this last job, it's not like the last job they're doing, but it's the last job they get to do because a lot of them die. So five members of the gang, not Peter, rent an apartment next to a jewelry shop and got to digging one night, you know, drilling a little hole in the wall between the houses like you do. When a nosy neighbor was like, I hear weird noises and popped around the corner to tell the police said, hey, there's a strange noise coming from next door. The cops knocked on the door and insisted they come in. So the thieves let the cops in and ambushed them. The first cop in through the door was shot twice in the neck. And really, you could chalk this up to a culture clash. It's what it is. You have unarmed police officers used to not much trouble at all. And they're meeting hardened revolutionaries who are searching for the money they need to free their people from the tyranny of the czar. Three cops are dead. Two were grievously wounded. We'll never work again. And it was Hartmanus, the quiet, serious mastermind who both shot the police and himself was shot by friendly fire. His friend, I think more than one of them was shooting, but Hartmanus seems to be called the main gunman. His friends carried him back to the apartment on Grove Street and called a doctor. They had a moment where they were like walking down the street. They basically like run out of the apartment, passed all the cops, and they're like helping their dying friend, Hartmanus, down the street. And some people come by and are like, what the fuck's going on? And they pull guns and they're like, man, keep walking. And so those people keep walking. They get back to the apartment on Grove Street. They call a doctor. The doctor couldn't or didn't save him, then snitched them all out and the police showed up to the apartment to find Hartmanus dead. They also found guns, ammunition, anarchist materials, musical instruments, multiple paintings, and a woman named Sarah, Luba's best friend, who was burning photographs in the hearth. It's hard to know exactly how that night went down, because there were a lot of statements made to cops and the courts, and obviously there's no incentive to telling the truth to courts and cops. But the most believable story seems to be the anarchists came home with their wounded friend, multiple accounts refer to it as carrying him in like a baby. And some people in the apartment immediately fucked off. Sarah stayed with him and got a doctor. The doctor said, look, he's going to die. You got to get him to a hospital, but Hartmanus refused to go to a hospital. And he died. Sarah and probably Luba were going to pour paraffin all over the body and set it in the apartment on fire and destroy all the evidence. But the cops came too soon before they could get that done. Thanks to the papers the police found and information from landlords and such, the police were able to track down most of the gang. The bulldog was ratted out by someone for the 500 pound reward. He wasn't caught. They were like, now we know who he is and we want him. His cousin, the social Democrat, Peters, was arrested at home for basically being Latvian and related to the bulldog. The cops come in and are like, there's a dead man at your cousin's house. And he's like, man, I don't give a shit what my cousin does. Fuck that guy. He's not a cool social Democrat like me. Of the people who were arrested, only one, Nina, was actually at the robbery. Yet four men were put into a lineup and incorrectly pointed out by witnesses. Meanwhile, the three remaining robbers who aren't dead or caught are on the run and are trying to get themselves to Australia. The bulldog and at least two other of the gang, William and Betty, you're like, wait, hold on, who? Betty has been all but left out of the story. Thanks, history. They're holed up in an apartment on Sydney Street and presumably would have stayed there, except they paid someone to deliver a letter for them. There was like basically a comrade who's supposed to help them out and help them navigate, you know, safe houses and things, right? And as far as the bulldog is like, look, I have a letter to my dad. Can you mail this letter to my dad? He's like, yeah, OK. But instead he's like, or I could try to get the reward money myself instead. So he ratted them out. And these folks, they're already not the go peacefully type, but they know with certainty that the London police were out for their blood. They had shot five unarmed cops a couple of weeks earlier. So 750 cops surround the apartment building. 50 of them are armed. It's such a different time. And the cops go through and evacuate all of the other buildings in the apartment. One of the gang, Betty, was tricked somehow into coming downstairs and was arrested. So William and the bulldog remain. They're throwing pebbles to try and get the fugitives attention. I think to be like, hey, come on down or whatever. And they're not coming. So a cop is like, fuck this and throws a brick through the window. And so the fugitives shot that cop in the chest. He's arrived. Every time the cops tried to approach, they were driven back by gunfire. So the cops called the home secretary, Winston Churchill, and interrupted his bath time. And he approved sending the scots guard with rifles, then showed up himself and stood at the firing line like he's like there and being like, all right, good boys will stop them on the beaches. I don't know what he said to them. Rather than being commended for his bravery, he was almost fired for being so reckless. For seven hours, the police and military laid siege to the building. Churchill and others wanted to storm the place, but they needed a bulletproof shield. And so they were scouring nearby buildings for a large piece of steel. But then a fire broke out on the top floor. Probably an errant bullet had struck a gas pipe. And do you know what else is explosive? These deals. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it. And knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast dependable delivery so you can keep your facilities stocked safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done. And we're back. So now the building's on fire and. Everything you read is like the anarchists outgunned the police, which is funny because they had mostly these mousers, which are an antiquated gun that was used a lot in early 20th century. It has a detachable magazine, which is very early on for guns having detachable magazines. And these are the broom handle guns in that they're like pistols with a fairly long barrel. But the case that you carry it in is this wooden stock that you can then attach so you can put it on your shoulder. It's actually a really interesting design. They're completely antiquated. They're overly complicated, but they were ahead of their time at the time. And they seem to have a fucked on ammunition because the cops are like outgunned until the Scott's guard with the rifles show up. So you got the building on fire. The anarchists are probably screaming, you'll never take me alive, copper or whatever the hell. And the fire department shows up. But the police refused to let them put out the fire. Now, to be clear, I could imagine not wanting to put out the fire while people are shooting. But specifically, the police made a decision and Churchill specifically made a decision that they wanted the building to burn to kill these two. Churchill directly ordered them to stand down and let the building burn and to not put out the fire and to let it kill the anarchists. Churchill said, quote, I thought it's better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives rescuing those ferocious rascals. Again, this is a man directly responsible for the death of millions of people in Bengal. You just need to always keep that in mind. He's got some other atrocities to his name, too. On the other hand, he also refused to let England surrender to the Nazis, unlike the main person who possibly could have taken power if he had died earlier. Like, for example, in 1911 at the Siege of Sydney Street. Oh, history, you monster, refusing to let us have black and white. Instead, it's so colorful and full of fire. The building is burning and the anarchists continue to shoot it out with the police. William caught a bullet in the head and he went down for good. And the bulldog kept firing, moving down floor by floor as the flames crept down the building. He was overcome by smoke when he was on the ground floor and he fell unconscious. He died of asphyxiation. Ten minutes after the last round that he fired, the building collapsed. And finally, the fire brigade was allowed to control the flames. One of those firefighters was killed by the falling masonry. Besides the two anarchists, he was the only person to die that day. Anywhere in the world, no, at the Siege of Sydney Street. Meanwhile, there were still people facing trial. They were supported in prison by none other than that old hippie, the neurotic, who'd supplied them with guns and explosives. He also ran a Russian language library in London and made sure the prisoners had books to read. The Social Democrat among them, Peters was supported by the Social Democratic Party. Now, I bet you're thinking to yourself. Actually, I promise you're not. But what if you were thinking to yourself? How come that Italian anarchist, Erico Malatesto, hasn't wandered randomly into this story yet? You've got Tolstoy. Where's Malatesta? Well, here he is. He was in London at the time and the cops picked him up because he was a known associate of Hartmanus, the man who died the night of the shootout. Malatesta admitted that he had sold somebody the gas cylinder that was used in the robberies, but gave, I think, false names and descriptions about the people he'd spoken to. He was like, ah, he's a young Englishman. And the cops believed his story and let him go. Anyway, later there's going to be more trouble for him, but there's never any end of trouble for Erico Malatesta. Person after person was picked up. Some talked, some told the truth, some told half-truths, a lot of them lied. Some said nothing, which proved to be the better option. Then and now. Sarah and Luba were released because there wasn't enough evidence to link them to the murders. I think Luba went in and she went in with her brother and was like, oh, I don't really know anything. I'm a silly girl. And I have, I, and basically like gave the cops the alibis of everybody. It was like, I just don't know anything. My parents are really rich and well to do. And they told me to come in and tell the truth and just come tell the truth to you as she came in and lied. One guy who was picked up, he was part of the gang, but he wasn't there that night. But he didn't say shit. And he was released for the same reason. There wasn't enough evidence because he didn't say shit. Meanwhile, the only person who's on trial, who's actually present for the burglary was Nina Vaseleva. Her job had been to live in the rented apartment to make it look legit. Ironically, it was the siege on Sydney Street and the death of their comrades that ended up saving the defendants. Also, they were innocent, but that clearly wasn't going to be enough. Well, they were innocent of the murder. A lot of them were part of the gang. Peters was completely innocent, but, you know. Four men and a woman had been present at the robbery. And there were four men and a woman on trial for murder. If all of them were guilty, then the two men who'd been killed on Sydney Street must have been innocent. And that would wreck Churchill's career if that had been murder. And so it seems a little bit like the state through the case, in fact. This is my conjecture. One witness admitted to passing notes between the defendants about what their alibis would be. Like their alibis changed as circumstances changed. And this is the guy who was like passing notes back and forth about it. And he admitted that in court. And those notes weren't entered into evidence. One by one, charges were dropped. The judge just said it outright, quote, I think the three people who shot at cops are now dead and the fourth has escaped England. The fourth person who escaped was Marx. Again, our Marx, not the other Marx, who was helped to escape by, ironically, the guy who'd ratted out the people who died in the siege. And the rat, he recanted too. On his deathbed years later, he begged his son's forgiveness for having turned in the revolutionaries. In the end, only Nina was convicted, which makes sense, only Nina was guilty. Her fingerprints were on bottles at the house. But the judge quashed her sentence and she was released after months instead of years. Later, when she was asked by the press about her involvement, she was like, well, I couldn't prove anything. So I guess I didn't do anything. And I'm paraphrasing, but I don't know. She was bad ass about it. And then the thing that the press said that got her mad is they were like, oh, you were just Hardimus's mistress, right? And she was like, the fuck I was. Actually, she had introduced Hardimus to his girlfriend, Masha, who fled the country back to Russia after his death. As for Peters, you know how, if you've listened to this show enough or read enough history books, you know how all the Bolsheviks kind of go bad? He later went back to Russia and he formed the Cheka, the secret police that disappeared political rivals and was one of the main architects of the Red Terror. And he helped orchestrate the massacre of the anarchists and the SRs, the socialist revolutionaries, the other faction that was largely aligned with the Bolsheviks until they suddenly weren't. And he said that Lenin openly admitted he was against the anarchists so fiercely because in Moscow, quote, two authorities existed there. On one hand, the Moscow Soviet, which was centralized under Lenin's direct control. And on the other, the staff of the Black Guard, the Black Guard being the anarchist army, plus the countless anarchists were in the broader Red Army. So a couple of decades later, you know, he goes and he forms the Cheka. Peters, this is different than Peter the painter. This is very confusing. I felt very clever when I just decided to call Giannis Peter the whole time because that's like the last name he's known by. But this guy's name is Peters with two Ss at the end. And so it makes it complicated. But Peters is the guy I'm talking about here who becomes Bolshevik. Peters was caught up in Stalin's purges, many such cases for the original Bolsheviks. He was tortured, then expelled from the Communist Party in 1938. He's taken to a country club shooting range that was used to kill 6,500 people by Stalin during the purge. Basically they were like, oh, we take him to the shooting range. People are used to hearing guns shots from there all the time. He's shot and he's left in a mass grave, despite his family being told that he'd been sentenced to 10 years and was just, you know, gone. Basically he was killed for, it wasn't because he had formed the Cheka. It's because he was Latvian and therefore untrustworthy. Stalin was doing one of his ethnic cleansings that he was so fond of. His wife was sentenced to seven years for being his wife and was banned from living in Moscow. His 17 year old son kind of turned out like that. 17 year old son rejected his parents and started working for the secret police. And was like, ah, don't worry, I have good politics unlike my terrible treasonous parents. This did not save him. He spent 10 years spying on his friends and then he was tortured and sentenced to 10 years in prison. His daughter, Peters' daughter, was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. All for being related to this man. Authoritarianism doesn't pay, not even once. But the Hounestitch case, so much hinged on that case that no one realized. It could have ruined Churchill's career. It also could have locked up Peters, one of the great monsters of history. Peter the painter wasn't at the robbery. He was at home playing violin. There are multiple witnesses who attest to that, although then again, the witnesses could have said whatever they wanted, but I genuinely think he wasn't there. But he was wanted, very wanted. For a long time, it was believed he'd been at Sydney Street and it somehow escaped the flames. And from that, his legend was born. After the siege, wanted posters went up for Peter Piatkov. Quote, alias Stern, alias Peter the painter, aged 28 to 30 years, height five foot nine or 10 inches, complexion, salo, clear skin, hair and medium mustache, black, otherwise clean shaven, eyes dark, medium build, reserved manner, dress, brown tweed suit, broad dark stripes, black overcoat, velvet collar, rather old, black hard felt hat, black lace boots, rather shabby, a native of Russia, an anarchist. End quote. And so yeah, he becomes the Osama bin Laden of his time, according to some people, but he's the Robin Hood. People are like, that guy's cool, which is kind of funny, because he just, the thing that they thought he did was rob a jewelry store and kill a lot of policemen. He didn't do either of those things this particular time. But yeah, there's a housing block named after Peter the painter in London right now, I believe. He escaped pretty much right away. He had a finely tuned sense for danger. Luba Milstein told him that Hartmanus had died, I believe that night, and Peter asked for enough money for a ticket out of the country. And she was like, yep, I got some money, and I think she goes and gets some change for him. And he fucks off, he goes to the Netherlands, then to Switzerland. Luba Milstein is pregnant with the Bulldogs kid, and she moves to New York city with another comrade, and they raise that kid together. And there's some speculation that basically, she was worried for her own life, from her own comrades, that they might come after her for like having information. No idea how true that is. That kid didn't learn who his real father was until he was 30 years old, and also his parents, the ones who raised him, became good Bolsheviks and supported the 1917 revolution while they were in New York city. And the kid who had up talking to historian Philip Ruff was like, I sure hated how secretive my parents were, it was weird and paranoid. Several of the London anarchists kept up the fight. And in 1917, during the revolution, some Latvian anarchists, including at least one member of the flame, resurrected the flame, and we're like, all right, we're doing our Latvian anarchist thing, let's the fucking rev, let's fucking go. And they started squatting the houses of the rich who had fled Moscow. The Bolsheviks, very specifically, including Peters, accused them of giving the rich people stuff directly to poor people. That's literally what the, they are bandits because they are stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. That is literally the argument the Bolsheviks make. And Peters personally directed raids against these anarchist bandits. More of the flame met their death and police sieges, this time fighting off the Bolsheviks who are mad at them for robbing the rich to give to the poor. One British reporter who was taken around by Peters during this time described coming upon where the Bolsheviks had massacred anarchists in the middle of an orgy. Peters looked at a woman who'd been shot through the neck and said, prostitute, perhaps it is for the best. So good, summarily execute all the sex workers. Fucking great. When anarchists were captured alive, they were interrogated about their knowledge of politics by the Bolsheviks. And if they were familiar with anarchist and communist theory, then they were just misguided revolutionaries who could be reformed. But if they didn't know a bunch of theory, they were just bandits and were imprisoned, exiled or killed. My friends tell me that it's not good for my mental health to read about the horrors of the Bolsheviks. But there is probably no group that has killed more communists than the people who capitalize the sea in communist. Peter and the Latvian anarchists were largely forgotten in an active sense, like they were actively forgotten during the Soviet rule. One Latvian historian, Andrus Polkis, was threatened for researching their history decades later in the 1970s and had to stop doing it. The historian Philip Ruff, who uncovered that Yana Shaklish was Peter, interviewed Andrus on his deathbed in 2003. Latvia didn't actually go Soviet right away. They were a republic for a while, then there was a coup, and then Stalin and Hitler teamed up to divide Eastern Europe with the Molotov ribbon truck packed, and Stalin got Latvia in that deal that he made with the Nazis. As for Peter the painter, he and I believe his wife made it to Australia, and they wanted no one to ever hear from them again, and no one ever heard from them again. At one point, one of his descendants went to, I believe, Riga and like went to a museum and was like, hey, my great grandfather or whatever is this guy, and people were like, huh, and that's it. No one found that guy again either. As for how he got to Australia, Peter the painter and his great-grandson, well, his mother sold the family farm in 1913, and she wrote she did it to give money to her children to pay off their debts, and she wrote up a whole thing, like I'm giving this much money to this kid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and conspicuously absent on that list was Peter's name, but the theory is that she sold the farm to finance his escape and just couldn't put that part into writing, and that is what family is for. That's the end of the story of Peter the painter. The man I didn't know about that I can't believe I made it this far not knowing about, I'm gonna be thinking about this guy a lot. I don't know shit about him as a person. Might've just been a fucking murderer. Probably wasn't, I don't know. Anyway, that's the end of the episode. Go look up the book, A Towering Flame by Philip Ruff. He put decades of work into uncovering this story, and my other sources are also in the show notes, and if you're looking for a place to buy that book, A Towering Flame, I might recommend Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina. They're a worker-owned cooperative, queer-owned, mutual aid hub when the crisis and the need arises, and they do good work. And if you use the referral code Killjoy at discount, that checkout, you should get 10% off. And if you subscribe to my newsletter, I post books and things in there every week as well as a bunch of other stuff. I'm Mario Killjoy, take care of each other, fuck ice, free Palestine, up the punks. Up the punks. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. 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