Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Oh, Kropotkin! About this episode Tracy shares her intentions to cover Peter Kropotkin years ago, and also unpacks some of the positive and negative aspects of his life.
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3:07 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We spent all of this week talking about Peter Kropotkin and anarchist communism. Mm-hmm. Not something we have spent a lot of time really diving into on the show before. I thought about doing this episode during early COVID. It didn't work out, but it was because there was such, flourishing is the wrong word, because it was happening in response to government action that was not happening. Mm-hmm. But like, there was an influx of mutual aid programs. Yeah. Organizations of people trying to like, work in their own communities, trying to
4:00 Tracy V. Wilson? help people, trying to meet needs that were not being met, of which there were many. And I realized pretty quickly that it was, it would need to be a much bigger episode than... What I was sort of thinking.
4:15 Holly Frey? Right.
4:16 Tracy V. Wilson? I just didn't quite have it. But then, here we are now, in the year 2026. Still a lot of need happening, still a lot of mutual support and aid going on for a lot of different reasons.
4:28 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Still also a lot of calls for change in the government.
4:35 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:35 Tracy V. Wilson? In the US. And wow, at least for me, I don't know why, why algorithms, algorithms think that I want this. But I'm continually being served discourse about, like, people who want to make reforms within the existing government of the United States. And people who want to throw it all out and start over, which is what Kropotkin was advocating.
5:06 Holly Frey? Yeah, I mean, I think if you're, I think if you're in any way looking at anything political these days, you're gonna get that eventually, because I get it too.
5:15 Tracy V. Wilson? It's just the same arguments over and over. There are a lot of things that Kropotkin wrote about that I definitely find appealing.
5:24 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
5:25 Tracy V. Wilson? I love the idea of everybody having enough and nobody being left behind and nobody being, you know, under the thumb of an oppressive government machine, all of that in favor of. But I'm also like, we live in such an even more globally interconnected world than during Kropotkin's lifetime, right?
5:50 Holly Frey? Right.
5:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Just vastly, vastly interconnected. Like, I was sort of just thinking this morning, I was like, international air travel. How would one do that without governments? And some people are probably like, we just wouldn't have international air travel anymore.
6:06 Holly Frey? I mean.
6:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Which.
6:08 Holly Frey? I just think of Star Trek, they figured it out.
6:11 Tracy V. Wilson? They do. Well, there was still like, there were still governments, right?
6:16 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:18 Tracy V. Wilson? So like the communism slash socialism questions, like those are, there's one, that's one set of questions.
6:26 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:26 Tracy V. Wilson? And like the sort of Star Trek utopia of everyone having enough and there not being, you know, capitalist monetary structures happening.
6:38 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, that's one thing. But the not having governments, like, that is a, an additional whole thing.
6:45 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, I, I think it starts to be like, how do you define a government, right? Like, could there be a coalition of transportation organizations that enable something like that?
6:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe so.
6:58 Holly Frey? You know, if they are all, all of this depends on like, the goodwill altruism and noble efforts of humans, which is where
7:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:10 Holly Frey? things get tricky. Because if you had a coalition of transportation organizations that were doing this outside of government, things like regulations would not be an issue because they would all be trying to do the best by all things.
7:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:26 Holly Frey? I'm about to invoke Anakin and Padme, right? Like, that's the problem, is that in, I'm literally working through this as I'm talking, right? There's that whole, listen, I know not everybody likes Attack of the Clones, and that's fine. But there's that whole meadow scene where he describes what he thinks, how he thinks government should work. And she, he's like, it should just be smart people getting together and talking it through. And she's like, what do you think we're doing, dog?
7:53 Holly Frey? That's exactly what we're up to. But everybody doesn't agree. And that's the tricky part.
7:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot going on. There, there are a lot of things that felt to me very idealistic in his writing at the time that he was writing it, in the late 19th, early 20th century. And then I was like, and then now on top of that, we have. An internationally interconnected food supply chain.
8:22 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Right? And so if there were to be a giant revolution, it would have to happen in a way that doesn't lead to a collapse of the food chain and people starving, right? And it's just like,
8:38 Holly Frey? Yeah.
8:39 Tracy V. Wilson? unending questions and issues. I do wonder, I, if he were alive today, I would want to read his thoughts about the billionaire class that has emerged in the world and individual people having enough money and power to like, buy information distribution channels like newspapers and just use them to whatever end.
9:08 Holly Frey? I mean, I think we can extrapolate how he would feel about it, but I would love to hear his writing.
9:13 Tracy V. Wilson? I would love to hear his words on it because I enjoyed, I enjoyed reading his writing a lot.
9:17 Holly Frey? Yeah.
9:17 Tracy V. Wilson? A couple of random things that I cut out of the episode because I just, it kept getting longer and longer. When he was a kid,
9:27 Tracy V. Wilson? he has his brother. Number one, one of their big amusements as a family was to go to plays and to the ballet.
9:35 Holly Frey? Right.
9:36 Tracy V. Wilson? And so he and his brother, and then I'm assuming like younger half siblings after they were born, they would amuse themselves by putting on plays at home. And their stage was the door between their bedroom and the classroom because that was divided with a curtain. And I was like, I love that. That's perfect. Absolutely great.
9:57 Holly Frey? Natural proscenium in place.
10:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:00 Holly Frey? I love it.
10:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, multiple sources that I read about him or lectures that I listened to or whatever, all took a moment to talk about his like, Social identity opinions. A lot of anarchists in the late 19th, early 20th century were also like sex reformers and were calling for things like free love, acceptance of relationships regardless of people's sex or gender. Right. Did I already say free love? Free love if I didn't already say that. You did.
10:42 Tracy V. Wilson? And it seems like Kropotkin not one of those people and was more conservative along those lines. And there are some interpretations of him that come to the conclusion that he was homophobic. And apparently, one of the things that has led to this conclusion is that when Oscar Wilde was on trial, Oscar Wilde was a huge fan of Kropotkin and Kropotkin's writing and political thought. And Oscar Wilde wrote to him for help. And he didn't acknowledge or respond to it, apparently. Yeah. And people have interpreted that as like him not being in support of Oscar Wilde.
11:27 Tracy V. Wilson? And then I have also read that he had conversations with Emma Goldman, who was on the more like sex reform side of the anarchist movement. And that Emma Goldman like modernized his opinions a little bit. But I didn't find documentation or quotes or anything about any of that. It was like, I kept hearing people make those same arguments and I couldn't trace them back to source material somewhere. Right. And I also didn't have a good place to put any of that discussion in the actual episodes. Right, especially when it's nebulous.
12:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, there was, yeah, nebulous is a good word. We talked about how his language of the time reflected words like savage that are unacceptable today, but were in wide use. So it's not totally surprising to me that someone who was raised in the society that he was raised in would still have biases that maybe other parts of the movement would be on a different perspective on. I mean, especially when you consider.
12:43 Holly Frey? His origins, right? Like,
12:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
12:48 Holly Frey? I mean, I marvel at somebody who literally is born into extraordinary privilege. And it's like, let's get rid of all of that. Like, that's a very unusual thing in and of itself. But like, he still has that hardwiring of like,
13:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:04 Holly Frey? this is how the social mores work. And he's probably not even cognizant that that's just like part of the
13:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:13 Holly Frey? conditioning you get as, as a kid in that environment. So, you know.
13:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Totally possible that he never really thought about it until Emma Goldman was, in my imagination, like, hey, what were you doing with Oscar Wilde not answering?
13:28 Holly Frey? Well, I mean, I can see a world where like, he didn't know how to answer and was thinking it over and it got away from him. I mean,
13:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, sure.
13:37 Holly Frey? I do that with just completely benign texts from people where I'm like, I don't know the answer to that question. I gotta think about it.
13:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:43 Holly Frey? Two weeks later, do you hate me? Oh, no, I just forgot.
13:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah.
13:48 Tracy V. Wilson? I literally had that happen with an email that a listener sent to us asking for a contact elsewhere in iHeart. And I didn't know who to direct them to. And I sent a note to someone asking if they knew. And it was not in my brain anymore when that person didn't get back to me and I didn't follow up on it. And then I found an email in my drafts like three weeks later and was like, whoops.
14:13 Holly Frey? Uh oh.
14:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Sorry about that.
14:16 Holly Frey? Happens all the time.
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15:06 Speaker 03 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Trisepotide and should not be used with other Trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have
15:49 Speaker 03 severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
16:13 Speaker 02 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
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18:33 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the articles that I read for this was by a scholar from Russia and said that a lot of work on Kropotkin and on anarchism is still basically banned in Russia today. Oh, wow. Which is like unsurprising, but also I couldn't figure out how to really confirm.
18:55 Tracy V. Wilson? That.
18:55 Holly Frey? Right.
18:57 Tracy V. Wilson? To what extent that's just, that's a very broad thing to go try to track down.
19:01 Holly Frey? Right. I mean, I feel like it's harder and harder to ban information.
19:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
19:08 Holly Frey? In places that have internet access.
19:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
19:12 Holly Frey? But also I think about like the stuff that came up when we were talking about France banning various things.
19:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
19:18 Holly Frey? In the Taya Field Steinblatt episode where I loved the workaround of like, I'm just gonna go across the border and have my pamphlet printed and then I'll come back with it. Everything's cool. Everybody be cool.
19:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. Even with like, you know, the, the so-called great firewall in China, like there are still ways to get information around things.
19:39 Holly Frey? Yeah.
19:40 Tracy V. Wilson? I think the last random thing that I had written on my list of random things to talk about was the fact that the sun went down at three o'clock in the evening when he was in prison. Because living in Massachusetts, where in the winter time, the sun is down by like four fifteen or four thirty.
20:00 Holly Frey? Yeah.
20:01 Tracy V. Wilson? For part of the winter, like, the idea of it being even earlier than that. I was like, that hurts my heart for you that you were, not only was the sun going down that early, but also you were imprisoned for it. But he had books to read, so at least there was that.
20:20 Holly Frey? I mean, the imprisoned part I get. I don't care about the sun so much.
20:24 Tracy V. Wilson? I have a hard time in the winter.
20:27 Holly Frey? I know.
20:27 Tracy V. Wilson? I have a, I have a, like, I've never been formally diagnosed with like seasonal affective disorder or anything like that.
20:36 Holly Frey? Yeah.
20:36 Tracy V. Wilson? But I have a noticeable pattern of feelings and behavior over the cold, dark winter months.
20:45 Holly Frey? I do, but I call it winter rage disorder because I don't care if it's dark, but I hate being cold so much that it makes me angry.
20:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:53 Holly Frey? And I will say, we had a very mild winter this year. And while I don't like what that means in the bigger picture, it was nice to not get angry.
21:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
21:05 Tracy V. Wilson? We did not have that.
21:07 Holly Frey? Yeah, you guys kept getting like piles of snow at every turn.
21:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, that just did not go away for a really long time.
21:14 Holly Frey? Yeah.
21:15 Tracy V. Wilson? I went on an actual for real hike this weekend. I had been on walks. Hike is a little different thing, both because of like weather and because of time and there it gets to a point where when everything is melted, I know the places where I could usually go hiking are gonna be swampy. And I was not really up for the swampiness. But yeah, I will say I am I am not seeking advice on what to do about my winter stuff, but things that do help me are making sure I am getting enough vitamin D, including whenever the weather permits going outside.
21:57 Holly Frey? Yeah.
21:58 Tracy V. Wilson? It helps me a lot. It helps me a lot.
22:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, I'm like 20% vampire DNA, I think. I just don't care.
22:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. I can't remember if I've said before, before I was born, my dad was in the army and he was stationed at Alaska. And my mom also struggled with the cold dark of Alaska. And she made homemade chocolate chip cookies every week because that made their their, you know, their apartment or wherever they were living smell so nice.
22:29 Holly Frey? Yeah.
22:30 Tracy V. Wilson? To have freshly baked cookies, which I love it. I love it.
22:33 Holly Frey? I mean, you don't have to wait for, you know, miserable weather. You could just do that.
22:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
22:38 Holly Frey? For fun.
22:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I'm also very fond of Peter Kropotkin and I think there are people who people who are fans of Peter Kropotkin really, really love him. So I hope those folks who may be in the audience think we did him justice. There are things we didn't even mention that like that he wrote a book on Russian literature.
23:05 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:06 Tracy V. Wilson? All kinds of stuff. Like if, if people were still calling people polymaths as much, I feel like that, that label of polymath was not quite as frequent in its use at the very, very end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century. I more saw him described as a scientist and a political philosopher, not as a polymath. But I think polymath also suits him.
23:34 Holly Frey? Yeah. I will confess, there were times where we would read a passage of his and I would have to refrain from going, "Right on."
23:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. Whatever is happening coming up on your weekend, I hope it includes things that make you say, "Right on." And you know, if not, then I hope you're able to have some quiet, some moments to yourself, something that will be rejuvenative and restoring, that you're able to take a couple moments to care for yourself and for the people around you. We will be back on Monday with a brand new episode. I don't know if I know what it's going to be about. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow.
24:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
24:42 Speaker 02 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound terzepatide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
24:58 Speaker 03 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound Contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
25:43 Speaker 03 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
26:05 Speaker 02 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
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