This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that there's a podcast. I really got to come up with something better than that. It's been a long time and here we are. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is part three of a four part episode about Peter the Painter and the Lopvian Revolution. The thing you didn't even know happened, probably. I love when I'm like, there's this famous guy called Peter the Painter. And you're like, I've never heard of that man, including a lot of my friends who are anarchist history nerds. Other people had heard of him, but yeah, he was called the Osama bin Laden of the time because he was very famous for not being in prison where they wanted him to be. And honestly, the comparisons sort of end there. You might notice parts one and two, we had a guest and that these parts, parts three and four, there is no guest. And that is because I planned for this to be a quick, simple, two-parter, true crime about some shit in London. But instead we wound up with one of the grandest stories of adventure I've ever read and I wrote, I don't know, 20,000 words and paired it down to 14 or 15,000 words. And trying to piece together all of these things. And it was more than a two-parter. Where we last left our heroes, we were following the tale of Peter the Painter, who was briefly abroad from Latvia. He had just robbed a bank in Helsinki, bought a bunch of guns, was like, all right, I got guns and ammo and bombs, time to go back to Latvia. But while he was abroad, he and many of his friends realized that the better word and better organizational structure for what they were fighting for was anarchism. Latvian anarchists made it clear that while the word anarchism came back to Latvia from revolutionaries who had escaped abroad, like our man Peter, it was that they'd found the word to describe what they already believed in, what they'd already been fighting for and building. A recent friend of mine who is, this is me talking to my own voice again, a recent friend of mine who has recently moved her politics towards anarchism, expressed something similar to me recently. She's in her late thirties and she's believed what she's believed for a long time already is the word itself and the community of people dedicated to making the world a better place. That's what she was new to. An unnamed Latvian anarchist wrote about this tension in a newspaper at the time, you know, 1906 or whatever the fuck. Quote, anarchism existed in the Baltics before the first anarchist literature reached there. We can say it was born from life itself and was created by the revolutionary people. When in 1906 some comrades loyal to the revolution openly started calling themselves anarchists, many others who thought the same treated them in a hostile way because they use the name anarchist. The wider masses understood under this name all of the horrors of which they were accused by the press of those days. And that's why the first Latvian anarchists often suffered misunderstanding from their comrades who had the same opinion, only a different name. Many carried out anarchist activities stood up for anarchist ideas, but were enraged when they were called anarchists. And this is just, this is kind of the problem of labels and it's to be fair, a particular problem that anarchism has that absolutely when the first people in the modern world call themselves that, they were kind of saying like, yeah, maybe we are terrorists, fuck you. You know, it is a aggressive thing to call yourself. It is a word based on the negation, the negation of hierarchy. But ironically, as we talked about a couple of times in some of our ancient history episodes, that word didn't actually always have those connotations in ancient Greek, anarchy, just kind of meant, no, I was like, not a leader right now, I was like, not a specific central figure. And so there's always been this tension between anarchism as this outside idea and anarchism as this thing that comes from millennia of cultural understandings of the fact that we're all equals and make decisions collectively. Because yeah, here are these people who are like, oh no, we like the Soviets. We like the collectives. We like the organizational structures we've built. That's where the power should be, not with a party and not with an electorate Congress. So when Peter came back to Riga and was like, I used to think there were some problems with the social democratic party, but then I realized the core of the party are those problems, right? The things that felt like awkward tensions, like the things that probably should be improved. He's like, no, those are, that's what this party is built of. And so here's this great hero of their revolution. And he's like, y'all, this capture in the state thing, it isn't it. And people listened to him and it didn't help or it did help, depending on your point of view. So when the czar put out the October manifesto and created the Duma, which happened kind of the end of last episode, it created this toothless Congress that didn't even necessarily need to be listened to. I'm not actually going to say the Duma was always toothless in 1917. It wasn't toothless, but whatever. A lot of groups, now that there's a Duma, wanted to stop fighting and support the moderate reforms and campaign. They were like, all right, time to get our representatives in and that's how we're going to do this thing. And the social democratic party started off uninterested in that and was boycotting the Duma. But by 1906, they were talking about supporting it and they were not putting their support towards the local councils that they had fought so hard to create. So a ton of the social democrats and the various councils became anarchists. Including members of the central committee of the Latvian Social Democratic Party. Peter, for his part, formed an affinity group with people there, including two members that had been previously members of the central committee. And the name of the group that they formed translates to the same in word and deed, because anarchists have always been a bunch of dramatic assholes. And because a core principle of anarchism, especially at this time, was to say our words and deeds have to match each other. You can't say it for freedom and do unfree things to get it. So people form a bunch of affinity groups. The party has historically not taken kindly to defections. A lot of harsh words were exchanged. Since a bunch of typesetters defected, the party had to relocate its printing presses to prevent the anarchists from capturing them. And I think the Latvian Social Democrats started bringing in propagandists from Russia to make sure that no one joined the anarchists. The social democrats at the time wanted to step away from open revolution and convene a constitutional assembly. Basically they're like, all right, we need to take a break. We've lost. We just need to figure out our politics better. If I figure out exactly how we want to move forward towards a communist society. The anarchists instead were like, we are literally in the middle of fighting a life or death revolution and we should continue to resist the state terror through violent revolution. The strategy, according to the Latvian anarchists, wasn't to vote in the Duma or convene a constitutional assembly, but to promote two things at once. The general strike in which workers withhold their labor from capitalist society and armed in surrection to destroy the capitalist institutions. The councils would be promoted and defended, creating an anarchic, that is bottom up federated society. And do you know who probably has no interest in any of that? The advertisers. I can't even say that they're against it, probably the people at the top of it are, but honestly, one of the things that's kind of more interesting about our current world is that so many of the institutions that were used to saying, like, oh, there's this big evil capitalist institution. Just like chock full of socialists. Just if you're a millennial or younger, you're just somewhere in that world. You know, and so it's it's pretty funny. It's a pretty interesting thing. We'll see where it goes. Here's ads. And we're back. So the Social Democratic Party, who again, they're the future Bolsheviks, can be a couple of years before they have that direct split and call themselves. The Social Democrats are saying, we've lost the revolution, let's regroup. And the anarchists are saying, the fuck we have lost, though, to be fair, they do lose pretty soon after this. It's possible that the Social Democrats were right about that. I don't know. Or they lost because half the people gave up. Both sides published attack after attack on each other. This is going to be completely unfamiliar to anyone living in the modern world, because we've moved well beyond that sarcasm. Meanwhile, with the Social Democrats withdrawing from the revolution, the anarchists were left to fight on alone. And the war continued. Over a two-year period, revolutionaries killed a quarter of the Riga police force, 110 cops. There were open gun battles in the streets, and anarchists developed a habit of refusing to be taken alive. The last bullet was always saved for themselves. Latvia and anarchists loved dying in police sages, and they did it in Latvia, in England, in the US, and in Moscow. So it went for Anna Connie and Carlos Crevens, two members of Peter's affinity group. They were holed up in an apartment in Riga in August 1906. And we know what happened that night, because a group of Social Democrats had the apartment above them. And the Social Democrats listened to the following happen and didn't do anything about it. Police knocked on the door and announced themselves. Anna and Carlos responded with a hail of gunfire through the door. Each time the cops tried to storm the apartment, they were driven back with homemade grenades. The pair hung a red cloth outside their window, a makeshift banner of the revolution, and sang revolutionary songs while soldier after soldier arrived to flush them out. When the enemy finally broke down the door, Anna was already on death's door, and Carlos shot himself. One of the soldiers later wrote about how moving the whole thing was, how he admired the pair. For singing to their last breath. There was police siege after police siege, in part because captured anarchists were tortured into giving up names and addresses. By the end of 1906, the state had largely regained control of Riga by mass executions of anyone suspected of participation. Latvians poured out of the country, knowing that to stay meant to die. As all of his comrades were trapped and killed by police, Peter the painter stayed alive and free. But it was during a police siege that he met his wife. I promised you in the last episodes I didn't know much about him as a person yet, and I specifically knew that he was married and didn't abandon his wife, but I didn't know more than that. It turns out that I can tell you the way that the family tells the meat cute of Peter and Lydia. It was a pretty normal way to meet the love of your life. Peter was deep in the countryside, hiding out in a barn on a farm, when the Cossacks surrounded the farm and prepared to kill him. He got ready to go down fighting. Then a farm girl, Lydia Schwartz came in and Schwartz, it means black. So her name was Lydia Black. And people assume that this was some kind of like name that she picked for herself. Probably she took this name because she was an anarchist or her whole family had taken the name because they were anarchists, couldn't tell you. Lydia Black walks right into the barn, throws Peter in a grain sack, and walks out with him over her shoulders like she's just carrying grain, nothing to see here. And the Cossacks search the barn, but of course Peter isn't there. And the two fall deeply in love and they get married. And that is beautiful. That's why you should always practice throwing your partner over your shoulder like a grain sack. What if the Cossacks are outside? Have you thought about that? Anyway, we know less about Peter once he left the party. The party famously won the 1917 revolution and the Civil War that followed it, in which they killed all their political adversaries left and right alike. So they write the history. And Peter wasn't interesting to them anymore once he was a filthy traitor who wanted to check notes, give all power to the Soviets and not give up on the revolution. After escaping from the barn and getting married, with the revolution essentially dead and under control, the two moved to a city in Russia for a while and Peter returned to his namesake profession, painting street signs and door numbers. He didn't stay in Russia long. Exact dates are hard to come by, but he headed west, possibly with Lydia, probably without her. But I know that at some point she's back in Latvia while he's out west because they're corresponding and they're planning to meet up all of the time and things like that. He might have spent some time in France and or London, but he definitely made it to Philly in the United States by 1907. There were Latvian anarchists and revolutionaries in exile all over the west, especially in the US and England, I believe. I also think a lot of them end up in Australia. There are no passport controls at that time across most of Europe. To go into the US, you didn't have to answer a lot of questions if you were white. They ask you, are you an anarchist? You don't actually have to say yes when they ask you that. It's actually still a law in the books. Pretty sure it's illegal to be a foreign-born anarchist in this country. Now, Peter was out of Latvia, but he wasn't out of the fight. His main goal while he was abroad was to raise money for the revolution. So he was going to raise money the only way he knew how, rob rich people. He built a new crew with some old friends, like the guys of ours, aka Bulldog, whom he'd broken out of prison, and a man named Hardiman's Coke, the younger brother of the guy he'd robbed a bank with in Helsinki a year or so prior. This is the younger brother of the guy who, once he was arrested, stabbed and shot three of his arresting officers, then took over the entire police station and held off the police for hours before getting arrested. And what's nice about that is it's nice to have the Coke brothers in history that we can cheer for. We don't know every expropriation that Peter took part in, but there are a couple that he might have been at. And if so, his uncanny capacity for escaping the scene of the crime continues unabated. In Massachusetts, three men robbed two businessmen. Cops later saw them as suspicious and tried to detain them. The men shot the cops and took off running. The cops shot a 12-year-old boy who was in their way during the chase. Two Latvian men, unnamed by history, were caught. The third escaped. Might have been Peter. Might not have been. In 1908, in London, some Latvians robbed a bank. Two were caught and one escaped. Which, I don't know, man, maybe never commit a crime with Peter the Painter. He's getting away. But are you? That bank robber, despite the rumors, Peter probably wasn't at it. He becomes this folk hero, right? So everyone is pinning everything on him. One of the bank robbers was a Latvian social democrat named Ludwigs. And when he was caught, he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party because you have to have party permission to commit crimes. And so they abandoned him and he died of tuberculosis in prison soon after his conviction. Peter, he did make his way back to Europe though. He probably just wasn't at that particular bank robbery. He spent some time studying chemistry in Switzerland before moving to Paris, then to Merci. He was there long enough that people remember him there, that he liked to smoke, but he never drank, that he was vegetarian. These are things that are really common in radical history. That he was a hard worker and as a sign painter and occasionally he did decorative paintings and tapestries. And he didn't bring girls around. And I think at this point is when we know he was writing letters to his wife, who was back in Latvia. But do you know who will also stay monogamously in love with you? The next sponsor of this show. And if you're already in a monogamous relationship, I'm sorry to say you're going to have to tell your partner that you're breaking up with them in order to marry the love of your life, the next sponsor you hear. Please don't take that bit seriously. Here's ads. And we're back. Now in London, there had been a Latvian revolutionary community since the 1890s at least. There's actually a couple, well there's like Russian folks even before then. Because people have been fleeing repression for a while. The first chunk of these Latvian revolutionaries were friend of the pod Tolstoyan anarchists, inspired by that Russian founder of Christian anarchism, Tolstoy. It's really funny how I grew up with him just being only famous as a writer and then he just works his way into every story about anything that happens in Europe in the late 19th, early 20th century. Mostly these Tolstoyan anarchists, they run a printing press. For a while a bunch of them live, they're hippies. For a while a bunch of them live in a 30 bedroom house and they all run the press together. And that either sounds like heaven or hell depending on the company, if you ask me. Later, by the early 1900s, Latvian revolutionaries in London were involved in the failed attempts to keep all the Russian revolutionary factions on the same side as one another. But then, by the time the Latvian leftists were fleeing the failed 1905 revolution, so like 1906, 1907, they turned their attention to the classic efforts we remember them for today. Well, that I remember them for and maybe now you do too. The Latvian anarchists are remembered for buying guns and smuggling them into Latvia. For example, the rich socialist Tizia Leshenska, who is a woman who has descended perhaps from Catherine the Great, who gave art lessons for a living and spent her free time as a gun runner before returning to Russia to join one of the fighting groups there and set up a bomb making school. God, I wish I knew more about her. That's just come on, come on. It really is hard to express just how much the old revolutionaries spent their time trying to acquire and defend two things, printing presses and small arms. Those were what the revolutions were built on in the 19th and 20th centuries. Frankly, they probably still are. Of course, the methods of mass dissemination of information have changed dramatically, but there's nothing wrong with having a good printer that isn't on the internet. Unrelated, did you know that politicians, including Democrats, are working as fast as possible to create age restrictions baked into operating systems and websites, which would grant them vast sweeping powers of censorship over the entire internet? And those same politicians, again, including the Democrats or in this case, just the Democrats, are working to try and install spyware on every 3D printer in the country so that it's never used to produce weapons and also, again, that they would be able to control everything that is and isn't printed on a 3D printer. That's just something to think about that's totally unrelated. Anyway, I'm afraid I'm painting too pretty of a picture of the revolutionaries in exile. Perhaps I'm Peter painting. The thing is, armed people who are used to solving problems with violence will often solve problems with violence, even when they shouldn't. Every tactic needs to be understood in its context. And what makes sense when you're at war against an autocracy doesn't always make sense in other societies. Guns, bombs, and violence are a bit of a Pandora's box. And once you believe you can solve a problem by shooting it, it's hard to remember it's not how to solve most problems. When Latvian revolutionaries were fighting the Cossacks who were killing their families or shooting down the Black hundreds who left pogrom after pogrom, it's easy to cheer for them. By the time those very same revolutionaries make it west, it gets blurrier. It becomes a different sort of tragedy. Like, for example, at one point in America, Latvian revolutionaries found themselves holed up in a cemetery in a gunfight with the police after a robbery gone wrong. It's possible Peter was at this one. I don't know. A watchman found them. Are you a cop, they asked? He was like, no, I'm a watchman. They shoot him to death. Anyway, bystanders were killed during robberies with a terrifying regularity. Take, for example, the Tottenham outrage in London. In January, 1909, two Latvian revolutionaries decided to rob the equivalent of an armored truck, the paycheck delivery for some workers at a rubber factory. This is a common target at the time. Basically, the people delivering payroll. That's like where the money is. So that's who you rob. So they rob the paycheck delivery for some workers at a rubber factory, and they get about 80 pounds, which is something like $10,000 in today's money. Cops were onto them immediately, and they were in a running battle, like something out of a movie. They hijacked a horse-drawn milk delivery wagon and then an electric tram. For two hours and six miles, police and passerbys chased the robbers. The robbers fired more than 400 rounds. A cop was killed. A 10-year-old boy was killed. Both robbers were killed by their own hands, just as they were about to be taken into custody. 17 other people, a mix of cops and civilians, were shot but survived. And the pair had been working to finance their work of printing revolutionary literature and smuggling it back east. To this day, it's unknown if they were social democrats, later going to be Bolsheviks or SRs, and they were ignoring the prohibition on expropriations, or if they'd come over to the anarchists. Honestly, any other revolution, I'd be like, no, it's the anarchists, and this one, I don't know. The money was never recovered either, and it seems likely it was handed off to a bag man who escaped capture. Believe it or not, I'm going to give you a little peek behind the curtain. I wish I didn't include my own moralizing into my show. Whenever I'm done recording, I'm like, oh, why didn't I just shut up and tell the story exactly as just the facts are. But I've been doing it for this long, and you're still listening. So maybe my opinions on all of this matter to you. It's tragic that people died and that they killed a 10-year-old over a measly $10,000. And one of the things that's hard to understand is leftist living in the west in the modern era is just how poor these folks were. These days, I would say it's an awful lot easier, safer, moral, and reliable to convince this or that person with a tech job to sponsor your radical website than to rob a bank and kill some people. If you want to run a social center, you might do better to get 20 people who can throw in $100 a month than turn to a life of crime that will put you in prison or in the ground. But revolutions, full-scale revolutions, those are expensive. And the people running these revolutions were mostly peasants and factory workers supporting themselves through odd jobs while putting all their money towards the cause. And expropriations are what made sense to them. It doesn't make it right, but it's what they figured they had to do. It was a desperate cause, and they were desperate women and men. I always get uncomfortable around the moral compromises made by revolutionaries. You can hear it in my voice every time I talk about these things. It's why that TV show, Andorra, is fascinating and powerful. It makes me unhappy when revolutionaries decide to put people other than themselves in harm's way or to act in ways that are guaranteed to bring down the wrath of the state. We should be made uncomfortable by that. The Latvian revolutionaries shifted over to anarchism precisely because they believed that the ends didn't justify the means, yet they too had to live in that tension. But as for how that tension went, we're going to talk about that in part four on Wednesday. And you're like, why is this episode so much shorter? Because, well, I write three to six thousand words per episode, and that is a lot longer when I'm talking to someone else about it. And it's a lot shorter when I'm not. That's why. I bet you figured that out. I bet you knew that all by yourself. And something else you might know is that one of my main sources for this particular book, possibly the main source, because this is the guy, a guy named Philip Ruff, figured out who Peter the painter was. He spent decades trying to figure out who Peter the painter was. And he wrote a book, and it's one of the most adventurous books I have ever read. And it is called A Towering Flame by Philip Ruff. And Philip has one L, and Ruff is R-U-F-F. It's in the sources, but I recommend it. And also, I will tell you that you can get it from Firestorm Books. You can get it wherever you want. But I have a referral code set up with Firestorm Books. If you use the referral code, Killjoy. It's different than a promo code. It's very annoying, but that's just the way the internet is. You'll get 10% off of it. It's a good book. It's a history book. It's not written in a narrative way, but it's got all the details that didn't make it into this. And boy, is it a rollicant tale. I don't know. What else do I want to plug? Go vote in the webbies for all of the Cool Zone stuff. I love my friends. And I why actually don't love you all because I don't know you? I'm sorry. I would feel like I was lying if I said that I love you. If you know me, there's a really good chance that I do. And if you don't know me, that's okay. All right. That was weird. Bye. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
