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    NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

    THE NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS POD. We are from your future.

    www.nefariousrussians.com

    Advertise

    Copyright: © Yasha Levine

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    Latest Episodes:
    The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello Sep 02, 2022
    Show notes

    Evgenia and I talk to Joe Costello about the politics of technology — nuclear energy, the internet, Wall Street, American democracy, the Romans, the need for new ways to organize society… As Joe points out, technology is not just gadgets but also social constructs: things like finance, debt, money, corporations, political institutions. The politics of these technologies are always hard to think about because “technology destroys history.” When a new one comes along it changes everything, yet it makes people think that this changed environment is how things have always been.
    Joe Costello is a personal friend of ours. He’s been working in American politics and energy for decades — including on Jerry Brown and Howard Dean’s presidential campaigns. So he’s got firsthand knowledge about how rotten everything is here.
    We highly recommend his new newsletter — Life in the 21st Century — where he writes about many of the things we talk about in this ep. Check it out and subscribe! Joe’s one of a kind.
    —Yasha
    PS: Forgot to mention that Joe’s also has a book — Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy. He also has a great standalone essay: The Politics of Technology.


    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

    "We Are As Gods" Aug 19, 2022
    Show notes

    Evgenia and I talk about “We Are As Gods,” the Stewart Brand hagiomentary that just came out. We were at the film’s theatrical premier in San Francisco — with Brand himself in attendance.

    Stewart Brand turns up as a minor but important character in my book Surveillance Valley. His personal contribution to the development of the internet was in the “branding” department: He helped move the anti-establishment cultural capital of the hippie movement into the corporate-military world of early internet and computer development — effectively imbuing a counterinsurgency technology with the spirit of the counterculture. It’s a rebranding that we still live with today.
    But that’s not something you’ll get in the film. Instead, you get the heroic selfless visionary Brand — a man who practically invented the counterculture and the environmental movement and who is now using his last years on earth trying to stop global warming by…doing Jurassic Park gene splicing with woolly mammoths out in Siberia, while actually living life dies out all around him. It’s absurd. But the film fits in well with the previous episode we recorded about our society’s terminal techno-utopianism.
    —Yasha Levine
    A couple of notes. In the first hour we talk about the myth of Stewart Brand. In the second hour we move on to talk about the documentary in greater detail.


    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 Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo Aug 12, 2022
    Show notes

    Evgenia and I talk to our friend Anthony Galluzzo about his views on the politics of technology, degrowth, the left’s inability to imagine a way of life decoupled from industrial capitalism and consumerism, and how both the right, the left and the center are all in the thrall of techno-utopianism.

    Anthony is a lecturer at the New School. His focus is on early American and Romantic literature. You can follow him on Twitter and read his some of his stuff here and here and here.

    —Yasha Levine

    One note: I wanted to start our talk with Anthony by discussing Biden’s pro-growth “climate” bill — which, among subsidies to electric car and solar panel corps and ghee-whiz green capitalist carbon reclamation projects, ties building wind farms to opening millions of acres of land for new onshore and offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska. But I got caught up in the moment and forgot to mention it. So we never got around to discussing the issue. Maybe next time…


    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

    Problematic Russians (preview) Aug 05, 2022
    Show notes

    In this ep Evgenia and I talk about our trip to Fort Ross — Russia’s old colonial outpost just north of San Francisco — and the ridiculous recent attempts here in America to cancel “Russian” authors and poets like Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, and Brodsky for spreading the cultural bacillus of Russian anti-Ukranianism. Yes, Bulgakov is Ukrainian. But that apparently doesn’t save him. Because, you know, being Russian is state of mind — a mind full of bad thoughts — it’s not about your ethnicity or where you were born.

    Being Soviet Jews it’s funny for us to see people suddenly try to sideline Russian authors for their racism and chauvinism — in this case their supposed anti-Ukrainianism. If we had cancel them for, say, their hate of Jews, we’d have to get rid of not just most Russian literature but pretty much the whole western canon.

    —Yasha Levine

    This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To hear the rest, sign up and listen here. A subscription also gets you access to our full archives.

    A couple of notes.

    There has been a steady stream of articles on the same theme. Two of the best examples: “The Ally of Executioners: Pushkin, Brodsky, and the Deep Roots of Russian Chauvinism” and “Russia’s Long Disdain for Ukrainian Nationhood.” I wrote a bit about this topic a few months ago.

    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

    "More of the same, except worse." Jul 26, 2022
    Show notes

    In this ep of The Russians, Evgenia and I talk to anthropologist Jeremy Morris about the internal Russian reaction to the war and how the war’s affecting Russian domestic politics.

    A couple of notes.

    I mention Jeremy’s pre-war prediction for what will happen in Russia if war does break out. For more of his work, check out his blog and his book, Everyday Post-Socialism. The intro music is sampled from the latest hit by a group called Assorti — an example of a new wave of Z patriotism being pumped out by Russia’s cultural producers. “We’re Russians / And that means God is with us” is how the song goes. What’s funny, though, is that the guy who created the band is a Russian Jew with an Israeli passport. Russkii mir!

    —Yasha Levine

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

    “For Kadyrov’s second Lamborghini!” (Courtesy of Jeremy Morris.)


    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

    Mortals of the Earth Unite! Jul 18, 2022
    Show notes

    In this episode Evgenia and I talk to Anya Bernstein about Nikolai Fyodorov, Cosmism, and Russian/Soviet anti-death utopias of the industrial age.

    Me, personally, I’m very much pro-death. But these guys had other ideas. Some wanted to become self-directed gods, under the flag of the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church. Others first wanted to defeat capitalism and then move on to the next big boss: death itself!

    Anya is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and the author of The Future of Immortality, a book about cosmism and transhumuanist movements in Russia. Check out her work.

    —Yasha Levine

    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

    Old pogroms and current events Jun 18, 2022
    Show notes

    In this episode of The Russians, Evgenia and I talk about the recent work I’ve done on recovering my Ukrainian family’s lost history of pogroms. We also talk a bit about the speech that Putin gave at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum yesterday. And at the very end of the ep, as a bonus, we offer some practical advice on how to make Russia a monarchy again.

    A few notes. You can read the family history I’ve been writing about here and here. Putin’s speech at the forum is posted on the Kremlin’s website. And the great big hope for the Russian monarchy we discuss at the end? Here’s the guy: Grand Duke George Mikhailovich of Russia.

    —Yasha Levine

    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

    Crimes of the Future (preview) Jun 13, 2022
    Show notes

    Evgenia and I sit down for a late night talk about David Cronenberg’s newest film: Crimes of the Future.

    A couple of notes.

    1. We throw around some spoolers. 2. I mention Evgenia’s great essay on Cronenberg and “procreation horror” — about how much his films borrow from the ultimate parasite: a baby. Check it out.

    This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To hear the rest, sign up and listen here. A subscription also gets you access to our full archives.

    —Yasha Levine

    Having a bit of lunch.

    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

    Red-washing the war May 15, 2022
    Show notes

    Evgenia and I recorded a late night episode on the May 9th Victory Day celebration and parade that took place last week in Russia. Unfortunately, not much to celebrate this year.

    —Yasha Levine

    A few notes.

    * Evgenia wrote a great essay on the degraded political culture of Putin’s Russia that talks about Putin’s parasitic weaponization of WWII memory. Last week, I wrote about how Victory Day is being used to shore up support for the war in Ukraine.

    * We mention Victor Suvorov’s revisionist history that blames WWII on Stalin — a ridiculous theory that’s very popular with Russian liberals and Soviet immigrants, but also very popular in America and Europe. There’s a great book-length rebuttal by Gabriel Gorodetsky. Suvorov’s revisionist history is thematically connected to the idea of a “Double Genocide” that’s been pushed for years and which is the law of the land in many Eastern European countries now: the idea the Soviets were as bad as the Nazis, if not worse. Double Genocide is basically a new kind of Holocaust denial and popular historians like Timothy Snyder basically push the idea on their unsuspecting readers.

    * We mention Aleksei Balabanov’s Brat film series. Here’s a link — it has both films cut up into a few episodes and has passible English subtitles.

    * And here’s a link to a video of the full parade.

    * Credit to Andreu Movtxan for making me think of “red-washing” as a label for what’s happening here.

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

    PS: Here’s a nice slideshow of the parade for you. Gotta say the woman to Putin’s right — a survivor of the Great Patriotic War — does not look very happy to be there.


    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 Immigrant Multiverse May 06, 2022
    Show notes

    Michelle Yeoh going into paranoid multiple personality immigrant mode.

    On this episode of The Russians, Evgenia and I talk about Everything Everywhere All at Once — an impressive new film that just came out by “the Daniels.” It’s been a big indie hit. And yet most reviewers have missed the central thing about it: at its core it is a film about being an immigrant in America — and about being unhappy with the choice you made. That’s why the film’s schizoid “multiverse” premise works so well here. It’s all about other possible worlds and “what if’s.”

    Our only problem with Everything Everywhere is that it’s too happy and sappy for our tastes. It resolves too sweetly with a nice happy ending. But then there aren’t many films that are dark and genuinely skeptical about the American immigrant experience.

    We didn’t mention it on the pod but writing this ep description reminded me of what I think is the best (and mostly unkown) novel about the Soviet immigrant experience here in America: Hotel California by Natalya Medvedeva, a singer and a model who was married for a long time to Eduard Limonov. During the Covid lockdown, Evgenia wrote a great script adapting the novel, which is set in Los Angeles, and tried to get a movie project off the ground when we were still back in LA. No luck yet. But I do hope she makes the film one day. It’s a great story and Natalya is a very impressive person.

    We discussed Natalya Medvedeva and her novel in a couple of previous episodes: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit and Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac. Check them out.

    —Yasha Levine

    Want to know more? Listen to 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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