NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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War anniversary Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

We recorded this episode on February 26, two days after the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its attempt to take Kiev. We talk about how a state of war has become the new normal for Russian society. Putin is not the nervous wreck he was a year ago. He struts around smugly smiling now, talking about the war not in concrete terms but in eternal civilizational ones — and it seems to be working very well politically for him. We also talk about how it’s much the same on the American side. Ukraine has become a stand-in for freedom, liberty, democracy. So in the end both sides present this as a civilizational conflict, rather than an old school big power fights over territory and influence. Meanwhile, capitalism and industrialism grind along in the background…

—Yasha

A couple of notes.

Evgenia talked about an interview that Greg Yudin did with Meduza where he praised Lenin’s thinking about imperialism and was mocked by Russian liberals for it. We also mentioned Stephen Kotkin’s interview with the New Yorker about how he thinks the war will end, in which he basically lays out the elite American view on the war: It has been good for “us.” It has brought the West together, shored up our ideals. We also talked about the essay Evgenia wrote a few months after the invasion. Check it out: Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir”…

Looking back on the last year, I realize we recorded a lot episodes on this shitty war — and the history and politics surrounding it.

* Putin's Grievance Speech...and, f**k this war.

* “Operation Z”

* Russians against the war

* A Ukrainian refugee in Tijuana

* History's Revenge

* Problematic Russians

* Old pogroms and current events

* A couple of White Russians

* Red-washing the war

* In Russia

* Escape from Russia

* Talking about Putin’s referendum speech while sick with Covid

* Eurasian trip debriefing, war talk and a review of "Triangle of Sadness"

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Sorokin in America with Max Lawton Feb 10, 2023

Show notes

In this episode we talk to Max Lawton — translator of Vladimir Sorokin, a cult Russian novelist whose cult status has only grown after the start of the Ukrainian war and Russia’s hard turn to a paranoid and closed-off society. Now there’s an effort to get Sorokin more widely read in America. We talk about Sorokin, his politics, his views on literature, and Max’s approach to translation.

—Yasha and Evgenia

PS: We reference an interview Max did with the Untranslated blog. Check it out here.

Want to know more? We recorded a few eps on Russian culture and lit…

* Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

* Lenin's flesh (and no blood)

* Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

* …and the rest of the archive.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Being Pagan with Rhyd Wildermuth Feb 04, 2023

Show notes

This week we talk with Rhyd Wildermuth, author of Being Pagan. We talk about paganism, animism, religion, the Enlightenment, and about reconnecting with the nature around us in the ruins of our rational and industrial world.

Rhyd’s thinking goes against the secular narrative that dominates today — that we western people live in some sort of special period of history, that’ve we’ve progressed away from our primitive past and moved on to a more rational age. A lot of people laugh at paganism but Rhyd points out that paganism feels like the most baseline and natural way of thinking about and relating to the world around us.

Check out Rhyd’s Being Pagan, a unique book that melds animism with a kind of Marxist materialism. Subscribe to his Substack and check out a course he teaches on paganism.

—Evgenia and Yasha

Want to know more? We recorded a few eps on related topics…

* The Ayahuasca Special

* The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

* Mortals of the Earth Unite!

* The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo

* …see the rest of the archive.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

The Rejewification of Soviet Jews Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

We talk to Sergey Serebryany, my uncle. He is a Doctor of Philosophy and a professor of Indian Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He is also a Soviet Jew. We talk about his experience growing up in Moscow, about the myths of state-sponsored anti-Semitism, his relationship to Soviet and Jewish identity, and why unlike many others who became disenchanted with the Soviet project he didn’t re-Jewify but stayed true to his Homo Soveticus origins.

—Evgenia

A couple of notes.

We mention a letter about Jewish identity that Sergey wrote to his South African Jewish colleague.

You can check Yasha’s The Soviet Jew book project here. The part of the history that deals with the western campaign to “save” Soviet Jews can be found here. Yasha mentioned Elie Wiesel and his trip to Moscow in the late 1960s, which resulted in a book that describes Soviet Jews as basically being on the brink of annihilation. You can read his write up of that book and the Israeli propaganda campaign that helped produce it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

New Year's Fireside Chat with Mark Ames Dec 31, 2022

Show notes

For the closing episode of 2022, Evgenia and I talked to our good friend Mark Ames.

We touch on a bunch of things — The eXile, his escape from suburban California, him going native in Russia and then re-integrating into America. We also talk quite a bit about journalism in America: how we got screwed over for our Tea Party-Koch scoop, how Mark’s reporting stopped Larry Summer from becoming US Treasury Secretary, and how the American way of silencing journalists can be more sadistic than the Russian way, which is just to kill them.

Happy New Year!

—Yasha Levine

Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.

PS: We’ve published a lot of things this year. A lot of has been related to Putin’s cursed invasion of Ukraine. We also did a bunch Soviet and Russian history, things about my own Ukrainian-Jewish family, and Evgenia’s essays on Russian political culture. We’ve also done some great interviews on the politics of technology. Then there’s been the stuff about California water oligarchs and the Pistachios War doc that will be finished in the first half of 2023.

So to close off the year, I figured I’d go along with media tradition and send out a list of the ten or so things that Evgenia and I published this year that I particularly liked. So here’s 2022 in review. The best of a cursed year. In no particular chronological order:

* Christmas Special — Immigration, Capitalism, Trans Politics

* The Ayahuasca Special

* Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir" by Evgenia Kovda

* “Operation Z”

* My Ukrainian grandma and our lost history of pogroms by Yasha Levine

* The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo

* Escape from Russia

* The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

* Philip K. Dick’s fiction is our nonfiction by Evgenia Kovda

* The Holodomor and the erasure of Jewish victims by Yasha Levine

* Lenin's flesh (and no blood)

* Private islands, forgotten California oligarchs, and Jewish converts. Say hello to our ruling class. by Yasha Levine

* …and then there’s all the rest in our archive.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

The Invention of the Podcast with Dave Anthony Dec 17, 2022

Show notes

For this ep Evgenia and I talk to Dave Anthony, comedian and cohost of The Dollop, about the politics and history of podcasting.

Podcasts are such a big part of our culture now. So we wanted to talk about this phenomenon with one of the people who was there right at the beginning. Turns out that this big boom started with a bunch of desperate, down-and-out white Gen X comedians looking for another shot at getting their careers back on track. And many of them did succeed, including Dave Anthony and Marc Maron. And now the youngsters took over the medium and use it as a jumping board to mainstream show business.

—Yasha & Evgenia

Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Immigrant Deprogramming w/Andrey Dec 07, 2022

Show notes

We continue our Immigrant Deprogramming series by talking to Andrey, a Russian immigrant who came to the United States in 1993 — brought over by his cool farsovshik/Soviet criminal underworld-adjacent dad.

We talk about the different sides of his extended Soviet family — vory types on one side, communists on the other. We also talk about him growing up in the Midwest and trying to fit into an American society that turned out to be more of a Beavis and Butthead than Home Alone world he imagined it to be as a Russian kid.

A couple of notes.

Andrey talked about Mark of Cain, a documentary on Russian prison tattoos. He also mentioned Ladoni, an art film on late Soviet poverty and mental illness, as well as a late Soviet TV program on farsovshiki. And we mentioned Brigada, a TV show about late Soviet and Russian organized crime — a kind of Russian Godfather.

—Yasha & Evgenia

PS: Check out Andrey’s music on SoundCloud.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

TraumaPorn from Adam Curtis Nov 25, 2022

Show notes

Evgenia and I talk about TraumaZone, Adam Curtis’ latest doc series. It’s about seven hours long and tries to tell the story of the twin destructions that took place in Russia: the destruction of communism and the destruction of democracy.

Despite a lot of simplifications and its Anglo-Saxon misery porn fetish, Evgenia thinks it’s a valuable historical document and it could only have been made by an outsider, precisely because of how traumatic that decade was for ex-Soviets. Even today few people there want to think about happened, let alone alone to dig into the archives and construct a clear narrative about those times. The entire population suffers from PTSD.

—Yasha Levine

A couple of notes.

Evgenia mentions a documentary that Paweł Pawlikowski made about Vladimir Zhirinovsky. She wrote about the film a while back — check it out. Evgenia also mentions a couple of documentaries by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson: Born Rich and the The One Percent. As Evgenia says, they stand out because documentaries are as a general rule made by the rich about the poor. But Johnson, fresh out college, made a couple of docs about his own oligarchic class — his family and friends, even Ivanka Trump is in there — and that’s very unusual.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

Talking SF politics w/Misha Steier Nov 14, 2022

Show notes

San Francisco has a real bad rep in the national imagination these days. If you follow the news it can feel like this place is melting — nonstop crime, homelessness, hardened villains roaming the streets, Walgreens stores under siege, citizens cowering in fear. It’s like there’s a big media psyop being run to make it seem like even the tiniest decent left-leaning policy is leading to ruin and destruction. Even New Yorkers are afraid of San Francisco now.

Evgenia and I have wanted to focus more on local politics ever since we moved here a year ago. So to kick it off we decided talk with Misha Steier, a SF native who’s been involved with the DSA and the left scene. Misha and I first bonded over the Shahid Buttar fiasco, which the left in SF helped prop up and which I helped bring down — to everyone’s benefit but Shahid’s.

We talk about SF’s long-gone radical cred, people’s ignorance of local politics, ways to combat moneyed interests electorally, and the importance of journalism for democracy. Check it out.

—Yasha Levine

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

RIP Mike Davis Nov 03, 2022

Show notes

I talked to Mike Davis almost exactly 9 years ago on October 31, 2013. I wasn’t sure if I still had the audio from the interview. But turns out that I do. So I decided to publish it in honor of his passing.

I used to work as a contributor for the now-defunct Prime Russian Magazine, a vaguely left-wing cultural magazine published in Moscow. I talked Mike Davis for an issue the magazine was doing on the subject of poverty — and that’s where this interview is form. In it, Davis talks about the evils of micro-financing, praises Islam for banning usury, and laments the failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement (which was still fresh back then) due to lack of any strategic planning. As David said, “politics is depoliticizing people in this country on unimaginable scale."

The interview starts about at 40 minutes.

—Evgenia Kovda

P.S. I did this interview for print so the Skype audio recording isn’t the best quality. But it’s clear enough, so bear with it!

Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

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